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YEAH!
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Messages like this are dangerous because they spur me on:Dear Dick,
Never knew how addicted I was to your blogs until missing them for a few days! ;-)
With best regards,
S------
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https://www.dailywire.com/news/virginias-new-attorney-general-is-not-messing-around-jason-miyares-fires-30-staffers-opens-new-investigations?utm_campaign=dw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=housefile&utm_content=non_member
Virginia’s New Attorney General Is Not Messing Around: Jason Miyares Fires 30 Staffers, Opens New Investigations | The Daily Wire
By Tim Meads
Do YOU Think Elections Matter?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/
Biden Crosses the Quinnipiac
Did the president finally admit that his claims about states preventing people from voting are false?
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Has BIBI reached the end of his rope?
Meet Benjamin Netanyahu's potential successors to head Likud
With nine candidates running, Israel's next prime minister could be elected by the fewest people ever.
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The meaning of take charge and decisive:
Virginia’s New Attorney General Is Not Messing Around: Jason Miyares Fires 30 Staffers, Opens New Investigations | The Daily Wire
By Tim Meads
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NPR (edited)
Anybody who regularly watches Supreme Court arguments knows the justices can get testy with each other. But these days, it can seem like there is more tension than usual. 
Listen to how the fissures in the court are playing out, or read the story.
Listen to how the fissures in the court are playing out, or read the story. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++
How to Halt Putin’s Ukraine Push
The U.S. needs unity and tough diplomacy. Economic sanctions won’t be enough.
By Walter Russell Mead
As the Ukrainian crisis deepens, there is only one option that would stop a Russian invasion—and that is the one that all the serious players in Washington say is off the table: dispatching an American and coalition force to defend Ukraine. Vladimir Putin is not ready for war with the U.S.; informing his gamble is a well-grounded conviction that America is not committed enough to Ukraine to defend it by force.
History may look back on this as a failure of nerve equal to the appeasement of the 1930s. Britain and France thought war was unthinkable until it became unavoidable. With troops off the table, the Biden administration hopes to whip up a mass of economic sanctions and political repercussions (up to arming Ukrainian insurgents) grave enough to warn Mr. Putin away from his intended prey.
“Hopes” is the operative word. In Washington, where trying to guess Mr. Putin’s intentions has become a bigger indoor sport than Wordle, even administration insiders doubt this approach will work. A worst-case scenario, in which Russia seizes much of Ukraine and the West invokes sanctions that fail to reverse the invasion, seems likely.
America’s Indo-Pacific allies in particular are watching with horror. A Russian occupation would expose the fragile underpinnings of world order and encourage China and North Korea to probe for weakness. And if America responds to Russian aggression by building up North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces and entering a prolonged confrontation with Moscow, what becomes of the U.S. focus on the Pacific?
Caught in this ugly predicament, Team Biden must improve the odds of deterring a Russian invasion and plan for the possibility—some think it’s a probability—that deterrence fails and Mr. Putin attacks. To do that, it must plan consequences that Mr. Putin will find serious, challenge his calculations about American weakness, and, without appeasement, make the peaceful option look more attractive.
Biden’s Only Honorable Course on Ukraine and Russia December 6, 2021
When it comes to threats, Democrats and Republicans alike tend to overvalue the effect of economic sanctions and underestimate their cost. Europe depends so heavily on Russian oil and gas that sanctions are necessarily limited in their scope. Even very small, poor countries like Cuba and North Korea have been undeterred by sanctions more severe than any Russia is likely to face. Formal defense ties uniting Sweden, Finland and the U.S. with a commitment to defending the Baltic states, or the restoration of close defense relations between the U.S. and Turkey (which has sold Ukraine drones and has much to fear from a resurgent Russia), would impress Mr. Putin more.
Beyond that, President Biden must do more to restore U.S. credibility than saying “America is back.” Mr. Putin believes the American polarization he has helped promote is so bitter that our foreign policy is doomed to be erratic, changing with every presidential election, and ineffective, because our domestic disputes leave little energy or political capital for foreign affairs. As tensions with Russia mounted, Mr. Biden flew to Atlanta to make the most divisive speech of his presidency, confirming Mr. Putin’s dismissive ideas about American paralysis at the worst possible time.
To defend peace abroad, President Biden needs to make some peace at home. Resistance to Russia unites both progressive and conservative senators. A bipartisan Senate delegation arrived in Kyiv over the weekend. The administration can and should develop a Russia policy with bipartisan support and put that unity prominently on display.
Mr. Biden then needs to use all the considerable tools at his disposal to educate the American people about the new and dangerous world we inhabit. The holiday from history is over. Between China and Russia, America faces adversaries as powerful and relentless as any we faced in the Cold War. It is President Biden’s mission to get this message across.
