Biden’s Policies are just NOT Working: If you take a look at the various policy decisions Biden and the Democrats have made, the only thing Americans can say is “this ain’t working!”
- Biden’s open borders policy to get to the ‘root cause’ of illegal immigration… this ain’t working!
- Biden’s supply chain crisis and supposed fix… it ain’t working!
- Biden’s massive spending bills that he promised would cost “zero”… sorry, this ain’t working!
- Biden’s anti-inflation policies to keep prices low… just ain’t working!
- Biden’s pandering to defund the police and Antifa riots to cause change for the better… this ain’t working!
- Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, leaving Americans and allies behind… that just ain’t working!
I can’t think of a single policy initiative that Biden has implemented that IS working? NONE are working as promised. He’s been a disaster!
Biden A Lame Duck President: The Democrats are already circling the wagons and starting the drum beat as to who will be the Democratic nominee for President. VP Kamala Harris, former First Lady Michelle Obama, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to name a few.
Biden’s policies are such a disaster that voter backlash seems inevitable. And ambitious Democrats are floating their names, options and maneuvering to gently push the sitting President out.
This should be a good one to watch.
Biden’s Policies: Forget the supposedly “moderate uniter” who ran for President. The Biden axis of Pelosi/Schumer and the progressive left are pushing policies that are BAD for this country.
Biden/Progressive Democrats push for government spending/borrowing is Bad.
Biden/Progressive Democrats support for Open Boarders is Bad.
Biden/Progressive Democrats empowering of ANTIFA and BLM rioters is Bad.
Biden/Progressive Democrats support for the Defund the Police movement is Bad.
Biden/Progressive Democrats for teaching Critical Race Theory is Bad.
Biden/Progressive Democrats WOKE culture at the corporate, university, and public square is Bad.
We just need a little sanity, discipline, respect, and tolerance for all…and it would go a long way towards a civil society.
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
Newt Gingrich warns us about Democrat drug price controls, the can gets kicked avoiding a government shutdown, and a stark warning about the Build Back Better cradle to grave nanny state agenda!
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/democrats-party-of-science-drug-price-plan
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-build-back-better-cradle-to-grave-big-government-dependency
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Build Back Better will only make Bidenflation worse
Consumers already have been suffering from near-record high inflation for months now, and today’s Black Friday Christmas shopping will deliver only more sticker shock. While almost everything people buy has become more expensive under President Joe Biden, it is actually low-income voters who are most likely to tell pollsters that rising gas and grocery prices are a “very big problem” facing the country.
Don’t worry though, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last week, because Biden’s Build Back Better agenda has “a number of components” that “will lower costs next year for the American people.” Psaki then promised that the price of child care, preschool, and housing would all go down next year if Build Back Better Became law.
How completely delusional. Only someone who believed implementing a catch-and-release policy on the southern border wouldn’t lead to record high illegal border crossings could possibly make such a promise. Oh, wait.
The problem with the child care and preschool policies in Build Back Better is the same problem that relentlessly drives up costs in the higher education and healthcare sectors. In healthcare, the federal government has passed countless regulations, such as Obamacare’s guaranteed issue regulation, that drive up healthcare prices for everyone. The federal government then “solves” this problem by giving consumers subsidies to buy the now more expensive healthcare. This cost-shifting may make healthcare more affordable for a few people, including those with preexisting conditions, but it raises prices for everyone else, which are then paid for by consumers in the form of higher deductibles and by taxpayers in the form of higher subsidies.
Biden’s border crisis – preventable, predictable and deadly
The Biden administration has made the system more unfair, disorderly and dangerous.
Waves of migrant caravans keep surging north from deep in Mexico. The latest to head for America: a group of some 3,000, mostly Haitians. A week ago, they started making the 1,350-mile trek north from Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala. They left with permission from the Mexican government – none of the migrant caravans moves without approval from Mexico City.
Speaking on Fox News, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said the Biden administration was “inviting” would-be migrants, and further charged that the administration is not permitting the Border Patrol “to do their jobs … or protect the border. They’re not allowed to have the resources that they need.”
Paxton also warned that the Mexican drug “cartels are gaining strength” and that, according to the Border Patrol, they earn an average of $8,000 for every person they smuggle across the border.
