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These are a few comments about what is happening in America. Covid pretty much eliminated children from exercising . We shut down normalcy and children began binge eating and now they seek operations to reduce the effect of binge eating..We are learning Fauci knew the virus escaped from a Chinese lab he urged America finance so we could learn about dangerous germs etc. Fauci then lied and urged we shut down an entire economy, the largest in the world,
Biden shut down the largest airport in Afghanistan that Trump urged we retain and keep open so we could withdraw in a controlled manner. Consequently, we needlessly lost 13 American military personnel, hundred of those who helped us and we abandoned billions of dollars of arms. The Taliban now has one of the largest military forces in the world and no doubt will make another terrorist attack on our homeland.
We just emptied our Sudan Embassy because of Biden's contempt for Trump and his disregard for the effectiveness of The Abraham Accords because Sudan and Israel were engaged, actively so, in conducting commerce and trade etc..
Inflation has exploded as we chose energy dependence when it was totally un-necessary. Nay stupid.
China now is playing footsy with our former allies and Xi is going around the world telling our former allies we are a sinking world leader.
Finally, we have had verified 51 American intelligence officers signed a letter in order to influence the 2020 election so Biden would win. The FBI knew there was no Russian involvement and Sec of State Blinkin purposely sought their signatures.
Meanwhile, we are learning about money shifts from China to Biden family members through Hunter Has any of this laundered money touched our President's hands? Furthermore, has there been efforts to stop these transfers by the FBI and AG. Meanwhile, Hunter now has moved into The White House.
If the American people allow this to slide kiss this republic goodbye. In less than a few months the GOP has revealed all this while the FBI sat on this, knowing it had happened for 2 years.
Trump was the one Democrats sought to blame he was guilty of what the Biden Administration were doing.
My wife believes nothing will happen ie. so what who cares nothing will happen.
Don't forget Biden told us he knew nothing about this.
Finally, Biden refuses to meet and negotiate with McCarthy who has come up with a plan that addresses serious budget issues..
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Do we even know we are socialists Now?
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Democrat lies and GOP factual responses:
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See below for some helpful charge and response talkers on the Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023, courtesy of Rep. Buddy Carter
CHARGE: Raising the debt limit should not be up for negotiation.
RESPONSE: As Vice President, Joe Biden led debt limit negotiations for the Obama administration. In 2011, Joe Biden was “really pleased and thankful” for the opportunity to negotiate on the debt limit.
Biden even said negotiating the debt limit in 2011 was an ”honor”: “I have had the great honor of spending hours and hours and hours, as you’ve covered my negotiating the debt limit and other things, with the leaders of the Republican Party.”
During 2011 debt limit negotiations, Biden said “we’ve got to make some real progress” on the long-term debt. Back then, the national debt was around $14 trillion. Today, the national debt is over $31 trillion – and Biden refuses to negotiate.
CHARGE: House Republicans are irresponsible by refusing to pass a clean debt ceiling increase – which Congress passed three times under the Trump administration.
RESPONSE: There were no clean debt limit increases under the Trump administration. House and Senate Democrats participated in negotiations and leveraged the debt limit every time to demand spending changes and other policies.
CHARGE: House Republicans have not produced a budget to show the American people where they want to eliminate waste.
RESPONSE: This bill has $4.5 trillion in savings. A budget resolution cannot raise the debt limit and cannot get signed into law because it is never presented to the President. We're prioritizing the approach that would lift the debt ceiling in a responsible manner.
CHARGE: House Republicans’ “plan” is just vague spending limits. President Biden’s budget provides detail on how every penny should be spent.
RESPONSE: House Republicans will soon begin work on our appropriations bills, which will prioritize spending, eliminate waste, and meet the fiscal year 2022 limit. In addition, the Limit, Save, Grow Act contains roughly $1 trillion in mandatory savings.
CHARGE: House Republicans’ bill would cut veterans medical care.
RESPONSE: House Republicans will responsibly prioritize spending in the upcoming appropriations process. Democrats have been playing games with veterans for years in order to make room for their pet projects elsewhere in the budget. We should prioritize meeting our veterans’ needs instead of trying to leverage their benefits for unrelated spending.
As Speaker McCarthy said, “Don’t believe anyone who says these are draconian limits. They’re the same spending levels we operated under just last [December]. And we’ll make sure that our veterans and our service members are taken care of.”
CHARGE: House Republicans’ bill would kill green jobs spurred by the Inflation Reduction Act, offshore American manufacturing, increase energy bills, give asthma to kids, and literally melt bones.
