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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Dem Civil War Erupts With Name-Calling, Leaks

https://dailycaller.com/2021/10/01/democratic-party-pelosi-sinema-biden-manchin-leaks-name-calling-infrastructure-spending-bill/

Chaos has erupted within the Democratic Party after a member of Congress leaked the contents of a caucus meeting Friday as moderate and left-wing members work toward passing an infrastructure bill and a social spending package.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi initially promised a group of moderates, led by New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, that she would hold a vote for the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) on Thursday. However, Pelosi delayed the vote after failing to reach an agreement with left-wing members of her party, who will not vote for the package unless the Senate passes the as-yet unwritten Build Back Better Act through the reconciliation process.

House Democratic leaders will confiscate cell phones from members ahead of a Friday afternoon full caucus meeting with President Joe Biden, after one member leaked the entire contents of Friday morning’s full caucus meeting to Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman.

The Research That Shows How Destructive The Biden Spending Will Be

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/04/the-research-that-shows-how-destructive-the-biden-spending-will-be/

It’s truly frightening how obsessed the Democrats are with spending nearly $5 trillion on infrastructure and social programs. They’re behaving as if our republic would buckle and collapse if their agenda isn’t passed. The real danger, though, are their ideas, which are economic IEDs.

More than 20 years ago, UCLA professors Lee Ohanian and Harold Cole, now a University of Pennsylvania professor, produced a report that showed President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policies not only didn’t end the Great Depression, they extended the misery by seven years. Simply put, there was too much government intervention in the economy.

FDR’s policies and those of President Joe Biden and the Democrats are not entirely analogous. Ohanian and Cole focused “primarily on the impact of Roosevelt’s early policies that allowed for monopolies and too much union power to increase prices and salaries.” The Democrats’ bills are mostly, but not exclusively, about spending other people’s money.

Another difference: We are not in a depression. The country is recovering from a downturn caused by officials foolishly locking down the economy, which they told us was necessary to beat the pandemic.

However, we can expect at best a sclerotic economy, and depression-like conditions, if the Biden bills become law. The unbridled spending will exacerbate the inflation that’s disrupting the U.S. economy as well as compound the supply chain problems that are blowing “a stagflationary wind through the global economy.”

Citadel professor of ethics and free enterprise leadership Richard Ebeling calls “the fiscal mindset of those in the White House and in Congress who are proposing new federal budgetary expenditure,” and tax hikes “in the trillions of dollars,” a “fantasy land of financial irrationality.”

Biden’s Vax Mandate To Be Enforced By Fining Companies $70,000 To $700,000? Adam Andrzejewski

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2021/09/28/bidens-vax-mandate-to-be-enforced-by-fining-companies-70000-to-700000/?sh=1e5a568a1c0d

President Joe Biden didn’t just announce a Covid-19 vaccine mandate on companies employing 100 or more people, he plans to enforce it.

On Saturday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House quietly tucked an enforcement mechanism into their $3.5 trillion “reconciliation” bill, passed it out of the Budget Committee, and sent it to the House floor.

Buried on page 168 of the House Democrats’ 2,465-page mega bill is a tenfold increase in fines for employers that “willfully,” “repeatedly,” or even seriously violate a section of labor law that deals with hazards, death, or serious physical harm to their employees.

The increased fines on employers could run as high as $70,000 for serious infractions, and $700,000 for willful or repeated violations—almost three-quarters of a million dollars for each fine. If enacted into law, vax enforcement could bankrupt non-compliant companies even more quickly than the $14,000 OSHA fine anticipated under Biden’s announced mandate.

The Biden Administration has already started implementing its vaccine mandate enforcement blueprint:

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) set precedent this summer and published an emergency Covid-19 rule in the Federal Register taking jurisdiction over and providing justification for Covid-19 being a workplace hazard for healthcare employment.
Early in September, Biden announced his 100-or-more employee Covid-19 vaccine mandate and tasked OSHA with drafting an enforcement rule to exert emergency vaccine compliance authority over companies with 100 or more employees.
The legislative provision that passed the Budget Committee raises the OSHA fines for non-compliance 10 times higher – and up to $700,000 for each “willful” or “repeated” violation. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has not announced when the House will vote on the reconciliation bill that includes the new OSHA fines.
If the legislation is enacted, OSHA could levy draconian fines to enforce Biden’s vaccine mandate, a move that could rapidly bankrupt non-compliant companies. The Biden mandate affects employers collectively employing an estimated 80 million workers.

