Joe Biden: 33%…enough said.
Senate Filibuster: The filibuster is essential because it guarantees consensus. Biden and Schumer’s shameless filibuster hypocrisy would be bothersome if not so obvious from past recorded statements being played over and over again. I honestly believe this has been just a distraction and an excuse for their failed policies that have fueled inflation, created empty shelves in stores, and made the world more dangerous.
The left-wing progressives are driving the bus…this is NOT you parent’s Democratic party!
Hypocrisy: Any amount of hypocrisy and lying is OK by the Democrats today in an effort to hold onto their power. Just compare the statements of Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi now to a few years back on multiple fronts. Whether it’s on the filibuster or so called ‘voter rights’ charade (which is nothing more than a federal power grab and left wing wish list of favorable election rules) the Democrats are shamelessly willing to say anything!
As Biden’s agenda stalls and they can’t pass their crazy left-wing proposals, Biden comes out swinging at Republicans?!? Where is the ‘moderate’ who ‘ran’ for president…another lie…or worse. Now we have people raising the question of senility?
The liberal progressive Democrats’ thirst to retain power is shameful. And that has put America at risk.
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
In this week’s video rewind- Inflation skyrockets as Biden stumbles, Tom Cotton rips efforts to remove the filibuster, and Hillary Clinton is waiting in the wings for 2024!
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Biden’s Disgraceful Voting Speech
Joe Biden has had a long career of careless pronouncements and demagogic speeches, but he outdid himself with his cynical rant in Georgia on Tuesday afternoon.
In a push to pass two sweeping Democratic voting bills federalizing a swath of election rules, Biden took a rhetorical sledgehammer to the legitimacy of America’s elections and identified opponents of the bills as domestic “enemies” on par with some of the most reprehensible figures in U.S. history.
It was a disgraceful performance, witless and sloppy even by Joe Biden’s standards.
He picked Georgia as the location of his speech because the state has been smeared by the Left, with Stacey Abrams leading the way, as a hotbed of voter suppression for years, culminating in last year’s election-reform bill signed into law by Republican governor Brian Kemp.
Despite practically every Democrat in the country believing, or pretending to believe, Abrams’s contention that discriminatory voting rules robbed her of victory in her 2018 gubernatorial race against Kemp, Georgia long ago adopted some of the rules now considered indispensable to democracy. The state has had no-excuse absentee voting for 15 years, widely available early voting for more than a decade, and automatic registration since 2016. The League of Women Voters in Georgia has complained that it’s hard to find anyone new to register to vote.
Not surprisingly, the alleged voter suppression that Abrams has made a political career out of decrying has been nowhere in evidence. Turnout in her gubernatorial election was almost as high as in the presidential election of 2016 and much higher than the gubernatorial election four years prior. In 2020, turnout exceeded 2008, when Barack Obama fueled big numbers. The Senate runoffs last January doubled what had been the previous record for turnout in a runoff.
Biden’s Georgia Speech Is a Break Point
He thought he was merely appealing to his base. He might have united the rest of the country against him.
It is startling when two speeches within 24 hours, neither much heralded in advance—the second wouldn’t even have been given without the first—leave you knowing you have witnessed a seminal moment in the history of an administration, but it happened this week. The president’s Tuesday speech in Atlanta, on voting rights, was a disaster for him. By the end of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s answering speech on Wednesday you knew some new break point had occurred, that President Biden might have thought he was just crooning to part of his base but the repercussions were greater than that; he was breaking in some new way with others—and didn’t know it. It is poor political practice when you fail to guess the effects of your actions. He meant to mollify an important constituency but instead he filled his opponents with honest indignation and, I suspect, encouraged in that fractured group some new unity.
