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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Disney’s Child Sacrifice The “family entertainment” giant bows down to the deities of “woke” ideology. Joseph Hippolito

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/04/queering-mouse-joseph-hippolito/

The world’s most respected producer of family entertainment has decided to sacrifice children to the deities of “woke” ideology.

Disney — which gave the world Mickey Mouse, Disneyland and other beloved aspects of popular culture — announced it will actively promote normalizing homosexual and transgender identity while resisting any opposition to the LGBTQ agenda.

The entertainment giant made that decision as part of its fight against two Southern governors trying to protect children and reinforce parental authority. Disney opposed a Florida bill, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed March 28, that prohibited school authorities from encouraging “classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in primary grade levels.”

Meanwhile, Disney joined other corporations such as Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft in opposing Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s order to investigate sex-change operations on children as illegal and possible child abuse. In a Feb. 22 letter the governor sent to Jaime Masters, commissioner for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, Abbott wrote:

“It is already against the law to subject Texas children to a wide variety of elective procedures for gender transitioning, including reassignment surgeries that can cause sterilization, mastectomies, removals of otherwise healthy body parts, and administration of puberty-blocking drugs or supraphysiologic doses of testosterone or estrogen.”

The Even Higher-Tech Lynching of Justice Clarence Thomas By J. Christian Adams

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2022/04/01/the-even-higher-tech-lynching-of-justice-clarence-thomas-n1586269

Justice Clarence Thomas, during his 1991 confirmation process, characterized the personal attacks against him as a “high-tech lynching.” If only he could have seen then what his old foes are up to now.

Call it a higher-tech lynching.

The Left has gone wild, turning every corner of the internet, Twitterverse, and cable news into a renewed personal assault against Justice Thomas, but this time also his wife Ginni Thomas.

In fact, the Left has decided to attack Justice Thomas through his wife. Let’s put aside the diabolical implications of the tactic of attacking a husband through his wife, and explore the merits of the tactic.

It goes like this. Ginni Thomas has a life separate from her husband’s role on the Supreme Court. She has her own beliefs, her own friends and professional acquaintances, and she voices her opinions. Because the Left hates Justice Thomas occupying a seat on the Supreme Court for reasons we will get to, annihilating him through any possible means must follow.

Ginni Thomas, so the battle plan goes, is active in conservative causes, and she shouldn’t be. Ginni communicated with President Trump her views that establishmentarian staff at the White House were blocking his agenda, and she should have kept quiet.

Ginni Thomas texted Mark Meadows her views about the 2020 election, and nobody, of course, should ever speak about that.

Looking for a Democrat who stands up to the crazies? Here he is By Silvio Canto, Jr.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/looking_for_a_democrat_who_stands_up_to_the_crazies_here_he_is.html

Over the last 15 months, Rep. Henry Cuellar of South Texas has been a loud critic of President Biden’s border policies, such as eliminating Title 42.  Cuellar was one of two Democrats in Texas to say no!

On another matter, Mr. Cuellar is refusing to go along with his party.  This is from The Texas Tribune:

U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a moderate Democrat from Laredo, broke with his party to vote against a landmark marijuana legalization bill on Friday that passed in the House. Only one other Democrat voted against it.

Cuellar, who is currently in a fierce runoff for his 10th term against progressive attorney Jessica Cisneros, has long infuriated progressive Democrats with his conservative positions on many social issues.

The Laredo politician opposes abortion and was the lone Democrat to vote against federal abortion rights [sic] legislation last fall.

Yes, Mr. Cuellar is making it easy for the AOC wing of the party to hate him, opposing open borders, marijuana, and abortion.

Mr. Cuellar may pay a price for his conservatism or independence.  He is fighting to keep his seat in a party runoff.

Your Top Priority is The Emotional Comfort of the Most Powerful Elites, Which You Fulfill by Never Criticizing Them. Corporate journalists have license to use their huge platforms to malign, expose and destroy anyone they want. Your moral duty: sit in respectful silence and never object. Glenn Greenwald

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/your-top-priority-is-the-emotional?s=w

When Hillary Clinton’s divine entitlement to the U.S. presidency began to look imperiled in 2016 — first due to the irreverent and unkempt (but surprisingly formidable) Democratic Party primary challenge from Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist Senator from Vermont — her campaign and its media allies invented and unveiled a deeply moving morality tale. A faceless horde of unnamed, uncredentialed, unmannered, violent, abusive and deeply misogynistic online Sanders supporters — dubbed with the gender-emphasizing name “Bernie Bros” even though many were women — were berating, insulting and brutalizing Hillary, her top campaign surrogates (U.S. Senators, former cabinet members, corporate executives), and especially pro-Hillary corporate journalists with a vast artillery of traumatizing words and violent tweets.

