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And:
Our wonderful Director of The State of Ga. Museum, Bill Eiland, and the wife of my deceased dear artist friend, Stella Golden,discuss her husband (Rolland's) career and Katrina Series works: https://youtu.be/
Rolland was a fabulist watercolorist, a superb drawer and a very dear friend. We own two of his works. I also invite you to read Rolland's beautiful autobiography about his long marriage and love affair with his young bride and career as a devoted artist.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++The Virus has unleashed enormous spending and it will come back to bite us as our currency sinks.
Hard to believe but
look it up on the Congressional website for HR 748 from 116th Congress.
American population:
330,483,530
Stimulus bill:
$2,000,000,000,000 ($2 Trillion)
Dividing the cost by every in
America is $6,051.74
The government could have given
every person over $6,000, but instead will give $1,200 to each adult under a
certain income.
Wanna know where the missing 96% of your tax dollars went?
$300,000,000 for Migrant and
Refugee Assistance pg 147
$10,000 per person for student
loan bailout
$100,000,000 to Nasa, because,
who knows why.
$20,000,000,000 to the USPS,
because why the hell not
$300,000,000 to the Endowment
for the Arts - because of it
$300,000,000 for the Endowment
for the Humanities/ because no one even knew that was a thing
$15,000,000 for Veterans
Employment Training / for when the GI Bill isn't enough
$435,000,000 for mental health
support
$30,000,000,000 for the
Department of Education stabilization fund/ because that will keep people employed
(all those zeros can be confusing, that’s $30 BILLION)
$200,000,000 to Safe Schools
Emergency Response to Violence Program
$300,000,000 to Public
Broadcasting / NPR has to be bought by the Dems
$500,000,000 to Museums and
Libraries / Who the hell knows how we are going to use it
$720,000,000 to Social Security
Admin / but get this only 200,000,000 is to help people. The rest is for admin
costs
$25,000,000 for Cleaning
supplies for the Capitol Building / I kid you not it's on page 136
$7,500,000 to the Smithsonian
for additional salaries
$35,000,000 to the JFK Center
for Performing Arts
$25,000,000 for additional
salary for House of Representatives
$3,000,000,000 upgrade to the
IT department at the VA
$315,000,000 for State Department
Diplomatic Programs
$95,000,000 for the Agency of
International Development
$300,000,000 for International
Disaster Assistance
$90,000,000 for the Peace Corp
pg 148
$13,000,000 to Howard
University pg 121
$ 9,000,000 Misc. Senate
Expenses pg 134
$100,000,000 to Essential Air
carriers pg 162 This of note because the Airlines are going to need billions in
loans to keep them afloat.
$100,000,000 is chump change
$40,000,000,000 goes to the
Take Responsibility to Workers and Families Act This sounds like it's direct
payments for workers. Pg 164
$1,000,000,000 Airlines Recycle
and Save Program pg 163
$25,000,000 to the FAA for
administrative costs pg 165
$492,000,000 to National
Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) pg 167
$526,000,000 Grants to Amtrak
to remain available if needed through 2021 pg 168 (what are the odds that
doesn't go unused)
Hidden on page 174 the
Secretary has 7 days to allocate the funds & notify Congress
$25,000,000,000 for Transit
Infrastructure pg 169
$3,000,000 Maritime Administration
pg 172
$5,000,000 Salaries and
Expensive Office of the Inspector General pg 172
$2,500,000 Public and Indian
Housing pg 175
$5,000,000 Community Planning
and Development pg 175
$2,500,000 Office of Housing
What DOES ALL of this have to do with the Virus? Are you confused? .
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Even Henninger says God forbid!
Trump, Biden, Hunter, Chaos
Is disapproval of a president’s personality sufficient reason to transfer power to the Democrats?
If Donald Trump loses, a question for the ages will be: Did he tank his own election? As a conspiracy theory, it has more going for it than the Steele dossier.