The speech itself was aggressive, intemperate, not only offensive but meant to offend. It seemed prepared by people who think there is only the Democratic Party in America, that’s it, everyone else is an outsider who can be disparaged. It was a mistake on so many levels. Presidents more than others in politics have to maintain an even strain, as astronauts used to say. If a president is rhetorically manipulative and divisive on a voting-rights bill it undercuts what he’s trying to establish the next day on Covid and the economy. The over-the-top language of the speech made him seem more emotional, less competent. The portentousness—“In our lives and . . . the life of our nation, there are moments so stark that they divide all that came before them from everything that followed. They stop time”—made him appear incapable of understanding how the majority of Americans understand our own nation’s history and the vast array of its challenges.
By the end he looked like a man operating apart from the American conversation, not at its center. This can be fatal to a presidency.
He was hardly done speaking when a new Quinnipiac poll showed the usual low Biden numbers, but, most pertinently, that 49% of respondents say he is doing more to divide the country, and only 42% see him as unifying it.
Biden’s Big Elections Lie
The president has decided to preemptively undermine confidence in the 2022 and 2024 elections, smearing half the country as racists while cosplaying as a civil-rights hero.
These were little more than the mendacious ravings of a demagogue. President Joe Biden delivered his “voting rights” speech in Atlanta today, telling a crowd:
The next few days, when these bills come to a vote, will mark a turning point in this nation. Will we choose democracy over autocracy, light over shadow, justice over injustice? I know where I stand. I will not yield. I will not flinch. I will defend your right to vote and our democracy against all enemies foreign and domestic. And so the question is where will the institution of the United States Senate stand?
Biden’s argument is predicated on the idea that anyone who continues to support the legislative filibuster — a Senate rule the president defended for nearly 50 years — or voter-ID laws, or time restrictions on mail-in ballots, or consistent hours for early voting, or bans on ballot harvesting is no better than Bull Connor. “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?” was the false choice offered by a man who repeatedly praised Wallace, and other segregationists, early in his career.
The president suggested that anyone opposing the Democrats’ voting-rights bill was not only a bigot but a seditious “domestic” enemy of the United States — a designation that now probably includes six Democratic senators, if not more. The president pronounced the Senate a “shell of its former self,” lamenting that the GOP had used the filibuster over 100 times in the past year, skipping the inconvenient fact that Democrats had done so over 300 times the preceding four years. Biden, “the institutionalist,” then unloaded a litany of completely misleading contentions about voting laws to justify his abandonment of principle.
And the reason Biden is compelled to lie about virtually every aspect of the Georgia voting law is that the specifics are actually quite popular and do not inhibit a citizen from casting a ballot. Most of the requirements Biden contends are now compulsory for democracy to properly function had only been instituted in the past few years — many of them only during the last election. Biden’s comparing Jim Crow to contemporary voter-integrity laws is detestable. One was a violent suppression of the minority vote; the other was giving voters only eleven weeks before an election to request a ballot and declining to keep expanding voting into the weekend.
Biden and Schumer’s shameless filibuster hypocrisy
The filibuster is essential because it guarantees consensus.
I’ve only been in Washington for three years, but one thing I’ve noticed is that career politicians seem to coincidentally forget everything they’ve said in the past. It happens in Congress all the time, but the flip-flops we are seeing from Senate Democrats right now on the filibuster is a case study in career politician amnesia.
This serious affliction is even affecting former Senators, like Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. It demands the attention of every American as Democrats attempt a hostile federal takeover of American elections
For decades, the legislative filibuster has served as a defining rule of the United States Senate. The filibuster requires a 60-vote threshold to end debate on pending legislation, protects the minority party’s rights, fosters bipartisan cooperation and safeguards the interests of millions of Americans.
A Dangerous Moment for Europe
What will Biden give Putin to avoid an invasion of Ukraine?
The crisis created by Russia at Ukraine’s border is the most dangerous moment for Eastern Europe in decades, and not merely for the chances of a Russian invasion. Another, perhaps greater, risk is what President Biden might concede to Vladimir Putin to prevent an invasion.
On Friday NBC News reported that “U.S. officials are ready to propose discussions on scaling back U.S. and Russian troop deployments and military exercises in Eastern Europe.”
