Tuesday, May 10, 2022

Parents Score Big Time. A Patriot Speaks Out. Approaching 89. Much More.

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 Patriot Parents Score Huge Win Against Woke CRT Lunatic Teachers

School board elections are usually boring and not something that many of us pay attention to.

Though they can make a big difference, especially now when this country is in the grip of woke madness from the left.

Patriotic parents around the country are some of the smartest people in this nation.

They’re getting the message and running for election in local school boards to try to protect their children from critical race theory (CRT) and the left’s sinister agenda.

The great news is that they are winning, as a number of local school board elections show in the Lone Star State.

Huge Wins for Texas

This past Saturday, May 7, four school districts in suburban Fort Worth, Texas saw a turnaround in school board elections. Specifically, they turned around from being run by centrists and woke liberals to being run by patriots.

There was a huge turnout of people voting. Parents who stand up for American values won every seat, including in places like Grapevine, Spring Branch, and even the Austin suburb of Dripping Springs.

Austin is a hotbed of socialist lunatics, but even there, they couldn’t stop the flood of normal, conservative Americans from taking over.

It is important to remember this feat had huge support from parents of students from schools in these districts.

The result of these last elections results from the revolt that took place in schools because of CRT, along with the disturbing growth in grooming from far-left, radical teachers.

They want to indoctrinate our kids and a growing number of parents are saying: never going to happen!

Why This Matters

One of the first places where CRT and the woke cult came up against parents was in Loudon County, Virginia.

We saw the Biden regime even try to categorize parents as a national security risk just for speaking up for their kids.

This got the attention of the rest of the country and led to these kinds of wins we saw recently in Texas.

What is CRT? It’s an academic idea created by far-left fanatics like Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado.

It teaches that white people are oppressors who keep non-whites down and that America is a racist, awful country. Needless to say, this racist, evil theory doesn’t belong anywhere near our kids.

The Bottom Line

Unity is strength; it’s great to see parents remembering the importance of a good education.

When parents get together, they make a big difference in the direction of the future as we’ve seen in Texas.

We all see school boards are going to be more and more important places where ideological battles are fought.

We need to make sure that families and the American way win, instead of far-left insane people who want to groom our kids.

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 This from a dear friend, a true patriot and fellow memo reader:

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Friends:

I feel like I’m living in the guest cottage on the grounds of an insane asylum in the nation of Bedlam…a place of madness, uproar, confusion and chaos. A place that is increasingly unrecognizable.  A state where, as Cole Porter wrote, "Anything Goes.”  Yes, the world has gone mad today, and good’s bad today, and black’s white today, and day’s night today.

On Sunday, Mother’s Day, we witnessed a rabid pro-death activist woman simulate an abortion by ripping apart a doll on the front steps of St. Patrick’s Cathederal.  Then there was an interview with another pro-deather who wanted to have sex with the Supreme Court “leaker” to thank him, and if she got pregnant would happily abort the baby. There is a mental malignancy here driven by hate.

Blaise Pascal said, faith is a gift of God…so is a child.

Lloyd

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As I approach 89, this becomes more meaningful. If I cannot return to the tennis courts because I am unsteady, even after hip surgery, then my fall back will be family, friends, bad piano playing, reading. memos, lunch with buddies and life at the Eden called The Landings. Could be worse and if we get rid of the Democrat Party, as presently constituted, life should even improve.
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Sorry, Progressives, This Is What Happens When You Screw Around for 50 Years on Abortion

By Matt Vespa

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Dear Teachers, They Aren't Your Kids

By Derek Hunter

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 And the other extreme view:

Republicans Waited 50 Years to Roll Back Abortion to…Bring Back Slavery

By Brad Slager

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Another pathetic choice:

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AMERICAN POLITICS

CONSERVATIVE NEWS

Biden’s New Press Secretary Has Serious Conflicts of Interest

 

White House press secretary Jen Psaki is on her way out of the Biden administration. On Friday, May 13, Psaki will leave her current post for a commentating gig with MSNBC.


Rumors of Psaki leaving the White House swirled around for quite some time before they were officially confirmed. Her departure comes as many other aides working for the Biden administration have seen their way out as well.


Once Psaki is officially out, current deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will be taking her place. The Biden administration has lauded this as positive representation, seeing as Jean-Pierre is a black, gay woman.


Yet, what the White House isn’t talking about is the serious conflicts of interest that come with Jean-Pierre working as press secretary, per PJ Media.


Corruption Tightens Its Grip on the Biden Administration

The most obvious conflict of interest with Jean-Pierre’s upcoming role as White House press secretary is her marriage to CNN employee Suzanne Malveaux.


