Ambassador’s Perspective

Will Biden Cross a Line on Poverty?

Will Biden Cross a Line on Poverty?
The administration may attempt to expand the welfare state via a definitional trick.
By Kevin Corinth
May 22, 2023 at 5:49 pm ET

A new report from the National Academy of Sciences seeks to redefine poverty. The NAS presents the effort as a matter of science: “An accurate measure of poverty is necessary to fully understand how the economy is performing across all segments of the population and to assess the effects of government policies on communities and families.”
But the report’s real purpose could be to expand the welfare state. If the Census Bureau adopts the new poverty definition, millions more Americans could automatically be made eligible for benefits—leading to at least $124 billion in additional government spending over the next decade, all accomplished by administrative fiat.

There is no scientific basis for any particular poverty line. Advocates of redistribution push for a higher poverty line because they want more people to count as poor and qualify for government assistance. But scientists aren’t supposed to be advocates. The 13 authors of the recent NAS paper appear to have been selected along partisan lines: 12 of them have
contributed to Democratic causes or worked for Democratic administrations.
The NAS authors recommend that the Census Bureau adopt its Supplemental Poverty Measure as the nation’s headline poverty statistic. This measure relies on an extremely complex formula, but the end result is clear: The new poverty line would be significantly higher. It would also break with more than 50 years of precedent by establishing a relative
standard. People could become better off and still be classified as “poor”; poverty would decline only if income at the bottom of the distribution increases more quickly than in the middle class.
Over the years, Congress has tied eligibility for dozens of programs to multiples of the poverty line. To qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, a family’s income can’t exceed 130% of the official poverty line. For ObamaCare subsidies, the limit is 400%. The Biden administration could raise the poverty line, and thereby expand these
benefits as soon as September, when the Census Bureau releases its annual report on poverty. The new poverty line would affect programs starting in 2024, all without any input from Congress.
In a new paper, I estimate the effects of such a change. I project that the poverty line for a family of four would rise to almost $38,000 in 2024, over $6,000 higher than it would be using the current approach that updates the poverty line with inflation each year. The gap would grow over time, and by 2033 the poverty line would be more than $13,000 higher
than it would be using the current approach.
Raising the poverty line would increase government spending on entitlements by more than $124 billion over the next decade—$47 billion for SNAP and $78 billion for Medicaid. ObamaCare subsidies, Medicare Part D low-income subsidies and the school-lunch
program would grow as well, not to mention the effects on dozens of nonentitlement programs.
As consequential is the potential reallocation of government assistance across states. The poverty line under the Supplemental Poverty Measure is higher in states like California and New York, where housing is more expensive, and lower in states like West Virginia and Mississippi, where housing is cheaper. If state-specific poverty lines were used to determine program eligibility, residents of states with cheaper housing would receive a smaller share of assistance. Yet poor people in low-cost states tend to be more deprived than poor people in high-cost states.
Redrawing the official poverty line would be a nakedly political move without any scientific basis that could alter the scope of the safety net overnight. It is up to Congress to prevent the administration from unilaterally expanding program eligibility and increasing government spending by over $124 billion.
Mr. Corinth is deputy director of the America Enterprise Institute’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility. He served as chief economist for the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (2020-21) and Republican staff director of the U.S. Congressional Joint
Economic Committee (2022-23).

Little Lithuania Stands Tall Against Russia and China

Little Lithuania Stands Tall Against Russia and China

Gabrielius Landsbergis, the Baltic nation’s foreign minister, explains why his country never bought into ‘the end of history’ and what Ukraine and Taiwan have in common.
By Tunku Varadarajan
May 5, 2023 at 3:53 pm ET

Lithuania is a Baltic country of just under 2.8 million people, a million fewer than live in the city of Los Angeles. It won its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991 and existed for the next three decades on the margins of international attention, patronized in the European Union (which it joined in 2004) by heavyweights like France and Germany.
The war in Ukraine changed all that, redrawing the moral and diplomatic map of Europe in significant ways. With France and Germany leading from behind—the latter chronically indecisive and hostage to Russian energy supplies—the front-line states of the eastern flank have been left to mount a robust European defense of Ukraine. Along with Poland, the Baltic states—Estonia and Latvia as well as Lithuania—have been most vocal in their condemnation of the invasion; and they’ve committed materiel to
the war effort in unstinting ways and hosted large numbers of Ukrainian refugees. In doing so, they’ve earned the wrath of Russia, which they regard as proof of a moral duty well done.“We still have a very clear historic memory of my country being under occupation,” says Gabrielius Landsbergis, 41, Lithuania’s foreign minister, in a Zoom call from his chancery in
Vilnius. “I’m a youngish politician, but I remember it, as does the current young generation in Parliament.” His children “only read about it,” but Lithuanians have national nightmares of Russian attacks, “not just the tanks in Ukraine, and in Georgia, but here in the capital city.”
Mr. Landsbergis was 9 when Soviet tanks rolled into Vilnius in an attempt to disperse massed protesters calling for independence. Fourteen Lithuanians died at the hands of Soviet troops on Jan. 13, 1991, now commemorated as Freedom Defenders Day. Eight months later, Russian President Boris Yeltsin recognized Lithuania’s sovereignty. United Nations membership followed days later. The foreign minister’s paternal grandfather, Vytautas Landsbergis, now 90, was the first head of state of independent Lithuania.
That experience gives Lithuanians an “additional layer of understanding of what we’re up against, and what Ukraine is up against,” the foreign minister says. It also explains why Lithuania is the world’s only country in a state of open confrontation with both Russia and China. Lithuania sees itself as standing up to bullies who would snuff out the sovereignty of other nations. Its political position was strengthened late last month when China’s ambassador to France said on French television that “previously Soviet states have no effective status in international law.”

China’s animus against Lithuania is easily explained. In November 2021, the government gave its imprimatur to the opening of a Taiwan Representative Office in Vilnius. Such an office is commonly described in the media as a de facto embassy, but Mr. Landsbergis takes care to call it “nondiplomatic.” It is the sole Taiwanese representative office in Europe to use “Taiwan,” as opposed to “Taipei,” the only name China considers permissible. Even in the U.S., Taiwan’s representatives adhere to Beijing-approved nomenclature.
The Chinese reaction was swift, disproportionate and vengeful. China ceased all trade with Lithuania overnight, recalled its ambassador from Vilnius and expelled Lithuania’s from Beijing. “It was a hand-brake situation,” Mr. Landsbergis says, “a full stop.” He believes it was unprecedented: “Going from 100% of trade to zero trade—that’s never happened.” It caused “a lot of stress to businesses” and “a lot of stress to the government, trying to figure out how to deal with the situation.”
As it floundered to deal with the economic shock, Lithuania found that it wasn’t friendless. Australia, Japan and South Korea opened their ports to ships that could no longer dock in China: “Last year, our trade with the Pacific grew by 40%.” Booming trade with Singapore prompted Lithuania to open an embassy there.

“We were decoupled by China,” Mr. Landsbergis says, “but we showed that it was possible to withstand it, and not lower our threshold when it comes to values.” Taiwan still has its office in Lithuania, and trade relations with China have been restored, although the ambassadors haven’t returned.

Why did Lithuania, alone in Europe, poke China in the eye? Mr. Landsbergis doesn’t care for that characterization; he says his country isn’t “poking China in the eye, but allowing people to feel dignified by calling themselves the way they see themselves. And if they see themselves as Taiwanese, be it politically or culturally, it’s not my place to ask, but to give
them that dignity.” He says Vilnius’s position on Taiwan derives from its national values and belief in a “rules-based world order.” He directly compares Taiwan to Ukraine. “The sovereignty of countries is one of our main values,” he says, as is the “dignity of people, which usually comes up when we’re talking about the people in Taiwan” and their desire to
be “recognized as a democratic community.”

China, Mr. Landsbergis says, accused Lithuania of violating “their One China policy. We said that every country has a One China Policy and we did not violate the policy that Lithuania has. So this is a political dispute, but it goes deeper than that, to an attempt to suppress identity.”
He also bristles at the thought of taking dictation on policy from Beijing. “Will we be able to talk about Hong Kong? About Xinjiang? Will we be able to look into human-rights abuse?
Maybe that will become an out-of-the-question question that will merit sanctions from China.” That “might start affecting our sovereignty. And this is where we are.”

The European debate over Taiwan has turned in Lithuania’s direction. In late March, the EU agreed to institute a process to allow for trade retaliation against countries that use punitive measures against its member states. “We’ve seen in the last two years that Taiwan has become more and more a topic that is being debated in Europe,” Mr. Landsbergis says.
Latvia and Estonia followed Lithuania in leaving a forum called 17+1, set up by China to build its relations with Eastern European countries. This week the Czech foreign minister said “the 14+1 has neither substance nor future.” In March, a 150-member delegation of Czech parliamentarians visited Taiwan. The Czechs have also negotiated a major arms deal
with the Taiwanese.
When the Soviet Union fell, a triumphalism prevailed in much of the West, exemplified by Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay and 1992 book about “the end of history.” Mr. Landsbergis says that Lithuania, “being a reborn country after years of occupation,” never bought into that: “Maybe I’m flattering my country, but I tend to believe that we feel the wind of geopolitical upheaval maybe better than others. Maybe that’s because we were born out of it. And it’s still alive, very much alive.”
As Mr. Landsbergis observed President Emmanuel Macron of France travel to China and perform what many in the free world regard as a kowtow—including an exhortation to Europe to be more than “just America’s followers”—he thought of earlier attempts to wean Russia off its old habits and transform it into a market democracy. “There is a lot of naiveté, a lot of wishful thinking that we will—with trade, with diplomacy, and interaction in the multilateral arena—drag and lock them closer to the West.” These methods “failed tremendously” with Russia, and “we should not be making exactly the same mistake with
China.”
The foreign minister tweeted recently that China, which has offered to mediate in the Ukraine war, “is not trying to help Russia or anybody else: China only helps China.” Xi Jinping aims “to create an alternative to Pax Americana,” a Pax Sinica,” which Mr. Landsbergis later rendered “Pax Cynica.” In our conversation, he explains that China seeks to set up a new global order based on “the might-is-right principle. It is presented as an ‘order,’ but in that order, only the strong win. And this is definitely not the world which would be safe for my country.”
What keeps Lithuania safe above all is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It’s “based on trust, trust that your back is covered,” Mr. Landsbergis says. “And that is so valuable when you are a front-line country like us.”
Asked if he thinks U.S. leadership is in decline internationally, Mr. Landsbergis says, “Oh no! I think it’s back. It’s very much back, at least where I stand. When it comes to Europe, the United States has shown, as in the past, that they’re here for us.” American participation was “decisive” in the two world wars, and we’re “seeing history repeat itself, in a different form.” Although U.S. troops aren’t fighting there, “Ukraine is immensely supported by the United States, not just militarily but politically, diplomatically and financially as well.”
Mr. Landsbergis isn’t fazed by the apparent domestic discord in the U.S.—especially in the Republican Party—over the extent of American support for Ukraine. He has met U.S. lawmakers from both parties and has found that dissension over Ukraine is overstated. “In some cases, headlines do not tell the truth,” he says. “At least from where I stand, I feel that
there is more consensus than we get to read sometimes.” What about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s reference to the Ukraine war as a “territorial dispute”? “Well, I would probably give it time,” Mr. Landsbergis says. “For some politicians, the mindset is forming.” And Mr. DeSantis did walk the comment back.
Mr. Landsbergis believes the “spirit of Reagan is still alive” in Ronald Reagan’s party. It’s alive in Lithuania too. Reagan said his theory of the Cold War was “We win, they lose.” Mr. Landsbergis says Ukrainian victory means “winning the whole territory back, including Crimea. It’s rebuilding what was destroyed and punishing those who are guilty for the act
itself, for the aggression.”
If Ukraine turns back the Russians, “we will not then be forced to defend a country like Lithuania, or a country like Poland, the next time around.” We mustn’t “give in to an idea that Russia is unbeatable,” he says, noting that in the 20th century “Russia was beaten in Afghanistan; it was beaten in Japan in 1905.”

