Conundrum: (Shared by a friend…thanks JL.)
A friend presented me with this Conundrum:
“A gun is like a parachute. If you need one, and don’t have one, you’ll probably never need one again.”
The definition of the word Conundrum is: something that is puzzling or confusing.
Here are six Conundrums of socialism in the United States of America:
1. America is capitalist and greedy – yet half of the population is subsidized.
2. Half of the population is subsidized – yet they think they are victims.
3. They think they are victims – yet their representatives run the government.
4. Their representatives run the government – yet the poor keep getting poorer.
5. The poor keep getting poorer – yet they have things that people in other countries only dream about.
6. They have things that people in other countries only dream about – yet they want America to be more like those other countries.
Think about it! And that pretty much sums up the USA in the 21st Century. Makes you wonder who is doing the math.
These three, short sentences tell you a lot about the direction of our current government and cultural environment:
1. We are advised to NOT judge ALL Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics, but we are encouraged to judge ALL gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics.
Funny how that works. And here’s another one worth considering…
2. Seems we constantly hear about how Social Security is going to run out of money. But we never hear about welfare or food stamps running out of money? What’s interesting is the first group “worked for” their money, but the second didn’t.
Think about it…..and Last but not least :
3. Why are we cutting benefits for our veterans, no pay raises for our military and cutting our army, but we are not stopping the payments or benefits to illegal aliens.
As a military veteran and a tax-paying American citizen, I wonder:
Am I the only one missing something?
Read more below and follow me on Twitter & GETTR – @sanuzis
–Saul Anuzis
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Saul’s News Weekly Rewind Video
This Week: David Axelrod sounds the warning on rock bottom POTUS approval rating, Senator Grassley doesn’t see evidence of Biden guilt, and AI algorithms may be denying Seniors the healthcare they need!
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/david-axelrod-joe-biden-donald-trump/2023/12/13/id/1145810/
https://www.axios.com/2023/12/13/humana-ai-lawsuit-deny-care-seniors-rehabilitation
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Civilization Versus the New Nihilists
Nihilism is the religion of the Left. Anarchy is now at the core of the new Democratic Party.
If the Left wished radically to alter the demography of the U.S., it could have expanded legal immigration through legislation or the courts.
Instead, it simply erased the border and dynamited federal immigration law.
By fiat, nihilists ended the wall, and stopped detaining and deporting illegal aliens altogether.
Or was it worse than that when candidate Joe Biden in September 2019 urged would-be illegal aliens to “surge” the border?
As a result, through laxity and entitlement incentives, eight-million illegal entrants have swarmed the southern border under the Biden administration.
They are swamping border towns, bankrupting big-city budgets, and infuriating even Democratic constituencies.
The same nihilism applies to crime.
In the old days liberals gave light sentences to criminals or reduced bail. But today leftist prosecutors do not even seek bail. They hardly prosecute theft or random assaults.
Criminals are arrested and released the same day. Is the nihilist plan to destroy the entire body of American jurisprudence, and to ensure “equity” in being victimized?
Is the woke idea that all Americans—inclusive of diverse Beverly Hills elites, Hollywood celebrities, or members of Congress alike—must share victim equity, and thus experience first-hand street robbery, car-jacking, smash-and-grab, and home invasion?
The United States can produce annually more natural gas and oil than any nation on earth. It once pioneered nuclear power. It has vast coal reserves and sophisticated hydroelectric plants.
The old idea was to use these unmatched resources to transition gradually to other cleaner fuels such as hydrogen, fusion power, solar, and wind. That way consumers would still enjoy affordable energy. And the United States could remain independent of coercion by the oil-producing Middle East.
But that was not the nihilist way.
Let’s Be Clear: This Is About Joe Biden, Not Hunter Biden
When James Comer wondered on CNN whether Special Counsel David Weiss had indicted Hunter Biden on nine tax-related charges to protect him from having to be deposed in the House Oversight Committee, Jake Tapper snarkily responded: “Yes, the classic rubric. He indicted him to protect him. I got it.”