With Malveaux’s wife working for the White House, it raises questions about whether CNN will objectively report on news involving the current administration.


Likewise, CNN will very likely have access to classified information from this administration, due to the marriage between the incoming press secretary and network employee.


CNN claimed that once Jean-Pierre officially begins as press secretary, Malveaux won’t be providing political coverage. That remains to be seen.


Nevertheless, another conflict of interest dealing with Jean-Pierre is her open hostility towards Israel, a central US ally. Jean-Pierre is tied to organizations, such as MoveOn, that make their aversion to Israel quite clear.


By Biden promoting Jean-Pierre to the press secretary role, he’s sending a disturbing message about how his administration views both Israel and Jewish people.


Nothing New For the Biden Administration

Despite the multiple conflicts of interest associated with the incoming White House press secretary, no one should be surprised. Lies and corruption are par for the course when it comes to the Biden administration.


To this very day, the president and his officials continue to repeat the lie that inflation is a “Putin price hike.” In actuality, inflation is a price hike caused by Biden’s spending bills that congressional Democrats enabled.


Karine Jean-Pierre’s work as White House press secretary is bound to mirror Psaki’s. After all, she worked under Psaki and took cues from her.


At the end of the day, regardless of who holds the post of press secretary for the Biden administration, they’ll still be lying to Americans every day.

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New threat from Iran:
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Iran MISSILE Threat - Researchers Discover Terrifying Reality
Iran MISSILE Threat Researchers Discover Terrifying Reality
Read it Here >>

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Is Putin more confused than even Biden?

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The Doctrine of American Unexceptionalism


The Biden administration believes that soft power is smart and hard power is dumb. Our allies are paying the price.

By Michael Doran


Russian leader Vladimir Putin was supposed to have used his Victory Day speech yesterday to reveal his intentions regarding the Ukraine war. Russia watchers expected him to define his aims, signaling a prolonged conflict or, possibly, a path to peace. As it turned out, Putin did neither. His war against Ukraine drags on.


But although this week failed to clarify the future of the war in Europe, there is still a small chance that it will offer us some clarity on another front: Iran’s ongoing efforts to build a nuclear arsenal. Enrique Mora, the European Union’s Iran nuclear talks coordinator, is visiting Tehran today, May 10, seeking to break the deadlock in the negotiations between Iran and the United States. His mission might teach us whether Tehran has decided to cut a deal with President Biden. Chances are, however, that we will end the week as much in the dark about Tehran’s intentions as we are about Putin’s.


To help us understand why, I turn to Michael Doran, the author of today’s essay. Doran sees a connection between the way the Biden administration has approached both the Ukraine war and the conflict with Iran. Namely: in both cases the White House has profoundly weakened America’s diplomatic hand by shying away from traditional deterrence.


Doran has never gone along with the crowd. He first came on my radar in 2005, after what we would now call “woke” professors mobilized against his bid for tenure at Princeton. I liked him immediately.


He has a knack for writing topical articles that age well. His 2002 Foreign Affairs article on Osama bin Laden, “Somebody Else’s Civil War,” remains one of the best things written on al-Qaeda and radical Islam. When his 2015 piece, “Obama’s Secret Iran Strategy,” first came out, Doran’s view about Obama’s eagerness to please Iran was controversial. It’s now common wisdom. And last year, when Biden took office, he co-authored a piece in Tablet Magazine, “The Realignment,” which predicted that President Biden would zealously follow Obama’s Middle East playbook.


Today’s essay tries to make sense of this administration’s baffling foreign policy strategy, which seems to offer succor toward our enemies, like Iran and China, while isolating allies in the Gulf and Israel. As Doran explains, this is not borne out of incompetence, but out of a deeply held ideology about the trajectory of America and the West. — BW

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The Islamic Republic of Iran can be a real pill.


Just ask the diplomats who spent the better part of a year working in Vienna to resurrect the Iran nuclear deal. By early March, they had completed the lion’s share of their work, but at least one sticking point remained: Tehran was standing firm on its demand that the United States remove the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations. 


Eager to get the deal done, President Biden began to consider complying with Tehran’s demand—a process that involved consultations with skeptics, including the Israeli government, which, needless to say, was flabbergasted. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett called the move “delusional.” 


But on March 12, the IRGC injected itself directly into the conversation—by launching an attack on Erbil, Iraq. The United States has traditionally considered lobbing ballistic missiles across international borders into civilian areas the very definition of a terrorist act. Yet Washington pretended it didn’t notice.


This was hardly a unique occurrence.


