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Ruth King

Democrats introduce resolution to ban Trump from US Capitol By Anthony Gonzalez

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/democrats_introduce_resolution_to_ban_trump_from_us_capitol.html

House Democrats introduced a resolution that would bar former President Donald Trump — along with Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Dan Scavino, Peter Navarro, Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, Kenneth Cheseboro, Rudy Giuliani, and other figures — from entering the U.S. Capitol.

Reps. Nikema Williams (D-Ga.) and Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) introduced the resolution in the House Committee on House Administration.

The measure draws on information from the former House Jan. 6 Committee, arguing that Trump and his allies put members of congress in “genuine peril.”

“The effort to undermine and overturn the 2020 presidential election damaged the functions of our democracy,” the resolution states.

Those efforts also “damaged the integrity of Congress’s constitutional role in certifying the election results” and “put the lives of Members of Congress and the Vice President of the United States in genuine peril,” it adds.

Shortly after the events of Jan. 6, 2021, Williams introduced a similar measure that would ban Trump from visiting the Capitol.

Vermont once embraced eugenics; now it embraces puberty-blockers By John Klar

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/vermont_once_embraced_eugenics_now_it_embraces_pubertyblockers.html

America is being torn apart by a “scientific” dispute over the appropriateness of hormone-blockers for minor children.  The safety of these drugs is in question, as well as whether children are being fully assessed for mental health issues that may underlie gender dysphoria.  A number of responsible states have initiated legislation to ban their use, most recently joined by Tennessee.  Meanwhile, another group of states are rushing to shield these drug regimens for kids from parental or legal interference.  Vermont, which eagerly embraced eugenics and forced sterilization a century ago, is aggressively creating a modern version of Underground Railroad for people in other states (with no age limits) to freely obtain hormone-meddling “therapies” in the Green Mountains.

Vermont has been a frontrunner in providing abortions through all stages of pregnancy.  Progressives shrieked in feigned panic when Roe v. Wade was overturned, claiming that women’s “rights” to infanticide were thereby threatened — even though Roe acknowledged fetal viability and the existence of a second life meriting legal protections at some stage of development in the womb.  “Women’s rights” became the clarion call in Vermont’s 2022 elections, in which nearly 77% of Vermont voters voted “Yes” to a constitutional amendment (Proposal 5) enshrining abortion ’til birth.

Proposal 5 was also a Trojan horse to etch the “right” to puberty-blockers for children into law, using the vague language “personal reproductive autonomy.”  Having regained a progressive supermajority in the election by this ruse, the Vermont Legislature has wasted no time pushing through novel extremist legislation to codify the practice of administering experimental puberty hormone–blockers to children.  H.89 passed the House on February 10 by a resounding child-mutilating margin of 130-13 and is now in the Vermont Senate.

Biden Nationalizes the DEI Bureaucracy How the president’s recent executive order threatens to subvert the principles of liberty and equality.

https://rufo.substack.com/p/biden-creates-a-national-dei-bureaucracy

Last week, President Joseph Biden quietly signed an executive order that promises to create a national DEI bureaucracy and embed the principles of left-wing racialism throughout the federal government.

The order, titled “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” relies on three key strategies: creating internal cadres and power centers through the deployment of “Agency Equity Teams”; funding third-party political activism through grants to “community[-based] organizations”; and weaponizing civil rights law by requiring federal agencies to use artificial intelligence “in a manner that advances equity.”

In this video, I explain how Biden’s executive order manipulates language and statistics in order to nationalize the DEI movement, suppress dissent from the new racial orthodoxy, and subvert the Constitution’s promise of equal treatment under the law.

Transcript

President Joe Biden is overhauling the entire federal government along the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it seems like nobody has noticed. Last week, he signed another executive order promoting DEI called “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” There was very little news coverage about this, but I think that it is an extremely important development. It has ramifications for almost everything that we’ve been talking about the last few years, and I’d like to go into this in detail to really understand how this DEI ideology works, how it embeds itself in the bureaucracy, and what it means for our country, what it means for our constitution, and what it means for our government.

Another bad day for the Inflation Reduction Act By Silvio Canto, Jr.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/another_bad_day_for_the_inflation_reduction_act.html

We are not sure about Senator Manchin’s 2024 U.S. Senate plans. We did hear that Senator Tester of Montana is running for re-election.  In fact, Senator Tester said that he is running because “Montanans need a fighter holding Washington accountable and I’m running to defend our Montana values.”

Well, I hope someone will ask both men about the Inflation Reduction Act in light of the new inflation concerns.  This is from The Wall Street Journal:

This measure of inflation, a favorite of the Federal Reserve, accelerated in January at the fastest monthly pace since June. The PCE index is worth following because it offers a view of price changes from business sources and takes into account the substitution of goods and services in a way the consumer-price index doesn’t.

PCE inflation overall rose 0.6% for the month, up from 0.2% in each of November and December. 

