Displaying the most recent of 90425 posts written by

Ruth King

Biden’s Got a Berlin Problem Brewing By Dalibor Rohac & Ivana Stradner

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/01/bidens-got-a-berlin-problem-brewing/

The rise of a German politician with a record of Putin pandering is bad news for the new administration.

T hose who expect President Joe Biden to singlehandedly fix the transatlantic relationship are in for a disappointment. Although the new administration in Washington takes a far more sympathetic view of Europe than its predecessor did, it is not clear that the sentiment will be reciprocated — especially in Berlin.

Following nearly two decades of Angela Merkel’s leadership, Armin Laschet, premier of Germany’s most populous state, Nordrhein-Westfalen, was elected on January 16 as the new leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Barring large swings in polls before the parliamentary election in September, Laschet is on track to become Germany’s next chancellor.

That is bad news for efforts to repair the U.S.–EU relationship. The presence of Laschet at the helm of Europe’s largest economy would give a boost for those in Europe who are reluctant to take their obligations within NATO seriously and would risk tethering the EU closer to both China and Russia.

Much as Biden and Laschet are likely to see eye-to-eye on climate change and other “multilateral” issues, the presumptive German chancellor is a man of little patience with those who see the promotion of democratic values as integral to foreign policy. As such, he is likely to frustrate U.S.-led efforts to hold Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and other dictators accountable for their domestic and international practices.

Herbert Hoover And The Jews By Saul Jay Singer

https://www.jewishpress.com/sections/features/features-on-jewish-world/herbert-hoov

Before serving as our 31st president (from 1929-1933), Herbert Clark Hoover (1874-1964) led the Commission for Relief in Belgium, served as the director of the U.S. Food Administration, and served as the third U.S. Secretary of Commerce.

When the United States entered World War I, President Wilson appointed Hoover, who became known as the country’s “food czar,” to lead the Food Administration. After the war, Hoover led the European Relief Council, which was charged with restoring Europe’s civilian economy and feeding the starving multitudes of Europe. Known as “the Great Humanitarian,” he is credited with saving literally millions of lives, including countless thousands in Jewish communities across Europe.

Hoover’s role administering European food relief brought him in contact with Europe’s Jews and sensitized him to their suffering from both severe economic distress and harsh anti-Semitic persecution. Moreover, a common interest in humanitarian work cemented friendships and political partnerships between Hoover and leading members of the Jewish community, particularly Bernard Baruch.

After Poland’s declaration of statehood in 1918, the Polish army began a campaign of terror against Polish Jews, including the April 5, 1919 summary execution of 37 Jewish residents of Pinsk by a Polish firing squad. Polish leader (and later first prime minister) Ignacy Jan Paderewski persisted in his claim that no Polish pogrom against Jews had ever been perpetrated, until Hoover secured his cooperation with blunt threats to withhold much-needed American support.

Hoover’s food aid to Poland was at the root of the Pinsk Massacre because the murdered Jews were reportedly meeting to discuss how to distribute Hoover’s aid when they were rounded up and shot. According to Lewis Strauss – whom Hoover put in charge of ensuring the equitable treatment of minority groups in the distribution of American aid (more on him below) – Hoover was “the only U.S. Government official to effectively press Poland and its prime minister to act against the pogromists.”

He Took an Envelope by: Diana West

https://dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/4177/He-Took-an-Envelope.aspx

” He looted Nancy Pelosi’s Office and Bragged About It???”

No, Richard Barnett took an empty envelope, but more on that later.

For now, the following excerpt from the charging documents has caught my eye and fancy both. It describes the scene of the federal crimes Barnett has been charged with —   

Video surveillance from a camera positioned outside of the Speaker’s main office door captures individuals entering and exiting the office. At approximately 2:30 p.m., several unidentified individuals appear to try the door to the office however the door is locked.

At approximately 2:33 p.m. an unidentified individual pushes in the door to the office.

Got that? At around 2:30 p.m., several people tried the door to the Speaker’s main office and it was locked, according to the complaint. At 2:33 p.m., someone just pushes the door open. As written, it does not sound as this someone entered the main office.

What happened in those three minutes? It’s possible that the first several people unsuccessfully “to try the door” were too timid or otherwise unable to open what may have been a stiff or heavy unlocked door. But it’s also possible somebody unlocked the door in that brief interval. 

If so, the trap was set and waiting for a mouse. If not, a trap was waiting anyway. 

Seventeen minutes pass.

Enter mouse:

At 2:50 p.m. BARNETT is captured on surveillance video carrying an American flag and a cellular phone while entering the doors which lead to the Speaker’s conference room adjoining the main office space.

As he is entering it, he is following behind the unidentified individual in the brown jacket. At 2:56 p.m. BARNETT is captured leaving the main office doors of the Speaker’s office space with only a phone in his hand. 

