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My response to a liberal friend who chastised me for calling his Democratic Party The Democrat Party.
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In no particular order, reasons why I consider the Democrat Party no longer Democratic.
1) Obama was the Manchurian Muslim who, knowingly brought in Radical Islamists, places them in a state where they became preponderant so they could be elected to Congress turning the leadership of this party into a breeding ground for anti-Semitism.
2) Bad as that is, he also arranged a contract, avoiding a treaty the Senate should have constitutionally approved. This agreement allowed Iran to pursue nuclear status and become an existential threat to our best ally, Israel, as well as The Big Satan.
3) The current president and his family are crooks. Biden gloated on TV how he had a Ukrainian investigator fired, so we withheld a $billion loan so his son could bludgeon the Ukraine government to hire him to the board of an energy company at an exorbitant salary.
This same president, allegedly, has received money from our adversaries, ie. China and Russia, and has stonewalled investigators of critical documents by our now corrupt Department of Justice.
Biden's predecessor A.G, Holder, also corrupted not only his own Justice Department but the IRS as well so adversaries were denied their legal rights. Read Kim Strassel's 2d book on intimidation.
4) A previous presidential Democrat candidate arranged for a corrupt law firm to create a false dossier accusing her opponent of being in bed with Russia. This was known to be false by an equally corrupted FBI Department. It was proven to be so after many months and at great cost.
This same candidate both ignored a judge's order not to destroy evidence, which she did, and never was held accountable. A two tier system of Justice?
5) The current president has opened our borders and allowed this country to be flooded with illegal immigrants. Many of them criminals and suffering mental issues. These illegals have increased discord in our nation, raised the crime rate, contributed to horrible murders of our citizens, deaths from illegal Fentanyl drugs, trafficking in prostitution while untold billions have been earned by cartels and China.
Why has Biden allowed this? Because he seeks their votes and an eventual government ruled by one party?
6) The Democrat Party has allowed a corrupt mass media to favor them until recently by circling the wagons and hiding facts from the American public. Now that has this has been exposed, after a disastrous debate, even the "Grey Lady" has called for Biden's resignation.
This same corrupt party has allowed neo-Marxists to infect our institutions with anti-constitutional efforts because these radicals fear our freedoms. They want to destroy this nation with their insanity such as DEI, ,CRT, BLM, shakedowns, by a crooked Black Minister, of cowardly capitalists and pusillanimous board members.
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Democrats Can’t Avoid the Biden Problem
The debate showed the President clearly isn’t up to four more years in office.
By The WSJ Editorial Board
Well, that was painful—for the United States. President Biden’s halting, stumbling debate performance Thursday night showed all too clearly that he isn’t up to serving four more years in office. For the good of the country, more even than their party, Democrats have some hard thinking to do about whether they need to replace him at the top of their ticket.
This isn’t a partisan thought; it’s a patriotic one. Democrats across the country were privately saying the same thing last night, and some of them on TV not so privately. Mr. Biden lost the debate in the first 10 minutes as he failed to speak clearly, did so in a weak voice, and sometimes couldn’t complete a coherent sentence. His blank stare when Donald Trump was speaking suggested a man who is struggling to recall what he has been prepped for weeks to say, but who no longer has the memory to do it.
This isn’t to say he didn’t score points against Mr. Trump now and again. He can still recall a line or a policy once in a while. But without a script provided by his aides, and without his usual teleprompter, the President looked and sounded lost. Voters already sensed this, which is why two-thirds have been saying for more than a year that they’d rather he not run again.
The President’s faltering effort allowed Mr. Trump to win the debate despite a mediocre performance in his own right. The former President was strong on inflation and the economy, where he knows he has an advantage. He rightly nailed Mr. Biden’s policies as the main inflation culprit.
Mr. Biden’s response that Mr. Trump caused inflation by the way he handled Covid was preposterous. The economy was recovering smartly when Mr. Biden took office, and his $1.8 trillion spending blizzard in March 2021 flooded the economy with money. Add an accommodating Federal Reserve, and that’s the cause of 9.1% inflation.
