Displaying the most recent of 91479 posts written by

Ruth King

A Presidential Trojan Horse: The Inflation Reduction Act by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19177/presidential-trojan-horse

U.S Senator Joseph Manchin has been playing both sides against the middle for the past year and it appears that game is about to end.

This year Manchin offered his vote to pass the so called “Inflation Reduction Act” in return for Senate leadership support of legislation that would loosen regulations now impacting energy pipeline construction in his home state of West Virginia. In some earlier era in Washington, that kind of Capitol Hill give-and-get would have gone unnoticed, just another deal being cut with taxpayers’ money before lunch in the Senate dining room.

That was then. This is now.

Manchin’s vote essentially gave the Biden Administration a blank check, spending hundreds of billions of dollars wherever and whenever they want as the White House ramps up their reelection bid. If one is permitted to say so, a citizen would have to be beyond naïve to believe that this blizzard of federal cash will all be accounted for on behalf of projects that actually strengthen the republic. No one knows that better than Manchin, as he cut his deal with Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer in a scene from “Advice and Consent.”

Now, Manchin’s side deal is in trouble. Political observers say his Republican colleagues spotted his political expediency some time ago and have little reason to support his proposal even if less regulation is a shared ideology

Manchin should not be surprised that his side deal is in serious trouble: he has wobbled across the political spectrum during 2022. It became obvious that he had no north star that guides his political goals. Rather, he seeks to cut deals with whomever he can for the purpose of advancing his own immediate agenda or, as he should, what he perceives as that of his state and constituents. Perhaps that worked in another era but not when, due to justifiable widespread skepticism over election integrity, the future of our democracy is at risk.

One wonders if Manchin wanted a Senate legacy: at 75, he will face a spirited challenger in 2024, whomever the Republicans select. If permitting reform was approved by the Senate he would use it as the cloak needed to ward off voter anger over an “Inflation Reduction Act” that could well be a Presidential Trojan Horse filled with dollars for states that are important when counting electoral votes.

The New Wokeist Faith By Tom McCaffrey

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/the_new_wokeist_faith.html

The website of the American Psychiatric Association says:

Psychological attempts to force a transgender person to be cisgender (sometimes referred to as gender identity conversion efforts or so-called “gender identity conversion therapy”) are considered unethical and have been linked to adverse mental health outcomes.

The official position of the APA is that a man who thinks he is a woman is not necessarily deluded, and it would be unethical to treat him as if he were.  It is, in other words, entirely possible for a person who carries an X and a Y chromosome and who is, therefore, biologically male to be, nevertheless, mentally female — a woman “trapped in a man’s body.”

The website continues: “Medical affirmation may include pubertal suppression for adolescents with gender dysphoria and gender-affirming hormones like estrogen and testosterone for older adolescents and adults.” (Emphasis added.)

We who still cling to reality are accustomed to viewing this sort of lunacy as, well, lunacy.  It appears that almost overnight half of America has gone mad.  We are at a loss to explain how otherwise rational, highly accomplished persons like those at the APA could ever have come to believe something that is so self-evidently contrary to reality.  Well, they are not mad.

The story begins in an unlikely time and place. Long before the civil rights movement of the 1960s, American leftists had set their sights on disaffected blacks as potential allies in their campaign against capitalism and Americanism.  The success of this alliance at forcing the defenders of the American Republic into retreat — the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for example, partially nationalized private businesses in the name of racial integration — persuaded the Left to begin striking alliances with other disaffected minorities.  Thus did the Left abandon their commitment to purely economic revolution, and thus was born cultural Marxism.

Bibi’s Back: A Conversation With Israel’s New Prime Minister Bari Weiss

https://www.commonsense.news/p/bibis-back-a-conversation-with-israels?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

EXCERPTS:

BW: Supporters and critics of yours describe you the same way, which is having a real sense not just of duty but really of destiny in your service to Israel. In a way, you view yourself as the leader that can save the Jewish state and therefore the Jewish people. There’s a line in the introduction to your book where you talk about how you wish to be remembered. It’s a simple and short line. You say, “that I helped secure the life of the Jewish state and its future.” But the whole idea behind Zionism—the political movement for Jewish self-determination, Jews being able to live in their own land, not dependent on anyone else, and able to protect themselves—is that the Jews no longer need to be saved. Who do you see Israel as needing to be saved from right now and do you imagine a day when Israel or the Jewish people will ever not need to be saved?

