VP Kamala Harris: After President Trump announced he was going to visit the southern border in Texas with Governor Greg Abbott, V.P. Harris had to FINALLY agree to visit the border crisis areas herself.
Illegal immigration is causing untold numbers of family crises, increased cost to local units of government and unknown spread of potential virus infected individuals or more.
The Biden border crisis is out of control and the Administration seems to be dumbfounded as to what to do since they rejected every effort and Executive Order President Trump instituted to deal with and reduce the flow of illegal immigration.
Liberal partisanship has created this crisis and Biden & the Democrats own it!
Biden’s Bait & Switch: President Biden invited Republican Senators to negotiate with Democrats to come up with a bipartisan infrastructure bill. After long, hard and ultimately successful negotiations, the President announce he would ONLY support the bipartisan plan if all the Democrat’s favorite pork and political project were included.
Bottom line: If Biden’s proposal for “family infrastructure” and climate change doesn’t pass, then neither will the bipartisan infrastructure deal that senators just negotiated…right?!?
So much for honesty, bipartisanship and working together for the good of the country…versus the Democrat’s partisan politics as usual.
Senate Committee on Aging: The 60 Plus Association team in DC had a series of great meetings on the Hill this week, including meeting the staff of the Senate Special Committee on Aging.
We’re looking forward to continuing our work with them.
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
60 Plus meets with the Senate Committee on Aging, Joe Biden invokes nuclear weapons in the gun control debate, and Mazie Hirono accuses Ted Cruz of “mansplaining!”
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
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The 60 Plus Association Team & Senate Special Committee on Aging
Led by the Founder/Chairman Jim Martin, the DC Team of the 60 Plus Association met with the Staff Director of the Senate Special Committee on Aging and their staff.
Our team discussed how we can work with the Committee on a variety of issues and expressed our concerns and observation about important issues affecting seniors. We covered topics that include killing the Death Tax, protecting Social Security and Medicare, SEC transparency issues, IRA and retirement account issues and more.
Staff Director Neri Martinez later gave us a tour of their offices and introduced us to the various staff members on the Committee.
Democrats will be running on their failures in the 2022 midterm elections
With another much-hyped piece of legislation going down in flames, Democrats are preparing to run in 2022 on their failures. Their plan is to complain that they can’t do whatever they want and hope that people go along.
Democrats saw their partisan election reform bill fail in the Senate. They made one grand compromise, with a Democrat, agreeing to allow a vote on West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s alternative proposal that includes a voter ID requirement, which Democrats were absurdly likening to Jim Crow just a few months ago.
They knew this bill would fail. It was a messaging bill, one that didn’t even enjoy Manchin’s genuine support. They couldn’t even win over centrist GOP senators such as Maine’s Susan Collins or Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski. The fact is, Democrats aren’t interested in governing. They are pushing progressive legislation, knowing that it will fail, so they can follow up by complaining that Republicans exist.
This has been the Democratic agenda for the first few months of unified Democratic control. They pushed a “pay equity” bill they knew would fail to win GOP support, given that it was based on the false premise of the “gender pay gap.” They pushed a $15 federal minimum wage that they knew would fail because Republicans wouldn’t sign on to decimate small businesses across the country. That one backfired when eight Democrats joined the GOP in opposition.
Redistricting Holds Key to House Majority
It’s hard to remember a time when conventional wisdom about the outcome of the midterm elections was this hardened this early in the cycle. Even folks who don’t pay particularly close attention to House elections feel comfortable giving Republicans a significant advantage in winning control of the body next year.
There’s good reason to regard Democrats as the underdogs. History alone suggests an uphill battle. Since the end of the Civil War, the party holding the White House has lost House seats in 36 out of the 39 midterm elections. Then there’s the fact that midterm elections are almost always referenda on the incumbent president, even more so when a party bears full responsibility for governing. As such, how popular/unpopular the first-term president is at election time is critical. For the last 40 years, only two first-term presidents (George HW and George W. Bush) have been more popular than unpopular in the fall of a midterm election. The others, Presidents Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Donald Trump had approval ratings in the low to high-40’s.