While consistently dodging questions on the ongoing border crisis, the Biden administration claims the crisis isn’t one, that “root causes” must be addressed – as if they’re prepared to root out deep-seated corruption from Mexico to the Northern Triangle nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. They add that they want an immigration system that’s “fair, orderly, and humane” – which is odd given they’ve made the system more unfair, disorderly, and dangerous.
That the situation on the border has become a crisis is no surprise. As soon as he took office, President Joe Biden ordered an end to most of President Donald Trump’s border initiatives.
Progressives forget that parents are in charge of kids’ education
A growing number of parents are pushing back on public school teachings they consider harmful to their children. They’ve raised a collective voice against divisive approaches like Critical Race Theory, radical gender policies, and the injection of woke ideology into almost every school subject. And they’re making a difference.
After winning Virginia’s gubernatorial race earlier this month largely on an education platform, Glenn Youngkin assured Virginian parents he’s in their corner: “We’re going to restore excellence in our schools…We’re going to embrace our parents, not ignore them.”
But many public education proponents aren’t so welcoming toward parents. Youngkin’s opponent, Terry McAuliffe, ran on the premise that parents shouldn’t be telling schools what to teach. Former president Barack Obama echoed his sentiments, referring to parental concerns as “phony, trumped-up culture wars.” A recent opinion piece in The Washington Post by education professor Jack Schneider calls parents’ efforts “conspiratorial fantasies,” comments that earned kudos on Twitter from Randi Weingarten, head of one of the nation’s largest teacher’s unions. Another education professor, Christina Wyman, put it even more bluntly in an NBC News opinion piece: “Parents, community members, and politicians who aren’t qualified to teach should keep their noses out of school curricula.” And in a calculated attempt to scare parents and silence their dissent, liberal advocacy group National School Boards Association asked President Biden to intervene, calling angry parents a “form of domestic terrorism.” Less than a week later, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo activating the FBI to probe local “threats of violence” to school boards.
Those looking to quell the pesky parental rebellion in America’s public schools need to face up to this simple, incontrovertible fact: parents are the primary educators of their children. From before they’re even born, parents teach their children by their words and deeds. As kids grow, parents often choose to partner with other parents, community leaders and teachers to amplify their children’s learning. But ultimate responsibility for the quality of a child’s education — physical, mental and spiritual — lies solely with parents.
Democrats Struggle to Energize Their Base as Frustrations Mount
Even as President Biden achieves some significant victories, Democrats are warning that many of their most loyal supporters see inaction and broken campaign promises.
Democrats across the party are raising alarms about sinking support among some of their most loyal voters, warning the White House and congressional leadership that they are falling short on campaign promises and leaving their base unsatisfied and unmotivated ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
President Biden has achieved some major victories, signing a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill and moving a nearly $2 trillion social policy and climate change bill through the House. But some Democrats are warning that many of the voters who put them in control of the federal government last year may see little incentive to return to the polls in the midterms — reigniting a debate over electoral strategy that has been raging within the party since 2016.
As the administration focuses on those two bills, a long list of other party priorities — expanding voting rights, enacting criminal justice reform, enshrining abortion rights, raising the federal minimum wage to $15, fixing a broken immigration system — have languished or died in Congress. Negotiations in the Senate are likely to further dilute the economic and climate proposals that animated Mr. Biden’s campaign — if the bill passes at all. And the president’s central promise of healing divisions and lowering the political temperature has failed to be fruitful, as violent language flourishes and threats to lawmakers flood into Congress.
Interviews with Democratic lawmakers, activists and officials in Washington and in key battleground states show a party deeply concerned about retaining its own supporters. Even as strategists and vulnerable incumbents from battleground districts worry about swing voters, others argue that the erosion of crucial segments of the party’s coalition could pose more of a threat in midterm elections that are widely believed to be stacked against it.
A Pollster’s Warning to Democrats: ‘We Have a Problem’
Focus groups with Virginia voters led to a bluntly worded memo on what Democrats need to do going into the midterms.
Brian Stryker, a Democratic pollster, didn’t work for Terry McAuliffe’s campaign in the Virginia governor’s race. But Mr. McAuliffe’s narrow defeat in a liberal-leaning state alarmed him and most every Democratic political professional.