Over the past six months, Iran has launched multiple ballistic missile and drone attacks on American allies like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia through its Houthi proxy in Yemen. It conducted a direct attack, this time through a proxy in Iraq, on American forces in al-Tanf, Syria. It hatched a plot to kidnap the Iranian-American journalist, Masih Alinejad, from her home in Brooklyn. And it has actively pursued plans to assassinate former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Iran envoy Brian Hook, and former National Security Advisor John Bolton.  In the context of the nuclear negotiations, the Biden team asked Tehran, politely, to put an end to these assassination plots. Tehran said no.


Yet the Biden team has played down all these provocations—and many more.


The question is why.


The obvious answer is that the White House does not want to do anything to slow down or derail its effort to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as the nuclear deal is formally known. The Biden administration operates within the lines that President Obama drew when he first sold the Iran deal. “There really are only two alternatives here: either Iran getting a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through negotiation,” Obama said. “Or it is resolved through force, through war.” 


But even the most cursory examination of the deal reveals that it resolves nothing. On the contrary, it permits Tehran to keep everything it needs to build a nuclear bomb, even including, for example, the secure bunker dug deep under a mountain near Fordow. Designed to shield Iran’s uranium enrichment facilities from attack, Fordow’s sole purpose is military in nature. We know this with certainty thanks to the nuclear archive that the Israelis captured in a Tehran warehouse in 2018. What’s more, the deal permits Tehran to make advances in its weapons program—by, for example, developing advanced centrifuges—even while its nuclear activities are still formally under international restrictions. 


The upshot is this: By 2031, under the terms of this supposedly excellent deal, Iran will have a major, unfettered nuclear weapons program.


America’s military and economic advantages over Iran are incalculable. The United States also has allies, Israel above all, who would be more than willing to do the hard of work of deterring Iran from advancing toward a bomb if only they were certain that America had their back. 


So again, we must ask: Why? Why is America making moves that seem nothing less than appeasement? What makes the Biden team so eager to cut a deal that guarantees a nuclear Iran? Why has the White House placed Moscow in the catbird seat in these negotiations? Why is it treating China as a key partner in the deal, even as China openly proclaims its intention to overturn the American-led world order? And why has Biden entirely excluded traditional allies, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia, from the negotiations? 


The answer to these questions lies in something Mahmoud Abbaszadeh-Meshkini, a spokesman for the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, recently said. “In the new world order, a triangle consisting of three powers—Iran, Russia, and China—has formed,” he declared on the eve of the Ukraine war. “This new arrangement heralds the end of the inequitable hegemony of the United States and the West.”


He’s right.


The Biden administration wouldn’t put it that way, of course. It continues to claim that it is dedicated to preventing the rise of Iran as a nuclear weapons power and to containing Iranian forces and proxies on the ground. But the ramifications of the deal are exactly as Abbaszadeh-Meshkini says: the undermining of American power. In the White House, however, the president and his advisors prefer to think of it as the heralding of a world based on multilateral partnership between Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran. 


Indeed, at its deepest level, the Iran nuclear deal is an instrument for rejecting American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States is uniquely poised by history and geography to exercise leadership on the international stage—and for ushering in a post-American global order. It is only through understanding this worldview that it is possible to understand America’s confounding and seemingly contradictory moves on the world stage.


I’ve come to think of it as reverse American exceptionalism.


Perhaps the cleanest articulation of this worldview came in 2009, from the mouth of Barack Obama, when he refused to endorse a traditional understanding of the concept of American exceptionalism. “I believe in American exceptionalism just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism,” he said.


That was the provocative sentence that drove headlines. But equally important was what Obama said next. America’s leadership role, he insisted, “depends on our ability to create partnerships.” That’s because, he said, America can’t solve “problems alone.”


The Iran deal was a direct outgrowth of this perspective. Obama dreamed, he told David Remnick of The New Yorker in 2014, of “an equilibrium” between the Gulf states and Iran in which “there’s competition, perhaps suspicion, but not an active or proxy warfare.”


This dream was not entirely fanciful—the search for regional stability is indeed the job of America. But Obama’s route to achieving it was loopy. The problem, in his eyes, were America’s allies. Israel and Saudi Arabia’s maximalist agendas were hastening conflict, launching the United States into an unnecessary confrontation with Iran. Thus, the goal of American policy should be to moderate both the Iranians and traditional American allies by accommodating Tehran.


Joe Biden, as vice president, strongly endorsed Obama’s view. “Our biggest problem is our allies,” Biden said in October 2014, lamenting the opposition of America’s allies to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s closest friend. As president, Biden has placed former Obama staffers in key positions, men who, like their mentor, believe that stability will come only after the United States reins in its allies, thus proving to Tehran that it can best solve its security dilemmas in concert with Washington.


