Biden’s Mental Capacity: This is NOT a political statement. Our president does not or cannot remember what he was told, what he said or what he did. There are enormous consequences to all of us and the world we live in. America…we have a problem.
WOKE Culture: Silencing speech, dissent, opinions, on campus debate, social media differences of opinions (suspending accounts) are NOT “democratic” values. Or at least they didn’t used to be.
This is NOT your parent’s Democratic party.
Time for School Vouchers: Teachers’ unions don’t want to teach. Children and families are at risk of falling years behind intellectually and socially while teachers’ unions demand pay for staying at home…coming up with unrealistic and unscientific demands to re-open local schools.
Now is the time to move to a true “schools of choice” program with vouchers for every family to decide how and where their children should be educated. Those who prefer in home learning by some schools/teachers, great. Others who are taking other measured safety procedures deserve an option.
Give families/parent a choice as to how and where their children should be educated. This is a perfect time to implement such public policy across the country.
Rigged: My Christmas present to myself was Mollie Hemingway’s book “Rigged, How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections” is an excellent analysis of what actually happened.
Much more accurate than “stolen” or “fraud” or “cheated” or “illegitimate” …the facts are that the left effectively used “the system” to manipulate the election process to their advantage in a way that it was virtually impossible to “prove” any illegal voting or fraud after the fact.
A great read…well documented and insightful.
EVERY State Legislator, Governor, and election activists should read this book. Election integrity is key!
Very few cases of fraud have been found and/or proven. Lots of irregularities, rule changes and ignored procedures under the cover of the pandemic deserve to be reviewed and addressed. Laws, procedures, and operations should be re-defined given the gamesmanship that did go on and many of the concerns raised in Rigged.
Ensuring the integrity of our elections, regardless of who wins, is critical. This should be a bipartisan issue. Here are some commonsense reforms that should NOT be controversial.
1. Photo voter ID
2. Must register (with ID) a month before
3. Verifiable mail in and absentee ballot process
4. Auditable Paper ballots
5. Public, transparent counting
6. No “found” votes after 12 hours
7. Voter files purged regularly with death certificates
8. U.S. citizens ONLY are allowed to vote. One election day
9. Implement the bipartisan Carter-Baker Commission’s report recommendations
Bottom line, make it easier to legally vote and harder to cheat. A simple, fair concept…no?!?
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
In this week’s video rewind- Proposed Congressional US Postal Service reform plan will crush Medicare, Bobby Rush joints two dozen other Democrats heading for the exit, and Hakeem Jeffries has his eye on the House speaker’s gavel!
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/04/politics/bobby-rush-retiring-democrat-illinois/index.html
https://dailycaller.com/2022/01/03/nancy-pelosi-retirement-hakeem-jeffries-replacement/
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2021: The Year of the Ruling Class’ Crackdown on Dissent
The year 2020 was the year of the lockdown, when the Ruling Class arbitrarily, capriciously and selectively suspended the natural rights bedrock upon which American life—indeed, life itself—relies.
The year 2021 closes as the year of the crackdown, when the Ruling Class weaponized its powers to crush dissenters from its Wokeist-Scientist orthodoxy in arguably the most far-reaching, brazen and lawless assault on Americans by the state and its private-sector adjuncts in our nation’s history.
This was the year that the campus became the country. Those engaging in speech that ran afoul of the Ruling Class’ party line were treated as physical dangers to the homeland, demanding the full force of the public and private sectors to deter, punish and subdue them.
Every free-thinking individual became a potential Donald Trump, liable to be ostracized, harassed and punished for daring to cross the regime in a society-wide Russiagate.
2021: The year of the parent activist
In the early hours of Nov. 3, Republican Glenn Youngkin, now the governor-elect of the commonwealth of Virginia, took to the stage at his campaign election night watch party to promise a conservative renewal in governance in a state that had moved to the left in recent years.
Youngkin’s victory over former governor and Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe was an unexpected upset and amounted to a political earthquake in a state that had voted for President Joe Biden by a double-digit margin the year prior, and it took place in Washington, D.C.’s backyard.
Youngkin’s victory, on a platform featuring a vow to empower parents in public education, proved to be the culminating achievement of a parental rights movement that was visible in Virginia but also swept across the nation to Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, and everywhere in between…
… “Parents have proven that when it comes to our children, they will not be silenced despite the threat of being thrown in jail by Attorney General Merrick Garland or stopped from speaking at school board meetings because CRT, sexual content, and COVID mandates are not ‘germane’ to the controlled school board agenda,” Zorc said.
