“No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.”– Mark Twain
Border Crisis: Why pretend it’s not?!? It is only getting worse!
Even if President Biden and the Democrats think they are bringing new voters to the rolls that will be enticed by the “welfare state” to vote Democratic…taxpayers will get the bill.
Illegal Immigrants will become a burden to our over stressed education system.
Illegal Immigrants will take jobs from Americans and drive down wages.
Illegal Immigrants will flood our healthcare system with unknown deceases and trigger dramatic cost increases.
America is the land of legal immigrants. We are a society built on the rule of law. The idea that the first thing you do to enter our country is to break the law and get away with it, creates the kind of resident that I’m not sure is best for our future.
We continue to be the most generous and welcoming country in the world, but there has to be a process, there are rules and even Democrats and the President shouldn’t be above the law.
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
In this week’s video rewind- Mike DeWine starts a COVID-19 vaccine lottery, Liz Cheney gets bounced from GOP leadership, and Mollie Hemingway prepares to expose the 2020 election sham!
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/ohio-give-people-million-covid-19-vaccine-lottery/story?id=77656133
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/
‘U.S. Welcome Patrol’: how some border agents are struggling with Biden’s policy shift
Some U.S. border patrol agents are so frustrated with President Joe Biden’s more liberal border policies that they are considering early retirement, while other disgruntled colleagues are buying unofficial coins that say ‘U.S. Welcome Patrol.’
Interviews with a dozen current and former agents highlight growing dissatisfaction among some rank and file members of the agency over Biden’s swift reversal of some of former President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies. Since Biden took office, border apprehensions have risen sharply.
Some of that frustration is coalescing into opposition to Biden’s pick to lead the border patrol’s parent agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). The nominee is Tucson Police Chief Chris Magnus, who still needs to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
The discontent was partly reflected in an unusual memo from the acting Border Patrol chief last month, who objected to a new directive to stop using the term ‘alien’ when referring to migrants, saying it would hurt agents’ morale.
More Than 120 Retired Flag Officers Call For Revival Of A New Tea Party
More than 120 retired flag officers are calling on Americans to rally and reject the nation’s excessive embrace of a radical leftist agenda, particularly the “antiracism” efforts the left weaponizes to suppress dissent.
“Our nation is in deep peril. We are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776,” wrote the prominent group of 124 retired generals and admirals. “The conflict is between supporters of Socialism and Marxism vs. supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty.”
The signatories, which include President Ronald Reagan’s former National Security Adviser John Poindexter, President George W. Bush’s former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William Gerald Boykin, and retired Army Brigadier General Donald Bolduc, who is now running for Senate in New Hampshire, rail against a litany of left-wing pursuits showcased in the first 100 days of the new administration led by President Joe Biden, who has redefined what it means to run a far-left presidency.
The retired flag officers blasted the Democrats’ assault on election integrity, pursuit of open borders, rampant Silicon Valley censorship, re-engagement with the Iran nuclear deal, dismissal of energy independence highlighted through the elimination of the Keystone Pipeline, weaponization of the military to gaslight the public of right-wing threats, excuses for left-wing anarchists in city streets, and the recent confusion over nuclear code procedures at the White House.
Mainstream media misinformation and the high cost of COVID-19 ignorance
Bad perceptions can lead to very poor public policy. As reported by Health Care News, a recent poll found that young adults “overstated their risk of dying from COVID-19 by as much as 10 times.
Those 24 and under believed they had a 7.7 to 8.7 chance from dying form COVID-19 while the real risk is 0.1 percent.” Much of the ignorance about critical health matters, and notably COVID-19, can be traced back to mainstream media, which far too often misinforms and makes everything political. Scaring people sells newspapers and focuses eyeballs on the news channels.
Unfortunately, government officials, like the notorious Dr. Fauci, also have an interest in keeping a high level of panic. This previously unknown government bureaucrat was given considerable power over his fellow citizens and the American economy. He clearly has enjoyed the power, as demonstrated by his almost non-stop TV appearances, his ability to glide past never-ending policy contradictions, and his willingness to comment on topics for which he has no expertise and little apparent knowledge.
Once the COVID-19 pandemic is no longer the news lead, Dr. Fauci will disappear from the tube — poof! And he knows that — so we must wear masks forever in anticipation of the next pandemic.
In a typical year, almost three million people die in the U.S., about one percent of the population, with a jump in 2020 because of COVID-19. The COVID-19 death toll continued at a high level until this past month when the total number of people vaccinated began to have the desired effect of reducing the death rate sharply. So, everyone wants to know when the pandemic will be “over” — herd immunity or whatever — so they can try to live a normal life again.