Mr. Landsbergis has a message for Americans: “We’re all connected” by “an unseen geopolitical thread” that binds the world. “A Ukrainian victory or loss will affect my country, will affect South Korea, will affect Taiwan, will affect Japan, will affect Israel, will Appeared in the May 6, 2023, print edition as ‘Lithuania Stands Tall Against Russia and China’.
affect the United States, will affect . . .” His voice trails off, then starts again: “We cannot get
tired. We cannot stop supporting Ukraine. We have to continue that until they win.”

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and
at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.

Biden Admin Negotiates Deal to Give WHO Authority Over US Pandemic Policies

The Epoch Times
Epoch Health

Biden Admin Negotiates Deal to Give WHO Authority Over US Pandemic Policies
New international health accord avoids necessary Senate approval

News Analysis

The Biden administration is preparing to sign up the United States to a “legally binding” accord with the World Health Organization (WHO) that would give this Geneva-based UN subsidiary the authority to dictate America’s policies during a pandemic.

Despite widespread criticism of the WHO’s response to the COVID pandemic, U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra joined with WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in September 2022 to announce “the U.S.-WHO Strategic Dialogue.” Together, they developed a “platform to maximize the longstanding U.S. government-WHO partnership, and to protect and promote the health of all people around the globe, including the American people.”

These discussions and others spawned the “zero draft” (pdf) of a pandemic treaty, published on Feb. 1, which now seeks ratification by all 194 WHO member states. A meeting of the WHO’s Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) is scheduled for Feb. 27 to work out the final terms, which all members will then sign.

Written under the banner of “the world together equitably,” the zero draft grants the WHO the power to declare and manage a global pandemic emergency. Once a health emergency is declared, all signatories, including the United States, would submit to the authority of the WHO regarding treatments, government regulations such as lockdowns and vaccine mandates, global supply chains, and monitoring and surveillance of populations.

Centralized Pandemic Response
“They want to see a centralized, vaccine-and-medication-based response, and a very restrictive response in terms of controlling populations,” David Bell, a public health physician and former WHO staffer specializing in epidemic policy, told The Epoch Times. “They get to decide what is a health emergency, and they are putting in place a surveillance mechanism that will ensure that there are potential emergencies to declare.”

The WHO pandemic treaty is part of a two-track effort, coinciding with an initiative by the World Health Assembly (WHA) to create new global pandemic regulations that would also supersede the laws of member states. The WHA is the rule-making body of the WHO, comprised of representatives from the member states.

“Both [initiatives] are fatally dangerous,” Francis Boyle, professor of international law at Illinois University, told The Epoch Times. “Either one or both would set up a worldwide medical police state under the control of the WHO, and in particular WHO Director-General Tedros. If either one or both of these go through, Tedros or his successor will be able to issue orders that will go all the way down the pipe to your primary care physicians.”

Physician Meryl Nass told The Epoch Times: “If these rules go through as currently drafted, I, as a doctor, will be told what I am allowed to give a patient and what I am prohibited from giving a patient whenever the WHO declares a public health emergency. So they can tell you you’re getting remdesivir, but you can’t have hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin. What they’re also saying is they believe in equity, which means everybody in the world gets vaccinated, whether or not you need it, whether or not you’re already immune.”

Regarding medical treatments, the accord would require member nations to “monitor and regulate against substandard and falsified pandemic-related products.” Based on previous WHO and Biden administration policy, this would likely include forcing populations to take newly-developed vaccines while preventing doctors from prescribing non-vaccine treatments or medicines.

Circumventing America’s Constitution
A key question surrounding the accord is whether the Biden administration can bind America to treaties and agreements without the consent of the U.S. Senate, which is required under the Constitution. The zero draft concedes that, per international law, treaties between countries must be ratified by national legislatures, thus respecting the right of their citizens to consent. However, the draft also includes a clause that the accord will go into effect on a “provisional” basis, as soon as it is signed by delegates to the WHO, and therefore it will be legally binding on members without being ratified by legislatures.

“Whoever drafted this clause knew as much about U.S. constitutional law and international law as I did, and deliberately drafted it to circumvent the power of the Senate to give its advice and consent to treaties, to provisionally bring it into force immediately upon signature,” Boyle said. In addition, “the Biden administration will take the position that this is an international executive agreement that the president can conclude of his own accord without approval by Congress, and is binding on the United States of America, including all state and local democratically elected officials, governors, attorney generals and health officials.”

There are several U.S. Supreme Court decisions that may support the Biden administration in this. They include State of Missouri v. Holland, in which the Supreme Court ruled that treaties supersede state laws. Other decisions, such as United States v. Belmont, ruled that executive agreements without Senate consent can be legally binding, with the force of treaties.

There are parallels between the WHO pandemic accord and a recent OECD global tax agreement, which the Biden administration signed on to but which Republicans say has “no path forward” to legislative approval. In the OECD agreement, there are punitive terms built in that allow foreign countries to punish American companies if the deal is not ratified by the United States.

As with the OECD tax agreement, administration officials are attempting to appeal to international organizations to impose policies that have been rejected by America’s voters. Under the U.S. Constitution, health care does not fall under the authority of the federal government; it is the domain of the states. The Biden administration found this to be an unwelcome impediment to its attempts to impose vaccine and mask mandates on Americans, when courts ruled that federal agencies did not have the authority to do so.

“To circumvent that, they went to the WHO, for either the regulations or the treaty, to get around domestic opposition,” Boyle said.

According to the zero draft, signatories would agree to “strengthen the capacity and performance of national regulatory authorities and increase the harmonization of regulatory requirements at the international and regional level.” They will also implement a “whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach at the national level” that will include national governments, local governments, and private companies.

The zero draft stated that this new accord is necessary because of “the catastrophic failure of the international community in showing solidarity and equity in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.”

A report from the WHO’s Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response (pdf) characterized the WHO’s performance as a “toxic cocktail” of bad decisions. Co-chair Ellen Johnson Sirleaf told the BBC it was due to “a myriad of failures, gaps and delays.” The solutions proposed by that report, however, did not suggest more local autonomy or diversified decision-making, but rather greater centralization, more power, and more money for the WHO.

‘One Health Surveillance’ and Misinformation
The WHO pandemic agreement calls for member states to implement “One Health surveillance.” One Health is a concept that has been embraced by the UN, the CDC, the World Bank, and other global organizations.

“The term originally meant a way of seeing human and animal health as linked—they sometimes are—so that you could improve human health by acting more broadly,” Bell said. “It has become hijacked and now is used to claim that all human activities, and all issues within the biosphere, affect health, and are therefore within Public Health’s remit. So public health can be deemed to include climate, or racism, or fisheries management, and this is being used to claim that addressing carbon emissions is a health issue and therefore a health ‘emergency.’”

The WHO zero draft states that “‘One Health surveillance’ means …,” leaving the definition to be worked out in future drafts. Whatever One Health surveillance ultimately entails, however, the signatories must invest in it, implement it, and “strengthen” it. In September 2022, the World Bank approved a Financial Intermediary Fund (FIF) to finance, among other things, One Health surveillance.

Signatories also agree to support the official narrative when it comes to information about a pandemic. Specifically, they will “conduct regular social listening and analysis to identify the prevalence and profiles of misinformation” and “design communications and messaging strategies for the public to counteract misinformation, disinformation and false news, thereby strengthening public trust.”

This aligns with efforts by the Biden administration to, as former White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki put it, “make sure social media companies are aware of the latest narratives dangerous to public health … and engage with them to better understand the enforcement of social media platform policies.” Or as UN Undersecretary-General Melissa Fleming stated at a 2022 World Economic Forum panel on “Tackling Disinformation” in Davos, “We own the science and we think that the world should know it.”

The official narrative during the COVID pandemic included support for lockdowns, school closures, and masking—all of which have since proven to be ineffective in stopping the spread of the virus and damaging to public health. A group of more than 900,000 doctors, epidemiologists, and public health scientists jointly signed the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, expressing “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.” This declaration was widely derided as dangerous misinformation and was censored on social media.

“The views that they crushed were orthodox public health,” Bell said. Up until 2019, public health guidelines “specifically said that things like prolonged border closures, closing stores, etc. were harmful, particularly for low-income people, and shouldn’t be done beyond a few weeks.”