This storyline — and especially the way it cleverly inverted the David v. Goliath framework of the 2016 campaign so that it was now Hillary and her band of monied and Ivy-League-educated political and media elites who were the real victims — was irresistible to Harvard-and-Yale-trained journalists at NBC, CNN, The New York Times and Washington Post op-ed pages who really believe they are the truly marginalized peoples. This narrative scheme enabled them — the most powerful and influential media and political elites in the world, with access to the most potent platforms and megaphones — to somehow credibly lay claim to that most valued of all currencies in American political life: victimhood.

Joe Biden flying too close to the son Michael Goodwin

https://nypost.com/2022/04/02/joe-biden-flying-too-close-to-the-son/

If there’s one thing Joe Biden doesn’t need, it’s more problems. With soaring inflation pushing household budgets into the red, crime rising everywhere, the southern border open to all comers and his agenda stalled in Congress, the 46th president is beyond beleaguered.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and his efforts to rally NATO initially seemed to give him a second chance with disappointed voters. After Biden focused a big portion of his State of the Union address on the war, he did get a bump in the polls.

But it didn’t last, and even his recent trip to Europe that was filled with photo ops with refugees and tough, if bizarre, talk about Vladimir Putin couldn’t stop the spiral. Two surveys released since the president returned show him with just 38% and 39% approval, respectively.

These are dead-man-walking numbers, and another bombshell waits in the wings. This one has the potential to deliver a fatal blow to his presidency.

Biden, the Ersatz President By Steve Feinstein

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/04/biden_the_ersatz_president.html

The United States does not have a real president right now.

There is an individual named Joe Biden who shows up occasionally and sits in the Oval Office, but in no way can he be considered to be “President” in the traditional understanding of that term. Biden is an ersatz president.

An American president is essentially the CEO of the federal government. He or she sets the overall strategy and direction of the country, outlines and articulates its major objectives and manages the subordinate elements that create the actual policy in order to achieve the big-picture goals laid out by the president.

Like any CEO, that person likely doesn’t personally have the specific technical knowledge and expertise on a micro level in a given subject area that his/her subordinates have (nor should a CEO or president get bogged down in that kind of attention-diverting minutia), but the CEO must have an overriding vision of their company’s intended direction and be able to see how the various component parts work together in the proper proportion and timing needed to achieve the stated goals. That holds true as well for the President of the United States.

Donald J. Trump was the prototypically ideal president in terms of setting clear achievement objectives for the country (securing the southern border, becoming energy independent, rebuilding our military, renegotiating advantageous international trade agreements, stopping China from taking unfair advantage of America in trade matters, getting NATO to pay more of its share of its defense needs, etc.) and putting in place the laser-focused personnel required to execute the plan.  This was classic large-scale business-style vision and management at its best.

Trading Realpolitik for a Puppet Show The Biden Administration’s lies, errors, and miscalculations over Russia will probably hurt the American people more than Putin.  By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2022/04/02/trading-realpolitik-for-a-puppet-show/

A week, as the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson is supposed to have said, is a long time in politics. Poor Joe Biden would doubtless agree, assuming that he remembers what a week, what a long time, and what politics are. It was just about a week ago, on March 26, that he said, “As a result of our unprecedented sanctions, the ruble was almost immediately reduced to rubble.” 

I wonder who thought of that play on words? The ruble is rubble. Ha, ha, ha. 

The Russian currency did take a sharp dive. But then, almost immediately, it recovered. Why? There are several explanations. The conventional headscratchers hold that it is largely because the nefarious Vladimir Putin has nefariously blackmailed the weak-willed Germans and others who prefer bucking the sanctions in order to heat their homes. What cowards. 

A better explanation, I think, is that Putin, having played this game before, more or less knew what to expect when he invaded Ukraine. The Western press was full of gloating stories about how Mastercard and Visa stopped handling transactions when Biden announced the sanctions. That’ll show ’em. But those companies had done the same thing back in 2014 when, with Barack Obama at the helm in the United States, Putin gobbled up Crimea. This time, Putin was ready. He had already implemented his own card payment system. Mastercard and Visa piggybacked on it. One irony of the situation, as the web site Daily Reckoning observes, is that “instead of Visa and Mastercard getting the fees, Russia’s central bank collected 8.2 billion rubles in net profit, or about $94 million at current exchange rates. Russia actually profited from Visa and Mastercard sanctions.”

