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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

“First Out, Next In” Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.bolgspot.com

Edward Bellamy’s 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward showed the difficulty of getting the future right, especially when idealism co-opts reason. National socialism proved a disaster to Germany and Italy (and the world), and state ownership of industry deep-sixed the Soviet Union. Kierkegaard suggested in the rubric above, life is best lived with an understanding of history. And as George Santayana famously wrote in Life of Reason: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Divisiveness characterizes our age, like the years leading to the Civil War, the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, or the late 1960s when the Country was divided by the Vietnam War. In last Friday’s The Wall Street Journal Lance Morrow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center wrote: “Exaggeration is the traditional style of American politics, but permanent culture wars, the global pandemic, the agitations of social media and the collapse of party discipline – and, not least, the role modeling of Joe Biden and Donald Trump – have left Americans discontent with mere exaggeration.” We have, he added, “gotten addicted to apocalypse…”

Is there a way out? Can reason subsume emotion? Is a middle ground achievable? I think there is, but I don’t believe that either Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump will lead the way. The former is in cognizant decline and the latter has become detached from reality. There are big issues that separate the two parties, but democracy is about debate and compromise, not incoherent brawling, which is what our politics have become.

Be Guided by the Angel on Your Shoulder by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20367/angel-on-your-shoulder

This article was first published by Gatestone on December 8, 2022.

Scientists have long sought to bring order to our universe through the application of formulas.

Einstein created what is probably the most recognized formula with his explanation of energy as “E = mc²”. The Greek philosopher Pythagoras has been given credit for stating the relationship between two legs of a right triangle and its hypotenuse. Calculus, with its many different equations, sits on the shoulders of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz who labored during the 1600s.

But what these formulas will never be able to compute is the function of the human heart, the role of individual conscience, and ability to recognize right from wrong.

For that, each human being on the planet must depend upon the Angel on their shoulder. The values offered by that Angel are not interchangeable. To secure happiness for us, and those around us, it is important for us to be guided by that Angel on our shoulder, for it is only then we can walk tall.

When that Angel is absent so too is morality. Equally lost is empathy. And for those who have forsaken that Angel on their shoulder, the very concept of love is missing.

During this holiday season it is particularly important to pause and insist upon a period of self-reflection for, regardless of one’s faith, that Angel is in search of the person who embraces the humanity within ourselves and the ability to love.

Author Emily Brontë understood this. In her novel, Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw, one of the main characters, was asked how she could love the gypsy stable-boy, Heathcliff. She replied, “Whatever our souls are made of his and mine are the same.” That might be as close to love, rapture, happiness as it gets.

Ironically, it may have been Einstein who authored the most cogent explanation of how that Angel on our shoulder allows us to love.

America’s Election Year Phantasmagoria Roger Franklin

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2024/02/joe-bidens-election-year-phantasmagoria/

EXCERPTS:

Just now, though, as the process of selecting America’s next president leaves the station and gathers speed towards the summer conventions and November, it might well be that only a writer with the eye of Thompson’s better years can do justice to the phantasmagoria unfolding from the southern border to the snowy north, New York’s courtrooms to the mob-looted stores of Oakland, Chicago, St Louis, Los Angeles and, well, just everywhere. There is no need to hit the hallucinogens; wide-eyed reality mocks illicit pharmacology’s fantasies and distortions.

Start with the Middle East, where the remains of three Americans killed over the weekend as they slept in their Jordan barracks will by now be in Germany and the care of Mortuary Affairs Specialists, the Pentagon’s in-house undertakers. The drone that did for them was launched by what the White House’s team of press-office obfuscators prefer to call “militants”, although there are times when reporters’ questions oblige them to preface that description with “Iran-backed”. Thompsonesque weirdness prevails in the Biden administration’s perception of the situation it is attempting with limited success to sell the American public. “We don’t want a war with Iran,” National Security Council flack John Kirby has repeatedly insisted, despite Iran quite clearly being very much at war with America.

Since early October, US bases in Iraq, Syria and Jordan have been targeted on a near daily schedule — some 160 times in a campaign which might well serve as the very definition of asymmetrical warfare. The drones Iran makes and supplies its proxies costs peanuts; the missiles that have destroyed all but a handful of those incoming threats cost millions and, worse, are said to have been used so often they are now in short supply. That tally of attacks, just by the way, doesn’t include what the Houthis of Yemen have been throwing at Red Sea shipping and, when the opportunity presents itself, US warships. Joe Biden’s response to all this? So far nothing but a series of ineffective air strikes on Yemen targets and his flacks’ vague promise that more action will be taken somewhere, somehow, to some extent.