RESPONSE: Over 90 percent of climate subsidies from the so-called Inflation Reduction Act go directly to large corporations with over $1 billion in sales, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation. These market-distorting credits are bad policy, bad economics, and will ultimately benefit foreign manufacturers in China at the expense of American taxpayers.
The Limit, Save, Grow Act makes us less dependent on China. By including the bipartisan Lower Energy Costs Act in House Republicans’ debt limit plan, we will expand American energy production and lower costs for the American people.
CHARGE: House Republicans’ bill would defund law enforcement, including the FBI.
RESPONSE: House Republicans will continue to support and defend law enforcement by prioritizing spending in the upcoming appropriations process. This bill ensures that overall discretionary spending is capped at the same level the federal government was operating under in December 2022 – just four months ago.
The American people deserve an honest accounting of the scope of a proposed $4 billion pork project to build a new FBI headquarters that is costing more than twice what it took to build the Pentagon.
CHARGE: House Republicans’ bill would cut meals on wheels, leave Americans across the country hungry, cut cancer research funding, take health care away from millions of Americans, and cut education.
RESPONSE: House Republicans will prioritize spending in the upcoming appropriations process. This bill ensures that overall discretionary spending is capped at the same level the federal government was operating under in December 2022 – just four months ago
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Mahr has begun telling it like he always knew it was. Why all of a sudden? Was it to keep his program alive?
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Bill Maher's Blunt Question to the Black Community in Chicago Will Surely Trigger Liberals
By Matt Vespa
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As I have said all along. It is weaponized political nonsense:
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Is Alvin Bragg’s Case Against Trump Constitutional?
Biden—and all future presidents—should hope that it is judged to violate the Supremacy Clause.
By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Kristin A. Shapiro
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of Donald Trump could mean trouble down the road for Joe Biden. “I think our Republican AGs and DAs”—attorneys general and district attorneys—“should get creative,” Mike Davis, a Republican former Senate staffer, told the New York Post. Rep. James Comer told Fox that he’s heard from at least two prosecutors who “want to know if there are ways they can go after the Bidens now.”
Mr. Biden himself is currently safe under the accepted view that sitting presidents are immune from prosecution. But under the Trump precedent, what’s to stop an ambitious Republican prosecutor somewhere from bringing dubious state charges against him before a hostile jury after he leaves office? Likewise for his successors of either party. Every four to eight years, prosecutors would order up a presidential ham sandwich. Presidents might end up having to flee the country when they leave office.
What the House Judiciary Committee Heard in New York City
But there’s a way Mr. Trump could stop the madness that would serve his own interests as well as his successors’. His lawyers should file a notice in the Southern District of New York to remove the case to federal court under a unique legal defense: immunity under the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.
The clause provides that federal laws, including the Constitution, “shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, any thing in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.” The Supreme Court stated in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) that “it is of the very essence” of the federal government’s supremacy “to remove all obstacles to its action within its own sphere, and so to modify every power vested in subordinate governments, as to exempt its own operations from their own influence.” The justices invalidated Maryland’s tax on the Bank of the United States on grounds that the power to tax the federal government would make a state “capable of arresting all the measures of the government, and of prostrating it at the foot of the states.”
One pivotal aspect of the Supremacy Clause is its provision of immunity to federal officers from state criminal prosecution for actions relating to their federal duties. The seminal case is In re Neagle (1890), in which the justices held that California couldn’t criminally prosecute a federal marshal for killing a man in defense of Justice Stephen Field. If a federal officer “can be arrested and brought to trial in a state court for an alleged offense against the law of the state, yet warranted by the federal authority they possess,” the court found, “the operations of the general government may at any time be arrested at the will of one of its members.”
To be sure, the case against Mr. Trump involves conduct that wasn’t “warranted by the federal authority” he possessed. But there is a strong argument that Supremacy Clause immunity should extend to any state criminal prosecutions of federal officers undertaken because of their federal service, even if the charged conduct is unrelated to their federal duties. Permitting states to burden former federal officers on account of their federal services offends the Supremacy Clause’s core principles and makes it easy for aggressive state prosecutors to circumvent. As the Supreme Court warned in Neagle, “unfriendly” states could administer the law “in such a manner as to paralyze the operations of the government.” That threat exists anytime former or current federal officers are targeted for criminal prosecution because of their federal service. A president or other official can’t lead effectively under constant threat of retaliatory prosecution.
Mr. Trump’s foes like to say that no one is above the law; and Mr. Biden’s enemies would no doubt adopt the same slogan. But Supremacy Clause immunity wouldn’t vitiate that principle. It wouldn’t prevent federal prosecutions, and it would protect against state criminal prosecutions only when the prosecutor targeted the defendant for his federal service. Mr. Trump could still be prosecuted if he shot a passerby on Fifth Avenue.
