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Why Biden should be impeached:
Th concept of impeaching is abhorrent and it has become an overused political weapon of choice to get back at an "enemy" rather than to protect our nation from a serious abuse by the commander in chief.
That said, I honestly believe Biden has broken his oath in several ways that place our nation in danger and has failed to admit his hatred of his predecessor as the motivating factor.
a) By choosing to allow an open invasion of our borders, Biden has weakened our nation in terms of a potential health hazard both as to Covid but also to an increased narcotic threat. At the same time he is allowing predatory narcotic gangs to benefit financially thereby, placing them in a position to do further harm.
b) He has increased the threat to our nation by virtue of increasing the prospect of internal acts of terror by those he has unwittingly allowed to enter our nation from countries known to harbor terrorists engaged in acts of terrorism who have sworn to activate same against America. Also, M17 gang members are entering.
c) The implementation of policies allowing/encouraging penetration of our borders flies in the face of his pledge to protect and defend our nation from enemies within as well as without.
d) We know politicians say and do most anything to win elections but when a presidential nominee makes "unifying" America a repeated pledge and then moves in the opposite direction it is the same as throwing fuel on an already begun fire.
e) Finally, I maintain weakening our nation through economic decisions and then blatantly allowing one's dedicated adversaries to benefit is another way to lower the protective barriers of the sworn oath all presidents pledge they will solemnly uphold.
Here, I am referring to shutting a pipeline in America that returns America to a position of dependency upon external energy sources and then turning around and implementing measures that allow a known adversary to open a pipeline that increases our NATO Allies' dependency. It so happens, this is the same NATO partner in arrears in its NATO commitment. This is an act of perfidy because it increases the threat to American troops in the event of a war.
To make matters even more inconsistent, it also reduces American energy exports we are capable of supplying to our NATO Allies. Consequently, our NATO partner effectively thwarts a financial gain to America. Finally, Biden is allowing this ally to increase their dependency upon Russia while at the same time Biden chooses to pick Russia's chestnuts out of the fire.
It is common knowledge President Trump was the one Democrats swore was in bed with Russia and which turned out to be based on a contrived hoax sponsored and paid for by his adversary, Hillary Clinton.
Now, Biden appears not only in bed with Putin but also is willingly washing his sheets.
Neither should one disregard viewing all diplomatic actions taken by Biden against the screen of his son's questionable activities vis a vis Ukraine, China and the potential threat Russia is making against Ukraine.
I have yet to even suggest Biden is engaged in financing Iran's ongoing acts of terrorism by linking them to the recent attack by Hamas on Israel.
There is nothing in Biden's past to suggest he has ever been on the right side of a significant issue when it comes to foreign policy initiatives.
Obviously it is discomforting to see Obama's hand on the strings leading to Biden and it is even more disconcerting to believe Russia, China and Iran are "stringing" America along as well.
A second, and equally important reason Bidden should be impeached relates to his pledge to unify the nation and then everything he is doing is race based and equity related in direct contravention of our Constitution which calls for the treatment of everyone equally.
By Salena Zito
NORTH CHARLESTON, South Carolina — All that is left of the lot where Sen. Tim Scott’s house stood on Meeting Street Road is a desolate field filled with dirt, gravel, and mounds of weed-choked grass. The poverty and crime rates in this neighborhood are consistently higher than the national averages. Some people, says Scott, call it a “nobody zone.”
But Scott, the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction, once called it home.
It was here that he lived with his grandfather, mother, and brother on the wrong side of the poverty line after his parents separated. Five family members shared two bedrooms; Scott shared a bed with his brother.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner Magazine, the rising Republican star, now talked of as a future presidential candidate, said the property where he grew up is an example of “the beauty of America,” where “in the most insignificant places from the outside, there’s always significance on the inside.”
America helps write such stories. “Always has, always will. So, when I think about the story behind that empty lot today, and I have lots of pictures of what it looked like when I was there, I think about high-potential people living in places where most people don’t visit.”
Click here for the full story.
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The former Atty. General has more guts than the current one:
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Why does the left seemingly hate Israel?
With more than 3,000 rockets having been fired into Israel by Hamas recently, the Democratic Party seems paralyzed over how to respond to the latest Middle East war.