President Biden’s job approval rating at this point sits at 52 percent. The good news for Democrats: he’s above water. The bad news for Democrats: this may be his high watermark. Even as Biden has presided over a successful roll-out of the COVID vaccine and a re-opening of the economy, support among independent voters is tepid. At the same time, approval among Republicans is pretty much non-existent. In other words, if this is where Biden’s job approval sits when things are going relatively well, and his administration hasn’t made obvious fumbles, it’s hard to see how his job approval ratings can go much higher in these next few months. Plus, it’s easy to see how a mediocre or troublesome next year can easily drag those approval ratings down.
Then there’s the turnout factor. We know that turnout drops in midterm years. And, that usually hurts the party in power. As we saw in the Obama years, Democrats had lots of trouble getting the “Obama coalition” of younger voters and voters of color to show up to vote in years when the president wasn’t on the ballot. But, once Trump was in the White House, Democratic enthusiasm went through the roof, while many “Trump Republicans” stayed home.
Finally, we live in an incredibly turbulent political era, where change in political power in Washington has become the norm, not the outlier. Since 2006, the House has changed hands three times. Few left in Washington remember a time when one party or the other had a firm grip on a majority.
‘Failure To Execute The Duties Of His Office’: Republicans Introduce Bill to CENSURE Joe Biden Over His Failure of Handling Border Crisis
Almost two dozen Republican lawmakers in Congress introduced a resolution on Wednesday to censure Joe Biden for his “failure to execute the duties of his office.”
The move to censure the 46th President of the United States comes amid the growing immigration crisis at the southern border, which was precipitated by Biden’s rollback of Donald Trump’s initiatives intended to stem the flow of illegal aliens into the country.
As one of his first executive orders, Biden halted the construction of the border wall intended to restrict and stem the flow of illegal immigration into the country from Mexico by closing the gaps in remote locations across Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.
Biden also rolled back several other Trump initiatives, namely those intended to keep asylum seekers and would-be migrants from Central America by processing them in their home countries and in Mexico.
Since then, Biden delegated the task of dealing with the border crisis to Kamala Harris, who only this week announced that she would take a trip to the U.S.-Mexico border on Friday, three months after she first took on the role.
Republicans block ‘rotten’ election reform bill in Senate as VP Harris presides over debate
Senate Republicans Tuesday blocked sweeping legislation on election and campaign finance reforms that Democrats said is crucial to ensuring voting rights and saving democracy but the GOP blasted as a partisan power grab.
The “For the People Act” needed 60 votes to clear a procedural vote in the Senate Tuesday, but Republicans filibustered and killed the legislation from advancing to debate. No Republicans joined with the 50 Democrats on the motion to proceed.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Republicans won’t stand for Democrats’ attempt to impose new voting standards on states that would “rig” elections in their favor. He called the substance of the nearly 900-page bill “rotten” to its core.
Republicans took issue with imposing federal standards on state elections that they said would weaken state ID requirements. They also oppose starting a new public financing system for congressional elections and politicizing the Federal Elections Commission that enforces campaign finance laws.
A Plan to Get Divisive & Radical Theories Out of Our Schools
As a candidate, Joe Biden’s number one promise was to “unite” America. Yet in his first months as president, his number one priority has been to divide our country by race and gender at every turn.
There is no clearer example than the Biden administration’s new effort aimed at indoctrinating America’s schoolchildren with some of the most toxic and anti-American theories ever conceived. It is vital for Americans to understand what this initiative would do, what drives it and, most importantly, how we can stop it.
For decades, the America-blaming left has been relentlessly pushing a vision of America that casts our history, culture, traditions, and founding documents in the most negative possible light. Yet in recent years, this deeply unnatural effort has progressed from telling children that their history is evil to telling Americans that they are evil.
In classrooms across the nation, students are being subjected to a new curriculum designed to brainwash them with the ridiculous left-wing dogma known as “critical race theory.” The key fact about this twisted doctrine is that it is completely antithetical to everything that normal Americans of any color would wish to teach their children.