The PCE index over the last 12 months is up 5.4%, which was up slightly from December after several months of decline. Inflation in services drove much of the increase and is up 5.7% since January 2022.

The story here is that inflation is proving stickier than many expected. 

Don’t you hate it when things prove stickier than expected?  I think consumers shopping for food can relate to that.  The Biden administration keeps telling you that inflation is dropping, but the prices of food and lots of other things are not.

The new report means that Chairman Powell may have to tinker with those interest rates again.  The new inflation concerns mean that Mr. Manchin and Mr. Tester will get questions about their votes that made the infamous Inflation Reduction Act possible.  I think a lot of good people in Montana and West Virginia will ask these gentlemen why they voted with Senator Schumer.

Our Neronian Super Bowl. Part Two Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/our-neronian-super-bowl-part-two/

The game itself was well-played and exciting. But the entire spectacle is heading into a strange and ultimately suicidal territory. Before the National Anthem, there was sung and observed the “Black” national anthem of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It is a wonderful song, but no substitution for our common, shared National Anthem, if such a thing even still exists in the era of a fragmenting America.

The country is supposedly “one people” with one anthem. There are now as many “Latinos” as there are blacks. So why not a Latino national anthem? Ditto Asians. But is it fair to have just one ethnic anthem and not others? What will be the criteria of segregated anthems?

How strange: If in 1960 Bull Connor had dictated to blacks (and who knows, he may have?), “you sing your own ‘separate but equal’ anthem before the nation’s National Anthem,” he would have been dubbed a racist up north and a segregationist down south. So have we come full circle?

Are we following the universities, those beacons of enlightenment and morality, which boast of multiple graduations, all predicated on race or gender? We could devote 30 minutes of pregame time to various chauvinistic anthems, or simply junk the game altogether and sing dozens of anthems ad nauseam?

The NFL bragged that its Super Bowl won 112 million viewers. But that number still counts as a million short from last year, and one million fewer than 2015, when there were about 15 million fewer Americans than now.

True, the NFL has recovered from its dismal Covid/Kaepernick years. But it seems bent to follow the descending trajectory of the NBA. Last year’s final NBA championship game earned a mere 14 million viewers. That was up from the 8.5 million catastrophe of 2020—but far below the 35 million in 1998. How, a quarter-century ago, could there have been 65 million fewer Americans and yet over 20 million more viewers! Where over the last 25 years did those 20 million viewers go?

When Anti-Racism Comes for the Anti-Racists with John McWhorter and Vincent Lloyd

https://glennloury.substack.com/p/when-anti-racism-comes-for-the-anti

Earlier this month, Vincent Lloyd, professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University, published an article in Compact that ought to make “anti-racists” everywhere think long and hard about what they’re doing. While leading a summer seminar last year at the Telluride Association entitled “Race and the Limits of Law in America,” Vincent found himself accused of the very forms of anti-racism his course was designed to interrogate. Under the influence of a Telluride-appointed anti-racism workshop leader Vincent refers to as “Keisha,” his students turned against him. No longer able to teach effectively in an environment turned hostile, Vincent ended the seminar early.

The irony is that Vincent is a committed anti-racist. He is the director of Villanova’s Africana Studies program, he leads anti-racist workshops, and he publishes on the topic of anti-racism. And, not for nothing, he’s black. One would think that those bona fides would insulate him from charges of perpetuating white supremacy. Indeed, even after being treated so shabbily by Keisha, Vincent remains a staunch anti-racist. As John notes in the following excerpt from our conversation with Vincent, all of this was, in some ways, predictable. The anti-racist mindset divides the world into victims and oppressors. When no true oppressor can be found, one will be conjured from the materials at hand in order to reestablish the phantom social order that anti-racism requires to justify its existence.

In our conversation, Vincent says that, while he was a victim of anti-racism run amok, he views Keisha as a victim, too. Perhaps she is. But if so, then the oppressor is the very worldview that seeks to lock people those two very narrow, inhuman roles. A true commitment to social justice would demand that we relinquish any paradigm that operates by reducing intelligent, kind, dedicated people like Vincent to mere nodes in a structure of domination. If anti-racism truly defended the full humanity of black people, then its own premises would require it to wink out of existence. Vincent’s story ought to be proof of that. Unfortunately, consistency seems too much to ask in this case.

Did U.S. Firms Help Propel China’s Balloon Fleet? By Susan Crabtree

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/02/24/did_us_firms_help_propel_chinas_balloon_fleet_148906.html

Sen. Mark Kelly, who previously served as a decorated space shuttle pilot with NASA, waded into the Chinese spy balloon uproar early this week after keeping publicly mum about it for several weeks.

