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Ruth King

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Tapped Out Tapper Steven Hayward

By on February 28th, 2025

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/02/tapped-out-tapper.php

“I predict one common theme from this and all the other forthcoming books about the 2020 election and the run-up to it: they will all absolve the media of any blame. Who covered it up? I thought exposing cover-ups is what the media is all about ever since Watergate. Biden’s “deception,” as it is termed here, would never have succeeded without a compliant media.Would this be the same Jake Tapper who scorned any mention of Biden’s obvious decrepitude, claiming that Biden’s stumbles were because of his “stutter”?

So CNN’s Jake Tapper and co-author Alex Thompson of Axios and CNN have announced May 20 as the publication date for their book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and his Disastrous Choice to Run Again.

My hunch is that they are still writing the book, but want to pre-empt the field of journalists feverishly cranking out similar “inside stories” of Biden’s disaster right now.

Let’s have a look at the pre-publication description:

Joe Biden launched his successful 2020 bid for the White House with the stated goal of saving the nation from a second Trump presidential term. He, his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations. At his debate with Trump on June 27, 2024, the consequences of that deception were exposed to the world. It was shocking and upsetting.

Now the full, unsettling truth is being told for the first time. Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson take us behind closed doors and into private conversations between the heaviest of hitters, revealing how big the problem was and how many people knew about it. From White House staffers at the highest to lowest levels, to leaders of Congress and the Cabinet, from governors to donors and Hollywood players, the truth is finally being told. What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless—a desperate bet that went bust—and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents. The story the authors tell raises fundamental issues of accountability and responsibility that will continue for decades.

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Should Federal Workers Be Treated Differently Than Private-Sector Employees?

By on February 28th, 2025

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/02/28/should-federal-workers-be-treated-differently-than-private-sector-employees/

In consuming the news, one could easily conclude that, as we said earlier in the week, President Donald Trump and Elon Musk are carpet bombing the federal government. The wails and screeching breakdowns over the injustice of federal workers losing their jobs are ear-piercing. They are, we’re told, under attack.

After all, these are no everyday workers toiling for large corporations and small businesses – they’re federal employees who apparently are so indispensable to life as we know it that if they are no longer employed at taxpayers’ expense, America and maybe even western civilization will collapse.

Why else would there be so much fuss, so many tantrums, over a few of them losing their jobs?

We noted earlier that even if 100,000 federal workers lose their jobs, that’s a tiny 4% haircut off of nearly 2.3 million federal workforce. Yet we hear about an angry mob – our term – “getting fired up for the fight,” the birth of “fresh grassroots energy (that) came after a wave of layoffs hit government workers in recent weeks” and grousing about the administration’s “extreme, illegal, and unconstitutional actions.“

“It really is a witch hunt that is happening regarding our federal workers,” Maryland Democratic Sen. Angela Alsobrooks said.

Federal workers have sued to keep their jobs, there have been obligatory protests, and in a letter to department and agency heads, more than 100 Democrats showed their desperation to save the bureaucracy that works for them and not the American people. They bellyached about “Elon Musk’s public threat to dismiss any employees who” don’t respond to his email asking them to explain what they do at “work”; called his “threat” “reckless, cruel, unlawful, and unenforceable”; and demanded “immediate action.”

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‘Shipbuilding, Shipbuilding, Shipbuilding’: Getting the Navy’s Priorities Right By Mark Antonio Wright

By on February 28th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/shipbuilding-shipbuilding-shipbuilding-getting-the-navys-priorities-right/

I was very happy to see secretary of the Navy nominee John Phelan tell the Senate in his confirmation hearing that President Trump’s guidance to him is “shipbuilding, shipbuilding, shipbuilding.”

In a similar vein, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tweeted this week, “It is urgent that the Trump Administration build up the Navy.”

I couldn’t agree more. If the goal is to deter Communist Chinese aggression in the east, there’s no matter more urgent than strengthening and, yes, growing the U.S. Navy as fast as possible.

We need to build more ships, we need to stop retiring older ships, and we need to look at bringing some mothballed hulls back into the fleet.

I commend to everyone Jerry Hendrix and Brent Sadler’s essay in National Review magazine on this very subject, “Restoring Our Maritime Strength,” which lays out a detailed First Hundred Days blueprint for getting the Navy back on track. The two retired Navy captains know of what they speak, and I endorse their thinking to all those interested in rebuilding America’s naval power.

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First, Fire All the Generals Rich Lowry

By on February 28th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/02/first-fire-all-the-generals/

The deeper issue with our top generals is that they are the creatures of a system geared toward bureaucratic conformity and a flavorless competence.

President Trump and his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, have outraged the Beltway by dismissing top generals, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Charles Q. Brown.

Also ousted were the chief of the Navy and the vice chief of the Air Force, with perhaps others on the chopping block.

This is being called an “unprecedented purge” and a step toward the politicization of the military.