A Tale Of Two Heroes; Gen. William ‘Billy’ Mitchell ‘The Father Of The U.S. Air Force’ And Marine Lieutenant-Colonel Stuart Scheller By Caren Besner

https://www.publishedreporter.com/2021/10/02/op-ed-a-tale-of-two-heroes-william-billy-mitchell-the-father-of-the-u-s-air-force-and-marine-lieutenant-colonel-stuart-scheller/

 This is a cautionary tale of two American soldiers. Nearly a century spans the incidents that brought them their notoriety; yet the issues they evoke are exactly the same and timeless. Does an active duty officer in the military have the right, a moral obligation even, to criticize the actions of his superiors; both military and civilian, if he firmly believes that those actions are incompetent and have dire consequences?

Our first soldier, William “Billy” Mitchell was born in December 1879 into a family of wealth and influence. He seemed a man destined for success. Opting for an army career, he became enamored of early developments in the field of aviation and joined the fledgling U.S. Air Service; then a part of the Signal Corps. Following distinguished service in WWI, during which he was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General, he continued to advocate for American air power during the lean post WWI years when military budgets were being slashed to the bare bone. Regarded as a visionary and a man way ahead of his time, Mitchell made a number of prophecies … all of which eventually came true.

Among other things, Mitchell foresaw the mass bombing of civilian population centers, airborne armies being dropped behind enemy lines, and the replacement of the battleship by the aircraft carrier as the dominant naval vessel. These ideas were all regarded as “crackpot” in the early 1920s, but yet, he continued to advocate for his cause, making many enemies as well as friends along the way. Mitchell’s undoing came in September 1925 when a Navy dirigible, the U.S.S. Shenandoah crashed during a severe thunderstorm killing 14 men. The airship had been ordered aloft as a public relations gesture during a period of severe weather over the protestations of its own Captain. Mitchell offered his opinion on this and other incidents that had previously occurred: “These terrible accidents are the direct results of incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration of the National Defense by the War and Navy Departments.” This was the last straw for the army. He was charged with insubordination, court martialed, convicted, and suspended from duty for five years without pay. He chose to resign from the army and continued to espouse the cause of American air power but his time had passed. He died in 1936 in relative obscurity; five years before his most famous prediction came to pass. He could not have known when he wrote in 1924 that “One day Japan will seek to attack the United States through the Hawaiian Islands; some fine Sunday morning.”

Claremont Under Fire Expect the fury of the attacks on the Claremont Institute and scholars like John Eastman to increase. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/02/claremont-under-fire/

What is the most important think tank in America circa 2021? I’d say that a good case could be made in support of the Claremont Institute, the California-based organization that is home to the Claremont Review of Books—perhaps our single most incisive quarterly devoted to high politics and the vocation of statesmanship—and a number of world-class scholars. Their statement of purpose says that “The mission of the Claremont Institute is to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life.” Through the CRB and the writings of their scholars and fellows, the institute lives up to that high calling. 

What is the single most disgusting and mendacious article published this year? The competition for that title is stiff, I know, but I’d like to propose Daniel Drezner’s mephitic eructation in the Washington Post abusing the Claremont Institute and some of the scholars associated with that organization. Mary McCarthy once noted that every word that Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, including the words “and” and “the.” Hellman had nothing on Drezner, whose hysterical (I do not mean “funny”) effort at demolition is as embarrassing as it is tendentious.  

The one amusing passage (inadvertently amusing, I hasten add) is the bit toward the end where Drezner invokes the late, great Samuel Huntington for support in his vendetta against Claremont. “The connection between democracy and political science has been a close and continuing one,” Huntington said in a late 1980s speech for the American Political Science Association. “Where democracy is strong, political science is strong; where democracy is weak, political science is weak.” Drezner offers this gloss: “Make no mistake, whatever it was in the past, the 2021 version of the Claremont Institute explicitly wants to weaken democracy.” That rumbling sound you hear is Huntington turning over in his grave. The author of The Clash of Civilizations and Who Are We? would not have been amused to be enlisted in this attempted character assassination.

As it happens, abusing the Claremont Institute has become a favorite pastime of our would-be masters. The occasion for Drezner’s flaccid fusillade was the American Political Science Association’s decision to ostracize Claremont from its annual conference, taking place this weekend in Seattle. In July, The Bulwark, Bill Kristol’s current squeaky megaphone, published a fevered attack called “What the Hell Happened to the Claremont Institute?” That piece is a runner-up for my prize of most deceitful article of the year.

