The new NILE Virus, type C
We are still battling COVID-19, and the next thing is here already.
Virologists have identified a new Nile virus - type C. It appears to target those who were born between 1930 & 1970.
Symptoms: Causes you
1 To send the same message twice.
2. To send a blank message.
3. To send a message to the wrong person.
4. To send it back to the person who sent it to you.
5. To forget to attach the attachment.
6. To hit SEND before you've finished.
7. To hit DELETE instead of SEND.
8. To hit SEND when you should DELETE.
That is why it is called the C-NILE virus!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The State of the Union In the coming New Year, 2022, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union address will occur on the same day.
This is an ironic juxtaposition of events.
One involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to an insignificant creature of little intelligence for prognostication . . . The other involves a groundhog.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Biden saves Iran from itself
by Richard Goldberg
President Joe Biden came into office pledging to rejoin the 2015 Iran nuclear deal quickly and then negotiate a follow-on agreement to address the deal’s many flaws. A year later, he’s laying the groundwork for an even worse deal that would pour billions of dollars into Iran’s terror infrastructure and leave the regime on the threshold of attaining nuclear weapons. Try as his administration might to pass the blame, one man alone is responsible for this catastrophic policy failure: Joe Biden.
It’s startling to review just how much leverage the president has squandered practically overnight.
At the end of 2020, Tehran had just $4 billion in accessible foreign exchange reserves, with a balance-of-payments crisis looming. Iranians blamed the mullahs for the nation's economic woes, protesting in waves throughout the country. The head of the United Nations’s nuclear watchdog agency was investigating Iran for concealing undeclared nuclear sites, materials, and activities — with a referral to the U.N. Security Council for noncompliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty possibly just months away. The Islamic Republic was also still reeling from the loss of its terror mastermind, Qassem Soleimani, and the father of its nuclear weapons program, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
From Biden’s first day in office, Iran began testing the new president. Days before Biden’s inauguration, Iran started producing 20% enriched uranium, a major escalation from the low-enriched uranium it produced in response to the Trump administration’s maximum pressure campaign. In the weeks that followed, Tehran-directed terror groups in Iraq attacked U.S. forces and interests, leaving a U.S. contractor dead. Soon, reports emerged of Iranian oil exports to China skyrocketing. Iranian leaders needed to gauge Biden’s willingness to enforce sanctions.
With Iran refusing to cooperate with the U.N.’s investigation into its clandestine nuclear work and the regime’s overt enrichment expanding, Biden had a perfect opening to push back and set down some lines to contain Iranian mischief. Instead, the president pressed U.S. allies to pull back any censure resolution at the March meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency board. The message to Tehran: America doesn’t care if you’re hiding nuclear sites and materials, nor does it care about your compliance with global nonproliferation agreements.
Iran’s response was predictable. The regime cut back U.N. access to its declared nuclear sites, produced uranium metal, a key component of nuclear weapons, and increased its enrichment purity level to 60% — dangerously close to weapons-grade. Considering Tehran’s failure to cooperate with the IAEA’s investigation, the obvious course of action presented itself: Refer the matter to the Security Council and restore U.N. sanctions on Iran. But in June, September, and November, Biden opted against any action that could provoke Iran at the IAEA’s quarterly board meetings.
Biden made other poor choices as well. He chose not to respond militarily to the March death of a U.S. contractor in Iraq. He chose not to respond militarily for months thereafter despite continuous drone and rocket attacks targeting U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria. And the two times he authorized a U.S. military response, he directed fire at non-Iranian personnel or installations rather than targeting the Revolutionary Guard commanders orchestrating the attacks.
Biden also gave a green light to Iranian adventurism in the region, a large source of chaos, instability, and deadly violence. In Yemen, Biden ended U.S. military support for a Saudi-led campaign against the Iran-backed Houthis and rescinded the group’s designation as a foreign terrorist organization. On Tehran’s orders, the Houthis responded by increasing missile and drone attacks against Saudi and Emirati citizens. In other words, Iran responded to Biden’s concession with more violence against U.S. allies. How did Biden respond to this pattern? By rewarding it. The administration removed American missile defense from the Saudi kingdom, which invited more Houthi attacks. In mid-January, a combined drone, ballistic missile, and cruise missile attack on Abu Dhabi left at least three people dead.
