“How long do politicians have to keep on promising heaven and delivering hell before people catch on, and stop getting swept away by rhetoric?”- Thomas Sowell
Democratic Socialism: It’s just a code word for the left controlling government and the means of production for their purposes. Think the Soviet Union, Cuba, and other great socialistic “success” stories throughout history. NO European country considers themselves to be “socialists.” Some have stronger, different social safety nets…but all operate as free market, capitalistic systems. So check their rhetoric.
Today’s liberal, progressive Democratic Party is OUT of touch and dangerous as it openly tries to destroy America as we know it.
Defund the Police; Critical Race Theory; men play girls sports; “mostly peaceful” riots & looting; massive deficits & government debt; open borders; unvaccinated illegal immigrants; ignoring parent’s rights; unconstitutional mandates…today’s Democratic party and their leadership pushing an agenda MOST Americans don’t support. There are NO moderate Democrats in Congress…they blindly follow Pelosi?!?
As the crazies go away, and they will, we then have to start talking to one another. Agree to disagree without being disagreeable. You can take a stand on principle without throwing a frozen bottle or burning down a building.
Democrat’s New Narrative: Just waiting… How long until the people who pushed lockdowns and mandates say they didn’t push lockdowns and mandates? How long until those who wanted to defund the police start saying they were always for law and order?
Another Biden Irony/Hypocrisy: Unvaccinated Canadian truck drivers are not allowed to deliver goods to the United States. Unvaccinated illegal immigrants get taxpayer-funded flights into and around the United States. Only the Biden Administration would think this makes sense.
Big Government Socialism Isn’t Working: Check out this video…the facts and left-wing policy failures laid out in a simple, straightforward way. Good language for conservatives to use.
https://americanmajorityproject.com/videos/
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
In this week’s video rewind- The National Debt passes an astounding $30 trillion, Senator Grassley meets with President Biden about SCOTUS pick, and labor unions received million in unauthorized PPP loans!
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/national-debt-tops-30-trillion
https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/labor-unions-received-37-million-in-illegal-pandemic-relief/
The making of a modern Republican
Paths to power and winning elections inside the GOP are changing rapidly and radically, spawning a new generation of kingmakers while diminishing the clout of many who lorded over the party for years.
Why it matters: Fourteen of the Republican Party’s top consultants and operatives across the country spoke in detail with Axios about how profoundly primary races have changed since 2014 — the last pre-Donald Trump midterm election and the last midterms in which a Democrat occupied the White House.
What we found: Those sources — whose clients range from as Trumpy as they come to establishment Republicans — described a clear shift in the party’s power brokers. They spoke of changes to the ecosystem across four categories: institutional upheaval, endorsements, conservative media and donors.
Axios granted them anonymity so they could speak with a degree of candor that’s not possible on the record because of personal and business relationships. Here’s what they told us:
3 Ways to Engage in Political Arguments More Responsibly (and Constructively)
To fix the blindness of a nation, it might help if we all take a hard look at the log in our own eye.
olitical tensions in the United States are at an all-time high.
A recent poll found that 84 percent of Trump supporters see Democrats as representing a “clear and present threat to American democracy.” Eighty percent Biden supporters said the same about Republicans.
As David French aptly puts it, “The combination of malice and misinformation is driving American polarization to a fever pitch.”
What can we do to bring tensions down a notch, while still advocating for the political ideas we cherish?
As a coach who’s spent two decades working with folks on every side of the political spectrum, and a former political op-ed writer who managed to maintain close relationships with family and friends who thought his views on government were insane, we have three ideas.
Why Ukraine Will Win (and Why the West Should Help Now)
Ukrainians have already made the decision about their future — it’s with the West. The only question is whether the West will listen, and help.
January 2022 ends with the greatest threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine since the last time Russia invaded, eight years ago. While war may indeed be likely, dire predictions abound which underestimate the Ukrainian people. Yes – Russia may invade. But in the end, it is Ukraine that will prevail.
Russia has a temporary advantage in the quality and mass of its armed forces, and the power of initiative. Ukraine and the world are preparing to react, but the West is scarcely proactive.
In the long run, however, Russia faces insurmountable disadvantages. Since Russia’s last invasion in 2014 and its seizure of Crimea, a Ukrainian national identity has been re-forged in the crucible of self-defense. Ukrainians know who they are, who they are not, and they are prepared to fight. They will not accept a Russian takeover.
Young people especially — all of whom have either served on the front-line with Russia or know someone who has — are determined to build a westward-looking, democratic, and European Ukraine. (An opinion poll last month showed 67% of Ukrainians now favor European Union membership and 59% want NATO membership.) They represent the future of Ukraine, and Russia cannot change this.
The Russian people do not control their state: they are subjects. But the Ukrainian people do control theirs: they are citizens. This fundamental idea — that people choose their government, rather than the government ruling over its subjects – is deeply embedded in Ukraine today. It is not an idea that can be dislodged by foreign — i.e., Russian – military conquest. It is an idea that the Russian people believe in as well, but feel powerless to implement. It is also the heart of what defines the West.
Biden’s Border Mess
Joe Biden’s border policy is nothing to be proud of, and the administration apparently realizes it.
Body-cam video unearthed by a Freedom of Information Act request captured a cop at an airport near White Plains, N.Y., asking federal contractors last year about the stealthy off-hours arrival of illegal immigrants. A contractor explains that “DHS wants everything on the down-low.” Another contractor says that no one wants it to get out that “the government is betraying the American people.”