Well, yes. Indicting a person on lesser charges can often protect him from more serious ones. It happens all the time. In this case, though, “him” isn’t Hunter, it’s Joe.
Weiss failed to indict Hunter for failing to register as a foreign agent or failing to pay taxes on the millions that flowed from those arrangements. Why? Probably because any investigation into Hunter’s $17 million foreign influence-peddling business — which Weiss has scrupulously avoided — leads to the president of the United States answering lots of awkward queries about his connection to disreputable people and authoritarian regimes. There is no Hunter Biden case without Joe. There is no Biden Inc. without Joe.
Hunter’s laptop — the one that the New York Post got its hands on, and that Tapper and others attempted to cover up — was crammed with texts and emails in which the son references his dad’s role in securing payments and taking cuts from the business. None of that is to mention the numerous witnesses that have come forward to contend that the “Big Guy” played a part in that outfit. Or the checks that ended up being written to Joe. Any genuine investigation into the 20-plus shell companies set up by James Biden, Joe’s brother, and Hunter would compel lots of people to answer questions on the record or under oath.
Weiss conveniently allowed some of these infractions to pass the statute of limitations, but some have not. Hunter pulled in a million a year from Burisma from the years 2014-2017, while Joe was forging American policy in that nation. It’s only a weird happenstance, not a massive conflict of interest, that the sitting vice president’s decisions may have aided the oil concern while his son was being paid. Hunter’s salary fell to roughly $500,000 annually from 2017 to 2019, after Joe was out of the White House. Another weird coincidence.
But the president’s son also had a 10 percent stake in a Chi-com investment fund named BHR Partners from 2013 to 2021. Joe flew him to China to set it up, met one of the partners, and then wrote a letter of recommendation for the man’s kid. All completely innocent, no doubt.
Biden border crisis: 13 million illegal immigrants now in US
As President Joe Biden’s open-border policies prompt daily stadium-sized lines of immigrants seeking entry from Mexico into the United States, thousands more are crossing undetected.
A new estimate this week put the growing population of “gotaways” at a sky-high 13 million, more than the population of every state except four: California, Texas, New York, and Florida.
“I think the number is around, now, probably close to 13 million,” said Steven Camarota, the research director for the Center for Immigration Studies.
He provided the new estimate at a conference held this week, during which he released a new census-based report showing that there are almost 50 million foreign-born citizens in the country, far more than previously expected by the government and likely driven by the spike in Biden administration-approved immigrants flooding into the country.
Camarota explained that there is no way to count the population of gotaways exactly but that there are accepted formulas.
“Could the number be bigger than we think? Yes. Could it be a million, maybe even two million bigger than we think? Yes,” he said.
At 49.5 million, the known foreign-born population is the largest percentage of the U.S. it has ever been, even bigger than during the great migrations that took place over a century ago.
Thousands of Migrants Overwhelm Remote Arizona Border Crossing
Even Democrats in the border state are demanding that the Biden administration do something to halt the flow of migrants.
Gerston Miranda and his wife were among thousands of migrants recently arriving at this remote area on Arizona’s southern border with Mexico, squeezing into the United States through a gap in the wall and walking overnight about 14 miles with two school-aged daughters to surrender to Border Patrol agents.
“There is no security in my country,” said the 28-year-old from Ecuador, who lost work when his employer closed due to extortion by criminals. “Without security you cannot work. You cannot live.”
A shift in smuggling routes has brought an influx of migrants here from countries as diverse as Senegal, Bangladesh and China, prompting the Border Patrol to seek help from other federal agencies and drawing scrutiny to an issue critical in next year’s presidential elections.
