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Ruth King

A Debt That Can Destroy a Nation by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18902/national-debt

For as long as there have been politics there have been deals.

Of course, it is illegal to trade one’s vote for cash, but those with the power to dispense patronage, projects, and promotions have a unique advantage in seeking the support of those whose endorsements can tip the balance for any given issue.

Whether it was the drafting of the Constitution, confronting the infamous slave trade, Tammany Hall’s “favored sons” or directing federal funds for a bridge, this kind of give-and-get has long been woven into the cynical side of politics.

It is unprecedented, however, when the stakes have become so high that these kinds of backroom deals can disrupt an election or even plunge a nation into an unrecoverable cycle of debt and economic despair.

That is why the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” that has come out of the Senate “sausage machine,” courtesy of its current majority leader, Sen. Charles Schumer, and his surprising enabler, Sen. Joe Manchin, needs to be closely examined. With its $700 billion price tag, it has the potential to seriously harm our nation’s economic future.

One of its elements requires a particularly hefty dose of sunlight. This massive spending plan will allow John Podesta, a Biden adviser, former Clinton aide, and longtime Democratic political strategist, to administer some $370 billion in energy programs of his selective choosing.

ELECTRIC CARS ARE NOT ZERO-EMISSIONS VEHICLES:JAMES D. AGRESTI

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/14/electric-cars-are-not-zero-emission-vehicles/

“In reality, electric cars emit substantial amounts of pollutants and may be more harmful to the environment than conventional cars.”

While praising California’s decision to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035, Governor Gavin Newsom declared that this will require “100% of new car sales in California to be zero-emission vehicles” like “electric cars.” In reality, electric cars emit substantial amounts of pollutants and may be more harmful to the environment than conventional cars.

Toxic Pollution

The notion that electric vehicles are “zero-emission” is rooted in a deceptive narrative that ignores all pollutants which don’t come out of a tailpipe. Assessing the environmental impacts of energy technologies requires measuring all forms of pollution they emit over their entire lives, not a narrow slice of them. To do this, researchers perform “life cycle assessments” or LCAs. As explained by the Environmental Protection Agency, LCAs allow for:

the estimation of the cumulative environmental impacts resulting from all stages in the product life cycle, often including impacts not considered in more traditional analyses (e.g., raw material extraction, material transportation, ultimate product disposal, etc.). By including the impacts throughout the product life cycle, LCA provides a comprehensive view of the environmental aspects of the product or process and a more accurate picture of the true environmental trade-offs in product and process selection.

LCAs are subject to multiple levels of uncertainty, but an assessment published by the Journal of Cleaner Production in 2021 shatters the notion that electric cars are cleaner than conventional ones, much less “zero emission.” The LCA found that manufacturing, charging, operating, and disposing of electric vehicles produces more of every major category of pollutants than conventional cars. This includes:

an increase in fine particulate matter formation (26%), human carcinogenic (20%) and non-carcinogenic toxicity (61%), terrestrial ecotoxicity (31%), freshwater ecotoxicity (39%), and marine ecotoxicity (41%) relative to petrol vehicles.

Foreshadowing that result, a 2018 report by the European Environment Agency warned that studies on the “human toxicity impacts” of electric vehicles were “limited” and that electric cars “could be responsible for greater negative impacts” than conventional cars.

By 2-To-1, Voters Call Biden MAGA Remarks Divisive: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/09/14/by-2-to-1-voters-call-biden-maga-remarks-divisive-ii-tipp-poll/

President Biden’s recent comments about Trump supporters espousing “semi-fascism” and accusing the former president’s followers of representing “an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic” shocked many Americans. Now, despite White House denials of ill intent, a majority of voters call Biden’s remarks divisive, September’s I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

During his campaign for the presidency and even in his inauguration speech in 2021, Biden vowed to “unify” the country after years of often-bitter political division. Voters warmed to the idea that he could bring Americans together after years of angry ideological debates, polls showed.

But the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows Americans no longer believe that Biden is a uniter, but a divider.

The online poll of 1,277 adults taken from Sept. 7-9 showed that 62% of Americans believed Biden’s comments about Trump and his MAGA followers “increases division in the country.” Just 29% disagreed. The poll’s margin of error is +/- 2.8 percentage points.

Perhaps surprisingly, Democrats — at 73% — were more likely to say that Biden’s MAGA comments increased division than either Republicans (50%) or independents (57%). Blacks and Hispanics (70%) exceeded white respondents (58%) in seeing the comments as divisive.