“2021 is the year parents have woken up and thrown down the gauntlet,” Zorc said.
Democrats Are Making a Mistake Focusing on Jan. 6
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats seem happy with their totally partisan Select Committee on Jan. 6. They will have activities this week including speeches by President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris at the Capitol.
Let me be clear: Those who broke into the Capitol, attacked police, and threatened members of Congress last year should be tried and brought strictly to justice. Further, Congress should seriously investigate what happened and how we can prevent it from ever happening again. But that’s not what is happening on Capitol Hill this week.
In the world of Big Government Socialist Democrats (nearly every elected Democrat in Washington) the riot last Jan. 6 is their best weapon to smear Republicans as unpatriotic. Just as the Russian Dossier, the Ukrainian phone call, and virtually every act of political theatre to defame Republicans has failed, this, too, will soon become an absurdity.
The reasons are simple.
Corporate Media’s Jan. 6 Anniversary Coverage Is All About Silencing Republicans
Equating the U.S. Capitol riot with GOP efforts to reform election laws is a way to avoid honest debate over the latter.
Alengthy New York Times editorial over the weekend has set the stage for this week’s Jan. 6 anniversary coverage. “Every Day Is Jan. 6 Now,” declare the Times editors, warning that Republican lawmakers in 41 states “have been trying to advance the goals of the Jan. 6 rioters — not by breaking laws but by making them.”
The argument itself, that tweaking state election law is somehow a subversion of democracy, is absurd and incredibly lazy. But it’s important to note, if only because it will serve as the baseline narrative for the entire corporate media’s Jan. 6 coverage this week.
Their message — they will all have more or less the same message — is simple: all Republicans are insurrectionists, the GOP is the enemy of the people, and the only way to preserve American democracy is to ensure that only Democrats can win elections.
To make this case, the Times’ editors had to stage a kind of linguistic insurrection. Lawful, constitutional efforts by elected representatives to change state election laws amount, in the Times’ telling, to a “bloodless, legalized” insurrection that “that no police officer can arrest and that no prosecutor can try in court.”
That’s no different than saying “speech is violence.” It’s nonsensical. By definition, there’s no such thing as a “bloodless, legalized” insurrection, any more than there could be a “mostly peaceful” riot. That said, the Times editors are wrong about one thing: state laws, including state election laws, can and often are challenged in court.
But the nonsense here serves a purpose. If the Jan. 6 riot can be conflated with perfectly valid GOP-led efforts to shore up state election rules, then perhaps those efforts can be wholly undermined, regardless of what voters in red states want. The irony is that it isn’t GOP lawmakers trying “to wrest control of electoral votes from their own people,” as the Times editors charge; it’s the Democrats and their media allies.
Arizona will give up to $7,000 for students to ‘ensure’ in-person learning
A new Arizona government program will award up to $7,000 to the families of eligible children at risk of being deprived of in-person learning to cover the cost of switching schools, childcare, or transportation.
Gov. Doug Ducey announced Tuesday the creation of the Open for Learning Recovery Benefit program to give students and their families access to in-person education if their local schools close “for even one day” due to COVID-19.
“In Arizona, we’re going to ensure continued access to in-person learning,” Ducey said. “Everyone agrees that schools should stay open and kids need to be in the classroom. With this announcement, we are making sure parents and families have options if a school closes its doors.”
Ducey has pushed for returning to full in-person education since March 2021 after many schools were shuttered for over a year due to the pandemic. The program allows the Arizona Department of Economic Security to provide the funds for eligible families the resources they need to get their children to the kind of education the families deem best, according to the governor.
“Parents are best suited to make decisions about their child’s education. In-person learning is vital for the development, well-being, and educational needs of K-12 students,” Ducey said. “We will continue to work with families, public health experts, and school leaders to ensure our kids can stay in the classroom and parents have a choice — always.”
On Russia, NATO cannot fold
Putin has tried this before, but we cannot negotiate down the barrel of a gun.
When I met Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time as NATO secretary-general, he opened our meeting by telling me he wanted to disband NATO.
If NATO allies engage with Russia’s most recent proposals for a new security relationship in Europe, they will be directly helping him move a step closer to achieving his goal, giving Russia the whip hand over the security of Central and Eastern Europe.