Glazov Gang: The Real Story of Anthony Fauci. The disturbing track record of Biden’s new top dog in fighting the “pandemic”.

https://jamieglazov.com/2021/01/31/glazov-gang-the-real-story-of-anthony-fauci/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Investigative Reporter Peter Barry Chowka.

Peter discusses The Real Story of Anthony Fauci, unveiling The disturbing track record of Biden’s new top dog in fighting the “pandemic”.

Don’t miss it!

The billionaire takeover of civil society Wealthy ‘progressives’ are shaping political life through a dense web of interconnected NGOs. Roslyn Fyuller

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/01/29/the-billionaire-takeover-of-civil-society/

As the founder and operator of a pro-democracy civil-society organization, I’ve often been astounded at calls to give NGOs a greater say in rule-making, more visibility during negotiations and privileged access to decision-makers. Because I know what few people do – that small, member-driven, self-funded NGOs are relatively rare.

Instead, the kind of organization that tends to drive the political agenda is generally billionaire (or at least multimillionaire) funded. The most well-known examples here are groups funded by conservatives like the Koch brothers and large companies like ExxonMobil. I had naively assumed that others criticized these organizations for the same reasons I did – because their actions undermined the principle of democratic equality by giving the impression that their ideas enjoyed far more backing than they did.

However, I stand corrected.

A few months ago, I suffered a rare relapse into naivety and decided that it was about time I got on to the NGO ‘funding’ gravy train. Apparently, floods of money were out there waiting for me in the democracy world. Meanwhile, for incomprehensible reasons, I was stubbornly insisting on behaving like some old-fashioned grandmother, cackling things like, ‘In my day, we used to go around with a tin can collecting for Amnesty International at Christmas! We met in the basement of a pub and everyone paid for their own beer!’

People were so baffled at this attitude that I began to doubt myself and look into how to get funding for projects in the democracy space. And because I thought it would be a good idea to be organized about it, I made a database.

That turned out to be a good idea, because it revealed the influence exerted by a wealthy few over civil society. To illustrate this, I am going to show how just a tiny fraction of a small slice of one funding network starts, but definitely does not end, with eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar.

Biden brood already cashing in on Joe’s presidency: Michael Goodwin

https://nypost.com/2021/01/30/biden-brood-already-cashing-in-on-joes-presidency-goodwin/

They can’t quit the grift. No sooner had Joe Biden won the White House than his family went back to trying to make a buck off his name. 

The latest sordid example involves one of Joe’s younger brothers, Frank Biden, appearing in a Florida law firm’s ad — on Inauguration Day no less. The ad used the president’s name to draw attention to the Berman Law Group’s class-action suit against sugar cane growers.

“The two Biden brothers have long held a commitment to pushing environmental issues to the forefront,” says the ad. “The president-elect has vowed to rejoin the Paris Agreement and wants to set ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets.”

The ad, first reported by CNBC, appeared in the Daily Business Review and carried a picture of Frank Biden and quotes him saying, “My brother is a model for how to go about doing this work.”

How touching. And shameless. 

After the enormous political trouble Hunter Biden’s shady business ties caused during the campaign, Frank’s bid to piggy-back on Joe’s election sounds especially reckless. But here’s another way to look at it.

Biden family members are oblivious to conflicts and criticism because they’ve been swimming in swamp corruption for decades. The two brothers, Frank and Jim, and Hunter have made millions and millions based on selling the perception of access to Joe’s power. 

China Doesn’t Have to Lift a Finger to Push Biden Around by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17012/china-push-biden

“Xenophobia” has been a constant Biden theme… Within moments [of President Trump’s “travel ban” last January] … Biden went on the attack. “This is no time for Donald Trump’s record of hysterical xenophobia and fear mongering to lead the way instead of science,” he said. There was nothing “xenophobic” about Trump’s travel ban. It was imposed on arrivals from the country where the disease first appeared. The ban, therefore, saved lives, and it would have saved even more if it had been stricter, announced sooner, and had been more rigorously enforced…. [If Biden] had been president then, the disease would almost certainly have spread faster in America. He was, during the campaign, against all such travel prohibitions.

Now, Biden is supporting another Chinese propaganda campaign…. The Chinese regime, which to this day uses geographical names for strains of virus, has been trying to ban any identification of China with the pandemic. Biden, with his executive order [rejoining the World Health Organization (WHO)], is doing Beijing’s work as Chinese leaders try to deflect blame.

This decision was especially hideous because WHO was complicit in China’s deliberate spread of the disease. WHO disseminated Beijing’s position that the coronavirus was not readily contagious even though the organization’s senior doctors knew it was highly transmissible. Moreover, WHO championed the Chinese campaign against travel bans. Americans died because of these and other indefensible actions on the part of WHO, and now Biden will go back to legitimizing and supporting that organization.

