Biden’s Folly: EVERY unvaccinated employee fired due to Democratic mandates deserves their job back…with back pay!
Bottom Line: We have the worst inflation in 4 decades, skyrocketing crime, and 2 million illegal border crossings. (Not to mention funding crack pipes?!? Really?)
The American people have given President Biden and the progressive Democrats a failing grade.
Science, what science? Democrats are now reverting to using the “science” of polling. Their obnoxious government mandate driven policies are backfiring across the country. The only science the democrats seem to be worrying about today relates to their statistical probability of getting re-elected.
Americans won’t forget that fast.
“We are not safe anymore”: Please read a powerful column from the FBI’s former intel chief: It took a cop’s widow to sum it up perfectly: ‘We are not safe anymore’ below.
Elections matter…this is NOT your parents Democratic party anymore.
Inflation: It’s real and it’s hurting working America. Inflation is the Democrats tax on EVERY American household. Inflation is a direct result of the Democrat’s borrowing and spending policies.
Crime: The Democrats enable their left-wing activists to “demonstrate.” They pushed to defund the police. And now the Soros backed District Attorneys won’t enforce the law and prosecute criminals, putting them back on the streets.
Democrat’s policies have consequences. Elections have consequences.
Reagan: Last Sunday we celebrated what would have been Ronald Reagan’s 110th birthday. Now, more than ever, we need the wisdom and leadership Reagan exemplified as the best America has to offer. There is a great article at the end of this week’s newsletter with some of his best/prolific quotes. I would encourage all to read it.
Next RNC Chair: After last week’s RNC meeting in Utah, the talk is picking up as to who might be interested in replacing Ronna McDaniel as the next Chairman of the Republican National Committee. Some say Ronna may want to run again?
Here are some names that are being talked about:
David Bossie, Maryland National Committeeman
Harmeet Dhillon, California National Committeewoman
Tommy Hicks, Co-Chair
Kyle Hupfer, Indiana GOP State Chairman
Leora Levy, Connecticut National Committeewoman
Michael McDonald, Nevada GOP State Chairman
Drew McKissick, South Carolina Chairman
Jessica Millan Patterson, California Chairwoman
Reince Priebus, former RNC Chairman
Michael Whatley, North Carolina GOP State Chairman
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
In this week’s video rewind- Inflation is up, Gas prices are up, and Biden’s poll numbers are down!
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Biden approval rating drops below 40% for the first time in an average of major polls
The White House is attempting to wrangle a number of crises.
Approval of President Biden’s performance in the White House continues to weaken as the administration works to deal with the Ukraine border conflict, rising inflation, the continuing COVID-19 pandemic and chaos at the Mexican border.
For the first time since taking office, Biden’s approval rating — based on an accumulation of polling data — fell below 40%. A Real Clear Politics average of all the most recent national surveys measuring Biden’s standing put the president’s approval at 39% and his disapproval at 54%.
Biden has also found himself at the center of a Russia-Ukraine border conflict in Europe. Last month, Biden predicted Russian President Vladimir Putin would advance into Ukraine, saying, “My guess is he will move in. He has to do something.”
Biden continues to take heat from Americans over rising gas prices, leading his own party to introduce a proposal to temporarily suspend the federal gas tax in order to help blunt the financial pain of surging prices at the pump.
Biden is wrong: Republicans stand for everything America needs now
President Joe Biden claims the Republican Party doesn’t stand for anything. That’s quite a statement coming from someone who spent his first year in office floundering on the job.
“Name me one thing they’re for,” Biden says. In fact, Republicans stand for everything America needs — especially right now.
Where Biden and his fellow Democrats are attacking our national principles, sapping our national will and dimming our national future, Republicans are advancing a positive vision that can unite our country. We will undo his damage and unleash a new era of American strength and pride.
Biden is right about one thing: Republicans stand opposed to his agenda. So do most Americans.
Our country doesn’t want an entire generation of kids to lose their education and their futures. We don’t want skyrocketing inflation, stemming from trillions of dollars in wasteful spending, that steals from our wallets. We don’t want an economy that’s stuck in reverse and a government that’s taking away our freedom. We don’t want more crime on our streets and more dead police officers…
… Now is no time to swap liberty, opportunity, free speech and the rule of law for tyranny, censorship and the raw exercise of power. Now is the time to apply our principles to make our country freer, better and fairer for all.
