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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Lia Thomas and the ‘Authentic Self’ Stealing the brass ring. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/lia-thomas-and-authentic-self-bruce-bawer/

If the New York Times poses as America’s newspaper of record, presenting every day’s news through the lens of woke ideology and the Democratic Party narrative, the New Yorker is our flagship “serious” weekly magazine. So when the New Yorker runs a sober 5700-word article about what is arguably, in the minds of our woke brethren, the major issue of the day – namely, trans athletes – it merits notice. The text in question, dated March 17, was written by sports journalist Louisa Thomas (hereafter “Louisa”) and focused primarily on University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas (hereafter “Lia”), who at a meet in Atlanta last Thursday became, as ESPN reported, “the first known transgender athlete to win a Division I national championship in any sport.”

Lia was born Will Thomas in 1998 or 1999 and, according to Louisa, “realized she was transgender in the summer of 2018.” But you won’t find the name Will Thomas in Louisa’s article, which begins as follows:

Lia Thomas has been swimming since she was five years old. As a high schooler, she was one of the top swimmers in Texas, an All-American. She followed her older brother onto the men’s team at the University of Pennsylvania, and established herself as a strong competitor in distance races; in her sophomore season, at the Ivy League championships, she finished second in three events.

In fact, during all that time, Lia was Will. And Will was a “he.” Lia is a “he,” too, of course. But in the year 2022, under the rules set down by our woke overlords, we are expected to pretend that Will’s decision four years ago to start calling himself Lia, and to identify as a “she,” had the magical effect of retroactively rewriting his entire life, turning Will Thomas into a girl from the moment of his birth

Biden’s Handlers Are Preparing to Eject Him (and Kamala) They must replace him, otherwise they themselves risk being replaced, which would be intolerable. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/19/bidens-handlers-are-preparing-to-eject-him-and-kamala/

I sense a disturbance in the force. In fact, I’ve been feeling the tremors for a while. Back in January, I wrote a column for American Greatness called “The Coming Dethronement of Joe Biden.” In it, I noted that Biden’s appalling performance as president would sooner or later—and probably sooner, given the ostentatious nature of his multifaceted failure—lead to his removal as president. 

I should have added that it wasn’t Biden’s performance per se that would lead to his downfall. The problem, rather, was the way his performance was undermining his—and therefore his minders’ and puppetmasters’—political power. As Saul Alinsky, community organizer to the stars, noted, the “issue is never the issue.” Accordingly, the people who put Joe Biden in power—I cannot name them, but I know they are the same people who keep him in power—do not care about inflation, rising gas and food prices, COVID lockdowns or mask mandates, the porousness of our Southern border, the threat of war with Russia, or the myriad other issues that worry ordinary voters. I am quite certain, in fact, that the word “voters” brings a vaguely contemptuous smile to their faces. 

They are not troubled by the suffering of the people, indeed, they approve of a certain amount of suffering. Suffering produces dependency; and dependency, in turn, is like an insurance policy for those who cater to it: the bureaucrats who fill the troughs that feed the populace. The point, of course, was never to end the dependency but to manage in such a way as to perpetuate and expand it. Joe Biden is an errand boy, a figurehead, in the metabolism of this great (not to say Great Society) act of political legerdemain. 

Back in January, I compared the conundrum that Joe Biden presented to The Committee that keeps him in power with the conundrum that Richard Nixon presented to the elites of his day. Nixon was hated by all the beautiful people of his day, but before he could be disposed of the elites had to address the problem of Spiro Agnew, who in his own way was nearly as preposterous as Kamala Harris. Fortunately for the anti-Nixon forces, Agnew was also corrupt in a pedestrian, easy-to-demonstrate sort of way. So all that the forces of light and virtue had to do was produce evidence of his glomming on to paper bags full of pelf in exchange for favors rendered and, presto, Agnew was history. 

Kamala Harris is more of a problem. She is at least as appallingly incompetent as her boss, and no less challenged rhetorically, as her alarming performance in Poland and Romania a week or two back demonstrated. But Harris will not be as easy to shift as was Agnew. I have heard nothing about actual bribery, and acting as the warm bun for Willie Brown’s bratwurst may be in dubious taste but is not actionable.

The Causes of War Keith Windschuttle

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2022/03/the-causes-of-war/

“Hence, if the military adventurers of Russia and China are predicating their exploits on some perception of American decline, they are badly mistaken. The only thing they have got right is their view of the lack of resolve of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, who have been, so far, the most timid American presidents since Jimmy Carter.”

Someone should remind them, and the Western intellectuals whose leftist thinking influences them, that Jimmy Carter was succeeded by Ronald Reagan. The American democratic system was not principally designed for warfare, but weak presidents usually beget strong ones, and sooner rather than later.