That defeat also prompted a centrist group, Third Way, to have Mr. Stryker convene focus groups to examine why Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin won in a state that President Biden had carried by 10 points last year.
Mr. Stryker drafted and posted a bluntly worded memo with his analysis from the focus groups, and that memo has circulated widely in his party.
The participants hailed from the suburbs of Washington and Richmond and had the same political profile: Each supported Mr. Biden in 2020, and either voted for Mr. Youngkin in November or strongly considered supporting him.
In an interview with The Times, Mr. Stryker expanded on what he learned from the voters and the course correction he believes Democrats must take.
Unite and Get Ready to Fight
Surrendering to the progressive dominance of the state is not an option.
The Wall Street Journal recently ran one of those opinion pieces you know you’ll remember years later. In “The Impossible Insurrection of January 6,” the Journal’s Barton Swaim argues that the invasion of the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters shouldn’t be considered an insurrection or an attempted coup, chiefly because, given progressives’ near-total control of our institutions, it had no chance:
It is irrefutable that some form of modern liberalism or progressivism prevails in nearly every sphere of American public life: the news media, the universities, K–12 education, the entertainment industry, corporate boardrooms, mainline religious organizations, college and professional sports (excluding the fans), much of U.S. military bureaucracy, and state and federal agencies.
Americans are increasingly aware of progressive dominance of society — and outraged at the woke mob’s totalitarian tendencies — but they despair at being able to do anything about it. Growing numbers of conservatives and independents sense that whatever the results of any election, the progressive agenda always wins. As in other instances of democratic failure, they are shifting their allegiances away from democratic institutions to charismatic personalities, from American ideals to cultural identity, from conservatism to a bipolar mix of nationalism and national divorce.
NYT wonders: Say, why aren’t deep-blue states progressive Utopias?
Democrats and progressives will not enjoy the answer.
“What do Democrats really do when they have all the power?” The New York Times asks that question in a video from earlier this month, and … Democrats and progressives will not enjoy the answer.
Of course, anyone in urban centers or California figured this out decades ago, but the Gray Lady’s belated realization is worth noting (via Matt Vespa):
The most amusing aspect of this revelation isn’t that progressive policies don’t work — which they don’t, as we see in urban areas that haven’t elected a Republican to office in decades. It’s that progressives mostly don’t even bother to try those core policies at the state level. Affordable housing gets the NIMBY treatment, something I saw up close in the Twin Cities. Affordable housing is a policy best applied to other people’s neighborhoods, which is all the more infuriating given efforts by Democrats in Washington to eliminate suburban autonomy through HUD policy.
It’s on education, however, where progressive hypocrisy shines brightest in the bluest areas. Progressives fight hard against a truly progressive policy in school choice, which would allow parents to choose their own schools for their children, which the wealthy already do — in more ways than one. Johnny Harris looks to one of the bluest enclaves in the US, Cook County and Chicago, to see how the wealthy ensure that their tax dollars only go to the schools where their own children are being educated. It’s less egregious in other blue-state cities with larger municipal school districts, which run under the control of the hard-Left, but the outcome is essentially the same. Wealthier families send their children to private schools, while everyone else is consigned to failing urban school districts obsessed with social-justice indoctrination rather than focused on actual education.
‘Cannot Power The World With Solar Panels And Wind Turbines Alone’: Bipartisan Lawmakers Advocate For Increased Nuclear Energy
Bipartisan leaders of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee vowed to continue promoting nuclear energy during an industry conference Wednesday.
Both Energy Committee Chairman Joe Manchin and Ranking Member John Barrasso reiterated their support for nuclear energy during the American Nuclear Society winter conference in Washington, D.C., arguing that an economy-wide transition to clean energy would be impossible without it. The Senate leaders added that the U.S. must produce more energy and avoid reliance on foreign entities.
“The reality is that you cannot power the world with solar panels and wind turbines alone,” Barrasso said during his remarks. “The demands for energy worldwide are going to continue to increase. Not just in the United States, you’re gonna see that worldwide.”
