There are those who believe "good" conquers evil and there are those who believe money is the root of all evil. Therefore, it should follow "good" and "evil" are constantly at war. It also is my view progressives and liberals are generally defined by their desire to bring about change and thus, it takes money to accomplish their goals. There are even some who believe they can spend without cost notwithstanding the fact they have little if any prospect of repaying their debts. I submit, these people are engaged in evil and hypocritical activities See where I am heading?
I rest my case.
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Manchin and Breed show Biden-era progressivism the door
By Rich Lowry
Joe Manchin and London Breed have nothing in common.
One is an old-school Democrat from West Virginia surviving and thriving in an increasingly red state, the other is the progressive mayor of San Francisco, a city that is a byword for cutting-edge left-wing politics.
Yet both, in their own ways over the last week, signaled that Biden-era progressivism has reached its high-water mark. Manchin, of course, delivered an emphatic thumbs down to President Joe Biden’s signature Build Back Better plan, while Breed reversed field on crime in a stunningly frank endorsement of law and order in a jurisdiction infamous for the opposite.
The de facto pincer movement by the wildly different Democrats from wildly different parts of the country — San Francisco is roughly 19 times larger than the biggest city in West Virginia — shows that the progressive tide that built in the Trump years is finally colliding with political reality and the real-world consequences of progressive extravagance.
This doesn’t mean that progressivism is spent, obviously. It dominates the media, academia and almost all the rest of elite culture. At the same time, Democrats still control the elected branches of government in Washington, a position of power they will exploit to the greatest extent possible during the next year. But a growing backlash against progressive excess has found expression in two notable acts of Democratic defiance.
By now, the context of Manchin’s “no” on Build Back Better is familiar. Joe Biden campaigned as a pragmatic Democrat only too happy to ignore the progressive hothouse of Twitter. Once elected, he immediately developed a heroic image of himself as the next transformational Democratic president in the line of FDR and LBJ and empowered staffers who evidently take their political and tactical cues from social media.
This drove the fundamental mistake of not realizing that Manchin and any other Democratic dissenter in the 50-50 Senate had the power to derail Build Back Better and scaling it back from the outset accordingly. Instead, until the very end, the White House and congressional leadership acted as if Manchin could be cajoled or bullied out of whatever qualms he might consistently express.
Perhaps Democrats will be able to reunite with the senator on a scaled-back spending bill in the new year, but the era of FDR fantasies is definitely over. Democrats should ask themselves: If they had a mandate to remake the country, why did the entire project depend on the approval of a single conservative Democrat from West Virginia?
Now, Democrats are looking down the barrel of a midterm election wipeout that could give the GOP a durable House majority that will put paid to any thought of BBB-style legislation for years.
If Manchin said “enough” to big-spending federal aggrandizement, London Breed said it to the soft-on-crime consensus in blue cities that has led to spiraling disorder. The Bay Area, home to the smash-and-grab robbery and other routine offenses against basic human decency, has been Exhibit A.
Concluding that even the tolerant people of perhaps the country’s most tolerant city wouldn’t put up with it much longer, Breed had her Howard Beale moment. In a speech clearly meant to set down a political and rhetorical marker, she called for an end to “the reign of criminals who are destroying our city.”
The Breed turnabout, from police-defunder a year ago to would-be Rudy Giuliani now, marks an end to the period after George Floyd’s death when anti-police sentiment was ascendant.
People sleep near discarded clothing and used needles on a street in the Tenderloin neighborhood in San Francisco, on July 25, 2019.San Francisco Mayor London Breed is finding out the hard way that soft-on-crime policies fuel drug infestation on the streets.AP Photo/Janie Har, File
There are other signs that the progressive momentum is beginning to give way. A rightward shift among Latinos shows the limits of paint-by-numbers identity politics. That the left’s response to the grassroots movement against critical race theory in the schools has been to deny there is any CRT in the schools speaks to a telling defensiveness. Next year, the Supreme Court may well knock out Roe v. Wade and the followup abortion ruling Planned Parenthood v. Casey, cornerstones of the progressive social agenda
Of course, the political and cultural war will continue apace. Still, December 2021 looks like an inflection point, when, as Breed put it in her speech, “the bull—t” got a reality check.
