“Let’s talk about American values.
If you are able-bodied, you work.
If you take out a loan, you pay it back.
If you commit a violent crime, you go to jail.
If you’re a man, you should play sports against men.”
-U.S. Senator Tim Scott
Democrat’s Wacky Week: First you have the Hunter Biden scandal covered up with a joke of a plea bargain from daddy’s DOJ. Then the Democrat’s Russiagate scandal blown to shreds by Special Prosecutor Durnham’s testimony in front of Congress pointing it out to be nothing more than a Hillary Clinton political scam. And finally, the censure by the House of Democrat Congressman Adam Schiff for lying to the American people and dividing the country for political gain.
A tough week that says more about the progressive liberal Democratic party of today than any campaign ever will. I just hope voters are paying attention.
This is NOT your parent’s Democratic Party.
A Mockery of our Legal System: The Hunter Biden plea bargain makes a mockery of our legal system…one for powerful, well-connected Democrats and another for everyone else.
So much for gun safety and gun control measures.
So much for tax fairness and crony capitalism.
The Democrats hypocrisy is dripping with irony!
Political Weaponization of our Government: What Biden and the progressive left-wing Democrats have done and how they have abused our legal system and government is just plain wrong.
Unfortunately, if you vote for today’s Democrat Party you are just empowering the worse that politics has to offer.
God, all I pray for is a return to normal!
Read more below and follow me on Twitter & GETTR – @sanuzis
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
This Week: Ranked-Choice voting could help the Republican Party primaries, Adam Schiff is censured by the House, and Oregon initiative will provide tax relief for senior citizens.
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4060816-why-ranked-choice-voting-is-a-win-for-republicans/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4061474-house-republicans-vote-to-censure-adam-schiff/
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The stunning revelation in Durham hearing should chill us to the core
Special Counsel John Durham recently appeared before Congress to answer questions about his bombshell report on the FBI’s botched handling of Donald Trump’s alleged Russian collusion in 2016, and what Americans heard in the hallowed halls of the Capitol should chill them to the core.
Durham told the House Judiciary Committee, “The FBI was too willing to accept and use politically funded and uncorroborated opposition research, such as the Steele dossier. The FBI relied on the dossier and FISA applications, knowing there was likely material originating from a political campaign or political opponent.”
And whose political campaign you might ask was funneling this false information to the FBI? Why that would be Hillary Clinton’s, Trump’s 2016 presidential opponent.
As if this weren’t bad enough, and it most assuredly is, at almost the same time as the same FBI was opening a case on Trump under false pretenses, it was closing its investigation on Clinton’s mishandling of classified materials with no charges.
In the report, Durham called the treatment of Democrat Clinton and Republican Trump “markedly different,” which is a nice way of saying it stinks to high heaven.
Put bluntly, according to Durham, the FBI had ample evidence to believe that the dirt dug up on Trump was coming from Clinton’s camp, that it was opposition research, not the product of a legitimate investigation, but they didn’t care.
Tim Scott is a Threat
Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States, is the son of a white woman from Kansas who gave birth to him in Hawaii. Afterward, he moved to Indonesia, returned to Hawaii, and attended a prestigious private school.
Barack Obama has decided to call out Senator Tim Scott for dismissing America as a racist nation. Tim Scott grew up in the heart of the Confederacy — Charleston, SC — and was raised in working-class poverty as the descendant of slaves and went to public schools.
Barack Obama is a descendant of Irish settlers on his mother’s side, and his father is from Kenya. Tim Scott is the descendant of slaves on both sides.
It is really notable that Obama and Scott are both from broken homes, but the one who got to travel the world and go to a private school in Hawaii wants to lecture the South Carolina descendant of slaves about race and opportunity in America.
The left really fears Scott. The left has told black voters for years that they are victims of systemic racism and that without the Democrats, they cannot get ahead. Tim Scott tells black Americans that they too can get ahead if they work hard and stop believing they’re the victim and America is racist. There are racists in America, but the country itself is not.
Obama tells GOP presidential candidate Tim Scott just how he’s allowed to be black
Is there anything worse than a white liberal who tells a black person how he’s allowed to be black?