Just listen to Robert Malley, who was responsible for Middle East policy in the Obama White House and is now the Special Envoy for Iran in the State Department. In 2020, he wrote, admiringly, that Obama’s “ultimate goal was to help the [Middle East] find a more stable balance of power that would make it less dependent on direct U.S. interference or protection.” Or here’s Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor. The goal, he wrote in May 2020, is to be “less ambitious” militarily in the Middle East, “but more ambitious in using U.S. leverage and diplomacy to press for a de-escalation in tensions and eventually a new modus vivendi among the key regional actors.”


In other words, the path to establishing equilibrium is to court the Iranian regime, not to crush it. The Obama-Biden doctrine is no mere “downsizing” or “rightsizing” of America’s role in the Middle East: The United States could, for example, pull back militarily while demanding that allies do more to confront Iran. This doctrine of American unexceptionalism, however, is opposed to the very idea of the balance of power as we have understood it since ancient times.


Democrats believe that, as a result of the end of the Cold War and the advent of a globalized and digitally networked world, humanity has transitioned to a more advanced stage in history. We have somehow migrated beyond the time-honored truths of Thucydides, Machiavelli, Metternich, Kissinger, et al. In such conditions, to adopt a traditional balance-of-power approach is not simply unnecessary. It is positively self-defeating.     


“End of History” assumptions—that a multipolar world is inevitable and that free trade and capitalism combine to form a powerful acid that will dissolve both state interest and nationalist particularism—have a long American pedigree.


Consider, as one of countless examples, the letter that Bill Clinton wrote to congressional leaders in 2000 to justify the accession of China to the World Trade Organization. “As China’s people become more mobile, prosperous, and aware of alternative ways of life, they will seek greater say in the decisions that affect their lives,” Clinton wrote. This democratizing process “will strengthen the rule of law” at home, while abroad China will become “a more constructive player . . . with a stake in preserving peace and stability.”


Consciously or not, Clinton borrowed this theory from Woodrow Wilson, whose thinking, in turn, derived from Perpetual Peace, a book by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, written in 1795. War need not be a permanent feature of international life, Kant argued. States have it within their grasp to establish a universal and self-perpetuating peace by recognizing a few key principles and creating an international federation dedicated to upholding them. On American soil, Kant’s intellectual descendants created an optimistic, quasi-religious belief that capitalism, free trade, diplomatic transparency, and voluntary restraint in warfare would spur the advent of global peace.


When Clinton made these arguments with respect to China, they were the consensus position in Washington and beyond: you were as likely to read them in the New York Times as you were on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. These days, however, most Americans are a little less optimistic and a little more clear-eyed, thanks to the rise of Chinese leader Xi Jinping and of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who have used profits from participation in the American-led global free trade system to build war machines dedicated to overturning that very system. (Last year, according to Gallup polling, the reputations of China and Russia hit historic lows among Americans.)


But while Americans in general are returning to realpolitik, progressives remain wedded to the dream of perpetual peace. Under their influence, a very different theory influences our foreign policy—especially in the Middle East.


Here again, no one has articulated that theory better than President Barack Obama. “In an era when our destiny is shared, power is no longer a zero-sum game,” Obama said in 2009 to the United Nations General Assembly. “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.” Note that Obama did not exhort the United Nations to create a new system. He claimed that the fundamentals of a more advanced order were already in place. “The people of the world want change. They will not long tolerate those who are on the wrong side of history.”


Joe Biden and his team would be the first to admit that Xi, Putin, and Khamenei have yet to understand this fact, but they would hasten to add that the aspiration of those leaders to be powerful and successful in a globalized world will sooner or later force them to bring their behavior into line with global public opinion. They will be more likely to adjust, moreover, if the United States ropes them into mutual dependencies, thereby demonstrating to them simultaneously that the West is not intent on destroying them, and that their prosperity is best pursued through cooperation. To put it crudely, the Biden administration believes that soft power is smart and hard power is dumb.


It is only by understanding this view that the Iran deal—a bizarre term for something that gives the West nothing and Iran everything it has ever demanded—makes any sense at all. The foreign policy strategists in the White House believe that, as Iran integrates into the world economy and becomes a more trusted participant in the security architecture of the Middle East, the resulting economic and political interdependencies will fundamentally reshape the worldview of leaders in Tehran.


Experienced men like Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken, the Secretary of State, are fully aware that traditional military tools continue to play an indispensable role in international affairs, but they consciously strive to minimize that role. Power politics as practiced from time immemorial may not have entirely disappeared, but it is on the way out, replaced by non-military tools such as sanctions.  The primary job of the United States is not to discipline rogue actors with unilateral applications of American power; it’s to build the global system that will discipline them automatically. 


