This one is a great example:
Mike Lindell, the My Pillow boss distributed huge quantities of bedding to many families affected by Hurricane Ian in Fort Myers. Now, Lindell is openly a supporter of Donald Trump and a political Conservative and religious Christian.
This was the headline on AOL’s Welcome page:
“My Pillow Boss Promotes Products Outside Wrecked Florida Home “
https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/14/were-in-the-climate-army-now/
During the Global War on Terror, when the United States was engaged battling terrorists and insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Left routinely lied to young voters that President George W. Bush in particular, and Republicans in general, were going to reinstitute the draft and send them to these active military theaters. The Left’s message was less than subtle: vote for Democrats or else the GOP will make sure you’re drafted and/or dead.
I was reminded of this in the heat of the 2020 election, when one of the Democrats’ smears was that an unstable President Trump was going to involve us in a war—likely a nuclear one. As during the Bush Administration, the scurrilous charge targeted young voters. What was different was that Trump was far less interventionist, and utilized American military power with significantly less frequency than did his predecessors. If one understands the Left’s tactics, Trump’s disinclination to use military power was not only insufficient to stop their “he’ll get us in a war” lie; it was, in fact, their reason for spreading it. (To those who contest this assessment of the Left’s tactics, does “Russiagate” ring a bell?)
Heading into the 2022 midterm elections, the Democrats and their media cohorts are now using the prospect of nuclear war to try and prop up Joe Biden’s sagging poll numbers, which threaten to drag his party’s federal and state candidates down to defeat. To wit, Biden opined to a gaggle of fat cat Democrats:
[For the] first time since the Cuban Missile Crisis, we have a direct threat of the use [of a] nuclear weapon if, in fact, things continue down the path they are going. We’ve got a guy [Putin] I know fairly well. He’s not joking when he talks about potential use of tactical nuclear weapons or biological or chemical weapons because his military is, you might say, significantly underperforming.
Yes, if the Democrats’ stoking of “civil war” rhetoric isn’t enough to get their voters to the polls for the 2022 midterm elections, why not toss in the prospect of nuclear annihilation—along a path they and their minions have helped cement—even as they taunt the enemy to try to look like a tough guy?
What could possibly go wrong?
https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/14/archives-politicization-portends-another-russiagate/
If the Russiagate fiasco proved anything, it is that slimy but clever beats straight but blundering, at least in the political short term. Unfortunately, the oleaginous tactics of the Biden Administration regarding former President Donald Trump’s statutorily protected presidential papers, combined with its politicization of what should be a neutral, nonpartisan National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), follows the temporarily successful Russiagate playbook. And as in the “Russia collusion” hoax, the media feeds the frenzy of its credulous naïf audience, using the shiny object of a few straggling classified documents out of millions, importance unknown.
More significantly, the media is concealing from the public the clear provisions of the Presidential Records Act (PRA), which, if read with critical intelligence, reveals the sickening politicization of the Archives which, like the FBI, is tasked to be neutral and nonpartisan.
For two hundred years, until Richard Nixon sought to destroy unflattering White House tapes, former presidents owned their presidential papers, classified and unclassified, after leaving office, willing them to their heirs or putting them in trust.
The 1978 PRA attempted to keep the status quo, with the exception that the government now owned the documents, with the Archives serving as a faithful librarian.
A former president has unfettered access to his documents for up to 12 years, while the sitting president and Congress have no access, unless the incumbent can show, per section 2205 (B) (2), that “such records contain information that is needed for the conduct of current business of the incumbent President’s office and that is not otherwise available.”
But whether or not the incumbent president can see these documents, the former president is assured by the PRA of access to all his papers: “The presidential records of a former President shall be available to such former President or the former President’s designated representatives.”
Those two simple statements are at the heart of the case that the Archives has been politicized and that the Biden Administration has weaponized this politicization. Both have acted shamefully, but our vaunted “investigative” media, of course, has not noticed. Don’t we have swarms of wannabe Woodwards and Bernsteins?
It is the duty of the Archives not to provide such access unless the requisite showing has been made. Because this exception requires a showing that the sitting president cannot get the information elsewhere and that it is needed for the current (i.e., already existing) business of the incumbent’s office, this should pose a high burden.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/10/foaming_at_the_mouth_the_media_tries_to_run_cover_for_j6_charade.html
It should come as no surprise that The Wall Street Journal, in an October 14 editorial, gave credence to the rogue, irresponsible, illegitimate, and unconstitutional “Jan. 6” House Select Committee comprised of nine Trump-despisers, two of which are rabidly anti-Trump Republicans, soon to leave Congress after monumental defeats at the August ballot box. The title read, “What the Jan. 6 Hearings Accomplished”. The Journal, by that title, showed its Trump-loathing hand for what it was: it was no inquiry, it was an inquisition.