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Glick tries to clarify the article based on an interview regarding a sharp disagreement between Bibbi and Trump. Time will tell.
Netanyahu and Trump’s Well-Defended Goal
By Caroline B. Glick
How are we supposed to understand journalist Barak Ravid’s dramatic exposes regarding former US President Donald Trump’s relations with Israel’s former Prime Minister and current Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu?
Ravid’s initial revelation – which was splashed across Yedioth Ahronoth‘s front page last Friday – had Trump cursing Netanyahu in the coarsest possible language for his belated congratulatory message to Joe Biden after Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential race. Although jarring, Trump’s expletive-laced tirade against Netanyahu was easy enough to explain because it was textbook “Ravid” journalism. Barak Ravid is more of a left-wing activist than a reporter. And to advance his personal war against the right, he has a knack for making marginal bloviations the heart of his stories and for reducing major events into idle gossip.
In just one memorable example of “Ravid” journalism, in the summer of 2019, the Netanyahu government barred Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar from entering Israel. The dramatic decision stemmed from the announced goal of their trip. Omar and Tlaib, who both reject Israel’s right to exist, intended to use their trip to advance the antisemitic BDS campaign against the Jewish state.
The government’s decision was a watershed event in the fight against progressive/Islamic Jew hatred. But for Ravid, it was nothing more than schoolyard politics. Ravid reported that the only reason Netanyahu barred the two women from entering the country was because Trump had pressured him to do so.
It wasn’t a bid to isolate and delegitimize two powerful lawmakers who devote great efforts to popularizing and mainstreaming Jew-hatred in America and undermining US support for Israel. By Ravid’s telling, Netanyahu was motivated solely his desire to please Trump. And Trump, for his part, was only interested in embarrassing two of his greatest critics in the House of Representatives.
Because in Ravid’s world, everything right-wingers do is trivial, personal and political.
But if Trump’s caustic language in reference to Netanyahu was easy enough to shove into the “Ravid gossip” file, Trump’s characterization of PLO Chief and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas on the one hand and his assessment of Netanyahu’s substantive positions on the other was impossible to shrug off. Trump likened Abbas to his deceased father, and said that Netanyahu wasn’t interested in peace.
The question is, what do we learn from Trump’s statements about the two men?
Trump’s claims don’t change the historical record. Trump was the most pro-Israel president in history. None of his predecessors, (and certainly not his successor President Joe Biden), come close. The same Trump who told Ravid that he viewed Abbas as a father figure stopped US financial support for the Palestinian Authority and shut down the PLO’s representative office in Washington, DC because Abbas funds and incites terrorism.
And of course, Trump moved the US Embassy to Jerusalem, and recognized the legality of Israel’s communities in Judea and Samaria.
The same Trump who told Ravid that Netanyahu didn’t want peace, stopped US funding for UNRWA because the UN agency funds terrorism. He pulled the US out of the UN Human Rights Committee because of its institutional antisemitism. He pulled the US out of the nuclear deal with Iran. He recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights.
Trump’s statements to Ravid don’t change the record. But they do tell us something important about the way Israel, under Netanyahu’s leadership, managed to convince then-President Trump to enact all of these extraordinary policies.
The first thing that Trump’s hostile statements tell us is that in everything related to Israel, the situation in the Trump White House was much more complicated than it looked from the outside. As he said to Ravid, Trump’s basic view of Israel was positive. But from a policy perspective, Trump waxed and waned. There were many powerful people around Trump who pulled him in different directions.
There were a lot of people around Trump who told him that Netanyahu was hostile to peace and that Mahmoud Abbas, the Holocaust-denying PLO chief who funds and incites terrorism, is a man of peace. They told him that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are “an obstacle to peace,” and that “the only solution,” is the so-called “two-state solution.” The “two-state solution,” they explained in turn, requires Israel to surrender Judea and Samaria and large swathes of Jerusalem, Jew-free, to man-of-peace Abbas.
