Democrat’s Problems: Yes, today’s Democratic Party has issues, actually several. They are printing and borrowing more money than ever before causing rising prices for gas, food, energy and everyday living…yes inflation (think Carter). Second, their cancel culture and complete disregard for main street America in favor discriminatory and extreme leftist, progressive identity politics is ruining western civilization. The border crisis is real, damaging and expensive for ALL American taxpayers…while miles of already paid for wall sit on the ground in some of the worst border crossing areas because of the Biden’s Administration’s cancel culture of anything Trump. And worse of all, they have empowered their allies to use riots to push their radical agenda destroying jobs, cities, and a way of life most would like to go back to.
The Democrats are responsible. America is watching. Things are getting worse and the crazy left is in charge of today’s Democratic Party.
There are some great articles below this week worth reading.
I, Pencil: “I, Pencil,” has become a classic, and deservedly so. I know of no other piece of literature that so succinctly, persuasively, and effectively illustrates the meaning of both Adam Smith’s invisible hand—the possibility of cooperation without coercion—and Friedrich Hayek’s emphasis on the importance of dispersed knowledge and the role of the price system in communicating information that “will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do.” – Milton Friedman
VP Kamala Harris: The hypocrisy of her politics is shocking…although I guess it shouldn’t be.
2021: “don’t come”
2017: “say it loud…say it clear…everyone is welcome here. #no ban no wall”
Yup, that’s our Vice President.
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
Drug prices in jeopardy of new price control scheme introduced in Congress, Insulin will cost more under the Biden administration, and Kamala cookies served on Air Force 2!
https://dailycaller.com/2021/06/07/kamala-harris-guatemala-customs-and-border-protection/
Help Us Fight Corporate Tyranny!
We have launched “the Corporate Accountability Initiative” to send a message to public companies on Wall Street. We own your stock. We fund your companies. We have the power. Stop disregarding us, stop offending us, stop screwing us over! Or we’ll pull our money from your companies!
Join the Fight! Visit https://www.60plus.org/fightwithwayne/
Our Increasingly Unrecognizable Civilization
I live about 20 minutes south of the Canadian border, which used to be called the longest undefended frontier in the world. People moved freely back and forth across it all day every day. But now it’s been closed for over a year. At one point my daughter asked me to drive her up there, because there was a 30-minute opportunity for people on one side to talk to their friends on the other. “Sad!” as President Trump would say. It was like Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin during the Cold War, except that both sides are now like East Berlin.
I don’t know how this happened, but it is just one indication that America, and the West in general, have become almost unrecognizable from what they were not that long ago.
Look at just three things we have lost.
One is equality before the law, something absolutely essential to a free society. In its place, we now have politicized law. If a policeman fatally shoots someone, whether his name is released to the public depends on whether the shooting is consistent with the preferred narrative of the ruling class. A policeman recently took down a young woman who was threatening the life of another young woman with a knife, and that policeman was immediately identified—indeed, his photo was posted and he was threatened by NBA superstar LeBron James on Twitter. On the other hand, we know nothing of the policeman who shot dead an unarmed woman in the U.S. Capitol on January 6. His name will apparently never be released to the public.
Second, border control. Functioning societies, at least since the Peace of Westphalia three centuries ago, have borders. America has no southern border and no plans to get one. The official position of our government seems to be that any of the seven billion persons on this planet has a right to come and stay in the U.S. for three years, until his or her assigned court date comes up. As the number of people with pending cases continues to grow, that three years will extend out to five or seven or 15 years. If we get all seven billion people to come here, the court system will break down entirely and maybe we can go back to having a functioning border.
And third, dare I bring up the fact that it is a real question whether we can go back to agreeing to have open and honest elections? And if we don’t have open and honest elections, control of our borders, and equality before the law, then we don’t have the conditions for politics or free government.
