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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Biden Administration’s Manipulated Energy Policy Demonstrates Ignorance of History We could end up being heavily dependent on China, which of course, like Russia, would absolutely use energy policy for leverage.By Ned Ryun

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/03/biden-administrations-manipulated-energy-policy-demonstrates-ignorance-of-history/

Consumed, as they have been, with the work of pushing revisionist woke ideology in the schools, it seems the Left missed the lesson that those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. They’ve learned nothing from the past, not even the recent past. 

Yet here we are, looking at the possibility we could repeat the same mistakes Europe made in the late 90s and early 2000s when they failed to realize the real motivations behind the green energy propaganda they were being spoon fed as truth.  

Back in the early 2000s, Russia did a phenomenal job with a disinformation campaign pushing anti-fracking in Europe. We know this because NATO admitted that this “green energy” advocacy was funded by the very people who stood to gain from the enacted policies: Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary-general of the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) announced in 2014 that “I have met with allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-government organizations—environmental organizations working against shale gas—to maintain European dependence on imported Russian [natural] gas.”

The result was many European nations, like Germany, buying environmental propaganda—hook, line, and sinker—and committing to a fool’s errand of net zero and renewables. Since 2000, Germany will have spent several decades and almost $600 billion on what they have termed Energiewende, which is a complete and utter failure on every front.

Now the Germans, and other Europeans, are heavily dependent on Russian fossil fuels that are being used as a weapon against them. With winter quickly approaching, it’s guaranteed they’re not laughing anymore at Trump’s warnings about being dependent on Russian energy. They are, in fact, staring at the horrifying results of being played by Putin when they could have been energy independent if only they had made the right decisions just a few decades ago. But they didn’t and here they are being hit upside the head by the 2×4 of reality.

Kamala’s Pernicious Plan for Hurricane Relief Distribute relief based on race and class, not solely on the basis of need by Joseph Klein

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

Hurricane Ian caused untold damage to Floridians. It destroyed virtually everything in its path after coming ashore in the Fort Meyers area as a Category 4 hurricane. Lives were lost. Homes were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people are still without electricity. The hurricane did not discriminate by race, ethnicity, or gender. Everyone in its path was affected.

Nevertheless, Vice President Kamala Harris proclaimed, in the name of “equity,” that “communities of color” and low-income communities should be given priority in receiving hurricane relief.

“I know we are all thinking about the families in Florida and Puerto Rico with [Hurricane] Fiona and what we need to do to help them in terms of an immediate response and aid,” Vice President Harris said at the Democratic National Committee’s Women’s Leadership Forum on September 30th. “We have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity, understanding that we fight for equality, but we also need to fight for equity. Understanding not everyone starts out at the same place, and if we want people to be in an equal place, sometimes we have to take into account those disparities.”

Sadanand Dhume, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, delivered this derisive retort: “If a hurricane hits a state, we should expect the government to help all those affected: black, brown white, purple, green. And there’s no such thing as ‘communities of color.’ Real people don’t talk like this.”

The Biden administration talks just like this. Indeed, Vice President Harris’s referral to “equity” as the guiding policy directing hurricane relief assistance follows President Biden’s Executive Order 13985 that he issued on his first day in office, entitled “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.”

The Outrageous, Republic-Distorting Census Error You’ve Heard Nothing About Ben Weingarten

https://www.newsweek.com/outrageous-republic-distorting-census-error-youve-heard-nothing-about-opinion-1748178?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Not content with the U.S. Supreme Court’s perverse ruling blocking the Trump administration from reinstating a plainly constitutional citizenship question in the 2020 U.S. census, and the Census Bureau’s apparent insubordination under Trump, House Democrats recently passed legislation making it still more difficult for a future administration to reinstate the citizenship question, and further insulating the Bureau from accountability to any president.

While the “Ensuring a Fair and Accurate Census Act” will do nothing of the sort, it does represent an inadvertent admission of failure in the last census—one of mammoth proportions, and with massive political implications, that you likely have not heard about.

The fact that such a failure has garnered minimal coverage and therefore public attention, while manifesting itself in the corruption of our republican system, demonstrates the disingenuousness of our ruling regime’s otherwise-hysterical “democracy defenders.”

The failure lies in the census count itself, which according to the Census Bureau’s own research was grossly inaccurate, and therefore grossly unfair to the American people.

While the Bureau, in conducting its Post-Enumeration Survey, only found a relatively small net undercount in the total U.S. population of 0.24%—or approximately 780,000 people—it also found major overcount/undercount errors when it comes to the 50 states.

And strikingly, it appears one party seems to have overwhelmingly benefited from the errors. You can probably guess which.

Dems’ role in today’s lawlessness boom Deroy Murdock

https://jewishworldreview.com/1022/murdock100322.php

Democrats promised that defunding the police would yield utopia. Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D — New York) predicted that America would look “like a suburb.”

AOC did not mention that this posh village would include hoodlums breaking into mansions, residents getting robbed beside white-picket fences, and neighbors seeing BMWs carjacked at gunpoint.