The Arizona Democrat said it makes no sense for the U.S. military to launch expensive missiles at weather balloons or other benign floating objects. Kelly was referring to a heat-seeking, air-to-air missile used in recent weeks to shoot down several high-flying aerial objects that the administration later suggested likely didn’t pose a threat. Earlier in the month, a U.S. Air Force F-22 shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon after it breached American airspace and floated across the country, setting off a firestorm in Washington.

Kelly, who is set to be inducted into the U.S. Astronauts Hall of Fame in May, says he’s working on legislation that would require weather balloons to carry transponders that would communicate with air traffic control systems to separate research balloons from mysterious objects.

“It would really help the Defense Department to be able to sort out what is civilian science payload, what’s a weather balloon, what’s a NASA balloon, what’s a private company in the United States doing, what might be even a U.S. military,” Kelly, who was tapped to chair a Senate Armed Services subcommittee amid the balloon controversy, told the Associated Press.

Sen. John Tester, a Montana Democrat who is heading up the investigation into how a Chinese surveillance balloon was allowed to pass over crucial U.S. missile sites, including some in his state, was more forceful.

“We’re going to get to the bottom of what happened and make sure we have a plan going forward to detect and then find out what potential problems this balloon may have caused,” Tester told Fox News.

China’s high-altitude spy balloon controversy appears to have taken most Washington lawmakers and the intelligence community by surprise, but it really shouldn’t have. China’s interest in these stratospheric dirigibles has been an open secret for nearly a decade.

Why the Diversity Industry Is So Homogenous Roger Kimball

https://www.theepochtimes.com/why-the-diversity-industry-is-so-homogenous_5071781.html?utm_source=epochHG&utm_campaign=rcp

It’s one of the great ironies of our time that the word “diversity” is repeated everywhere, while the opposite, a stultifying homogeneity, is the reality that’s enforced “on the ground.”

Our educational institutions offer the classic example.

Is there any self-respecting college or university that doesn’t tout its commitment to “diversity” these days?

You can’t peruse a college’s promotional literature, let alone set foot on its campus, without being inundated by assurances that diversity is its most cherished value, the cynosure to which every other pursuit is subordinated.

But when you look at what they actually teach and preach, it turns out that rigid conformity is the order of the day.

We used to titter that there were people whose title was some variation on “dean of diversity.”

“You’re kidding, right?” was the response.

No one is laughing now.

On an increasingly wide range of subjects, only one opinion is granted the patent of diversity. Those deans are there not to invigilate academic excellence but to enforce social and moral conformity.

Thanks to Obama’s ‘Nuclear Deal,’ Iran Now a Major Arms Exporter by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19436/iran-arms-exporter

In the next phase of Iran’s dangerous development, export and proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), it is attempting to set up drone assembly lines abroad, likely to expedite the process of weapons delivery to its allies.

“Moscow and Tehran are moving ahead with plans to build a new factory in Russia that could make at least 6,000 Iranian-designed drones for the war in Ukraine, the latest sign of deepening cooperation between the two nations….” — Wall Street Journal, February 5, 2023.

Iran’s regime has also been focusing on the proliferation and export of long- and short-range precision-guided ballistic missiles.

While ballistic missiles can be used for either offensive or defensive purposes, the sophisticated ones are mainly developed as delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons.

Iran must not be allowed to have nuclear weapons.

Media Demands Darkness, Not Sunlight, on January 6 Tapes What we are hearing from the media industrial complex is fear, not concern. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2023/02/23/media-demands-darkness-not-sunlight-on-january-6-tapes/

Ever since Axios reported that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) gave Fox News host Tucker Carlson unfettered access to surveillance video captured by Capitol security cameras on January 6, 2021, the corporate media has experienced a collective convulsion bordering on a nervous breakdown.

Guardians of the fourth estate long ago abandoned their self-proclaimed role as watchdog over those in power in exchange for the role of lapdog. But apparently the last ones to get the joke are reporters, editors, and cable news hosts themselves, who still operate under the delusion they maintain a vaunted place in the pecking order of American society rather than rank in popularity just below the toxic sludge smoldering in East Palestine, Ohio.

Not long ago—or maybe it has been a long time?—journalists would salivate at the chance to report on the contents of a massive trove of footage related to what the government calls a terror attack, especially if the same government pulled every trick in the book to keep it under wraps. Compelled by slavish idolatry of the state and contempt for the common man, the media, for lack of a better term, is acting as if the release of unseen video recorded on January 6 is a crime in progress.

This comes, mind you, after two full years of uncritically repeating every talking point about the so-called “insurrection” which involves calling it an “insurrection” even though no one has been charged with “insurrection.” No cop cried too unconvincingly, no lawmaker made too outlandish a claim, no occupant of the White House told one too many lies to jolt the slumbering curiosity, or even innate sense of skepticism, of corporate media apparatchiks.

“Breaking news” bulletins sought to grab the attention of their shrinking audience before airing a cherry-picked clip gleaned from the very collection of tapes now considered sacrosanct.