It is not just that they fear that “The Squad,” Black Lives Matter, the shock troops of antifa, and woke institutions such as academia and the media are now unapologetically anti-Israel. They are also terrified that anti-Israelism is becoming synonymous with rank anti-Semitism. And soon, the Democratic Party will end up as disdained as the British Labor Party under Jeremy Corbyn.
The new core of the Democrats, as emblemized by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, has in the past questioned the patriotism of American Jews who support Israel, and occasionally has had to apologize for puerile anti-Semitic rants.
The left in general believes we should judge harshly even the distant past without exemptions. Why then, in venomous, knee-jerk fashion, does it fixate on a nation born from the Holocaust while favoring Israel’s enemies, who were on the side of the Nazis in World War II?
It was not just that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, was a Nazi sympathizer. Egypt, for example, welcomed ex-Nazis for their hatred of Jews and their military expertise, including infamous death camp doctor Aribert Ferdinand Heim and Waffen-SS henchman Otto Skorzeny. The Hamas charter still reads like it is cribbed from Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
The left claims it champions consensual government and believes the United States must use its soft-power clout to isolate autocracies. But the Palestinian Authority and Hamas refuse to hold free and regularly scheduled elections. If an Israeli strongman ever suspended free elections and ruled through brutality, U.S. aid would be severed within days.
If history and democratic values can’t fully explain the apparent hatred of Israel on the left, perhaps human rights violations do. But here, too, there is another example of radical asymmetry. Arab citizens of Israel enjoy far greater constitutional protections than do Arabs living under either the Palestinian Authority or Hamas.
Is the left bothered by the allies of Hamas? After all, most are autocracies such as Iran and North Korea.
We return, then, to other reasons for the woke contempt directed toward Israel.
In part, the Western left always despises the unapologetically successful — as if they are inevitably beneficiaries of unfair privilege. Underdog Israel was not so hated from 1947 to 1967. Then, it was poorer, more socialist and in danger of being extinguished by its many neighboring enemies.
But after the victories in the 1967 and 1973 wars, the Israeli military proved unconquerable in the region, no matter how large the numbers, wealth and armaments of its many enemies.
For the left, Israel’s current strength, confidence and success mean it cannot be seen as a victim, but only as a victimizer. As its Iron Dome missile defenses knock down the flurry of Hamas rockets, and as its planes take out the military installations that launched those rockets, the left bizarrely believes Israel wins too easily and acts “disproportionately.”
The left also has a strange idea of current “imperialism” and “colonialism.” The general rule is that Westerners cannot settle in numbers in the non-West. But the reversal is certainly not true. Millions of Middle Easterners are welcomed into Belgium, France, Germany, the UK and the United States. Yet Jews have been in what is now Israel since nearly the dawn of civilization. And their 1947 borders only grew after they were attacked and threatened with extinction.
The left claims that its anti-Israelism has had nothing to do with anti-Semitism. But it is almost impossible now to make that distinction, when woke criticism obsesses over democratic Israel and ignores far greater oppressors and oppressed elsewhere.
Why are there no demonstrations in major Western cities damning the Chinese government for putting 1 million Muslim Uighurs in camps? Why are the world’s millions of former refugees — the Volga Germans, the East Prussians, the Cypriot Greeks — long forgotten, and yet the Palestinians alone are deified for being perpetually displaced?
Our formal NATO ally, Turkey, received little global pushback for its treatment of the Kurds, or its frequent intolerance of religious minorities. Why does Israel alone always earn such venom?
Hating democratic Israel while it is under attack is not just a reflection of the new woke and ethically bankrupt left. It is also a symptom of a deeper pathology in the West, one of moral equivalence, amoral relativism and self-loathing.
Hating Israel has become the surrogate Western way of hating oneself.
(Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
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Ross Rants:
Here is my view of the stock market. There is a massive, unprecedented amount
of cash flooding the world now, with the consumer savings at extraordinary
levels. The various governments around the world have flooded their systems
with additional massive cash flows. The Biden administration is letting the far
left run wild with radical left spending programs. All of these things have
combined to create a massive excess of savings in the world, and in the US.
There is now not even a real lack of cash for the unemployed who in most cases
are making a lot more not working than if they worked. Sixteen states have
ended the $300 so there is hope. Result. There is no real alternative for all
that cash to go anywhere other than savings accounts or the stock market. Bonds
make no sense and will continue to be losers for a long time as the economy
heats up and rates rise. Commodities are too hard for most of us to understand.