Under the new Russian proposals, NATO would have to seek consent from Moscow to deploy troops in Central and Eastern Europe, refrain from “any military activity” across Eastern Europe, the southern Caucuses and Central Asia, and halt any NATO drills near Russia. The agreement also demands a written guarantee that Ukraine will not be offered NATO membership, and a draft treaty with the United States would ban it from sending warships and aircrafts to “areas where they can strike targets on the territory of the other party,” like the Baltics and the Black Sea.
This is not a serious proposal from a man who wants peace…
… Ukrainians are a battle-hardened people willing to fight for the freedom that much of Europe has taken for granted, and we in the free world should be under no illusion that they fight for our freedom too. History tells us that aggressors tend not to stay in their own neighborhoods.
NATO is an alliance of peace. It wants nothing but peaceful cooperation with Russia and has sought to include Moscow in discussions about the European security architecture. But that cooperation has been made difficult by Putin’s behavior.
Even when Russia tore up the rules-based international order in 2014, we still sought dialogue. Dialogue is important, but it must be on our terms, recognizing that we do not negotiate on the basis of threats and escalation.
NATO cannot negotiate down the barrel of a gun. And if we back down now, that signal will be heard loud and clear by both the democracies that rely on us, and the autocrats who lament and fear our freedom.
Biden’s terrible first year
From culture and foreign policy to COVID-19 and the economy, a close look reveals Biden’s first year was worse than either party thought it would be.
Biden started the year with a huge misstep for cultural conservatives when he released a Jan. 20 executive order on “preventing and combating discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation.” While not an official law, this order did pave the way for federally funded entities such as schools to ban single-sex bathrooms, as administrators with the Chicago Public Schools did recently. Biden signaled within the first few days of holding office, and again in his April State of the Union speech, that he would not just be friendly to the gay and transgender community, but he would eagerly sign bills, such as the Equality Act, that would upend societal norms about gender and sex and penalize people who hold traditional views about such topics.
Biden’s mistakes go far beyond cultural issues. That same week in January, Biden halted former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, a move that was single-handedly responsible for the largest surge of immigrants at our nation’s border in over 20 years and that immediately caused a dangerous increase in crime and drugs at the border. The decision forced Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to bolster the border patrol and build a wall.
The economy has fared no better under Biden. While Democrats applauded Biden for his infrastructure bill, both parties should be able to admit that little about the economy or infrastructure has improved since he took office. In fact, it’s gotten far worse. The inflation rate “rose to 6.8% over the last year to its highest point since 1982,” and gas prices surged to $3 or more after the president shut down the Colonial Pipeline. An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal cited Biden’s “[i]naction on the Renewable Fuels Standard” as an additional contributor to high gas prices. Skyrocketing gas prices might seem small to lofty-minded politicians, but to small businesses and people who commute to work daily, the cost has been crippling.
Is H.R. 1 a “Voting Rights Bill”?
H.R. 1, dubbed by its backers the For the People Act, passed the House Wednesday on a near‐party‐line vote, with not a single Republican in favor and only one Democrat voting against. Both the Washington Post and New York Times in recent days have seen fit to describe it as a “voting‐rights bill.”
In fact H.R. 1 is a sprawling omnibus measure that would assert federal control over a broad array of areas of American life related not just to elections and campaigns but to the dissemination of opinion about politics and policy, as well as a range of matters yet further afield:
Democrat Strategist: ‘Cynical Elites and Politicians’ Divide Democrats and Republicans
Democrat strategist Justin Horwitz told Breitbart News Saturday that he has found that Republicans and Democrats have far more in common than it seems, but “cynical elites and politicians,” as well as fringe activists and corporate media outlets, have made it seem as if the opposite is true, all for personal gain.
“What we found is after having these conversations — with Republicans, with people we thought we really don’t agree with or have huge differences with — we’re finding that we have a lot more in common than anybody realizes,” Horwitz told Breitbart News Saturday.
“And frankly we have cynical elites and politicians who are trying to weaponize our differences in order to focus on what divides us rather than what unites us, and I really do believe it’s that simple, that we agree on most issues,” he said, explaining that the media “weaponizes” and magnifies differences, “whether it be race, ethnicity, socio-economic class — that that really is the root of our disunity in many ways.”