Those who pushed for lockdowns “were very clear that what they were recommending for COVID was going to be extremely harmful, and that the harm would outweigh the benefit,” Bell said. “They were clear because they wrote that down before, and there’s nothing new in the idea that impoverishing people reduces life expectancy. Something dramatically changed their minds, and that something wasn’t evidence, so we can only assume that it was pressure from vested interests.”

In January, a survey presented at the World Economic Forum found that public trust in government has plummeted since the start of the pandemic, though attendees were at a loss to explain the reasons for the decline in trust. Instead, the discussion at the panel, titled “Disrupting Distrust,” focused on combating rogue news sources that challenged the central narrative.

America’s Membership in the WHO
In July 2020, then-President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from membership in the WHO. Citing the WHO’s dismal performance in responding to the COVID pandemic and its ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Trump said that U.S. funding of approximately half a billion dollars per year would also cease.

In response, then-presidential-candidate Joe Biden vowed: “On my first day as President, I will rejoin the WHO and restore our leadership on the world stage.” Biden kept his promise and took it one step further, negotiating the pandemic accord.

Today, GOP lawmakers are attempting to revive the effort to take the United States out of the WHO. On Jan. 12, House Republicans introduced the “No Taxpayer Funding for the World Health Organization Act,” which was sponsored by 16 representatives.

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), lead sponsor of the bill, stated: “Funneling millions of taxpayer dollars to the corrupt World Health Organization that serves the Chinese Communist Party is a slap in the face to hardworking American families struggling under record high inflation, and to all those whose lives and livelihoods were ruined and destroyed by the COVID pandemic. The WHO … praised China for their ‘leadership’ at the beginning of COVID-19 and has done nothing to hold the CCP accountable for the spread of COVID-19.”

The pandemic accord, a spokesman for Roy told The Epoch Times, “is just another reason to defund the WHO.”

Redefining Sovereignty and Human Rights
The zero draft of the accord states that national sovereignty remains a priority, but within limits. “States have, in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations and the principles of international law, the sovereign right to determine and manage their approach to pubic health,” the draft declares, “provided that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to their peoples and other countries.”

The accord states that human rights are also important, and it mandates that “people living under any restrictions on the freedom of movement, such as quarantines and isolations, have sufficient access to medication, health services and other necessities and rights.” The accord presents human rights as “health equity, through resolute action on social, environmental, cultural, political and economic determinants of health.”

In line with this concept, countries like Austria went so far as to criminalize the refusal to take the COVID vaccine. Within the United States, places like New York City mandated vaccine passports for access to public spaces, dividing its residents into a privileged vaccinated class and a second-tier unvaccinated class.

However, others see human rights not in terms of collective health but rather as individual rights, to include such things as personal sovereignty, the ability of individuals to make their own choices, the right of people to have a voice in medical decisions that affect them, free speech, and freedom of movement and assembly.

Following the Second World War and the state-control ideologies of fascism, national socialism, and communism, “it was realized that there has to be a fundamental understanding that individuals are sovereign” Bell said. Human rights declarations after the war emphasized that, even during times of crisis, “we are born with rights, we’re all equal, and those rights are inviolable. That is being very much watered down or wiped away in order to do this.”

“I think this issue is much, much broader; it’s what sort of society we want to live in. Do we believe in equality or do we believe in a feudal system where we have a few people at the top, controlling society, telling others what to do? That’s the direction we’re going in.”

The WHO, the U.S. Health and Human Services Department, and the World Bank were contacted regarding this article but did not provide a response.

Kevin Stocklin is a business reporter, film producer and former Wall Street banker. He wrote and produced “We All Fall Down: The American Mortgage Crisis,” a 2008 documentary on the collapse of the mortgage finance system. His most recent documentary is “The Shadow State,” an investigation of the ESG industry.

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There’s a Problem in the Upper Reaches of Our Military

Townhall.com
There’s a Problem in the Upper Reaches of Our Military

Victor Davis Hanson

Sep 02, 2021
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

It is the beginning of a never-ending bad dream. Joe Biden and the Pentagon have managed to birth a new terrorist haven, destroy much of U.S. strategic deterrence, and alienate our allies and much of the country.

In the hours after the horrific deaths of 13 service members, we have been reassured by our military that our partnership with the Taliban to provide security for our flights was wise. We were told that the terrorist victors share similar goals to ours in a hasty American retreat from Kabul. We were reminded that Afghan refugees (unlike U.S. soldiers) will not be forced to be vaccinated on arrival. Such statements are either untrue or absurd.

On the very day of the attack that killed American troops, the sergeant major of the U.S. Army reminded us in a tweet that diversity is our strength, commemorating not the dead but Women’s Equality Day. If so, then is the opposite of diversity — unity — our weakness? Will such wokeness ensure that we do not abandon the Bagram air base in the middle of the night without opposition?

The chief of staff at the Office of Naval Intelligence warned the ONI’s active duty and retired service members that they must not criticize Biden, their commander in chief, over the Afghanistan fiasco. The office correctly cited prohibitions found in the Uniform Code of Military Justice barring any disrespect shown to senior government leadership.

Indeed, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps was relieved of his command for posting a video accurately blaming military and civilian leadership for the Afghanistan nightmare.

Yet until Jan. 20, retired top brass had constantly smeared their elected commander in chief with impunity.

Recently retired Gen. Michael Hayden retweeted a horrific suggestion that unvaccinated Trump supporters should be put on planes back to Afghanistan, where they presumably would be left to die. Hayden earlier had compared Trump’s border facilities to Nazi death camps.

Other retired high-profile military officials variously called their president an emulator of Nazi tactics, a veritable Mussolini, a liar, and deserving of removal from office sooner than later. None of these retired four-stars faced the sort of repercussions that the Office of Naval Intelligence just warned about.

More than 50 former intelligence officials on the eve of the November election signed a letter suggesting that incriminating emails found on Hunter Biden’s missing laptop might be “Russian disinformation.” They used their stature for political purposes to convince the American people that the story was a lie.

Retired Gen. Joseph Dunford and retired Adm. Mike Mullen recently blasted retired brass who had questioned Biden’s cognitive ability. OK. But they should have issued a similar warning earlier, when the violations of fellow retired officers were even more egregious in election year 2020.

Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, apologized for doing a photo op with Trump, erroneously buying into the narrative that Trump had ordered rioters cleared from Lafayette Square for the staged picture. Worse, he leaked to journalists that he was so angry with Trump that he “considered” resigning.

Think of the irony. If Milley considered a politicized resignation to rebuke Trump over the false charge, then surely he could consider a real resignation after overseeing the worst military disaster of the last half-century in Kabul.

Milley had promised to root out white supremacy from the ranks while recommending that his soldiers read Ibram X. Kendi’s racialist diatribes.

Something is terribly wrong in the ranks of America’s top commanders that reflects something wrong with the country.

The Pentagon needs to stop virtue-signaling about diversity days and culturally sensitive food for Afghan refugees. Instead, can it just explain why the Bagram air base was abandoned by night, or why Taliban terrorists are our supposed “partners” in organizing our surrender and escape?

Which general allowed more than $85 billion in American weapons to fall to the Taliban — a sum equal to the price of seven new U.S. aircraft carriers?

Who turned over to the Taliban the lists of Americans and allied Afghans to be evacuated?

Who left behind biometric devices that the Taliban are now using to hunt down our former Afghan friends?

Somehow our new woke Pentagon is hell-bent on losing the trust of the American people — along with the wars it fights abroad.

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I Have A Solution by Bill Schoettler

I Have A Solution

By: Bill Schoettler

January 25, 2023

Since a “solution requires a “problem”, let me begin by defining/ describing the “problem” so we’re all on the same page as we proceed.

Let’s begin with a broadly defined problem, unwanted deaths.

Now that terminology implies that there may be wanted deaths so some sort of further explanation is needed. An example of a wanted death would be that of people sentenced to death by a jury or judge. It may be said, at least by some, that the people have spoken for such deaths.

Arguably, such deaths as those decreed by judicial fiat can be considered “wanted” because of the procedure followed.

Then we might say that deaths that come about through war/combat are “wanted”. This is a bit murky category because while wartime deaths are inevitable, some categories of such deaths are considered unacceptable. Such issues are frequently left to the victor to decide any justification or lack thereof…when it comes to an ultimate judgment.

It is certainly easy to accept the idea of a soldier who is threatened, shooting those who threaten him. Shooting an enemy combatant is probably a wanted death, at least it is wanted by the shooter who himself is the object of an enemy shooter. In general terms, we do not condemn the soldier for such killings.

But combat deaths as being wanted becomes a murky area when considering what is euphemistically called collateral damage. That would be deaths caused not intentionally but as the result of an intentional effort to destroy a “legitimate” military target. We don’t want to debate here the issue of collateral casualties or whether such deaths are wanted or unwanted.

Then there is the classic issue of self-defense and defense of family/loved ones/friends. The mother causing death to one trying to harm her child(ren) is a classic example of a wanted death. The individual faced with an attacker who uses lethal force to defend himself can be said to have caused a wanted death.

We can look to medicine for other examples and perhaps many can find personal experiences which are equally acceptable in describing wanted deaths.

But let’s jump into the broad category of all other deaths and simply call them unwanted deaths. These would be accidental deaths and intentional deaths caused without legally acceptable justification.

Okay, now we have the problem, let’s look at some solutions.

Starting with the idea of wanted deaths, we have first the issue of societal philosophy that allows the death penalty to be imposed. The obvious issue here is whether society’s wishes prevail, or some sort of philosophical objection should carry more weight. That is a social problem for which I do not offer a solution.

Next, we have the issues of combat deaths and collateral damage. Here we have a wealth of philosophical questions over the nature of mankind, issues of the psychological makeup of nations and their leaders, and a multitude of issues that have been discussed for as long as we have had people to discuss them. We will not go further into this arena.

What about deaths caused by self-defense? There are arguments raised by some that the sanctity of life is so important a concept that even the notion of self-defense is not adequate justification for killing another. This is an area of ample discussion we will put aside.

Finally, we come to deaths caused by accident (no matter how one may define it) and intent (of another). Here is an arena where prevention is worth exploring and for which some solutions will be offered.

Let us begin with the annual statistic of deaths caused by traffic accidents. In this country, that number runs around 30,000 plus per year. The solution? Simply ban all traffic. This answer is ridiculously simple. By eliminating all motor vehicles, nobody would be killed by a motor vehicle.