If the supreme leader had any doubt left about whether he could establish Iran as a nuclear weapons threshold state without fearing a U.S. military response, Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, looking the other way as the Taliban marched on Kabul, sealed his calculus.
All the while, Biden let Iran’s economy stabilize. He suspended sanctions, which gave the regime access to billions of dollars more in frozen funds. And he refused to crack down as China increased its imports of Iranian oil. As Tehran’s regional violence increased and its nuclear transgressions continued unabated, Washington essentially helped the mullahs avoid a financial crisis.
Never has a U.S. president given up so much leverage so quickly for absolutely zero gain. To borrow a football analogy, Biden started his presidency with Iran backed up against its own goal line, and he deliberately allowed the regime to march all the way to America’s red zone, the threshold of nuclear weapons.
The president made a bet one year ago that abandoning maximum pressure in favor of maximum deference would somehow induce the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism that pledges “Death to America” to make concessions. He lost that bet. And every time he doubles down on that bet instead of admitting his mistake, he loses again.
Biden came into office and implemented a new Iran policy. He owns its failure.
Richard Goldberg is a senior adviser at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. He served on Capitol Hill, on the U.S. National Security Council, as the chief of staff for Illinois’s governor, and as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer.
Finally:
A Year of Unforced Errors for Biden in the Middle East
by Jonathan Schanzer
The Dispatch
One year into his presidency, Joe Biden endeavors to pivot away from the Middle East. The Middle East simply won't let him. Like his predecessors, the president continues to struggle with the right approach to this important and perilous region. To date, many of Biden's approaches have amounted to unforced errors. A number of them are likely to haunt him.
Afghanistan: Though the country is not technically not part of the Middle East, Biden's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan last year continues to impact how states in that region view America's role in their neighborhood. The botched sequencing of the withdrawal was the primary focus (removing military assets before political assets). But the fact that the U.S. described the Taliban terrorist group as a "partner" in its retreat sent shockwaves around the world. Moreover, the Arab states and Israel cannot help but note that a ragtag, untrained army forced a superpower to flee under duress. Admittedly, the Taliban had help from state sponsors (notably Pakistan and Iran). However, the neo-isolationist trends in American politics that ultimately justified the embarrassing and unceremonious end to this American war effort raises troubling questions about the future of the U.S. commitment to the order it established in the Middle East. It's also worth remembering that the defeat of the Soviet army at the hands of the mujahedeen in 1989 inspired Osama bin Laden (and his Palestinian partner Abdullah Azzam) to leverage the Islamist fighters (who believed that theirs was a divine victory) to create the al-Qaeda terrorist network. Whether we witness a resurgence in Islamist terrorism as a result of Biden's Afghanistan disaster remains to be seen.
Iran: In the wake of the Afghanistan debacle, the region is nervously watching as the White House signals its intent to completely capitulate to the clerical regime in Tehran at the negotiating table in Vienna. The administration's determined effort to rejoin the deeply flawed nuclear agreement of 2015 at any cost has yielded too much leverage to the world's most prolific state sponsor of terrorism. While the negotiations have not yet concluded, it appears that the regime will walk away having legitimized a number of its alarming advances toward a nuclear weapon, with the Biden administration demanding fewer restrictions and granting tens of billions of dollars in sanctions relief as remuneration for a weaker deal. The White House is aware of the terrible optics. The concerns are even more acute in light of the fact that most of Iran's nuclear expansion occurred after Biden's election. This was the result of Biden's decision to reverse "maximum pressure" to what can only be described as "maximum deference." Rumors are now swirling that the White House has sought out a high-priced public relations firm to handle the fallout. In the meantime, officials are doing their best to blame the Trump administration for whatever terrible deal is reached, citing Trump's hasty exit from the nuclear accord in 2018. Try as they may, whatever deal is struck will be Biden's to own. Right now, the chances are high that Iran pockets American concessions and still makes a dash for a bomb.