Members of the pro-Palestinian camp included Trump’s first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson and senior State Department officials, his first Defense Secretary James Mattis, and senior Pentagon officials, senior CIA officers, and others. Outside Trump’s administration, members of this camp included the media and Jewish leaders, including Trump’s long-time friend Ronald Lauder, who initiated and orchestrated Trump’s meeting with Abbas.
Facing these powerful actors was the opposing camp, which also enjoyed considerable power. Its members were passionate supporters of a strong US-Israel alliance. This camp’s members included Vice President Mike Pence, Trump’s second Secretary of State (and first CIA Director) Mike Pompeo, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman, and Middle East envoy (until late 2019) Jason Greenblatt. Members of the camp outside the administration included the vast majority of the Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate, and tens of millions of Evangelical Christians.
Like Trump himself, his son-in-law and top advisor Jared Kushner was predisposed to support Israel, but was not a member of either camp.
The existence of the two factions and the epic fight between them was always open for all to see. For instance, Tillerson and Mattis were both open about their opposition to moving the embassy to Jerusalem and walking away from the nuclear deal with Iran.
This brings us to the second thing we learn from Ravid’s tapes of his interview with Trump. Netanyahu’s critics on the right – most famously, current Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked and leaders of the Council of Israeli Communities in Judea and Samaria and the Samaria Regional Council David Elhayani and Yossi Dagan – accused Netanyahu of “standing in front of an open goal and refusing to kick the ball” in relation to his dealings with the Trump administration.
Their idea was that Trump was willing to agree to anything that Israel proposed but that Netanyahu had failed to propose policies that are vital for the country. Netanyahu’s decision to “stand before the open goal,” they insisted, meant that he either wasn’t sufficiently committed to the country’s well-being, or that he was a closet leftist.
Ravid’s tapes of his interview with Trump demonstrate that the “goal” was never open. Every single pro-Israel step Trump took came after a protracted, hard-fought battle within the administration. Trump moved the embassy to Jerusalem. But he torpedoed Netanyahu’s plan to apply Israeli sovereignty to the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria and to the Jordan Valley. Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal. But he refused to follow up on the withdrawal with concerted action to either overthrow the regime or destroy Iran’s nuclear installations.
Trump’s statements to Ravid show that Netanyahu wasn’t standing on the sidelines passively. As Trump’s derogatory statements against Netanyahu demonstrated, Netanyahu was in the ring, fighting desperately over everything. Nothing came easily. Netanyahu achieved great things because he is a political and diplomatic Messi. He doesn’t make every shot. But he scores a lot of goals.
This brings us to the failure of Netanyahu’s plan to apply Israeli sovereignty to parts of Judea and Samaria. Today, with the Bennett-Lapid government sending reinforcements for police in Judea and Samaria to “fight” non-existent Jewish terrorists and freezing all road construction for Jewish communities, while providing thousands of building permits to the Palestinians in Area C, which surrounds the Israeli communities, the epic dimensions of the missed opportunity are coming into clear view.
And there are people to blame for the failure.
When we recognize the complex conditions Netanyahu was operating in, it’s obvious just how devastating a role Elhayani and Dagan played in the saga. The two ostensible leaders of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria vocally opposed Netanyahu’s sovereignty plan from the moment Netanyahu presented it to them in Washington the night before it was formally announced in the White House in January 2020. In the months that followed, they led a major campaign to kill a plan that would have ended the anomalous situation in which half a million Israelis live under military rule. The two men’s vocal opposition to the sovereignty plan confused Evangelical leaders, with whom Dagan in particular was in close contact.
Not wanting to harm Israel, the Evangelicals opted to stay out of the fight. But without Evangelical support, when the plan came before Trump for a final decision in July 2020, opponents of the plan were able to point to Evangelical silence, settler opposition, and claim that no one supported it. So with the Evangelical leaders unsure whether or not it was the right thing to do, Evangelicals within the administration lead by Pence and Pompeo also opted to stand on the sidelines.
With a fractured pro-Israel camp on the one side and a unified pro-Abbas camp on the other, Trump had no problem deciding to kill the plan.