Now you may argue that motor vehicles are so necessary to the survival of all citizens that by eliminating them more deaths would result nationwide than the number of deaths caused by the continued use of motor vehicles.

Such an approach might be called “risk analysis”. In other words, it becomes necessary to consider the cost (in this case, the “cost” in terms of human life) versus the benefits (how many lives would be saved by the alternative). By permitting motor vehicles to continue functioning, more people would continue to live than might be killed in motor vehicle accidents.

Once we understand this cost-benefit analysis we can probably agree to the continued use of motor vehicles.

What about accidental deaths involved in various kinds of recreational activities, such as sky diving, hang gliding, skiing, mountain climbing, motorcycle riding, automobile racing, football, and a host of other activities that have all reported participant deaths? Well, simply banning all these activities will certainly prevent any involved deaths. Yes, there are enormous sums of money involved in some of these athletic activities but then that involves another kind of risk analysis, and there is the issue of potential personal reward (endorphins plus emotional satisfaction) that would seem to draw willing participants.

Not to be forgotten is the very real fact that participation in these activities is mostly voluntary. Those who do participate can be said to appreciate the various risks involved and willingly accept them. While we can’t say that death resulting to participants is a “wanted” matter, it is a philosophical question for each participant to decide.

What about those deaths caused intentionally to those who neither voluntarily participate and do not willingly accept such risks? The “victim” of an attack who frequently has no reason to believe another bears him harm, the innocent bystander whose only “mistake” is being in the wrong place at the wrong time…are these deaths “preventable”?

Yes, they are. Again we can use the simple approach…eliminate whatever mechanisms might be involved in a causal connection with the deaths.

We considered, and eliminated the idea of abolishing motor vehicle travel, air travel, train travel, and ship travel. I suppose we should include travel of any sort here (horse, bicycle, tight-rope walking, etc.).

What about deaths caused by firearms? Simply eliminate all firearms?

Whoops. Where are we going here? This is a sacred area and is certainly one of high emotional considerations. Eliminate all firearms? Well, certainly if you get rid of all guns, nobody will ever be killed by a gun. Works for automobiles, airplanes, and so forth.

There are some problems here. Perhaps we should start with the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These documents are enshrined in legal protections that are considered sacrosanct. That is, the laws of this land, at all levels (Federal, State, County, City) and the courts of this land (Federal, State, County, City) very specifically allow any adult honest citizen to possess a firearm, and to use it (in both recreational use and self-defense) without civil or criminal penalties. This idea is enshrined in the very foundation of this country and has been demonstrated to be not only a valid concept but a vital one, used over and over again for the protection of the country and its citizens.

Then there is the problem of the willingness of the general population to have their firearms“taken”. We’ve all heard or read the comment “You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers”. This is a silly statement because if the potential “taker” has more firepower than the potential “giver”, the taker will pry it from his cold, dead fingers. Next, consider that if the government were to pass laws requiring the relinquishment of ALL personally-owned firearms in the hands of ALL citizens, regardless of personal inclinations to resist, the holder of an “illegal gun” would not be able to use it, ever, anywhere, except perhaps just once.

Now let us consider the concept of “risk analysis” when applied to the social question of benefits to the public versus risk to the public over whether we permit the continued ownership of firearms.

We have to consider such things as the voluntary participation of gun owners in sporting activities such as competitive target shooting, hunting, pride of ownership, and exhibition. We should recognize the volume of annual gun sales (millions per year) demonstrating the willingness of a majority of the population to own, possess, and use firearms.

We also need to address the statistical reality that the percentage of firearms used in so-called “mass shootings” and individual shootings represents the “use” of perhaps 0.0001% of all guns in the hands of private citizens. From a practical standpoint, punishing 99.9999% of gun owners for the misuse by such a small fraction of miscreants is not only absurd, but it is also legally unsupportable. And this without even examining the true social benefits provided by and to the owners of guns.

What are the social benefits of gun ownership? Depends on whom you ask and how you go about establishing the information. The Centers for Disease Control has done studies examining the number of times the ownership and/or use of a firearm has protected an individual or individuals. Their findings have demonstrated the actual number of times per year that the use of a personal firearm has protected against a potential “threat” substantially exceeds the number of times “innocent” people are killed by the wrongful use of a firearm. Thus we have a similar argument on the subject of risk analysis for keeping personal firearms as we have for automobiles and other forms of travel, as well as recreational activities.

Hunting license fees, sales taxes on the sale of guns and ammunition, and related sporting activities provide a significant source of income to governments at all levels. On any given weekend, regardless of weather conditions, it is possible to find literally millions of individuals enjoying shooting sports of all kinds. Target shooting, skeet and trap shooting, bird and game hunting, and just plinking…all are happening everywhere. Just as people go for rides in their personal vehicles, go swimming (do you know how many people, especially children, die each year in swimming pools?), hiking, flying, skiing, and so forth.

What is it that “causes” accidents, intentional crimes, and any form of unwanted deaths? It is not the instrumentality, it is the user. How then can we change the user? That is the rub.

U.S. Disarms Itself To Aid Ukraine: Byron York

JANUARY 25, 2023

Welcome to Byron York’s Daily Memo newsletter.

U.S. DISARMS ITSELF TO AID UKRAINE.

The United States has shipped massive amounts of military aid to Ukraine since the Russian invasion in February 2022. There has been bipartisan support on Capitol Hill for the aid, although some Republicans have questioned the price tag — $27.5 billion so far in military aid, or “security assistance” alone, which does not include tens of billions in financial, humanitarian, and other types of aid. Some GOP lawmakers have also expressed concern about the lack of safeguards in sending so much money to a notoriously corrupt country.

But there is another growing worry about the amount of U.S. military aid to Ukraine. The Biden administration is sending so many weapons to Ukraine that the U.S., already underprepared for a major war, is running low on munitions for its own defense. In effect, the U.S. is disarming itself to aid Ukraine. That would be troubling in any event but is especially so amid growing tensions with China over Taiwan.

The scope of the problem is detailed in a new report, “Empty Bins In A Wartime Environment,” from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. Author Seth Jones writes that “the U.S. defense industrial base is not adequately prepared for the competitive security environment that now exists.” Citing analysis of stockpiles and usage rates, plus several CSIS war games, Jones writes that supplies are so low that “the United States would likely run out of some munitions — such as long-range, precision-guided munitions — in less than one week in a Taiwan Strait conflict.”

Jones writes that the U.S. has been underprepared for years. But the war in Ukraine is making the situation worse. The American effort in Ukraine has “depleted U.S. stocks of some types of weapons systems and munitions, such as Stinger surface-to-air missiles, 155 mm howitzers and ammunition, and Javelin anti-tank missile systems,” Jones writes. “For example, the quantities of Javelins transferred to Ukraine through late August 2022 represented seven years of production [at 2022 rates]. … The number of Stingers transferred to Ukraine is roughly equal to the total number built for all non-U.S. customers in the last 20 years. … As of January 2023, the U.S. military has provided Ukraine with up to 1,074,000 rounds of 155 mm ammunition, significantly shrinking the availability of 155 mm rounds in storage. Because of the limited availability of 155 mm howitzers and ammunition, the U.S. military began sending 105 mm howitzers and ammunition instead.”

“Since many of the weapons systems and munitions have come directly from U.S. inventories,” Jones concludes, “U.S. assistance has depleted some stockpiles that could be used for training, future contingencies, or other operational needs.”

Jones notes that lower weapons stockpiles make it difficult to deter China — why would China be deterred, knowing its adversary would run out of ammunition in a week? A major argument in favor of U.S. support for Ukraine has been to send China a message that aggression like Russian President Vladimir Putin showed in Ukraine will meet stiff resistance. But what if it has also shown China that the U.S. has exhausted its supplies on Ukraine and will take years to recover?

And it will be years. Weapons systems take a long time to develop. Weapons are stockpiled and supplies not renewed. Then, all of a sudden, they are needed, and there’s no quick way to replace them. “The history of industrial mobilization suggests that it will take years for the defense industrial base to produce and deliver sufficient quantities of critical weapons systems and munitions and recapitalize stocks that have been used up,” Jones writes. “It might take even longer to materialize facilities, infrastructure, and capital equipment, making it important to make changes now. The long timelines are manageable in peacetime but not in the competitive environment that now exists.”

Things never work out as expected. U.S. defense planners put a high priority on preparing for a possible conflict with China. And then they found themselves “directly aiding Ukraine in an industrial-style conventional war with Russia,” according to the CSIS report. The U.S.’s new proxy war with Russia is burning up weapons and ammunition at a rate the planners didn’t plan for. “While the Pentagon has focused on fighting wars with small numbers of more expensive precision-guided weapons, Ukraine is largely relying on howitzers firing unguided shells,” noted the New York Times.

The good news is that Congress has appropriated billions more to upgrade American capacity. There will be more Javelins, more Stingers, more howitzers, and millions more artillery rounds. It is part of “the most aggressive modernization effort in nearly 40 years,” according to an Army report cited by the New York Times.

Right now, the goal is to make more weapons — for Ukraine. “Before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the U.S. Army’s production of 14,400 unguided shells a month had been sufficient for the American military’s way of war,” the New York Times reported. “But the need to supply Kyiv’s armed forces prompted Pentagon leaders to triple production goals in September, and then double them again in January so that they could eventually make 90,000 or more shells a month.”

It is important to increase U.S. weapons production. The No. 1 reason, by far, is that the U.S. might need the weapons to defend itself. Now, the U.S. is ramping up production because it has gotten progressively deeper and deeper into a proxy war with Russia, a war that could burn vast amounts of weapons and munitions in the months, or perhaps years, to come. As they increase U.S. military capacity, civilian leaders might also want to consider how deeply and for how long they will be committed to the current war.

For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe.

January 6 Committee- Victor Davis Hanson

The January 6th
“Insurrection”

By: Victor Davis Hanson
January 12, 2023

Here is what we do not understand about the January 6th Committee—if it truly was intended to appear as a disinterested investigatory body.