And take it from me, the first female governor of South Carolina and the first minority female governor in the United States: America is not a racist country.
What does the Republican Party stand for? Everything that makes America the best country in the world — everything that can make America even better. The real question is why Joe Biden and the Democratic Party don’t.
Biden promised he’d be a unifier; he’s been anything but. The U.S. elected a divider-in-chief.
The corporate media worked overtime to paint President Biden as a moderate, compassionate unifier. But in recent months, that facade has crumbled. Americans are watching a hyper-partisan, divisive president — one who simply does not care about Americans. Just look at his recent rhetoric in Georgia.
In a desperate effort to ram through his federal takeover of elections, Mr. Biden went to Atlanta, where he smeared anyone who opposed his agenda as racist and immoral. It was reminiscent of Mr. Biden’s claim that Georgia’s election reforms requiring voter ID amounted to “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.” The message was clear: If you don’t wholeheartedly back Mr. Biden’s radical playbook, you are a racist and a white supremacist.
But this hyperbolic rhetoric is dishonest. It ignores the valid reasons why millions of Americans of all races and across the political spectrum oppose Mr. Biden’s far-left scheme.
It took a cop’s widow to sum it up perfectly: ‘We are not safe anymore’
Dominique Luzuriaga Rivera, a widow at 22, stood at the ambo in St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Jan. 28 and delivered, through lágrimas de pena, a piercing eulogy for her young husband, Jason, an NYPD officer killed while doing his job.
She anxiously smoothed the papers from which she read, as if to wipe away her dread reality. Her city accent gave a punch to the blunt words she used to describe herself as “full of rage and anger, hurt and sad.” Her serrated grief filled the church and etched its way through the thousands who came to honor her husband.
Dominique painfully earned her audience, which stretched beyond the massive expanse of blue uniforms gathered inside and outside the cathedral and spilled across the electronic devices of millions of Americans. It was an audience she didn’t seek but that assembled before her because she is suffering in a way none of us wants to. And we all listened with that special silence and rapt attention that only eulogies evoke…
… “We are not safe anymore.” Yes, that is precisely the essence of what more and more of us are feeling in America today. Part of the concern is driven by the rising crime that infects our neighborhoods and businesses, but part is driven as well by the disturbing indifference of some of those in power who are charged with protecting the citizenry. There is an unsettling sense that nothing will be done about it.
When bail is ridiculously reduced or eliminated, we are not safe anymore. When dangerous prisoners are prematurely released, we are not safe anymore. When shoplifting crimes are absolved, we are not safe anymore. When people minding their own business are punched on the street or shoved in front of a subway train, we are not safe anymore. When police budgets are foolishly stripped away, we are not safe anymore.
$30 Trillion in Government Debt and Counting
What matters is the amount held by the public and interest costs.
News Tuesday that gross U.S. government debt had surpassed $30 trillion for the first time caused a flutter of headlines but merely yawns from the political class. That might have something to do with the arsonist not wanting to hang out at the scene of his fire. But it’s worth a moment to explain how to think about that gargantuan debt number.
The first point is that the debt really isn’t $30 trillion. About $6 trillion of that is debt the government owes to itself in Social Security and other IOUs. Social Security is a promise made by politicians to workers. It isn’t a contractual debt like a Treasury bill that must be repaid or risk default. Future politicians can refuse to pay workers what they owe, and eventually they will.
The debt held by the public is some $24 trillion, which is bad enough. That’s more than 100% of GDP, a level the U.S. has previously reached only during wartime. Much of this debt is held by Japanese or Chinese, who won’t take kindly to not being repaid. But they’ll keep lending that money as long as they assume they will be repaid.
The real issue is interest on all that debt, and what it means for the federal fisc. The debt costs very little when interest rates are near-zero. But when they rise, as they soon will, the burden of interest costs on the debt rises too. By one measure every percentage point increase in rates adds $100 billion a year or more to debt costs. That must be financed either with higher taxes or more debt.
In Washington’s fantasy world, spending is a free lunch. It isn’t, as eventually Americans, if not politicians, will learn the hard way.
Different Cults on the Right and Left
It would be hard to find a time in the 168-year shared history of the Democratic and Republican parties when their ideologies, policies, and even values have been so far apart. Putting aside the question of whether we are a democratic republic or a republican democracy, the success of representative democracy is predicated on elected representatives seeking to build consensus and finding areas where compromises can be reached. Yet the parties share so little with the other in terms of points of view that there is little overlap between Democrats and Republicans on much of anything. As a result, what used to be easy for lawmakers is now arduous. Calling the U.S. “ungovernable” may be a bit melodramatic, but when have we been less governable than we seem to be today?