At the very least, though, these moves send a message that change is coming to an ossified Pentagon, and if they are followed up with reforms to how we promote and evaluate our generals, they will be a step toward a more effective and — to use one of Hegseth’s favorite words — lethal military.

Worries about the politicization of the military are rich after years of the civilian leadership pushing DEI on the ranks and insisting that climate change is a national-security threat. Here comes Secretary Hegseth saying that the military needs to be about “its core mission of deterring, fighting and winning wars,” and he’s the dangerous ideologue?

General Brown is an honorable man, but he’s the one who used his position as a political soapbox.

After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, Brown released a video that began, “As the commander of Pacific Air Forces, and a senior leader in our Air Force, and an African American, many of you may be wondering what I’m thinking about the current events surrounding the tragic death of George Floyd.”

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Trump Is Right About Birthright Citizenship By John C. Eastman

By on February 28th, 2025

https://tomklingenstein.com/trump-is-right-about-birthright-citizenship/

Shortly after President Trump issued his executive order addressing birthright citizenship, the U.S. Senator from Hawaii, Mazie Hirono, posted this on her X/twitter account: “The Fourteenth Amendment is clear as day—’All persons born or naturalized in the United States…are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.’” Fascinating that she elided over the key phrase, “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” 

Unfortunately, my long-time friend, Professor John Yoo, recently published an article at The Civitas Institute that begins with a summary that repeats the same error. “The Fourteenth Amendment directly overruled Dred Scott by declaring that all persons born in the US were citizens.” (Emphasis added). Now I know that Professor Yoo himself does not believe that, as during our many debates on the subject of birthright citizenship, he has always acknowledged that the “subject to the jurisdiction” clause excludes the children of diplomats and occupying armies. But there it is, boldly stated in this article, without even the ellipses that Senator Hirono used in her X post.

My dispute with Professor Yoo centers on whether the “subject to the jurisdiction” clause omitted from his and Senator Hirono’s formulations exempts from the grant of automatic citizenship only the children of diplomats and occupying armies, as the old English common law of jus soli did, or whether it also exempts the children of temporary visitors (“sojourners” was the word in use at the time), such as those present in the U.S. as tourists or on temporary work or student visas, and the children of those who have entered this country illegally.     

Truth be told, because immigration (and particularly illegal immigration) was not an issue in 1868 when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, there is no direct debate about whether children of temporary sojourners or illegal immigrants would be citizens. But there is extensive debate over the analogous question of whether the children of Native Americans would be citizens. Those debates make clear that they would not be, because they owed, through their parents, allegiance to their semi-sovereign tribes and not to the United States. 

Children born to parents who, as merely temporary visitors (legal or illegal) to this country continue to owe allegiance to a foreign power — their home country — are by analogy even less entitled to automatic citizenship. Quite simply, they are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States in the complete sense intended by the Fourteenth Amendment.

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Nobel laureate on terrorist release deal: ‘We’re killing ourselves’By David Isaac

By on February 28th, 2025

https://www.jns.org/nobel-laureate-on-terrorist-release-deal-were-killing-ourselves/\

Yisrael (Robert J.) Aumann was awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his contribution to Game Theory, a branch of applied mathematics that studies strategic interactions between individuals or groups.

Aumann has said that if he could describe Game Theory in one word, it would be “incentives.”

JNS caught up with Aumann on Feb. 23 at his offices in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he is a member of the Einstein Institute of Mathematics and The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, to ask what he thought of the current prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hamas.

The deal called for the release of 33 Israeli hostages in exchange for about 1,900 imprisoned terrorists, many of them murderers serving multiple life sentences.

In a word, said Aumann, “Crazy.”

“The basis of Game Theory is to give incentives to the other side to do what’s good for you,” Aumann told JNS. “And we keep doing the opposite. We are literally killing ourselves. We are killing our own children. It’s not only that they will kidnap more. We are incentivizing them to attack us again and again, to make war against us, to repeat Oct. 7,” he said, referring to the Hamas-led massacre of Oct. 7, 2023.

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Richard T. Bosshardt I’m a Surgeon, and I’ve Never Been More Alarmed About My Profession Today’s surgical residency graduates are increasingly unprepared for professional practice.

By on February 27th, 2025

https://www.city-journal.org/article/surgery-safe-american-college-of-surgeons

I have been a surgeon for 38 years. Three of those I spent as a general surgeon in the Navy, the remainder as a plastic surgeon in private practice. I have never been more alarmed about the state of my profession than I am today.

My concerns began surfacing about 25 years ago. I was collaborating with a newly trained general surgeon on a bilateral breast reconstruction, a procedure that utilizes tissue flaps from the patient’s abdomen. This is a significant and lengthy operation, and I appreciated the young surgeon’s offer to close the abdominal donor site. To my horror, however, he began taking excessively wide needle “bites” of the abdominal wall using a heavy-gauge suture, visibly distorting the abdominal wall as he pulled these sutures tight. After watching in disbelief for a few minutes, I thanked him and said that I could manage without help. The young surgeon subsequently gained a reputation for handling tissues roughly and for being difficult to work with. It came as no surprise when he left our hospital after less than a year.