Mollie Hemingway Writes 2020 Election Book Media Don’t Want Read
The ruling class did everything in their power to make sure what happened in 2016 — a Donald Trump election victory — would never happen again in 2020.
If questioning the results of a presidential election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath, nearly the entire Democratic Party and media establishment would have been incarcerated for their rhetoric following the 2016 election. In fact, the last time they accepted the legitimacy of a presidential election they lost was in 1988.
After the 2000 election, which hinged on the results of a recount in Florida, Democrats smeared President George W. Bush as “selected, not elected.” When Bush won re-election against then-Sen. John Kerry in 2004, many on the left claimed that voting machines in Ohio had been rigged to deliver fraudulent votes to Bush. HBO even produced and aired “Hacking Democracy,” a documentary that added fuel to the conspiracy theory fire of conversations about the 2004 results. But nothing holds a candle to what happened in 2016 after Donald Trump’s surprising defeat of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
Rather than accept that Trump won and Clinton lost, the political and media establishments desperately sought to explain away Trump’s victory. What they settled on was a destructive conspiracy theory that crippled the government, empowered America’s adversaries, and illegally targeted innocent private citizens whose only crime was not supporting Hillary Clinton.
With baseless claims of hacked voting totals, illegal voter suppression, and extensive media manipulation, the Russian collusion hoax had it all. But more than anything, the belief that Trump stole the 2016 election had the support of the most powerful institutions, individuals, and even government agencies in the country.
A Welcome Backlash against Critical Race Theory
Recent weeks have brought welcome pushback against the spread of critical race theory (CRT) and related dogmas of division in our nation’s schools.
Contrary to what many of CRT’s advocates often claim, the theory is about more than just teaching kids to “think critically” about the role that race has played in American history. It’s the conceptual apparatus of a self-avowedly activist political movement seeking to renovate the American social order from root to branch using state power.
CRT is a subdiscipline of the broader academic school of critical theory. According to one of critical theory’s pioneers, the German thinker Max Horkheimer, a theory is critical to the extent that it helps “to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them” and “to create a world which satisfies” their “needs and powers.”
As CRT’s most recognized proponent, Ibram X. Kendi, puts it:
New Voters Helped Propel Biden in 2020
We know that 2020 produced the largest voter turnout in modern history. But, for a detailed understanding of who voted—and how they voted—we had to wait until state voter files were updated and analyzed. This week, Catalist, a Democratic data analytics firm, released their first deep dive into the 2020 election using their database, which, they note “includes 15 years of voter registration records, supplemented by large-scale polling, modeling and precinct-level geographic analysis.”
What they found was a national electorate more diverse than any in American history. Overall, they estimate that 72 percent of the electorate was white, a 2-point drop from 2016. As recently as 2008, 77 percent of the electorate was white. Turnout among Asian Americans was up 39 percent from 2016, while Latino turnout was up 31 percent. Even so, white voters continue to have the highest turnout rates of any group. Seventy-four percent of white voters turned out in 2020, compared to just 50 percent of eligible Latino voters, 63 percent of Black voters and 62 percent of Asian voters. In other words, even as turnout among voters of color increased, they are still punching below their weight. This was especially pronounced in fast-growing and diverse sunbelt states. A Catalist estimate of voters and non-voters across battleground states in the South and West — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Texas found “nearly as many non-voting people of color (11 million) as there are voters of color (13 million), mostly concentrated in Latino communities. The numbers look quite different among white people in these states, with only 9 million non-voters and 24 million voters.”
Meanwhile, the Baby Boom generation’s reign as the dominant demographic group has ended as Millenials and GenZ have increased their political influence, a trend that Catalist calls “a demographic change that is functionally permanent.” Those under the age of 40 made up one-third of the electorate, a seven-point jump from 2016, while the share of the electorate of Baby Boomer age dropped to 44 percent. As recently as 2008, Boomers made up 61 percent of the electorate.
Yet, even as the 2020 electorate was more diverse than ever, Biden underperformed both Obama’s 2012 and Hillary Clinton’s 2016 performance with Latino and Black voters. How is that possible? After all, the conventional wisdom has long held that any surge in non-white turnout would benefit Democrats exclusively.
The New Electoral Map After the 2020 Census – Electoral Vote Map
The United States chose a new president in 2020, but we also got a new Electoral College map based on the 2020 U.S. Census.
That’s because the next U.S. Census will lead to congressional apportionment.
The new electoral vote map will be first used in the 2024 presidential election.
Winners and Losers of the 2020 Census
Texas has gained two more votes in Congress and the Electoral College for the next decade, while Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina and Oregon each gained one seat..
