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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Despite $460 Mil Budget for Capitol Cops, Pelosi Wants More Money Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/03/despite-460-mil-budget-capitol-cops-pelosi-wants-daniel-greenfield/

This is a joke. Right?

The Capitol Police have over 2,000 sworn officers and they’re the 19th largest police force in America. If that’s not enough to protect a few buildings, then maybe it’s time to ask some serious questions about the competence and corruption of the key players in this mess.

The Capitol Police have over 2,000 sworn officers. A police force dedicated to protecting Capitol Hill has more personnel in its service than the police forces of most of the country.

Congress’ private cops are the 19th largest police force in the country. It’s a larger force than the police forces of Atlanta, Baltimore, Denver, or Milwaukee with a massive $460 million budget.

While Democrats advocated defunding the police, their private police force budget shot up from $375 million in 2016 to $460 million in 2020. After the Capitol Hill riot, expect it to go higher.

Much higher.

How much higher? Pelosi is clamoring for more cash.

Speaker Pelosi said they have “drafts” of security proposals, but protecting the Capitol properly will require more funding.

Climate and COVID: The Erosion of Common Intelligence and Common Sense By David Solway *****

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/03/07/climate-and-covid-the-erosion-of-common-intelligence-and-common-sense-n1430627

In a recent article for PJ Media, I discussed the decline in IQ scores across the West over the last decades, a phenomenon confirmed by many psychological studies and clinical reports. In the article I provided links and documentation as well as numerous episodes and examples in support of the survey’s conclusions. But I omitted for reasons of space what strikes me as a cardinal illustration of the contemporary erosion of common intelligence and common sense, namely, the popular belief in “climate change” and so-called renewable energy sources, and, more recently, mass compliance with government public health dogma and politically inspired COVID legislation.

With regard to climate: Untold millions credulously buy into long-exploded pseudo-scientific fables like anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and the utility of wind turbines and solar arrays, attesting to the ongoing debility of critical inquiry and independent reasoning, qualities associated with intelligent thinking. The unsightly despoiling of the environment, the distribution of these monstrosities in fields and pastures across the national landscape, and the hecatombs of bird and insect species caused by these lookalike Imperial Walkers should give us pause.  

Moreover, the toxic nature of industrial wind, involving hazards like ILFN (Infrasound and Low Frequency Noise), noxious REEs (rare earth elements), and the installation of Permanent Magnets whose components produce prodigious amounts of radioactive waste, cause serious health impacts and deformities. This has become a matter of criminal import, something people should be aware of. The data has been available for years. In this connection, a legal challenge has been launched in France against the government under articles of the Penal Code. 

The notorious Texas freeze, to take a recent instance, should have provided abundant evidence that wind and solar are not only weather-dependent and inadequate suppliers of electric power but potentially disastrous; yet many continue to believe that the answer to such emergencies is even more green technology. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, who introduced the Green New Deal in Congress, claims that the infrastructure failures in Texas “are quite literally what happens when you don’t pursue a Green New Deal.” The degree of stupefaction here is legendary. Renewables are not only ill-suited for, but wholly contra-indicated to serving as primary energy sources for industrial societies.

Climate delirium has been with us for a generation and more and has been discussed and analyzed in innumerable articles and books. The authentic literature on the subject has long been discoverable by any sentient person. What is comparatively new on the psychogenic scene is Covid Derangement Syndrome.

Uh-oh! They let Biden get in front of a microphone again By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/uhoh_they_let_biden_get_in_front_of_a_microphone_again.html

Even ten minutes reading from a teleprompter on a Saturday afternoon was too much for the 46th President of the United States. I suppose his handlers figured that it was important to mark Senate passage of the nearly $2 trillion pork-laden, blue state-bailing out “stimulus” bill with some presidential remarks. It may, after all, turn out to be the high point of the Biden presidency, since Senate passage of the rest of the Biden agenda looks iffy, now that Senators Manchin and Sinema have stated their opposition to ending the filibuster.

But how much longer will the American people accept the spectacle of their command-in-chief visibly incapable of coherence? It’s painful to watch even 35 seconds of it.

When he had all of his (limited) faculties, Biden knew that a bipartisan bill was one that attracted votes from both parties. The husk of his former self does not.

We’re all getting older, and it is no fun at all to notice how addled he is getting.

My guess is that his handlers had some date in mind for pulling the plug on Joe’s presidency via the 25th Amendment, figuring that it would look too fishy to evacuate him from the Oval Office too soon. A year at least, right? Anything less would suggest that they knew he was unable to perform the duties of office but pulled a fast one on the voters with the enthusiastic help of the media. Not even Democrat primary voters were willing to vote for Kamala as president, so he was her human shield, her stand-in.

But poor Joe seems to be fading fast. The awesome responsibilities of office seem to age presidents at a scary pace (except Donald Trump, who looked in terrific form a week ago at CPAC).  Jen Psaki asked for 3+ weeks until he does a press conference. I am beginning to wonder if that will be the one where he announces he is stepping aside?

$2.3 Billion Paid To Chicago Public School Teachers – Who Refused Classroom Teaching By Adam Andrzejewski

https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2021/03/01/23_billion_paid_to_chicag

20,927 full-time teachers in the Chicago Public School (CPS) system may be headed into Chicago classrooms for the first time since March 2020, after approximately 13,000 Chicago Teacher Union (CTU) members voted to go back.

In 2020, Chicago taxpayers spent $2.3 billion on teacher payroll, while 347,476 enrolled CPS school children logged on from home.

That’s an average annual teacher compensation package of $108,729 ($81,422 in salary, $27,307 in benefits), according to records obtained by OpenTheBooks.com through a FOIA request. CPS teachers also can accrue 244 days of sick leave (more than an entire 175-day school year) or apply it to their pensions.

We found Janice K. Jackson, CEO of CPS, made $322,839 – a $260,000 salary and $62,839 in benefits. The 522 Chicago principals averaged $194,000 in pay and benefits, with the highest earners making up to $219,000. Another 304 acting, interim, assistant, and resident principals averaged $171,315 in pay and perks. Even custodians had compensation packages as high as $101,177 in 2020, with 22 earning up to $75,066 in base pay.

Last year Maurice Swinney, CPS’s “Chief Equity Officer,” made $214,000 managing a group of six employees. The pay vastly exceeded the $177,412 salary of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.

Enlightened thinking in Texas by Nicholas Kerr

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/enlightened-thinking-in-texas

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced on Tuesday that the statewide mask mandate and all restrictions on business’ operating capacity would be lifted this coming week. The following day, President Biden called these decisions “Neanderthal thinking.”

In making his announcement, Abbott focused on the fact that Texans have mastered individual habits and practices to mitigate against the risks of contracting the coronavirus. In addition, the state has already protected a majority of its most vulnerable citizens. Any seniors not already vaccinated will have access to one by the end of March, and Texas now has therapeutic drugs that are mitigating the risk of pandemic deaths and hospitalization. At its core, this decision is about personal responsibility and the importance of letting residents weigh health risks against the other risks inherent to their lives. Biden’s response was sadly predictable.

While the state mandates are to be lifted on Wednesday, businesses and people in areas that have had higher case rates are retaining mask requirements and other sensible precautions. Within hours of the governor’s decision, we received notices from our Dallas school and local businesses letting us know there will be no immediate change to the way they operate. This is as it should be and what we anticipated given how hard our city has been hit by the virus.

But it also seems appropriate that small towns and counties in the largest state in the continental United States, some of which have not had a single virus fatality, should be able to return to normal. Simply put, Texas’s governor is treating us like adults, whereas others want us to act like sheep.

A Storm Over the American Republic by Guy Millière

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17147/storm-over-american-republic

The atmosphere in the United States remains poisonous. Critics claim that stoking in the public is being done on purpose — to create a false narrative that not only is Trump supposedly a “threat to democracy,” but that his more than 74 million supporters are, too. Others, however, claim that the real threat to democracy is actually these serial liars, violators of the Constitution and falsifiers of information.

The right to challenge and criticize, which is an integral part of the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment, appears seriously threatened. The right to defend oneself against charges also appears threatened, and the legal profession dangerous to practice.

Expressing doubts about the November 3 election is now a liability. Substantiated reports show that it was far from perfect. The American economist Peter Navarro, in his private capacity, drew up three meticulous analyses: “The Immaculate Deception,” “The Art of the Steal” and “The Navarro Report”. They have been zealously disparaged — many think unjustly.

Some authors describe what is happening as a slide towards authoritarianism. They note that many Americans and corporations, while behaving in an increasingly authoritarian manner, accuse their opponents of being authoritarian — in other words, blaming their opponents for what they themselves are doing.

For more than three years Trump was accused, without any evidence apart from a fake “dossier”, of being a Russian agent. The accusations eventually proved baseless, but not before $32 million of taxpayers’ money were spent in what the prosecutors knew from the start was a fraud. They also tried to frame, incriminate and send innocent people to prison. The exercise was, at bottom, nothing more than an attempted coup d’état.

Throughout his entire term, Trump was faced with threats, abuse of power and unremitting attacks. Even though Trump is no longer president, the war against him continues.

If H.R.1 becomes the law of the land, it will entrench those “very things that made the election of 2020 such a mess”. These include, among other things, the flooding of states with millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots, failure to verify signatures, no chain of custody of ballots, same-day voter registration, and ballot-harvesting — many of which are invitations to commit fraud. As a bipartisan report in 2005 from the Commission on Federal Election Reform, chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker III, concluded: mail-in ballots “remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” If H.R.1 is passed in the Senate, countless ways of demolishing election integrity will be set in cement.

January 20, 2021. President Joe Biden is sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. The scene, however, is devoid of any human presence. The streets of Washington DC are empty. People had been urged to stay at home and Americans throughout the rest of the country asked not to come. The city is under the protection of 25,000 members of the National Guard, heavily armed. High barriers topped with razor wire surround the Capitol area. In the streets planned for the new president’s “parade”, barriers separate the sidewalks from the roadway. The only people visible are men in uniform carrying rifles. A day that is usually a day of celebration in the United States is, this year, strange and sad.

The explanation given by city officials and the FBI was that there was a risk of serious disruption. Other inaugurations had faced disruption, but had never placed the city under siege. On January 20, 2017, during President Donald J. Trump’s inauguration, hostile protesters had come to Washington DC, burned cars and smashed windows. The police had protected the ceremony without razor wire and soldiers. Hundreds of thousands of people had cheered the new president.

Tearing Down Our Castles Home and family, bulwarks of freedom and freedom-making in their turn, are hated by those who hate mankind and want to subject it to vast systems of social and political control. By Anthony Esolen

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/06/tearing-down-our-castles/

“Of all the modern notions generated by mere wealth the worst,” says G. K. Chesterton, “is that domesticity is dull and tame. Inside the home (they say) is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety.” As is so often the case when a people derive their opinions largely from mass entertainment, mass schooling, and mass media, all it takes is a little consideration, or a few minutes of experience, to see that a given popular notion is not only false, but wildly and ridiculously so.

Enter the home of someone who really has a home to enter. What will you find there? You can assume there will be beds in bedrooms, a stove in the kitchen, and a table to eat from; you can assume there will be electric lights, and some form of heating; you can (nowadays) assume there will be indoor plumbing. Beyond that, you dare not go. “For the truth is,” our Apostle of common sense goes on to say, “that to the moderately poor the home is the only place of liberty. Nay, it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only spot on the earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim.” 

I have sometimes imagined an Armageddon to bring down our vast structure of standardization in business, schooling, and government: a lone worker at a McDonald’s somewhere in Idaho, in a fit of cheerful and human lawlessness, sprinkles the French fries with paprika. Or a teacher in one of those public enclaves built to resemble a factory or a prison gets a wild idea—perhaps it is springtime, and the scent of a long-forgotten blossom is in the air—and teaches his students an old Hebrew poem, beginning, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Or the workers sitting opposite one another on a commuter train shut their computers and begin to—what is it called?—have a conversation.

Peak Cancel Culture? Don’t Bet on It By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/06/peak-cancel-culture-dont-bet-on-it/

Last week it was a book by Ryan Anderson and a speech by Donald Trump. This week it is some books by Dr. Seuss. We don’t call it “totalitarianism” for nothing.

Here’s a question that I do not know the answer to: Is the current insanity of “cancel culture” cresting or just getting started? 

Last week in this space, I told you about how Amazon suddenly and without any explanation decided to delist Ryan Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment from all its emporia—audible.com and abebooks.com as well as Amazon itself. (The link I provide goes directly to the publisher). 

We published that book at Encounter some three years ago. Why did Amazon, the self-described “world’s largest book store,” finally get around to placing it on their unofficial but still very potent Index Librorum Prohibitorum? Since Amazon has thus far refused to enlighten us, I don’t know.

Yes, the retail giant flagged a new policy that permits it to refuse to sell works that are “inappropriate and offensive” or that trade in “hate speech.” But Anderson’s book is a serious, deeply researched, and humane investigation of a deeply controverted public issue. Some people might disagree with his analysis or his conclusions. Does that make it “inappropriate and offensive”? Does it render it an instance of “hate speech”?

Let’s pause here for a moment. “Inappropriate” and “offensive” describe a wide range of expressions. “Hate speech,” when you come down to it, is really just shorthand for “speech that I do not like.” A free society allows, indeed encourages, robust disagreement. Some may find your expression of certain opinions “inappropriate” and/or “offensive.” But a free society does not interdict in your expressing of them because, while it values comity and good manners, it also values free expression and open debate. 

The Way We Live Now

That said, almost everyone apart from extreme libertarians would admit that there are limits. The expression of some ideas is forbidden in almost all societies. Where are our limits? We know that Amazon thinks it is OK if people express certain kinds of inappropriate and offensive opinions because it cheerfully sells Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, anti-Semitic fantasia deriving from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and various writings by Louis Farrakhan and other anti-white writers. (This is not by any means a complete list of books that some or many consider inappropriate and/or offensive that Amazon sells.) 

Yet Anderson’s scholarly investigation of transgenderism doesn’t make the cut. What does that tell us about “the way we live now”? 

As the Insurrection Narrative Crumbles, Democrats Cling to it More Desperately Than Ever If the threat of “armed insurrectionists” and “domestic terrorists” is as great as some claim, why do they have to keep lying and peddling crude media fictions about it? Glenn Greenwald

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/as-the-insurrection-narrative-crumbles

Twice in the last six weeks, warnings were issued about imminent, grave threats to public safety posed by the same type of right-wing extremists who rioted at the Capitol on January 6. And both times, these warnings ushered in severe security measures only to prove utterly baseless.

First we had the hysteria over the violence we were told was likely to occur at numerous state capitols on Inauguration Day. “Law enforcement and state officials are on high alert for potentially violent protests in the lead-up to Inauguration Day, with some state capitols boarded up and others temporarily closed ahead of Wednesday’s ceremony,” announced CNN. In an even scarier formulation, NPR intoned that “the FBI is warning of protests and potential violence in all 50 state capitals ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.”

The resulting clampdowns were as extreme as the dire warnings. Washington, D.C. was militarized more than at any point since the 9/11 attack. The military was highly visible on the streets. And, described The Washington Post, “state capitols nationwide locked down, with windows boarded up, National Guard troops deployed and states of emergency preemptively declared as authorities braced for potential violence Sunday mimicking the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of pro-Trump rioters.” All of this, said the paper, “reflected the anxious state of the country ahead of planned demonstrations.” 

But none of that happened — not even close. The Washington Post acknowledged three weeks later:

Despite warnings of violent plots around Inauguration Day, only a smattering of right-wing protesters appeared at the nation’s statehouses. In Tallahassee, just five armed men wearing the garb of the boogaloo movement — a loose collection of anti-government groups that say the country is heading for civil war — showed up. Police and National Guard personnel mostly ignored them.

Psaki says Biden will hold press conference ‘before the end of the month’ Biden has not addressed Congress either, which recent predecessors had done by now in their first year Morgan Phillips

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/psaki-biden-press-conference-before-end-month

AFTER 43 DAYS, BIDEN HASN’T HELD A PRESS CONFERENCE 

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday President Biden will hold a press conference before the end of the month. 

Nearly six weeks into the new job, Biden has not held a formal conference with reporters. Donald Trump took 28 days to take questions from the press, while Barack Obama did it after only 21 days in office and George W. Bush took 34 days.

Biden was not known for addressing reporters during his campaign either.

Biden has taken brief questioning from reporters in other settings, as Psaki pointed out, and given interviews to some news outlets. 

“The president takes questions several times a week. He took questions actually twice yesterday,” Psaki said. ‘’We look forward to holding a full press conference. We’re working on setting a final date for that and as soon as we do we will let you all know,” she continued.