How Mark Zuckerberg I$ Trying to Take Over American New$papers
Big Tech billionaires, including Mark Zuckerberg, who already censor comments and news they don’t like, are now coming after your local paper.
The group Report for America is placing its hand-selected woke reporters into local newsrooms across America to cover “under-reported” stories such as climate issues, Census Bureau block parties, how vaccines are working, and hating Donald Trump.
Newspapers are delighted with the cut-rate help. “We won a grant from Report for America so we can better cover our (city, town, state, county),” they enthuse.
Such is the way Report for America (RFA) couches its “gifts” to local newspapers around the country. The gift is a reporter or multiple reporters who belong to a larger “corps” of reporters.
RFA is based on the ideas of its two founders, Steven Waldman and Charles Sennott, reporters with what they call The GroundTruth Project. The organization has been placing their hand-picked “emerging” reporters (read: newbies) since 2018. The green recruits are trained and mentored by like-minded, older journalists and placed into American newspaper and public radio station newsrooms.
Zuckerberg’s company, Facebook (now called Meta), and his and his wife’s charitable foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, are pouring millions into this effort.
Which 2024 Candidates Won 2021?
This time, it’s actually not too early to game out the next presidential contest. The potential contenders are already maneuvering.
he 2024 presidential campaign has unquestionably begun, with Donald Trump plotting, other Republicans networking and many Democrats panicking.
Early polls suggest we’re heading for a Trump-Biden rematch. But is Trump really a lock for the GOP nomination? Is Joe Biden even running? With so much unknown at this early stage, White House hopefuls have no choice but to begin positioning themselves for a possible campaign. And that’s what they did in 2021 — though some did it better than others.
In what has become an annual POLITICO Magazine tradition for me, here is my look at the emerging presidential field and how their machinations fared this year.
‘Dark money’ topped $1 billion in 2020, largely boosting Democrats
March 15-21 is Sunshine Week, a national initiative celebrating open government and access to public records. Undisclosed spending by political actors undermines transparency and voters’ ability to make informed decisions.
The 2020 election saw more than $1 billion in “dark money” spending at the federal level, a massive sum driven by an explosion of secret donations boosting Democrats in a historically expensive cycle.
That’s according to an estimate from OpenSecrets. The billion-dollar sum includes a whopping $660 million in donations from opaque political nonprofits and shell companies to outside groups. In 2020, dark money groups preferred to bankroll closely-tied super PACs rather than spend the money themselves — politically active nonprofits that do not disclose their donors reported roughly $88 million in direct election spending to the Federal Election Commission. The remainder of the total is made up of spending on “issue ads” targeting candidates online and on the airwaves.
Democrats have consistently called for closing loopholes in campaign finance law that allow secret donors to bankroll pricey political ads. But that hasn’t stopped them from using secret funds to win elections. Of donations and spending reported to the FEC, liberal groups directed more than $514 million in dark money into the 2020 election, overshadowing around $200 million that boosted Republicans.
FAIR’s Five-Point Plan: How to Quickly and Effectively Address the Border Crisis
In his first 100 days in office, President Joe Biden created a historic border crisis through a series of Executive Actions and policy changes aimed at dismantling immigration enforcement and controls, while also endorsing massive amnesty proposals. This crisis was both predictable and preventable, but it doesn’t have to be permanent. Check out FAIR’s five solutions and learn what Biden should be doing right now to quickly and effectively solve the border crisis!
Trump election claims loom over GOP on Jan. 6 anniversary
Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to scrap a news conference on the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol granted Republicans a temporary reprieve from the former president’s efforts to relitigate his 2020 election loss, even as his false claims of voter fraud continue to haunt many in the GOP ahead of the 2022 midterms.
The former president’s planned remarks stirred consternation among Republicans, including some Trump allies, who feared that the news conference would only serve to highlight one of the darkest moments of Trump’s presidency and drag his party back into a potentially damaging debate over the 2020 election and its aftermath.
But in canceling his news conference, Trump also vowed to air many of the same grievances during a high-profile rally in Arizona later this month, underscoring how his claims could continue to weigh on the party as it looks toward both the midterms and the 2024 presidential election.
“It is old news,” Saul Anuzis, a political consultant and former chair of the Michigan Republican Party. “This is the only thing the Democrats have to hang their hats on and so they’re trying to make it as big of an issue as they can.”