The Journal’s anti-Trump editorial also gave credence to the unconstitutional subpoena for the former (and future?) President Donald J. Trump.
Noting the 9-0 vote in favor of the Trump subpoena, the Journal said: “If he wants to avoid the hot seat, Mr. Trump only needs to find a way to resist the subpoena….”
Immediately following that, the next paragraph began:
Rep. Liz Cheney justified an extraordinary subpoena to a former President by saying that ‘more than 30 witnesses in our investigation have invoked their Fifth Amendment right to self-incrimination.’
Let’s stop there for a personal, relevant note. Chalk it up to my age and lifelong interest in politics, but as soon as I learned of the Trump subpoena, I recalled a political event that occurred in November 1953, when I was 13-and-a-half years old. I remembered that former President Truman (a Democrat) had been served with a subpoena by House Republicans (then in the majority) and rejected the subpoena as violating the Constitution’s separation of powers principle. Having that memory, I then went to the internet for confirmation. The fruit of that search appears here.
Paul A. Gigot, editor of the Journal’s editorial page where this article appeared, could not have had a memory of Mr. Truman’s rejection of the House subpoena as he was not born until 1955, a year-and-a-half after the Truman subpoena. But a separation of powers problem should have occurred to Mr. Gigot — or did his apparent loathing for Mr. Trump blind him to major constitutional details? How else can one explain the editorial’s claim that “Rep. Liz Cheney justified an extraordinary subpoena to a former President….”?
Briefly stated, there can be no justification of a subpoena “to a former President” — unless the server has no respect for the separation of powers principle — much less this observation in Federalist Paper no. 47 attributed to James Madison:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-pentagons-recruitment-woes-army-military-navy-air-force-u-s-defense-11665664019?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
The U.S. Army recently told the press that it missed its fiscal year recruiting goal by 25%, coming up short nearly 20,000 soldiers. For 50 years America has relied on volunteers to defend the country, but that system is a luxury maintained at a cost, and its struggles deserve attention.
The Army’s troubles are acute but not unique. The Air Force barely hit its numbers for 2022. The Navy met its targets for enlisted sailors but came up short about 200 officers. Both the Navy and Air Force had to dip into “delayed entry” pools of recruits usually kept in a holding pattern for later, which means the services will start a new recruiting year in an even tougher position. The numbers are worse in the reserves.
Several factors are contributing to the shortfall. Fewer than one-quarter of Americans ages 17 to 24 are eligible to serve, and the reasons for disqualification include obesity, addiction and criminal history. The decision to close high schools during the pandemic kept recruiters at bay and left many teens mentally unwell, another disqualification.
Record job openings and Covid transfer payments hurt enlistment, but the problems run deeper. Fewer than one in 10 youth are inclined to serve, according to survey data. Dismal civic education hasn’t helped; teenagers taught to think America is a racist or imperialist country won’t wear the uniform.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-durham-and-the-presss-battle-with-truth-collusion-hoax-fbi-media-lying-steele-dossier-analyst-sources-trial-11665776889?mod=opinion_lead_pos8
Members of the press are rooting for the failure of the latest John Durham prosecution, because they think it absolves them of their roles in the collusion hoax.
Nor are the feelings of special counsel Durham hard to guess. They are likely identical to those of a previous exposer of FBI misfeasance, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, who could not have failed to be surprised and a little appalled at the media’s indifference to the truths he and his team labored to reveal at taxpayer expense.
It was Mr. Durham himself, in his initial and expansive indictment of Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann, who dwelled and dwelled on every reason for believing the FBI had not been fooled by the lie Mr. Durham charged the lawyer with telling in the collusion hoax.
The message is even clearer in this week’s prosecution of Steele dossier principal “researcher” Igor Danchenko, who has also pleaded not guilty to lying to the FBI. The world now knows, thanks to Mr. Durham, that the FBI put Mr. Danchenko on its payroll for 3½ years and kept him there as late as October 2020, long after it knew the dossier was a package of lies. One effect of this arrangement was to discourage the analyst-about-town Mr. Danchenko from telling the press or other investigators the truth about the dossier’s fraudulence while the FBI was still suggesting to the public and courts it was “credible.”
As a news story, alas, all this runs into the blinkeredness, not to mention giant helpings of personal cowardice, of many reporters covering it.
Telling is a Washington Post scene-setter on the Danchenko trial that began by misrepresenting the three-year-old words of the Justice Department’s Mr. Horowitz, who said he found no “documentary or testimonial evidence” of improper motivation in the Clinton email and Trump collusion investigations.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18964/aggression-russia-ukraine
The West is not threatening Russia. Putin is threatening the West.