Meanwhile, Fox News reporter Bill Melugin got footage of single adult males being processed through a nondescript location in Brownsville, Texas, to be flown to cities around the country. An ICE source told him that these kinds of releases have been taking place quietly since last spring.
The administration’s instincts at the border have been all wrong, but at least it has the sense to try to hide the full scope of its abysmal failure to enforce our laws and maintain good order.
America’s $30 Trillion Problem
Ignoring it won’t make it go away, but that’s exactly what Washington plans to do.
‘Contrary to the prevailing wisdom in Washington these past few years, we cannot simply spend as we please and defer the consequences to the next budget, the next administration, or the next generation,” then-President Obama declared during a “Fiscal Responsibility Summit” convened at the White House on February 23, 2009, days after signing a massive economic-stimulus bill into law. At the time Obama made the statement, the total debt of the United States government stood at $10.8 trillion, or nearly double where it was when his predecessor George W. Bush took office in 2001.
In the years since, two fiscal developments are especially noteworthy. One is that total debt has nearly tripled, eclipsing $30 trillion this week. The other is that nobody cares.
Indeed, back in 2009, even as he was advancing expansive fiscal policies, the big-government liberal Obama felt it necessary to claim to be fiscally responsible. These days, even in the face of a much deeper problem, both parties are further than ever from even pretending to care about the mounting debt and its looming consequences.
Liberals, who have gained more influence within the Democratic Party, recognize that any concerns about the debt and deficits are a barrier to advancing their sweeping domestic agenda. Whether or not they have explicitly done so by name, in effect, they have absorbed the lessons of Modern Monetary Theory and determined that debt doesn’t matter, nor should it get in the way of pursuing policies that they would otherwise support on the merits.
US national debt exceeds $30 trillion
The United States’s national debt exceeded $30 trillion for the first time, according to Treasury Department figures released on Tuesday.
The national debt is now about double China’s entire gross domestic product.
The sobering milestone comes after the federal government spent trillions of dollars to stimulate the economy and lessen the economic blow that came with the pandemic.
The country’s debt has increased by a whopping $7 billion since the end of 2019, just before the pandemic took hold.
Leaked document reveals Biden’s Afghan failures
Leaked notes from a White House Situation Room meeting the day before Kabul fell shed new light on just how unprepared the Biden administration was to evacuate Afghan nationals who’d helped the United States in its 20-year war against the Taliban.
Why it matters: Hours before the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan’s capital on Aug. 15, 2021, senior Biden administration officials were still discussing and assigning basic actions involved in a mass civilian evacuation.
Outsiders were frustrated and suspicious the administration was having plenty of meetings but was stuck in bureaucratic inertia and lacked urgency until the last minute.
While the word “immediately” peppers the document, it’s clear officials were still scrambling to finalize their plans — on the afternoon of Aug. 14.
For example, they’d just decided they needed to notify local Afghan staff “to begin to register their interest in relocation to the United States,” the document says.
And they were still determining which countries could serve as transit points for evacuees.
Tunisia’s democracy is disappearing before our eyes
While we are distracted by the looming war in Europe, the “genocide Olympics” in China and the never-ending pandemic, the last hope for a successful Arab democracy in the Middle East is fading. Tunisia, the only real success story from the Arab Spring, is slipping into the autocratic abyss — and the United States is nowhere to be seen.
Last July, When President Kais Saied sacked the prime minister, dissolved the parliament and turned the military on his political opponents, the international community generally expressed cautious optimism that Saied would quickly hand back the power he had just grabbed. Despite warnings that he was perpetrating a “self-coup,” the Biden administration decided to give him the benefit of the doubt
Nearly seven months later, there’s no room left for such wishful thinking. Saied has extended his 30-day state of emergency repeatedly. He took over control of the courts, which sentenced former president Moncef Marzouki to four years in prison in December. He had plainclothes police arrest a former justice minister, part of his clampdown on the main opposition party Ennahdha and all other political opposition.
Amnesty International recently reported that the Tunisian military, controlled by Saied, now routinely tries, convicts and punishes civilians, including political activists and journalists, as part of the president’s crackdown on dissent and free speech. Saied’s self-appointed ministers ordered police forces to shut down the government’s anti-corruption authority. Saied has effectively consolidated total power over the government and dismantled Tunisia’s messy but functioning system based on political inclusion and checks and balances
When Saied rolled out his new “political roadmap” in December, the State Department made encouraging noises. Left out were the details that the president plans to personally choose the officials who will write the new constitution, which will lay out the ground rules for elections scheduled for December. If he’s not yet a dictator with total power over the government, he’s well on his way
“Tunisia was the place where the Arab Spring started and stood as proof that democracy could succeed, even in a country with a significant Islamist constituency,” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who traveled to Tunisia and met with Saied in September, told me. “And now we’re left scrambling with a quasi-dictator and real uncertainty as to which way this country is heading.”
AOC Says ‘Capitalism is Not A Redeemable System,’ Offers ‘Alternative Ways of Doing Business’
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) sat down with Yahoo Finance’s Andy Serwer for the latest episode of his Influencers show.
During a discussion about capitalism, the full transcript of which was published Thursday, AOC explained why she believes that it is no longer the best system for the United States.
“To me, capitalism at its core, what we’re talking about when we talk about that is the absolute pursuit of profit at all human, environmental, and social cost,” she said…
…AOC is a member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization that believes workers should control most of the levers of production. The DSA’s website notes that capitalism should be replaced with “democratic socialism, a system where ordinary people have a real voice in our workplaces, neighborhoods, and society.”