“I don’t think we need a wider war in the Middle East,” Biden said on Tuesday, “that’s not what I’m looking for.” That comment, like all his interactions these days with the White House press corps, was delivered as he prepared to board the presidential helicopter, those words even harder to make out above the chopper’s turbines than the standard incoherence of any typical public appearance. Would he mount direct attacks on Iran, the reporters shouted? America’s commander in chief stumbled, then landed upon a jesuitical distinction. His “problem” , he said, was that Tehran had provided drones and missiles to those pesky “militants”. That Iran also funds and directs them, from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah’s various iterations in Lebanon and elsewhere, was nothing he thought worth mentioning or, just as likely, thought about at all.

Contrast that wait-and-see prevarication with, say, Ronald Reagan, who reacted to just one Iranian provocation, the 1988 mining of a US frigate in international waters, by sinking five of Tehran’s warships and pulverising a pair of former drilling rigs converted to offshore radar stations.

Hell Must Be Empty By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/02/hell_must_be_empty.html

In New York City, the bad guys have long understood an unwritten rule: you don’t hit a cop.  In the past, doing so put you at the top of the NYPD’s to-do list and ensured that you would not be free on the streets for long.  When 30,000 officers are tasked with securing a metropolis of nine million residents, the impenetrability of the “thin blue line” is a matter of life and death.  When video emerged of a group of illegal aliens wrestling two cops to the ground near Times Square and beating them with fists and feet, that thin blue line got thinner.  When news broke that the offenders were released without bail and that a left-wing “charity” had likely given them a free ride to California, the blue line all but disappeared.  

By looking the other way as criminal invaders attack the people charged with protecting the city, NYC mayor Eric Adams and district attorney Alvin Bragg not only betray their duties to those who risk their lives every day for others’ safety, but also prove their complicity with those who wage war against citizens of the United States.  Before he disappeared without a care in the world, one of the foreign nationals apprehended for the attack left Manhattan Criminal Court with two middle fingers extended into the air and a broad smile across his face.  It was an “F you” to all Americans from a man who should never have been allowed to illegally enter the United States in the first place.  At the same time, it sure felt as if Adams, Bragg, Biden, Mayorkas, and all the other open-borders advocates and politicians were really the ones flipping off desperate American citizens whose decades-long pleas for secure borders have been entirely ignored.  

Ever since Obama’s presidency, Democrats have demonized police officers and lionized criminals.  They lied about “hands up, don’t shoot”; maligned cops as Klan members with badges; and instigated race riots throughout the country.  They excused criminal behavior, cut bail requirements, reduced felonies to misdemeanors, and celebrated unethical prosecutors who have used their powers to lock up police officers for spurious charges while treating violent crime as some kind of race-based civil right.

Barack Obama and Eric Holder (the corrupt attorney general who regularly abused the law to protect friends and target political enemies) set the country down a dangerous path, where criminal gangs are psychologically empowered to target law enforcement officers for assassination and municipal politicians are so desperate to prove their soft-on-crime bona fides that they release violent criminals from jail in order to make room for unjustly indicted cops. 

Democracy in Decline: The Subversion of Rule of Law There are many signs and portents that signal the guttering of the rule of law and its replacement: rule by law. It is an autumnal sign—a sign of civilization at the end of its tether. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2024/02/04/democracy-in-decline-the-subversion-of-rule-of-law/

A friend recently wrote me to offer a sharp formulation of a distinction I have often written about myself. Regular readers know that I am fond of distinguishing between “democracy”—a political arrangement in which the demos, the people, rule—and “Our Democracy™,” a counterfeit or masquerade of democracy in which not the people but an elite nomenklatura rule. To an increasing extent, I believe, the United States is gradually subsisting into the latter, with all the political, social, and moral deformations that such anxious oligarchical arrangements entail.