What is it about the Claremont Institute that drives the snotty establishment to distraction? In a word, Trump. They hate Donald Trump and they hate anyone who doesn’t share their hatred. They especially hate anyone who questions the legitimacy of the deeply problematic 2020 election or raises questions about the FBI-sponsored protest at the Capitol on January 6. 

Heroes of the Pandemic Meet 15 of the leading physicians and scientists at the forefront of the counter-narrative on COVID-19. By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/02/heroes-of-the-pandemic/

Many highly accomplished and credentialed medical professionals have put their careers and reputations on the line with their public opposition to the failed COVID strategies of the global biomedical complex. For this, the corporate media has done everything it can to discredit them, and suppress their alternative message.

Over  9,100 medical doctors and scientists have signed a document charging policy-makers with potential “crimes against humanity,” accusing them of preventing physicians from providing life-saving treatments for their patients and suppressing open scientific discussion.

The now-famous “Rome Declaration” wasn’t even the first time a large number of medical experts had gone on the record to reject the tenets of the church of COVID.

A year ago, more than 860,000 infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists signed a declaration expressing their “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.”

The Great Barrington Declaration argued that “the most compassionate” way to reach herd immunity while minimizing mortality and social harm was “to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.”

Unfortunately, because of the work they’ve done over the past year and a half advocating for early treatments, and raising red flags about the experimental vaccines, many brave doctors and scientists have had their voices muzzled and their reputations smeared by the corporate media.

Why? Because no one is allowed to question the official narrative of the global biomedical complex, which is that the vaccines are very safe, effective, and the best way to fight COVID-19.

Among the detractors of this narrative, highlighted below, are medical doctors, infectious-disease researchers, virologists, a former vice president of Pfizer, the inventor of mRNA vaccine technology, and even a state surgeon general.

Even as the authoritarian Biden Administration has ratcheted up pressure on unvaccinated Americans to get the jab or lose all of their rights, these bold medical professionals have fought back, arguing that the experimental injections fail a risk-benefit assessment for most people, and are arguably a violation of the Nuremberg Code.

Inequality — the Engine of Prosperity By Alexander G. Markovsky

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/inequality__the_engine_of_prosperity_.html

“The proponents of economic equality fail to recognize the immutable fact — freedom enables people to use their ingenuity to generate wealth, whereas coerced economic equality suppresses the very freedom required to innovate and begets poverty.”

Throughout the history of civilization, people have been dreaming of a perfect world — full employment, full satisfaction of material and intellectual needs, and equal distribution of wealth — only to discover, to their disappointment, that this utopian system does not exist on this side of the grave.            

Nevertheless, the illusory ideas of economic equality transcend time and appeal to people of all colors and races. If the supporters of economic equality, including Marxist graduates of American universities, absorb human history, they may realize that the only historical datum that points to economic equality goes back to the era of primitive communism. Ten thousand years ago, before farming, people were forced to obtain food collectively. Everything that was produced was immediately consumed. This primitive society produced no surplus and created no wealth. Under such arrangement, the private property was limited to personal articles of clothing, hunting tools, etc. resulting in total economic equality — in absolute poverty. Ironically, this is the only way economic equality can be achieved — economic equality and wealth are mutually exclusive.

As people invented agriculture and property ownership, put fences around their properties, produced surplus, engaged in commerce and subsequently built up wealth — inequality was born. The predominant pursuit of wealth creation is the purpose of any society, whether it is slavery, feudalism or capitalism.

Inspired by human’s inherent desire for well-being and passion to extricate himself from misery, wealth creation became the locomotive of economic growth. Capitalism stands out as the greatest wealth generator and distributor that has created more wealth during the last 250 years than all preceding civilizations combined in 7,000 years. 

The source of this enormous wealth is the man’s God-given ability to think and innovate. This intellectual ability is a property of the individual and has not been dispersed equally. Hence, it wouldn’t be reasonable to expect equal results from unequal abilities.

The Fragility of Political Sanity W.R. Wordsworth

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/9_30_2021_23_54.html

The classical liberal tradition that inspired America’s founding is rooted in a deeper Enlightenment tradition that rose in principled opposition to religious conflict in Reformation Europe. This earlier Enlightenment fostered a secular political culture that disavowed the enforcement of religious uniformity as an object of political endeavor. Under the guidance of the Enlighteners, the fanatics were disempowered and the West abandoned theocracy as a governing ideal. Western societies grew to accommodate religious variety without sacrificing social harmony. We are heirs to this tradition, and we would do well to reflect upon it, especially since human nature itself would seem to make the ascendancy of political fanaticism a permanent threat.