Maybe it’s President Obama, who these days has gone the Joe Biden route, and is now effectively telling Sen. Tim Scott how he’s allowed to “live his truth” and be black.
According to The Guardian:
Barack Obama has criticized two Republican presidential hopefuls, the South Carolina senator Tim Scott and the former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, over their stances on race relations in America.
In a podcast interview, Obama, who became the first Black US president when he was elected in 2008, said that while presenting a hopeful message on race relations was important, “that has to be undergirded with an honest accounting of our past and our present”.
Scott is the only Black candidate in the 2024 Republican presidential primary race and Haley is Indian American.
Asked about Scott’s messaging, Obama said there was sometimes a tendency among Republican candidates to gloss over the effects of racism, arguing that candidates need to address racial disparities to be taken seriously on the subject of American unity.
Which has got to leave a sour taste in Scott’s mouth, given that he’s the only black man in the presidential race, and what’s more, he’s actually lived firsthand through the era of real racism as a child growing up in the South.
Obama, by contrast, is only half black, from late-to-the-party immigrant stock, meaning, he’s never had one whit of commonality with Scott, who has lived through Jim Crow racism under southern Democrats firsthand.
Obama is coming off as a sanctimonious white liberal in his pronouncements, and in some ways he is just that these days, living like a billionaire, and flying around in private jets on some kind of permanent vaction to all his many mansions.
Why ranked-choice voting is a win for Republicans
With the entrance of Mike Pence, Chris Christie and Doug Burgum into the race this month, there are now 13 major candidates running in the GOP presidential primary, including a former president and vice president, governors, senators and business leaders.
The size and diversity of the field should be a strength, but under our current election rules, it actually creates major problems. Candidates split the vote with one another. Long shots like Christie or Burgum are cast as distractions or spoilers, instead of being appreciated for the ideas they bring to the contest. Voters fear “wasting” their vote on anyone besides a front-runner. Ultimately, instead of being energized and united behind a consensus nominee, we feel frustrated and divided.
There is a simple solution to these complicated problems: Give voters backup choices. If a voter’s first choice can’t win, their vote counts for their second choice, and so on.
This voting method — usually known as ranked-choice voting — is how Virginia Republicans nominated now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin in a seven-candidate contest in 2021. It may be our best shot at allowing all candidates to run and make their case to the American people. It would also free voters to select candidates from their own state (so-called “favorite sons”).
New study dissects polarized political climate in the U.S. — and how to fix it
The authors of the study say anti-democratic leaders across the world are convincing their supporters to vote away their political rights.
Campaigns for the 2024 presidential election are in full swing, with several Republican powerhouses entering the race, including former President Donald Trump, former Vice President Mike Pence and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The crowded field of popular conservatives will be whittled down to one candidate who will likely face President Biden, who has announced his run for reelection. The upcoming election follows a tumultuous presidential race in 2020, which was ripe with false information about election-rigging that caused further distrust among Republicans and Democrats.
A new University of California Berkeley study turns the focus on U.S. voters and found that simple bipartisan commitments to genuine American democracy may offer a way to ease polarization and increase positive feelings on all sides.
The research, published on May 22 in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, found that both major parties believe in the democratic process and values. But dysfunction arises when voters on one side believe their opponents are hostile to those values. The study suggests extremist political leaders can manipulate their followers to believe that opponents are anti-democratic.
“In both groups, we found a very strong relationship. … People most willing to break the rules of our democracy themselves are also the same people who most fear that the other party [is] breaking the norms,” Gabe Lenz, a professor at UC Berkeley who co-authored the study, told Yahoo News.
He said that many factors have contributed to America’s current political turmoil.
“There’s lots of political science research that suggests that rising inequality has contributed to it and stagnant incomes among people without college degrees. But I think that one factor consistent with our studies that’s underappreciated is that some politicians just excel at creating conflict and creating us versus them situations and fostering misperceptions of the other party,” Lenz said.
There are some examples in the U.S. of positive political discourse, with the study highlighting one from 2020:
Do We Still ‘Hold These Truths’?