Finally, he needs to open an effective back channel to explore a way forward. Mr. Putin isn’t wrong that Washington and Moscow need a relationship that acknowledges Russia’s new power. Quiet conversations between senior people on both sides are likely to be more effective than official exchanges.
These steps can improve the odds of a better outcome in Ukraine, and position the U.S. better should deterrence fail, but the final decision is out of our hands. American policy makers should reread their George Kennan. His 1946 Long Telegram provides an analytical framework that explains why the U.S.-Russia relationship is so volatile, why attempted resets with Mr. Putin have failed, and how best to manage an important relationship that will never be easy.
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Being Jewish has always been an "iffy" proposition. Not it is getting "iffier" even in the U.S.
Anti-Semitism and Double Standards
Politicians should disavow Islamists and white nationalists in equal measure.
By Dominic Green
I spent Friday night like millions of other Jews, at the Shabbat table with my family, and then spent Saturday night like millions of other Jews, watching the phone for updates on the hostage situation at the Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas. I went to bed thankful for the bravery and professionalism of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, puzzled as to how and why the hostage-taker, a British Muslim, ended up in a synagogue in Texas—and somehow not surprised.
I wasn’t surprised that it happened. This sort of crime isn’t yet normal, but it is starting to feel familiar. Familiar enough for Jewish parents to calculate the chances of getting caught in the statistical crossfire every time we take our children to synagogues, schools and Jewish-themed events. This is part of the reality of Jewish life in America today.
When you’re perpetually calculating these odds, the question of whether the person who might shoot up the place is a deranged Islamist or a deranged white nationalist is secondary. Yet it’s of primary importance to the media and political parties. Terrorism, like everything else in this balkanized society, has become a team sport, for both its protagonists and their cheerleaders. Perception, the battle of images, has become more important than reality to our politicians.
Political ideologies exist in a continuum, from the small number of true believers to the larger number of those who sympathize in some degree with the terrorist’s grievance but not his actions, and the largest number—those who, embarrassed by association, want to minimize or look the other way. The swing vote in presidential elections gets smaller every four years, making it more necessary to get out the vote in key sectors, and more tempting to exploit the full range of the ideological continuum, including the extremist fringe.
Two-party systems are great for parliamentary stability, but they require their parties to have broad appeal. When there’s a coalition to build and an election to win, it’s easy to ignore the company in which you’re traveling. That’s the sordid logic that in 2019 led Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pose with Rep. Ilhan Omar for the cover of Rolling Stone.
The result is that Islamist and left-wing terrorism are closely associated with the Democrats, and white-nationalist terrorism closely associated with the Republicans. The representatives of both parties deny their complicity with the extremists who incite these actions. But extreme elements in both parties recognize these associations and exploit them, especially to convert rhetorical points into votes. The Democrats are still making hay from misrepresenting President Trump’s maladroit response to the 2017 white-nationalist riot in Charlottesville, Va. Republicans will forever remind Kamala Harris that when the actor Jussie Smollett faked a hate crime with a script that implicated Mr. Trump, she leapt to decry “an attempted modern-day lynching.”
The problem is, the fellow-traveling and furtive incitement also get converted into terrorist attacks like the mass murders at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, and Saturday’s hostage-taking in Colleyville. When that happens, it is necessary to trace the attacker’s inspirations and establish the context of a crime—regardless of which team the attacker thinks he’s playing on.
After a white-nationalist attack, the media devote considerable resources to tracing the attacker’s ideas and search history along the ideological continuum and tarring the Republican Party with “complicity” in his crimes. After an Islamist attack, the imperative is not to establish politicians’ complicity with the criminal, but to avoid any inquiry that might amount to “Islamophobia.”
Stifling the debate in this manner reflects the preference of most American media for the Democrats, but that shouldn’t distract us from a reality that has implications for all Americans.
Anti-Semitism is a barometer of a society’s health—or rather its sickness, because anti-Semitism, whether that of the white nationalist or the Islamist, is at heart a spiritual disease. The unprecedented and rising levels of incitement and violence against Jews in the U.S. are warning signs of social breakdown. Anti-Semites are the proven enemies of a free and decent society, yet elected representatives of both parties continue to play footsie with them.
Just as Republicans like Rep. Paul Gosar need to cut loose from the white-nationalist subculture, so the Democratic leadership needs to disavow their fellow-traveling with Islamists. Speech isn’t violence, but it does have consequences.
Mr. Green is editor of the Spectator’s world edition.
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The FED has become less independent over the years. Now Biden wants to politicize it even more so through appointments.
Biden Plays Capture the Federal Reserve
Sarah Bloom Raskin wants to politicize Fed bank supervision, especially on climate.