And here’s the thing. It is not at all clear to me that many of America’s conservative politicians understand the seriousness of all this. You can see it in the fact that they go around trying to scare people with the specter of a “radical socialist agenda.” For well over a year now, we have been living in a world in which it’s accepted as normal that the state has essentially unlimited power—and in which our freedom to decide for ourselves has been diminished almost to invisibility. Why do these conservative politicians think the words “radical socialist agenda” still scare anyone in a time when the state can tell us whether we can have Aunt Mabel over for Christmas? They are completely out of touch.
Over the same period as the pandemic lockdowns, we have seen an escalation of so-called wokeness. And if you look at one of the most startling manifestations of this, transgender fanaticism—which involves, after all, the abolition of biological sex and, I’m sorry to have to say it, the physical mutilation of children—one notices that America is farther down this road than any other country in the Western world. In other words, at this moment of crisis for Western Civilization, or for what we used to call Christendom, the leading country of the free world is pulling the wrong way.
Think of it. Your daughter has been training since she was a little girl to run in school sports. Now at 17, she’s in the state high school track championships, and you are forbidden even to notice that she’s competing against a woman who is 6’2” with thighs like tugboats, a great touch of five o’clock shadow on her face, and the most muscular bosom you’ve ever seen. You’re not supposed to notice the craziness of this, and the craziness is at its craziest right here in America.
$2 billion of border wall money sits idle in bank as Biden leaves busiest migrant area wide open
Most of the $2 billion that Congress set aside for 110 miles of wall and technology in the busiest region of the U.S.-Mexico border sits in the bank unspent as thousands of migrants illegally cross each day.
Eighty-nine miles of the project is unfinished, along the winding Rio Grande River that divides the two countries. While President Joe Biden’s administration shut down wall construction funded through diversions from the Trump administration, the project was approved and funded by the House and Senate. Besides this section, most of the wall projects funded by Congress during the Trump administration have been completed.
A senior Border Patrol agent said the project costs about $20 million a mile, and it is not clear why the final 89-mile stretch has been stalled or who will make the final call on whether to spend the money.
“We work for the government. We work for the Department of Homeland Security, so the secretary,” the official said, who was only able to speak anonymously with the Washington Examiner during a congressional tour this week. “He gets his orders from Congress and also from the executive branch, right? But ultimately he’s appointed, right? So he’s our boss. We do what he tells us.”
Top Republicans have moved to force the Biden administration to build the portion of the wall that was appropriated by Congress. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, and Vice-Chairman Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama have asked for the Government Accountability Office to intervene and decide whether Biden violated the Impoundment Control Act by suspending all projects without providing legal justification. Such a finding could give them reason to sue.
Street Violence as a Political Tool
The Democratic Party has had a problem. It’s a small, incoherent, and privileged clique funded by billionaire oligarchs to push policies that even mainstream Democratic voters oppose. How to bridge the gap? The solution they chose, which party officials made clear this week, was simple: the way third-world elites always do—by using street violence to keep their clients in line.
This week, pro-Palestinian demonstrators auditioned for the chance to join already established Democratic Party militias antifa and Black Lives Matter by attacking Jews in New York and Los Angeles. Apologists for the violence reason that the demonstrators are angry about the deaths of innocent Palestinian babies under Israeli fire in Gaza so they’re taking their frustrations—admittedly misplaced!—out on American Jews.
That is not what’s happening.
Who knows how many of the activists waving the Palestinian flag as they beat Jews and detonate fireworks in front of Jewish-owned businesses are genuinely Palestinian Americans? Maybe some aren’t even Arab or Muslim, but that’s irrelevant—they are staking their claim to recruit, promote, and represent Arabs and Muslims as an interest group. And so the flag they’re really flying isn’t for the Palestinians but rather for the Democratic Party.