Instead of helping young people discover that America is the greatest, most tolerant, and most generous nation in history, it teaches them that America is systemically evil and that the hearts of our people are full of hatred and malice. Far from advancing the beautiful dream of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — that our children should “not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” — the left’s vile new theory preaches that judging people by the color of their skin is actually a good idea.
Swiss miss – Biden blew a chance for a win in his meeting with Putin
Time and again, we fail to understand Russia and its rulers. Back in 1939, Churchill acknowledged that, famously describing Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”
Nevertheless, three years later, Roosevelt convinced himself that Stalin “likes me,” and that he could therefore “handle that old buzzard.” He told an advisor: “I have just a hunch that Stalin doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.”
The Cold War followed. It appeared to be a forever war until 1991 when – to almost everyone’s astonishment – the Soviet Union suddenly up and died.
At that point, most of us had great expectations for Russia. Surely, this long-suffering nation would now become “normal,” by which we meant a prosperous, representative democracy, guaranteeing fundamental freedoms. Wrong again.
It’s within this historical context that we should consider last week’s summit (a coinage of Churchill’s by the way) between President Joe Biden and President Vladimir Putin.
Bad-Faith Democrat Attacks on Election Integrity Are Failing
A recent legal proceeding in Florida proves the cheap, theatrical partisanship driving nationwide Democrat attacks on election integrity. Priorities USA, a Democrat super PAC, sued the state of Florida, claiming it made voting-by-mail too difficult. One of the plaintiffs, a Yale graduate student, was asked in a deposition to explain why returning his ballot was difficult. He explained it was a 30-minute walk to his nearest post office. He was then asked if he knew of Google and if he had used it to look for a closer mailbox. He stated that he had not used Google or done any other research to find closer mailboxes. The student was unaware of the USPS mailbox six blocks away from his apartment or that he could use the mailbox at his apartment complex. This disastrous deposition could have been the reason the Democrats gave up on the case, walking away before the trial even began.
Such a comprehensive failure in a single instance would be embarrassing enough. However, this kind of floundering isn’t an isolated event for those Democrats engaged in dishonest attacks on election integrity. Failure is a pattern.
Top Chinese counterintelligence official defected to US, provided intel on Wuhan lab and China’s bioweapons programs
There are multiple reports that a top Chinese official, who is reportedly “close to” Chinese President Xi Jinping, has defected to the United States. The reports claim that the defector is cooperating with a U.S. intelligence agency, providing eye-opening intel about the Wuhan Institute of Virology and China’s bioweapons programs.
There are reports that Dong Jingwei defected from China with his daughter Dong Yang in mid-February, flying from Hong Kong to the United States. Dong landed in California, where he contacted the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency to inform officials that he was defecting and could provide inside information about covert Chinese operations, according to a report from Red State, which says, “Dong then ‘hid in plain sight’ for about two weeks before disappearing into DIA custody.”
Dong is a longtime official in China’s Ministry of State Security, also known as the “Guoanbu.” The U.S. Department of Justice describes the Ministry of State Security as an “institution similar to the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency (ClA) combined under one intelligence directorate responsible for counter-intelligence, foreign intelligence, and political security.”
Dong’s “publicly available background indicates that he was responsible for the Ministry’s counterintelligence efforts in China, i.e., spy-catching, since being promoted to vice minister in April 2018,” as reported by the Daily Beast and SpyTalk, which is a news site offering analysis on national security topics and U.S. intelligence operations.
Biden Divides Us. Here Are 12 Principles That Can Unite Us
Americans are woke. They woke-up and realized President Joe Biden is no moderate. He is spearheading the most radical policies in modern history, policies that would transform this nation into an unrecognizable country—far less safe, more impoverished, and more unfree.
Nevertheless, the vital issues of the day pull us together. Conservatives share a common vision for maximizing human freedom and opportunity. They are primed to unite and fight. What’s more, many Americans who do not identify as conservatives share these goals. Any national leader who champions this unifying vision will win the support of a vast swath of centrist America, and will energize conservatives in the process.
