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August 2022

The Biden Administration’s Most Audacious Lawless Act Yet; And A Potential Response Francis Menton

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2022-8-25-the-governments-most-audacious-lawless-act-yet-and-a-potential-response

Every day it gets harder to keep up with the accelerating lawlessness of the Biden Administration. The basic strategy is, just do whatever the left wants, using all the vast powers and resources of the federal government, and dare anyone to try to stop you. To mention just a few recent examples, one day it’s a multi-trillion-dollar transformation of the energy economy without Congressional authorization (perhaps slowed down by the Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA); the next day it’s holding meetings to pressure tech giants like Twitter and Facebook to censor the speech of political opponents; next it’s weaponizing the Justice Department and FBI to investigate and prosecute the leading political adversary on the flimsiest of pretexts. Additional examples could fill tomes.

But now we have what could well be the most audacious lawless act yet. I’m talking about the plan to “cancel” some hundreds of billions of dollars of student loans, announced by President Biden on Wednesday August 24.

With this one, they’re barely pretending to have a legal basis. Supposedly, according to the Department of Education’s legal memo, it’s the 2001 HEROES Act, 20 USC Section 1098bb(a)(1) and (2)(A), passed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, giving the Secretary of Education authority to “waive or modify” provisions of student financial assistance programs at times of “national emergency”; combined with the current Covid-19 “national emergency,” just extended by Biden past the upcoming election. Does this fool anyone? It’s the most naked possible vote buying, in the run-up to the mid-terms. The cynical political calculation is that the Democratic Party base of upscale young college grads will show their gratitude for the $10,000 or $20,000 handouts with their votes, while the blue collar workers who never took out student loans will not perceive how they are getting hosed. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court will likely strike this down under the Major Questions Doctrine when the issue finally gets there, but by that time this election (and probably the next one) will be long over. Maybe a Democratic Congress can even pack the Court by then.

MY SAY: WHO SAYS WEALTHY LIBERAL ELITES DON’T CARE ABOUT WORKING PEOPLE?

To begin with that accusation is false. I live in an upscale liberal neighborhood that just helped Jerry Nadler trounce Carolyn Maloney. In their campaign outings both trashed rich Republicans for ignoring the working class. The unvarnished truth is that well off liberals discuss the working class more than anyone else.

Exhibit A: in the coastal and suburban playgrounds of the liberals the working class are mainstays in the conversation:

It is so hard to get good help now. They go on to blame Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

2.We have to build better housing for immigrants who work here. We must become a sanctuary city to avoid these shortages in domestic and commercial help. Donald Trump’ fault.

3.The electricians and the plumbers take weeks to get here and now charge even more. Trump’s fault.

The restaurants are so shorthanded now and the service is getting poor while the prices go way up for us. Trump’s fault.
My car took a week to service they are so shorthanded with mechanical help. Trump’s fault.

They really care.   rsk

Mahmoud Abbas’ ‘Holocaust Inversion’ A vile ideological tactic to malign Israel and Jews. Richard L. Cravatts

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/mahmoud-abbas-holocaust-inversion-richard-l-cravatts/

When Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas spoke at a news conference in Berlin with Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Aug. 17, he publicly revealed, perhaps inadvertently, that while he has a long-standing record of Holocaust denial, he still felt perfectly willing to draw a comparison between the lethal actions of the Third Reich toward Jews and Israel’s actions toward the Palestinians.

“From 1947 to the present day,” Abbas said, “Israel has committed 50 massacres in Palestinian villages and cities—in Deir Yassin, Tantura, Kafr Qasim, and many others—50 massacres, 50 Holocausts. And until today, and every day, there are casualties killed by the Israeli military.” 

It was Abbas’ use of the word “Holocaust” that drew such a fierce blowback, not only because it was recklessly uttered in Germany, but that it suggested that the deaths of Palestinians by Israel exceeded the extermination of Jews by the Nazis—in fact, absurdly, fifty times as many deaths.

