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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Student Debt ‘Forgiveness’: Biden’s Illegal, Inflationary, Inequitable Attempt To Buy Votes

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/25/student-debt-forgiveness-bidens-illegal-inflationary-inequitable-attempt-to-buy-votes/

President Joe Biden’s plan for student debt “forgiveness” is nothing of the sort. It merely takes money from one group of taxpayers and gives it to another. It will not increase access to education, or improve it at all. And it will drive up inflation. In short, it’s yet another leftist sham intended to cull votes from the unthinking herd.

After leaking that the debt forgiveness scheme would amount to about $10,000 per eligible student, the White House — surprise! — made it $20,000 instead, doubling the damage that will ensue.

Under the program, Pell Grant recipients will be eligible for that $20,000 in relief, versus $10,000 for all others. And it goes only to those earning less than $125,000. It also extends the current loan repayment “pause” though the end of this year, while capping the amount a student has to repay at 5% of income.

There are so many problems with this idea it’s hard to know where to start.

How about this: The president doesn’t have the right under the Constitution to “forgive” anyone’s debts. It’s not in his list of superpowers. But that’s just some crazy right-wing idea, you say?

Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, no shrinking violet when it comes to leftist lunacy, understands this:

Biden White House Was Involved With DOJ Probe Into Classified Trump Documents, Memos Reveal

https://dailycaller.com/2022/08/23/mar-a-lago-trump-archives-raid-fbi-biden/

The Biden White House authorized the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to waive former President Donald Trump’s claim of executive privilege in the Justice Department’s investigation into his handling of classified documents, according to a NARA letter.

The letter, first reported by Just the News, was sent by National Archivist Debra Wall to Trump attorney Evan Corcoran on May 10 and shows that President Joe Biden personally delegated the decision to waive Trump’s claim to executive privilege to NARA following a request by the DOJ to view classified documents Trump handed over to the agency. Trump had voluntarily turned over 15 boxes of documents he had taken with him to his Mar-a-Lago home after he left office earlier this year, and the investigation into his handling of classified documents ultimately culminated in the Aug. 8 FBI raid on his Florida home.

“The counsel to the president has informed me that, in light of the particular circumstances presented here, President Biden defers to my determination, in consultation with the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal counsel regarding whether or not I should uphold former the former President’s purported ‘protective assertion of executive privilege,’” Wall wrote.

“I have therefore decided not to honor the former President’s ‘protective’ claim of privilege,” Wall wrote.

Biden’s 87,000 IRS Agents Set to Become Woke Army of “Equity” Enforcers Katie Sullivan

https://amac.us/bidens-87000-irs-agents-set-to-become-woke-army-of-equity-enforcers/

Many Americans are by now aware of the Biden administration’s plan to hire some 87,000 new IRS agents with $80 billion set aside for that purpose as part of Democrats’ misleadingly titled Inflation Reduction Act. But even more terrifying than this army of new “tax enforcers” prying into the finances of millions of ordinary Americans is the fact that, under the Biden administration’s “equity” agenda, all of them will be trained in the tenets of wokeism and ordered to advance Democrats’ far-left social agenda.

On day one of his administration, Joe Biden signed an Executive Order on “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” Specifically, the Order directed every federal agency to develop and implement an “ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda that matches the scale of the opportunities and challenges that we face.” Notably, Biden included the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Tax Policy in the “Equitable Data Working Group” that the Order established.

This move immediately raised the alarm for conservatives, who had by then become all-too familiar with the left-wing concept of “equity.” While the term sounds similar to “equality,” it in fact refers to the exact opposite approach – using government power to dispense unequal treatment among different groups in an attempt to force “equal” outcomes for all. As Vice President Kamala Harris explained in a tweet in November 2020, “equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.”

The Treasury Department – which oversees the IRS – released its “Equity Action Plan” in accordance with Biden’s Executive Order in October 2021 to little fanfare. But contained within the document are hints at a scheme to radicalize the IRS in accordance with left-wing identity politics – a plan that the agency will soon have the manpower to implement.