This is all “intersectionality” really is — a branding mechanism to unite the various sects the Democratic Party has gathered under a big and potentially bloody tent. The current-day Democratic Party is a top-down structure paid for by the corporate establishment, led by Big Tech and finance, that appeals to a small class of managers, technocrats, and educators who for a variety of reasons, from self-pity to psychopathy, really do back the party’s most sinister policies—like open borders, designed to impoverish America’s working middle class. The party has lots of money and owns virtually all of the country’s major institutions, from the press to the Department of Justice. What it lacks, however, is voters. So they packed together interest groups and turned them into clients.
Deutsche Bank Issues Stark Warning About Rising Inflation: Economies Are ‘Sitting on a Time Bomb’
Deutsche Bank said the U.S. may be headed towards one of its worst periods of inflation in history amid increased government spending and relaxed monetary policy, warning that the belief inflation is transitory could have serious consequences for the economy.
The report, which was released Monday, begins with a series of quotes—contrasting Ronald Reagan’s warning about how serious inflation is with how Joe Biden, Janet Yellen and others have justified “acting big.”
“Despite the shift in priorities, central bankers must still prioritize inflation,” the report says. “Indeed, history has shown that the social costs of significantly higher inflation and greatly expanded debt servicing obligations make it hard, if not impossible to reach the social goals that the new US administration (among others) is keen to achieve. We fear that the vulnerable and disadvantaged will be hit first and hardest by mistakes in policy.”
Deutsche took particular issue with the Federal Reserve’s new framework tolerating higher inflation in order to reach a full recovery.
Inflation a growing problem for Democrats in 2022
Rising inflation is creating a drag on the Democrats’ 2022 prospects, threatening to send the price of household goods skyrocketing and turn voters against the party’s thin congressional majorities.
Inflation increased significantly in May, pushing the cost of food and gasoline higher just as the United States digs itself out of the pandemic-induced recession of the last year. Republicans blame President Joe Biden’s $2 trillion American Recovery Plan for flooding the economy with too much taxpayer-subsidized cash and say Democratic proposals to spend trillions more will send inflation spiraling out of control.
Republican strategists say the issue of inflation on its own is not a problem for Democrats. But its impact will be, they say, if the price tag of everyday goods and services spikes over the next 18 months.
“Gas prices are the easiest for people to see, feel, touch, and also the easiest to tie to Biden and the Democrats,” a Republican pollster said before cautioning: “This has yet to come up in our focus groups. People are still focused on employment, recovery, and opening schools.”
Echoes of the 1970s and Why It’s Time to Watch Free to Choose Again
It’s time to remember the legacy of the famous 1980 series amid a rising inflation and growing government déjà vu.
Milton Friedman in Hong Kong in the first episode of Free to Choose. (Free to Choose Network/YouTube)
It’s time to remember the legacy of the famous 1980 series amid a rising inflation and growing government déjà vu.
In May, Bob Chitester, producer of Milton Friedman’s famous Free to Choose PBS TV series and Free to Choose Media, died at the age of 83. Last year marked 40 years since the original airing of the series, which was first released in January 1980, toward the end of the Carter administration, in response to liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Age of Uncertainty BBC series released in 1977. Free to Choose, in its original run on PBS, played an important part in making Friedman a household-name economist, and it has since attracted millions of views online.
The series, which defended the virtues and welfare-enhancing abilities of free-market capitalism that helped set the stage for Reaganism, was launched during an era of rising inflation and big government. Indeed, the supply-shock era of the 1970s was a setting that all too eerily bears resemblance to today’s COVID-19 economic environment amid President Biden’s spending binge, the current “transitory” uptick in prices, and gas lines following the Colonial pipeline cyberattack. (The latter, in fairness, pales when compared with the OPEC embargoes of the 1970s and is hardly the fault of the president.) For this reason alone, everyone should consider watching (or rewatching) Free to Choose.
Friedman’s principle message was this: Through the mechanism of unregulated prices agreed upon by buyers and sellers, markets have the ability to align incentives to coordinate resources much more efficiently than any government or central planner can; often the decentralized model involving more freedom leads to much better outcomes for the poor, in the form of more jobs and a greater variety of better, more cheaply available products.