Mr. Trump also won the exchanges on taxes, linking his 2017 tax cut to the economy’s strong pre-Covid growth. And his linkage between Mr. Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is almost certainly true. Ambitious dictators move when they smell weakness.
But Mr. Trump also ducked question after question—and his exaggerations and falsehoods kept coming. The former President was coached to keep his cool and stick to hitting the Biden record, and for the most part he did. But as the debate progressed he couldn’t resist returning to his self-pitying line about the “stolen” 2020 election.
Mr. Trump began one answer shrewdly by saying his “retribution” would be the “success” of a second term. But then he couldn’t resist saying Mr. Biden deserved to be charged as a criminal, and he didn’t rule out charging him. This sense of personal grievance and fear of four more years of ugly mayhem is the reason Mr. Trump isn’t winning by more than he is. If Nikki Haley were the GOP nominee, the race would be over.
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7) This same corrupt Party has sought to pin the tail on Trump through weaponizing politics and embracing character assassination.
Granted, Trump's behaviour is not presidential in manner and speech. However, his accomplishments have been amazing against all odds. to destroy him and his administration by jailing many of his associates and bringing unconstitutional charges against him. He moved the Israeli Embassy to Jerusalem, he increased the net earnings of black citizens, he sought to make us energy independent, he arranged for the Abraham Accords and he sought to make America Great Again.
What should a president do, make America second again? He kept our adversaries guessing and peace reigned as inflation was no longer was a kitchen table threat.
He worked with Senator Scott to create an amazing program funded publicly to enhance living circumstances for lower socio citizens, particularly blacks living in gang controlled public housing. As a businessman he thought out side the box unlike self-centered politicians who care more about retaining power and elitism.
8) When it comes to 1/6 all alleged criminals are entitled to a speedy trial. The corrupt former Speaker, Pelosi, was urged by Trump to call out the National Guards and refused because she knew she had a negative issue stirring.
This is the same woman who tore up Trump's SOTUS so the entire nation could witness her disgusting display of contrived pique. She and her husband have made millions in illegal insider trading.
The Democrat mayor of D.C painted an entire street with BLM, a black shake down organization run by avowed and admitted Communists, who purchased $million homes etc. and the Democrat Party supported them by looking the other way
Trump like Bibi went beyond in his encouragement but the FBI escorted the renegades into the Capitol and one killed an innocent bystander and never was punished. This was all orchestrated so make Trump look bad and for false incitement.
I have always believed Bibi is the Israeli equivalent of Trump and surely had a hand in stirring up the crowd against Rabin. It went too far but Bibi was aghast when Rabin was assassinated.
9) As for the issue of SCOTUS. Liberals have controlled SCOTUS for decades and their Justices have legislated from the bench. Roe V Wade was never a federal matter but a states right one for states to decide. States now will be subject to voters and democracy will determine the issue of abortion not some Congressperson.
There are instance after instance where former liberal stacked Supreme Courts have made decisions when Democrats controlled Congresses and were unable to pass desired legislation.
Justice Scalia argued, correctly in my opinion, that control of the separation of power was the greatest threat to our republic. This lead to dictators as we now see with Obama and Biden..
I could go on and on but I rest me case.
I challenge you to read these books:
Oligarchs by Sean Bruner
Betrayal: By Jewish Leadership By Jacobs and Goldwasser
Netanyahu: The Road To Power. By Ben Caspit snd Ilan Kafir
America's Cultural Revolution By Christopher Ruso
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Two Big Victories for Liberty at the Supreme Court
The Justices continue their repair work on the separation of powers.
By WSJ The Editorial Board
Friday was a good day, make that a great day, for liberty and the Constitution at the Supreme Court. The Justices delivered an overdue rebuke to overreaching regulators in a ruling that abolishes Chevron deference, while they also reined in prosecutors who stretched the law in pursuit of Jan. 6 cases.