With hundreds of migrants crossing daily in the area, the American government on Monday indefinitely shut down the nearby international crossing between Lukeville, Arizona, and Sonoyta, Mexico, to free Customs and Border Protection officers assigned to the port of entry to help with transportation and other support. The agency also has partially closed a few other border ports of entry in recent months, including a pedestrian crossing in San Diego and a bridge in Eagle Pass, Texas.
Critics of the move, including Arizona’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs; the state’s two U.S. senators, the governor of Mexico’s Sonora state and the leadership of the nearby Tohono O’odham Nation, said it could harm trade and tourism.
Sen. Katie Britt Introduces Legislation To Prevent Illegal Immigrants From Voting In Federal Elections
Republican Alabama Sen. Katie Britt introduced legislation Tuesday that aims to make sure states are able to verify that only American citizens are voting in federal elections.
The Daily Caller first obtained a copy of the bill, which is titled the Citizen Ballot Protection Act. The bill would specifically require that an applicant provide proof of American citizenship when registering to vote by mail-in application.
The Washington, D.C., City Council voted in October of 2022 to pass D.C. Act 24-640, District of Columbia Council’s Local Resident Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2022, which would allow illegal immigrants and legal non-citizens to vote in local elections. The D.C. city council transmitted the bill to Congress on Jan. 11, 2023. Other states have passed measures to allow legal non-citizens to vote as well.
“Voting in our country is a sacred right that must solely be limited to American citizens. To allow States to uphold this principle should be simple commonsense,” Brit told the Caller before introducing the legislation. “We are seeing certain cities across our nation begin to openly allow noncitizens to vote in local elections. This effectively disenfranchises hardworking American citizens, insults those American citizens who came to our country legally and took the time and effort to go through the citizenship process, and undermines faith in our entire electoral system – which is a cornerstone of our nation that we cannot allow to crumble.”
Argentina’s newly elected president, Libertarian Javier Milei, sworn into office
Javier Milei talks to supporters about failing economy: ‘We don’t have alternatives and we don’t have time’
Argentina’s newly elected president, Javier Milei, a self-described anarcho-capitalist whose sensational rhetoric drew comparisons to former U.S. President Donald Trump, was sworn into office on Sunday
During his inaugural address, Milei reportedly spoke about the nation’s economic emergency and sought to prepare the public for a major adjustment to public spending cuts.
“We don’t have alternatives and we don’t have time. We don’t have margin for sterile discussions. Our country demands action, and immediate action. The political class left the country at the brink of its biggest crisis in history,” he said to thousands of supporters in the capital, Buenos Aires, according to the Associated Press. “We don’t desire the hard decisions that will be need to be made in coming weeks, but lamentably they didn’t leave us any option.”
Bidenomics has taken a big bite out of your retirement
Millions of Americans trying to retire today feel like Bob Cratchit, toiling away in Scrooge & Marley’s counting house, but unable to get ahead.
New research explains why: The modern-day Scrooge of Bidenomics has reduced the real value of the average 401(k) by a quarter in the last two and a half years.
The study, published with the Committee to Unleash Prosperity, examined individual retirement accounts (IRAs) and pension plans and found shocking losses under the Biden administration, enough to delay many Americans’ retirement plans for years.
How this happened is a painful lesson in government overspending and overregulating, the hallmarks of Bidenomics.
Immediately upon taking office, the Biden administration and their big-spender allies in Congress ran up multitrillion-dollar tabs with no way to pay, so the Federal Reserve just created the money to finance it all.
That sparked 40-year-high inflation, which was followed by the fastest interest rate hikes in just as long.
This severely hampered equities but completely devastated bond markets, delivering a one-two punch to people’s retirement accounts.
As Mortgage Rates Rise, Renting Is Now Cheaper Than Buying for Many: The Kiplinger Letter
A jump in mortgage rates has caused housing affordability to slump and priced many first-time home buyers out of the market.
Housing affordability is at its lowest point in almost two decades. It has continued to worsen this year as mortgage rates have hovered above 7% since mid-August Affordability is down 8% from a year ago as the average rate on a 30-year mortgage has risen to its highest since 2000, alongside rising home prices.