We do not have to look further than the hellscape of Syria to see what this theoretical approach produces in the real world. In October 2015, Moscow and Tehran intervened together in the Syrian civil war. When Russian jets began bombing civilians, critics of Obama’s passivity called on him to take military countermeasures. Rejecting those calls, Obama said, “An attempt by Russia and Iran to prop up Assad and try to pacify the population is just going to get them stuck in a quagmire, and it won’t work.”


Hard power solutions, Obama preached, are inherently self-defeating. Putin, however, never learned the lesson. Together with the Iranians, Moscow systematically reduced most of Syria’s major cities to rubble and saved the Assad regime without ever paying a serious price. Of course, Obama opposed exacting that price, because it would have destroyed his dream of creating a concert system with Russia and Iran in the Middle East.


A similar restraint is guiding Biden in Ukraine today—and with similar results. In traditional statecraft, leaders rely on the balance of power and deterrence to prevent war and empower diplomacy. The traditional playbook calls for keeping Putin guessing about what the United States military might do, while preemptively arming the Ukrainians with weapons and other capabilities that will guarantee unbearable pain to the Russians. But that hasn’t happened. While the American military and its European allies have indeed armed the Ukrainians, the aid has come too late and without the necessary lethality to influence Putin’s major decisions.


It was Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, speaking from Kiev, who offered the most succinct and scathing rebuttal of this approach. When the Biden administration offered him asylum—a move that signaled to the world that Washington had given up all hope of conducting a serious resistance to Putin—Zelensky said, “The fight is here; I need ammunition, not a ride.”


Even after the Ukrainian military proved itself to be a capable fighting force, Biden continued to reject the classical logic of power politics. In a two-part presidential tweet, he deployed the rhetoric of old-school deterrence to hide the fact that he was refusing to rely on it.  “I want to be clear: We will defend every inch of NATO territory with the full might of a united and galvanized NATO,” Biden wrote. The rhetoric made the president sound like Harry Truman standing up to Stalin’s Soviet Union. Putin, however, had no intention of attacking NATO allies. Biden was “deterring” an attack that Putin had never even contemplated.


With respect to the aggression that Putin was actually prosecuting, Biden used the same tweet to all but welcome it. “But we will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine,” Biden wrote. “A direct confrontation between NATO and Russia is World War III. And something we must strive to prevent.” Biden was rejecting a direct confrontation with Russia that few were advocating. At that moment, the president’s critics were urging him to deliver more lethal assistance to the Ukrainians—such as MiG fighter jets from Poland, which would be flown by Ukrainian pilots. No American or NATO soldiers would join the fight.


The doublespeak in Biden’s World War III tweet now defines the lived reality of America’s Middle Eastern allies. The Biden administration’s zealous efforts to transform the Islamic Republic from pariah to partner are neither containing nor deterring Iran’s leaders—quite the opposite. They are emboldened, as the ballistic missile attack on Erbil (not to mention the recent rise to the presidency of hardliner Ebrahim Raisi) indicates.


In the meantime, thanks to the Biden team’s steadfast intention to empower Iran, America’s Gulf allies have become security orphans. They increasingly look for help from China, the great power with the most influence over Tehran. The list of hard power arenas in which China is now a major player is long and growing longer by the day: It manufactures military drones in partnership with both Saudi Arabia and the UAE; it builds ballistic missiles together with the Saudis, whom it is also helping to master nuclear technology; and it is selling jets to the UAE, where last year it was secretly building a military site at Khalifa Port near Abu Dhabi.


Under pressure from the Americans, the Emiratis shut down the facility in the spring of 2021, but it won’t be long before Abu Dhabi and Riyadh refuse to comply with any such demands from the United States. Deference to Washington rests on the understanding that the United States will provide security—hard power deterrence. Instead, the Biden administration is offering its allies doublespeak based on utopian theories about how giving Tehran a hug and hundreds of billions of dollars will persuade it to play nice.


Among themselves, America’s allies wonder how such a crackpot idea ever became the guiding concept of American foreign policy. Senior leaders in both Israel and the Gulf have told me personally that they find the Biden team’s policies incomprehensible and its explanations of those policies fundamentally incoherent, if not dishonest. In quiet voices in Tel Aviv, Israeli leaders are now talking about when, not if, they will have to take major military action to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.