The Fiscal Cost of Resettling Refugees in the United States
At the end of 2016, the United Nations estimates that a record-setting 65.3 million people had been forcibly displaced from their homes due to conflict or persecution. Many of those people will seek refuge in the developed countries of the West, including the United States. Reflecting America’s long tradition of providing refuge to the oppressed, we have admitted over 3.5 million people since 1980 and 96,900 refugees just in the last year in 2016.
As the nation considers what levels of immigration we can fiscally and environmentally sustain, it is important to understand the costs of resettling both refugees (people seeking refugee status abroad) and political asylum seekers (those applying for refugee status from within the United States).
According to a new study released by FAIR, the annual cost to U.S. taxpayers is $1.8 billion and over five years, that financial burden skyrockets to $8.8 billion.
Those figures are only estimates because refugees will access welfare and other government assistance at different rates and the number of refugees entering the U.S also changes from year-to-year.
Using the most recent admissions figures, data on federal and state public assistance programs, and information from the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), our analysis found:
The cost per refugee to American taxpayers just under $79,600 in the first five years after a refugee is resettled in the U.S.;
In 2016, the State Department spent nearly $545 million to process and resettle refugees, including $140,389,177 on transportation costs;
Of the $1.8 billion in resettlement costs, $867 million was spent on welfare alone;
In their first five years, approximately 54 percent of all refugees will hold jobs that pay less than $11 an hour;
$71 million will be spent to educate refugees and asylum-seekers, a majority of which will be paid by state and local governments.
Over five years, an estimated 15.7 percent of all refugees will need housing assistance, which is roughly $7,600 per household in 2014 dollars.
It is important to note that this analysis does not address the costs associated with any incurred national security and law enforcement costs associated with some refugees who pose a threat. The total price of additional vetting and screening expenditures, law enforcement and criminal justice costs, and federal homeland security assistance to state and local agencies is hard to quantify.
How the ‘The Ant and the Grasshopper’ Fable Reveals the Folly of Student Loan Forgiveness
Today, instead of Aesop Fables, we have Government Fables.
here is a well-known Aesop Fable entitled “The Ant and the Grasshopper.”
The Ant works all summer preparing for winter while the Grasshopper squanders its time in non-productive pursuits. When winter comes the hungry Grasshopper comes to the Ant begging for food but is refused. The moral to the story is that provident behavior consisting of hard work and planning for the future is rewarded while failure to do this will have dire consequences.
Today, instead of Aesop Fables, we have Government Fables. One of these Government Fables, College Debt Forgiveness, closely parallels the Ant and the Grasshopper but with a perverted moral. Here, the Grasshopper’s irresponsible prodigal behavior with college loans is rewarded while the Ant’s responsible behavior (avoiding or paying off loans) is not. In addition, the Ant is shown to be a “foolish naïve chump” for doing the right thing.
Loans are a mainstay of both business and life. There are home loans, car loans, and credit card loans. Because of their ubiquitous nature, the concept and expectations of loans are easy to understand. Loans benefit both the borrower and the lender. Without having sufficient cash on hand, loans allow borrowers to have cars, houses and a college education. The lender is rewarded in this transaction by having the borrower pay back the original principal plus interest or a fee. It is a given expectation that the borrower will make good on the terms of the loan and pay back the entire loan.
We are now being told by a number of politicians (Senator Elizabeth Warren in particular) that college loans “are different” and have become a serious national problem. There are 45 million Americans who have student loan debt that averages $33,000. (Translation: Of the 255 million Americans over the age of 18, there are 210 million (82%) who did not take out any student loans or, if they did, the loans were paid back in full.) For the 18 percent of the population with outstanding student loans, Congress and the president are proposing a “one-time” student loan forgiveness program of between $10,000 and $50,000 to address this serious national problem.
Units of Indoctrination
A Language Arts curriculum widely used in U.S. schools ignores academic fundamentals in favor of radical pedagogy.
Few parents of school-age children would recognize the name Lucy Calkins, but her English Language Arts curriculum, Units of Study, is used in thousands of classrooms across the United States. Calkins’s curriculum is “built on critical theories,” including critical race theory (CRT), which Democrats and the media have repeatedly denied is taught in K-12 schools.