True enough, the United States was never really a democracy—a form of government, as James Madison observed in Federalist 10, that tended to be “as short in its life as it is violent in its death.” Rather, the United States was, from the beginning, a democratic republic. Ultimately, the people were sovereign—that was the point of the phrase “We the People.” But their sovereignty was mediated through the agency of representation. The point of my distinction, however, still holds. The Founders bequeathed us a democratic republic and a Constitution whose chief purpose was to define and limit the power of government. Their modern successors have inhabited that political dispensation, slyly perverting and emptying it out of its original signification while maintaining the names and rituals of the original.

If you believe that the words “perverting” and “emptying it out of its original signification” are extreme, I invite you to contemplate the tenth amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” To what extent is the letter or spirit of that instruction followed today?

The answer is: not at all. What was originally a document designed to limit government and protect people from its coercive intervention has mutated into a reliquary containing the desiccated remains of a once-potent, now mostly quaint and antique admonition.

Rafael A. Mangual Outrageous—But Not Surprising The Times Square assault of two NYPD officers, and the release of several of the suspects, are predictable outcomes of destructive policies on migrants and public safety.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/new-york-city-falling-into-disorder

Last weekend, video cameras posted in Times Square captured a scene that has sparked outrage across the city. While struggling to arrest a resisting suspect, two NYPD officers were viciously attacked by at least six other men—all migrants, recently arrived in our “sanctuary city.” They all got away. Not long afterward, police made seven arrests related to the incident, on charges that included assault and robbery (according to reports, one of the officers’ cell phone was stolen during the fight). Adding insult to injury, at least four of the seven attackers have already been released. The attack and the subsequent release of the alleged perpetrators may shock the consciences of many New Yorkers, but anyone surprised by this hasn’t been paying attention.

The sad truth is that this episode reveals exactly what the politicians running Gotham’s city council and the legislature in Albany have invited. For years, my colleagues and I have called attention to the destructive policies that city and state officials have proposed and enacted. We’ve warned that those shifts would embolden offenders, make police more vulnerable, and put residents at risk. The Times Square episode is an amalgam of the obvious and expected effects of just a few of those policies.

New York City mayors and other city leaders have on multiple occasions defended the decision to make the city a “sanctuary”—which includes refusing to assist federal authorities seeking to deport migrants suspected of crimes. As noted in a recent article in City & State, this has been the city’s policy since 2014, and it has been state law since a state appellate court held as much in 2018.

The city council has also criminalized the use of basic police grappling techniques through the “diaphragm law,” which, on pain of criminal prosecution, prohibits the placement by cops of any pressure on the diaphragm, chest, or back of even actively resisting suspects, or otherwise restricting their airflow. The law was initially thrown out on constitutional grounds, but a state appellate court overturned that ruling in 2022. Handcuffing a grown man who is forcefully resisting is not easy, even when officers outnumber him. Yet, we ask our police to try to win these fights without running afoul of these restrictions—even when they’re surrounded by others willing to use violence to thwart the arrest.

PENTAGON TO AUDIT SPENDING ON VIRUS RESEARCH IN CHINA, OTHER FOREIGN NATIONS

Taxpayers will finally learn what their hard-earned tax dollars are funding on research of Coronviruses, Ebola and more.

OpenTheBooks had a record-breaking year in 2023 thanks to your support.

Our investigations were cited at least 20 times in congressional floor speeches or in congressional oversight letters to federal agencies. Then – Congress voted on seven of our budget amendments and five of them passed – each was a direct result of our exposures.

Now we’re turning our investigations into 2024 wins!

Just this week, we had a major victory when the National Defense Authorization Act included language that directs the Inspector General to quantify and report on all Defense spending into Chinese entities and on virus research over the last 10 years. 

This doesn’t just include coronaviruses like COVID, but also Ebola, nipa, influenza and more. 

The Strangest Case of E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/the-crazy-story-behind-the-ridiculous-news-part-five/

80-year-old E. Jean Carroll, a former relationship- and sex-advice columnist, just won a huge $83.3 million settlement from Donald Trump in connection with a previous finding that she was “defamed” by Donald Trump.

New York is not a hospitable place for any conservative politician or celebrity, much less one ex-president Donald Trump—as we have seen from prosecutors Alvin Bragg and Letitia James, who both promised voters that they would get Trump if just elected.