Another truth Ravid’s tapes bring home is just how deep and wide support for Israel is among Republicans. Trump may move back and forth between the opposing camps. But his party doesn’t.
In stark contrast, from election to election, the Democrat Party becomes more and more hostile to Israel. In the 2020 elections, Tlaib and Omar’s antisemitic “squad” tripled its membership.
Last week Defense Minister Benny Gantz travelled to Washington in hope of convincing the Biden administration to stop trying to reach a deal with Iran that will enable Iran to become a nuclear power. A member of his delegation told The Jerusalem Post that they were stunned to discover that Secretary of State Antony Blinken insisted on spending as much time discussing Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria as he spent discussing Iran – as if Jewish communities are a threat, and one of equal gravity as Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
The official may actually have underplayed the situation. The Biden administration’s obsequious efforts to appease the Iranian regime on the one hand, and its hostile treatment of Israel in relation to the Palestinians on the other, indicate that Biden and his advisers are more hostile to Israel than they are to Iran and its nuclear weapons program.
Politically this makes sense. Whereas Trump received standing ovation from his party for his pro-Israel policies, Biden receives plaudits from his party for his anti-Israel policies. Pro-Israel policies land him in hot water with his base.
As statesmen, Trump and Netanyahu changed the face of the Middle East together. But for Ravid, they are little more than bare-knuckled politicians. And here he’s not entirely wrong. Trump and Netanyahu are politicians and his very political story will have political consequences.
In Netanyahu’s case, the consequences will be terrific. Ravid’s revelations of Netanyahu’s stubborn refusal to budge on his principles massively strengthened Netanyahu’s standing among right-wing voters. The jury is still out on how Trump’s disclosures to Ravid will be judged.
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About Manchin's stand:
Why Manchin torpedoed Biden's big bill
By Charles Dent
Charlie Dent is a former Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who served as chair of the House Ethics Committee from 2015 until 2017 and chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies from 2015 until 2018. He is a CNN political commentator. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
(CNN) — The late Sen. John McCain of Arizona will forever be remembered for his personal and political courage. He was unafraid to deviate from the herd -- even as members of his own party were screaming betrayal.
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A great hard hitting satirical op ed by Rod Liddle
If Greta and her pals really want to get results, they should try protesting in Tiananmen Square
Greta Thunberg is now kayaking back to the Swedish port where she left her bicycle, having spent the week outside a conference centre in Glasgow, swearing a lot and being interviewed by BBC journalists who fawned like soap stars being introduced to the Queen. They didn’t call the annoying little bucket of ego “Your Majesty”, but you could see they were thinking it.
I simply don’t get the Thunberg phenomenon. She has no knowledge of how the world works, no manners and no letters after her name, because instead of going to school she’s been busy sailing round the world so she can be mardy and abusive to grown-ups. What she needs is a smacked bottom.
Rod Liddle calls her the “Swedish doom goblin”, which is, of course, brilliant, but she’s worse than that. She’s a pest. A 4ft maypole around which the deranged and the weak and the unemployable can dance and chant and make a nuisance of themselves.
However, she did come up with one idea last week that struck a chord. In essence she said that there was no point listening to whatever the f*** the Cop26 politicians were saying inside their important meetings because the people outside knew what had to be done and could just get on and do it.
Absolutely. I already know that I should not buy palm oil or products that come with unnecessary plastic packaging, and that I should not use wet logs in my wood-burning stoves. I also know that if my journey’s less than a mile I should walk rather than use the car, and that I should make more of an effort to understand what goes in the recycling part of my bin and what doesn’t. I don’t need Joe Biden to wake up from one of his naps and tell me.
So here’s a tip, Greta: lecturing me on what needs to be done is pointless. It’s like standing in my bedroom every morning ordering me to wear clothes. I know already.