Enter David French, the evangelical, Harvard Law-trained, Iraq War veteran who now writes at The Dispatch and The Atlantic. French, as you may remember, was urged by then-Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol to run as a third-party or independent candidate in 2016. He declined, but he’s developed into one of the most articulate voices among Trump-skeptical conservatives.
In a recent Dispatch article entitled “The Cult of Ideology vs. The Cult of Personality,” French argues that “the Democratic Party has moved quite decisively to the left, and the median Democrat has moved far more to the left than the median Republican has moved to the right.” He refers in part to a chart published in The Economist, based on data from Pew Research Center polling. The Pew data created quite a stir at the time because while it not unexpectedly showed that the ideological middle of the electorate was shrinking, it also showed that Democrats were moving farther left than Republicans were to the right. Cue teeth grinding among Democrats.
Meanwhile, over in the GOP, French writes that “the right’s cult is different.” Sure, it’s beholden to Trump, “it’s deeper. … It’s a cult of a certain type of personality, one that is relentlessly, personally, and often punitively aggressive. The aggression is mandatory. The ideology is malleable.”
The Cult of Ideology vs. The Cult of Personality
The most important clashes aren’t between right and left but within right and left
Do you ever read an idea and feel enlightened and envious at the same time? You simultaneously think, “Aha! That’s insightful,” and “Dang! I’ve been sniffing around this concept and haven’t quite nailed it like he did.” In this instance, it’s a concept that helps explain both the deep dysfunction of our political system and the deep discomfort that so many people of good will—on both sides of our political spectrum—feel with our political culture.
It’s summed up in this tweet by a sharp lawyer I follow who tweets under the name “A.G. Hamilton.”
I want to talk about why I disagree with this. Problem w both parties right now is a “cult” issue. Politicians are self-interested weather vanes that pander. Elected R’s are trying to pander to a cult of personality while elected D’s are trying to pander to a cult of ideology.
If you click on the tweet you can read his entire thread, but his point rests on two key and obvious trends. First, the Democratic Party has moved quite decisively to the left, and the median Democrat has moved far more to the left than the median Republican has moved to the right. This chart, recently made famous in a column by progressive writer Kevin Drum, illustrates the point nicely:
The GOP is gaining among Texas Hispanics. Women are leading the charge.
In places where Donald Trump made some of his biggest inroads with Hispanic voters, women are playing a key role in the Republican Party’s growth.
Democrats were caught off guard by Donald Trump’s numbers in South Texas in 2020. The Hispanic Republican women who live there were not.
Many of them have played a leading role in urging their neighbors in majority-Hispanic South Texas to question their traditional loyalty to the Democratic Party.
Hispanic women now serve as party chairs in the state’s four southernmost border counties, spanning a distance from Brownsville almost to Laredo — places where Trump made some of his biggest inroads with Latino voters.
A half-dozen of them are running for Congress across the state’s four House districts that border Mexico, including Monica De La Cruz, the GOP front-runner in one of Texas’ most competitive seats in the Rio Grande Valley.
It’s some of the clearest evidence that Trump’s 2020 performance there may not have been an anomaly, but rather a sign of significant Republican inroads among Texas Hispanics — perhaps not enough to threaten the Democratic advantage among those voters, but enough to send ripples of fear through a party that is experiencing erosion among Hispanics across the country.
“For so long, people here just never had Republicans knocking on their doors and calling them the way we did in 2020. The majority of us are women that did it then and are doing it now because we feel it’s our responsibility to keep the American Dream alive,” said Mayra Flores, a leading candidate for the GOP nomination in a South Texas-based congressional seat.
Biden’s ‘guns first’ approach to violent crime ignores basic facts
Over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms.
With violent crime increasing over the last two years, Americans want a solution. But President Joe Biden constantly frames violent crime as only a gun problem. Again, it was the sole focus of Biden’s speech in New York City on Thursday. Even when he mentions police or prosecutors, it was in terms of enforcing gun control laws.
But this “guns first” approach ignores a basic fact – over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms. And while Biden blames guns for the increase in violent crime, the latest data show that gun crimes fell dramatically.