This horror show is the result of deliberate Democrat policies:

• Defund the police

• Demonize the police

• Demoralize the police

• Pro-criminal “prosecutors” who defend punks

• Decriminalize shoplifting.

When Californians swipe less than $950 worth of goods per instance, this barely enforced misdemeanor becomes a 100 percent discount. Businesses cannot survive by donating their merchandise. Violent criminals watch this lawlessness and think: “Our time is now.”

They’re Redistributing Wealth, Not Fighting Inflation by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18948/wealth-redistribution-inflation

The Inflation Reduction Act is a lie. It doesn’t reduce inflation: it actually gooses it. The IRA is another inflationary leftist spending boondoggle that throws billions at green energy and $80 billion at the IRS to audit the middle class in the hopes of balancing out some of the crony cash.

A week after signing the IRA, Biden announced a trillion dollar loan bailout for his party’s base of perpetual grad students. Like the Inflation Reduction Act, this was a massive wealth transfer. Audit the middle class and send the checks to Tesla drivers and sociology grad students. Raise inflation rates with inflationary spending and transfer some of the wealth over to welfare voters.

That’s what the White House was really celebrating.

The Biden administration isn’t fighting inflation, it’s deliberately increasing it even as its cronies in the Federal Reserve hammer home new interest rate hikes to force the economy into a recession. This two-step dance destroys savings, wrecks investments and allows for a massive wealth transfer to Democrat donors, special interests and voters. The more that the Democrat majority spends, the worse inflation gets and the more justification there is for higher rates.

If a recession arrives, there’ll be even more justification for government wealth transfers.

“I’m kind of in a position that FDR was,” Biden modestly claimed. FDR’s position was to use the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s Italy as templates for dramatically transforming America through massive spending, socialist controls and crackdowns on conservative political opponents.

So far Biden has managed 2 out of 3.

The Biden administration is not here to “save the economy”…. The formula has always been really simple: create the crisis, worsen it, and then exploit it.

Honest socialists like Bernie Sanders would at least admit that they’re trying to replace the economy with socialism while pursuing massive wealth redistribution.

Biden is pretending that he’s a firefighter when, like FDR, he’s actually an arsonist in a big helmet and black boots. Inflation is one of the fires being fed to justify tighter government controls and interventions that reduce economic independence and redistribute wealth.

Devaluing money is the traditional tool of totalitarian leftist regimes. Runaway inflation provides them with a pretext for interventions such as wage and price controls, both of which were rolled out during COVID lockdowns on an unprecedented scale and still continue….

These trial runs involve government intervention creating artificial scarcity or higher prices by intervening in the production process, shutting down plants or oil and gas leases, and then stomping in to reshape the marketplace.

Anyone living under actual socialism can tell you that it can get much worse. And will.

When that happens, Biden will throw an even bigger party. And we’ll be the ones paying for it.

Biden threw a party to celebrate the Inflation Reduction Act on the White House South Lawn even as the latest figures showed that core inflation has continued to rise. Grocery prices had the steepest increase since 1979. Rent prices shot up again and medical costs are escalating.

The Seth Rich Case: The FBI’s Other Laptop Scandal By Jack Cashill

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/the_seth_rich_case_the_fbis_other_laptop_scandal.html

This is the tale of two laptops, one tale definitely damaging to the Democrats, one potentially so. What they have in common is that the FBI did its damnedest to bury both.

For all the hubbub about the Hunter Biden laptop, there has been little talk about the laptop owned by DNC data analyst Seth Rich. In the way of brief summary, the 27-year-old Rich was beaten and then shot by unknown assailants on a Washington, D.C. street in the early morning hours of July 10, 2016. His attackers appear to have taken nothing—not his wallet, not his phone, not his watch.

Rich’s laptop was in his apartment not far from the scene of his murder. For six years, its fate has remained a mystery. In less than two weeks, however, thanks to a recent federal court decision, the FBI will be compelled to share its secrets, presuming there are any secrets and presuming too those secrets have not been scrubbed.

The FBI’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop is well enough known. The FBI took the laptop into possession in October 2019. If the New York Post had not revealed its existence and some of its highly incriminating contents in October 2020, the public might not be aware of it even today.

FBI whistleblowers and Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley have pushed the Biden laptop back into the news. In a July 25  letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, Grassley noted that the FBI allegedly “developed information in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity,” but FBI Headquarters “improperly discredit[ed] negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease.” The agent who blocked the Biden investigation from proceeding, Tim Thibault, resigned under a cloud a month ago.

The World Wants No Part of Woke, But It’s Glad We Do America once taught the world what works — only now to mock its own lessons. Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-world-wants-no-part-of-woke-but-its-glad-we-do/

The United States obsesses over whether biological men can compete in women’s sports as transgender females.

Crime is spiking at levels not seen in 40 years. But some consider it racist to suggest that arrests, indictments, convictions, and incarcerations deter crime.

Major U.S. downtowns almost overnight went from mostly safe and clean to terrifying and toxic — and we brag that we are at least “tolerant” of the medieval conditions.