It costs the average household 44.6% of its income to afford a median-priced home, and renting is cheaper than buying for many folks. Despite the costs of renting and homeownership increasing after the pandemic, renting is more affordable than owning in most metro areas. Renting vs. buying comes out even in some cities, like El Paso, Texas, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Buying pays off in New Orleans, Louisana and Jackson, Mississippi.
Note that the median income of home buyers is now at a record high. It leapt to $107,0000 in 2023 from $88,000 last year as less affluent buyers got priced out.
How Tax-Exempt Nonprofits Skirt U.S. Law to Turn Out the Democrat Base in Elections
Even as Democrats such as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse warn of “right-wing dark-money network seeking to undermine the future of democratic elections in the United States,” progressives have far-outstripped Republicans in harnessing the power of putatively non-partisan, nonprofit organizations that push the boundaries to win elections.
More than 150 progressive nonprofits spent $1.35 billion on political activities in 2021 and 2022, according to data compiled by Restoration of America, a conservative political action committee. Although there are no readily available estimates of comparable conservative efforts, observers say they are overmatched.
“The liberal nonprofit sector is much bigger than the conservative nonprofit in the political arena,” said Bradley Smith, a former commissioner with the Federal Election Commission and founder of the conservative Institute for Free Speech.
The progressive activist nonprofits include faith-based groups, ethnic activist operatives, and colleges and universities, which have taken on an outsized part of the Democratic party’s election strategy.
China Already Hacking into U.S. Utilities, Pipeline, Port Companies
The goal, the report describes, is to find ways to “sow panic and chaos or snarl logistics in the event of a U.S.-China conflict in the Pacific.”
China’s threat to America now includes schemes to disrupt power and water supplies, communications and even transportation systems, according to officials cited in a new report.
Experts quoted by the Washington Post explained that hackers linked to China’s People’s Liberation Army already have succeeded in breaching “the computer systems of about two dozen critical entities over the past year.”
The goal, the report describes, is to find ways to “sow panic and chaos or snarl logistics in the event of a U.S.-China conflict in the Pacific.”
Those in a bull’s-eye already include a water utility in Hawaii, a port along the West Coast and an oil and gas pipeline, those experts told the publication.
“The hackers also attempted to break into the operator of Texas’s power grid, which operates independently from electrical systems in the rest of the country,” the report noted.
The report, citing anonymous sources, said there also were several targets outside the United States.
It’s not just Nevada – A look at a quiet movement among Republican state parties and some penalties from the RNC
In the months leading up to and in those since Nevada Republicans eschewed the newly established state-run presidential primary, story after story has been written about the intent of the move and the impact it may have on Republican delegate selection in the Silver state in 2024.
Often it is a story told against the backdrop of the way in which the Nevada Republican Party has bungled its way through caucuses in competitive cycles of the recent past. Nearly as frequently, those same stories have tended to gloss over the fact that it is not uncommon for states to have a both caucuses and a state-run (beauty contest) primary in the same cycle. Nevertheless, the Nevada situation is unique. But the whole discourse around the foibles of the Nevada Republican process for 2024 has obscured a broader pattern in Republican delegate rules making at the state level that has not gotten a lot of attention to this point.
Even leading up to the October 1 deadline from the Republican National Committee for state parties to have submitted delegate selection plans for 2024, it was clear that there was a movement away from state-run primaries. Divided Republican majorities in state legislatures in Idaho and Missouri could never reach consensus about how to move and/or bring back state-run presidential primary options. Unlike Nevada, however, neither of those states will have a presidential primary in 2024, beauty contest or otherwise. And similarly, Utah Republicans opted out of the presidential primary in the state, choosing instead to conduct caucuses on the same Super Tuesday date on which Beehive state Democrats will vote in that same state-run primary.
But October 1 revealed that the movement away from primaries was not confined to that small group.