A recognition of Supremacy Clause immunity in this context would involve an inquiry into a prosecutor’s state of mind, something courts are reluctant to undertake in most contexts. But not all—courts are regularly required to determine, for example, whether a prosecutor has engaged in racial discrimination in jury selection, or whether a state criminal prosecution is motivated by a desire to harass the defendant.
First Amendment case law also recognizes, in the context of protecting core constitutional rights, the impermissibility of disparate law-enforcement treatment. In Nieves v. Bartlett (2019), the high court held that probable cause isn’t sufficient to block a retaliatory-arrest claim “when a plaintiff presents objective evidence that he was arrested when otherwise similarly situated individuals not engaged in the same sort of protected speech had not been.”
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Et Tu Brute!
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If Western Civilization Dies, Put It Down as a Suicide
By Gerald Baker
We are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit.
A few years ago the then-boss of Goldman Sachs explained to me the main reason he thought the firm had risen to such a dominant position in global investment banking over the previous half century. At the start of that period, banking was still dominated by a blue-blood class. In London especially, where I began my career in finance, the City was a place in which, in a still heavily regulated market, a slot in one of the big institutions was a coveted ticket to a life of riches.
But the tickets were available mainly to men from the right sort of background. The rules for identifying and selecting these men were opaque. There was no formal bar on anyone from a particular socioeconomic status being admitted to the magic circle—that would have been crass and, even then, illegal. Instead a complex system of semiotics did the job of weeding out the riffraff. A flattened vowel pronunciation, a vulgar word for lavatory, the wrong sort of shoes, and you were excluded without even understanding why. In Britain, the system’s overseers had an acronym by which the untouchables were designated: NQOCD, for “not quite our class, dear.”
Goldman came along and cut through this thicket of asinine, self-perpetuating privilege. It simply hired the best people for the job, however they spoke, whatever they looked like. As long as you were smart, driven, ruthless and committed to making money and beating the living daylights out of the competition, you were in. It worked.
I was reminded of this when I read last week that employees at Goldman have recently been encouraged by their leaders to embrace a full rainbow range of “pronouns” when identifying themselves in communications, including such neologisms as “ze,” “zir” and “zemself.”
It’s a small thing, another little step down in the long, steady descent of Goldman, which I’m told still hires a good number of people of genuine talent, alongside the rising numbers of identity-box-checking drones who help enforce the unspoken rules of woke compliance. We might dismiss it as another piece of ludicrous public-relations messaging designed to keep social-media storm troopers at bay. But I prefer the story I heard recently of a British army officer who, finding zemself seconded to a suitably modern government department and faced with a similar instruction to identify zis pronouns, promptly circulated a memo to colleagues with the declaration that his preferred pronouns were “colonel” and “sir.”
In its small way the Goldman memo colorfully captures the deepening mess the precepts of contemporary ideological orthodoxy are making of our society, our economy and our democracy. It highlights how the real progress made over decades toward a fairer and more equal society is being thrown away under the authority of a new set of rules and rulers as elitist and privileged as the old ones.
For those ancien régime aristocrats, it was having the right shoes or the proper accent. For today’s, it is adherence to the constantly changing rules of ideologically approved thought and language.
It was thanks to the radical meritocracy and audacious dynamism of institutions like Goldman that we were able to dismantle so much of the authority of elite power structures that restrained us from fulfilling our potential. The past 50 years have been marked by the genuine eradication of barriers to opportunity for the underprivileged regardless of ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation or anything else. This is how we were genuinely starting to fulfill the promise of equality.
But the cultural revolution that began in the past decade is re-erecting those barriers and creating new elite power structures, elevated not by talent or hard work, but, curiously, by membership of the self-approved class, signaled by the right luxury beliefs and articulated by the right “inclusive” language.
Adrian Wooldridge, who has written a book on the rise of meritocracy, frames this in a recent article in the Spectator. The left, he says, is “creating a new social order based on virtue, rather than ability.”
Bear with me because I am going to extrapolate from these baneful developments to a much larger worry about the geopolitical conditions we confront.
As we survey the competition between global civilizations in the multipolar world we now inhabit, we see that the West is challenged as it hasn’t been in centuries. It’s axiomatic that a rising China and perhaps other powers look like formidable contenders for global leadership—with implications for our own security and prosperity.
But if we are losing that struggle, it isn’t because of the superiority of authoritarian, communist or autocratic systems. We know that liberal capitalism has done more for human prosperity, health and freedom than any other economic or political system.