Just two weeks from Election Day, with October surprises adding to already routine chaos, the baseline reality in front of the incumbent president is that some 90% of the electorate is already committed either to him or Joe Biden, and so his victory depends on squeezing votes out of the remaining undecided turnips.
Also posit that Mr. Biden’s theory of the election has just two elements: first, the apparent fact that most Americans, notably seniors, disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic; and second, the belief that most undecided voters are reluctant to absorb four more years of the unique Trump persona.
So what has the president done since the bizarre first presidential debate to turn the turnips in his direction?
So what has the president done since the bizarre first presidential debate to turn the turnips in his direction?
To reassure their concerns on Covid-19, he called Anthony Fauci an “idiot.” Dr. Fauci is a maddening media hog, but why would an 11th-hour assault on a nominal leader of his own coronavirus team do anything for the president but subtract votes?
Even Mr. Trump’s most ardent supporters acknowledge the reality of ambivalence about the president’s routine belligerence. At a recent Pennsylvania rally, Mr. Trump called out to suburban women: “Will you please like me?” Within days of asking undecided women to vote for him, he calls the Bidens “a criminal family.” Appalling swamp creatures, perhaps, but the Gambinos?
Outside the world of Never Trumpers, it has been difficult not to marvel at Mr. Trump’s refusal to bow to political convention. But one evident price for this persistent anti-convention is that from day one, and despite a quite remarkable record of economic vitality, his presidential approval rating has never crossed 50%. Why not? Again, the Biden campaign’s not-irrational conclusion is that Mr. Trump simply rubs enough of the American public the wrong way to ensure his inability to win re-election.
So it is not unreasonable to wonder if the president has decided that if he’s going down, it will be in a final Trumpian blaze of invective and defiance.
We aren’t there yet. The undecided turnips can’t go to sleep until they resolve what the 2020 election has come down to: Is hating Trump enough? Is disapproval of a president’s personality sufficient reason to transfer power to Joe Biden and the Democratic Party?
For some, and this includes voters who admire most of Mr. Trump’s policies, the blunt answer is yes. Many of them have a personal final-straw story, for instance Mr. Trump’s shabby dismissal of former Defense Secretary and Marine Gen. Jim Mattis.
Still, elect Joe Biden? Has any candidate for the U.S. presidency ever run on less than Joe Biden this year?
Mr. Biden’s campaign has consisted almost entirely of riffing variations on the first words in his convention acceptance speech. “The current president has cloaked America in darkness for much too long,” Mr. Biden said, asserting that if voters “entrust” him with the presidency, “I will be an ally of the light, not the darkness.”
Less than two weeks from the vote, that is pretty much the four-year deal on offer from Mr. Biden: release from Donald Trump in return for “an ally of light.”
You wouldn’t be saying much either if you were going into the final presidential sprint carrying as much baggage as the former vice president—a Democratic Party gone too far left to talk about and, unexpectedly, the Hunter Biden darkness.
Whatever else, Hunter Biden is the story of a life lost to compulsions and addiction. Joe Biden’s inability, once informed in 2015 by State Department officials about the Ukraine deals, to direct his son to pull back from his descent into self-destruction shows significant weakness of judgment. Instead, he let Hunter rip. That poor judgment is not going to improve.
Mr. Biden has made a Faustian bargain with his party’s activist left, and should he win, their price will be putting the U.S. on a fast track toward significant income confiscation and “distributive justice.” The Obama presidency got close, and economically, it was not a good experience for lower-middle-class workers or the unemployed. The creation of economic opportunity is why the possibility of support for Mr. Trump among black Americans and Hispanics may be one of the election’s sleeper issues.
At its finish, this presidential election is of a piece with everything else in 2020—the desire that some things just go away. So which is it, Donald Trump or the Democratic Party?
I think the greater national need is for the Democratic Party to go away and rethink what has become its profound alienation from the history, traditions and identity of the United States. If they win, the divisions will get deeper. In our invaluable system of checks and balances, it’s a bigger risk to have one of America’s two major parties this far off the tracks than any single personality.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Nothing off the table as radical Democrats prepare to bully and intimidate America and re-direct our constitution. Vote for president "pushover" and his sidekick and pay the price:
Breaking Judicial Norms: A History
A Democratic Senate pattern, from Bork to the filibuster rule.