BN: I think life is a constant battle and the life of nations is no different. Nations come; nations go. Civilizations rise and civilizations fall. The Jewish people have broken the so-called iron laws of history. There was a great Italian philosopher, in the 16th century, who said that all nations are born, they flower, then they wilt, and then they die. You can’t escape it. Well, the Jewish people have escaped that. We died 100 deaths and we came back to life.

BW: The Jews are the ever-dying people.

BN: Well, we decided to stop dying. The birth of Zionism said that the way to rescue the Jewish people from the final death, which our modern Moses—Theodor Herzl—saw very clearly 120 years ago, he said we’d be destroyed if we don’t have a way to save the Jews from the fires of violent antisemitism. We would die and we would be erased. My father, 33 years after Herzel in 1933, at all of 23 years old, said we are facing a Holocaust. That’s his word. The Holocaust of Hitlerism, which would destroy the Jewish people. The only way to save the Jewish people, to save the Jewish future, was to have a Jewish state which would be a haven for the millions that would otherwise be trapped in Europe. He devoted his life, before my brother fell in Entebbe, to found the Jewish state.

Liz Peek: Biden mute as protests demand freedom around the world

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-mute-protests-demand-freedom-world

What does the United States stand for? With Joe Biden in the White House, absolutely nothing.

Apparently, we don’t stand for freedom. As brave citizens in China desperately protest that country’s heinous lockdowns and censorship, a spokesman for the Biden administration says that the White House is “going to watch this closely.”  

We don’t stand against human rights abusers. As crippling energy prices threaten the president’s approval ratings, Biden’s emissaries travel to Venezuela, allowing an easing of sanctions and resumed oil exports from a murderous regime that happens to have the world’s largest oil reserves. 

Amnesty International has called out the Maduro government for “extrajudicial executions, excessive use of force, arbitrary detentions and torture and other ill-treatment against those perceived as critical of the government” but the Biden government needs oil. 

We don’t stand for peace in the Middle East. Too small-minded to accept the extraordinary success of the Abraham Accords achieved under President Trump, which created new alliances in the region and ring-fenced Iran, the Biden team continues its pursuit of a new nuclear deal with Tehran. The Biden White House resolutely ignores Iran’s past history of cheating on its nuclear commitments; astonishingly, it allows Russia to act as an intermediary.

We also seemingly don’t stand with women’s rights. Violent and widespread protests in Iran over the killing of a young woman arrested for not wearing a hijab have reportedly resulted in hundreds of deaths and the blinding of hundreds more by rubber bullets and metal pellets fired by security forces. 

The White House, other than issuing the usual supportive pablum, has been largely AWOL. Biden inadvertently boasted on the campaign trail that “We’re going to free Iran” but his team soon walked back the comment, saying that we merely “stood in solidarity” with the protesters. 

Leftwing Hysteria and the Art of the Psychodrama. Part One Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/leftwing-hysteria-and-the-art-of-the-psychodrama-part-one/

What follows is an extended analysis of how the Left obtains power without agendas that win popular support, and how such aggrandizement inflames social relations and national unity.

The progressive media—which constitute the majority of print newspapers, network news, public radio and TV, Google/Apple/Yahoo news, and the best-funded online venues—have fused with the hard-left Democratic Party. Most in the media, like most Democrats, accept the reality that the progressive, and increasingly neo-socialist, agenda does not and will never win majority support.

Americans want a closed border, a crackdown on crime, fossil-fuel independence, control of inflation and drunken spending, and an end to the woke cancel culture.

So how does the fusion media/political Left obtain power? Usually by the politics of distraction and feigned crises—perhaps better defined as the art of the psychodrama.

Daily the Left scans the news. It ceaselessly ferrets out any story that can be sensationalized and distorted to frighten, to anger, or to confuse the public into thinking America is a racist, sexist, homophobic, and downright awful place run by an elite, rich cadre of prejudicial, white-male Christian nationalists.

And then, presto, social media fuels the agreed-on lie. Television news accelerates it. And print journalism distorts it—all part of an agenda to justify radical changes (“fundamental transformations”) in America otherwise impossible.