The seven states losing one vote each are California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
Based on the 2020 election results, Joe Biden would have received three less electoral votes if the new map had been in place.
Here’s the New Electoral Map
This is the electoral map that will be used for the 2024 presidential election. However, it’s shown using the 2020 election results but with the new electoral vote allocations based on the U.S. Census.
The electoral map is interactive. Just click on the states to flip them between Red, Blue and Toss Up.
America’s Failed Experiment in Public Housing
It leaves families living in squalid conditions, trapped in segregated neighborhoods. Rather than spending billions on socialized shelter, we need to put money in their pockets to give them choices.
President Biden’s nearly $2 trillion infrastructure package calls for doubling down on public housing. Projects are in “disrepair,” the plan rightly observes, with “critical life-safety concerns” and “imminent hazards to residents.” Biden proposes investing $40 billion to clean and green them. This is roughly 14 times the federal government’s current capital spending on public housing agencies, and it’s likely just the beginning.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is now demanding at least $80 billion in federal public housing funds. But why stop there: Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have joined other progressive activists calling for a Green New Deal for Public Housing costing as much as $172 billion — or $230,000 per unit — to retrofit public housing for energy efficiency and greenlight new projects.
Is the public housing we have really the affordable housing we want? This question matters to the 2.2 million residents of more than 1.1 million units of public housing managed by more than 3,000 public housing agencies across the country. The Biden administration’s housing agenda represents an opportunity — not to redo public housing, but to rethink whether it was a good idea in the first place and to consider policies that give lower-income families the kinds of choices that better-off Americans have long enjoyed.
America Needs An Honest Debate About Red Lines In Defense Of Taiwan
Politicians and military analysts should be blunt about their plans regarding the defense of Taiwan from possible Chinese invasion.
he greatest present challenge facing America and its allies is arguably a small democratic island off the coast of the biggest rising naval hegemon. Detached historians might see an amusing parallel from ancient Greek history, but history has rarely been kind to small islands caught in the middle of a great-power rivalry. The same argument has now reached Washington D.C., as China embarks on one of the fastest and largest naval build-ups in human history.
Charles Glaser writes for Foreign Affairs that China is geographically poised to take Taiwan if it so desires, yet defending Taiwan militarily is a fool’s errand — impossible to do without an uncomfortable, civilization-destroying cost. According to Glaser, the defense of Taiwan isn’t imperative to the balance of power in Asia, and unlike other allies — such as Japan and Australia — Taiwan is uncomfortably placed in a region where geography gives China an advantage.
That said, in a war the United States might be able to prevail, but the cost of that would be unbearable to generations who have no idea what a genuine great power war might look like. Therefore, Glaser argues that America shouldn’t tie its fate to Taiwan or promise to do something it cannot. Countering Glaser’s assessment in Foreign Policy, Blake Herzinger accuses Glaser of Chamberlain-esque appeasement, arguing that if the United States abandons Taiwan, all hope is lost.
Their debate frames the situation in simplistic Manichean terms, providing only two options: complete abandonment of Taiwan, or catastrophic war mounted in Taiwan’s defense. Yet such bifurcation is flawed, not least of which because it fails to mention a whole host of additional options, from deterrence by a vigorous arming of Taiwan, or by “bleeding” China by way of asymmetric escalation.
Yet the balance of power in place for the last three decades is, unfortunately, unlikely to hold. As scholarly literature suggests, the relative power difference between China and the United States has changed since the early 1990s. As such, any debate about Taiwan should start with these three questions.
Should FBI be abolished, replaced? FISA court issues dismal report
The FBI has been “seriously and systematically abusing its warrantless electronic surveillance authority” by overstepping the limitations under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act” (FISA).
We’ve been saying this for years, certainly ever since it was learned that the Russia hoax and the fake Steele “dossier” were used to fraudulently obtain warrants from them to spy on Trump campaign associates. You know it, we know it, we all know it, and now the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has finally offered evidence of it, in a 67-page opinion issued by presiding judge James Boasberg. (It actually came out last November but has just now been made public.)
Actually, the above quote is from Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Andy Biggs of Arizona, who’ve just sent FBI Director Christopher Wray a strong letter about the problem of “widespread abuses” and “illegal spying activities.” Jordan is ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee and Biggs serves as ranking member of the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.
As THE EPOCH TIMES explains in a premium report, Section 702 of the FISA law allows the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to jointly authorize, without a warrant, the surveillance of non-U.S. citizens residing outside the United States. When this is done, however, they’re supposed to adopt “targeting procedure” to make sure the spying is indeed limited to non-citizens and also to prevent the “intentional acquisition” of communications within the U.S.