By The Editorial Board
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is widely reported to have told his Democratic colleagues on Saturday that “nothing is off the table for next year” if Republicans confirm a Supreme Court nominee in this Congress. He means this as a threat that Democrats will break the filibuster and pack the Court with more Justices in 2021 if they take control of the Senate in
So what else is new? Democrats have a long history of breaking procedural norms on judges. While packing the Court would be their most radical decision to date, it would fit their escalating pattern. Let’s review the modern historical lowlights to see which party has really been the political norm-breaker:
• The Bork assault. When Ronald Reagan selected Robert Bork in 1987, the judge was among the most qualified ever nominated. No less than Joe Biden had previously said he might have to vote to confirm him. Then Ted Kennedy issued his demagogic assault from the Senate floor, complete with lies about women “forced into back-alley abortions” and blacks who would have to “sit at segregated lunch counters.” Democrats and the press then unleashed an unprecedented political assault.
Previous nominees who had failed in the Senate were suspected of corruption (Abe Fortas) or thought unqualified (Harrold Carswell). Bork was defeated because of distortions about his jurisprudence. This began the modern era of hyper-politicized judicial nominations, though for the Supreme Court it has largely been a one-way partisan street.
No Democratic nominee has been borked, to use the name that became a verb. Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose left-wing legal views were obvious upon her nomination, received a respectful GOP hearing and was confirmed 68-31 with nine GOP votes. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed 96-3, Stephen Breyer 87-9, and Elena Kagan 63-37.
Democrats, meanwhile, have escalated to character assassination. Clarence Thomas was unfairly smeared on the eve of a Senate vote and barely confirmed. Democrats accused Samuel Alito of racism and sexism for belonging decades earlier to an obscure Princeton alumni group.
Democrats promoted the uncorroborated claims of women accusers against Brett Kavanaugh from his high school and college years. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse undertook a deep dive into Justice Kavanaugh’s high-school yearbook. This treatment has become the real Democratic Party “norm.”
• Filibustering appellate nominees. It’s mostly forgotten now, but in George W. Bush’s first term Senate Democrats pioneered the use of the filibuster to block nominees to the circuit courts. That was also unprecedented.
Miguel Estrada was left hanging for 28 months before he withdrew, though he had support from 55 Senators. A 2001 Judiciary Committee memo to Sen. Dick Durbin was candid in urging opposition to Mr. Estrada because “he is Latino” and couldn’t be allowed to reach the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals lest he later become a candidate for the Supreme Court.
Democrats also filibustered or otherwise blocked appellate nominees Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown, Charles Pickering Sr., Henry Saad, Carolyn Kuhl, William Pryor, David McKeague, Richard Griffin and William Myers, among others.
This violation of norms was stopped only after the GOP regained the majority and threatened to change Senate rules. A handful of Senators in both parties then negotiated a deal to vote for nominees except in “extraordinary circumstances.” Republicans did not unilaterally break the filibuster for judicial nominees.
• Breaking the filibuster for appellate nominees. That norm-breaker was executed by Democrats in 2013, led by then Majority Leader Harry Reid with the enthusiastic support of Barack Obama. Democrats rewrote Senate rules in mid-Congress, on a party-line vote, to add three seats to the D.C. Circuit. The goal was to stack that court with liberals who would rubber stamp Mr. Obama’s “pen” and “phone” regulatory diktats.
Those liberals have done that numerous times, while sometimes blocking President Trump’s deregulatory rule-makings. But the political cost has been high, as we warned at the time. Harry Reid’s precedent allowed GOP leader Mitch McConnell to do the same when Democrats tried to filibuster Neil Gorsuch. The GOP majority can now confirm Mr. Trump’s next nominee with 51 votes.