What you should be doing instead is cycling to countries where people are perhaps less well aware of what should be done. China, for example. That I’d like to see. Greta standing outside Zhongnanhai with her parka and her Glastonbury backpack and her microphone, lecturing the leaders about their policies on coal and trees and so on. Maybe she could be joined by those Extinction Rebellion halfwits who go to the middle of London to tell Barnes people in Teslas to be more green, rather than going to the slums of Calcutta, where two million people, living in poverty, cook their supper every evening on chulha stoves, which blanket the city in a thick yellow fog. These are the people Tarquin and their sexually ambiguous mates should be targeting. But they’re not.
I saw a map last week of where the world’s methane is coming from. And let me tell you that billions of tons of the stuff is pouring into the skies from India and China. And not a single hairy person in Liberal Democrat shoes is over there with a placard complaining about it. Because they’re all here, moaning about how my cows burp too much and how there’s a turd in the River Evenlode.
It’s the same story with the loft insulation protesters. There was a photograph in my newspaper on Friday that showed them blocking the path of a lorry that was actually delivering loft insulation. So, again, they’re inconveniencing the lives of people who are already doing their best.
They too should be in China, because I’d dearly love to see that as well. Especially the footage of the Chinese police unglueing the hands of a vicar from the tarmac in Tiananmen Square. “Oh no, Reverend. All your skin’s come off. And now you’ve hit your head on the police car.” I’d also like to see them daubing the words “racist” and “murderer” on statues of Chairman Mao, but this would never happen because they know they would not be treated with respect and reverence by China’s news crews. And neither would they be invited with Greta and the Lib Dem vicars round to President Xi’s for some nuclear-free vegan peace food.
This is why they’re not protesting in countries where protest might do some good: because they’re timid and wet. Greta turns up in Glasgow so she can bathe in some adulation for a few days, rather than be sent to a labour camp for a few decades.
That’s what these protesters need to get through their knitted hats and into their thick skulls: that if you want to get something done, and I mean really done, you’ve got to be uncomfortable. And you’ve got to be surrounded by people who don’t like you, not those who do. You’ve got to talk to Fox News, not CNN or the BBC.
Look at Gandhi and Mandela. They were prepared to undergo unimaginable hardships to further the cause in which they believed.
Thich Quang Duc was prepared to go even further. Had this Buddhist monk stepped out of his Austin A95 and glued himself to the road to protest about the South Vietnamese government, it’s virtually certain that no one would remember his name. And I wouldn’t have been able to recall what sort of car he had. But he didn’t glue himself to the road. Instead he set himself on fire and sat there, in the middle of a busy crossroads, until he was dead.
Then you have Emily Davison, who, to further women’s rights, leapt in front of the King’s horse at the Derby and was killed. And the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and William Wallace. I think it’s safe to say that if the blue-faced agitator had fought for Scottish independence by glueing himself to a tree, Mel Gibson would have been less inclined to make that film.
But those days are long gone. Today we have a planet that’s being fried because too many people are living on it. And there’s not a single climate activist who’s prepared to make a protest by reducing the numbers.
“Democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.” – Thomas Jefferson
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Kim asks Schumer what gives?
What’s Chuck Schumer Up To?
Bullying Manchin won’t win his vote, but that’s not the leader’s priority.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
The White House has handled Sen. Joe Manchin with all the dexterity of a skating giraffe, misjudging the West Virginian for much of a year. But the prize for political malpractice may yet go to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, with his new vow to place Joe Biden’s agenda on the Senate floor without majority support.
Democrats are still reeling from Mr. Manchin’s Sunday rejection of their multitrillion-dollar reconciliation plan, though the real wonder is the surprise. It isn’t only that Mr. Manchin has clearly and consistently stated his objections since the summer. Democrats also ramped up a bullying campaign that was destined to push him to the breaking point.
Mr. Schumer’s leadership team, specifically Dick Durbin, the majority whip, started griping about Mr. Manchin in public. A Biden statement last week openly cited Mr. Manchin as the reason for the bill’s delay—though the bill wasn’t complete and despite the senator’s personal request that the White House leave out his name to discourage further harassment of him and his family. Administration officials also leaked a distorted version of a Manchin counteroffer.