New Durham bombshell: FBI paid Russian accused of lying as a confidential informant against Trump Prosecutor says Igor Danchenko, the primary source for the discredited Steele dossier, was paid by FBI as confidential human source for three years despite prior concerns he was tied to Russian intelligence services. JohnSolomon

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/new-durham-bombshell-fbi-paid-russian-accused-lying

In a bombshell revelation, Special Prosecutor John Durham revealed Tuesday in court filings that the FBI paid a Russian businessman as a confidential human source in the investigation of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign even though it had prior concerns that businessman was tied to Moscow’s intelligence services.

Durham persuaded the federal judge in the upcoming trial of Igor Danchenko to unseal a motion revealing that Danchenko, the primary source of the now-discredited Steele dossier, was paid by the FBI as a confidential human source for more than three years until the fall of 2020 when he was terminated for lying to agents.

Danchenko is charged with five counts of lying to the bureau during that relationship and faces trial next month in federal court in the Virginia suburbs of Washington D.C.

“In March 2017, the FBI signed the defendant up as a paid confidential human source of the FBI,” Durham’s unsealed court filing disclosed for the first time. “The FBI terminated its source relationship with the defendant in October 2020. As alleged in further detail below, the defendant lied to FBI agents during several of these interviews.”

The revelation means that the FBI first fired former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, the author of the Hillary Clinton-funded dossier, as a human source in November 2016 for having unauthorized contacts with the news media. And it then turned around a few months later and hired Steele’s primary informer to work with the bureau even after determining some of Danchenko’s statements in the Steele dossier were uncorroborated or exaggerated.

Even more stunning, Durham confirmed that the FBI had concerns about Danchenko’s ties to Russian intelligence a decade earlier, opening up a counterintelligence probe on him after learning he was trying to buy classified information from the Obama administration

Life Expectancy in the Covid Era: Joel Zinberg

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/09/life-expectancy-in-the-covid-era/

New life-expectancy estimates are out for 2021, and they paint a grim picture: Life expectancy declined in 2021 by 0.9 years to 76.1 years, the lowest it has been since 1996. This followed a decline in 2020 leading to an overall decrease in life expectancy between 2019 and 2021 of 2.7 years for the total population. Covid-19 was responsible for 50 percent of the 2021 longevity decline. A grab bag of other causes of death was responsible for the balance with unintentional injuries being the most common (16 percent).

But closer examination of the tables from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics reveals an interesting fact. While Hispanics and blacks both had substantially greater life expectancy losses than whites during 2020, in 2021 the situation was reversed. The white population saw a one-year decline in life expectancy while blacks saw a 0.7 year drop and Hispanics saw a 0.2 year drop.

Many public-health experts and media pundits blamed the disproportionate losses suffered by people of color in 2020 on “structural inequalities” and “systemic racism.” Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University, for example, wrote that the foremost cause of “disproportionate reductions in life expectancy among racial and ethnic groups in the US” in 2020 was “systemic racism.” Now these experts are scrambling to explain what happened in 2021.

The New York Times quotes Woolf as saying that the worse 2021 outcomes for whites “reflects the greater efforts by Black [sic] and Hispanics to get vaccinated, to wear masks and take other measures to protect themselves, and the greater tendency in white populations to push back on those behaviors.”

Put these lines of reasoning together and the relatively worse outcomes for people of color in 2020 was whites’ fault (systemic racism) and whites’ relatively worse outcomes in 2021 was their fault too (intransigence and failure to “follow the science”).

Yet this explanation makes little sense.

Rings of Power’ versus ‘House of Dragons’ One represents a world where virtue is possible, the other is about power and nothing else. Don Feder

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/sep/12/rings-of-power-versus-house-of-dragons/

EXCERPTS:

HBO’s “House of The Dragon” and Amazon’s “The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power” provide an instructive contrast. (You might call them fables for our times.) One is about power for power’s sake; the other concerns virtue and containing power.

The “Rings of Power” reflects Lord Acton’s adage: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Like the heroes of “Rings of Power,” the Founding Fathers sought to contain power. The Constitution with its balance of power between the three branches of government and respect for the rights of citizens (another limitation on government) was their genius.

President Joe Biden claims fidelity to the Constitution, while constantly undermining it.

Democrats always seek to expand government. They are wannabe dragon lords who are turning citizens into serfs. Whatever Washington spends, it’s never enough. They view taxpayers as milch cows for the welfare state.

For them, the Constitution is more a series of suggestions than a limitation on the power of the state. Barack Obama said, “I’ve got a pen and a phone” and can do pretty much as I like through executive orders. Mr. Biden is testing the limits of that by transferring $1 trillion in student debt from potentially high-earning graduates to truck drivers and waitresses, without Congressional approval. The Desolation of Joe?