***
Urged on by the progressive media, Democrats are now vowing that they’ll break the 60-vote legislative filibuster rule to add two, or even four, new Justices to the Supreme Court next year for a total of 11 or 13. But they have already been saying this for months. Barack Obama gave the green light when he used John Lewis’s funeral to call the filibuster a “Jim Crow relic.” Never mind that as a Senator he endorsed a filibuster of Mr. Alito. Mr. Whitehouse and four colleagues explicitly threatened in an amicus brief that the Court would be “restructured” if Justices rule the wrong way.
Republicans could surrender and not confirm a nominee, and Senate Democrats would still break the filibuster. Court packing would then become a sword hanging over the Justices if they rule contrary to the policy views of the Senate left. Leader Schumer won’t resist because he is quaking at the prospect of a primary challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2022.
Contrast this Democratic record, and now this court-packing threat, with the GOP record. In 2016 Mitch McConnell and his colleagues refused to confirm Merrick Garland and said the voters should decide the issue in the election. Mr. Schumer had previously vowed the same standard in the final years of George W. Bush. Mr. McConnell essentially made a political bet by putting judicial philosophy and the Supreme Court at the center of the 2016 campaign.
Judges were also on the Senate ballot in 2018 after the Kavanaugh ugliness. The GOP gained two net seats. The use of their elected Senate power now to confirm a nominee would be a wholly legitimate use of their constitutional authority. They should not be cowed by Democratic threats from confirming a nominee. Democrats have shown they will do what they want with Senate power no matter what Republicans do now.
What Republicans should do is let the voters know about the Democratic filibuster and court-packing plans, and make them a campaign issue. Democratic Senators and candidates should have to declare themselves not merely on Mr. Trump’s nominee but on the filibuster and court-packing that Mr. Schumer has now told the country will be on the table.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Significant Gaza tunnel discovered by IDF: https://www.algemeiner.com/
2020/10/21/idf-chief-says- uncovered-gaza-terror-tunnel- was-very-significant-asset-of- the-enemy/
and:
Tobin on Trump's correct intervention:
Trump illustrates the right kind of American intervention
The foreign-policy establishment is jeering his push for Sudan to normalize relations with Israel, but this is just one more example of why we shouldn’t trust them.
(October 21, 2020 / JNS) President Donald Trump’s approach to foreign policy has been subjected to harsh criticism since before he took office. Trump’s emphasis on criticizing past American interventions in foreign conflicts and his decision to employ the term “America First” to describe his intentions led many to believe that he was steering the country on an isolationist course. His beliefs about alliances seem, with a few exceptions, purely transactional rather than rooted in notions about common values. But it’s also true that he has proved a disappointment to genuine isolationists. And as the administration’s latest foreign-policy initiative—an effort to force Sudan to normalize relations with Israel—has shown, not only is he not shy about exercising American influence, his ideas about the right way to intervene abroad are actually an improvement over the policies of the past.
Like just about everything Trump has attempted, the Sudan gambit is being bitterly criticized by the so-called “experts.” They say the administration’s heavy-handed approach to Sudan, in which the president has offered to remove that country from the State Department’s list of State sponsors of terror in exchange for its paying compensation to American victims of terrorism and normalizing relations with Israel is a mistake.
As an article from the Brookings Institution—a think tank that is a bastion of the establishment and from which it is likely that former Vice President Joe Biden will recruit some of his foreign-policy team—made clear, Trump’s strategy is considered too risky by the so-called “adults.”
At the heart of their concerns is a genuine dilemma about whether pushing Sudan to recognize Israel will be counterproductive.
Until not very long ago, Sudan had one of the most dangerous and most despised governments on the planet. The regime led by dictator Omar al-Bashir plunged that country into three decades of famine and war, committed genocide in the Darfur region and hosted terrorists like Al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden, in addition to Hezbollah and radical Palestinian groups. Bashir started to move away from his old allies by breaking ties with Iran in 2016. But his overthrow last year has surprisingly led to an attempt to transition Sudan to democracy. Still, the new government is far from stable as the chronically poverty-stricken nation is undergoing a severe economic crisis that has led to shortages of food and medicine.