I, Pencil
Eloquent. Extraordinary. Timeless. Paradigm-shifting. Classic. Six decades after it first appeared, Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil” evokes such adjectives of praise. Rightfully so, for this little essay opens eyes and minds among people of all ages. Many first-time readers never see the world quite the same again.
Ideas are most powerful when they’re wrapped in a compelling story. Leonard’s main point—economies can hardly be “planned” when not one soul possesses all the know-how and skills to produce a simple pencil—unfolds in the enchanting words of a pencil itself. Leonard could have written “I, Car” or “I, Airplane,” but choosing those more complex items would have muted the message. No one person—repeat, no one, no matter how smart or how many degrees follow his name—could create from scratch a small, everyday pencil, let alone a car or an airplane.
This is a message that humbles the high and mighty. It pricks the inflated egos of those who think they know how to mind everybody else’s business. It explains in plain language why central planning is an exercise in arrogance and futility, or what Nobel laureate and Austrian economist F. A. Hayek aptly termed “the pretence of knowledge.”
Biden’s Rabid Trump Reversal Fever Is Bad for America
Do we really want to get along? I find myself wondering that a lot these days. In more normal times, finding ways to be less contentious and better to each other would be a noble goal. With Congress almost evenly divided some bipartisanship might be helpful.
We hear a lot about how divided we are as a nation. Worst time ever, and whatnot. I don’t know, from everything I’ve read, the politics in America during the Civil War seem to have been pretty heated. There was a fair amount of tension here in the late 1960s too. We’re sniping a lot at each other right now, but are we really at an all-time low?
I’m usually a big fan of political battles, especially now that the Democrats have moved to the left of Cuba. It would be nice if we could get along better but it’s just too much work now that common ground has practically disappeared into the ether.
Our alleged president is most certainly not the centrist uniter that we were promised during the campaign. We’ve now been treated to almost six months of a governing philosophy that is driven by nothing but a desire undo everything that President Trump did.
Here’s the thing though, Trump did a lot of good things. Republicans still want what’s best for America, Democrats want what’s best for Democrats.
In the beginning of the month I wrote column about an Arizona sheriff lamenting the consequences of Biden signing an executive order ending the construction of the border wall almost immediately after he was sworn. The overwhelming urge of Biden and his handlers to unravel Trump’s legacy began having unpleasant domestic consequences right away.
The Problem with a ‘Woke’ Military
A push for progressive policies in the military bureaucracy threatens the unity and meritocracy that make our armed forces effective.
U.S. Army paratroopers with the 82nd Combat Aviation Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, participate in a pass-and-review during a change of command ceremony at Fort Bragg, N.C., June 26, 2019. (Specialist Hubert D. Delany III/US Army)
A push for progressive policies in the military bureaucracy threatens the unity and meritocracy that make our armed forces effective.
Iused to belong to a war-fighting organization, where we were taught a shared set of Army values. We were taught mission accomplishment before all else, enforced by “mission first and people always.” Within the Department of Defense (DoD) Diversity and Inclusion Strategic Plan we are told that “diversity is a strategic imperative — critical to mission readiness and accomplishment.” We are also told, by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, that it must be a priority for the military “to look like America and not only in the ranks, but our leadership should look like America.” On the surface, this sounds okay. But it flips what had long been a soldier’s commitment to the Army and mission: The new priority turns the Army into a social experiment at the cost of mission readiness. The new push within the DoD for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) goes well beyond measures to ensure equal opportunity and instead looks to create preferences that have nothing to do with merit. Our military will suffer if it does not change course.
Believing that the Army should be and has been the best example of a meritocracy in the history of the world has become a forbidden position. The only acceptable position now is full acceptance of all elements of DEI. Examples abound, from the more benign recent recruiting messages depicting cartoon stories — one of an “activist” soldier — all the way to creating a new permanent DEI infrastructure to push policies in line with critical race theory. That I am not allowed to openly hold the position that war-fighting and combat readiness should be the Army’s top priority, while being force-fed a radical DEI agenda, demonstrates the open erosion of mission-first principles within the military.