Abbas, of course, is well known for his crude Holocaust denial, having written his doctoral dissertation that cast doubt on the number of Jewish fatalities in the Final Solution. In 1984, that dissertation was published as a book, The Other Side: The Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism, and laid out the fantasy that Zionists themselves were complicit in supporting the Nazi genocide, that they told the Nazis “to do as they wish to the Jews, as long as it guarantees individual immigration to Palestine . . . This was because it [the Zionist leaders] thought that raising the number of victims would increase its rights at the end of the war, when the bounty is divided.”

In Abbas’ hallucinatory worldview, Zionists were so inhumane, so rapacious and murderous in their zeal to create a Jewish homeland, that they willingly sacrificed millions of their brethren in order to achieve that statehood, not to mention reaping reparations as a result of inflated fatality numbers.

And even if Jews are to be believed when they recount the Holocaust, Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians is inexcusable since they should understand suffering and death by a murderous regime “If they [Jews] say that they made sacrifices in World War II, and we respect what they say, they should not treat us the way they were treated,” Abbas told Polish journalists in 2015. “We must not be a victim of the victim.” 

Big Business Enables Race-Based Discrimination in College Admissions How woke corporations aid and abet racism. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/big-business-enables-race-based-discrimination-matthew-vadum/

Corporate America is awash in racism and racist brainwashing, so it’s not surprising that it is defending the anti-white and anti-Asian racism practiced at the nation’s colleges.

It’s gotten so bad in the world of business that hurting people with the wrong skin color is now a Fortune 500 best practice.

This corporate racism has only intensified since violent career criminal and drug addict George Floyd died of Fentanyl poisoning while he happened to be in Minneapolis police custody on May 25, 2020, and was instantly transformed by leftists into a symbol of police brutality for the ages.

Since St. George’s martyrdom, big businesses have funneled untold millions of dollars to the terrorist outfit known as Black Lives Matter, embracing the faddish lies of the 1619 Project as they race to one-up each other in their embrace of “anti-racism,” the misnamed brainchild of racism-profiteer Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers), who insists that the only way to get rid of racist discrimination is to perpetrate it against white people.

These corrupt companies seem to be fulfilling Vladimir Lenin’s much quoted aphorism turned cliché that “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

Businesses nowadays compel employees to embrace Black Lives Matter and denounce themselves as racist for the sin of being born white. As Cynical Theories author James Lindsay has said, this is cult programming, not responsible human resources management, because it teaches employees that they are defective and in need of correction.

And as Christopher Rufo writes, diversity consultants teach that “all whites have unconscious, ‘implicit’ bias that they must vigilantly program themselves to overcome.” This “has become an article of faith across corporate boardrooms, academe and law enforcement, even though the premise is unscientific and impossible to verify.”

In the pursuit of so-called racial justice, the Walt Disney Co. terrorizes its employees, intimidating them into unquestioning acceptance of the most orthodox tenets of Marxist-derived Critical Race Theory. American Express gives managers bonuses for firing white employees. Hollywood increasingly refuses to hire white, especially white male, writers. Wells Fargo cruelly gives fake job interviews to minorities for jobs already filled in order to satisfy internal diversity interviewing quotas. Dropbox openly discriminates against whites in the hiring process.

PEN Works to Destroy Education By Robert Weissberg

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/pen_works_to_destroy_education.html

Controlling education is the grand prize in today’s culture wars. Why worry about elections if voters arrive at the polls fully ideologically indoctrinated? The Left has recognized this reality for decades and its long march through the institutions to control schools is now finally paying off. How else can one explain why such views as Critical Race Theory now infuse the curriculum from the earliest grades to graduate seminars in elite universities?  

While the Left has been conquering education for decades, conservatives have now finally awakened and are fighting back. The recent election for governor in Virginia and legislation in Florida, for example, illustrated what can happen when parents discover that junior is learning about his/her/them White Privilege. Meanwhile school board elections now can draw national attention.  

The Left is aware of this conservative counterattack and has predictably mobilized to crush all those insisting that education is about acquiring skills such as literacy versus knowing that the Founders were evil rich white slave-owners. The Left’s push back is an all hands-on-deck enterprise, total mobilization in military terms, to sustain its ongoing conquest of American education. Even groups that ostensibly have nothing to do with education have been conscripted to the Left’s crusade.