In arguably the most significant decision of the year, a 6-3 majority (Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo) overturned the Court’s 40-year-old Chevron doctrine that told judges to defer to agency interpretations of vague laws as long as they are “reasonable.” Now regulators will have a harder time bending laws, and Congress will have to legislate more clearly. Imagine that.
Chevron arose when judges were willy-nilly legislating from the bench, but its flaws were “apparent from the start,” as Chief Justice John Roberts explains for the majority. The doctrine lacked a constitutional basis and clashed with the Administrative Procedure Act’s command that courts “decide all relevant questions of law, interpret constitutional and statutory provisions.” From the start, he says, Chevron was “a ‘rule in search of a justification,’ if it was ever coherent enough to be called a rule at all.”
The doctrine spawned confusion and conflict in lower courts, including whether a given law was ambiguous in the first place. As Justice Antonin Scalia put it five years after Chevron was decided: “How clear is clear?” The Chief says deference to regulators became “an impediment, rather than an aid, to accomplishing the basic judicial task.”
The High Court hasn’t invoked Chevron since 2016, relying instead on basic statutory interpretive tools and its major questions doctrine, such as in West Virginia v. EPA. “At this point, all that remains of Chevron is a decaying husk with bold pretensions,” the Chief writes.
The problem is that lower courts still rely on Chevron and cite it repeatedly to rubber stamp even the most dubious rules. See the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Court’s considerations about when to revere precedents also support its decision. Not only has Chevron proven unworkable, it “has undermined the very ‘rule of law’; values that stare decisis exists to secure,” the Chief stresses. As Justice Neil Gorsuch notes in a powerful concurrence, “these antireliance harms” aren’t “distributed equally.” While “sophisticated entities and their lawyers may be able to keep pace with rule changes affecting their rights and responsibilities,” others may not.
Chevron “has led us to a strange place. One where authorities long thought reserved for Article III are transferred to Article II, where the scales of justice are tilted systematically in favor of the most powerful, where legal demands can change with every election even though the laws do not, and where the people are left to guess about their legal rights and responsibilities.”
Lacking a strong legal rebuttal, the three liberal Justices fret about “judicial hubris” and the Court turning “itself into the country’s administrative czar.” “The majority disdains restraint, and grasps for power,” Justice Elena Kagan writes in dissent. “Judges are not experts in the field.”
But the progressive impulse to defer to the rule of experts is one reason Americans are so frustrated with government. Some judges may run off the rails, but then some do that now. The crucial constitutional point is that each branch of government stays in its proper lane.
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Chevron’s defenestration will require judges to determine the best reading of statutes. The Chief demonstrates how to do this in Fischer v. U.S. Prosecutors charged a Jan. 6 rioter with violating the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, of all unlikely statutes.
The financial securities law makes it a crime to “corruptly” shred or conceal documents “with the intent to impair the object’s integrity or availability for use in an official proceeding.” This provision is followed by another one punishing anyone who “otherwise obstructs, influences, or impedes” such a proceeding.
The government argued this catchall applied to the rioter’s obstruction. Six Justices disagreed. The catchall “was designed by Congress to capture other forms of evidence and other means of impairing its integrity or availability,” the Chief writes. He was joined by Justices Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
It would be “peculiar to conclude that in closing the Enron gap, Congress created a catch-all provision that reaches beyond the scenarios that prompted the legislation,” the Chief adds. The government’s “novel interpretation would criminalize a broad swath of prosaic conduct, exposing activists and lobbyists alike to decades in prison.”
The Court’s Friday decisions safeguard individual liberty against overreaching government. Isn’t that why the Founders fought the Revolution?
But the bitter truth for Democrats after Thursday is that Mr. Trump’s liabilities may not matter if Mr. Biden is the party nominee. Mr. Trump at least looked vigorous and reminded voters of the pre-Covid economy. Mr. Biden looked like a feeble man no American should want going head to head with Mr. Putin or China’s Xi Jinping.
One inevitable question is why those closest to Mr. Biden let him run again. We and many others warned them. It was clearly a selfish act for him to seek a second term. But did they really think they could hide his decline from the public for an entire election campaign? It’s hard to believe they wanted this early debate as a way to change the campaign in their favor.