Citing current and former officials, the report said talks “could potentially address the scope of military drills held by both powers, the number of U.S. troops stationed in the Baltic states and Poland, advance notice about the movement of forces, and Russia’s nuclear-capable Iskander missiles in the Russian territory of Kaliningrad between Poland and Lithuania.”
Wow. The report quickly stirred consternation, and pushback from the White House. “Reports that the administration is developing options for pulling back U.S. forces in Eastern Europe in preparation for discussions with Russia next week are not accurate,” a National Security Council spokesperson said.
Insurrections and Double Standards
Reveling in the anniversary of the Capitol riot, Democrats and the media dubiously brand it a right-wing “insurrection”—while ignoring the urban anarchy that began in May 2020.
The disappointment was palpable. As the one-year anniversary of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot approached, the Department of Homeland Security had warned state and local law enforcement officials that “domestic violent extremists” could strike again. Security forces were on guard and many people were on edge, reported the New York Times. Yet, as a CNN anchor morosely observed during the network’s saturation coverage of the anniversary celebration: “There’s been no violence at the Capitol today.”
The letdown was all the greater, coming after so many similar disappointments. Early in 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security predicted that white supremacists and militias would stage January 6-inspired attacks throughout the year. Fencing and bollards ringed the Capitol through July, protecting against the alleged white supremacist threat. The Biden administration budgeted for attacks from domestic terrorists embedded within the military and law enforcement. In late spring, DHS issued an intelligence bulletin about coming domestic extremist attacks during the summer of 2021. A flurry of excitement broke out about possible violence in August 2021 from Trump plotters. College campuses were also at risk from those who feel “hostility toward higher education, intellectualism, and societal sectors seen as elite,” according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Barricades went back up around the Capitol in September 2021 and law enforcement was put on high alert, in preparation for unrest from right-wingers protesting the treatment of the January 6 rioters. The FBI doubled its investigations of white supremacists and militias, since extremists “advocating for the superiority of the white race” pose the greatest threat of mass civilian attacks, the bureau has concluded.
None of those expected attacks materialized—not last week, on the one-year anniversary of January 6, or during the preceding year. The media’s Capitol riot anniversary celebration, however, was choreographed to underscore the fictional claim that white supremacy is the biggest impediment to civil order in the U.S. today. “White supremacy is a clear and present threat, and must be rooted out,” Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley said on MSNBC. If that threat was not realized at the Capitol over the last year, we are told, that is only because it has migrated elsewhere. “Domestic extremists are glomming on to other issues,” Oren Segal, vice president of the ADL Center on Extremism, told CNN on Thursday. “They need to focus locally to keep extremism going,” so they’re showing up at school board meetings, Segal said. MSNBC host Joy Reid seconded that assessment: The “MAGA insurrectionists have travelled to school boards” to fight the teaching of history. Those insurrectionists are worried that their “kids will identify with abolitionists,” Reid explained.
In truth, last year’s January 6 riot was bad enough without the Democrats’ “white supremacist” spin. The rioters tried to impede the constitutional transfer of power, an essential element of civil peace. If uprisings from losing parties become the norm in the U.S., Americans will forfeit the blessings conferred by the Anglo-American political tradition. The vandals boorishly violated the respect due to our national monuments. The rioters who assaulted police officers undermined conservatives’ claim to be the party of law and order and aligned themselves with the thugs who have been killing or attempting to kill cops since the George Floyd race riots.
Liberal Elites Want Us to Care About Jan. 6. But They Don’t Care When Our Cities Burn
I remember the call from my husband on May 31. It was our anniversary, and he was out running errands before he came home—not because we had plans, but because there was a curfew in place in Minneapolis. He called to tell me he had to drive to a nearby suburb to pick up a medical prescription. “Our Walgreens on Hennepin Avenue isn’t there anymore,” he said. “It was burned to the ground.”