If we are losing, it is because we are losing our soul, our sense of purpose as a society, our identity as a civilization. We in the West are in the grip of an ideology that disowns our genius, denounces our success, disdains merit, elevates victimhood, embraces societal self-loathing and enforces it all in a web of exclusionary and authoritarian rules, large and small.
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It is OK to feel powerful but you also have to be powerful if you want to act in that manner.
Biden is weak, America is weal and we no longer can act like a world leader when you are sinking.
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Scolding Isn’t a Foreign Policy
America needs friends, and it isn’t going to win them by delivering lectures.
By Walter Russell Mead
Internationally, it was another grim week for the Biden administration, the United States of America, and world peace. Brazil, the country with the largest population, economy and landmass in Latin America, reinforced its alignment with China as its president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva pledged to work with Xi Jinping to build a new global order and called on the European Union and the U.S. to stop shipping weapons to Ukraine. Indian officials reported that China is supporting the development of a military listening post on Myanmar’s strategic Great Coco Island in the Bay of Bengal. Saudi Arabia, which flirted a few weeks ago with opening diplomatic relations with Israel, is intensifying its oil cooperation with Russia and now seeks a meeting with Hamas. Farther south, a Sudanese military faction backed by Russia’s Wagner Group battles for control of Africa’s third-largest nation.
The usual spinners and makeup artists are doing their best to make the disorderly unraveling of the American-led world order look like a visionary triumph of enlightened foreign policy, but former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers expressed a more cogent view. Describing America’s increasing loneliness on the world scene, Mr. Summers said, “Somebody from a developing country said to me, ‘What we get from China is an airport. What we get from the United States is a lecture.’ ”
When the Biden administration steps down from the bully pulpit, good things can still happen. A year ago, Ferdinand Marcos Jr.—son of the U.S. Cold War ally and Philippine strongman whose 1986 overthrow was hailed by democracy activists as a milestone in world history—ascended to his father’s former office after a decisive victory in a less-than-pristine election. The democracy lobby was appalled. Six Democratic senators, including three members of the Foreign Relations Committee, wrote a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken warning him to prioritize democracy and rule-of-law issues. Their core prescription for managing the Filipino leader was the same one they prescribe for almost every American bilateral relationship: Lecture more, and when that fails, use sanctions.
Fortunately, the administration was smarter than this. While the Philippines ranks low on the Freedom House global freedom index and ranks high on Transparency International’s measurement of perceived corruption, its location makes the country’s cooperation vital for any serious attempt to deter China from an invasion of Taiwan. Stroking and petting the democracy lobbyists while insulating the relationship from their ill-counseled meddling, Team Biden persuaded Mr. Marcos to allow the U.S. access to four new strategically important bases on its territory as the two countries launched their largest joint military exercise in three decades.
This is surely a better outcome than anything the Biden administration has accomplished by the impassioned stream of moralistic lectures it unleashed against the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
On Mr. Blinken’s recent visit to Vietnam, he again chose morality over moralism, refraining from criticizing the Communist Party of Vietnam for its many policies that displease the democracy lobby in the interest of shoring up the coalition of states aiming to prevent Chinese hegemony in the Indo-Pacific.
Dean Acheson, Harry S. Truman’s secretary of state, thought deeply about the place of morality in foreign policy. “The righteous who seek to deduce foreign policy from ethical or moral principles are as misleading and misled as the modern Machiavellis who would conduct our foreign relations without regard to them,” he said in 1964.
America’s Cold War policy aimed at stopping the spread of Soviet tyranny was, Acheson rightly believed, deeply moral. Today, the Chinese Communist Party has become an expansionist, tyrannical power whose inordinate ambition endangers freedom world-wide. America’s interests and values both lead us to oppose that ambition, even as we seek to avoid the catastrophe of another great-power war.
Too many self-described democracy activists want the U.S. to dissipate its diplomatic energy in moralistic posturing. They would rather we prioritized sermons and sanctions over building a multilateral coalition to check Chinese expansion. Their problem is not that they love righteousness too much. It is that they have thought too little and too superficially about what righteousness really demands.
Moral foreign policy often requires pragmatism. Defeating Nazi Germany required an alliance with the equally evil Soviet Union. And President Nixon’s rapprochement with Mao’s China, then at the horrifying acme of the Cultural Revolution, similarly was driven by the need to counter the greater threat posed at that time by the Soviet Union.
After the Cold War, many Americans thought that global moral improvement had replaced national security as the principal goal of American foreign policy and that pragmatic calculation was a form of moral cowardice.
Those illusions can no longer be sustained.
America needs friends now, and nobody likes or trusts the village scold.
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