None of this is likely to change minds in the White House. The progressive foreign policy paradigm is a closed intellectual system, which can never be falsified. It is also a domestic political initiative, which readily attributes any of its failures to the behavior of its adversaries. Is Iran more aggressive now than ever before? Perhaps, but not because Obama’s nuclear deal was ill-conceived. Iran is aggressive, because President Trump abandoned the JCPOA and thus rejected Obama’s path to peace.  He provoked the Iranians, so now we are all paying the price.


Of course, the Israelis will always prove a ready scapegoat. The binary choice that Obama presented to Americans—between support for the nuclear deal or catastrophic war—divided the world into two camps. His was the party of peace. Opposite it stood the party of war, which included, among others, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party, Evangelical Christians, hawkish Republicans, and the Saudi leader, Mohammed bin Salman—a cast of characters whom progressives reviled even before the deal. While this formulation does not turn Iran into a member of the peace camp, it does transform it into the object of diplomacy.


As a means of stopping Iran from getting a bomb, the nuclear deal is sadly wanting; but as a tool for branding the Saudis, the domestic rivals of the progressives, and, above all, the Israelis as warmongers, it is an effective propaganda tool. When a kinder and gentler Islamic Republic fails to arrive—and fail it most certainly will—then the Biden administration mandarins will lecture us like didactic professors. More in sorrow than in anger, they will shake their heads and lament the fact that those damned Israelis and Saudis just couldn’t learn to share the Middle East with the Iranians. We tried to tell them, but they just wouldn’t listen.

The pointy heads in the Biden administration are marching us toward a beautiful world of perpetual peace. They will never get there. But they will find plenty of people and countries to cancel along the way.

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A worthwhile repeat:

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Hunter Biden's $2M 'sugar brother'


HUNTER BIDEN'S $2M 'SUGAR BROTHER.' One of the mysteries of the Hunter Biden matter is how the president's son, with no obvious sources of income, manages to maintain a grand lifestyle. For the last year or so, he has been living in a $20,000 a month rental house in Malibu, California. (The taxpayers are footing the bill for the Secret Service to pay even more, $30,000 a month, to rent the house next door while protecting him.) The younger Biden also likes nice cars: A 2020 photo showed him arriving for lunch at the Waldorf Astoria in a Porsche Panamera GTS, which costs six figures. Federal prosecutors are also said to be looking into his purchase of another six-figure auto, a Fisker electric sports car.


Where is all that money coming from? Does Biden, who by his own description has in the past been a notorious drug addict who threw away money right and left, have great investments that keep him in such a life, even as he hires expensive lawyers to represent him in a federal tax and influence investigation? Are his corrupt benefactors in Ukraine or China or elsewhere still helping him? Has he sold so many paintings, in confidential transactions, of course, that he is rolling in dough? What is the story?


Now we have some new clues. New reports from the New York Post and CBS News said that a "high-powered Hollywood attorney," a man named Kevin Morris, has been paying the president's son's back taxes and monthly bills. Morris, according to the New York Post, "earned a fortune representing the co-creators of South Park and won a Tony Award as the co-producer of The Book of Mormon."


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That's a lot of money. The New York Post reported the back taxes that Morris has paid for Biden amount to $2 million, "more than twice what was previously reported." Morris, who is known to Biden's friends as his "sugar brother," reportedly also pays Biden's "rent and living expenses [and] has also been advising the president's son on how to structure his art sales."


If any Biden allies choose to defend him, look for them to attack the New York Post. Remember that they denounced the New York Post when it published the original story of the laptop. It turned out the Biden defenders were wrong and the New York Post was right. Now, another news organization, CBS, is also reporting on the Morris connection. The network led its story this way: "Hunter Biden has garnered quiet support and financial backing from a high-powered Hollywood attorney while awaiting the outcome of a long-running federal investigation into his taxes and finances being conducted by the U.S. attorney in Delaware, multiple sources told CBS News."


CBS reported that Morris has "paid Hunter Biden's past-due tax debts." And it said that Morris "has been operating behind the scenes and has turned his attention in recent weeks to conducting a forensic analysis and investigation into what happened to Hunter Biden's laptop — including how the device became public, sources familiar with his efforts say."


That's a fascinating tidbit because it indicates Biden might be preparing some sort of public relations campaign challenging the legitimacy of the laptop — just as his defenders did before the 2020 election. It was successful back then, when some major news organizations downplayed the news, social media giants suppressed it, and national security "experts" denounced it as "Russian disinformation." But in the years since, both the New York Times and the Washington Post have authenticated information that came from the laptop. It will be hard to play the Russian disinformation card again.