Over the spring and summer of 2020, thousands of businesses were looted, damaged, or totally destroyed during the George Floyd protests—especially here, where Floyd was killed. Every day we read heartbreaking stories of business owners begging and pleading with rioters to spare their livelihoods, many of them uninsured, pleas that went unheeded. There was over $2 billion in property damage.
And yet, to follow the mainstream news, you’d be forgiven for thinking the destruction of cities across the country—the decimation of small businesses, many of them owned by lower income people of color—wasn’t the biggest story of violence in recent history. That honor, to hear the media tell it, is reserved for an hours-long mobbing of the Capitol in Washington, D.C. The Capitol riot on January 6, 2021 has been the lead story in the liberal mainstream media all week long.
This breathless, week-long commemoration—along with the sacrosanct solemnity with which January 6 is discussed in elite liberal circles—exposes whose lives really matter: the elites in D.C. ivory towers and Manhattan newsrooms. And it exposed whose lives don’t.
Don’t rule out a GOP Senate wave
Senate races shape up very differently from House ones.
As usual, Democrats are fighting among themselves — this time about what to do with the Senate filibuster.
Most would like to simply eliminate it, but that is not going to happen in a 50-50 Senate that includes Sens. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, two Democrats who are uncomfortable with rule changes. So Democratic officeholders and strategists have talked about trying to “carve out” an exception to protect voting rights. But even that now seems a heavy lift.
The irony here is that while some Democrats worry that carving out an exception to the filibuster might set a bad precedent, the imbalance in the three Senate classes, which I wrote about in May, may give Republicans a chance at a filibuster-proof majority during the 2024 elections, when the Senate map strongly favors the GOP.
Of course, when I noted that, President Joe Biden’s job approval was sitting in the low-to-mid 50s, while his disapproval was about 10 points lower.
Now, those numbers have reversed, and there are more questions about the sitting president’s ability to deliver on his promised “Build Back Better” plan, his ability to make headway against the coronavirus, his ability to work with Republicans in a bipartisan fashion and his ability to return things “back to normal” — all goals he articulated during the presidential campaign and subsequently.
Democrats must abandon endless assault on police
We must stand up against the radical ‘defund police’ movement
Today, on National Law Enforcement Appreciation Day, we honor the courageous men and women who proudly serve our communities and keep our families safe. Every day, they put their lives on the line to protect us, despite the rhetoric and policies of anti-police Democrats.
We must stand up against the radical “defund police” movement and show our law enforcement heroes that we have their backs. We must reject the efforts of the Democrat politicians and liberal city councils who are defunding their police departments and refusing to prosecute violent criminals.
As violent crime surges across the country, most notably in Democrat-run cities, it is disturbing that liberal and progressive lawmakers do not take responsibility for how their extreme policies have crippled police departments and allowed violent criminals to run rampant throughout our streets.
The city of Detroit serves as a counterexample and was able to lower its homicide rate while murders spiked in other big cities nationwide. In an interview with The Detroit News, Detroit Police Commissioner Ricardo Moore said, “When you make police more visible, you’re removing a lot of the opportunity for crime.”
The Left’s Latest Political Scheme: Let Noncitizens Vote
Despite misgivings, New York City’s new mayor, Eric Adams, has rolled over for the city council and allowed more than 800,000 noncitizen residents to vote in future elections for mayor and all other city officials.
Starting in 2023, the city will have to print separate ballots for city races, since noncitizens will still be barred from voting in statewide and presidential elections. But make no mistake. The new New York law is part of a nationwide push to blur the very meaning of citizenship and promote noncitizen voting everywhere and for all offices.
There are few limits on how far the “woke” Left will go to change the rules of voting. In 2019, a majority of House Democrats voted to lower the federal voting age to 16 years, from 18. This week, Senate Democrats will try to ram through a bill that would nationalize elections by taking away the right of states to determine their own voting systems. Liberals will use any hysterical argument to justify this power grab: Representative Eric Swalwell (D., Calif.) even told MSNBC last week that if Republicans win November’s midterm elections, “voting in this country as we know it will be gone.”