In an intriguing article in the latest edition of the UK online publication The Article, Raymond Keene tries to explain Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as the product of a national trait that runs deep within the Russian psyche: an excess of paranoia. This echoes one of the common assumptions in the media today: Putin must have gone mad.

Keene defines paranoia as a suspicion of a non-existent threat and goes on to argue that Putin has succumbed to such an unwarranted ailment: “I doubt that Russia had ever been less threatened than at the start of 2022, with a complacent, underfunded NATO, secure borders and a stranglehold economic grip on European energy supplies.”

Merrick Garland Has Turned the Department of Justice into a Left-Wing Blog By Dan McLaughlin

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/merrick-garland-has-turned-the-department-of-justice-into-a-left-wing-blog/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=fifth

“America dodged a bullet keeping this man off the Supreme Court. Garland is too partisan to be attorney general, let alone a justice. So long as he runs the Justice Department, its chief role will be supporting whatever cause animates left-wing blogs. America deserves more equal justice under law.”

The Biden Justice Department is all lefty politics all the time.

E arlier this month, Merrick Garland marked the first anniversary of taking over the United States Department of Justice. It would be an understatement to say that Garland has politicized the DOJ. Garland has turned the Justice Department into something indistinguishable from a left-wing blog.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Unlike some other recent attorneys general — say, Jeff Sessions, another AG who had previously had a judicial nomination rejected by the Senate — Garland did not have a background in elected office and had never been a public presence in culture-war fights. When he was nominated to the Supreme Court in 2016, after years on the D.C. Circuit, Garland was known to be a social liberal (Democratic spin about him as a “moderate” to the contrary), but he was widely regarded as a sober-minded, pro-big-government, institutional liberal in the mold of Stephen Breyer rather than a rhetorical bomb-thrower.

When Garland testified before the Senate at his confirmation hearing, he assured the senators that his department would be both impartial and independent:

The Hunter Biden disinformation campaign It wasn’t Russian propaganda; it was Democrats and the media trying to hide the truth: Peter Van Buren

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-hunter-biden-disinformation-campaign/

Democrats are obsessed with the idea that when they lose elections it must be because of outside forces, usually some sort of Russian. But what we know now is that if anyone has been manipulating our once precious democracy, it has been the Democrats.

The latest findings by the Durham investigation make clear that the 2016 Clinton campaign paid for and implemented a massive disinformation strategy to falsely link Donald Trump to Russia, and then worked the intelligence services of the United States and the mainstream media to drive that narrative deep into the American psyche.

When Trump won, Democrats used that same strategy to try and drive him from office. That that too failed is not the point; the playbook was being worked out for manipulating an election within the boundaries of the American system. The Dems/intel services/MSM proved to be fast learners, because when it came to 2020, the basic plan did work, deep-sixing the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop to help glide Joe into the White House.

The Same People Who Said Hunter’s Laptop Was Fake and a Trump Pee Tape Was Real Are Pushing for War With Russia Supporting the people of Ukraine does not mean propelling the world into a war that will end all wars. Time and again, American involvement has not helped. This is one of those times. JD Rucker

https://jdrucker.substack.com/p/the-same-people-who-said-hunters?token=e

I hope and pray that most of our readers are at least reticent if not adamantly opposed to going to war with Russia. One can support Ukraine, oppose Russia, and still not want the United States to get involved militarily or to escalate our response to Russia to the point that they attack NATO, drawing us into WWIII.

But there are Democrats and RINOs who are warmongering us towards direct involvement in the regional conflict prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They are getting louder. Anecdotally on social media, I’m seeing more “conservatives” calling for actions like no-fly zones that will force us to shoot down Russian aircraft and plunge us into war. My question is this: Why are so many otherwise lucid America First conservatives buying into the warmonger narrative?

As I stated on Twitter…

Reminder: The same people who told you Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” are now telling you Soros- and Schwab-backed Volodymyr Zelensky is democracy’s messiah. Accepting that Zelensky is corrupt and antagonizing world war does not make you a “Putin apologist.”

Andrea Widburg wrote an article for American Thinker that embraced an article by Sundance at The Conservative Treehouse. It details some of the inconsistencies we’re seeing with the sudden rise in warmongers across America, who now account for an uncomfortable number of people.

Hunter Biden and the media’s feedback loop If you’re waiting for an apology from partisan journalists, you’ll wait in vain Cahrles Lipson

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/hunter-biden-laptop-media-feedback-loop/

Well over a year after the presidential election, long after all mainstream media outlets killed a legitimate story about Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop, the New York Times finally announced it had “authenticated” the computer and its messages. The computer, left amid a drug-filled haze at a Delaware computer repair shot, is filled with damning information about Hunter’s pay-to-play operations, which monetized his family’s political power.