Racism to Achieve Diversity Harms All Americans For everyone’s sake, Americans of all ethnicities must unite to reject racism of all kinds and embrace becoming a colorblind meritocracy. By Edward Ring

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/23/racism-to-achieve-diversity-harms-all-americans/

If you’ve navigated the thicket of microinstructions, hectoring, guilt-tripping, institutionalized resentment, establishment-generated misinformation, double standards, and bizarre new terminology, then welcome to the world of woke antiracism in America today.

One of the biggest absurdities spread by the woke antiracists is that white people must practice “allyship” and refrain from sharing their opinions on race relations with “people of color.” There is nothing wrong with listening as well as talking, but for white people to remain silent in the face of one of the most destructive movements in American history is negligent and cowardly.

As it is, progressive elites in America, almost all of them white, are indoctrinating nonwhites in America to believe that they live in an oppressive, racist nation. They are falsely told that unjustified police violence disproportionately targets blacks. They are falsely told the biggest threat to the nation is white supremacists. Worse still, they are told that every disparity in achievement between races is a product of white racism, and that white racists are to blame for any failures in their individual lives or within their communities.

The motivation for this indoctrination is political and economic. America’s corporate socialist uniparty—all of the Democrats and a sizable percentage of Republicans—finds power and profit in selling this narrative. It justifies expanding government, nurturing dependency, unchecked immigration, and building the welfare and diversity bureaucracies. It creates a divided and fractious electorate that is incapable of recognizing this political betrayal and unifying to stop it.

The fruits of woke indoctrination are that an overwhelming majority of blacks, Latinos, and Asians vote for “progressive” politicians. In the 2020 election, Biden was supported by 87 percent of black voters, by 61 percent of Latinos, and by 63 percent of Asians. These partisan margins have become the decisive swing vote that is changing the destiny of America. Which is to say, America used to be a country where property rights and free speech were paramount values, but today it is being converted into a corporate socialist dystopia where there are only oligarchs and serfs dependent on government handouts. And as this epic, life-changing transformation occurs, white people are told to just shut up and be “allies.”

There are plenty of brilliant conservative black intellectuals who are doing a good job of exposing how the fraudulent, destructive essence of woke ideology harms everyone regardless of their ethnicity: Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Carol Swain, and other well-established luminaries, along with thousands of younger entrants such as Candace Owens and Brandon Tatum. The emergence of black conservatives, too numerous to mention, is an encouraging pushback against the woke minions and their corporate backers. Others, such as Indian-Americans Vivek Ramaswamy and Dinesh D’Souza, have also become important conservative thinkers.

So with their help, it’s time to mainstream a position that is unfairly depicted by the “woke” as something only a “far-right extremist can think”—namely, that for several decades America has been a systemically racist nation against white people, and has more recently begun to also discriminate against Asians, especially in college and university admissions. This is harming everyone, including the nonwhites it is alleged to help.

The Morning Briefing: The Delicious Stupidity of Liz Cheney’s Presidential Folly By Stephen Kruiser

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/08/24/the-morning-briefing-the-delicious-stupidity-of-liz-cheneys-presidential-folly-n1623691

It has been just over a week since the Republican voters of Wyoming let Liz Cheney know what they thought of her stabbing them in the back by joining the Democrats’ J6 House Soviet Select Committee on Daddy Issues.

The mental unwellness that Dick’s daughter began exhibiting that night hasn’t improved. Soon-to-be-former-Congresswoman Cheney is still harboring delusions about the viability of a presidential run in 2024. So much so, in fact, that she’s lining up some Koch money and some experienced Republican consultant firepower to help her, per Rick’s reporting.

I cannot begin to describe how much I would like to see her go through with this. I may have to rent a storage space for the extra schadenfreude I’ll have when this ego train wrecks.