Such conscription is illustrated by how the venerable organization,  PEN, whose purpose is  to “Defend free expression, support persecuted writers, and promote literary culture” has joined the fray. This is a major mission shift since for over a century PEN had protected controversial authors from censorship, especially imprisonment in dictatorships, and it remains a prestigious free-speech organization worldwide. Now, however, it has focused on K-12 education and joined the woke army’s assault on traditional American values.

In a recent report PEN embraced tactics, notably demonizing opponents, lying, and twisting language that is commonplace among today’s social justice warriors. For the report’s authors, when a state legislature regulates school curriculum in a way antithetical to the Left agendas, it is labeled “imposing a gag order” and “an attack on education.” This “attack” may also mandate “curriculum transparency” (scare quotes in original) that permits parents to discover and then report via hotlines to state authorities what their children are being taught.

Republicans Don’t Get It Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are plowing new and dangerous ground. Meanwhile, the GOP is silent. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/25/republicans-dont-get-it/

When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) looks around his adopted hometown of Washington, D.C.—a city shamelessly and aggressively using every lever of federal power to destroy Donald Trump and the 76 million Americans who dared to vote for him in 2020—he sees only one menace to the well-being of the nation:

January 6 protesters.

“I do think it’s an important issue,” McConnell said in response to a reporter’s question about a recent poll that ranked “threats to democracy” as the top concern among registered voters who responded. “There were those who were trying to prevent the orderly transfer of power for the first time in American history and that was not good.”

But contrary to his somber reflections, January 6 was very good for McConnell; he got exactly what he wanted after the tear gas smoke cleared that evening. As I explained here, not only did McConnell intentionally leave the Capitol largely unguarded, he warned of the irreparable damage to the republic if his Senate Republican colleagues demanded an audit of contested states—the “official proceeding” actually taking place when the building was breached. McConnell later cooed to a reporter that he had prevailed that day.

“Exhilarating” is how McConnell described his emotions after congressional Republicans, cowed by the four-hour disturbance, abandoned their plans to seek a 2020 election audit commission.

In a way, McConnell is right that the events of January 6 represent a grave threat to the country. They do—just not in the way he thinks. 

The Capitol protest is being used as the pretext to criminalize political dissent as the FBI continues its dragnet to round up 850-and-counting Trump supporters (with new arrests announced just this week) and the Justice Department circles Donald Trump as the alleged instigator of the “insurrection.”

Hunter Biden Just Slipped Up, Telling The WHOLE World That His Father Has Dementia

According to New York Post writer Miranda Devine’s new book, Hunter Biden accidentally let it slip to his therapist that his father has dementia.

Hunter communicated this as a light-hearted turn of phrase, joking that if his father had overcome dementia then he was indeed a man of capability and respect.

Something tells me that he wasn’t just joking around, and while one part of his statement may have been mockery, the subject of that statement seems to have a growing body of evidence behind it…

Let’s take a look at what he said:

A few months before Joe Biden launched his presidential campaign, Hunter Biden was exchanging text messages with Keith Ablow, his therapist and friend, in early January 2019. The book highlighted that Ablow and Hunter were discussing Democratic presidential candidates when Ablow said, “Your dad is the answer” and then later quoted himself, mockingly saying, “Any man who can triumph over dementia is a giant. Think what he could do for our nation’s needed recovery.”

Falling Life Expectancy Driven By Flailing, Failing Federal Health Baloney-aucracy Bob Maistros

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/26/falling-life-expectancy-driven-by-flailing-failing-federal-health-baloney-aucracy/

“New NCHS report shows life expectancy declined in all 50 states and DC in 2020” – National Center for Health Statistics tweet

Life expectancy didn’t just “decline.” Per woke medical news site Medpage Today, it “plummet(ed).” By nearly two years, a gobsmacking statistic.

This commentator knows what you’re thinking. NBC News beat us to it: “The main reason for the decline, of course, was Covid-19.”

Of course.

Except … expectancy was already flat or down six times between 2012 and 2021. After steadily rising for generations.

Hmmm. Your correspondent is hardly the first to connect these dots, but guess what else changed in Health Care World in the early 2010s? Hint: starts with “O” and ends with “care.”

University of Colorado Boulder professor Ryan Masters, author of a previous life expectancy study (spoiler alert: lifespans dropped further in 2021) noted: “(H)igh rates of obesity and heart disease, along with inequities in access to health care, were already leading the U.S. to lose ground with respect to health and survival before the pandemic. ‘Those same factors made the U.S. more vulnerable … to the mortality consequences of COVID-19.’”

Death, Despair, And Lockdowns

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/26/death-despair-and-lockdowns/

The old saying that the cure is deadlier than the disease is a worn-out cliche. But that doesn’t mean it can’t make a point. The pandemic lockdowns are a perfect example of a banality being absolutely true.

Over about two-and-one-half years COVID-19 has killed a little more than 1 million Americans and another 5.5 million in the rest of the world. It’s a grim toll. At least its deadly effects will decrease as it becomes endemic.

The same can’t be said for the lockdowns. Their poison will be killing victims for years.

A recent article from the London Telegraph posted in Yahoo News tells the story of “​​experts” believing “decisions taken by the government in the earliest stages of the pandemic may now be coming back to bite.”

“Policies that kept people indoors, scared them away from hospitals and deprived them of treatment and primary care are finally taking their toll,” said the Telegraph.

For more than three months, excess deaths in England and Wales have averaged around 1,000 a week, and none are due to COVID.

It’s not as if the decision-makers weren’t warned. Robert Dingwall, a Nottingham Trent University professor and a government adviser during the pandemic, told the Telegraph that “the picture seems very consistent with what some of us were suggesting from the beginning.”

On our side of the Atlantic, “from April 2020 through at least the end of 2021, Americans died from non-COVID causes at an average annual rate 97,000 in excess of previous trends,” says a National Bureau of Economic Research paper.

It further contends that “excess mortality continues into calendar year 2022,” though it’s safe to say they will persist well past that date.

The authors, one from the University of Chicago Economics Department, the other a partner from a data and investment research firm, say “it should be no surprise that a widespread disruption to patient circumstances would degrade health and even elevate mortality from chronic conditions. Nevertheless, early in the pandemic some experts mocked this perspective as a ‘pet theory about the fatal dangers of quarantine.’” 

The “Great Reset”: A Blueprint for Destroying Freedom, Innovation, and Prosperity by J.B. Shurk

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18825/great-reset-wef

Notice that no nation has managed merely to print money and tax its citizens on the path to prosperity. Real wealth cannot simply be conjured from thin air. There must be recognized value in what a nation and its citizens possess.

More than any other source for national wealth, however, one towers above the rest: innovation. The ability of the human mind to create something new and valuable provides society with endless wealth creation…. Innovation is the magic sauce for generating wealth.

Humans struggling merely to survive in the world do not waste time, labor, or resources on projects that offer no prospect for future reward. Humans working as servants to the state under centrally controlled economies have no incentive to innovate. Only when private ownership and personal liberty combine can human innovation flourish. Freedom is the secret ingredient to innovation’s magic sauce for increasing wealth.

A country whose institutions do not respect property rights or whose customs do not value freedom will remain a barren desert for human innovation. In this way, nations have a great incentive to liberalize over time. Should they not, they quickly become financially and militarily vulnerable to more innovative and wealthier nations. Observing this simple truth, classical liberals have always understood free markets as the gateway to human emancipation. Economic self-interest, in other words, ultimately leads to expansive human rights and liberties across the planet.

Nothing about Western politicians’ embrace of the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” or “Build Back Better” paradigms protects property rights or liberty in the slightest. The WEF’s agenda promotes radically anti-liberal programs… [that] will smother human innovation by first depriving Westerners of their freedoms.

Wealthy free nations are a threat to the WEF’s New World Order. If censorship must be embraced to control the “narrative,” then so be it. If citizens must be denied freedom of movement under the guise of a “health emergency,” no big deal. If private bank accounts must be seized to intimidate protesters, then such threats are the price for ensuring compliance. In this way, the WEF’s plans for a controlled economy intentionally reverse centuries of liberal progress. Political leaders today are dragging the West into the past.

First, individual liberties will continue disappearing. Then, the greatest economic engine of all, innovation, will dry up. Finally, wealth will return solely to the hands of a small “ruling class” minority. This is the future the World Economic Forum hails as “progress.” It is not. It is a recipe for human bondage.