1. Why for the first time in memory did Speaker Pelosi forbid the House Minority Leader’s pro forma nominees to a special House committee? Fairly or not, the result was that the only two Republicans who did serve shared two embarrassing requisites: they would likely be out of office, and not by their own volition, in January 2023; and two, they despised Donald Trump and voted for the second Trump impeachment.

So, what were the Democrats afraid of to make them break all precedents with past hearings? Pelosi, in other words, ensured that there would be no cross-examinations of any witnesses, no disagreements about witness lists, no contrasting interviews to the media about the work of the committee, and no diversity in staff interrogatories.

2. Why did the Committee not investigate whether the FBI had numerous agents and informants present on January 6th? Michael Rosenberg, the New York Times assigned a reporter to the demonstration, claimed they were ubiquitous. Were they?

3. Why did the Committee not review the circumstances in detail of the deaths of Officer Brian Sicknick and the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt? These were the two most high-profile and controversial deaths on January 6th, and Babbitt’s perhaps was the only violent death at the direct hand of a known other.

4. Why did the Committee not investigate and release all the communications between the House leadership and the Capitol police to learn why the Capitol was virtually open and unsecured on a day that everyone knew would be the scene of mass protests there?

5. Why did the Committee not investigate all incendiary speech by major elected officials at iconic Washington buildings, deemed inflammatory and allegedly resulting in violence at a subsequent time? For example, in 2020 then Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer screamed to a large demonstration massed at the doors of the Supreme Court:
“I want to tell you Gorsuch, I want to tell you Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

“You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price”? “Hit you”? Did Trump say to supporting demonstrators on January 6th anything like, “Pelosi and Biden, you released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Had Trump said that, would he now be in jail?

Note that not too long after Schumer’s threats, protestors appeared to swarm the homes of conservative Supreme Court justices, including a would-be assassin.

6. Why did the Committee not investigate all organized rioting by activist groups that also damaged federal properties, such as in 2020 a federal courthouse that was torched and attempts to storm the White House grounds to endanger a president?

7. Why did the Committee not release all the full transcripts of all those it interrogated, and why not all the arrangements and conditions with witnesses it finalized to make them appear?

The Coup we never knew -Victor Davis Hanson

January 9, 2023
The Coup We Never Knew

Did someone or something seize control of the United States?

By: Victor Davis Hanson
January 5, 2023

What happened to the U.S. border? Where did it go? Who erased it? Why and how did 5 million people enter our country illegally? Did Congress secretly repeal our immigration laws? Did Joe Biden issue an executive order allowing foreign nationals to walk across the border and reside in the United States as they pleased?

Since when did money not have to be paid back? Who insisted that the more dollars the federal government printed, the more prosperity would follow? When did America embrace zero interest? Why do we believe $30 trillion in debt is no big deal?

When did clean-burning, cheap, and abundant natural gas become the equivalent of dirty coal? How did prized natural gas that had granted America’s wishes of energy self-sufficiency, reduced pollution, and inexpensive electricity become almost overnight a pariah fuel whose extraction was a war against nature? Which lawmakers, which laws, which votes of the people declared natural gas development and pipelines near criminal?

Was it not against federal law to swarm the homes of Supreme Court justices, to picket and to intimidate their households in efforts to affect their rulings? How then with impunity did bullies surround the homes of Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas—furious over a court decision on abortion? How could these mobs so easily throng our justices’ homes, with placards declaring “Off with their d—s”?

Since when did Americans create a government Ministry of Truth? And on whose orders did the FBI contract private news organizations to censor stories it did not like and writers whom it feared?

How did we wake up one morning to new customs of impeaching a president over a phone call? Of the speaker of the House tearing up the State of the Union address on national television? Of barring congressional members from serving on their assigned congressional committees?

When did we assume the FBI had the right to subvert the campaign of a candidate it disliked? Was it legal suddenly for one presidential candidate to hire a foreign ex-spy to subvert the campaign of her rival?

Was some state or federal law passed that allowed biological males to compete in female sports? Did Congress enact such a law? Did the Supreme Court guarantee that biological male students could shower in gym locker rooms with biological women? Were women ever asked to redefine the very sports they had championed?

When did the government pass a law depriving Americans of their freedom during a pandemic? In America can health officials simply cancel rental contracts or declare loan payments in suspension? How could it become illegal for mom-and-pop stores to sell flowers or shoes during a quarantine but not so for Walmart or Target?

Since when did the people decide that 70 percent of voters would not cast their ballots on Election Day? Was this revolutionary change the subject of a national debate, a heated congressional session, or the votes of dozens of state legislatures?

What happened to Election Night returns? Did the fact that Americans created more electronic ballots and computerized tallies make it take so much longer to tabulate the votes?

When did the nation abruptly decide that theft is not a crime, assault not a felony? How can thieves walk out with bags of stolen goods, without the wrath of angry shoppers, much less fear of the law?

Was there ever a national debate about the terrified flight from Afghanistan? Who planned it and why?

What happened to the once-trusted FBI? Why almost overnight did its directors decide to mislead Congress, to deceive judges with concocted tales from fake dossiers and with doctored writs? Did Congress pass a law that our federal leaders in the FBI or CIA could lie under oath with impunity?

Who redefined our military and with whose consent? Who proclaimed that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff could call his Chinese Communist counterpart to warn him that America’s president was supposedly unstable? Was it always true that retired generals routinely libeled their commander-in-chief as a near Nazi, a Mussolini, an adherent of the tools of Auschwitz?

Were Americans ever asked whether their universities could discriminate against their sons and daughters based on their race? How did it become physically dangerous to speak the truth on a campus? Whose idea was it to reboot racial segregation and bias as “theme houses,” “safe spaces,” and “diversity”? How did that happen in America?

How did a virus cancel the Constitution? Did the lockdowns rob us of our sanity? Or was it the woke hysteria that ignited our collective madness?

We are beginning to wake up from a nightmare of a country we no longer recognize, and from a coup we never knew.

How did we get here?!

What Will the FBI Not Do?
By: Victor Davis Hanson
December 26, 2022

The FBI on Wednesday finally broke its silence and responded to the revelations on Twitter of close ties between the bureau and the social media giant—ties that included efforts to suppress information and censor political speech.

“The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter show nothing more than examples of our traditional, longstanding, and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements, which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries,” the bureau said in a statement. “As evidenced in the correspondence, the FBI provides critical information to the private sector to allow them to protect themselves and their customers. The men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public. Unfortunately, conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”

Almost all of the FBI communique is untrue, except the phrase about the bureau’s “engagements which involve numerous companies over multiple sectors and industries.”

Future disclosures will no doubt reveal similar FBI subcontracting with other social media concerns of Silicon Valley to stifle free expression and news deemed problematic to the FBI’s agenda.

The FBI did not merely engage in “correspondence” with Twitter to protect the company and its “customers.” Instead, it effectively hired Twitter to suppress the free expression of some of its users, as well as news stories deemed unhelpful to the Biden campaign and administration—to the degree that the bureau’s requests sometimes even exceeded those of Twitter’s own left-wing censors.

The FBI did not wish to help Twitter “to protect themselves [sic],” given the bureau’s Twitter liaisons were often surprised at the FBI’s bold requests to suppress the expression of those who had not violated Twitter’s own admittedly biased “terms of service” and “community standards.”

The FBI and its helpers on the Left now reboot the same boilerplate about “conspiracy theorists” and“misinformation” smears used against anyone who rejected the FBI-fed Russian collusion hoax and the bureau’s peddling of the “Russian disinformation” lie to suppress accurate pre-election news about the authenticity of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

The FBI is now, tragically, in freefall. The public is at the point, first, of asking what improper or illegal behavior will the bureau not pursue, and what, if anything, must be done to reform or save a once great but now discredited agency.

Consider the last four directors, the public faces of the FBI for the last 22 years. Ex-director Robert Mueller testified before Congress that he simply would not or could not talk about the fraudulent Steele dossier. He claimed that it was not the catalyst for his special counsel investigation of Donald Trump’s alleged ties with the Russians when, of course, it was.

Mueller also testified that he was “not familiar” with Fusion GPS, although Glenn Simpson’s opposition research firm subsidized the dossier through various cutouts that led back to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. And the skullduggery in the FBI-subsidized dossier helped force the appointment of Mueller himself.

While under congressional oath, Mueller’s successor James Comey on some 245 occasions claimed that he “could not remember,” “could not recall,” or “did not know” when asked simple questions fundamental to his involvement with the Russian collusion hoax.

Comey, remember, memorialized a confidential conversation with President Trump on an FBI device and then used a third party to leak it to the New York Times. In his own words, the purpose was to force a special counsel appointment. The gambit worked, and his friend and predecessor Robert Mueller got the job. Twenty months and $40 million later, Mueller’s investigation tore the country apart but could find no evidence that Trump, as Steele alleged, colluded with the Russians to throw the 2016 election.

Comey also seems to have reassured the president that he was not the target of an ongoing FBI investigation, when in fact, Trump was.

Comey was never indicted for either misleading or lying to a congressional committee or leaking a document variously considered either confidential or classified.

While under oath, his interim successor, Andrew McCabe, on several occasions flat-out lied to federal investigators. Or as the office of the inspector general put it:
As detailed in this report, the OIG found that then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe lacked candor, including under oath, on multiple occasions in connection with describing his role in connection with a disclosure to the WSJ and that this conduct violated FBI Offense Codes 2.5 and 2.6. The OIG also concluded that McCabe’s disclosure of the existence of an ongoing investigation in the manner described in this report violated the FBI’s and the Department’s media policy and constituted misconduct.

McCabe purportedly believed Trump was working with the Russians as a veritable spy—a false accusation based entirely on the FBI’s paid, incoherent prevaricator Christopher Steele. And so, McCabe discussed with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein methods to have the president’s conversations wiretapped via a Rosenstein-worn stealthy recording device, presumably without a warrant.

Note the FBI ruined the lives of General Michael Flynn and Carter Page with false allegations of criminal conduct or untruthful testimonies. Under current director Christopher Wray, the FBI has surveilled parents at school boards meetings—on the prompt of the National School Boards Association, whose president wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland alleging that bothersome parents upset over critical race indoctrination groups were supposedly violence-prone and veritable terrorists.

Under Wray, the FBI staged the psychodramatic Mar-a-Lago raid on an ex-president’s home. The FBI likely leaked the post facto myths that the seized documents contained “nuclear codes” or “nuclear secrets.”