Saudi Arabia: In the early days of the Biden administration, the White House took a series of steps to deliberately alienate Riyadh. Biden pulled support for the Saudi-led war against the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, delisted the group as a foreign terrorist organization, and then released information implicating crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) in the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi at the hands of Saudi operatives in 2018. These moves were all counterproductive. The Saudis are leading the only military effort to halt the dangerous Houthi advances in Yemen. The group is undeniably a terrorist group, as evidenced by a subsequent sanctions imposed by this administration on individual leaders of the Houthis. And while the Saudis should be lambasted for Khashoggi's killing, the information released about MBS was not new; it was an obsequious nod to the "progressive" wing of the Democratic Party that has labored to vilify Saudi Arabia. All three moves only served to drive a wedge between Riyadh and Washington. The Houthis continue to sow terror throughout the region, with a recent drone attack on the UAE capital of Abu Dhabi. Meanwhile, by deliberately injecting tensions into its relationship with Riyadh, the White House has squandered an opportunity to broker a valuable normalization agreement between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Given Saudi Arabia's status as guardian of the two holiest sites in Islam, such an agreement would almost certainly inspire others in the Arab and Muslim worlds to follow suit.
Israel: The Israelis were truly thankful for Biden's support during the Gaza War in May 2021. Biden blocked efforts to vilify the Israelis at the United Nations, and delivered the right messages at home to support Israel's operations against Iran-backed Hezbollah. However, two days before the conflict ended, Biden's rhetoric shifted dramatically. He blamed Israel for not bringing about a swifter end to the conflict, even though he knew an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire was imminent. Once again, Biden was trying to score points with the hard left of his party. Since then, with a change in government in Israel, the administration has worked hard to build a solid foundation with new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. However, the lack of American resolve to remain engaged in the region, coupled with the looming Iran nuclear deal, leave many Israeli questions unanswered about the reliability of its most important ally.
Competing with China: Amid all of this, the administration has placed significant pressure on Israel to dial back on its commerce with Beijing. Specifically, the White House wants Israel to halt the sale of technology that could be exploited by the Chinese for military purposes. Israel has taken significant steps to do exactly that. But the administration is not holding the rest of the Middle East to the same standards. The foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain, and the secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) all visited China recently for talks designed to take trade and security cooperation to the next level. The Biden White House has not mounted a meaningful response. Nor has it done anything to disrupt the 25-year strategic partnership worth $400 billion between Iran and China, signed in March of last year. If anything, the sanctions relief that the White House seeks to offer Tehran in the Vienna negotiations will only boost the value of this pact.
Global crises loom: China is eyeing an invasion of Taiwan. Russia has amassed troops around Ukraine. North Korean missiles are flying. A lack of American deterrence (the credible threat of a military response), as conveyed by the Biden White House, has likely contributed to these crises. Strong American leadership in response to these crises could help convey a sense of calm in other regions, such as the Middle East. A lack of American leadership will only lead to further destabilization. How the Biden administration tackles these challenges in 2022 could have immense consequences for his presidency, not to mention the political and military trajectory of the broader Middle East.
Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, is senior vice president for research at Foundation for Defense of Democracies. His new book, Gaza Conflict 2021: Hamas, Israel and Eleven Days of War (FDD Press) was released in November. Follow him on Twitter @JSchanzer.
One more reason why the media are no longer respected:
The Media Doesn't Stop Lying, It Doubles Down On Its Lies
By DANIEL GREENFIELD
NPR claimed that Sotomayor was forced to work remotely because Gorsuch wouldn't wear a mask despite Chief Justice Roberts asking everyone to wear masks. In an extraordinary move, Roberts, Gorsuch, and Sotomayor have all denied the story.
This hasn't even slowed down NPR which is in a conflict over how hard to sneer its way past it.
This Daily Beast headline ought to clarify the execrable arrogance in play here, "NPR ‘Founding Mother’ Unloads on Public Editor Over SCOTUS Story: 'She's Not Clarifying Anything!'"
Fake, but accurate. In an accurate, but fake sidebar, the media managed to turn an innocuous Mitch McConnell quote into a racial slur.
Mitch McConnell says Black people vote just as much as 'Americans' - Courier Journal
Mitch McConnell Suggests Black Americans Aren’t Really ‘Americans’ McConnell didn't misspeak—at best, he uttered a white nationalist Freudian slip. - News One
The rest of the garbage parade quickly arrived.