This year in America, let’s listen, learn, help and lead
Now is the time to determine how we, as Americans, can ensure continued prosperity and freedom for future generations.
The start of a new year is a time for reflection and opportunity. As we look forward to 2022, we should also recall what we learned as a country in 2021.
Entering a new calendar year does not erase the real challenges facing our nation that impact Americans’ daily lives. Sadly, inflation continues to skyrocket, supply chain disruptions prevail, drug overdoses soar, and homelessness is on the rise.
Although these crises remain, a new year gives us hope and reminds us of the importance of committing ourselves to real change. A better future for America starts in our communities, neighborhoods, churches, schools, and homes.
Now is the time to determine how we, as Americans, can ensure continued prosperity and freedom for future generations. Together with our team at Gingrich 360, we came up with a series of resolutions for America for 2022.
Censorship From Left on the Rise
A vaccine doctor, Thomas Paine, and an investigative reporter silenced.
Here’s but a few sample headlines from the last few days:
Newsmax: Twitter Suspends mRNA Vaccine Pioneer, Mandate Critic.
NewsBusters: Facebook and Instagram Censor Founding Father Thomas Paine
NewsBusters: SHUT HIM UP! Twitter Suspended Just The News Founder John Solomon for Doing Journalism.
Go back a few days and months beyond that and one finds:
The Federalist: Facebook Censors Article About Dangers Of COVID Censorship.
New York Post: Facebook trying to censor posts from COVID-19 vaccine skeptics: report.
Then there was this headline from the National File in August: Facebook Censors Gold Star Mother Of Fallen Marine Kareem Nikoui.
That story reported this:
Shana Chappell, the mother of fallen U.S. Marine Kareem Nikoui, had both her Facebook and Instagram accounts censored after posts that were critical of Biden. Nikoui, 20, was one of the 13 U.S. Marines killed in the Kabul suicide bombing.
“After I lay my son to rest you will be seeing me again!” Chappell said in a post in which Biden was tagged.
“Remember I am the one who stood five inches from your face and was letting you know I would never get to hug my son again, hear his laugh and then you tried to interrupt me and give me your own sob story,” she continued. “You are no leader of any kind! You are a weak human being and a traitor,” Chappell later said in the lengthy post.
In a follow-up post, the grieving mother revealed that Instagram had censored her post. Her posts were also censored by Facebook, which owns Instagram. “As soon as I posted about what happened to my son Instagram started pulling up my posts from months ago and sending me notifications that if I kept posting stuff like this that they would disable my account,” said Chappell. “Posts from months ago!”
There is no new “news” here other than the adding of this week’s targeting of vaccine pioneer Dr. Robert Malone, Founding Father Thomas Paine, and investigative journalist John Solomon to an increasingly very, very long list of censorship targets.
Russia, China and the Bid for Empire
The U.S. must hold the line against their imperial ambitions in Ukraine, Taiwan and elsewhere.
Intellectuals can’t stop denouncing the West for its legacy of imperialism. But the imperialism on the march today is in the East. Russia and China are determined to consume Ukraine and Taiwan, legacies of the Romanov and Qing dynasties respectively, into the latest versions of their historical empires. Technology has intensified this struggle for imperial geography. Great-power war has become entirely imaginable because of the reduced emphasis on thermonuclear bombs in an era of hypersonic missiles, automated weapons systems, and information warfare. Russia and China demonstrate that the struggle for empire has rarely had such nerve-racking stakes.
The notion that we can play Russia off against China—as the Nixon administration played China off against the Soviet Union—is a fantasy. President Biden’s reward for giving up opposition to Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Germany has been the advance of nearly 100,000 Russian troops to the Ukrainian border area. National security adviser Henry Kissinger’s secret 1971 visit to Beijing occurred in the context of dramatic military tensions on the Chinese-Soviet frontier. China was in desperate need of U.S. help. Russia today has no such need.