The debate instead has exposed him and their long cover-up of the truth. If they believe that Mr. Trump is the threat to democracy they claim, they did a disservice to the country by nominating Mr. Biden again. They owe an apology to Dean Phillips, the sole Democrat willing to challenge the President.
All of this presents Democrats with an excruciating choice. Mr. Biden has the delegates to win the nomination, and the only way he won’t be the nominee is if he decides to withdraw. The question is whether any prominent Democrats will now break from their party-wide omertà and call on the President to consider stepping aside. Perhaps there will be a delegation of the President’s closest friends willing to tell him so privately.
A Biden withdrawal would create some temporary panic as Democrats seek a new nominee. Vice President Kamala Harris isn’t the answer. But others would come to the fore as candidates, and the Democratic convention would command the attention of the world. You know Mr. Trump is counting on Democrats to stick with Mr. Biden, but the country deserves a better choice.
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McCaul: Biden admin ‘effectively withholding seven weapon systems’ from Israel
The House Foreign Affairs Committee chair said that he signed off on the weapons, and Congress appropriated them.
The Biden administration has held up transfers of seven weapon systems to the Jewish state, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Shannon Bream on the program Fox News Sunday.
“This is what is most disturbing to me—is that we’re withholding weapon systems that I have signed off on and Congress has appropriated with the intent of sending those weapons to Israel,” McCaul said. “Remember the supplemental? They were effectively withholding seven weapon systems.”
“I can’t get into the details,” the congressman said. “That is not helping Israel.”
Bream noted that Air Force Gen. Charles Q. Brown, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, had said that the United States would have difficulty defending the Jewish state against a Hezbollah attack.
“I respect him, Gen. Brown. I know him, but the fact is we’re not helping them,” McCaul said of Israel.
Robert Greenway, director of the Allison Center for National Security at the Heritage Foundation, wrote that the Biden administration was holding up the seven arms shipments as Iran reportedly is sending weapons to Hezbollah.
David Milstein, a former adviser to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s presidential campaign, wrote that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was right to release a video stating that it was “inconceivable” that the Biden administration was withholding weapons from Israel.
“Those who criticized him were wrong,” Milstein wrote.
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The Hezbollah Time Bomb Is Ticking
by David Daoud and Jonathan Schanzer
Let's not mince words: The Middle East is on the precipice of the most destructive war of the region's modern history.
This war did not begin on October 7. It actually began one day later, when Hezbollah, the most powerful proxy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, began attacking Israel. The Israelis, already on their back foot from the Hamas assault in the south of their country, struggled to gain equilibrium.
The Israeli Defense Forces began with proportional responses to Hezbollah's unprovoked attacks. But when that failed to deter the Lebanese terror group, the IDF steadily stepped up its retaliatory strikes. This, too, has done little. Hezbollah has lost more than 300 of its senior Radwan Forces along the border. An estimated 91,000 Lebanese citizens have been forced to evacuate from southern Lebanon. Yet, Hezbollah continues to fire at Israel.
The Israelis, for their part, have been forced to evacuate roughly the same number of citizens from their northern communities. This is an unacceptable situation for Israelis across the political spectrum, and the public is demanding decisive action from the government to resolve this threat. With peaceful resolutions appearing increasingly elusive, Israel and Hezbollah are inching toward what is expected to be their bloodiest confrontation yet.
A flurry of international efforts has been mounted to forestall the fight. This includes American and French proposals based on a gradual—or at least partial—implementation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701. The resolution calls for Hezbollah to withdraw north of the Litani River, which runs laterally across Lebanon, roughly 10 miles north of the border. In theory, this would solve the threat posed by Hezbollah ground forces, which are a legitimate concern after the October 7 attacks by Hamas, a less potent Iran-backed proxy. The resolution also calls for the deployment of Lebanese Armed Forces and U.N. troops to south Lebanon to help restore order, and for all armed groups, including Hezbollah, to disarm.