Here are 12 issues that conservatives have answers for. Together, they make up a platform that a majority of Americans can rally around.
Bovard Blasts Biden’s Buffoonish War On Extremism
The Biden administration revealed on Tuesday that guys who can’t get laid may be terrorist threats due to “involuntary celibate–violent extremism.” That revelation is part of a new crackdown that identifies legions of potential “domestic terrorists” that the feds can castigate and investigate. But there is no reason to expect Biden administration anti-terrorism and anti-extremism efforts to be less of a farce and menace than similar post-9/11 campaigns.
Since the French Revolution, politicians have defined terrorism to stigmatize their opponents, a precedent followed by the Biden administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism. The report labels the January 6 clash at the Capitol as a “domestic terrorism” incident but fails to mention it spurred a mushroom cloud of increasingly far-fetched official accusations. Capitol Police acting Chief Yogananda Pittman told Congress that January 6 was “a terrorist attack by tens of thousands of insurrectionists.” Less than a thousand protestors entered the Capitol that day but apparently any Trump supporter who hustled down the Mall towards the Capitol became the legal equivalent of Osama Bin Laden. Unfortunately, this “seen walking in the same zip code” standard for guilt could be the prototype for Biden era domestic terrorist prosecutions.
The Biden report did not bestow the same “terrorist” label on the mobs who burned U.S. post offices in Minneapolis or assailed a federal courthouse in Portland last year. In its litany of terrorist incidents, the report cites “the vehicular killing of a peaceful protestor in Charlottesville” at the 2017 Unite the Right ruckus but omits the 49 people killed in 2016 by a Muslim enraged by U.S. foreign policy at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando. Maybe that case was excluded because the murderer was the protected son of a long-term FBI informant and FBI falsehoods derailed the subsequent trial of his widow. Nor did the report mention the worst terrorist incident since 9/11—the Las Vegas bloodbath where a single shooter killed 58 people and injured 900 others. The FBI claimed it could never find a motive for that slaughter and its “final report” on the incident was only three pages long. Never mind.
Protecting Seniors From Drug Pricing Schemes
It’s a good time to be an American senior. Average life expectancy has risen steadily for most of the last century. Quality of life is going up too.
Much of this improvement comes from new medicines. Cancer death rates have declined 26 percent in the United States since the early 1990s, with most of the gain in survival due to novel treatments.
Of course, new medicines cost money, which is why lawmakers are trying to lower out-of-pocket drug expenses for seniors. Amid these efforts, though, an idea that would do more harm than good has gained traction.
Foreign reference pricing, as it is known, is the centerpiece of (House Resolution) H.R. 3, a bill recently reintroduced in the House, and has popped up in other legislation. Unfortunately, it would put many life-saving treatments out of reach, and dry up funding for research into future medicines.
Foreign reference pricing schemes tie the price of prescription drugs in the United States to the amount paid in foreign countries. H.R. 3, for example, says that drugs sold in the United States cannot cost more than 120 percent of its average cost in six other countries — Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
As it happens, the reference countries have socialized medical systems in which governments dictate drug prices. They also have significant problems with access to medicine…
… Lowering out-of-pocket pharmacy costs is critical, of course. But foreign reference pricing would come with negative side effects — and bring our upward trajectory of better health for seniors to a halt.
House GOP becomes first national party organization to accept cryptocurrency for campaign contributions
The House Republicans’ campaign arm announced Thursday it will start accepting cryptocurrency as a form of campaign donations.
This makes the National Republican Congressional Committee the first national party committee to accept such a form of monetary currency for political contributions.
“The NRCC is proud to lead the charge in accepting cryptocurrency campaign contributions,” NRCC Chairman Tom Emmer said in a statement. “We are focused on pursuing every avenue possible to further our mission of stopping Nancy Pelosi’s socialist agenda and retaking the House majority, and this innovative technology will help provide Republicans the resources we need to succeed.”