Biden’s proposal yesterday to “work to take those shooters off the streets as quickly as possible” is great, but with over 92% of violent crime not involving guns, why not promise to do this for all violent criminals?
The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, in the latest year available (2020), shows that there were 4,558,150 rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults, and the FBI reports 21,570 murders. Of those, 350,460 rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults (see Table 8) and 13,620 murders involved firearms. Adding those numbers up, 7.9% of violent crimes used guns.
Relying on public health researchers, Democrats blame increasing gun sales as the cause. But while violent crime reported to police rose 5% in 2020, you can’t blame that increase on guns because gun crimes actually fell by 27%. The National Crime Victimization Survey also finds a similar 27% drop.
11 Examples of Defensive Gun Use Highlight Importance of Second Amendment in New Year
Just one month into 2022, it became clear that the new year hasn’t brought relief from the unprecedented spikes in violent crime in many cities since the summer of 2020.
Take Philadelphia, for example. With 140 carjackings reported through the first five weeks of 2022, the city is well on pace to surpass last year’s total of 757 carjackings.
Portland, Oregon, meanwhile, experienced more homicides and shootings in January 2022 than in January 2021—doubly concerning, since 2021 was by far the most violent year in Portland’s history.
These cities are far from alone.
Yet, progressive prosecutors in many of them seem to be doing their best to ensure that even the most violent criminals receive minimal punishment. Worse, cities such as San Jose, California, choose to lay the blame for criminal gun violence at the feet of lawful gun owners, imposing useless insurance mandates and unconstitutional taxes.
Documents reveal U.S. military’s frustration with White House, diplomats over Afghanistan evacuation
Senior White House and State Department officials failed to grasp the Taliban’s steady advance on Afghanistan’s capital and resisted efforts by U.S. military leaders to prepare the evacuation of embassy personnel and Afghan allies weeks before Kabul’s fall, placing American troops ordered to carry out the withdrawal in greater danger, according to sworn testimony from multiple commanders involved in the operation.
An Army investigative report, numbering 2,000 pages and released to The Washington Post through a Freedom of Information Act request, details the life-or-death decisions made daily by U.S. soldiers and Marines sent to secure Hamid Karzai International Airport as thousands converged on the airfield in a frantic bid to escape.
Beyond the bleak, blunt assessments of top military commanders, the documents contain previously unreported disclosures about the violence American personnel experienced, including one exchange of gunfire that left two Taliban fighters dead after they allegedly menaced a group of U.S. Marines and Afghan civilians, and a separate incident in which U.S. troops killed a member of an elite Afghan strike unit and wounded six others after they fired on the Americans.
The investigation was launched in response to an Aug. 26 suicide bombing just outside the airport that killed an estimated 170 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. service members. But it is much broader, providing perhaps the fullest official account yet of the evacuation operation, which spanned 17 nightmarish days and has become one of the Biden administration’s defining moments — drawing scrutiny from Republicans and Democrats for the haphazard nature in which the United States ended its longest war.
‘For Putin, Russia Is the Only Sovereign State in This Neighborhood’
For several years, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s 520-page updated 2015 biography of Vladimir Putin, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, sat on my bookshelf, started but unfinished. It’s really well researched book, it’s just . . . long, detailed, and not fun reading.
But I picked it up again, looking for perspective on the current Russian aggression towards Ukraine – and the last chapter delivers it by the bucketful. (You can find a large portion that last chapter here.) One observation indicates that the Biden administration’s desire to build a “stable, predictable relationship” with Vladimir Putin was always a fool’s errand:
Putin has only a handful of contacts with U.S. and European insiders and thus a very incomplete grasp of what motivates or drives Western leaders. Finding himself too far outside their political perspectives and interactions, Putin falls back on his (and Russia’s) age-old threat perceptions. He looks for, and finds, plots and conspiracies. The plots he finds are consistent with his logic. They make sense in terms of his frame of reference—as seen through his filters of the Cold War, the KGB, his time in Dresden, and the prevailing political views of conservative and patriotic Russia circles. This does not mean that the plots exist or that his views are correct. Putin’s “too-far-outside,” other-world, perspective is a source of weakness in this respect, not strength. Vladimir Putin has spent a great deal of time in his professional life bending the truth, manipulating facts, and playing with fictions. He is also, we conclude, not always able to distinguish one from the other, his tools for doing so are often inadequate. This is a source of danger in Russia’s relations with the West.