Mr. Manchin made clear that the attempt to “badger and beat” him into being “submissive” was a stone-cold loser and the reason he’d walked away. Mr. Schumer’s response? To announce he’d badger and beat Mr. Manchin even more publicly, by forcing the West Virginian to cast an official vote on the spending bill on the floor—“not just on television.” He also vowed to make Mr. Manchin tank the party’s federal election bill, presumably by refusing to kill the filibuster.
A party leader will sometimes bring up a bill that is destined to fail, usually for the purpose of putting the opposition on the record. Mr. Schumer plans two doomed votes, back to back, with the sole purpose of humiliating a member of his own party. Lyndon B. Johnson he isn’t.
The strategy is even wackier given that the political prospects of a Build Back Better floor showdown range from grim to ugly for Democrats. Mr. Schumer may be banking on Mr. Manchin’s refusal to proceed to debate, killing the bill outright. He might even hope such a moment would inspire his warring members to start fresh on a new project. Even so, he’ll have made his most vulnerable incumbents vote on a controversial bill that will never become law. Republicans are already cutting commercials. And that’s the best-case scenario for Mr. Schumer.
What ought to worry Mr. Schumer is that the West Virginian votes to proceed with the bill and modify it to his liking. The budget-reconciliation process allows a simple majority to pass legislation, but it comes with a price: unlimited amendments. Despite Democrats’ efforts to claim just “one senator” stands against their bill, the actual number is 51—Mr. Manchin and the 50 Republicans. Imagine what fun that majority could have in a vote-a-rama.
Mr. Manchin could craft amendments striking entire entitlements from the bill, amendments barring climate programs, amendments gutting the bill’s tax hikes. At least a few of those would get full Republican support, and thus 51 votes. Republicans would craft amendments that would prove difficult for Mr. Manchin to vote against. At the August start of the reconciliation process, the Senate did a dry run of a vote-a-rama. Mr. Manchin sided with Republicans on amendments involving energy, fracking, abortion, critical race theory and taxes. He may well do so again, only this time the amendments would be binding.
Mr. Manchin might even propose an entire substitute bill—say, along the lines of his most recent counteroffer, which included universal prekindergarten, an ObamaCare expansion, and climate dollars. It’s a generous offer, yet still infuriates progressives. Mr. Schumer may be setting up a situation in which Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, not Mr. Manchin, vote to kill reconciliation.
If this scenario feels familiar, it’s what happened in 2017 when the GOP warred on the Senate floor over amendments to its reconciliation repeal of ObamaCare, and the bill collapsed. Why would any leader attempt to re-create that fiasco?
Perhaps because he has a priority other than passing legislation or unifying his party. Among the reasons Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is so vilified by Democrats and the media is that he allows himself to be vilified—for the sake of his party. He takes the heat to help his members keep their seats. Mr. Schumer, by contrast, seems wholly occupied by the personal—namely, a threat of a primary by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It was progressives, in a rage, who demanded Mr. Manchin be publicly flogged for his opposition with a Senate floor vote, and Mr. Schumer marched to their orders. It helps no one but Mr. Schumer.
What will Mr. Manchin do? Mr. Schumer seems to think that deploying an even greater pressure campaign will make the senator roll. It hasn’t worked so far. And continuing to do so could yield an even worse political fallout for Democrats.
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I am not in favor of eliminating The FBI but a change in the entire organization is overdue as it heads in the direction of America's equivalency of the Gestapo:
Fedsurrection:
For anyone still following the January 6 story nearly a year later, it should be obvious that:
a) the January 6 committee is a complete political sham based upon ensuring that the GOP is permanently tarnished and that Trump never returns to power;
b) hundreds of prisoners remain in jail, most of them in solitary confinement going on one year now, many of whom did nothing more than trespass; and
c) there was never an insurrection because no one has actually been charged as such, and it is more than probable that the entire thing was set up by the Feds.
But don’t take my word for it. Revolver News has been doing incredible investigative work into the January 6 story. The following essay is part two of their phenomenal investigative reporting, which at some point will eventually be made available to the general public. The NYT can only stay silent for so long.
For anyone looking for more proof that the FBI should be dismantled once and for all, here you go:
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