Virginia Democratic Rep. Donald McEachin condemned the remark in a letter to the Kentucky Republican, saying, "I am writing today in response to your recent comment on voting rights in which you insinuated that African Americans are somehow not American citizens."
And it wouldn't be complete without a fake Snopes fact check.
In January 2022, U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell referred to "African Americans" and "Americans" as two separate groups. - Correct Attribution
That's what Democrats like to call "misinformation."
"If you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a number as Americans," McConnell said.
Americans in general might have been the better way to finish that sentence, but anyone who is marginally literate understands exactly what he was saying and what he meant.
To fact check Snopes, no Mitch McConnell did not refer to "African Americans" and "Americans" as two separate groups, he referred to black people as a subsection of Americans. You can make this same remark about any number of groups. Including white people.
But that's what the media does. It lies and then doubles down on its lies.
++++++++++++++++++++
Back to the Degraded Military Future
Failure to pass a budget will squeeze defense at a vulnerable time.
By The Editorial Bord
Congress has been so absorbed with recriminations about the Build Back Better bill and intoning about the end of democracy that few have noticed that lawmakers are failing in their basic duty of funding the government. It’s worth detailing the damage that budget dysfunction could do to America’s defenses and national security.
The government is currently operating under a stopgap measure passed last year known as a continuing resolution, or CR, that expires on Feb. 18. Democrats are blaming Republicans for the lack of a deal, though Democrats run the government. The fallback plan is another CR, possibly covering the rest of the fiscal year at last year’s spending levels. Some Republicans are on board, as a CR would mean a modicum of domestic spending discipline.
But last week the Pentagon’s service chiefs warned on Capitol Hill about the havoc a full-year CR would wreak on a military that is trying to adapt to multiplying global threats. The Pentagon can’t get going on new projects under a CR, or bump up rates of production.
All sorts of equipment could be procured more slowly, cost more or both. The Navy warned of delays and overruns on the Columbia-class submarine, the essential replacement for the sea leg of the nuclear triad. A CR could cause an up to one-year delay for the Air Force’s new B-21, badly needed as the bomber force is about 45 years old on average.
Air Force chief Charles Brown said a yearlong CR could also “prevent the procurement” of such conventional advanced weapons as 12 air-launched rapid response weapons and the development of hypersonic cruise missiles—though the bipartisan consensus is the military needs to move faster on such programs.
As destructive would be cuts to military operations and readiness, which lead to crashed airplanes and undeployable ships. For pilots, the Air Force would be forced to “execute a flying hour program well below what is required to maintain high levels of proficiency.”
Congress knows better: The National Commission on Military Aviation Safety found in 2020 that CRs “are disruptive, compromise safety, and place lives at risk” in flying units. The high cost of military aviation, the commission noted, makes it an attractive bill payer when funding dries up and salaries and healthcare have to be paid.
The Navy said it may need to cancel or put off maintenance for five submarines and two aircraft carriers, which will delay deployments and add stress to the fleet. The Marines have a list of exercises they’d have to scale back or cancel, including training in the Pacific.
The headaches extend to missing money for retention bonuses, even as the services struggle to attract and keep personnel. The Army recently announced its largest-ever enlistment bonus: up to $50,000. Making matters worse is inflation that will shrink the Pentagon’s purchasing power, as it spends more on everything from maintenance to fuel
Congress has authorized $25 billion more to President Biden’s defense request, but that will be pointless if it isn’t followed with an appropriation. The effect would be less proficient sailors and soldiers who don’t have the equipment they need for a fight that may arrive sooner than Americans expect.
+++++++++
A lethal state of denial
The attack on the Texas synagogue reveals even more disturbing issues
By Melanie Phillips
Ostriches with their heads in the sand
The attack on Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas, where the rabbi and three other Jews were taken hostage until they managed to escape unharmed, was shocking enough.
What has subsequently emerged, however, is even more disturbing.
The attacker, Malik Faisal Akram, was a British Muslim from the English town of Blackburn. It turns out that he was able to enter the United States two weeks earlier because of a major foul-up by Britain’s intelligence service, MI5, and the police.
In 2020, MI5 investigated Akram as a possible terrorist threat but concluded that he posed no risk and effectively closed his file.