Those denials are true in a narrow sense: K-12 students aren’t reading the primary documents of CRT any more than they’re reading the works of John Dewey or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But the works of writers like Kimberlé Crenshaw, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and others directly inform Calkins’s Units of Study, which focuses on identity-based power dynamics, victimhood, white supremacy, microaggressions, and the like.
It’s hard to determine precisely how many schools use Calkins’s Units of Study. One professor of education acknowledged that publishers “aren’t very forthcoming” with this “very basic data.” The curriculum’s publisher claims that it is used in “tens of thousands of schools around the world,” and a poll from EducationWeek estimates that 16 percent of U.S. elementary school teachers use it, including, one education journalist estimates, at least 55 districts in Massachusetts. It isn’t a stretch to say that thousands of teachers rely on its lesson plans, assessments, and other materials.
The War on Meritocracy
Meritocracy made the modern world. Now the revolt against merit threatens to unmake it.
The meritocratic idea is so fundamental to modern societies that we take it for granted. We expect to be given a fair chance when we apply for a job. And we are outraged at the mere smell of nepotism or favoritism or discrimination. “All Americans have the right to be judged on the basis of individual merit, and to go just as far as their dreams and hard work will take them,” Ronald Reagan proclaimed in 1984. “We believe that people should be able to rise by their talents, not by their birth or the advantages of privileges,” Tony Blair said fifteen years later and an ocean away.
Yet taking something so fundamental to the health of both our economy and our polity for granted is the height of folly. Look at the history of the West and you don’t have to go back very far to find a world where jobs were handed from father to son or sold to the highest bidder. Look at the rest of the world and you can see governments riddled with corruption and favoritism. The meritocratic idea is necessarily fragile: humans are biologically programmed to favor their kith and kin over strangers. We are right to think that the modern world, with its vibrant economy and favor-free public sector, would be impossible without the meritocratic idea. But we are wrong to think that meritocracy will be with us forever if we proceed to douse its roots in poison.
Here Comes the Limited Hangout
America’s Nixonian press corps takes a page from the Watergate playbook to try and cover up its active role in the criminal Russiagate hoax.
Since Watergate, conventional Washington wisdom holds that the cover-up is worse than the crime. Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) tasked former intelligence operatives to break into Democratic National Committee headquarters to wiretap the opposition. To cover up his involvement in the Watergate break-in, Nixon lied about what he knew and when he knew it, resulting in his resignation from office.
Whether Hillary Clinton was aware of the crimes committed between 2016 and 2020 to further her political ambitions is a question that may never be answered. What has been proved beyond any shadow of doubt by the U.S. Justice Department over the past few months is that top operatives in her 2016 campaign used concocted falsehoods to leverage active law enforcement officials who in turn used U.S. government programs and resources to spy on the Trump campaign—a violation of American political norms whose only real parallel is Watergate. We also know that under the pretext of “investigating collusion,” at least 40 Obama officials, including then-Vice President Joe Biden, spied on the Trump team. There is circumstantial evidence that Barack Obama knew what was going on, but since, miraculously, no one has ever publicly asked him about Russiagate, not even once, he hasn’t had the opportunity to either lie or come clean.
But with Trump now safely out of office, it appears that the cover-up is now cracking wide open. In September, John Durham, the special counsel investigating the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe, charged Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann with lying to the FBI. In September 2016, Sussmann, a former Justice Department official, passed reports to the bureau that were meant to incriminate the Trump circle by claiming evidence of links between the Trump organization and a Russian bank. Sussmann had told the FBI he was not acting on behalf of a client, but records Durham obtained from Sussmann’s law firm, Perkins Coie, showed he was billing the Clinton campaign for drawing up the reports and for the meeting itself.
Last month, charges were brought against Igor Danchenko, the former Brookings Institution analyst who was ostensibly the primary source for Christopher Steele’s notorious “dossier,” which served as the legal foundation for the Russiagate conspiracy theory within the FBI. Danchenko was indicted for lying to the FBI, on five counts, with a maximum sentence of five years for each count. According to Durham’s 39-page indictment, Danchenko lied to the bureau when he said that Washington, D.C., public relations executive Charles Dolan (identified in the indictment only as “PR Executive 1”) was not one of the sources for information that he passed on to Steele. In fact, Danchenko used several pieces of information provided to him upon request from Dolan, yet another figure in the Clinton orbit.