Today, our choice is between republic and oligarchy.
In about three weeks, we will once again be celebrating the Fourth of July, America’s Independence Day. But what are we really celebrating? For all too many Americans, the Fourth of July is just another summer holiday, albeit one with fireworks. Of course, most Americans dimly recollect that it was on this day, sometime in the distant past, that Americans declared their independence from Great Britain. But they seldom stop to reflect on the true revolution that the Fourth of July signifies: the Declaration of Independence and the creation of a nation based on a universal idea. As Alexander Hamilton put it in the Federalist, the United States had the opportunity to establish a government founded on “reflection and choice” rather than on “accident and force.”
The Declaration of Independence claimed to derive its authority from certain “self-evident” truths. Do we still believe in them? Do we still believe, as the Declaration maintains, that nature, including human nature, is accessible to human reason? That human reason can ascertain the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and certain self-evident truths, e.g. “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed . . .”?
For the founders, the Constitution was designed to provide the framework for the kind of government envisioned by the Declaration: a republic or commonwealth intended to protect the natural rights of its citizens. The link between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution was nicely captured by Abraham Lincoln in a fragment he most likely composed in the winter of 1861, shortly before his inauguration. Contemplating the nature of the Union and the Constitution in the face of the secession crisis, Lincoln argued the Constitution is principally a framework for sharing power within a republican government. He contended that this was the real thing to be preserved, because only republican government is capable of protecting the rights and liberties of the people. But Lincoln also saw the Declaration of Independence as the foundation of such a government, and the Constitution as the means of implementing it.
In this fragment, Lincoln observes that as important as the Constitution and Union may be, there is “something back of these, entwining itself more closely about the human heart. That something, is the principle of ‘Liberty to all’” as expressed in the Declaration. With or without the Declaration, Lincoln continues, the United States could have declared independence, but “without it, we could not, I think, have secured our free government, and consequent prosperity.”
How Reddit Radicalizes The Left And Encourages Political Violence
Reddit, a link-aggregating website that claims to be the “front page of the internet,” has turned into a hotbed for radicalization.
Reddit’s fundamental reliance on upvotes over an algorithm produces an unstable equilibrium in the hands of bad-faith moderators. This creates an incredible echo chamber made up of subreddits, which create groups of individuals who will gladly throw away their empathy as long as they view themselves as a “bastion of good” fighting those who are ontologically evil.
In some rare cases, these individuals reach beyond the keyboard and manifest this radicalization into action.
This article is meant to shed some light onto the unseen world of Reddit, where left-wing users are routinely goaded into increasingly concerning rhetoric and, sometimes, even violence.
What George Soros’s succession plan means for America
The recent announcement that 37-year-old Alexander Soros, rather than his 52-year-old half-brother Jonathan, would take control of his father’s $25 billion business empire was an important development in the financial world. But there’s more to this story than the financial soap opera in which the more considered and cautious Jonathan, the longtime favorite to succeed George Soros, was bested by Alexander, who seems to be cut from the same cloth as his risk-taking father.
The more important prize that the Soros boys were vying for was not their Hungarian-born father’s hedge fund but his philanthropic foundation, the Open Society Foundations that the business supports.
Since its founding in 1984, OSF has operated on an epic scale. While initially primarily focused on promoting democracy in Eastern Europe, by the dawn of the 21st century, it had completely reinvented itself as the Left’s all-purpose sugar daddy, doling out tens of billions of dollars to a vast network of left-wing groups that seek to influence policy and elect candidates to political office.
The fund’s willingness to invest enormous sums in a sharply focused ambitious agenda made it the single most influential force in leftist activism and politics. It also turned the now 92-year-old elder Soros into a larger-than-life figure of almost mythical stature for both the Left and the Right. George Soros lives and operates quietly, eschewing the limelight. But his every action, from his youth as a teenage survivor of the Holocaust to his career making billions shorting foreign currencies and creating economic misery in his wake and on to his current status as a pinata for right-wing criticism that is widely characterized as antisemitic by his defenders, is a focus of intense and often-critical scrutiny and controversy.