The Pentagon and CIA put out recruitment videos that sound like kindergarten diversity, equity, and inclusion programming.

Yet the military is less eager to explain why the United States met utter humiliation in Afghanistan or why the army only has met about 50 percent of its scheduled recruitment targets.

Few dare to attribute declining morale, inept strategic thinking, and anemic recruitment to the stereotyping and targeting of middle-class white males, Soviet-style workshops, and diversity, equity, and inclusion mind conditioning.

The Biden administration in its first 18 months warred on the U.S. oil and gas industry. Radical cutbacks in fossil fuels supposedly would “transition” the world to a greener future.

Biden expressed little worry about the resulting economic damage to the middle class or the lack of commensurate efforts in India and China to curb emissions.

Biased, Two-Tier Justice System Is A Growing Problem: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/03/biased-two-tier-justice-system-is-a-growing-problem-ii-tipp-poll/

One standard of justice for one group, but another for a different group? Even though that sounds distinctly un-American, many voters believe that’s happening today in America’s courts and legal venues. And it seems to be getting worse, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll suggests.

In June, a Golden/TIPP Poll (TIPP is Issues & Insights’ polling partner) asked Americans if “There is a two-tiered system of justice in America depending on your political affiliation and ideology?” At the time, a sizable majority of 63% agreed, either “strongly” (28%) or “somewhat” (35%), with that statement. Only 17% disagreed, while 21% said they were “not sure.”

But something intervened between that June 8-10 poll, the first time the question was asked, and the one taken from Sept. 7-9. Namely, the Aug. 8 raid on former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate by the FBI, which took documents from Trump’s presidency along with personal effects.

The latest online survey of 1,277 voters found a significant increase from 63% to 71% of those saying they agreed that we now have a “two-tiered system of justice,” with 32% agreeing “strongly” and 39% agreeing “somewhat.”

Just 15% disagreed, with 5% saying they disagreed strongly and 10% saying they disagreed somewhat. The “not sure” responses fell to 14% from the earlier 21% reading.

Marxism at the Museum What does donor Stephen Schwarzman think of these anti-capitalist exhibits? Andy Kessler

https://www.wsj.com/articles/marxism-at-the-museum-new-york-washington-capitalism-socialism-marx-smith-wealth-productivity-schwarzman-donors-11664712471?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

“This is a rather loud message to capitalists Bezos, Musk, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg: Give your money away if you want to be remembered kindly. Just don’t give your money to libraries or museums. Please.”

Polls show more than half of 18- to 24-year-olds in the U.S. have a negative view of capitalism. More than half have a positive view of socialism. I wonder where they got that.

I recently strolled through the New York Public Library’s “Treasures” exhibit, which would delight readers and writers alike: Charles Dickens’s writing desk, a manuscript delivered in a box from former newspaper columnist Mark Twain, draft cover art for Jack Kerouac’s novel “On the Road,” and an illustrated page from Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities” manuscript. Pretty cool stuff.

Ah look, a first edition of Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” from 1776—the free-market bible. I was in awe until I read the description: “Adam Smith believed, as did Karl Marx the following century, that national prosperity was best measured by a country’s labor power rather than by how much gold lay in its treasury.” I guess the description is technically correct, but Karl Marx? In the same breath as Adam Smith, who called free markets “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty”? Unlike Smith, Marx naively saw a static world without productivity, only labor exploitation. He completely missed that labor is more brain than brawn. Add exhibit curators to the list of socialist tub thumpers.

I wonder what Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the rather capitalistic private-equity firm Blackstone and giver of $100 million to the New York Public Library, whose name is etched in stone outside, thinks about the Marxist agenda of the library’s curators.

Judge Laurence H. Silberman, 1935-2022 He was more consequential than most Supreme Court Justices.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/laurence-silberman-dead-judge-circuit-court-obamacare-arms-public-service-robb-11664726000?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

The most famous judges in American history are those who make it to the Supreme Court, but that doesn’t mean they are the most consequential. One of the latter is Judge Laurence Silberman, who died Sunday, a few days short of his 87th birthday.

Judge Silberman had one of the great careers in the law and public service. Appointed by Ronald Reagan, he spent some 36 years on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, hearing cases even after taking senior status and up to the time of his sudden illness.

His most consequential opinions include Parker v. D.C. (2007), which found that the Second Amendment was an individual right to bear arms and not merely for a militia. Silberman’s opinion examined the history of gun practices in common law and the American founding, which served as the basis for Justice Antonin Scalia’s opinion in the landmark ruling in D.C. v. Heller (2008).

He was also ahead of his time in 1988 (In re Sealed Case), when he held that the independent counsel statute violated the Constitution’s Appointments Clause. The Supreme Court ruled the other way in the dreadful Morrison v. Olson decision. But Judge Silberman’s view was echoed in Scalia’s famous Morrison dissent that would surely prevail with today’s Justices if the counsel statute hadn’t lapsed after Ken Starr’s investigation of Bill Clinton.