But here are some strange facts about the case—with the proviso we have no idea of what exactly happened when both Carroll and Trump consensually and strangely entered into ribald banter in a department store’s lingerie section, then mutually and apparently willfully entered a dressing room, at which point their stories radically diverge (as opposed to somewhat diverged, since Trump at various times said he didn’t recall meeting her at all).

Trump appeared raucously in person in court to turn the civil suit into a referendum on the supposedly coordinated leftwing efforts to damage his presidential candidacy. But he was fighting with a Bill Clinton-appointed judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, and with a New York liberal jury pool, in a suit concerning his denials of a sexual assault of Carroll some 30 years ago. She won an earlier ruling that his meae culpae were excessive and entered the realm of character assassination and therefore was suing for defamation damages. 

Judge Kaplan certainly grew tired of Trump’s editorialization and like most New York jurists probably did not enjoy Trump in his courtroom in the first place. And although a jury earlier did not find Trump guilty of “rape,” Kaplan de facto has stated that it was OK to claim publicly that Trump was nevertheless guilty of rape.Or as the judge put it, “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape.’”

But if that’s true, Judge Kaplan, why didn’t the jury, on the judge’s prior own instructions, simply convict Trump of rape, which it certainly had the power to do? How can someone not guilty of the definition of rape be guilty of rape?

The ‘Bidenomics Worked’ Sham Kicks Into High Gear For 2024

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/02/02/the-bidenomics-worked-sham-kicks-into-high-gear-for-2024/

Bidenomics boosters in the media and on Wall Street are everywhere to be seen these days, selling the election-year idea that our president’s economic policies have somehow triumphantly raised our economy Phoenix-like from the ashes. Nothing could be further from the truth.

A sampling of headlines going back to last summer show the adulation for Bidenomics among our supposedly objective economic cognoscenti (Latin for “know-it-alls”):

“Bidenomics Is Real Economics,” Time Magazine.

“Bidenomics is working,” New York Magazine.

And our over-the-top favorite: “Bidenomics’ critics are being proven wrong. Happy days are here again,” Fortune Magazine.

We could go on, but why bother? Popular pundits, media mavens and left-leaning economists are all selling you a bill of goods.

Tracey Jacobson Abandoned Our Afghan Allies. Now She’s Getting a Promotion. The woman who failed to rescue U.S. friends from the Taliban is Biden’s nominee for ambassador to Iraq. By Eli Lake

https://www.thefp.com/p/tracey-jacobson-afghan-allies-iraq-ambassador?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

When America was retreating from its 20-year-war in Afghanistan in August 2021, Omar was one of the Afghan allies President Joe Biden promised to rescue. He had performed a perilous task for the U.S. military: identifying and neutralizing roadside mines embedded by the Taliban insurgency. 

Omar was supposed to receive a special immigrant visa, or SIV, which would have been his ticket to a new life in the U.S. now that his old life was in grave danger from the Taliban. 

He never got that SIV. Instead, after being stopped at a checkpoint last February, Taliban thugs dragged him from his home two days later and beat him to a pulp for helping the United States. His family found his unconscious body lying limp on the street. After four surgeries, Omar succumbed to his wounds and died that same month. (The Free Press is withholding Omar’s last name to protect his family) 

Nearly two years after Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, there are 150,000 Afghans like Omar who put their lives at risk to work with the U.S. government, but are still waiting for their SIVs. Though the SIV process was supposed to provide an escape route for our Afghan allies, that process was “chaos incarnate,” said Tom Kasza, the executive director of the 1208 Foundation, which helps former Afghan allies obtain their visas.

And yet the woman in charge of the SIV Taskforce during the fiasco is getting a promotion. Last week, the White House nominated Tracey Jacobson, 59, to be the next U.S. ambassador to Iraq. The last time Biden talked publicly about Jacobson was on August 14, 2021, the day before Kabul fell to the Taliban. The president said he was putting Jacobson “in charge of a whole-of-government effort to process, transport, and relocate Afghan Special Immigrant Visa applicants and other Afghan allies.” 

America’s ambassador to Iraq is a crucial appointment now that the U.S. is engaged in a regional war with Iran and its proxies. Iran’s militias in Iraq, which draw their salaries from the government budget in Baghdad, have stepped up their attacks since Hamas’s October 7 massacre in Israel. One of those militias, the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, claimed credit Sunday for a drone attack on a U.S. base in Jordan that killed three service members and wounded at least 34 more.