But the fact is that this resolution was never implemented after the last major dustup between Israel and Hezbollah in 2006. This reflects a lack of international will, as well as zero interest on the part of Hezbollah, not to mention Iran, for a permanent ceasefire with Israel. Why? Because Hezbollah—like its patron in Tehran—seeks nothing less than Israel's total destruction. This is borne out of the group's immutable hostility to Judaism and resulting aversion to Israel, a Jewish state, built on what it believes is sacred Islamic and Arab land. The group has therefore declared eternal war upon Israel, to be fought in perpetuity but gradually—"victory in increments," in the words of its Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah. Over time, the Iranian-led "Axis of Resistance" seeks to amass sufficient strength to deal the Jewish state a "fatal blow."
Preventing conflict between Israel and Hezbollah has become even more complicated in recent years. Lebanon is a failed state. Elections continue to be held, but the government in Beirut is a feckless placeholder. The country is in debt exceeding $200 billion, while its currency has lost almost 100 percent of its value. No economic or political reforms are on Lebanon's horizon.
Hezbollah has contributed significantly to this political and economic collapse. But it is also an integral part of Lebanon's social and political fabric, supported by a sizable bloc of Lebanese Shiites—perhaps the country's largest sect. The group won the most parliamentary votes of any party in 2022, and it continues to perform well in the polls. Since all Lebanese decision-making is done by sectarian consensus, and Hezbollah commands this large Shiite support, Hezbollah is an immovable object.
Complicating matters further is the sheer power that Hezbollah has amassed. The group has an arsenal of 200,000 rockets and missiles, a fleet of deadly drones, roughly 1,500 precision-guided munitions, and well-trained fighters. Some estimates suggest that Hezbollah's power is tantamount to a midsize European army. The Lebanese Armed Forces can therefore never forcibly disarm, relocate, or restrain Hezbollah. That would certainly spark a civil war, which the terror group would likely win.
Meanwhile, the international community's fixation on futile deals has only whetted Hezbollah's appetite for violence. The group sees the desperation to prevent a wider war. Its leaders note with glee how Israel has been restrained by the Biden administration. Their belief—mistaken and dangerous—is that Israel's hands are tied by the White House. Nasrallah believes that "America controls Israel," that the country is merely an American "forward military base. " Indeed, the Hezbollah leader said in March, "When the Americans put their foot down, threatening to halt funds, Israel quakes in fear. When the Americans halt weapons shipments, the Israeli Chief of Staff quickly takes stock of his remaining ammunition."
The Biden administration's baseless signals of public displeasure with Jerusalem are undeniably seen by Hezbollah as a constraint on Israeli freedom of action. They are also treated as a green light for Hezbollah's provocations. Washington's decision to pause weapons shipments to Israel surely encouraged Hezbollah's latest and most dangerous escalation. The group's attacks suddenly became more destructive, reaching deeper into Israel.
For now, Israelis are weighing two terrible options. They can succumb to growing international pressure to accept a bad ceasefire deal. That would restore a deceptive quiet to their northern border, but it would also leave Hezbollah intact and able to harm Israel in ways that the country has vowed to prevent after the 10/7 attack.
Alternatively, Israel could hit back, initiating a conflict themselves to eliminate Hezbollah. The so-called "Dahiyeh Doctrine" adopted by the Israeli military promises to eviscerate the group's bases of operations throughout Lebanon.
However, the Israelis are keenly aware of the price of such a war. Hezbollah's destructive forces—with perhaps help from Iran and other surrounding proxies—could force Israel to fight a war that yields tens of thousands of Israeli deaths, and billions of dollars in destruction.
Off-ramps for this conflict are increasingly difficult to locate. The Biden administration, if it seeks to prevent this war, must quickly reverse its current course. Diplomatic efforts must evolve into pressure campaigns against the Iranian regime and its proxies. And the public attempts to restrain Israel in Gaza and Lebanon must immediately cease. Such messaging is only pushing the region to a conflict of historic proportions.
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