Here is a snippet from a VIP column I wrote last week:

There is no great GOP silent majority just waiting for a milquetoast squish alternative to Trump. It’s absolutely ridiculous to think that if faced with AOC, Mayor Pete, or Kamala Harris on the ballot, millions of Republicans are going to think, “Hmmm… better that than mean tweets.”

We should also remember that the disgruntled GOPers who would get behind a Cheney run are the same ones who were behind the Great Evan McMullin Gambit of 2016.

In short, Cheney’s merry band of potential voters is made up of a handful of morally bankrupt Never Trump grifters and maybe one drunk Democrat named Chet.

A Dying, Desperate Establishment Is a Dangerous Beast : David P. Goldman

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2022/08/23/a-dying-desperate-establishment-is-a-dangerous-beast-n1623454

The best piece of U.S. political analysis published in recent weeks is Michael Anton’s essay at Compact Magazine, “They Can’t Let Him Back In.” Writes Anton, a former deputy national security adviser in the Trump administration: “Our rulers’ wealth and power rise with open borders, trade giveaways, and endless war. Trump, at least in principle, and often in practice, threatens all three.” The brazenly partisan perversion of the justice system that was the Mar-a-Lago raid validates Anton’s warning in spades.

Trump threatens what the elites call the “rules-based international order,” which simply means an international order in which the elites make the rules.

Our elites are as incompetent as they are malicious. If anyone bears the blame for tearing down the post-war international order—the NATO alliance and the dollar-centered monetary system—it is the elites themselves, whose arrogance, overreach, and outright pigheadedness threaten to ruin the West. Long before the next U.S. president takes office in January 2025, the “rules-based” order and the institutions attached to it will be in ruins. The elites will be desperate.

The Ukraine war is a dealbreaker for the “rules-based order.” Despite the drumbeat of propaganda channeled through the echo chamber of international media, Russia is NOT losing—not militarily and not economically. China has doubled its imports of Russian oil and India has quadrupled its imports. The two countries alone pay Putin $150 billion a year.

The Trump Warrant Had No Legal Basis A former president’s rights under the Presidential Records Act trump the statutes the FBI cited to justify the Mar-a-Lago raid. By David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-warrant-had-no-legal-basis-mar-a-lago-affidavit-presidential-records-act-archivist-custody-classified-fbi-garland-11661170684

Was the Federal Bureau of Investigation justified in searching Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago? The judge who issued the warrant for Mar-a-Lago has signaled that he is likely to release a redacted version of the affidavit supporting it. But the warrant itself suggests the answer is likely no—the FBI had no legally valid cause for the raid.

The warrant authorized the FBI to seize “all physical documents and records constituting evidence, contraband, fruits of crime, or other items illegally possessed in violation of 18 U.S.C. §§793, 2071, or 1519” (emphasis added). These three criminal statutes all address the possession and handling of materials that contain national-security information, public records or material relevant to an investigation or other matters properly before a federal agency or the courts.

The materials to be seized included “any government and/or Presidential Records created between January 20, 2017, and January 20, 2021”—i.e., during Mr. Trump’s term of office. Virtually all the materials at Mar-a-Lago are likely to fall within this category. Federal law gives Mr. Trump a right of access to them. His possession of them is entirely consistent with that right, and therefore lawful, regardless of the statutes the FBI cites in its warrant.

Those statutes are general in their text and application. But Mr. Trump’s documents are covered by a specific statute, the Presidential Records Act of 1978. It has long been the Supreme Court position, as stated in Morton v. Mancari (1974), that “where there is no clear intention otherwise, a specific statute will not be controlled or nullified by a general one, regardless of the priority of enactment.” The former president’s rights under the PRA trump any application of the laws the FBI warrant cites.