One might like to assume that people are basically reasonable and that episodes of brutal domination are historical aberrations, but such practices as the burning of heretics and the slaughter en masse of errant co-religionists did not simply end on their own — people didn’t just come to their senses one day. Political sanity is not as self-recommending as one might like to assume; arguments for toleration had to be made, and they had to gain general acceptance, supplying new norms. These norms had to be codified into laws and these laws safeguarded by institutions designed to uphold them.

The philosopher Baruch Spinoza was among the earliest authors of these new norms, norms that would eventually inform the American founding. These norms have held for centuries. Not so long ago the consensus supporting them was so solid there was little need to consciously invoke them; they are now buckling under the relentless attacks of a morally bigoted, hateful, authoritarian Left.  

It is perhaps a fundamental truth of the human experience that the mere prospect of exercising political power motivates the very worst kinds of people to seek it. These vulgar climbers often masquerade as paragons of virtue. Indeed, the empowerment of “virtue” (however defined) is perhaps the most common founding myth of tyranny.

The Cult of Victimhood Will Destroy Western Civilization In the past, the powerful exerted control over the weak overtly. Today, they exert control by masquerading as weak. By Adam Kravatz

https://amgreatness.com/2021/10/01/the-cult-of-victimhood-will-destroy-western-civilization/

Human beings are complex social animals who evolved the extraordinary ability to empathize with others—especially in their suffering—which further led to the ability to signal suffering to other humans as a strategy to receive help, resources, and social status. This tactic can be morally desirable. For example, people are more willing to donate to causes, such as GoFundMe, when difficult social circumstances are a factor in the request. A just and moral society is concerned with the welfare of those in low positions through no fault of their own. 

Wherever benefits can be obtained from exhibiting hard-to-verify personal information, however, there will always be cynical and morally obtuse people looking to cash in on the generosity of a well-intended populace. This unfortunate reality is exacerbated by our modern proclivity to use victimhood as an identity.

Victim identities, deserved or undeserved, are said to warrant special care and deference, whereas “privileged” identities are devalued. Victimhood confers a special status that today generates tremendous power; it can be used as justification for retributive acts against “oppressors,” provide an exclusive moral legitimacy or position to speak to certain issues, and function as an excuse for one’s personal wrongdoing or failures. The allure of victim status—because of the leverage it seems to impart to people who want to obtain power and sympathy all at once—should not be underestimated. Seeking this anointed status, would-be victims often exaggerate the severity of offenses or create these offenses themselves.

Recent research into victimhood signaling found individuals who exhibit high degrees of narcissism, psychopathy, personal entitlement, and amoral manipulation. The frequency with which these individuals signal victimhood predicts their willingness to engage in ethically questionable behaviors, such as exaggerating claims about being harmed in an organizational context.

The Victim Hoax Game

Biden’s militarized executive agencies By Robert A. Bishop

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/bidens_militarized_executive_agencies.html
Does the IRS really need all that ammunition?

The Obama-Biden administration stockpiled an arsenal of high-powered weapons in the Executive Branch based on the vision of a civilian national security force.  The stockpile can outfit an army.  The Biden regime controls the trigger to the arsenal.  

“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set.  We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded,”  Obama said on July 2, 2008.

Non-profit OpentheBooks released a comprehensive oversight report earlier this year titled “The Militarization of The U.S. Executive Agencies” (here).  The report estimated “that there are now more federal officers with firearm authority (200,000+) than U.S. Marines (186,000).”  It’s the fulfillment of Obama’s well funded prophecy.

There is clearly no legal authority, requirement, or reason for general administrative agencies, like the Internal Revenue Service, whose power is limited to implementing laws, to have weapons.  Biden plans on expanding the IRS by 87,000 workers.  Will their audit training include marksmanship?

Accountability isn’t a strength of the federal government.  The Pentagon never passed its 2017 audit, nor could the Department of Defense document $22 trillion in expenditures.  Not a vote of confidence when it comes to the executive agencies protecting the decentralized stockpiles of firearms and ammunition.  Weapons could easily fall into the hands of vigilantes like Antifa.  Given the Biden administration’s top-down revolution, it is not unthinkable for agencies to intimidate citizens in gun-toting confrontations, conduct government purges, or supply military-grade weapons to a civilian national security force (paramilitary).