Under Wray, the FBI perfected the performance-art, humiliating public arrests of former White House officials or Biden Administration opponents, whether it was the nocturnal rousting of Project Veritas muckraker James O’Keefe in his underwear or the arrest—with leg restraints—of former White House advisor Peter Navarro at Reagan National Airport for misdemeanor contempt of Congress charge or the detention of Trump election lawyer John Eastman at a restaurant with his family and the confiscation of his phone. Neither O’Keefe nor Eastman has yet been charged with any serious crimes.

The FBI arguably interfered in two presidential elections, and a presidential transition, and possibly determinatively so. In 2016, James Comey announced that his investigation had found that Hillary Clinton had improperly if not illegally used her private email server to conduct official State Department business, some of it confidential and classified, and likely intercepted by foreign governments. All that was a clear violation of federal statutes. Comey next, quite improperly as a combined FBI investigator and a de facto federal prosecutor, deduced that such violations did not merit prosecution.

Around the same time, the FBI had hired as a source the foreign national and political opposition hitman Christopher Steele. It helped Steele to spread among the media his fraudulent dossier and used its unverified and false contents to win FISA warrants against U.S. citizens on the bogus charges of colluding with the Russians to throw the election to Donald Trump. By the FBI’s admission, it would not have obtained warrants to surveil Trump campaign associates without the use of Steele’s dossier, which it also admittedly either knew was a fraud or could not corroborate.

Again, such allegations in the dossier were false and, apparently, the FBI soon knew they were bogus since one of its own lawyers—the now-convicted felon Kevin Clinesmith—found it necessary also to alter a court-submitted document to feign incriminatory information.

The FBI, on the prompt of lame-duck members of the Obama Justice Department, during a presidential transition, set up an entrapment ambush of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. It was an effort to lure Flynn into admitting to a violation of the Logan Act, a 223-year-old law that has led to only two indictments and zero convictions.

During the 2020 election, the FBI suppressed knowledge of its possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Early on, the bureau knew that the computer and its contents were authentic and yet kept its contents suppressed.

Moreover, the FBI sought to contract out Twitter (at roughly $3.5 million) as a veritable subsidiarity to suppress social media traffic about the laptop and speech the bureau deemed improper.

Again, although the FBI knew the laptop in its possession was likely genuine, it still sought to use Twitter employees to suppress pre-election mention of that reality. At the same time, bureau officials remained mum when 51 former “intelligence officials” misled the country by claiming that the laptop had all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” Polls later revealed that had the public known the truth about the laptop, a significant number likely would have voted differently—perhaps enough to change the outcome of the election.

The media, Twitter, Facebook, and former intelligence operatives were all following the FBI’s preliminary warning bulletin that “Foreign Actors and Cybercriminals Likely to Spread Disinformation Regarding 2020 Election Results”—even as the bureau knew the laptop in its possession was most certainly not Russian disinformation. And, of course, the FBI had helped spread the Russian collusion hoax in 2016.

In addition, the FBI-issued phones of agent Peter Strzok and attorney Lisa Page, along with members of Robert Mueller’s special counsel “dream team”—all under subpoena—had their data mysteriously wiped clean, purportedly “by accident.”

Apparently, the paramours Strzok and Page, in particular, had much more to hide, given how earlier they had frequently expressed their venom toward candidate Donald Trump. Strzok boasted to Page that the FBI in general, and Andrew McCabe in particular, had an “insurance policy”means of denying Trump the presidency:

I want to believe the path you threw out in Andy’s office—that there’s no way he gets elected—but I’m afraid we can’t take the risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40.

When some of their embarrassing texts emerged, both were dismissed by the special counsel. But Mueller carefully did so by staggering Strozk and Pages’ departures, and not immediately releasing the reasons for their firings or reassignments.

To this day, the public has no idea what the FBI was doing on January 6, how many FBI informants and agents were among the rioters, and to what degree they knew in advance of the protests. The New York Times reporter most acquainted with the January 6 riot, Matthew Rosenberg, dismissed the buffoonish violence as “no big deal” and scoffed, “They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.”

“There were a ton of FBI informants among the people who attacked the Capitol,” Rosenberg noted. We have never been told anything about that “ton”—a topic of zero interest to the January 6 select committee.

What are the people to do about a federal law enforcement agency whose directors either repeatedly lie under oath, mislead, or do not cooperate with congressional overseers? What should we do with a bureau that alters court documents, deceives the court with information the FBI had good reason to know was false, and leaks records of confidential presidential conversations to the media to prompt the appointment of a special prosecutor? What should be done with a government agency that pays social media corporations to warp the dissemination of the news and suppress free expression and communications? Or an agency that hires a foreign national to gather dirt on a presidential candidate and plots to ensure that there is “no way” a presidential candidate “gets elected” and destroys subpoenaed evidence?

What, if anything, should the people do about a once-respected law enforcement agency that repeatedly smears its critics, most recently as “conspiracy theorists”?

The current FBI leadership under Christopher Wray, in the tradition of recent FBI directors, has stonewalled congressional overseers about FBI activity during the Trump and Biden administrations. In “Après moi, le déluge” fashion, the bureau acts as if it assumes the next Republican administration in office will remove the current hierarchy. And thus, it assumes, for now, not cooperating with Republican investigations while Democrats hold control of the Senate and White House for a brief while longer ensures exemption.

Wray, most recently, cut short his Senate testimony on the pretext of an unspecified engagement, which turned out to be flying out on the FBI Gulfstream jet to his vacation home.

Yet the bureau’s lack of candor, contrition, and cooperation has only further alienated the public, especially traditional and conservative America, characteristically the chief source of support for the FBI.

There have been all sorts of remedies proposed for the bureau.

The three reforms most commonly suggested include:
1) simply dissolve the FBI in the belief that its concentration of power in Washington has become uncontrollable and is increasingly put to partisan service, including but not limited to the warping of U.S. presidential elections;
2) move the FBI headquarters out of the Washington D.C. nexus, preferably in the age of Zoom to a more convenient and central location in the United States, perhaps an urban site such as Salt Lake City, Denver, Kansas City, or Oklahoma City; or
3) break up and decentralize the FBI and redistribute its various divisions to different departments to ensure that the power of its $11 billion budget and 35,000 employees are no longer aggregated and put in service of particular political agendas.

The next two years are dangerous times for the FBI—and the country. The House will soon likely begin investigations of the agency’s improper behavior. Yet, simultaneously, the Biden Justice Department will escalate its use of the bureau as a partisan investigative service for political purposes.

The FBI’s former embattled, high-ranking administrators who have been fired or forced to leave the agency—Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Peter Strzok, James Baker, Lisa Page, and others—will continue to appear on the cable news stations and social media to inveigh against critics of the FBI, despite being all deeply involved in the Russia-collusion hoax.

Merrick Garland will continue to order the FBI to hound perceived enemies through surveillance and performance art arrests. And the people will only grow more convinced the bureau has become Stasi-like and cannot be reformed but must be broken up—even as in extremis a defiant and unapologetic FBI will, as its latest communique shows, attack its critics.

We are left with the dilemma of Quis custodiet Ipsos custodes. Who watches the watchers?

THROWING THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
UNDER THE BUS!!

By: Dr. Virginia Merchant, PhD
December 24, 2022

Well, if you watched as the House passed the Omnibus Bill today by Proxy Vote, which Nancy Pelosi instituted, the Bill is containing $1.7 billion of “PORK”. First off, you can only vote for legislation in the House and Senate to pass legislation if you are present in person. Most in the House were not present and this legislation is the same as Pelosi did on Obamacare— “you have to pass it and then read what it contains.” Two things, you should note, that our tax dollars are going for in this Bill is to build Nancy Pelosi a building in San Francisco which will be called “Pelosi Tower.” Do you want your tax dollars to go for that? Next is a “hiking trail”named after Michele Obama in Georgia, do you want to pay for that? Again, this is in the Omnibus Bill—the Obamas could pay for a hiking trail themselves; I am sure!

Who voted for his bill to be passed? Well in the House only Democrats, but in the Senate where it began, the following Republicans joined the Democrats to pass this mega legislation. They were:
Roy Blunt (Missouri),
John Boozman (Arkansas),
Shelley Capito (West Virginia),
Susan Collins (Maine),
John Cornyn (Texas),
Tom Cotton (Arkansas),
Lindsey Graham (South Carolina),
Jim Inhofe (Oklahoma),
Mitch McConnell (Kentucky),
Jerry Moran (Kansas),
Lisa Murkowski (Alaska),
Rob Portman (Ohio),
Mitt Romney (Utah),
Mike Rounds (South Dakota)
Richard Shelby (Alabama),
John Thune (South Dakota),
Roger Wicker (Mississippi)
Todd Young (Indiana).
From my standpoint, I believe none of these individuals should be in the Senate or run again. How dare they throw the American taxpayers under the bus with this bill and ask that we must pay higher taxes for it.

If you watched the joint House of Congress when the leader from Ukraine spoke you would have seen a very smart man getting mega funds from a group that was “enthralled” by his coming to speak to them. By smart I mean he knew they would give him what he wanted in mega bucks to fight Putin. This is in the Omnibus Bill just passed but nothing to protect our sovereign border—which is a mess. I watched Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky give Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris (who is in charge of the border but has never been there) a Ukrainian Flag—I thought the two women were going to collapse or “wet their pants”. Of course, the Omnibus Bill has mega bucks for him to fight Putin.

Wake up America and “start yelling” at our leaders! I know this Omnibus Bill will only cause more inflation and a larger recession come 2023. We need to get younger leaders that are not willing to throw faithful Americans under the bus. The group of Republicans that voted for this “pork” should not be reelected. We need new younger politicians that are willing to fight for our 1st Amendment rights, The Constitution, and no censorship or “Shadow Banning”! Thanks to Elon Musk he is putting documents and censorship in front of the world since buying Twitter.

Actually, the GOP needs to get rid of Mitch McConnell, I know our Florida Senators made a try at that and were defeated. Republican voters are desperately concerned about the country and are looking for bold and persuasive leadership instead of comfort with a few small intermittent successes. Personally, I happen to like Florida Governor DeSantis. Look what he did to send illegals to Martha’s Vineyard—lasted about 12 hours, unfortunately. I did a bio on his background not too long ago if you happened to read it.