The NRCC will accept cryptocurrency using Bitpay, a provider of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency payment services. The cryptocurrency payment processor will sell contributed crypto in U.S. dollars and send the money to the committee’s account, the NRCC first explained to Axios.
BLM May Now Have To Admit What Really Happened In Lafayette Park
Black Lives Matter must reframe their case, acknowledging the falsity of their initial allegations, or risk sanctions for alleging facts without evidentiary support.
A federal judge on Monday dismissed all but two of the claims Black Lives Matter and several individual demonstrators brought against Donald Trump, William Barr, and others in the sprawling lawsuit filed after the clearing of Lafayette Square on June 1, 2020.
Bigger than this legal defeat, however, was the report from the inspector general of the Department of the Interior disproving many of the substantive allegations in the plaintiffs’ complaint — all of which the court had accepted as true in its 50-page opinion.
Attorneys for BLM and the demonstrators now face the unpleasant choice of reframing their case, and thus acknowledging the falsity of their initial allegations, or risking sanctions for alleging facts without evidentiary support.
Court Assumed BLM Complaints Were True
In an opinion issued earlier this week, Judge Dabney Friedrich analyzed the claims Black Lives Matter and several individual plaintiffs brought against a bevy of defendants, including former President Trump, former Attorney General Barr, the U.S. Park Police, the D.C. National Guard, the U.S. Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the Arlington County Police Department, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, as well as individual officers working for the various agencies.
Before delving into the various constitutional and statutory claims, Friedrich made clear he “must accept as true all material factual allegations in the complaint” at this stage of the litigation. This governing standard created an interesting dynamic because the complaints (which were amended three times before the court addressed the defendants’ motions to dismiss) and the corresponding oral argument predated the report from the inspector general. Released earlier this month, that report undermined the prevailing narratives about the clearing of Lafayette Park.
So, in deciding the defendants’ motions to dismiss — a procedure used to quickly toss out a case because the alleged facts fail to support a legal claim — the court cited the falsehoods or half-truths of the complaint. “Peaceful protesters assembled in historic Lafayette Park across from the White House,” the court quoted, when “officials, wielding batons, sprayed the crowd with tear gas, flash-bang grenades, smoke bombs, and rubber bullets.”
Europe has to become geopolitical — or face the increasingly uncertain, even dangerous times
When a plane from Athens to Vilnius, from Old Europe to New Europe, was forced to land in Minsk (the future Europe?) with threats of an explosion on board and the scrambling of a fighter jet last month, there was uproar and anger from European capitals. It seemed, at the time, like the vindication of Jean Monnet who used to say that, “Europe will be forged in crises.” Speedily and unanimously, Europe decided to impose sanctions on Lukashenko’s regime. Europe was united, it acted resolutely and decisively. Europe was magnificent. Needless to say, I very much hope we will stay that way.
There is a danger of complacency creeping in, however, as we congratulate ourselves for our very fine performance. Are we not somehow missing the bigger picture? Let’s take a step back and take stock of the larger perspective — what is happening here, precisely?
Heretofore, the weaponization of civil institutions such as air traffic control was not thought an option. Now it is. What next? This is difficult to say when dealing with a regime that is bordering on insanity. Lukashenko‘s Belarus has habitually been referred to as the last remaining outpost of the Soviet Union, but nowadays it is increasingly reminiscent of North Korea in its mix of capricious unpredictability and unbridled, paranoid aggression.
Yet the question remains — is it really only Lukashenko‘s doing? Does he go it alone? It remains unclear who precisely was involved in the incident, and the investigation continues. But one thing is clear — Russia was not unaware of it, its reaction was pre-prepared and reached the world faster than Western shock reached Twitter. Moreover, as in Soviet times, Lukashenko immediately flew to report to his Kremlin patron. Since last year‘s stolen election, Russia was involved in Belarussian affairs more than ever with political consultants, military advisors, and propaganda aid.
But not only in Belarus. The question I would like to raise is this: what is the goal of Russia’s current regime apart from ensuring its own survival? What is Russia’s overall geopolitical goal?
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.