File that under “unintended consequences.” 

Biden Runs Out of Gas:The president has an unerring instinct to make problems worse. By Matthew Continetti

https://freebeacon.com/columns/biden-runs-out-of-gas/

‘This is a wartime bridge to increase oil supply into production,” President Biden said during his announcement Thursday that he would release more barrels of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve than at any point in American history. His decision was also a concession. None of the policies Biden has enacted throughout his short presidency have alleviated the problems they were meant to solve. Quite the opposite: In practically every case, Biden has made things worse.

Energy? Killing the Keystone pipeline was one of the first things Biden did when he took office. In February, Biden delayed approval of new oil and gas leases. He continues to blame the increase in gas prices on Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, even though prices began to rise early in Biden’s term. Biden scapegoats oil companies for sitting on profits, while he could be doing everything in his power to ramp up domestic production of available fuel sources — including nuclear.

The fallout from Putin’s war was bound to make energy scarce and thus more valuable. Biden could have lessened the pain on the American consumer by pursuing an all-of-the-above energy dominance policy from the start, and by reducing the size of the American Rescue Plan so that it didn’t contribute to inflation. He chose to ignore the warnings of economists such as former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and followed his advisers who incorrectly predicted that inflation would be temporary. By turning to the Strategic Reserve, Biden is promoting a temporary fix while the long-term solutions are plain to see. He’s relied on similar gimmicks before. They haven’t worked.

Consider Biden’s immigration policy. He spent his early days as president tearing up President Trump’s agreements with Mexico and several Central American countries that forced asylum-seekers to stay in third-party nations while U.S. judges decided on their claims.

The Rules About Corruption Just Don’t Apply To The Bidens Francis Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=fefc435a63

About two weeks ago, the New York Times published an article finally conceding that the Hunter Biden laptop and many of the emails on it are authentic. Yesterday (March 30), the Washington Post followed suit. The laptop in question is the one that Hunter left at a Delaware computer repair shop, and whose contents the New York Post revealed in a series of explosive October 2020 articles. Those articles got the NY Post banned from Twitter in the run-up to the 2020 election, while some 51 ex-intelligence officials denounced the laptop as likely “Russian disinformation.” Meanwhile, the Times and the WaPo never breathed a word about the laptop’s existence or its contents for the intervening year and a half.

Both the recent Times and Washington Post articles mention the laptop in the context of reporting on a federal criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s tax liabilities and business dealings in foreign countries including Ukraine and China. Clearly the newspapers are trying to get out in front of a likely impending indictment of the President’s son. After all, it would be quite embarrassing for them if the President’s son were to get indicted based on events that have long been public but which events have never been mentioned in either of those two papers.

But how about the question of how this investigation, and Hunter’s underlying conduct, relate to President Biden himself? To read the Times and the WaPo, you would think that that whole question is somehow out of line. The Times’s piece doesn’t even discuss Joe’s role or involvement, although it does include this bizarre line:

It is not clear whether the criminal probe is focused solely on Hunter Biden, or if he is among a group of individuals and companies being scrutinized.

Business vs. Government? by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18393/business-vs-government

If a corporation builds a better mousetrap than the government, we buy it. And generally, that is a good idea. But it may come with costs, not easily measurable in dollars or speed.
The Constitution itself was not designed for efficiency…. Ours was designed to check and balance power, rather than to expedite results. We pay a price for our desire to prevent too much centralization of authority in any one person or institution. And sometimes we grow impatient at the slow pace of progress.
We want our mail delivered faster and more frequently; we want to know the outcome of elections tonight not next week… we want our disputes resolved without months of pretrial discovery. And so, we turn to the classic American solution: private enterprise, free market competition, capitalism.
The time has come to consider the consider the costs and benefits of this important development.
It is not the object of this article to resolve these issues or to propose specific jurisprudential shifts. It is simply to bring together a number of related changes that have in common the privatization of traditional governmental activities, and to begin a discussion of the legal changes that, especially in the area of social media censorship, seem urgently required.
We must begin a discussion of the legal changes that seem urgently required, especially in the area of media censorship, invasion of privacy and lack of transparency by private companies that appear to be performing functions, possibly at the behest of the government, as a way of bypassing the restrictions placed on the government by the First Amendment.

When I was growing up, the mail was delivered by the post office, money was printed by the treasury, votes were counted by election officials, wars were fought by the army, prisons were run by departments of correction, law enforcement was conducted by the police force, space exploration was done by NASA, legal disputes were resolved by judges and juries.