His only marketable skill was opening doors with his last name. It’s still unclear how deeply and directly Hunter’s father, Joe, is implicated in this sleazy business, which went on for years. Not that the Times wanted to know any of this when it mattered most, before the 2020 election.

As NPR’s managing editor for news put it on October 22, 2020, after the New York Post had broken the story, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

NPR and the Times were hardly alone in killing the story. The Post was the only major paper that investigated and ran the damning news. Fox News was the only TV source that reported on it. For that investigative work, the Post deserved a roomful of journalistic prizes but, predictably, it received none. Why “predictably”? Because the folks who award prizes are the same hall monitors who try to control public discussion. They were the ones who suppressed the laptop story.

The NCAA’s Three-Day Swim Farce Is Over, but the Controversy Is Not By Madeleine Kearns

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-ncaas-three-day-swim-farce-is-over-but-the-controversy-is-not/

Atlanta — UPenn swimmer and biological male Lia Thomas finished eighth at the women’s NCAA 100-yard freestyle final tonight, with a time of 48.18 seconds. The winner was UVA’s Gretchen Walsh, at 46.05 seconds. And so concludes the NCAA’s sexist three-day swim farce.

On Thursday, Thomas was awarded the women’s 500-yard freestyle championship. On Friday, Thomas took to the podium again for a joint fifth place in the 200-yard freestyle.

The New York Times and other outlets have framed Thomas’s 500-yard victory as the story of “the first openly transgender woman to win a N.C.A.A. swimming championship.” Really, the story here isn’t about athletes’ identities. The story — or rather, the scandal — is about biological sex.

Nobody objects, for instance, to the participation of Yale swimmer Iszac Henig in the women’s championships. Henig identifies as transgender but – crucially — is biologically female. Henig finished fifth in tonight’s NCAA 100-yard freestyle, with a time of 47.32 seconds.

The same people who would boo Thomas can happily cheer for Henig. How can that be, if their motivation is “transphobia”?

That Henig has been content to swim alongside other biological females also exposes the nonsense argument that it would somehow be a denial of “human rights” to expect Thomas to swim alongside biological males.

What Should Be Done to Fight Inflation? A U.S. Lawmaker (Lisa McClain R-MI) Interviews Two Michigan Economists

https://www.aier.org/article/what-should-be-done-to-fight-inflation-a-u-s-lawmaker-interviews-two-michigan-economists/

The following is a recent discussion between US Congresswoman Lisa C. McClain, Northwood University Economics department chair Dr. Dale C. Matcheck and Dr. Timothy G. Nash, director of the McNair Center for the Advancement of Free Enterprise and Entrepreneurship at Northwood University. The conversation centered around recent comments by US Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Jerome Powell, and how the Federal Reserve intends to bring our 40-year high inflation rate down to levels prior to 2021. 

McClain: It’s great to be here with two of my favorite economists, Northwood University’s Dr. Tim Nash, and Dr. Dale Matcheck, to discuss Federal Reserve monetary policy. Dale let’s start with you defining inflation.

Matcheck: Sure, Lisa, it’s great to be here. Inflation is the decline in a country’s currency purchasing power over a sustained period of time. Inflation is reflected in an increase in the average price level of goods, services, and assets. The best-known yardstick to measure US inflation is the Consumer Price Index or CPI.

McClain: Tim, your and John Hantz’s late January inflation piece in The Detroit News underscored why it’s so important to discuss Milton Friedman when determining the cause of inflation and how to battle it. Especially topical, given our current inflation rate is at a 40-year high as measured by the CPI.

$1.5 TRILLION SPENDING BILL PASSED BY U.S. HOUSE LESS THAN 24 HOURS AFTER RELEASE

The bill is 2,700 pages – the length of ten books.

Congress had less than one day to read the bill before they voted. President Biden has already signed off — a $1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill. Magic!

Do we really have a representative republic if our representatives don’t even know what they are voting on?

Here are just a few examples of what was in the bill:
$1 million for a “farm-to-refrigerator training facility” in Pennsylvania
$2 million for George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change
$2.5 million for a museum in Vermont.
$3 million for a fisherman’s coop facility in Guam
These examples represent only four of 4,400 earmarks in the bill!

Earmarks are the ‘currency of corruption in Congress.’ It’s legal bribery to give away member pet projects for votes.

(It took 367 pages alone just to list the earmarks!)

Republicans cheered a 6% increase in defense spending. Democrats cheered a 7% increase in social services and executive administration spending.

And, presto, you — the taxpayer — are paying for all of it.

This week, we launched our investigation on television with the 190 local ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX affiliates of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a Fortune 500 company.

It’s time to bring the heat, so Congress sees the light!

SIGN OUR PETITION to #READTHEBILL.

Urge Congress to take a 72-hour timeout to #READTHEBILL.

Together, let’s hold our elected officials accountable. Tell Congress to do their job!