Emerging markets are still far from getting on top of the virus due to slow
vaccinations. India being the prime example. Real estate is not readily
accessible to most, other than a REIT, or their own home. So the only real
place for all that cash is the stock market to earn a return. For that reason I
believe stocks have a way to go in the short run, and possibly for much longer.
One of the most prominent, and by far, smartest people I know in Wall St,
believes the amount of cash will keep the market going up for two to three more
years. The reason the market went down last week was taxes are due May 17, so
there was massive tax selling. That was exacerbated by the inflation report,
and the reality that rates will go up from here. The Fed is likely to move
sooner than they have said.
Hopefully all of you who have been telling me how Bitcoin is a currency and
that crypto is the next huge thing, have learned your lesson about the reality
of crypto this week. It is a complete make believe worth only what some other
sucker is willing to pay. It is magic money. It is not genuine digital
currency, and the Chinese and Musk just proved that to everyone. One day there
will be real digital currency from the Chinese, then others, but that is not in
any way the same as Bitcoin or Dogecoin..
I believe the power is now shifting to a point where McConnell is going to be
able to mostly stop the radical left agenda, and the massive added spending,
and the taxes. I think moderate Dems realize this is a loser for them, and
makes no sense, and I believe there is now pushback from them. I have no basis
for that belief other than gut instinct. I think Manchin is really going to
hold on the filibuster, and that is the difference. Biden met with the R’s this
past week because the Dems sense they don’t have the votes to shove through any
more multi-trillion programs, and now with full release to reopen as I have
been predicting in May, the economy will boom. The only things holding back the
full boom is the excess $300, plus all the other subsidies keeping people from
going back to work, plus the teachers unions who now have no argument. The
consumer spending will now ramp up to levels never before seen, and corporate
profits will soar beyond consensus. The spend may shift from goods to services
like travel, or beauty salons. As a measure of how bad the debt is, annual
Federal spending is now at 31% of GDP, about the same as in WWII.
A few other data points. Banks have so much excess reserves they are under no
pressure to foreclose and can afford to do more modifications. Treasuries are
still negative real rates given the still low rates and increased inflation.
One result of still low cost of capital and the massive flow of cash looking
for deals is, cap rates are still very low by historic standards and will
likely remain low for a while. As inflation of building materials has skyrocketed,
the replacement cost of all sorts of buildings has jumped as well, making
buying existing a better prospect than building new in many cases. Industrial
values never really changed, hotels are back in many cases to 2019 values as
travel ramps up, and multi is back to 2019 values. Retail remains down and is
likely to remain down for quite a while. Now that everything is reopened,
online shopping growth is back on trend and slowing growth. The coming heavy
emphasis of the administration means major new allocations of spending by
corporations to lobbyists and campaign contributions. In DC it is all about the
money. Due to Covid killing a lot of old people early, a lot of grandchildren
-600,000 is estimate, received substantial inheritances early.
Here in Longboat the local diner had to close one day a week for lack of staff.
The waitress said she has talked to numerous people and they are just sitting
home collecting for the government instead of working. There are help wanted
signs everywhere, but no takers. She also said in talking to tourists from
other states, that she hears it is no better anywhere else. That extra $300
plus the other government handouts are stopping millions from going to work.
Everywhere I go from FL and now back in the Hamptons there are help wanted
signs everywhere. Yet the Dems and Moody’s still claim the $300 plus all the
other goodies does not have much provable effect. I have told the Moody’s execs
they need to get out in the real world, and stop looking at their “surveys”.
Were it not for all the government money being handed out it is likely we would
be under 4% unemployment and GDP would be materially higher. Once again the
Dems do not understand when you pay people more to stay home than to work they
stay home. It is the low income and minorities who get hurt the worst because
the longer you do not work you lose some skill and work habits, and you lose
some time in grade to be able to get promoted vs those who continued to work.
It is all bad policy.