Shimon Peres: Dreams of peace became Israel’s nightmare – opinion Moshe Dann

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-723757

Shimon Peres, an iconic Israeli leader until his death in 2016 at the age of 93, was the subject of a recent documentary sponsored by the Simon Wiesenthal Center. A prominent figure in the Labor Party, Peres held the positions of prime minister, foreign minister and president of Israel. He was best known for his role in developing Israel’s nuclear facility, as well as what was known as “the peace process” that became the basis for the Oslo Accords, for which he shared the Nobel Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat.

The film and plans to name the International Convention Center in Jerusalem in his memory, however, have stirred controversy and criticism for what many believe to be a publicity campaign that ignores Peres’s true legacy: the Oslo Accords, and his failure to understand the PLO’s agenda to destroy Israel.

Shimon Peres’s legacy

In 1985, as prime minister, Peres arranged the release of over 1,000 convicted terrorists in what was called the “Ahmed Jabril deal,” named after the terrorist leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PLFP). Less than three years later in December 1987, many of the terrorists led a surge of violence, known as the First Intifada, and others joined terrorist organizations.

Before the 1992 elections, Peres’s deputy Yossi Beilin concluded secret deals with the PLO in which the Israeli leaders pledged to grant it self-rule and quasi-state status. This became the basis of the Oslo Accords. The secret content of these negotiations has never been revealed.

China Protestors Call for End to CCP Rule by Gordon G. Chang

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19173/china-protestors-communist-rule

The CCP, as the Chinese Communist Party is informally known, has now lost hearts across the country.

China throughout the Communist period has witnessed demonstrations, but most of them are, as Burton noted, “highly localized” and “directed at malfeasance, corruption, and incompetence of lower level Communist functionaries.”

Now, however, the anger is directed at the Party itself. In short, as evident from the spontaneous demonstrations of the weekend, the Chinese people have had enough of Xi Jinping and CCP rule. They recognize the fundamental fact that the Party’s system does not work.

The Chinese people are not only angry over Xi Jinping’s “dynamic Zero-COVID policy;” they are also troubled by a crumbling economy and the collapse of the all-important property sector. New-home prices in 70 cities, for instance, fell in October for the 14h-straight month. There have been abnormally few sales in recent months as the market is “frozen,” with big spreads between what sellers demand and what buyers are willing to pay. These drops in prices and sales are of great concern because some 70% of Chinese household wealth is tied up in property. China’s people, as a result, were not happy even before Thursday’s fatal blaze.

Fomenting hatred of America, to save the Communist Party from popular unrest, would not be a big step for Xi.

Extraordinary protests quickly spread across China over the weekend, including major cities such as Beijing and Shanghai, since a fire Thursday claimed a reported 10 lives in an apartment block in Urumqi, in the northwestern part of the country.

China’s people were enraged by the regime’s COVID controls, which had prevented firefighters from reaching the scene of the tragedy in time. “This is people past their breaking point,” tweeted CNN’s Selina Wang on Sunday.

Also on Sunday, the Telegraph’s Simina Mistreanu reported on Twitter that a crowd numbering at least 100 began marching toward Tiananmen Square, in the heart of the Chinese capital. Police, however, stopped demonstrators after only a few blocks, at the Liangma River. “The fact that they intended to protest at Tiananmen,” she wrote, “is wild.”

Trans Psychologist Files Brief Against School District Hiding Students’ Gender Transitions From Parents Madeline Leesman

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/madelineleesman/2022/11/28/trans-psychologist-slams-school-for-transitioning-students-without-parental-consent-n2616447

A transgender clinical psychologist joined a lawsuit against a Maryland school district over a policy that allows educators to hide students’ gender transitions from their parents. 

Last week, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty filed an amicus brief in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit to reverse a ruling from a District Court judge in August that dismissed a complaint from parents against the Montgomery County Board of Education over the policy. 

According to The Washington Post, three parents argued that the policy hinders their ability to “direct the care, custody, education, and control of their minor children” under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The psychologist, Dr. Erica Anderson, reportedly joined the lawsuit because the school district’s policies to keep parents out of their children’s lives will “rip families apart” and “teach children that deceiving one’s parents is acceptable.”