“From a political standpoint, Republicans have to address the issue, but move on to the issues that are relevant to the American people: Jobs, immigration, the border, taxes, regulation,” he added.
Democrats Lose Hispanic Voters — Lots of Them
The Democratic Party’s problem with Hispanic voters is worse than leaders think, according to a new assessment by the highly regarded strategist Ruy Teixeira. That conclusion is particularly important because Teixeira wrote the influential 2002 book “The Coming Democratic Majority,” which convinced many Democrats that a growing Hispanic population — one that heavily supported Democrats — was the key to permanent Democratic dominance of American politics.
Now, with Hispanic voters abandoning the Democratic Party in droves, it’s all falling apart. “The seriousness of this problem tends to be underestimated in Democratic circles for a couple of reasons,” Teixeira writes in a recent Substack article. “(1) They don’t realize how big the shift is; and (2) they don’t realize how thoroughly it undermines the most influential Democratic theory of the case for building their coalition.”
Teixeira’s last point is an understatement. The idea of a permanent Democratic majority is based totally on Hispanic voters. No other group is growing at the rate the Hispanic population is growing. When Democrats looked forward to the day when a nonwhite-majority America elected Democrat after Democrat, they were basing it on the growth in the number of Hispanic Americans, coupled with the assumption that those voters would loyally support Democrats. If that doesn’t happen, there’s no permanent Democratic majority.
And for now, at least, it doesn’t seem to be working out. Instead, Teixeira cites several measures of Hispanic voters increasingly supporting Republicans. A new Wall Street Journal poll found them split evenly on the question of whether to support the GOP or Democrats in the 2022 congressional elections. That’s a big change from an imposing Democratic advantage in previous races. The poll also showed the Hispanic vote virtually tied in a hypothetical 2024 Joe Biden-Donald Trump rematch — after supporting Biden by more than 25 points in 2020.
The Fed’s Doomsday Prophet Has a Dire Warning About Where We’re Headed
Thomas Hoenig knew what quantitative easing and record-low interest rates would bring.
homas Hoenig doesn’t look like a rebel. He is a conservative man, soft-spoken, now happily retired at the age of 75. He acts like someone who has spent the vast majority of his career, as he has, working at one of the stuffiest and powerful institutions in America: the Federal Reserve Bank. Hoenig has all the fiery disposition that one might expect from a central banker, which is to say none at all. He unspools sentences methodically, in a measured way, never letting his words race ahead of his intended message. When Hoenig gets really agitated he repeats the phrase “lookit” a lot, but that’s about as salty as it gets.
This makes it all the more surprising that Tom Hoenig is, in fact, one of America’s least-understood dissidents.
In 2010, Hoenig was president of the Federal Reserve regional bank in Kansas City. As part of his job, Hoenig had a seat on the Fed’s most powerful policy committee, and that’s where he lodged one of the longest-running string of “no” votes in the bank’s history.
Hoenig’s dissents are striking because the Fed’s top policy committee — called the Federal Open Market Committee, or FOMC — doesn’t just prize consensus; it nearly demands it. The committee likes to present a unified front to the public because it is arguably the most powerful governing body in American economic affairs. Hoenig’s string of dissents shattered that appearance of unanimity at a critically important time, when the Fed was expanding its interventions in the American economy to an unprecedented degree. It was a hinge point in American history, and the economy has never been the same since.
Between 2008 and 2014, the Federal Reserve printed more than $3.5 trillion in new bills. To put that in perspective, it’s roughly triple the amount of money that the Fed created in its first 95 years of existence. Three centuries’ worth of growth in the money supply was crammed into a few short years. The money poured through the veins of the financial system and stoked demand for assets like stocks, corporate debt and commercial real estate bonds, driving up prices across markets. Hoenig was the one Fed leader who voted consistently against this course of action, starting in 2010. In doing so, he pitted himself against the Fed’s powerful chair at the time, Ben Bernanke, who was widely regarded as a hero for the ambitious rescue plans he designed and oversaw.
The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election (Worth remembering…and reading again! -Saul)
A weird thing happened right after the Nov. 3 election: nothing.
The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. Right-wing militias were girding for battle. In a poll before Election Day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence.
Instead, an eerie quiet descended. As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on Nov. 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the U.S. to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump’s ouster.