By The Editorial Board
President Biden has a chance to remake the Federal Reserve Board of Governors by filling multiple vacancies. This is especially important given inflation’s breakout, yet Mr. Biden’s latest nominees seem less worried about prices than pushing progressive policies that aren’t the Fed’s job.
Mr. Biden on Friday nominated former Treasury official Sarah Bloom Raskin as Fed vice chair for supervision, along with economists Lisa Cook and Philip Jefferson to vacancies on the Board of Governors. All three deserve scrutiny, but especially Ms. Raskin given what would be her regulatory power over banks and finance.
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Ms. Raskin previously served as a Fed governor from 2010 to 2014. But her recent public statements have focused on climate change, especially using financial regulation to steer capital from fossil fuels to green energy.
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In May 2020, with awful timing, she wrote a New York Times op-ed titled “Why Is the Fed Spending So Much Money on a Dying Industry?” That was amid the government’s pandemic shutdowns, when the Fed was acting to save the economy from collapse. The Fed established broad-based lending programs to prevent businesses that were otherwise sound from failing due to the shutdowns.
Ms. Raskin wanted the Fed to exclude fossil-fuel companies from these facilities. “The Fed is ignoring clear warning signs about the economic repercussions of the impending climate crisis by taking action that will lead to increases in greenhouse gas emissions at a time when even in the short term, fossil fuels are a terrible investment,” she wrote.
This showed colossally bad judgment. The crisis of the hour was Covid and a potential depression, not climate. Yet at that perilous moment Ms. Raskin was urging the Fed to discriminate against an industry that employed hundreds of thousands of people. Had the Fed taken her advice, many more oil and gas producers would have gone bankrupt, and energy prices would be even higher today.
“The Fed’s unique independence affords it a powerful role,” Ms. Raskin added. “The decisions the Fed makes on our behalf should build toward a stronger economy with more jobs in innovative industries—not prop up and enrich dying ones.” By unique independence, she apparently means it is unaccountable to voters. The Fed won’t pay a price at the ballot box if it destroys jobs.
Ms. Raskin expanded on her views in a June 2020 report “Addressing Climate as a Systemic Risk,” for the liberal investing outfit Ceres. “We must rebuild with an economy where the values of sustainability are explicitly embedded in market valuation,” she wrote. This will require “our financial regulatory bodies to do all they can—which turns out to be a lot—to bring about the adoption of practices and policies that will allocate capital and align portfolios toward sustainable investments that do not depend on carbon and fossil fuels.”
Note that phrase “allocate capital.” Among other things, the report recommended the Fed use climate stress tests to make banks account for the risk of government anti-carbon policies such as electric-car mandates and carbon taxes. It also suggested that the Fed deem fossil fuels risky assets and require banks to calculate the carbon emissions of their loans and investments.
Since this forced climate march will especially hurt lower-income Americans, both through destroyed jobs and higher energy prices, the report suggests the Fed use the “community reinvestment process to bolster the resilience of low-income communities to climate change.” Liberals have long used the Community Reinvestment Act to steer more lending to low-income neighborhoods.
Now Ms. Raskin apparently wants the Fed to use the law to force banks to finance green energy—for instance, electric-vehicle charging stations and rooftop solar panels—in minority communities. None of this is the Fed’s job under the law. The central bank’s regulatory command is financial stability, not making policy judgments that are the province of Congress, and not using regulation to allocate capital based on politics.
The Fed’s vice chair has extraordinary power to set the agenda on bank regulation. Chairman Jay Powell plays a secondary role. Along with the other new Fed Governors, Ms. Raskin would be in a position to steer lending in ways that could undermine financial stability by punishing some industries while favoring others.
It’s no surprise that Ms. Raskin was pushed hard by Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats who want to use regulation to steer bank lending. This political play to control the Fed is ironic given that Democrats opposed Judy Shelton for a regular Fed governor position because she had written favorably about a price rule for monetary policy.
Ms. Raskin’s views should trouble Senators who care about the Fed’s independence. And they should especially concern Democrats, such as West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Montana’s Jon Tester, whose state economies depend on fossil fuels.
“The @FederalReserve is no place for someone incapable of making policy decisions independent from political calculations,” Sen. Warren tweeted last November. Do Democrats only care about the Fed’s independence when a Republican is President?
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A Politicized Fed Endangers the Economy
The central bank can’t deliver price stability if it’s distracted by climate change and social justice.
By Jeb Hensarling
During Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s reconfirmation hearing last week, there was an understandable focus on inflation. Led by Republican Sen. Pat Toomey, several senators expressed concerns that politicization of the Fed is hampering its effectiveness in dealing with inflation and could lead to an erosion of monetary-policy independence. If such concerns are left unaddressed, the American economy will suffer.