Reality about high taxes on the wealthy. When the top rate was 91% in 1962,
only 447 payers paid that rate out of 71 million payers. The top 1% paid only
16% of their income. The bottom 50% paid 7% of the total. Today it is 3.4%. In
1945, under wartime taxes, the top 1% paid 23.5% of their income in taxes. Now
it is 25.7% In 1986 when the top rate was dropped to 28%, but loopholes were
closed, revenue to Treasury grew as the economy expanded and asset sales
surged. As the top rate fell from 91% in 1962 to 28% in 1988, the percentage of
income paid in taxes by the top 1% and top 10% actually increased to 20% from
around 15%. That means as tax rates declined by 2/3, the percentage taxes paid
by the top earners increased by 1/3. In 2020 the top 1% paid on average 25.7%
tax which is close to the average of the last 25 years despite tax reform in
2017. Wealthy Americans, the top 10%, actually pay a higher percentage of total
income taxes received by the federal government-45.1% - than those same top 10%
in Germany, France and Sweden. The top 10% earn 33.5% of taxable income and pay
45.1% of all taxes. A progressivity ratio of 1.35 in the US vs Germany at 1.07,
France at 1.1 and Sweden at 1.0. So wealthy Americans are the most fair
progressive taxed people in the world. We more than pay our fair share compared
to every other western nation. Liz Warren and the Dems are full of BS.
Corporate tax rates across the developed world are low and the economies had
been growing well until the virus. Now the administration needs to try to
justify high taxes so they turned to a international tax base to justify higher
US taxes. I predict it will not happen. Too many countries do not want it, and
it is too complicated to put into effect.
Pay a lot of attention to demographics going forward. The US birth rate is
dropping materially. That impacts economic growth. It in time creates labor
shortages. It also means there are more older people who are no longer
productive and who collect cash instead of create cash for the government. It
also makes it harder to get political will to deal with pensions and Medicare
costs. Healthcare eats more of spending. As the demographics change we can not
afford the vast entitlement programs the left is trying to put in place as
there is simply not enough tax payers to cover the no longer tax payers. With
50% paying only 3.4% of all taxes, the numbers just do not work. The US labor
force grew well as women did not have as many babies and went to work. That is
now over as a force in labor force growth. The overall US labor force grew only
2.0% over the past decade. Due to the pandemic, a lot of people retired earlier
than they otherwise might have, which means more labor shortages. That means
higher labor costs which means more inflation and more investment in technology
to reduce the need for humans. Due to the one child program, China now has a
reducing population of working age. That will get worse. That means rising
labor costs in China, and more movement of production to other countries in
Asia. Since China has no immigration, they are headed to material problems
because the are short tax producers and they have hundreds of millions of old
people now needing medical and other care. This is a real issue for China over
time. Over the past couple of decades, many more women entering the labor
force, and older people continuing to work, grew the US labor force and kept
labor costs lower. That surge is now over.
There is no way Putin did not know about the Colonial cyberattack. So what is
Biden’s response. I will discuss it with Putin in June, and in the meantime I
will lift the sanctions on his gas line to the EU giving him a huge win while I
shut down US pipelines screwing the US economy. He needed to call Putin and say
you have 12 hours to arrest these guys and get them to provide the code to free
it up, or we will retaliate. And you and they owe us $100 million for past
ransomware attacks they staged.
Now Biden is letting the anti-Semitic left push him to try to limit Israel from
finishing off Hamas. The Dems who are defending the terrorists, and trying to
shut down weapons to Israel when they need them, are blatant anti-Semites, and
have no clue about real geopolitics. They understand nothing at all about the
Mideast. Biden should be telling Iran all talks are dead now because you gave
Hamas the rockets and told them to fire them. Biden’s moves in geopolitics the
past couple of days is astonishingly ignorant, weak and disastrous, and even
worse than I feared in such a short time. In December the world was now a much
more dangerous place with Biden but he is far more dangerous than I thought in
such a short time. China is watching all this and will be encouraged to step up
threats on Taiwan. Iran is now going to be even more demanding of Biden.
Luckily Netanyahu essentially told Biden to go screw, and that Israel is going
to finish off Hamas, no matter what the far left in the US thinks. The world is
very dangerous now.
The AMA has decided they need to have a major effort to get more black docs,
and that judging by merit no longer has any place in selection of docs. Their
new policy is to set aside meritocracy and replace it with “racial justice”.