No one gave Mr. Biden the authority to allow roughly one million people to enter the country illegally each year. He did it by simply refusing to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.

Under the direction of Democrats, Congress has spent $4.6 trillion on “emergency” COVID relief measures. The president’s party lavished money on its favorite constituencies (like teachers’ unions) to counteract a shutdown of the economy it engineered.

The Orc army unleashed by social justice warriors spent most of 2020 rampaging through our cities – burning, looting and killing. Democrats used this crisis to push what they call racial justice, including CRT in our schools.

Power is seductive.

Liz Peek: As economic woes continue, Biden will struggle to make midterms a referendum on Trump

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3641386-as-economic-woes-continue-biden-will-struggle-to-make-midterms-a-referendum-on-trump/

As President Biden travels the country touting his economic successes and excoriating former President Trump, we prepare for the next debacle courtesy of this president: Biden’s stagflation.

We’ve had Biden’s inflation, Biden’s recession and Biden’s natural gas shortage. Now we have renewed inflation and the very real possibility of a double-dip recession.

Tuesday’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics dashed hopes that inflation was cooling. While prices did not budge in July, they rose by 0.1 percent in August, despite a significant swoon in energy costs (gasoline prices declined nearly 11 percent in just one month) and a sharp increase in the value of the dollar. Both of those trends helped stem the rise in prices, but not as much as expected.

Over the past 12 months, the consumer price index (CPI) rose 8.3 percent overall; analysts were expecting 8.1 percent. While the top-line rate of increase has dropped from the four-decade high of 9.1 percent reached in June, the rate of decline is alarmingly slow. Core inflation, absent food and energy, came in at 6.3 percent, up from 5.9 percent in July, and also worse than expected.

Positives other than falling gasoline prices, like some improvement in supply chains, declining commodity prices and lower used car prices also pumped up the “inflation is cooling” story.

The Federal Reserve is now expected to push rates up more rapidly, and for longer, than previously expected. Almost immediately, markets priced in a 20 percent chance of a 100 basis-point hike next week; prior to the latest CPI report, those odds were set at zero.

US’ diplomatic option and Iran’s child martyrdom – incompatible! Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

https://bit.ly/3eQDji5

*Is the diplomatic option viable when dealing with Iran’s Ayatollahs, who have promoted – since 1979 – child martyrdom in their school curriculum and on the battlefield?!

*Is the diplomatic option viable when dealing with Iran’s Ayatollahs, who have espoused child martyrdom in the service of their Islamic Revolution, which aims to topple all pro-US Arab Sunni regimes and bring “the Great American Satan” and other Western “infidels” to submission?!

*Is the diplomatic option viable when dealing with Iran’s Ayatollahs, who have urged Iranian children to participate in the annual November 13 “National Day of Fighting Arrogance” (commemorating the takeover of the US Embassy in Tehran and holding over 50 Americans hostages for 444 days), declaring their hatred toward “the bullying and oppressive USA” and chanting “Death to America”?!

Luring children into mine-sweeping

Brainwashing children into martyrdom is presented by the Ayatollahs as an extension of the Shiite mythology surrounding the 680 AD Battle of Karbala, which was the Big Bang of the Sunni-Shiite conflict and the role model for martyrdom. During the battle, Hussain ibn Ali, the third Shia Imam and the grandson of Muhammad, and his warriors – including children – were betrayed and massacred by the Sunni Caliph Yazid.

“During the 1980-1988 Iraq-Iran war, children were sent to be slaughtered on mine-sweeping missions…. Iranian officials forced underage Afghan refugees to fight in the Syrian civil war on the side of Bashar al-Assad’s government….”

According to the Geneva-based Refworld (an arm of the UN High Commissioner on Refugees), “[Iranian] child soldiers, some as young as nine, were used extensively during the Iran-Iraq war…. They were given ‘keys to paradise’ and promised that they would go directly to heaven if they died as martyrs against the Iraqi enemy….   

The Palestinians and the World Do Not Need Another Corrupt, Failed Terrorist Arab State by Khaled Abu Toameh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18897/palestinians-corrupt-failed-terrorist-state

The truth, however, is that neither the Palestinian Authority leadership nor the Palestinian people is ready for statehood. And the responsibility for that fact lies squarely with the ruthless and failed Palestinian leaders.