“Catch and Release” Has Become “Greet and Release”
Since President Biden took office, the number of illegal aliens encountered at our southwestern border has exceeded all records.
There has been no significant reduction in illegal entrants. They have simply been renamed and redirected.
Congress needs to defund the administration’s open-borders operations.
Since President Biden took office, the number of illegal aliens encountered at our southwestern border has exceeded all records. Yet the administration continues to deny this undeniable fact.
It’s boasting that border encounters have plummeted due to its supposedly tough “Comprehensive Plan to Manage the Border After Title 42.” But this plan is nothing more than a smoke screen for the administration’s true objective: Let in as many aliens as possible and punt them into backlogged asylum and court systems—in most cases without proper GPS tracking or scheduled court appearances.
In a June 6 “victory lap” press release that media outlets and allies on Capitol Hill quickly echoed, the White House claimed that its “historic expansion of lawful pathways” has reduced “unlawful entries between ports of entry … by 70% since May 11,” the day Title 42 authority ended.
It’s a shell game. The administration is comparing the historical high of 10,000 daily illegal alien southwest border encounters in the days before Title 42 ended with the 3,000 per day after the Title 42 termination.
Debunking Gavin Newsom’s claim that California’s economy is the best in the nation
During Gov. Gavin Newsom’s (D-CA) interview with Sean Hannity last week, he talked a strong game on California’s economy, claiming it is the best in the nation while rattling off a few quick statistics. But a look at the facts reveals that is simply not the case.
Let’s start with Newsom’s most important claims: namely, that California is “No. 1 in the nation for new business starts,” and that it has one of the best GDP growth numbers in the world.
On new businesses, Newsom uses statistical sleight of hand by using raw numbers rather than per capita numbers. California has, by far, the largest population of any state. Consequently, it will, of course, have the most raw business starts. However, U.S. Chamber of Commerce data indicate that California was actually ranked No. 29 in business applications per capita in 2022. This is a superior measure because it adjusts the number to the population.
Newsom likes to compare California to Florida and Texas on subjects like this. But the numbers show Florida was ranked No. 3 in business applications per capita in 2022, and Texas was ranked No. 15.
So far, not so good for Newsom.
His claim that California has one of the best GDP growth rates in the world is similarly specious. To get to 7.8%, he had to go back to 2021, during the post-COVID recovery, when every state had abnormally high growth rates. It is true California had the second-best growth that year, only trailing Tennessee, but a broader look at the data show something less sunny.
In 2022, which is the most recent year for which data is available, California was in the bottom 10 in terms of GDP growth, rising only 0.4%. Similarly, in 2020 and 2019, California was nowhere near the top. In fact, in each of those years, the top of the list was dominated by red states such as Texas, Idaho, Tennessee, and Utah. In other words, in order to make the claim California’s GDP growth is historic and unique, Newsom had to cherry-pick one year out of the last four — when even then, his state was not at the top.
Comer says Wray could face another round of contempt of Congress proceedings
Rep. James Comer (R-KY) said the FBI is “stalling, stonewalling, doing everything they can to obstruct the House Oversight Committee’s credible investigation of Biden bribery.”
On Tuesday, the Oversight Committee chairman, along with ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-MD), viewed two additional documents related to the alleged “criminal bribery scheme” involving Hunter Biden, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and “foreign national” Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian owner of Burisma.
Comer said that one of the documents, however, was not what he had requested.
“The way I knew about these two documents, that the FBI initially denied having, was that there are footnotes in the original document that the whistleblower brought to [Sen. Chuck] Grassley and I. In the footnotes, they referenced two other 1023s, one dated 2017 and one dated 2018,” Comer told Fox News Tonight. “The two documents that they provided me today, that were heavily redacted, the one thing that wasn’t redacted was the date, and both dates were 2017.”
“So, I asked them to bring me the 2018 one,” Comer continued. “It’s just a complete waste of my time. It’s another example of the FBI stalling, stonewalling, doing everything they can to obstruct the House Oversight Committee’s credible investigation of Biden bribery.”
Comer explained that his committee may, once again, pursue contempt of Congress proceedings against FBI Director Christopher Wray.