We all must start fighting back in some way and start taking a very serious interest in what is going on around us, especially our leaders and government. Between you and me and the fence post, I’m not sure we need Trump running again. He did a fine job for 4 years, but the end seems to be a disaster, and I am not sure most Americans want an older President. We need vitality and “real smarts” to fight the far left.

Here’s to 2023 and may we all have a Healthy, Happy New Year! Please be determined to help change the course of “ruining” the United States of America. May all voices be heard!
God Bless America.
Ginny

I Am Fortunate
By: Bill Schoettler
December 26, 2022

I consider myself fortunate to have lived during the epitome of American civilization, brief that it has been. I was born in 1936, a time when America and the rest of the world was going through the tail end of the Great Depression. It was around this time that we can trace the beginning of World War Two, that great and universal war that involved all of the world’s great powers and many of the not-so-great powers. Millions died, cities were leveled, populations were decimated and the world was laid to waste.

Except this was the time for American victory. The United States of America, that sleeping giant of economic and political, and intellectual power awoke, scourged the world of the forces of evil that had been destroying it, and, single-handedly healed the world’s wounds and made everything work better.

From 1945 when the Great War ended to roughly 2000 the USA was the global light that shone brightly over the planet earth, staunched the wounds of the world, led the way to prosperity and democracy, and, with technological achievements in virtually all fields of science and industry, set an example for all nations to achieve and emulate.

Then things began to crumble. The homeland of this great nation was attacked for the first time in almost 200 years. The country began a series of skirmishes with small enemies that drained our energies and began the slow disintegration of our greatness. New generations that hadn’t lived through the growth struggles were blessed with the rewards earned by their predecessors. These new generations developed their own philosophies based on the leisure of security and complacency of previous accomplishments. No longer were there any wars to be fought or principles to be established. Now it was possible to revel in the luxury of inherited accomplishments which allowed freedom of thought and imagination that was not earned but inherited – without struggle.

Universities began teaching bizarre history courses that changed the meaning of what I had learned. Contemporary people were to be held responsible for the sins of their fathers, ancient heroes were not only shown to have feet of clay, but they were also to be destroyed in the interests of some sort of reconciliation with the past.

Principles of economics were distorted to account for present payment for allegedly past sins and concepts of “free speech” were re-defined to allow the burning of the American Flag but not the desecration of an LBGTQ flag, the prohibition of words like “American citizen” in exchange for “US citizen” and [and this is really curious] the elimination of any words used by so-called “white supremacists” that might be imagined offensive to any grouping of non-white persons.

Can this social [and emotional] revolution be sustained? Will it lead to a complete desecration of former American ideals, all to be replaced by re-thought, woke, principles, and re-defined wordings of diversity, equity, and inclusion?

What this country has now witnessed is a mid-term election the results of which can honestly be said to have endorsed the direction which I now criticize and rejected the solutions offered by such political stalwarts as Victor Davis Hanson and Tucker Carlson.

Celebrities and political figures and man-in-the-street interviews show our current President getting not only supporting but actual rave reviews of his performance in office.

Universities basking in former reputations have replaced the more traditional subjects with progressive topics designed to alter the former thinking that produced John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Advertising on television and in magazines would have been unrecognizable just 25 years ago.

Generations have been raised without the exposure of us “old-timers” to the “dirty Nazis”, the “dirty Japs”, the“blasted injuns” and other traditional enemies of America. Yes, those things were an integral part of my upbringing and it was left up to me to accept or reject, to learn or ignore the ever-changing political and emotional realities of daily life in this country.

The Nazis became good West Germans and bad East Germans, and the dirty Japs became our hosts in a country we helped industrialize after having first virtually destroyed its entire manufacturing ability. We financed and supported most governments of the world for roughly the first 50 years after WWII and then relaxed our vigilance as the world’s forces of evil seemed to dwindle.

With the leisure of peace and prosperity came the insidious tentacles of socialism and other experimental philosophies, alarmists over the health of the planet, and conspiracy theories about how the world’s populations should be managed and directed “for their own good and betterment”.

Those who fought against such pressures were themselves pilloried with lies and calumnies, their families attacked and their reputations sullied with deliberate and manufactured disinformation. And what’s even worse, what is absolutely inexcusable and itself deplorable to the highest degree is that once such lies and deceits have been disclosed, the disclosures themselves are completely ignored and the old lies continually regurgitated.

My days are shorter now, and I can look back upon a life of personal successes and reasonable accomplishments. I will leave behind some family, a passing reputation and will take to my grave personal memories of having lived through an historically memorable time of American greatness and personal satisfaction. I would wish that my generation’s estate, such as it is, would sustain this country for many more generations. But at this time in my sunset years, I am saddened by what I see and hear about me.

I sincerely hope I am wrong in my diagnosis.

THEY JUST DON’T CARE
By: E. P. Unum
December 25, 2022

I believe with all my heart and soul that we are witnessing the perverse undoing of everything we hold dear. Our Founding Fathers who pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to give us a Constitutional Republic must be turning in their graves.

Remember when President Obama told us about his plans for “The Fundamental Transformation of America”, that he was going to bring forth like a Messiah, “Change you can believe in”?

What he really meant is that his plans were for the fundamental destruction of America by changing what we believed, and this intentional destruction is being carried forward by Susan Rice and the rest of the Obama cabal who are working the strings of their puppet Joe Biden behind the scenes in the White House. That is not conjecture on my part. It is a fact. If you are looking for evidence to support this charge, all you need do is look at the actions taken by the Biden Administration since he took office almost two years go on January 20, 2021. Absolutely nothing he has implemented has benefitted our nation and its citizens. And if you were devising a plan for the destruction of the United States economically, spiritually, morally, and militarily you could not have fashioned a better blueprint than the one orchestrated by this band of corrupt, incompetent, wet-behind-the-ears crew called the Biden Administration.

Let me be absolutely clear. What we are witnessing on a daily basis is the planned, intentional, and corrupt dismantling of our Constitutional Republic including our belief in God, our Constitution, and our Flag. Moreover, the path those we entrusted to represent us in the hallowed hall of Congress is not what our Founders envisioned. It is an insane path based on a deep, pervasive hatred for America and contempt for working-class Americans.

It is time for the Republican Party and the Media in our nation to begin to recognize the true nature of the crises facing America today.

Planned Chaos…
The people making up the Biden Administration from the West Wing of the White House, to the Pentagon, to the Biden Cabinet are not foolish or misguided people. They are in a word, pure evil. There is no way to sugar-coat this. They are motivated by one thing and one thing only – power. They covet it, and they do not care how they obtain it. And they will trample anyone who gets in their way. Think about it. There is not a single day that goes by that Democrats are not laser-focused on President Donald Trump, and he has been out of office for two years! Their hatred of the man and anyone who supports him is palpable. Why? It is because they fear him. They know that he knows how corrupt the Biden Administration, the Biden Family, and even Barack Obama have been and they will do anything to stop his getting the nomination of his party and being re-elected President in 2024. They know he will win against any democratic candidate, including Joe Biden, they put forth in 2024.

Consider this maxim from an American farmer. If you leave the gate open, the cows will wander off. So if you intentionally leave the gate open, you want the cows to wander off. You can’t blame stupidity or laziness. You wanted it to happen.

The same holds true for other basic common sense principles. If you cut police budgets, you will get more crime on the streets. So if you intentionally cut police budgets, you want more crime on the streets. If you choose not to prosecute criminals, you will almost certainly end up with more criminals on the street. If you opt for cashless bail, then you are clearly signaling that you believe criminals should be free, and therefore more crime will result including theft, robberies, murder, shootings, rapes, etc. It’s not an accident. This is what you planned to happen. And it has.

If you cut back the supply of oil, gas prices at the pump will go up. So if you intentionally cut back the supply of oil by banning oil exploration in areas where we have proven oil reserves enough to sustain our energy needs here in the United States for the next 500 years, then you wanted gas prices to go up. It is not an accident nor is it related to Putin’s war in Ukraine, the recent solar eclipse of the sun or the mathematical equation used to calculate the distance between Mars and Venus at the Vernal Equinox. It’s because you planned for a shortage of gasoline, jet fuel, and heating oil and increased prices on over 6,000 products besides gasoline, all of which are based on petroleum. The people be damned!

If you print trillions of dollars without increasing the supply of goods, inflation will hit hard. So if you intentionally print trillions of dollars without producing more goods you want inflation to hit hard. It is not an accident nor is it related to “Putin’s war in Ukraine”. You violated a principle of sound economics, and you wanted to increase inflation.

If you leave the U.S. southern border wide open and invite immigrants to come in illegally, you will get more drug and human trafficking. So if you intentionally leave the border wide open, it is because you want more drug and human trafficking. It also means that by continuing to allow deadly drugs to come into our country like fentanyl, you want to allow the unchecked killing of Americans. Americans suffer from this blatant disregard for the security of our nation while the drug cartels in Mexico flourish making billions of dollars. They laugh at our insanity. And you wanted it to happen….and it is!

If you shut down 40% of the supply of baby formula in February, you’ll get a huge shortage. When you know a huge baby formula shortage is coming because of the FDA’s actions, and you purposefully do nothing to prevent it, month after month, until the crisis finally hits hard, you intended for this crisis to happen. It was not an accident nor a mistake in judgment. You planned for this to happen. If you are looking for someone to blame, look in the mirror.

Have you ever questioned why we have had no thorough investigation into the cause of Covid-19 and how it came to be? Would it really surprise you to learn that China has been shoveling millions to the Biden family for years? And maybe we just might find out that the U.S. has had a hand in the evolution of Covid-19 inasmuch as Dr. Anthony Fauci and the National Institutes of Health were actually funding gain of function research at the Wuhan, China Infectious Disease Lab. That news would then leak into the media about how corrupt the Biden family has been and that our President is compromised and in China’s pocket. Hell, it might even stretch back to the Obama Administration. And that just would not do!