. . . The West will find it hard to change his views. Putin has no reliable interlocutors in the West from his perspective, only a handful of intermediaries. And he simply does not trust anyone. Any effort to persuade him that he has misread the situation in some definitive, black-and-white, way will likely be seen as a ploy. Restoring a degree of trust is not impossible, but it will be extremely difficult. In the meantime, the West will have to deal with the reality of Putin’s views: the fact that he does think differently from his U.S. and European counterparts. He does see the West as a threat to him and his system.
In the end, Putin will never gravitate toward a “stable and predictable relationship” with the U.S. because his whole identity is defined as the defender of Russia against a nefarious, encroaching West. If the West isn’t really nefarious and encroaching . . . what would Russia need a man like Vladimir Putin for?
As for Ukraine, Hill and Gaddy accurately predicted that Putin wanted the de facto restoration of the Soviet Union’s borders through “spheres of influence,” where eastern European countries bordering Russia would be left technically independent but not really capable of defying Moscow:
Ronald Reagan at 110: Twenty of His Best Quotes on Freedom, Government, and America
Unlike many US presidents, Ronald Reagan understood there was no loftier achievement for any society than freedom.
Now almost two decades since he died at 93, things he said are far better remembered than the things critics said about him. And that is a good thing, because Reagan got more things right than most of them did…
… This is not to say that Reagan was perfect. I wish he had vetoed more bills. I wish he had understood the harm of the drug war. And because he was too much of a nice guy, he probably didn’t fire or criticize enough bad apples in government. But remember a couple things: He was not a dictator; the opposition party controlled the House all of his eight years and greeted his proposed spending cuts as “dead on arrival.” His focus on the big-ticket issues—rolling back the Evil Empire, cutting punitive tax rates, taming price inflation and reducing over-regulation—sometimes prompted him to compromise on other matters to save political capital for these more critical ones.
For the most part, and more than any of his fellow presidents since Coolidge, Reagan knew that there was no loftier achievement for any society than freedom. We do ourselves a service to get re-acquainted with that notion. Recognizing that for many reasons (some no fault of his), Reagan’s rhetoric sometimes soared higher than actual results, I offer here some of the best things he said on the subject.
All Americans — including those arrested in the Jan. 6 riots — deserve due process
Sen. Rand Paul calls out progressives who refuse to fight for a right to a speedy trial for those arrested in the Capitol Hill riot.
As the author or co-sponsor of more than two dozen criminal justice reform bills, I have a long history of working with Democrats to correct injustice in our system, especially as it pertains to those accused of non-violent crimes such as drug possession.
The right to due process, enshrined in the Constitution, includes the right to a speedy trial by a jury of one’s peers. Those denied bail or unable to afford it can often be incarcerated for months awaiting trial, during which time they often lose their jobs, face eviction, and have their lives spiral downward — all before ever being convicted of a crime…
… I condemned all violent acts on Jan. 6 and continue to do so. But that does not mean we should destroy the lives of non-violent protesters by deliberately conflating them with the acts of others, denying them bail, and incarcerating them for nearly a year with no trial. That is not justice. Our laws demand that even those accused of the most horrific crimes of mass murder are guaranteed due process. To abandon those principles for political purposes is to abandon the very bedrock of American jurisprudence.
Our laws demand that even those accused of the most horrific crimes of mass murder are guaranteed due process. To abandon those principles for political purposes is to abandon the very bedrock of American jurisprudence.
Hillary Clinton to speak at New York Democratic convention: report
Former Clinton allies recently speculated ‘a perfect storm in the Democratic Party’ could open the door for a comeback.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is slated to speak at the New York State Democratic Convention next week, according to sources who spoke to CNBC.
“She’s beloved by the mainstream members of the Democratic Party and her popularity is likely higher than that of President Biden,” a person familiar with the arrangement told the outlet. “It’s good for her because it keeps her relevant, and her appearance is likely meant to galvanize the party and the audience.”
Chris Melnyczuk, who is chief of staff to New York State Democratic Party chair Jay Jacobs, said the party “reached out to a number of people to speak and, you know, we’re waiting back on confirmation from a number of people. So there are a few things in the works.”
“We’ve reached out to a number of folks, we’re not going to say who we’ve reached out to,” he added regarding whether Clinton had been invited.