It desperately needs Western help but can’t get it as long as it remains on the list of terror sponsors. That gives the United States enormous leverage over the Sudanese, and characteristically, Trump intends to use it. He has dangled the removal from the terror list in front of the Khartoum government, while also negotiating a settlement of claims against the nation from victims of terrorism for which Sudan had responsibility such as the 1998 Al-Qaeda attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Somalia, and the assault on the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Cole in 2000.
But Trump wasn’t satisfied with this paltry return for a move that could make all the difference for Sudan’s future. He has also insisted that Sudan normalize relations with the State of Israel.
According to Trump’s critics, that’s a mistake. They say forcing Sudan to join the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which recognized Israel in the Abraham Accords signed last month at the White House, is an unnecessary irritant that will endanger the progress the country has made in the last year. And, according to some in the Islamic world, ties with Israel will delegitimize the Sudanese reformers. Iran’s Supreme Leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is also openly threatening Sudan’s government with retaliation on Twitter if it joins those making peace with Israel.
There’s little doubt that some in Sudan, which has a tradition of support for radical Islamists that goes back to the late 19th century when a movement led by a charismatic figure called “the Mahdi” temporarily defeated British and Egyptian occupation forces, are opposed to normalizing relations with Israel. Sudan is in a different position than Egypt and Jordan, which made peace treaties with the Jewish state in order to opt out of the cycle of war that they had been pushed into by the Palestinians, or the UAE and Bahrain that stand to profit from trade with Israel.
The establishment not only thinks that pressuring Sudan to recognize Israel is a terrible idea. Just as they dismissed or minimized the Abraham Accords with the Gulf states, they accuse Trump of seeking this goal for political reasons in order to secure a triumph before Election Day. They’re also the same people who said normalization with Israel in the Arab world would have to await the creation of a Palestinian state, and that moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would set the region aflame. They were not only wrong about those decisions; it’s equally clear that if normalization is put on hold, it may never happen.
This disagreement sums up in a nutshell America’s mistaken approach to the Arab world in the decades before Trump arrived in the White House. So long as Americans indulged Palestinian extremism, and Arab and Muslim extremism, normalization with Israel was impossible. Like President Barack Obama’s push for more “daylight” between the United States and Israel, as well as his quest for a rapprochement with Iran, this attitude encouraged rejectionism, not peace. An administration determined to appease Islamists would never have embarked on the same course as Trump and would not have achieved his successes.
The demands being made upon the Sudanese spring from the same instincts that led Trump to insist that NATO members pay more for their own defense, as well as his tough approach to Iran and his decision that once ISIS was largely defeated, the U.S. need not continue to participate in the endless conflict in Syria. Decry it as transactional if you like, but an American foreign policy guided by a desire to pursue U.S. national interests is common sense, not a blunder.
It’s easy to question some aspects of this strategy. But just as the Kurds—whom many, including me, feared would be destroyed by Trump’s Syria move—survived, the Sudan move is no invitation to disaster. It’s a smart decision to take advantage of a unique opportunity to force Sudan into the peace camp, which won’t likely recur anytime soon.
Trump’s boast of not involving the United States in new wars is deprecated by some of his critics as isolationism. But, as we’ve seen with his tough stance on Iran, and his effort to maneuver the Gulf States and now Sudan into peace with Israel, he is not afraid of foreign interventions. Rather than military adventures, Trump has used America’s economic and diplomatic leverage (what Obama administration staffers would have called “soft power”) to advance U.S. interests, a category into which making Israel less isolated and more secure falls.
No matter who wins the presidential election and what they call their foreign policy, that’s a strategy that future administrations should follow.
And:
Trump's re-election walks through these nine key states:
·
:70% of American Jews
say Biden’s their choice.
The key to Trump's debate performance tonight
Click here for the full story.
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