Do you still believe President Biden when he emphatically stated on several occasions that he had never spoken to his son Hunter Biden about any of his business dealings in China, Ukraine, Russia, or Kazachstan despite pictures showing Joe Biden when he was Vice President with Hunter and his business partners playing golf or having dinner? Are we to believe that Hunter Biden accompanied his father on Air Force 2 on a trip to China, met with Chinese Communist Investment Bankers, and walked away with $1.5 Billion in investment into Hunter’s Company, and none of this was discussed with Joe Biden? Are you still comfortable knowing that all of this was kept under wraps prior to the election of Joe Biden as President? I’m not.

Are you tired of all the lies told by our President? I am.

When you appropriate billions to help foreign nations like Pakistan shore up their borders but don’t provide a penny to secure our southern border, it is not because you are stupid or inexperienced. It is because it was intentional. You want our country overrun by illegal immigrants, many of them on terrorist watch lists. You want chaos and hardship.

When you encourage elementary and secondary school teachers to tell our children that it is OK to seek gender modification surgery if they are uncomfortable with their own sex and feel they want to be a man or a woman without seeking the approval of their parents, you have abandoned all sensibilities of reason and moral behavior. When you condone teaching that America is a racist country founded on racist ideology, and embrace the principles set forth in the NY Times endorsed “1619 Project”, you have relinquished all historical principles, disciplines, and perspectives. You are infusing our youth with false narratives and denying them the knowledge that America, for all its faults, has been the single greatest force for good in the entire history of mankind on this planet. You are no longer educating our young, you are indoctrinating them. Worse, you are teaching them what to think not how to think, and doing them and our nation a terrible disservice.

When you attempt to install woke ideology into our military, especially at West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy by forcing Critical Race Theory into their curricula, you are insuring that our future leaders will be more concerned with the use of pronouns than with leadership principles and winning wars.

When you wait until the eleventh hour – literally just before Christmas 2022 – to vote on a budget to keep the government and our military going, and then stuff that budget with wasteful, unnecessary spending and call it an Omnibus Bill consisting of 4,155 pages totaling $1.7 Trillion (money we don’t have by the way), that is not just irresponsible, it is intentional malfeasance and dereliction of your sworn duty to protect our nation and its citizens. It is also certain to create more chaos, inflation, and hardship for American citizens.

It is time to recognize the evil people behind that sad old creature in the White House. They want crisis. They want chaos. They want riots. They want conflicts in your town and, I am sad to say, they are pushing us deeper and deeper into global conflict because in war their powers will be enhanced not curtailed.

Recall the stated purpose years ago when Obama declared his approach was to “take the US down a few notches on the world stage.” Imagine a U.S. President making that statement on the world stage!

Today, I can feel the quality of my life going down with the country I love, and I want all the corruption, ridiculous rules, and regulations to stop. Our nation has serious problems. We need serious people to tackle these problems, not corrupt politicians with their hands in the till.

And above all remember this:
These are not foolish or misguided people. They are the personification of pure evil, and they just do not care about the American people.

They are headed somewhere you don’t want to go.

It’s time to take our country back.

©2022 Rip McIntosh Enterprises. All rights reserved.

Bring on a new year- Ted Malloch

A DISAPPOINTING 2022 — GOOD RIDDANCE

Theodore Roosevelt Malloch

I think that this last year was arguably one of the worst in recent history.

It was an annus horribilis in so many ways they are hard to count. With an economy faltering, elections turning out other than planned, and a series of scandals, censorship, FBI wrongdoings, not to mention the continuation of the Wuhan deadly viral disease, no one should be sad to see December 31st fast approaching.

If you are the type that makes lists, doubtless you have your own number of downfalls, scary turns or failures to post. It seems year after year we see more and more of the same and they intensify and multiply, only making a bad situation, worse. It is almost enough to make one into a continual pessimist or even a cynic.

The conservative cup is more than half empty, I would sadly have to posit. We need a refill.

So, here goes my list of 2022’s Biggest Disappointments, in descending order:

10. Phillies
My hometown favorite team gave us a run for the money and got further along than most national pastime observers thought remotely possible. They just squeaked into the playoffs but went on the roust the Padres and hammer the Braves. In the World Series, they beat the cheating Astros, twice but in the end could not carry the day. As so often before, the City of Brotherly Love failed to win when it counts. The issue here is that our favorite teams bring us so close, excite us so much, get us to near elation—and then the balloon bursts. Conclusion: Sports Teams Disappoint.

9. Mid-term Elections
With the pundits to a person, even the nasty Democrats become Socialists, predicting a biblically proportioned Red Wave, it was a huge disappointment on the evening of the first Tuesday in November when it simply failed to materialize; and then again in the Georgia runoff. There wasn’t much of a ripple truth be known. The Republicans struggled just to eek out the ouster of the Speaker and lost the Senate. Fingers pointed every which way and the long knives were out but the fact remains even with all the suppression of voting, fraud, and rigging, the Republicans are down and left to fight with each other, Trump included. Conclusion: Politicians Disappoint.

8. Elon Twit
With Elon the white knight purchasing the social media giant Twitter, it finally appeared that the US would have a First Amendment, again. He would ride in to save the day and undo the evil actions of the past. Things would get better—immediately. And what did we discover? The proverbial shithouse was far worse than anyone expected. There was a scandalous entanglement between the Deep State (FBI- CIA) and the media, big tech included, to make sure Trump was not reelected in 2020 and the Hunter laptop never saw the light of day. The facts were there for all to see and even still the mainstream media failed to cover it or frankly admit they are in the pocket of Leftist Progressivism. In truth, many of us have come to find that the present system is so rotten to the very core it can’t be fixed or reformed. The last two elections should just be nullified. We need to start all over. Conclusion: Media Disappoints.

7. SBF-FTX
A Ponzi scheme bigger than even the giant Madoff scam was unearthed involving a boy con-man, his Stanford Law School professor parents, a grifter hedgie girlfriend, and the whole Democrat Party, who he bought off with up to a billion dollars in donations. It was enough to keep him out of jail, living in luxury in the Bahamas, and to see the Democrats win with the stolen (loot recycled through the Ukraine, nonetheless) elections. Putting crypto on the ropes, SBF (his now infamous initials) took the money of a million investors and it was all gone in a – puff! Conclusion: Ponzi’s Disappoint.

6. Economics
The dull science was made even duller this year. Assets of every type were way down in value. Don’t even look at your 401K or IRA statement. Interest rates shot higher and higher. No one can afford a mortgage. Inflation soared to a forty year record. Gas and food prices made living too costly for the average Joe. Many had to choose between gas or food. Financial losses were compounding and the President made things worse, printed yet more money, and denied the facts. We are all much poorer as our standard of living gets decimated. Conclusion: Economics Disappoints.

5. Adolph Ye
What is up with our sick culture? On one side, we have the cancel bunch of woke racists and BLM-CRT ideologues who want to close down anything they disagree with. And on the other side, we have rap artists who have gone mad, praising Hitler and loving Nazis. If culture is a reflection of where we are as a society, God help us. The notion that we could discover or appreciate the good, the true, and the beautiful, has surely departed us. What we are left with is empty souls, degrading us in a complete desacralization of what used to be called Christendom, aka Western Civilization. Conclusion: Culture Disappoints.

4. The Pelosi’s
The emperor has no clothes, according to the Danish playwright, Hans Christian Anderson. In this case our American royalty have too been exposed. Queen of Botox, Nancy was fired from her job after disappointing citizens for decades. Her arrogance, fake zealotry, and San Fransicko values were always a farce. But this year her poor Prince of a husband, Pauli, was likewise exposed. He got a DUI in Napa wine country while his “friend” in the front seat of the fast, expensive Porsche ran away. Then in an early morning scuffle, the same octogenarian had a hammer put to his head in uncertain circumstances in his own swank mansion bedroom by a man he “knew”, a homeless, illegal immigrant, with weird views, habits, and sexual preferences. Conclusion: Elites Disappoint.

3. Hunter & The Big Guy
The Biden crime syndicate is perhaps the biggest scandal in US presidential history and yet it goes nearly unnoticed and unprosecuted. Having fleeced the country in an unprecedented influence peddling scheme, the Biden’s have shaken down the Russians, Chinese, Ukrainians, Mexicans, Romanians, and Jesus only knows who else, in a multi-million dollar pay-to-play game where the crack cocaine, hooker addicted, son of the President is the wing man, collecting money to benefit his a-stute but senile father. As the “Big Guy,” Joe cashes in his ten percent, and the whole family over the decades has gotten incredibly rich. It is called corruption on the grandest scale. Conclusion: Biden’s Disappoint.

2. Ronna & Mitt
There is a view in some Republican circles that only the Dems are up to no good. The RINOs as a part of the uniparty—the oligarchy that runs America — is equally at fault. Trump tried to expose and weed them out but the McConnell’s, Ryan’s, and Romney’s all strike back. They don’t want any changes to their gravy train and they rather like things pretty much just the way they are. With niece Ronna running the RNC, and Pierre Delecto incognito, screwing up the Senate, what could go wrong? Conclusion: RINO’s Disappoint.

1. Lord Fauci
Faucism is without question, at the root of most all evil. The patron saint of Wuhan, Lord Fauci, of AIDs fame, and now instigator and enforcer of lockdowns, masking, and useless experimental vaccines, Fauci has probably done more than any human being in history to lead to the harm and deaths of innocent people. His gain of function research gave us Chinese Covid and his dictatorial “public health” scientism shows the tyrant for what he is, a Mengele for our times. This highest paid, hubris filled bureaucrat, who received millions of dollars in royalties from drug companies, was lionized as a hero, when in fact he was an arch villain. Conclusion: Science Disappoints.

Ring in 2023—it can’t get much worse or disappoint more. When we sing Auld Lang Syne this year we will mean it. Is it too much to ask that the future have a few slight glimmers of hope?

Can more America-loving, security conscious old-line liberal Democrats resign and become Independents, like the Arizona maverick Senator?

Urging it, I realize it may not necessarily be their choice to join the GOP, but to merely dissociate from their corrupt, unpatriotic and unprincipled party in order to vote for freedom. Joe Manchin should also make the move and be followed by a handful of others.

This would allow America a chance to see the Democrat Party “outed” for what they are– Leftist abettors of a corrupt, power-crazed and globalist cabal. And, on our side is it too much to ask that Republicans put up a fight, do what they say, and start loving everything good about America, again?

Bring on a new year…