Putin might desperately try to reverse the situation, whatever the cost… Ukraine and its heroism have shocked the world. Ukraine’s army can win, but it will require the unwavering support of the West.
The men Putin recently began sending to the front may be reservists, but most have not held a weapon for a very long time and have no will to fight. Some who managed to send messages on Telegram channels say they know they are destined to be cannon fodder.
Putin has almost no allies and could lose what limited support he has. Chinese President Xi Jinping has in common with Putin a clear hostility to the West, but has reportedly not supplied Russia with weapons.
During a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in Samarkand, Uzbekistan last month, Xi reportedly told Putin that it was necessary to “instill stability and positive energy into a world in turmoil”. Whatever that meant, it was not a message of support for the war.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on September 20 that “Russia should return the occupied lands to Ukraine” — not exactly the direction in which Putin would like to be going.
The Chinese Communist Party, which openly says it wants to dominate the world, apparently does not want a larger war just now. On September 24, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, was even more explicit…
The United States has, once again, like it or not, emerged as the only power capable of defeating an aggressive enemy of democracy; when it does, the status of the US and NATO are strengthened. It is, however, impossible to forget that America’s debacle in Afghanistan, the Biden administration’s frenzy to sign a lethal nuclear deal with Iran under almost any conditions, and the extreme weakness of Biden’s White House before Putin invaded Ukraine. These failures no doubt played into Putin’s decision to invade.
The Biden administration’s failure to arm Ukraine before the invasion and his comments that a “minor incursion” might be acceptable were catastrophic. The same failure to provide sufficient deterrence to Taiwan is unquestionably inviting Communist Chinese aggression.
The weakness of the Biden administration has created aggression everywhere — Russia, China, Iran, Turkey, North Korea; assaults on the dollar as the World’s reserve currency — even domestically.
Will the Biden administration ever learn from its mistakes? Or is its ultimate, unspoken goal actually to hand over the United States quietly to Russia, China and Iran?
September 21. Russian President Vladimir Putin, in a pre-recorded speech on Russian television, announces that Russia is being attacked by the Ukrainian government and the West. He defines Ukrainian territories occupied by the Russian army as “liberated zones”. He speaks of the referendums he staged in the regions of Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhya and Kherson to try illegally to attach them to Russia. He says that he has decided on a “partial mobilization” to defend the Russian fatherland; adds that the West threatens Russia, and that any aggression against Russian territory will lead to a response by “all weapon systems available to us”.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18995/iran-protest-support
While the majority of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Parliament chants ‘Death to America’ & supports the Khamenei loyal police for their barbaric actions the leader of the free world (Joe Biden) is silent. Why?” — Iranian Americans for Liberty, Twitter, October 2, 2022.
Nika Shakarami, a 17-year-old girl, was one of the many women who was arrested for burning her hijab. According to the forensic doctor, she was repeatedly raped, beaten and her dead body was delivered to her family with smashed nose and broken skull.
In August 2015, Obama delivered another speech justifying his [Iran] deal, also immediately exposed as a lie: “After two years of negotiations, we have achieved a detailed arrangement that permanently prohibits Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. It cuts off all of Iran’s pathways to a bomb. It contains the most comprehensive inspection and verification regime ever negotiated to monitor a nuclear program.”
However, as the “sunset clauses” quickly revealed, there was nothing “permanent” about it. Iran was to have all the nuclear weapons it wanted in a few short years, along with ballistic missiles to deliver them.
Obama’s billions which were reported as part of a plan to turn Iran in to a “friend,” did the opposite. Iran took the billions, enriched even more uranium, hid what it was doing even further from inspectors, took over Lebanon, and began a war in Yemen.
So far, sadly, instead of standing with the people of Iran heroically confronting a regime that chants “Death to America”, Biden tsk-tsks, says he is “gravely concerned,” but effectively says nothing. He still wants a deal with the mullahs that will quickly bring Iran to nuclear weapons capability, reward Iran’s aggression with a trillion dollars, enable it to oppress women and kill more of its innocent citizens, and empower it to help Russia with even more military equipment to crush Ukraine.
Is Biden — whose family received $3.5 million from the widow of the mayor of Moscow; who, on day one, effectively crippled US oil and gas exploration and exports, thereby, as the price of oil and natural gas suddenly shot up, funding Putin’s war on Ukraine, and who gave Putin the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to blackmail Europe in winter — once again just being a “Russian stooge”?
While the Iranian regime is arresting, wounding, torturing and killing protesters, all the Biden administration appears to be concerned with is trying to revive a nuclear deal that will soon give Iran unlimited nuclear weapons capability; lift sanctions against the expansionist regime of Iran thereby pumping billions of dollars into its treasury for further adventurism; build nuclear weapons; provide Russia with still more deadly military equipment; and empower the mullahs even further to oppress and murder their innocent, fed-up civilian population for the “crime” of women showing too much hair. Their mothers must be very proud of them.