Anybody reading the new stories about Morris paying Biden's back taxes and expenses will have to wonder: Is that legal? It's unclear. CBS reported that Morris is "working on a documentary chronicling Hunter Biden's life since he has been the focus of conservative television commentators and investigated by congressional Republicans." Perhaps the financial arrangement between Morris and Biden has something to do with that. Perhaps the president's son has sold the rights to his life story to Morris and the deal includes Morris keeping Biden afloat — yet another way for him to cash in on his family's name. In any event, whatever is being done is being done under the noses of federal prosecutors, who are investigating whether Biden properly paid taxes on the millions he received through trading on the family name with shady foreign businesspeople.


But always remember this. The big story — the biggest story — behind the laptop is President Joe Biden. Yes, Hunter Biden used his family connections and collected millions of dollars from disreputable overseas operators. But there is still the more important question of the president. What did he know about his son's business dealings? And did he benefit?


The president has repeatedly claimed he knew nothing about his son's operation, even as evidence accumulates that suggests he must have known. And what about the references in communications on the laptop that indicate Hunter Biden, when he was pulling in big overseas payments, covered some of his father's expenses? And then what about reports that Joe Biden, in return, paid up to $800,000 of Hunter Biden's expenses during the presidential campaign?


Clearly there is more to learn. At some point, the U.S. attorney in Delaware will decide to charge or not to charge Hunter Biden. When that happens, we will learn more, but not all, of the story. We might learn more still if Republicans win either the House or the Senate, or both, in this year's midterm elections. If they do, you can bet there will be GOP Hunter Biden investigations galore. But whoever is doing them, the point remains: The public needs to know more about Joe Biden's and his son's financial dealings, however that can be accomplished.

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Let's have a little more fun at the expense of the nut cases who call themselves liberals, Democrats, progressives, bleeding hearts, and you can come up with your own descriptions.  Before the nonsense is hopefully brought to an end, in the mid-year ballot  box, Biden will have told all America's women overturning Roe v Wade ends abortion, Democrats will have harassed conservative SCOTUS Justices hoping they could intimidate them  into changing their votes and you know the rest.  


Stay tuned and watch the the fun time begin because they could not have their way.

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China claims the corona virus came from an old bat; Nancy Pelosi denies it.

 

'Payday' candy bar is changing its name because it's offensive to those who don't work.

 

If the current power grid can't handle a night of 20 degree temperatures without rolling blackouts, how are we going to charge 100 million electric cars every night?

 

Are there any countries that tax their citizens and send Foreign Aid to Americans?

 

Imagine, if you will, a world where every tweet and meme must be fact checked but not a ballot.

 

How to stop drunk drivers from killing sober drivers? Ban sober drivers from driving. That's exactly how gun control works.

 

I sang 'I'm dreaming of a White Christmas' last year and was called a racist

Can we still order black coffee?

Are brownies being taken off the shelf?

Is White Castle changing its name?

I'm sure Cracker Barrel is screwed.

 Can we still play Chinese checkers?

Is that season still called Indian summer?

No more Italian sausages? 

 

How far do you want to go with this foolishness?

 

Hell of a job, Democrats! You've managed to bring back the 1929 depression, the 1968 race riots and1973 gas price problems- ALL AT THE SAME TIME!


And:

Schumer’s Radical Abortion Bill

The Women’s Health Protection Act makes the new Democratic policy: Safe, legal and don’t tell your parents.

By The Editorial Board


Protesters marched on the homes of conservative Supreme Court Justices over the weekend, an ugly attempt to scare them into saving Roe v. Wade. This week the drama moves to the Senate, where Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer plans a vote on a sweeping bill to override state laws and set a national abortion policy.


House Democrats passed the Women’s Health Protection Act (WHPA) last year, but it stalled in the Senate. It’s expected to fail again this week. But that isn’t stopping Mr. Schumer, who is refusing to take up a bill by GOP Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who have their own proposal to codify Roe v. Wade. “I have long supported a woman’s right to choose,” Ms. Murkowski said, “but my position is not without limits, and this partisan Women’s Health Protection Act simply goes too far.”


Bill Clinton’s artful framing was that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare,” but that’s ancient history to today’s Democrats. The WHPA would guarantee abortion access “at any point or points in time prior to fetal viability,” about 23 weeks. Women seeking such services could not be asked to “disclose the patient’s reason.” Some states have tried to prohibit sex-selective abortion, the practice usually of terminating a girl merely because a boy is desired. The WHPA appears to protect that choice.


After fetal viability, the WHPA would assure a right to an abortion whenever the physician’s “good-faith medical judgment” is that “the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient’s life or health.” What counts as “health”? This is sometimes defined to include mental, emotional or familial factors, a loophole that permits elective abortions, more or less, through all nine months of pregnancy.