Now Britain’s Jewish Chronicle reports that in May last year, at a meeting in Blackburn called to discuss “escalating tensions” between Israel and Gaza, Akram declared in a diatribe that Jews needed to be punished and should be “bombed”. A locally elected politician who attended the meeting was so concerned by this that he told the police. To his astonishment, he heard no more about it.
The JC has also obtained a recording of the phone call during the Colleyville siege between Akram and his brother, Gulbar, who was trying to persuade him to surrender.
On the recording, Akram ranted and raved against America. Rambling semi-coherently about American involvement in overseas conflicts, he said: “Why do these f***ing motherf*****s come to our countries, rape out women and f*** our kids? I’m setting a precedent … maybe they’ll have compassion for f***ing Jews”.
Clearly, British intelligence has much to answer for. But there’s also the question of how Akram was allowed into America in the first place. For he had a long criminal history, which included jail terms for harassment, theft and attacking a cousin with a baseball bat.
In 2001, he was excluded from his local magistrates’ court after threatening and abusing staff and ranting that a court official should have died on one of the planes that flew into the Twin Towers.
Yet he was able to enter the United States as a tourist, presumably by lying about his criminal record on his entry form, and he was able to obtain a gun there.
In both Britain and America, the security agencies have allowed themselves to become increasingly focused on a reportedly rising threat from white supremacism. But the overwhelming threat to the west comes from Islamic extremism.
The security establishment is reflecting a wider state of denial. In both countries, the political, media and cultural establishment has blocked itself from acknowledging the true nature and extent of Islamic radicalisation.
People have allowed themselves to become either persuaded or intimidated by the designation of all such acknowledgment as Islamophobic — the catch-all denunciation of any adverse comment about Islam or the Muslim world.
While terrorist attacks by lone white supremacists provoke instant claims of a dangerous cultural trend, terrorist attacks by lone Islamists tend to provoke instead the claim that the perpetrator was mentally ill and therefore his actions had no wider significance.
Thus, Akram has been widely reported as having had serious mental health problems. Yet the JC talked to his former doctor, who said Akram had been “a confident man who didn’t need any mental help” and had no mental health complaints in his medical notes.
It’s not just that media coverage of the Colleyville attack has been muted, with virtually no acknowledgment of the attacker’s antisemitism.
In addition, no one in the mainstream media has bothered to investigate Akram’s home town of Blackburn. Yet this is a hotbed of Islamist radicalism which the British authorities have allowed to grow.
It’s become the global hub for the ultra-conservative Deobandis and the Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic jihadi sect that dominates the mosque attended by Akram and which some countries have banned on account of its extremism and connections to terror.
Blackburn is deeply problematic. The Campaign Against Antisemitism has reported that, in a subsequently deleted post, the “Blackburn Muslim Community” Facebook page prayed for “the Almighty” to bless Akram “with the highest ranks of Paradise”.
And it was Muslim men from Blackburn who last September drove in convoy around Jewish areas of London screaming antisemitic abuse at Jewish residents.
Yet none of this causes so much as a ripple in Britain. Politicians, the mainstream media and other cultural leaders either fail to look at what’s happening or ignore its implications.
It’s important to acknowledge that many Muslims have no truck with anti-western or anti-Jewish attitudes. After the Colleyville synagogue attack, some courageous Muslims have spoken out against antisemitism in their community.
A Duke University professor, Abdullah T. Antepli, said members of his faith had a “moral call for action for the soul of Islam and Muslim” to address the hatred towards Jews.
Nevertheless, antisemitic attitudes and attacks on Jews are disproportionately far higher among Muslims than among the rest of the population. Indeed, anti-Jewish paranoia and hatred are rampant throughout the Islamic world.
Last week, Tahra Ahmed — a volunteer during London’s 2017 Grenfell Tower apartment block fire disaster that claimed the lives of 72 people — was convicted of stirring up racial hatred.
In two Facebook posts, she referred to the fire’s victims as “burnt alive in a Jewish sacrifice”. She said: “Jews have always been the ones behind ritual torture, crucifixion and murder of children, especially young boys, as a way of atoning for their sins in order to be allowed back into Palestine”.
In court, she said the Jews she referred to in the posts were those who belonged to a criminal “cabal” of “the evil elite who are orchestrating everything in order to divide and conquer the world”.