Eco-vandals threw tomato soup on one of Van Gogh’s priceless “Sunflowers” paintings at Britain’s National Museum on Thursday, the latest in a long string of attacks on Western Civilization’s treasures.
The reason for the Van Gogh attack? Two members of Just Stop Oil attempted to destroy the artwork and glued themselves to the wall because they’re anti-oil and “Sunflowers” is an oil painting.
Get it?
Yeah, me neither.
The enemies of civilization are idiot vandal-savants with moral pretentious, dressed up like dues collectors from 1984′s Junior Anti-Sex League.
Here’s what passes for their thinking:
Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” had nothing to do with climate change, [Just Stop Oil spokesweasel Mel Carrington] said. It was simply “an iconic painting, by an iconic painter” and an attack on it would generate headlines. But the choice of soup was more symbolic, Carrington said: In Britain, many householders were struggling to pay fuel and food bills because of soaring inflation, and some could not even afford to heat up a can of soup. The government should be helping ordinary people deal with “the cost of living crisis,” rather than enabling fossil fuel extraction, she added.
Fortunately, the only damage done was “some minor damage to the frame,” according to an email released by the National Gallery. The painting itself sits safely behind glass.
I’ve been to the National Museum. I’ve seen “Sunflowers.” I’ve seen the protective glass. I’d rather have seen Van Gogh unencumbered, but I understand that the West’s treasures must be protected from the two-legged animals behind groups like Just Stop Oil.
Witness now your so-called moral betters, overgrown children still in need of a spanking:
Unavoidably, our “protestors” got what they wanted — the world talking about them.
But maybe not in the way they intended, if these selections from my Twitter timeline are any indication.
Enjoy.
Commander Salamander is one of my favorite milbloggers — one of my favorite bloggers, period. His suggestion is exactly what we ought to do, with the glued-down protestors as much on display as the art for visitors to the National Gallery.
I have to get a little more serious with this next one.
Please burn this line into your brain: “The vandalism or destruction of art is always an authoritarian act.”
Even some lefties can’t get behind this particularly stupid and futile act.
girl i’m down with the cause but van gogh was a broke mentally ill painter considered a failure until his death like what does he have to do with this https://t.co/cNpgoBKPd7
— matt (@mattxiv) October 14, 2022
Here’s another.
Kurt Schlichter has had quite enough, as you’ll see below. But it was one of the replies (also below) that really caught my eye.
Tom Clancy did just that to the environmental wackos who tried to wipe out humanity in Rainbow Six, and it’s an admirable solution. I’d also recommend no insect repellent, clothes, or food. Enjoy your nature, kids!
Oh, and ignore that comment from Ian Miles Cheong about the painting being “destroyed.” Ian provides good links and some solid content, but sometimes he plays a little fast and loose with the facts.
That’s enough for today, and I’m going to try not to lose any sleep wondering where Western Civilization’s children-with-daddy-issues will strike next.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-to-lose-friends-and-influence-over-people-saudi-arabia-obama-biden
Americans have a reputation, with others and in their own national literature, for being careless and breaking things. Often this is because they are so admirably creative, dynamic, and unattached to the past. But for the last two decades, the epicenter of American carelessness has been the Middle East, an area of the world that seems to encourage fantasies among all Westerners, yet where real-world margins for error are small. The result has been a series of disasters for the peoples of the region and for American prestige. This week brought what looks like another unforced error in policymaking, fed by hubris, fantasy, airy talk, and a refusal to acknowledge reality.
On Tuesday, White House national security spokesman John Kirby announced that President Joe Biden will be reevaluating America’s relationship with Saudi Arabia after OPEC+ announced the previous week that it would cut oil production. Kirby’s announcement followed a statement by Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., claiming that Saudi Arabia is helping to “underwrite Putin’s war” through OPEC+. “As Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” Menendez said, “I will not green-light any cooperation with Riyadh until the Kingdom reassesses its position with respect to the war in Ukraine.”
As a Saudi who loves the United States, and believes deeply that our two countries need each other, the only word that comes to mind regarding the contemporary “reevaluation” of our relations is: obscene.
It was the Obama administration that decided to give Vladimir Putin a foothold in the eastern Mediterranean, which it sold to the American people as a way to “deescalate” the civil war in Syria. As the United States romanced Putin, offering him Crimea and warm water ports in Syria in exchange for pulling Iran’s irons out of the fire over the past decade, U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and Israel have had no choice but to cope. Last month, while Russian-operated Iranian drones and missiles were pounding Kyiv, Riyadh used its diplomatic leverage to obtain the release of American and British POWs from Putin.
Top Stories @ Fox News