Congress should resist the temptation to use the Fed to advance social policy or fund its favorite programs off-budget. In turn, the Fed should halt its mission creep into fiscal policy and stay out of unrelated partisan congressional debate.
Out of the hundreds of federal agencies, commissions and bureaus, arguably none are more independent of congressional checks, balances and accountability than the Fed. But this historic grant of independence from Congress was designed only for the narrow purpose of conducting monetary policy, which today is defined by Congress’s dual mandate to achieve stable prices and maximum employment. Ever since the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed has been engaged in much more, and the lines between monetary policy and fiscal policy have become blurred.
During the 2008 financial crisis the Fed, using its so-called 13(3) exigent-circumstances powers, propped up a single sector of the economy—the housing market—not to mention nondepository financial institutions like investment bank Bear Stearns. In 2010 Congress broke precedent and used the Fed’s balance sheet to fund in perpetuity the newly created and unrelated Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. In 2015 it used the Fed’s capital surplus account to help fund a highway bill.
Since the advent of Covid, the Fed has become thoroughly ensconced in fiscal policy, specifically credit policy, by backstopping practically every credit market in the U.S. Extraordinary times require extraordinary actions. The nation should be grateful for many emergency measures the Fed took during two historic crises. But these steps went way beyond the Fed’s monetary-policy remit. Continuing them in ordinary times is fraught with peril. To use a dramatic parallel, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War. Few thought that was wise or constitutional after Appomattox.
Some members of Congress have called for the Fed to use its balance sheet—now more than 10 times as large as before the 2008 financial crisis—to fund government programs as diverse as public transit and the arts. Depending on the outcome of future elections, other lawmakers could seek to use the Fed’s balance sheet to fund border security, for example. Legislators may now begin wondering why they should go through the messy and difficult process of winning an annual congressional appropriations vote when they can simply have the Fed fund their favorite programs off-budget.
Another threat to the Fed’s monetary-policy independence comes from a bill pending in Congress that would force the central bank “to address the ongoing crisis of racial inequality and disparities in economic outcomes.” The Fed is no more equipped to deal with these issues than the Pentagon is equipped to police securities markets. If the bill becomes law, the Fed may be saddled with a laundry list of policy mandates—from social justice to free speech. There are many noble causes and many partisan political issues. They don’t belong at the Fed.
The Fed itself hasn’t been blameless. At his recent second-term confirmation hearing, Mr. Powell endorsed the idea of “climate stress tests” for banks. The Fed has promoted research papers on everything from paid sick leave to higher-education reform. These are important issues. But all are subject to partisan debate and far afield from monetary policy.
Some at the Fed have expressed concerns over the loss of monetary-policy independence. Randal Quarles, the Fed’s departing vice chairman for supervision, warned in December that normalizing fiscal measures at the central bank could lead to “dangerous fiscal irresponsibility, and the attendant pressures would turn [the Fed] from a technocratic, non-political institution . . . into the most politically entangled organization in the country.”
It is time to depoliticize monetary policy. First, instead of making the Fed’s mandate broader, Congress should consider narrowing it to one of price stability. The Fed’s contribution to achieving full employment should be through focusing on long-term price stability. Next, as we learn to live with Covid and as the economy continues to recover, the Fed must go beyond merely tapering its bond purchases. It must set out a credible process and timetable to unwind its balance sheet.
Should the Fed be called on again to exercise emergency powers, Congress must ensure those powers are of limited duration and that any credit facilities created are quickly transferred to the Treasury Department. Finally, the more improvisational and discretionary the Fed’s conduct of monetary policy, the more difficult it is to withstand political pressures. The Fed should move to a monetary-policy framework that is more systematic, predictable and transparent.
If politicized monetary policy doesn’t prove transitory, it is doubtful the Fed will be able to deliver either stable prices or maximum employment.
Mr. Hensarling served as a U.S. representative from Texas (2003-19) and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee (2013-19).
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One of my very dear friends and fellow memo reader knows I love art so he sent this
How to Appear Cultured Without Going to a Museum
1) If the background is dark and everyone looks tortured, it's Titian.
2) If everyone has large buttocks and the women have small breasts, it's Rubens.
3) If all the men have eyes like cows and look gay, it's Caravaggio.
4) If there are lots of people, it's Pieter Bruegel.
5) If everyone looks like a beggar under a public street lamp it's Rembrandt.
6) If the painting includes cupids or sheep (or if you think there might be), it's François Boucher.
7) If the people are beautiful, naked and all piled up, it's Michelangelo.
8) If there are ballet dancers, it's Degas.
9) If it is very high contrast and the men wear beards on emaciated faces, it's El Greco.
10) If the men look like Vladimir Putin, it's Van Eyck
11) If everyone looks like thieves and morons while trying to look serious...
.. it is not a painting; it's Congress!
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