A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had backed Trump’s candidacy and supported his policies, called on him to concede. To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”
In a way, Trump was right.
There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain–inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests–in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy.
Raiding Medicare Won’t Produce Postal Reform
Congress has a plan to fix the United States Postal Service’s well-known financial crisis. The only catch? The plan Congress has hatched up will do little to reform the Postal Service, but will instead saddle Medicare with new liabilities and exacerbating an already fragile fiscal outlook.
Leave it to Congress to attempt to fix one problem by creating an even bigger, and unrelated, mess.
One of the most glaring problems facing the United States Postal Service, of course, is its balance sheets, which are covered in red ink. The USPS has not come close to breaking even for many years. In fact, according to a report produced by the Government Accountability Office in 2020, the postal system’s total losses over the past 13 years are close to $78 billion. “USPS’s current business model is not financially stable” is the report’s inescapable conclusion.
More than half of the mail the USPS delivers is “marketing mail,” (industry-speak for “junk mail”). The United States Postal Service continues to add delivery stops, even as its volume of mail pieces continues to decline, with junk mail accounting for the overwhelming majority of daily deliveries. With email, online bill payment options, and automated bank transactions, letters account for a diminishing percentage of overall USPS mail, with packages increasingly accounting for a larger share.
With a business model that prioritizes six-days-per-week delivery of mostly unwanted mail, it is hardly surprising that the postal system is under water.
The need for postal reform is clear, and Congress is right to seek to modernize and make reforms to the postal system. The reform proposal Congress has devised, however, is a classic Washington solution — sleight-of-hand accounting tricks and cost-shifting, rather than any meaningful cost reductions.
Russia’s Aggression Against Ukraine Is Backfiring
Putin’s military moves are rallying Ukrainians and unifying NATO.
Western intelligence agencies have warned that Russia is contemplating an invasion of Ukraine, perhaps involving some 175,000 troops. Vladimir Putin’s government has already moved more than 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s borders, including into Belarus. Russian officials have been making outrageously paranoid and false accusations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, for example, recently blamed NATO for the return of the “nightmare scenario of military confrontation.” Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said that the United States is smuggling “tanks with unidentified chemical components” into Ukraine’s Donetsk. And Putin himself has been equally vituperative about NATO, threatening military moves unless it agrees to his terms. “They have pushed us to a line that we can’t cross,” he said on Sunday. “They have taken it to the point where we simply must tell them: ‘Stop!’”
Yet a recent report concludes that despite its massive deployment and threatening rhetoric, Russia is not planning to invade Ukraine. The report, produced by the Critical Threats Project of the American Enterprise Institute, where I serve as the director of foreign- and defense-policy studies, together with the Institute for the Study of War, finds that the political and economic costs of an actual invasion are too high for Russia to sustain. “Putin may be attempting a strategic misdirection that impales the West in a diplomatic process and military planning cycle that will keep it unprepared,” the report argues. Rather than directly invade Ukraine again, Russia instead seeks to further destabilize the country in advance of its elections, station troops in Belarus, divide NATO, and precipitate Western concessions to de-escalate the crisis.
What does the Russian ultimatum to the West mean?
On December 17, the Russian Foreign Ministry unveiled two draft texts — a “Treaty between the United States and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees” and an “Agreement on Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation and the Member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization [NATO]”. Moscow’s stated goal is to obtain “legal security guarantees from the United States and NATO.” Moscow has requested the United States and its NATO allies to meet the Russian demands without delay.
“The two texts are not written according to the principle of a menu, where you can choose one or the other, they complement each other and should be considered as a whole,” declared Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov. The second text is a kind of parallel guarantee because “the Russian Foreign Ministry is fully aware that the White House may not meet its obligations, and therefore there is a separate draft treaty for NATO countries.” The Russian maneuver is to bind NATO through the United States, the United States through NATO. There is nothing to negotiate, you have to accept everything as a whole.
Some Russian media, such as the digital newspaper Vzglyad, are already triumphant: “The world before and the world after December 17, 2021 are completely different worlds… If until now the United States held the whole world at gunpoint, now it finds itself under the threat of Russian military forces… A new era is opening, new heroes are coming, and a new Danila Bagrov [character of the patriotic mobster in the popular film Brat], raising his heavy fist and looking into the eyes of his interlocutor, asks softly again: how strong are you, American?”