This is a real and serious change, and politician veterans such as Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Dan Crenshaw are right to be worried about it. The Army used to be a values-based organization focused on mission accomplishment above all else. These values were drilled into every soldier during initial entry training and reinforced at unit level. This was done through two long-standing Army traditions, an inability to spell and the overwhelming need to make everything an acronym. So we settled on LDRSHIP (pronounced “leadership”): loyalty, duty, respect, selfless service, honor, integrity, and personal courage. These values were all pitched toward the idea of leaving your past behind, as you had become part of an organization with a larger purpose. Diversity is not our strength; our shared values and singularity of purpose toward mission accomplishment is our strength. In fact, to “fight and win our nation’s wars,” we need conformity toward the mission-first mindset. We were taught that what came before the Army did not matter. All that matters was how you form a team to accomplish a wide range of demanding mission sets.
GOP Sweeps in Texas Races Signal Growing Hispanic Support for the Party
Winning Republican mayoral candidates ran on an anti-crime platform.
Republicans swept key races for mayor in Texas on Saturday, setting back Democratic hopes that the state’s urban areas will deliver statewide majorities for them in the future. Most shocking: In McAllen, Texas, a border city of 150,000 people of which 85 percent are Hispanic, Republicans elected their first mayor ever.
Other cities with strong Hispanic populations also elected Republicans to replace retiring mayors. Fort Worth is the twelfth-largest city in the country and has more than 1 million people. Only a third of them are Anglo. But 37-year-old Republican Mattie Parker easily defeated Democrat Deborah Peoples, becoming the youngest mayor …
Joe Manchin: Why I’m voting against the For the People Act
The right to vote is fundamental to our American democracy and protecting that right should not be about party or politics. Least of all, protecting this right, which is a value I share, should never be done in a partisan manner.
During my time as West Virginia’s secretary of state, I was determined to protect this right and ensure our elections are fair, accessible and secure. Not to benefit my party but all the people of West Virginia. For example, as secretary of state I took specific actions to establish early voting for the first time in West Virginia in order to provide expanded options for those whose work or family schedule made it difficult for them to vote on Election Day. Throughout my tenure in politics, I have been guided by this simple philosophy — our party labels can’t prevent us from doing what is right.
Unfortunately, we now are witnessing that the fundamental right to vote has itself become overtly politicized. Today’s debate about how to best protect our right to vote and to hold elections, however, is not about finding common ground, but seeking partisan advantage. Whether it is state laws that seek to needlessly restrict voting or politicians who ignore the need to secure our elections, partisan policymaking won’t instill confidence in our democracy — it will destroy it.
As such, congressional action on federal voting rights legislation must be the result of both Democrats and Republicans coming together to find a pathway forward or we risk further dividing and destroying the republic we swore to protect and defend as elected officials.
COVID marked the twilight of America’s arrogant ‘expert’ class
At some point, the US Congress stopped legislating and handed over most “rulemaking” governing Americans’ lives to the administrative state’s sprawling bureaucracy. The brainchild of progressive President Woodrow Wilson, the modern administrative state is rooted in a disdain for the messy give-and-take of politics and a preference for rule by an enlightened clerisy.
“Trust the experts,” in other words. Over the century-plus since Wilson’s presidency, the federal mandarins themselves, as well as many citizens and lawmakers, elevated the slogan to the status of dogma. To question the numerous agencies of the federal government and their armies of “experts” became tantamount to questioning science itself.
Then came COVID-19. The virus dealt an irreparable blow to the credibility of our ruling class and its appeal to its own authority as a coterie of highly credentialed and capable experts.