The legislation also exempts itself from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which is why Ms. Collins says it would undercut “basic conscience protections” for religious healthcare providers. In its findings, the bill says abortion access “has been obstructed” by state “parental involvement laws (notification and consent).”


Is the Democratic policy in 2022 that abortion should be safe, legal and don’t tell your parents? “Ultimately I feel that young women at a certain age should have the rights to make these kind of decisions with their doctor,” Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly told National Review reporter John McCormack. “I’m not going to be the arbiter of an age and a timeline.” Nobody is asking him to be the arbiter. Yet he’s voting to nullify state laws.


A national abortion bill is also constitutionally suspect. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe, the federal government will lack any 14th Amendment justification to override state abortion laws. The WHPA could be left relying on Congress’s power to “regulate Commerce” among the states.


But the Commerce Clause isn’t unlimited, and Congress can’t overrule the constitutional police powers of the 50 states. It can ban some activity that a state allows, such as marijuana cultivation in California (Gonzales v. Raich, 2005) when there is arguably an interstate market in the drug. But abortion is a medical procedure provided and regulated locally or by states.


Some states are likely to ban abortion if Roe falls. If Congress can then compel the legality of abortions that are banned by state law, there is no limiting principle to what traditional sphere of state power it can’t oversee under the Commerce Clause. Why not local zoning or prostitution laws?


By the way, in voting for a national abortion law, Democrats may be creating an open door for Republicans to do the same when they next hold power. This would be as constitutionally dubious as Mr. Schumer’s bill, but Democrats will have made it easier for the GOP to ignore the Constitution too.


Similar logic probably applies to the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act that Congress passed in 2003. The Justices upheld that law against a different set of arguments. Yet as Justice Clarence Thomas noted in a concurrence: “Whether the Act constitutes a permissible exercise of Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause is not before the Court.” If Roe falls, it’s hard to justify under the Commerce Clause.


As for Democratic calls to kill the Senate filibuster, do they really want abortion policy in 50 states to flip-flop depending on who wins the next Senate race in Georgia or Wisconsin? The wise move is to table the WHPA. Then Democrats can fight it out in the states, the constitutional way, for the abortion policy they want.


Finally:

It all comes down to this according to the Senator from Wisconsin and Florida:

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Democrats: When Do You Think Life Begins?

Politicians dodge the question, but the scientific answer is clear: At the moment of conception.

By Rick Scott


I have a simple question for Democrats: When do you believe life begins?


The Republican position on abortion is based on a fundamental belief that life begins at conception. It’s a conclusion grounded in faith and values, but also in science.


We know that unborn babies can feel pain very early. We know that after six weeks a baby’s heartbeat can be heard in the womb. Modern sonograms show unborn babies smiling, yawning and sucking their thumbs.


Put simply, science has revealed that an unborn baby is a human being, and voters agree. According to recent polling conducted by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, 73% of voters agree that an unborn baby is a human being.


So that raises the question: When do Democrats believe life begins? At conception? At viability? At birth? After birth? They won’t say. Even more disconcerting, reporters won’t ask them. It’s a dereliction of duty by the mainstream media not to push the question, and it’s an abdication of their responsibility to inform the American people and spur legitimate debate.


Since the leaked draft opinion in the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Democrats have come out as the abortion extremists we’ve always known they are. They’ve staked out a position that is simply outside the mainstream of where average American voters are.


Democratic U.S. Senate candidates in swing states such as Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin embraced legalizing abortion up until the moment of birth. Some, such as Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, are refusing to say if there should be any restrictions on abortion whatever.


In response to the leaked Supreme Court opinion, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced plans to move forward on yet another vote on the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would legalize abortion up until the moment of birth.


Since taking majorities in both houses of Congress, Democrats have also rejected the longstanding bipartisan tradition of including the Hyde and Helms amendments in spending bills, which prevent taxpayer funding of abortions, including abortions overseas.


All of these positions are well outside the mainstream of where American voters are. According to recent National Republican Senatorial Committee polling, 65% of Americans agree that taxpayer money shouldn’t be used to pay for abortions, while only 30% disagree. Only 30% of Americans agree that abortion should be legal any time, on demand and without apology, while 61% of voters disagree.


Fifty-seven percent of Americans would be less likely to support abortion laws if the U.S. allows for abortion to be performed for any reason up until the moment of birth, which is the new Democratic Party line.


Meanwhile, Republicans are happy to answer the question of when life begins: We believe life begins at conception because we believe in science and place value in every life, born and unborn.


Once Democrats have an answer, we can have a legitimate debate on the issue.


Mr. Scott, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Florida.

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