They say in their document that treating people equally is wrong. They have
adopted critical race theory as part of medical school. Yes you read that
right. I thought the SCOTUS decision was all about treating people equally. The
AMA considers using merit as racist. So here is a true outcome from a direct
source at U of P. At U of P hospital, one of the best in the country, they just
hired a black oncologist who FLUNKED his boards. Several of the docs in that
department actually are the ones authoring the boards test. Before I would have
had no issue with a black doc. Now I do have a problem because I can no longer
be sure he is qualified by anything other than skin color, so the policy of the
AMA has now made me unwilling to use a black doc. The reverse of what they
think they are doing. The White House this past week said they think critical
race theory is what should be taught in school. We all need to push back hard
against this indoctrination of our kids. When they fired the officer from the
Space Force for speaking out against Marxism and critical race theory, the
military undermined good order and free speech. This has gotten dangerous.
The Democratic party used to be the party for Jews. No longer. Now we see the
blatant anti-Semitism of the left speaking out against Israel. The squad was
openly anti-Semitic before, but now it is an even bigger group of Dems. It is
similar to blacks. It was the Democrats who controlled Congress and the South
in Jim Crow days and Woodrow Wilson was a Democrat and blatant racist. Dem
policies of welfare etc are destructive of black families and society. So far
Biden has not sided with his left wing friends on Israel, but we need to wait
to see how this plays out. How Biden can push ahead with a new Iran deal in
light of Gaza just shows how Obama is really in control, and Susan Rice is his
proxy actin g to control Joe. They were anti-Israel when in office and that has
not changed. They learned nothing over the past several years as it relates to
Iran. This is all the rehash of the failed Obama foreign policy.
You may have missed it, on Wednesday the White House said because Biden is so
important, masks are needed around him, then on Thursday morning Fauci said you
need to wear masks, as did the head of CDC. In the afternoon they said no
masks. Saying you have to wear a mask if not vaccinated ignores the 50 million
of so who are immune now because they had the virus. It also ignores kids. It
also did not bother to tell the teachers they no longer have any excuse to not
be in school in person classes, but the union did a 180 immediately and now
says they will be in class in September. Hat about summer school to make up for
the lost year. Remember a couple of weeks ago the head of CDC said she feared
pending doom. So much for Biden and the Dems claiming they will follow the
science, and that Trump did not.
Many years ago the left refused to allow offshore drilling off CA due to the
sight of rigs in the water ruining tourism on the beaches. Now they say it is
great to have windmills off the beaches. In addition the amount of energy and
mined materials used to build the windmills far outweighs environmental gains
from wind. Nobody has asked what are they going to do with the giant plastic
fan blades in 20 years when they are out of useful life. They get buried in
landfills. They need to look at the entire cost and impact, not just that wind
sounds like carbon free power.
From the time when I was a little kid in school they drilled into us that
America was a melting pot and we were all equal Americans. We saluted the flag
each morning and were taught pride in the US. Now it is divisiveness, emphasis
on skin color differences and victimhood. In short, tribal differences.
Throughout history tribal differences lead to war and civil wars. That is what
set America apart, the concept of a melting pot with a deemphasis on tribal
differences even though those clearly existed. With today’s heavy emphasis on
racial differences, and victimization, we are creating the civil; disruption,
anger, and sense of I can do whatever I like including killing people because I
am a victim and there are minimal consequences, like no bail. Cops are bad, so
I can do as I wish because if they hassle me I can maybe get them fired. Biden,
academia, the press, the “woke” CEO’s and the left are leading the country in a
very dangerous direction, which will only lead to more riots, crime, right wing
violence pushing back, and civil disorder. The mayor of Chicago refuses to talk
to white reporters, and that is not racist??? The media should sue her, and
demand she be charged with a hate crime.
I have had to delay my departure from FL to my home in the Hamptons for several
days due to press reports gas shortages along the way north on 95. I just did
the drive. There was plenty of gas everywhere but NC, and no lines. The press
overhyped it as usual.
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Hi Dick:
In my latest piece for the Dispatch, I explain that while Benjamin Netanyahu was poised to lose his grip on the nation’s premiership in the days before the Israel-Hamas fighting broke out, Israel might instead be headed toward yet another parliamentary election. But like the others, another trip to the polls promises much the same result, failing to resolve the country’s political quagmire. At the end of the day, Israel knows how to defeat terrorists; it is still figuring out how to manage itself.
Also, ICYMI: Marc Thiessen and I interviewed FDD’s Jonathan Schanzer on what’s fueling the fighting, Iran’s role, and the Biden administration’s response. Listen here.
Best,
 | Danielle Pletka Senior Fellow, Foreign & Defense Policy aei.org | @dpletka ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Every once in a while something nice happens: Semper Fi. |
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