No single person exemplifies this fall more than Dr. Anthony Fauci, who attained celebrity status during the pandemic as the nation’s leading immunologist and forward-facing spokesman for our public-policy response.
As Steve Deace and Todd Erzen detail in their new book, “Faucian Bargain: The Most Powerful and Dangerous Bureaucrat in American History,” Fauci has repeatedly contradicted himself throughout the pandemic, waffling on what “the Science” demands at any given moment, while still always seeming to err on the side of draconian overreaction.
It’s Clear Now Anthony Fauci Isn’t A Fool, He’s A Villain
Lies upon lies, poetic injustice, arrogance, and an agenda that harmed millions of people. A novelist couldn’t have written him better.
A trove of thousands of emails released as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request show that, since the beginning of COVID-19, Anthony Fauci has been just as mendacious as some of his worst critics have alleged.
On Jan. 1, 2020, Fauci received a credible warning from a professor at the Scripps Research Institute, Kristian Anderson, that some of SARS-COV-2’s features “(potentially) look engineered” and that she and her colleagues “all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”
Fauci later blasted the “lab origin theory” as completely uncredible, leading the entire media-industrial complex to deride theories of bio-engineering or even the idea the virus might have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. His assurance, despite now finding it safe to backtrack on saying he’s “not completely confident” of SARS-2’s natural origin, was doubtless a major factor in Facebook banning posts supporting the lab origin theory.
That’s just one among many lies he’s spun since SARS-COV-2 reached our shores. It was clear from almost the beginning that Fauci was not just a benevolent science bureaucrat “trying to figure it out,” not just a bumbling idiot, but someone willing to put the entire nation through a punishing social and medical experiment, to gaslight the public time and time again to keep it going, and then bask in the sycophancy of Democratic Party lawmakers and the media while millions suffered needlessly. That’s the sort of thing we expect from the villains of political thrillers, not well-intentioned public servants who are just trying to “follow the science.”
Students 100 years from now might be forgiven for thinking Fauci was an invented boogeyman. Deceit is a classic character trait of fictional antagonists, and Fauci is, as one popular (now Twitter-banned) lockdown skeptic put it, a “one-man highlight reel of mendacity.”
The Science Suggests a Wuhan Lab Leak
The Covid-19 pathogen has a genetic footprint that has never been observed in a natural coronavirus.
The possibility that the pandemic began with an escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology is attracting fresh attention. President Biden has asked the national intelligence community to redouble efforts to investigate.
Much of the public discussion has focused on circumstantial evidence: mysterious illnesses in late 2019; the lab’s work intentionally supercharging viruses to increase lethality (known as “gain of function” research). The Chinese Communist Party has been reluctant to release relevant information. Reports based on U.S. intelligence have suggested the lab collaborated on projects with the Chinese military.
But the most compelling reason to favor the lab leak hypothesis is firmly based in science. In particular, consider the genetic fingerprint of CoV-2, the novel coronavirus responsible for the disease Covid-19.
In gain-of-function research, a microbiologist can increase the lethality of a coronavirus enormously by splicing a special sequence into its genome at a prime location. Doing this leaves no trace of manipulation. But it alters the virus spike protein, rendering it easier for the virus to inject genetic material into the victim cell. Since 1992 there have been at least 11 separate experiments adding a special sequence to the same location. The end result has always been supercharged viruses.
A genome is a blueprint for the factory of a cell to make proteins. The language is made up of three-letter “words,” 64 in total, that represent the 20 different amino acids. For example, there are six different words for the amino acid arginine, the one that is often used in supercharging viruses. Every cell has a different preference for which word it likes to use most.
In the case of the gain-of-function supercharge, other sequences could have been spliced into this same site. Instead of a CGG-CGG (known as “double CGG”) that tells the protein factory to make two arginine amino acids in a row, you’ll obtain equal lethality by splicing any one of 35 of the other two-word combinations for double arginine. If the insertion takes place naturally, say through recombination, then one of those 35 other sequences is far more likely to appear; CGG is rarely used in the class of coronaviruses that can recombine with CoV-2.