Every colleague whom I have spoken with has noticed the same thing: an alarming number of surgical residency graduates are unprepared for professional practice. The problem has only gotten worse. I recently worked with another young surgeon on a breast cancer patient, for example, and was shocked to discover that he had never performed an axillary node dissection—a common operation to remove lymph nodes from a cancer patient’s armpit. How could a surgeon have completed five years of training without learning how to do this?

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Anti-Israel Protesters at Barnard College Seize Academic Building After Two Students Were Expelled David Zimmerman

By on February 27th, 2025

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/anti-israel-protesters-at-barnard-college-seize-academic-building-after-two-students-were-expelled/

Anti-Israel protesters at Barnard College seized an academic building Wednesday evening to protest the recent expulsions of two students who disrupted a Columbia University class about modern Israel’s history last month.

Video footage shows more than 50 protesters staging a sit-in outside the college dean’s office, where they beat drums and shouted through megaphones. The masked demonstrators chanted, “Every fascist state must fall.”

Columbia University’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine are demanding that Barnard leadership immediately reverse the two expulsions, provide amnesty to all students disciplined for anti-Israel protests, give the group a public meeting with Dean Leslie Grinage and President Laura Rosenbury, and abolish the college’s disciplinary process.

Grinage agreed to meet with up to three protesters, according to a professor who tried to appease the crowd in the dean’s place. Before capitulating, Grinage apparently asked the mob permission to use the bathroom. The students then shamed her as she walked by the scene, according to a video.

Notably, Columbia suspended SJP in November 2023 after its members held unauthorized campus protests that made others feel threatened. The suspension was upheld by the New York state supreme court last fall, yet the group remains operational in practice.

The anti-Israel activists reportedly occupied Barnard’s Milbank Hall for several hours and assaulted security guards. The rowdy demonstration forced classes in that building to be cancelled, Jewish students posted on social media.

Columbia’s SJP cried victim, claiming Barnard security officers have “harassed and shoved several students” who were taking part in the unauthorized protest.

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CNN’s Jake Tapper Faces Backlash Over New Book ‘Exposing’ Coverup of Joe Biden’s Mental Decline By Debra Heine

By on February 27th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/26/cnns-jake-tapper-faces-backlash-over-new-book-exposing-coverup-of-joe-bidens-mental-decline/

A new book purporting to expose the cover-up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, co-authored by CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson, has conservative critics fuming with exasperation.

While Thompson was one of the few legacy media journalists who questioned Biden’s mental acuity well before his disastrous debate, Tapper ignored the elephant in the room for years, and even insisted in 2020 that Biden’s chronic incoherence was just a “stutter.”

The pair, according to CNN, was inspired to write “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” the day after Donald Trump won the 2024 election.

But even before the 2020 election, it was obvious that Biden was struggling cognitively on the campaign trail. It became clearer by the day post election, even as White House staffers limited and strictly choreographed his media appearances.

The media, including CNN, was largely complicit in the fraud throughout Biden’s term.

Now, CNN reports, the “deeply sourced” Tapper and Thompson can report that there was indeed a “cover-up” of Joe Biden’s “serious decline.”

The book’s publisher, Penguin Press, announced the book on Wednesday, saying: “What you will learn makes President Biden’s decision to run for reelection seem shockingly narcissistic, self-delusional, and reckless — a desperate bet that went bust — and part of a larger act of extended public deception that has few precedents.”

Biden, “his family, and his senior aides were so convinced that only he could beat Trump again, they lied to themselves, allies, and the public about his condition and limitations,” the press release added.

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Who Caused the Counter-Revolution? Trump’s first month is a shock treatment to decades of spending, open borders, and bureaucratic bloat—restoring what was lost while critics decry the cure more than the disease. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on February 27th, 2025

https://amgreatness.com/2025/02/27/who-caused-the-counter-revolution/

At some point, some president was going to have to stop the unsustainable spending and borrowing.

To have any country left, some president would eventually have had to restore a nonexistent border and stop the influx of 3 million illegal aliens a year.

Some commander-in-chief finally would have to try to stop the theater wars abroad.

But any president who dared to do any of that would be damned for curbing the madness that his predecessors fueled.

And so none did—until now.

Not since Franklin Roosevelt’s rapid and mass implementation of the New Deal administrative state have Americans seen such radical changes so quickly as now in Trump’s first month of governance.

Americans are watching a long-awaited counter-revolution to bring the country out of its madness by restoring the common sense of the recent past.

It is easy to run up massive debts and hard to pay them back. Politicians profit by handing out grants and hiring thousands with someone else’s money or creating new programs by growing the debt.

Yet it is unpopular and considered “mean” to spend only what you have and to create a lean, competent workforce.

1776, not 1619, is the foundational date of America.

Biological men should not manipulate their greater size and strength to undermine the hard-won accomplishment of women athletes.

Affordable fossil fuels, when used wisely, are still essential to modern prosperity.

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