The Russian blackmail is explicit and is directed at both the Americans and the Europeans. If the West does not accept the Russian ultimatum, they will have to face “a military and technical alternative”, according to Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko: “The Europeans must also think about whether they want to avoid making their continent the scene of a military confrontation. They have a choice. Either they take seriously what is put on the table, or they face a military-technical alternative.” After the publication of the draft treaty, the possibility of a pre-emptive strike against NATO targets (similar to those that Israel inflicted on Iran), was confirmed by former Deputy Minister of Defense Andrei Kartapolov (Duma Defense Committee): “Our partners must understand that the longer they drag out the examination of our proposals and the adoption of real measures to create these guarantees, the greater the likelihood that they will suffer a pre-emptive strike.”
America’s Asymmetric Civil War
It’s within metro areas, not between the states
America’s states seem increasingly disunited. Divisions over controversies related to COVID— lockdowns, vaccine mandates, school closures—have accentuated existing splits among blue Democratic and red Republican states with respect to partisanship and attitudes toward crime and public policy.
Some fear that these trends foretell a new civil war. Others welcome them as evidence of the saving genius of the founding design of a republic based on federalism. But before you choose sides in a new conflict between the states, you need to know that the basic assumption is wrong: There is no actual divide by states, which are merely battlegrounds in a proxy war. The real civil war is between neighborhoods in the same metro areas, backed by asymmetrical allies.
Ignore maps that show electoral results by state and look at county maps or maps of U.S. House districts. At this level of granularity, state borders disappear. There are no red states or blue states. Instead, there are blue urban cores floating in a sea of red. Even the exurbs and rural areas in blue states like California and New York tend to be overwhelmingly red and Republican.
This is not a difference between “city” and “country.” Hardly any Americans live or work on farms or ranches anymore. The big divide is within metro areas, between the blue downtowns and their inner-ring suburbs that are home to the American oligarchy and its children and retainers, and the red exurbs; outer-ring suburbs tend to be battlegrounds between the Democratic and Republican coalitions. This geographic concentration hurts the Democrats in the Senate and the Electoral College. At the same time, Democratic blue core cities in majority red states can often circumvent state governments by appealing directly to Congress and to the enforcement layers of the federal bureaucracy and judiciary, as well as to the media and corporate elites controlled by the national party.
A Conservative Alternative to Biden’s National-Security Agenda
With the Biden administration expected to release a major, statutorily mandated document setting out the president’s broad-brush thinking on U.S. national security in early 2022, conservative national-security thinkers are gearing up to rebut what they anticipate to be its wrongheaded approach.
In a brief, ten-page paper released last week, a group of experts from the two most recent Republican administrations and conservative think tanks outlined an alternative to the Biden administration’s expected national-security-strategy document. Those experts include former Trump administration National Security Council officials and Bush-era figures, such as Will Inboden, a former National Security Council staffer who worked on the 2006 strategy, as well as researchers with the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The point of the project, housed at the Forum for American Leadership, a new conservative national-security group, is to offer suggestions for the White House’s eventual strategy, and also to draw a contrast with it, the two co-chairs of the FAL strategic-studies working group told National Review.
Is Natural Immunity More Effective Than the COVID-19 Shot?
According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data, COVID-19 “cases” have trended downward since peaking during the first and second week of January 2021.
At first glance, this decline appears to be occurring in tandem with the rollout of COVID shots. January 1, 2021, only 0.5% of the U.S. population had received a COVID shot. By mid-April, an estimated 31% had received one or more shots, and as of July 13, 48.3% were fully “vaccinated.”
However, as noted in a July 12, 2021, STAT News article,“cases” had started their downward trend before COVID shots were widely used. “Following patterns from previous pandemics, the precipitous decline in new cases of Covid-19 started well before a meaningful number of people had been vaccinated,” Robert M. Kaplan, Professor Emeritus at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, writes. He continues…
… The reason natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced immunity is because viruses contain five different proteins. The COVID vaccine induces antibodies against just one of those proteins, the spike protein, and no T cell immunity. When you’re infected with the whole virus, you develop antibodies against all parts of the virus, plus memory T cells.
This also means natural immunity offers better protection against variants, as it recognizes several parts of the virus. If there are significant alternations to the spike protein, as with the Delta variant, vaccine-induced immunity can be evaded. Not so with natural immunity, as the other proteins are still recognized and attacked.