The Palestinian bid to obtain UN recognition of a Palestinian state comes at a time when the PA appears to be losing control over some parts of the West Bank, where gunmen belonging to several groups have replaced the Palestinian security forces… [and] are responsible not only for terrorist attacks against Israel, but also the growing scenes of anarchy and lawlessness….

Abbas himself has long been praising and glorifying Palestinians who carry out terrorist attacks….

Abbas, who is unable (and unwilling) to rein in a few hundred gunmen in two major Palestinian cities in the West Bank, wants the United Nations, its member states and the rest of the world to believe that he is ready to run a state of his own.

If Abbas cannot send his officers to confiscate an M-16 rifle from an unruly gunman in Jenin or Nablus, how can he be trusted to prevent the future Palestinian state from turning into a launching pad for regional terrorism?

Abbas wants the UN to grant the Palestinians the status of full member state, but cannot provide any guarantees that the aspired-for state would not be turned into a terror entity that is armed and funded by Iran’s regime and its proxies.

Abbas wants the UN to recognize “Palestine” as a state when he literally has no control over half of the Palestinians… If Abbas dares to go to the Gaza Strip, Hamas will hang him at the entrance to the area on charges of “collaboration” with Israel.

Abbas is seeking full UN recognition at a time when he continues to block general elections for the PA, arrests and intimidates his political opponents, refuses to share power with other Palestinians and muzzles freedom of expression.

More than they need a state, the Palestinians need good leadership. They need to rid themselves of the corrupt leaders who have deprived them of international aid and led them from one disaster after the other since the early 1970s, when the PLO was expelled from Jordan for undermining the kingdom’s sovereignty.

[T]he Palestinians’ biggest tragedy by far has been failed leadership and more failed leadership. It radicalizes them toward Islamic fundamentalism and deprives them of elections, freedom of expression and international aid. The UN member states would be doing a great service to the Palestinians if they asked Abbas about the absence of freedom of speech and a functioning parliament under his regime.

They would also be doing the Palestinian people a huge service if they asked Abbas about torture in Palestinian Authority prisons and the continuing crackdown by his security forces on human rights activists and journalists. And they should definitely ask him what measures he has taken to end financial and administrative corruption in the PA.

These issues are more pressing for the Palestinians than another worthless document by the UN recognizing a fictitious Palestinian state that is already marked by the intrusion of other brutal radical Islamist dictatorships.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership has decided to renew its bid to gain full membership in the United Nations. PA President Mahmoud Abbas, who is scheduled to address the UN General Assembly during its session in New York later this month, is expected to raise the issue of upgrading the Palestinians’ status from non-member observer state to full member.

Green Globalism is the Ultimate Expression of White Supremacy Green globalists are proclaiming a planetary crisis to camouflage an agenda of conquest dominated by white Westerners. Green imperialism is still imperialism. By Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/12/green-globalism-is-the-ultimate-expression-of-white-supremacy/

There has been broad recognition of late that the American Left projects their own flawed proclivities onto their political opponents. They accuse the Right of not caring about the American worker, but the functional consequence of every policy they devise has been destructive to American workers. They accuse the Right of being corporate puppets, when every major corporate special interest caters to the Left. They accuse the Right of having no respect for the Constitution or the rule of law, while they attempt to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College, ignore the First and Second Amendments, and refuse to prosecute criminals. They accuse the Right of being fascist, yet their allies in Antifa and Black Lives Matter have cells operating in every major city.

Maybe the biggest projection of all is the common leftist accusation that the Right is dominated by white supremacists. The first thing to observe here is that the American Left – its leadership, its donors, and its corporate partners—“diversity, equity and inclusion” notwithstanding—is itself dominated by whites. And apart from their rhetoric, they certainly aren’t doing anything to help nonwhites. From welfare to affirmative action to avoidable cost-of-living increases, every policy the Left implements has the effect of disproportionately marginalizing and impoverishing nonwhites.

But are these white leaders on the Left supremacists? Yes, they are, because the American Left, and the globalist green agenda it is cramming down our throats, has only one logical ultimate goal: To conquer the world. It’s pretty hard to be more “supremacist” than that.

Recognizing this reality relies on fairly simple logic:

If life on Earth will come to an end unless all nations achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050, but so far the only nations attempting to achieve this goal are white Western nations, then to save the earth, those nations that are not complying must be forced to comply. In the short run, for example, this means preventing emerging nations from acquiring the investment and technical support to develop an energy economy based on fossil fuel. But within a decade or two, with another generation of Westerners reaching adulthood firmly convinced the world will come to an end if “net zero” is not achieved, the green agenda will be a marketable justification for world war.