In fact, in the entire class of coronaviruses that includes CoV-2, the CGG-CGG combination has never been found naturally. That means the common method of viruses picking up new skills, called recombination, cannot operate here. A virus simply cannot pick up a sequence from another virus if that sequence isn’t present in any other virus.
Although the double CGG is suppressed naturally, the opposite is true in laboratory work. The insertion sequence of choice is the double CGG. That’s because it is readily available and convenient, and scientists have a great deal of experience inserting it. An additional advantage of the double CGG sequence compared with the other 35 possible choices: It creates a useful beacon that permits the scientists to track the insertion in the laboratory.
Now the damning fact. It was this exact sequence that appears in CoV-2. Proponents of zoonotic origin must explain why the novel coronavirus, when it mutated or recombined, happened to pick its least favorite combination, the double CGG. Why did it replicate the choice the lab’s gain-of-function researchers would have made?
Supreme Court unanimously rejects border jumper’s demand for path to citizenship
The Supreme Court on Monday shot down an attempt by an immigrant who is in the U.S. illegally to claim that he is entitled to a pathway to citizenship because he was granted a deportation amnesty under the Temporary Protected Status program.
Jose Santos Sanchez, a citizen of El Salvador, had argued that once he won TPS under the law he qualified for an adjustment of status to lawful permanent resident — obtaining a green card. But the justices said that was a misreading of the law.
The case turned on the way the law is written, with Mr. Sanchez arguing that TPS meant he was now in nonimmigrant status, which is a prerequisite to get a green card.
But Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the unanimous court, said another part of immigration law requires that those applying for green cards enter the country lawfully.
“Sanchez was not lawfully admitted, and his TPS does not alter that fact. He therefore cannot become a permanent resident of this country,” Justice Kagan wrote.
Mr. Sanchez crossed the border illegally in 1997, and his wife did so the year after.
El Salvador Blazes the Path to Bitcoinization
On Saturday, El Salvador’s president [Nayib Bukele] shook the Bitcoin world by announcing a plan to make Bitcoin legal tender in his country. Details will emerge over time, but even this early it looks like a very big deal.
So I wanted to get some quick thoughts on paper.
First off, will it happen? Lots of bills are introduced about Bitcoin but few become law. In this case, however, President Bukele sports a 92% approval rating and has a strong majority in the Salvadoran parliament. He’s a right-leaning populist, so he has many enemies in media and abroad, but he seems very secure at home.
So, yes, it’s very likely to become law. We don’t yet know what pressure outside countries, especially the US, will apply—more on that below. But, for now, it looks very much real.
Okay, but is it a big deal? Critics are already laughing off El Salvador as a small and poor country. Of course, Google’s first 10,000 users looked silly compared to Yahoo’s millions. All revolutions start small.
Is Thomas Sowell one of the most important thinkers of our time?
Fans of Thomas Sowell have been eagerly awaiting the new biography by Jason Riley, with the appetite being whetted by the release of Riley’s one hour documentary on Sowell’s life in January.
This is not a standard biography.
Apart from providing a basic overview of Sowell’s life (his difficult upbringing in the segregated South and in Harlem, his late entry into academic life and meteoric rise as a public commentator), the author’s primary goal is to provide an introduction to Sowell’s voluminous body of work on matters as diverse as economics, education, cultural disparities and political ideology.
Like Sowell, Riley is a conservative African-American writer. A member of The Wall Street Journal editorial board, he is critical of the statist measures (expanded government, racial quotas, etc) which many leftists advocate, arguing that they hurt blacks instead of helping them.
Four decades Riley’s senior, Sowell has a long track record of making similar arguments. Interestingly though, he initially held very different views.
A Marxist radical from a young age, Sowell overcame the burdens of being a school dropout and worked his way to a Harvard economics degree.