So far, Biden has taken steps that certainly encourage Beijing. His rejoining the Paris Agreement, his cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline, and his repeal of the ban on Chinese equipment in the American electrical grid, among others, favor, directly or indirectly, Beijing. Also of great concern is the failure of Commerce Secretary nominee Gina Raimondo to confirm that Huawei Technologies will remain on the department’s Entity List.

The Biden administration has just endorsed one of China’s most vicious attack lines against the United States.

The new administration’s actions look as if they are setting a pattern for its responses to Beijing on the disease and other matters.

On January 26, Biden signed his executive order titled “Memorandum Condemning and Combating Racism, Xenophobia, and Intolerance Against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States.”

New Team in Washington: Beyond Tokenism by Amir Taheri

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17013/washington-tokenism

But what does the term “minority” mean in a democracy based on equal citizenship for all? The term minority denotes “less-ness” compared to the “more-ness” of another entity. However, how could one regard some citizens of a democratic state as “less” than other fellow citizens?

[T]he United States is about “We the People,” not “We the Minorities”. Democracy is a melting pot, not a salad bar.

America… started as a space for settlers from England but was put on the way of becoming a nation by “founding fathers”: Their “one nation under God” had the distinction of being the first constitutional democracy. Its motto became: Government of the People, by the People, for the People.

To pretend that this or that Cabinet minister was chosen because of his or her skin color, religious faith or other “minority” attribution is certainly not a compliment. If the choice is based not on the individual’s competence but on salad-bar considerations, it cannot be justified on democratic grounds. If, on the other hand, such considerations played no part in the choice, why make such a song-and-dance about “rainbowism” and progressive representation?

[F]ortunately, many members of the new Washington team have impressive academic and practical resumes. It is in everyone’s interest to hope that they will see themselves not as figures in a game of ethnic tokenism but the servants of the American demos at a difficult time.

Last month, as he started shaping his future Cabinet, President-elect Joe Biden promised to form a team that offers a better representation of America as it is. Judging by the welcome that his Cabinet has received across the globe, one may conclude that he has delivered on his promise.

If One Mask Doesn’t Work, Try Two, or Three, or Four… By Ted Noel, MD

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/01/if_one_mask_doesnt_work_try_two_or_three_or_four.html

Once upon a time, my primary specialty of anesthesiology was the most scientific of all the medical specialties that actually touch patients. Then I saw that Dr. Scott Segal, chair of Anesthesiology at Wake Forest Baptist Health in Winston-Salem, North Carolina told NBC news that we should consider wearing four — count ‘em — four face masks at once. I had thought that the insanity would stop at double masking. Welcome to the new normal. Panic porn has taken over even the medical community that should know better.

Albert Einstein is credited with the maxim that “Doing something a second time and expecting a different result is insanity.” So the first step in “Will more masks help?” is to ask, “Do masks help at all?” Lots of people have done a lot of good work on the mechanics of masks. Jose-Luis Jiminez at the University of Colorado and Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech are two excellent scientists who study the mechanics of the aerosols that transmit COVID-19. Both have demonstrated that masks will markedly reduce droplets. Numerous YouTube videos have also demonstrated that quite dramatically. Masks may even slightly reduce — not eliminate — aerosols.

The problem with all this work is that it starts from two primary assumptions. First is the questionable idea that droplets are responsible for spreading the bug. The second is that if we stop droplets, we will necessarily stop the virus. When the epidemic started, we were told to worry about droplets from speaking, singing, and sneezing. But while those can travel many feet, they follow a spitball’s path to the floor, where they cause no further problems. Unless someone sneezes directly in your face from close range as you are inhaling, they can’t get inside your lungs to make you sick.

By his own definition, Biden is already governing like a dictator By Joe Concha

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/536317-by-his-own-definition-biden-is-already-governing-like-a-dictator

“I have this strange notion, we are a democracy … if you can’t get the votes … you can’t [legislate] by executive order unless you’re a dictator. We’re a democracy. We need consensus.” 

Those are the words of Joe Biden. And, no, this isn’t a matter of unearthing a clip from the 1980s or ’90s in an attempt to play a game of gotcha on some antiquated flip-flop. That’s Democratic nominee Biden, less than three weeks before the 2020 presidential election, talking to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos about the dangers of governing like a dictator.

In President Biden’s first week alone, he has signed 37 executive orders and actions as of Thursday. That’s 33 more than the guy he indirectly referred to as a dictator, in the form of predecessor Donald Trump. It’s 32 more than his old boss, Barack Obama, and 37 more than George W. Bush, who signed zero in his first week as president. 

“With unity we can go do great things, important things,” Biden said during his inaugural address. “Unity is the path forward. We must meet this moment as the United States of America. We’ve never failed in America when we’ve acted together.”

“Without unity, there is no peace, only bitterness and fury. No progress, only exhausting outrage. No nation, only a state of chaos. This is our historic moment of crisis and challenge, and unity is the path forward,” he also said, in a speech lauded by those on both sides of the political aisle.