People in Britain have been shocked and horrified to learn what she had said. They are shocked because no discussion of Muslim antisemitism is generally allowed. Anyone who draws attention to it is denounced as “Islamophobic”.
This is also true in America, where a recent report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) asserted that mainstream Jewish and allied charities were spreading “Islamophobia” by opposing radical Islamic terror.
The Islamophobia canard has been eagerly endorsed by those in the wider community for whom the very concept of Jewish victimisation is a problem.
That pathology is on regular display at the BBC, which has been doubling down on its apparently baseless report last month that orthodox Jewish teenagers set upon by Muslim men in an antisemitic attack in the centre of London themselves voiced an anti-Muslim slur.
The deep reluctance by the wider community to acknowledge Muslim antisemitism has been further facilitated by the silence of British Jews on this issue. For the community’s leaders never mention it. Instead, they lash out at any Jew who dares call it out.
At the Board of Deputies, 46 left-wing members are demanding that the Jewish National Fund UK charity gets rid of its chairman, Samuel Hayek, over his “Islamophobic” suggestion that Jews might soon be forced out of the United Kingdom because of the rising number of Muslims who hate or want to harm Jewish people
This misplaced attack by Jewish liberals is idiotic and disgraceful. For antisemitism is not only rampant in the Muslim world but is absolutely central to Islamic extremism.
Numerous Islamist terrorists have made it clear that, in attacking the west, their most fundamental target is the Jews. At war against modernity, they believe that behind modernity stand the Jews — who they think are behind everything in the world that the Islamists have decided is bad.
This doesn’t mean every Muslim anti-Semite will turn into a terrorist. But it does mean that every Muslim terrorist is an anti-Semite
Antisemitism doesn’t just endanger the Jews. It is the marker for Islamic extremism. Until this is realised, the west will continually fail to understand the threat it faces.
Jewish News Syndicate
++++++++++++++
Mexico's Immigration laws:
Mexico is smarter than US; this is reality in Mexico
Voter registration cards with photo and fingerprint with hologram to prevent forgery is the law in Mexico.
New Immigration Laws
Be sure to read to the bottom or you will miss the message...
1. There will be no special bilingual programs in the schools.
2. All ballots will be in this nation's language.
3. All government business will be conducted in our language.
4. Non-residents will NOT have the right to vote no matter how long they are here.
5. Non-citizens will NEVER be able to hold political office.
6. Foreigners will not be a burden to the taxpayers. No welfare, no food stamps, no health care, or any other government assistance programs . Any who are a burden will be deported.
7. Foreigners can invest in this country, but it must be an amount at least equal to 40,000 times the daily minimum wage.
8. If foreigners come here and buy land, their options will be restricted. Certain parcels including waterfront property are reserved for citizens naturally bo rn into this country.
9. Foreigners may have NO protests; NO demonstrations, NO waving of a foreign flag, NO political organizing, NO bad-mouthing our president or his policies. These will lead to deportation.
10. If you do come to this country illegally, you will be actively hunted and, when caught, sent to jail until your deportation can be arranged. All assets will be taken from you.
And:
Ben Sasse on Eliminating the Filibuster
‘You will ensure that this body, too, ends up consumed by demagogues, conspiracists and clown
Sen. Ben Sasse (R., Neb.) speaking on the Senate floor Jan. 13:
There’s a place of course where simple majorities rule. It’s right down that hallway. We have a House of Representatives already. Does anybody want to make the argument that that place is healthier than we are because it is a simple majoritarian body? . . . The Senate is supposed to be the place where passions are tempered and refined by people who are responsible for thinking beyond our next election, which is why every election cycle in America only has one-third of senators even up for re-election. That’s the whole reason we have six-year terms. . . .
If you get rid of the filibuster, you will turn the Senate into the House and you will ensure that this body, too, ends up consumed by demagogues, conspiracists and clowns. . . . The American people are not fans of these political parties. Getting rid of the filibuster means you don’t have to try to talk to people on the other side of the aisle and get to a 60-vote threshold for legislation or a 67-vote threshold for rules changes. It means that one of these two terrible parties gets to do a lot more stuff a lot faster.
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
+++++++++++++++++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment