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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Kangaroo court now in session By Larry Brandes

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/kangaroo_court_now_in_session.html

President Donald Trump left office on Jan. 20, 2021.  The Democrats hated the man, his family and all of his Bible-reading followers. The leftists in this country wanted you know just how much they hated him, so they impeached him for a second time, just to hate him some more.  Ironically, the impeachment is unconstitutional because 1) the president had already left office and cannot be removed, and 2) Supreme Court Chief Justice John Robert’s refuses to preside over the impeachment because, well, it’s unconstitutional. Ya think?

In a brilliant stroke of genius the Democrats have now unwittingly brought back a man who had just exited the stage with 75 million angry followers, again to center stage.

This is the same group of 75 million people who firmly believe that the 2020 election was rigged and Biden* (who’s going to go down as the president with an asterisk) is a usurper. Emperor Joe just said that this second farcical trial of Trump, “has to happen,” but whether he understands what he is saying is anyone’s guess. He might be confused with getting ice cream or taking a nap for all we know. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was not confused, and said, “I don’t think there’s a need for a whole lot of witnesses.”  That makes total sense. You don’t need no stinkin’ witnesses for what’s in reality a kangaroo court!

Democrats are pulling the old sleight of hand trick: Hey, dummies come watch our total Schiff show.  We have clowns galore and RINO elephants who just want to poop on Trump once more. Over in the center ring a bunch of preening, moronic, nincompoops will burn Trump at the stake and totally ignore slow Joe Biden.

The mystery of conservatives hating Trump By Robert Arvay

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/01/the_mystery_of_conservatives_hating_trump.html

Five to six years ago, I was corresponding online, on a regular, frequent basis, with several strong conservatives.  We all advocated for policies like smaller central government; lower taxes; First, Second and Tenth Amendment freedoms; restrictions on abortion; strict control of our borders, including merit-based immigration; and many other standard conservative positions.

That was then.

Along came the 2016 presidential campaign, and the finalists were Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump.  As expected, most conservatives, as described above, were enthusiastically supportive of Trump.  Unexpectedly, however, there was a significant proportion of conservatives, or those who claimed to be, who were not only opposed to Trump, but vehement “NeverTrumps.”  “Anybody but Trump” was their mantra.  And they meant it.  Anybody. 

Why this is so is a mystery not yet fully explained.

In recent encounters (online) with some of them, I was amazed at their glee, caustically expressed, that Donald Trump had left the White House.  According to them, Trump was the devil.  He did nothing right.  He made everything worse.  He locked children in cages, then went golfing.  He was Islamophobic and xenophobic.  He was destroying the environment.  He was recklessly risking nuclear war with North Korea and Iran.  He was colluding with the Russians.  He sold much of our scarce uranium to the Russians (oh, wait — that was Hillary, but even so, Trump was bad).

There is so much more and so little room here.

And it all had to be true, because all the leftist “news” outlets were saying so.  They wouldn’t lie.  They were unbiased, science-oriented, purveyors of fact, weren’t they?

Democrats Want Biden To Be The Dictator They Said Trump Was

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/28/democrats-want-biden-to-be-the-dictator-they-said-trump-was/
They have a maniacal need to rule….

Donald Trump was treated by the opposition party and media (we repeat ourselves) like no other president in our memory. He was called a dictator, a tyrant, an authoritarian, and a fascist, to name a few childish invectives hurled his way. Of course his adversaries were projecting. It’s the Democrats and their media collaborators who yearn for absolute power.

Trump was accused of being a dictator at the same time he was trying to weaken the federal government through tax cuts and deregulation. The agitators – the elected, unelected, functionaries, and self-appointed – who made the allegations were never required to explain why a dictator would undermine his power base by downsizing the government under his charge; how a tyrant could be impeached twice; how an authoritarian failed to expand his authority during a pandemic; how a fascist brokered peace deals in the Middle East; how someone routinely called “Hitler” willingly walked away from his “dictatorship” after losing an election; how screaming heads could insult him and his family without fear of punishment.

Yet Trump was a dictator just because they said he was. Questioning the proposition is not allowed.

Meanwhile, Charles Schumer, the New York Democrat and Senate majority leader, said Monday “it might be a good idea for President Biden to call a climate emergency” because there are “many, many things under the emergency powers of the president” that “he could do without legislation.”

Even without declaring a climate emergency, Biden is already moving in the direction Schumer laid out for him, signing 33 executive orders within his first week. This is only months after Biden said “you can’t [legislate] by executive order unless you’re a dictator. We’re a democracy. We need consensus.” 

So now we know what could be reasonably assumed: He’s just another pen-and-phone president who doesn’t need the hassle of the legislative process to rush through his party’s agenda.

WONDERFUL PAUL SPERRY TWEET!

https://twitter.com/paulsperry_/status/1354242289535766535?s=11

Tweet
Paul Sperry@paulsperry_
·Obama is behind those 30 executive orders. Biden is just the pen. #Jobama

Biden starts staffing a commission on Supreme Court reform He pushed the idea as a candidate during the Amy Coney Barrett confirmation fight. Now, he’s getting it going.By Tyler Pager

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/27/biden-supreme-court-reform-463126

The Biden administration is moving forward with the creation of a bipartisan commission to study reforms to the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary.

The commission will be housed under the purview of the White House Counsel’s office and filled out with the behind-the-scenes help of the Biden campaign’s lawyer Bob Bauer, who will co-chair the commission. Its specific mandate is still being decided. But, in a signal that the commission is indeed moving ahead, some members have already been selected, according to multiple people familiar with the discussions.

Among those who will be on the commission are Cristina Rodríguez, a professor at Yale Law School and a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Obama Department of Justice, who will join Bauer as co-chair. Caroline Fredrickson, the former president of the American Constitution Society, and Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and a former assistant attorney general in the Bush Department of Justice, will also serve on the commission, those familiar with discussions said.

Fredrickson has hinted that she is intellectually supportive of ideas like court expansion. In 2019, she said in an interview with Eric Lesh, the executive director of the LGBT Bar Association and Foundation of Greater New York: “I often point out to people who aren’t lawyers that the Supreme Court is not defined as ‘nine person body’ in the Constitution, and it has changed size many times.”

Donald Trump Fought For Us. Now It’s Our Turn Trump created a new conservatism. Now its our job to nurture it. By David Marcus

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/27/donald-trump-fought-for-us-now-its-our-turn/

Back in the early days of the Donald Trump phenomenon, whenever he supposedly got out of line a recurring joke about him was, “But he fights.” The pundits laughed. The poor rubes suckered by Trump were supposedly taken in by some canard that he was a fighter. But the fact is he was, he won a lot of those fights, and his voters are better off for those wins.

When the spurious allegations of long past sexual misconduct from now Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh emerged, conventional wisdom said his nomination was over. Pre-Trump, that would have been exactly right. He would have been thrown under the bus in the time it took a Sandy Koufax fastball to reach the plate. It was the smart play. But instead Trump fought.

Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, as U.S. presidents have promised for, well nigh my whole life and never delivered on, was accomplished. This was supposedly going to retard the prospects of peace in the Middle East. Instead, Trump achieved the historic normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab states. That happened because he fought.

Since the late 1980s we have assumed that opening trade to communist China would liberate the repressive state there. We did that even after Tiananmen Square. It didn’t work. We now have a China even more committed to repressing its people. Our workers lost out over those decades of acquiescence to China. Trump started a trade war. He fought.

The pro-transgender movement has now convinced the left there is no difference between a biological man and a biological woman. Joe Biden signed an executive order making sure that girls have to compete against boys in sports. Trump ordered the exact opposite of this, compelling the federal government to respect the scientific idea of biological sex. He fought.

Against all odds, Trump reduced American troop levels overseas, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. He protected our soldiers. He proved something that seemed almost impossible: the idea that a sitting president doesn’t have to start new wars. In less than a week, Biden is increasing troop levels overseas. Trump fought.

Oligarchy in America Crossing the Rubicon of class Dominic Green

https://spectator.us/topic/oligarchy-america-rome-athens-jeff-bezos/

The fog of the Trump wars is lifting, the road from COVID-19 rising before us, the outlines of the 21st-century American system emerging. Like the bankruptcy in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the change has happened ‘Gradually, then suddenly.’ The age of the democratic republic is over, the age of the American oligarchy beginning.

Oligarchy is the ‘rule of the oligos’, the few: the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a self-sustaining elite. It sounds quaint, classical even, as though it couldn’t happen here because it already happened there. But it has, in fact, already happened here. Augustus Caesar, who made himself Rome’s first emperor in 27 BC, would recognize the symptoms of our American novelties. The cult of the founding fathers and the cult of entertainment. The elites divided by violent factionalism and united by naked venality. The decay of republican virtues. The widening of the wealth gap and the rise of the populares, the members of the ruling class who rebel in the name of values already overthrown. And then, when all seems lost, Oligarchy in America the rise of the imperial oligarchy that offers to restore law and order, but installs a different law and a new order.

Oligarchy happens here because it happens everywhere. It is a recurring reality, the precursor of mob democracy in Plato’s Republic; the alternative to liberal democracy in modern China, Russia and the European Union; the endless present in Arab and African states. The Chinese oligarchy is ‘market-Leninism’ under the ‘princelings’ of the party, from whose ranks Xi Jinping emerged to become a quasi-emperor. The Russian oligarchy is a post-communist, sub-czarist parody of democracy whose winners, the looters of the energy sector and the graduates of the spy services, first returned ‘oligarch’ to modern use in the Nineties. The European states were creating their oligarchy too in that decade, in the unaccountable imperial technocracy that is the European Union. The Nineties were not the decade of the triumph of liberal democracy. They were the decade when oligarchy, illiberal, liberal or semi-liberal, conquered the globe.

No Impeachment Surprise — Just Dirt Dov Fischer

https://spectator.org/trump-impeachment-democrats/

Nancy Pelosi delivered her annual impeachment to the Senate, and the result was exactly as I had predicted in The American Spectator two full weeks ago on January 13: dead on arrival.

There are not two-thirds of the Senate to convict. There never were going to be two-thirds of the Senate to convict. Rather, it all is a sham and a fraud on the American public, who, frankly, are getting exactly what the fools who voted for this House of Representatives and Senate deserve. With people dying of COVID, vaccinations running way behind schedule, shortages in vaccine supplies, a befuddled Joe Biden now telling his voters that his plan to combat COVID basically is the same as Donald Trump’s plan, the focus in Washington is on … an impeachment that is dead on arrival.

Congressional representatives and U.S. senators are paid to do the people’s business. They are paid very well. Taxpayers also pay for the Democrat women in Congress to all buy new white dresses for the State of the Union. Taxpayers pay for their meals, their platinum health care, their air travel around the country and around the world. In return, taxpayers would expect that the people’s needs would be front and center. The current crop of American voters have no one to blame but themselves for the Congress they have — a myopic assemblage of mediocrities driven only by pure hate: hate for conservatives, hate for White people, contempt for the intelligence of Black people, hate for the only cable television station that has a modicum of conservative semblance, hate for talk radio. Just hate.

We saw this Congress’s inaction in action when Pelosi took the gavel from Paul Ryan two years ago. It became a House of cards, that is a House of low-caliber characters. A bunch of jokers in a deck that, to call a spade a spade, has few hearts, fewer diamonds, just insiders in private clubs who consume billions and trillions of tax dollars on nonsense, waste, and silliness. It all is about wasting the day every day, spending other people’s money without fear of an accounting, and making speeches and television appearances for egotistical self-aggrandizement until one day they finally are defeated at the polls and instantly are forgotten.

Dismounting the COVID Tiger The oligarchy’s chosen method of “reopening” after the pandemic shows that it intends to attempt to validate the harm it did over the previous year. Will it work? By Angelo Codevilla

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/26/dismounting-the-covid-tiger/

Riding fear of COVID-19, our oligarchs persuaded millions of Americans to join in masked pantomime, to deliver themselves to something like house arrest, and to blame Donald Trump for their troubles. But as much as the oligarchs enjoyed COVID powers and dreamt of segueing them into a “new normal,” they knew that America could not be locked down forever.

They especially knew, were they to unseat Trump and become responsible for the country, their charges that he had failed to stop the pandemic would come back to haunt them. “Why can’t you stop it?” would be the natural question they would have to face as the virus did what airborne viruses do: spread. Hence, after January 20, dismounting the COVID tiger, albeit gingerly, became the order of the day.

And so it happened, on January 22, Joe Biden spoke the truth: nothing that anyone could do can alter the trajectory of the virus’ spread. 

A few grumbles notwithstanding, there was silence from very same media and “experts” who had accused Trump of responsibility for hundreds of thousands of deaths because he had not implemented a nationwide test-trace-and-quarantine system. The futility of such measures in preventing an infectious disease from running its course once it has entered a population was as obvious in 2020 as in 2021. But then, denying it served the oligarchy’s prosecution. Affirming it now serves its defense.

Already on January 16, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that his state could not wait to reopen until herd immunity had been reached naturally or through a vaccine, because “If we wait, there will be nothing left to open.” 

To Hell With Unity It is not good for the country to pretend that the Left will respect your rights as Americans if you just let them have their way with the law. By Dan Gelernter

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/26/to-hell-with-unity/

The recent betrayal by Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and former Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is a reminder that the ruling class in Washington, D.C. values nothing so highly as being the ruling class in Washington, D.C. Offer them a choice between maintaining a “good working relationship with their colleagues across the aisle” on the one hand, and democracy on the other, and they’ll stick with their colleagues: Their daily lives change little no matter who is in power. 

Their priority is that they be able to chat amicably at parties with people who just called them liars on cable TV. It’s just politics, after all. It’s just a game. They don’t feel the effects of their policies because they live in the one city in America that gets wealthier when the economy gets worse.

But ordinary people will feel the effects. Joe Biden has already rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement. He has rejoined the World Health Organization. He has suspended federal oil and gas permitting and canceled the Keystone XL pipeline. He has stopped work on the border wall, suspended deportations for 100 days, and announced his intention of a path to legalization (i.e., a path to ballooning the Democratic Party’s voter rolls) for millions of illegals in the country. He signed a mandate requiring masks on federal land. He signed a bizarre executive order forcing schools to accept biological men on women’s sports teams. He reversed Trump’s ban on Chinese involvement in the U.S. power grid. And he also reversed Trump’s order mandating lower prices for insulin and epinephrine pens. Biden will also be raising your taxes—but that takes time. Everything above is just executive action. 

Imagine how great it will be once the Democratic House and Senate start pumping out unopposed legislation. But, you know, Mitch and Lindsey will still be okay hanging out with the Democrats after work because they were able to close ranks over the issue of people being angry at them about the election. Unity is wonderful.