“As a psychologist who works with these kids and families, I have seen instances of family rupture when children don’t advise their parents of what’s going on with them, and then they proceed down a path that sometimes is interrupted only when parents are surprised to learn some of these things,” Anderson said in an interview with Fox News Digital.

“So on all accounts, I am opposed to schools depriving parents of the knowledge of what’s going on with their children,” Anderson added.

Everybody Hates Liz Cheney Pimped by Democrats, used by the news media, abandoned by Republicans, and disliked by the public, Cheney, like her father, might have managed to tick off almost everyone on her way out the door. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/28/everybody-hates-liz-cheney/

It wasn’t supposed to end this way.

After successfully winning the affection and approval of political enemies who, not so long ago, considered her father a war criminal, Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) will leave Congress in about 30 days to much greener, so to speak, pastures. (Ironically—or not—Cheney’s effort to indict Trump related to the events of January 6 will continue under Special Counsel Jack Smith, fresh off the heels of prosecuting Kosovo government officials at The Hague, the very place many of Cheney’s new admirers wanted former Vice President Dick Cheney to face trial.)

Democrats, however, may not give the doyenne of NeverTrump Republicans the grateful send-off she undoubtedly believes she earned during her brief tenure in Congress. Cheney, according to news reports, is as popular with the staff of the January 6 select committee as she is with Republicans in Wyoming, who voted her out of office by a nearly 2-1 margin in August. 

Her obsessive fixation with Donald Trump—a personal vendetta in retaliation for Trump’s denunciation of the Iraq War and her father’s lies about weapons of mass destruction—is backfiring as the committee’s work concludes. And like all things Cheney, the end is fraught with internal drama, delusions of grandeur, personal score-settling, private bullying, and growing disaffection among those who trusted her to act in good faith.

The release of the official report has been delayed four times; it’s now scheduled for December 20, just two weeks before Republicans take control of the House with no time to pass any legislation to prevent a future “insurrection,” a major selling point to the public. Cheney, apparently, is to blame. “[Less] than six weeks before the conclusion of the committee’s work, Cheney’s influence over the committee’s final report has rankled many current and former committee staff,” the Washington Post reported last week. “They are angered and disillusioned by Cheney’s push to focus the report primarily on former president Donald Trump, and have bristled at the committee morphing into what they have come to view as the vehicle for the outgoing Wyoming lawmaker’s political future.”

More than a dozen former and current committee investigators spoke anonymously to the Post; some have quit in protest of Cheney’s focus on Trump. “[It’s] long been clear that Cheney deprioritized findings that didn’t fit a specific narrative about Trump’s efforts to foment the insurrection,” the Post revealed. One former staffer complained that the committee had morphed into a “Cheney 2024 campaign.”

‘Pup play,’ ‘genderfluid’ nuclear bureaucrat accused of felony luggage theft By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/pup_play_genderfluid_nuclear_bureaucrat_accused_of_felony_luggage_theft.html

It made the headlines when the Obama administration hired Sam Brinton as the deputy assistant secretary of the Office of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the U.S. Department of Energy. In other words, a fairly high-level nuclear guy. On paper, Sam Brinton, an MIT-credentialed nuclear engineer, looked good. In real life, he’s a way out there “genderfluid” man who believes in pretending to be a puppy for sexual reasons. Now, he’s alleged to have stolen a woman’s suitcase at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport (“MSP airport”).

It’s hard to express just how strange Sam Brinton is. He shaves his head and swans around in women’s clothes:

He’s also a proud “pup handler,” an identity (because leftists always have “identities,” the more, the better) that sees him and his sex buddies dress up like puppies and their owners for fun. It’s unclear if real dogs are involved.  

Brinton is so passionate about his self-acknowledged “kink” that he’s lectured on the “Physics of Kink” at the University of Wisconsin. He’s also a member of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an old-time 501(c)3 drag group that mocks Catholicism, where he rejoices in the name of “Sister Ray Dee O’Active.”

Now, to that list of outré behaviors, we can add “accused luggage thief.” AlphaNews, a Minnesota-based online news outlet, reports that Brinton was charged with felony theft after he allegedly stole a woman’s luggage at the MSP airport.