True, the Chinese are making large-scale economic advances in formerly Soviet Central Asia, as well as providing security assistance to the Muslim republics there. But Russian President Vladimir Putin has calculated that China, a fellow authoritarian regime, isn’t a threat to his rule in the way the West is. (Indeed, Mr. Putin easily moved antiriot police into Kazakhstan, a place that the Russian empire settled with peasants from Russia and Ukraine in the 19th and early 20th centuries.) He has little need to line up with the West to balance against China.
Rather the reverse: Mr. Putin needs China to balance against the West. Since it is the West, in his view, that has helped install a hostile regime in Ukraine, whose border is less than 300 miles from Moscow, and would like to install a similarly hostile and democratic regime in Belarus, also relatively close to the Russian capital. What we see as potential or fledgling democratic states, Mr. Putin sees as vital parts of the former Soviet Union, a great power whose sprawling territory was based on czarist imperial conquests. While Ukraine was the birthplace of Kyivan Rus, it was also forcibly absorbed inside the czarist empire in the late 18th century, only to declare independence in 1918, before the Soviet conquest.
The Atlantic’s Odd Case Against Capitalism
The magazine argues that insidious hobbies are the latest example of capitalism’s anxieties, but I’ll take those anxieties over the ones the socialists offer.
Capitalism’s foes can’t make much headway arguing that socialist societies do a better job at providing for the economic and physical needs of the population, so critics are reduced to ferreting out minuscule or made-up problems that capitalist economies create. Most of these flaws are so picayune as to be laughable, yet it’s best to track our enemies’ thinking just in case their ideas catch on.
And some of this nonsense is funny to read. The latest attention-grabber comes from Julie Beck, writing in the Atlantic under the headline, “How Hobbies Infiltrated American Life.” Most Americans find that their pastimes — sewing, baking, bicycling, hiking, gardening, etc. — help ensure a richer and more fulfilling life. We learn lessons from these undertakings, which provide an enjoyable respite from our workaday and often-sedentary lives.
Capitalism provides an abundance of wealth, which we can squander on our latest crafts.
But Beck sees hobbies as something potentially insidious — an indictment of capitalist America’s emphasis on accomplishment and productivity. “If you’ve ever felt like your Instagram feed is taunting you with all the lovely crafts, elaborate home-cooked meals, and sweaty Peloton rides that other people seem to manage to fill their time with, … there is a reason for this,” she wrote. “The anxieties of capitalism are not confined to the workplace.”
She argues that this focus on hobbies predates the coronavirus epidemic — and that society once viewed hobbies as an “obsessive fixation” rather than something aspirational and wholesome. As she explains it, the Industrial Revolution reduced Americans’ work hours, but moralists saw the resulting leisure time as leading to delinquency and moral depravity. The result was a focus on “serious leisure,” where people honed skills unrelated to their work. Voila, “hobbies.”
To most of us, that sounds like a good thing. Human beings are intelligent creatures, and those of us who pursue particular hobbies tend to do so with joy and gusto — and we naturally want to improve our skills, learn new techniques, and join with others in pursuing these passions. Capitalism gives us the time and money to, say, figure out how to bake the finest gluten-free bread or plot a challenging hike through the Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Perhaps capitalism causes these anxieties, as we read on social media about how are friends are doing so much more with their time than we are. But this certainly beats the anxieties of socialism — wondering whether you’ll even be able to buy a basic sack of flour, waiting in line at the store, or wondering whether your uncle is still in the gulag. Capitalism provides an abundance of wealth, which we can squander on our latest crafts.
Capitalism is nothing more than the result of the multiple choices that people freely make. People use that freedom to make good and bad decisions. Other people’s choices might cause you some stress, but we’re all free to reject hobbies and pursue a life of indolence and sloth. Beck quotes author Steven Gelber, who says that hobbyists are “seldom aware of the ideological implications of their pastimes,” which apparently emanate from the Protestant work ethic. Excuse my grandmother for never contemplating the ideological underpinnings of knitting.