(Recall that when James Clapper was asked under oath if the intelligence community ever gathered the conversations of U.S. citizens, he lied and said, “Not wittingly.” Clapper apparently was trying to appear Section 702-compliant. I digress.)
Keep One Eye on Xi and the Other on Putin
As Washington focuses on competition with China, it can’t afford to forget the threat from Russia.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Kiev last week on the heels of his first G7 meeting in London. The trip demonstrated strong, high-level U.S. support for Ukraine, suggesting that the Biden administration takes seriously the threat posed by Russian president Vladimir Putin’s regime. Such a message of resolve in Europe is especially welcome as the growing challenge from China tends to crowd out attention to other enduring geopolitical threats, including those coming from Moscow.
The view of the Russian peril is clear from Kiev. The Russian Army recently massed forces on Ukraine’s border and in occupied Crimea. But Ukraine’s fate is also important to the United States, because the Biden administration’s Russia policy—and how it handles a possible June meeting between Putin and President Biden—will be an early indicator of whether the administration can manage simultaneous challenges from Beijing and Moscow.
To be sure, the Chinese Communist Party poses a major challenge and threat to the United States, our allies, and the democracies around the world. Previous U.S. administrations shared this view, and according to the Biden administration’s Interim National Security Strategic Guidance released in March, China “is the only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge to a stable and open international system.” China’s leaders, the guidance continues, “seek unfair advantages, behave aggressively and coercively, and undermine the rules and values at the heart of an open and stable international system.”
The administration is right in its description of China. Under President Xi Jinping, China has launched a vigorous campaign to overtake the United States as the leading global player. The authoritarian Xi has also overseen a genocide against the Uyghurs and an ugly crackdown on those living in Hong Kong and inside the mainland; flexed China’s military muscles in the South China Sea and threatened Taiwan; and used technology to surveil, censor, and threaten its own people and those beyond China’s borders.
The threat posed by Russia under Putin is different—but no less dangerous. In the present and near-term, one could argue, Putin presents a more serious danger. The rival who seeks to outcompete may be the larger strategic threat, but if one ignores the rival that seeks to sabotage and destroy, the strategic contest may not be—ultimately— the determinant one.
Xi Jinping: From princeling to president
Xi Jinping became president of China in 2012, ushering in an era of increased assertiveness and authoritarianism.
He has been front and centre of China’s push to cement its position as a superpower, while also launching crackdowns on corruption and dissent.
A consummate political chess player who has cultivated an enigmatic strongman image, the leader of the ruling Chinese Communist Party has rapidly consolidated power, having his ideas mentioned by name in the constitution – an honour that had been reserved only to Mao Zedong until now.
The “Xi Jinping Thought” means that any challenge to the president will now be seen as a threat to Communist Party rule.
In 2018, the National People’s Congress approved the removal of the two-term limit on the presidency, effectively allowing Xi Jinping to remain in power for life.
Tony Blair: Without total change Labour will die
The Labour Party needs complete deconstruction and reconstruction. Nothing less will do.
The challenge facing Britain’s Labour and Liberal Democrat parties cannot be overstated. Political parties have no divine right to exist and progressive parties of the centre and centre left are facing marginalisation, even extinction, across the Western world. Where is the French Socialist Party of François Mitterrand or the German SPD of Willy Brandt? And dominant national parties can very quickly become small fringe parties under the hammer blows of poor leadership and social and economic change. Look at the Liberal Party of Asquith and Lloyd George, reduced from 397 to 43 seats in just 18 years in the early 20th century.
Joe Biden’s victory in the United States apart, progressive politics across the globe is badly placed: four election defeats for the UK Labour Party and no one betting against a fifth; the German SPD placed behind a moderate Green Party; the French Socialists, who won the presidency in 2012, now polling at 11 per cent; the Italian left imploded and divided; the Spanish and Swedish socialists hanging on to power, but way below their earlier levels of support.
And truth be told, no sensible Democrat or democrat should overplay the Biden victory. He won against an incumbent like no other, considered by centre-ground voters to be uniquely strange and unacceptable in his behaviour. In the middle of the Covid-19 crisis, Donald Trump’s actions appeared to have worsened the pandemic; and even then, Trump increased his number of votes in the 2020 presidential election from 2016, while the Republicans took seats in the House and probably only lost control of the Senate thanks to the bizarre post-election antics that ended in the storming of the US Capitol in Washington, DC on 6 January. The Biden victory was a heavy reaction not so much against the policies as the comportment of Trump. And in Biden, the Democrats nominated possibly the only potential leader who could have won.