Liz Cheney’s Agony By Richard McDonough

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/liz_cheneys_agony.html

EXCERPT

Liz Cheney, who sits on the Jan. 6th Committee, has made her political agenda clear from the beginning.  Although an “investigation” is supposed to be a search for the truth, Liz Cheney made agonizingly clear many times that she didn’t need to wait for the results of the investigation.  From the beginning her stated aim was “make sure that Trump never gets near the White House again.”  Permanent Washington also made their aim clear.  The Jan. 6th Committee “investigation” was for her, and many others, mere political theatre to achieve a predetermined political agenda.

Had Cheney been interested in the truth, she might have insisted that the committee seat the appropriate number and type of Republicans to cross-examine the prosecutorial witnesses.  She did not do so.  At every turn she interpreted any testimony in the worst way possible for Trump, e.g., she has recently stated that Trump “commanded” a “heavily armed mob” to try to stop the counting of electoral votes.  She and her Jan. 6th Committee have, however, given no evidence whatsoever that Trump “commanded” an armed mob to use violence to stop the counting of electoral votes.  Her very strong statement requires that she prove both causality and intent.  However, the committee has only demonstrated a degree (even that not clear) of correlation between Trump’s remarks and the riot, namely, that Trump made some remarks and some people went to the Capitol and rioted.  The committee has not proved that Trump’s remarks caused the mob to riot at the Capitol or that Trump intended that his remarks cause the mob to riot at the Capitol.  Demonstrating causality or intent is never easy in social situations: “Since intent is a mental state. it is one of the most difficult things to prove.” It is certainly not easy given the very murky events surrounding Jan. 6th, events that the committee in their “Star Chamber” has conspired to keep murky.  For Liz Cheney, however, everything about Jan. 6th is as clear to her as her seething hatred of Donald Trump.

Where Is Steven D’Antuono? The head of the FBI’s field office in Washington, D.C., has a lot of explaining to do. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/22/where-is-steven-dantuono/

A few days after the Capitol protest on January 6, 2021, a tough-talking FBI chief with a Boston accent promised the American people that the bureau would spare no resource in hunting down everyone and anyone involved in the four-hour disturbance that day. 

Steven M. D’Antuono, the newly appointed head of the Washington, D.C. FBI field office, gave the public a stern warning. “The FBI will leave no stone unturned. This is a 24/7, full bore, extensive operation,” D’Antuono explained during a January 12, 2021 press conference at the Department of Justice. “As Director Wray says, the FBI does not do easy.”

His agency, D’Antuono bragged, has a “long memory and a broad reach.” Agents from 56 FBI field offices across the country “will be knocking on your door if we find out you were part of the criminal activity at the Capitol.” He urged people to turn in their co-workers, neighbors, and relatives if they had information that could help the FBI in its dragnet.

Turns out, his comments weren’t just Beantown-style braggadocio. More than 850 Americans since then have been investigated, arrested, and charged for mostly nonviolent offenses related to the January 6 protest. Armed FBI agents have conducted early morning raids at homes across the country, using military style vehicles to batter in front doors while traumatizing families, children, and neighbors in the process. It is a crusade of fear and terror meant to reinforce D’Antuono’s threats that those who dared to demonstrate against the fraudulent election of Joe Biden that day will pay a hefty price. 

Nearly 20 months later, D’Antuono’s office continues to announce new arrests.

Fauci flees his office, fearing Republicans taking control in Congress and holding him to account By Thomas Lifson

Yesterday, in a statement posted on the website of the federal agency he runs, Dr. Anthony Fauci announced his retirement in December, one month before Republicans are expected to take control of the House of Representatives and maybe the Senate.

I am announcing today that I will be stepping down from the positions of Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, as well as the position of Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden. I will be leaving these positions in December of this year to pursue the next chapter of my career.

As Sister Toldjah notes at RedState:

Apparently, the “next phase” of Fauci’s career will include collecting a sweet pension and possibly avoiding having to answer before Congress under oath as to what he knew about the origins of COVID-19 and U.S. gain of research funding: