https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-pathetic-energy-theater/
The New York Times reports that President Biden has a plan to counteract Russia’s energy stranglehold on Europe:
The Biden Administration announced on Tuesday that it was working with gas and crude oil suppliers from the Middle East, North Africa and Asia to bolster supplies to Europe in coming weeks, in an effort to blunt the threat that Russia could cut off fuel shipments in the escalating conflict over Ukraine.
The EU currently imports about a third of its oil and gas from Russia. And, of course, the Germans have been busily making the situation worse by shuttering their nuclear-powered electric plants and pushing for the opening of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which would bypass Ukraine and further entrench German dependence on Vladimir Putin’s petro power.
“We expect to be prepared to ensure alternative supplies covering a significant majority of the potential shortfall,’’ a Biden administration official told the Times.
And if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. . .
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/new-york-judge-strikes-down-governor-hochuls-mask-mandate/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first
A New York State Supreme Court judge on Monday ruled that Governor Kathy Hochul’s mask mandate for schools and other public locations is unconstitutional.
Judge Thomas Rademaker found that the governor and the state health commissioner did not have the authority to enact a mask mandate without the state legislature, given that the governor no longer has emergency powers.
The mask mandate has been in place since mid-December, when the state saw a surge in the highly transmissible Omicron variant.
“There can be no question that every person in this State wishes, wants and prays that this era of COVID ends soon and they will surely do their part to see that is accomplished,” Rademaker wrote in his decision. “However, enacting any laws to this end is entrusted solely to the State Legislature. While the intentions of Commissioner Bassett and Governor Hochul appear to be well aimed squarely at doing what they believe is right to protect the citizens of New York State, they must take their case to the State Legislature.”
The ruling comes from a state Supreme Court based in Nassau County, which is a trial court. The New York Court of Appeals is akin to a more traditional “Supreme Court” in terms of authority, in that it is the state’s highest court.
https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/25/the-bitter-fruit-of-pandemic-paranoia/
One media report says “the U.S. economy dropped down to a slower gear in January” due to the Omicron variant. But that’s being overly charitable. This is President Joe Biden’s economy. And his party’s. Leaving them in charge of federal policy beyond 2022 will lead to years if not decades of regret.
Surveys of senior business executives provide “the first clear indication of the damage done to the U.S. economy in the first month of the new year,” MarketWatch said Monday. “A ‘flash’ index of service-oriented companies tumbled to an 18-month low of 50.9 from 57.6 in the final month of 2021 … a similar gauge of manufacturers dropped to 55 from 57.7 in December – a 15-month low.”
The article goes on to say “Omicron clearly dented the economy in January,” as “millions” missed work “and the virus disrupted already strained supply chains.” The hardest punches connected on the jaws of “restaurants and other businesses that ‘serve’ customers directly.”
It didn’t have to be this way.
Biden swore he was going to shut down the virus but not the economy. The former was a promise no one could possibly keep. The latter, however, was easily reachable.
https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/ric-grenell-ukraine-russia-biden/2022/01/22/id/1053553/
The situation with Ukraine is a “disaster” with only “terrible and bad choices,” says former ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell, and foreign leaders “smell weakness” with President Joe Biden in charge.
“All the work we did, whether it’s the border, whether it’s the Middle East, and now what we’re seeing in Europe is frustrating,” Grenell, who served under former President Donald Trump and is now a senior national security analyst for Newsmax, said on “The Count.”
“We don’t have any good choices. But the reality is that the leaders of Russia and China and a whole bunch of other places smell weakness.”
And now, with the news that the United States is starting to evacuate nonessential personnel from Ukraine, that shows that there is no plan for what will happen if Russia invades Ukraine or what will happen if Americans are left behind enemy lines, like they were in Afghanistan.
“We don’t have a handle on the numbers,” said Grenell, adding that the U.S. does not have an ambassador in Ukraine, so lower-level individuals are left to coordinate with Washinton.
“I can tell you from experience,” he said. “I’d been at the State Department for 11 years. The individuals who are in charge of our embassy in Ukraine right now are not making decisions on their own. They’re going back and organizing with the assistant secretary of state for Europe, who is Karen Donfried, who used to work for the German Marshall fund where the Germans paid part of her salary. So this is a disaster situation all over.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents apprehended more than 2 million migrants at the southwest border during President Joe Biden’s first year in office, likely the highest number in over 20 years, according to a National Review analysis of CBP data.
According to the data, agents encountered 2,033,863 migrants at the border in 2021, with the vast majority – more than 1.9 million – being apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol officers. The rest were apprehended by Office of Field Operations agents at U.S. ports of entry.
The 2 million apprehensions in 2021 is more than double the 921,812 apprehensions in 2019, during a surge at the border under then-President Donald Trump’s administration. There were 341,519 Southwest border apprehensions in 2017, Trump’s first year in office.
(Ryan Mills)
The 2021 Border Patrol encounters are the most in over 20 years, and more than the 1.6 million Border Patrol apprehensions in 2000, the next highest on record, according to the data. Earlier CBP data reviewed by National Review doesn’t include Office of Field Operations data.
Since May, Border Patrol encounters at the Southwest border have broken all monthly records, said Andrew Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies. The peak was in July, when CBP agents apprehended 213,593 migrants at the border. The number of monthly encounters dipped slightly through October, but have since ticked up again.
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“Apprehensions typically peak in May, and decline through January, when they pick up again in February. We haven’t seen that sort of pattern this year,” Arthur said. “This migration doesn’t look anything like that historical trend.”
Biden’s critics blamed the border surge on the president’s pro-immigrant rhetoric on the campaign trail, and executive orders and efforts to dismantle Trump-era immigration deterrents, like the “Remain in Mexico” policy for asylum seekers and a temporary deportation moratorium. In early 2021, the Biden administration and mainstream media outlets claimed the border surge was part of a regular seasonal pattern. The Washington Post reported in March that the surge was “actually a predictable pattern.” Biden said “it happens every single, solitary year.”
But the surge never really stopped, and by late spring the Biden administration was blaming Trump for the chaos at the southern border. The surge “began during and was exacerbated by the Trump administration,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in May. “After four years of an immigration system rooted in destructive and chaotic policies, President Biden is talking the challenge head on and is building a fair, orderly, and human immigration system.”
Arthur said there are leaders in the Biden administration who aren’t happy with the ramped-up border apprehension numbers, because they know they are “poison for Democrats.” But there are immigrant advocates in the administration who are less concerned, he said.
“This is the frog in the hot water,” Arthur said. “They just want you to kind of get used to the fact that you’re going to see huge numbers of people enter illegally.”
The surge has taken a toll on the Border Patrol, which has had longstanding struggles with morale.
Over the last few months, only about half of the migrants encountered at the southern border have been expelled. Arthur said that part of the problem is that a decade ago, the vast majority of illegal immigrants crossing the southern border were single men from Mexico. Now, family units and children make up about a third of the Border Patrol’s encounters. It takes about eight hours to process a single adult male, whereas it can take days to process a family, he said.
“The reason they’re letting so many people go is they just don’t have the resources, they don’t have the manpower to actually care for that many people,” Arthur said.
“The Biden administration has broken the border,” Arthur said. “It might have been Biden’s rhetoric at the beginning; it certainly was. But now there are just so many people, the border’s broken, and Border Patrol lacks the capacity, CBP lacks the capacity to deal with the huge numbers of people that they’re seeing. So they let them go, which just encourages more to come in.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10439847/Three-Bidens-Iran-negotiating-team-RESIGN-not-tough-nuke-deal.html
Republican Rep. Michael Waltz praised the negotiators who have stepped back for ‘recognizing when diplomacy is getting too desperate’
Waltz has had his own experience in the Middle East as an Army Green Beret
State Department official confirmed Tuesday that Richard Nephew stood down
He was U.S. Deputy Special Envoy for Iran and known as sanctions architect
Nephew, who wanted Biden to take a harder stance against Iran, has reportedly been avoiding the meetings in Vienna since December
At the same time, reports emerged that two other negotiators had left
It comes at a critical time in negotiations between the West and Tehran
Iran has rejected talk of an interim agreement and wants a legal guarantee that the U.S. will not walk away from the nuclear deal
A Republican member of Congress on Tuesday praised three Biden administration officials who walked away from their roles on the State Department’s nuclear talks with Iran.
Rep. Michael Waltz of Florida, who served in the Middle East as one of the Army’s elite Green Berets, told DailyMail.com their departure at a critical junction of the discussions is a reflection of President Joe Biden’s policies putting ‘national security at risk.’
A State Department official confirmed that Richard Nephew, known as the architect of sanctions on Tehran, had stepped down as U.S. Deputy Special Envoy for Iran after urging a tougher stance on nuclear talks.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18174/biden-latest-mayhem
It should not be surprising that Russian strongman Vladimir Putin believes he can invade Ukraine, a sovereign neighboring nation, and claim it as an historic part of his empire. After all, there is a shameful European history to reflect upon, combined with the most recent actions of the United States under the current White House.
In 1938, Western democracies were more than willing to hand over a free and stable central European nation to Hitler. The Czechs found themselves abandoned and served up on a plate to the Third Reich as Hitler threatened war if the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia was not annexed by Germany. The reason for his demand was that it was territory long populated by many ethnic Germans. (And this may sound disturbingly familiar if you follow Putin’s logic why Ukraine is his, given that part of its diverse population is Russian.)
Some 84 years ago, Britain’s Neville Chamberlain conspired with the French to appease Hitler, and telling a BBC audience, “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.”
The deal forced onto the Czech leadership by the democracies was that the Sudetenland would become part of the Reich but the rest of the Czech nation would be secure. It was cynical nonsense of course. Hitler sensed the moral bankruptcy of the democracies and within 12 months would take over the rest of Czechoslovakia. He did it without firing a shot and without the democracies confronting him.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18162/iran-palestinians-proxy-jihad
The Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the second largest and hugely influential group in the Gaza Strip after Hamas, does not believe that the conflict with Israel is over Jerusalem, settlements, borders, checkpoints or Palestinian prisoners.
Qattati’s article shows that PIJ and its masters in Tehran consider not only Israel as the “enemy,” but the US too. This is the same Iran whose representatives are currently negotiating with the US and other world powers about reviving the 2015 nuclear deal.
PIJ is undoubtedly hoping that the talks in Vienna will allow Iran to proceed with its plans to deceive the world into thinking that it will end its support for terrorist groups throughout the Middle East or abandon its plan to obtain nuclear weapons.
PIJ’s statement shows that its supporters understand resolutions pertaining to the Israeli-Arab conflict by the United Nations and anti-Israel organizations around the world as a license to continue the jihad against Israel and all Jews.
It is also most critical that the Biden administration immediately place Iran’s other proxy organization, the Houthis, who just bombed Abu Dhabi, back on the US List of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Since the US Department of State removed them from the list in February, they have returned the favor by becoming more aggressive than ever and are successfully destabilizing the region.
When these groups are enriched and emboldened, that just means even more bad news for the US and the region.
The Biden administration might do well to remember that its arrangements with the mullahs in Iran will spill over into bloodletting by Iran’s proxies throughout the Middle East — who will be only too happy to credit the Biden administration for their toxic, destructive success.
The Iran-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), the second largest and hugely influential group in the Gaza Strip after Hamas, does not believe that the conflict with Israel is over Jerusalem, settlements, borders, checkpoints or Palestinian prisoners.
Peter Schweizer says that, in a quarter-century as an investigative journalist, this is the scariest investigation he has ever conducted.
That the Chinese government seeks to infiltrate American institutions is hardly surprising. What is wholly new, however, are the number of American elites who are eager to help the Chinese dictatorship in its quest for global hegemony.
Presidential families, Silicon Valley gurus, Wall Street high rollers, Ivy League universities, even professional athletes—all willing to sacrifice American strength and security on the altar of personal enrichment.
In Red-Handed, six-time New York Times bestselling investigator Peter Schweizer presents his most alarming findings to date by revealing the secret deals wealthy Americans have cut to help China build its military, technological, and economic might. Equally as astonishing, many of these elites quietly believe the Chinese dictatorial regime is superior to American democracy.
Schweizer and his team of forensic investigators spent over a year scouring a massive trove of global corporate records and legal filings to expose the hidden transactions China’s enablers hoped would never see the light of day. And as Schweizer’s past bombshells like Profiles in Corruption, Secret Empires, and Clinton Cash all made clear, there are bad actors on both ends of the political spectrum.
Exhaustively researched, crisply told, and chilling, Red-Handed will expose the nexus of power between the Chinese government and the American elites who do its bidding.
