https://justthenews.com/government/white-house/trump-greeted-army-navy-game-chants-usa
President Donald Trump’s arrival at the annual Army-Navy game on Saturday was greeted with sustained cheers and rolling chants of “USA! USA!”
Trump waved to the crowd amid the cheering that greeted his arrival. The storied Army-Navy matchup began in 1890 and has regularly been attended by sitting presidents.
https://nypost.com/2020/12/11/the-defense-industry-swamp-is-eager-to-engulf-the-biden-administration/
Just days after the presidential election, a new investment firm called Pine Island Acquisition Corporation quietly began trading on the New York Stock Exchange, with the prospect of becoming a notable player in the $2 trillion defense and aerospace industry. The company’s greatest asset was not its relatively modest bankroll goal of $200 million, but its connections — deep ties to policy establishment figures shaping the incoming Biden administration.
In describing itself to potential investors, Pine Island’s prospectus boasted a leadership team with “extensive access, insight, expertise and management skill” in the defense sector.
In the dawning Biden era, that might be an understatement.
Pine Island was established as a “blank-check company” by Pine Island Capital, a small private-equity firm based in Fort Lauderdale. Among that firm’s partners are Michèle Flournoy and Antony Blinken, two of the president-elect’s top foreign-policy advisers. Blinken, who served as Vice President Joe Biden’s national-security adviser and, later, deputy secretary of state, is Biden’s pick to lead the State Department. Gen. Lloyd Austin, Biden’s nominee for defense secretary, is also listed as one of the firm’s “DC Partners.”
Pine Island recently lowered its fundraising goal from an initial target of $300 million, a move that appears to have expedited its listing on the New York Stock Exchange. While that move will reduce its available capital, it appears to position the company’s shareholders to benefit from any positive news stemming from a potential nomination of any of its partners.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-restaurant-lockdown-massacre-11607730189?mod=hp_opin_pos_1
New York’s Andrew Cuomo on Friday joined the stampede of Democratic governors shutting down restaurants despite scant evidence that they are driving a surge in Covid cases. Their shutdowns are hitting minorities the hardest and increasing economic inequality.
Democratic governors in Michigan, Illinois, Oregon and Washington in recent weeks have closed indoor dining. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has banned outdoor patios in most areas too. Mr. Cuomo said Friday that he’s shutting down indoor dining in New York City as of Monday.
According to state contact tracing data, restaurants and bars account for 1.4% of the virus spread in the state while household gatherings make up nearly 74%. That’s not surprising. In New York City, restaurants were limited to 25% capacity. Who limits capacity in their living rooms during football watch parties or Thanksgiving?
Restaurants and other small businesses have spent heavily to comply with government Covid regulations, including buying personal protective equipment for staff and improved ventilation systems. But now they are being punished because, well, government can’t control the virus and Democratic leaders feel they must appear to be doing something.
https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/11/as-swalwell-spy-scandal-spirals-pelosi-wont-say-how-many-other-house-intel-dems-had-sexual-relationships-with-spies/
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi will not say if any other Democrats sitting on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have had political or sexual relationships with foreign spies.
This week, reporting by Axios revealed that suspected Chinese spy Christine Fang cultivated deep connections with U.S. Democratic politicians in the Bay Area for years, including with California Rep. Eric Swalwell, to send political intelligence and personal information back to China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), one of the country’s primary spying agencies.
Fang reportedly developed a relationship with Swalwell, raising millions for Swalwell’s re-election in 2014 and assisting in placing at least one intern in his Washington, D.C. office before abruptly leaving the country in 2015, around the same time a counterintelligence investigation was opened on her.
The Federalist previously reported that in addition to bundling donors for the congressman, officials believe Fang may have been sexually and romantically involved with Swalwell.
The Federalist asked Pelosi if she knew how many other Democrat members of the House Intelligence Committee have had political, sexual, or relationships with spies for hostile foreign countries. Her office did not comment and instead pointed to her statement that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s questions about the influence Fang had on Swalwell, a sitting member on multiple intelligence committees, are simply a distraction from QAnon conspiracy theories.
“You know what he’s trying to do? He’s trying to deflect attention from the fact that he has QAnon in his delegation over there. And that I think is a danger in terms of our debate here about, you know, what the possibilities are for undue influence to Members of Congress,” she said at a Thursday press conference.
https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/12/11/why_we_must_restore_america
Americans take it for granted that they can continue to enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the world. And with the Dow at 30,000, why worry?
When asked to list major economic problems, Americans are most likely to cite income inequality at the top of the list. That issue dominated this year’s debates among Democrat Party presidential hopefuls. The perceived problem is unfairness in sharing the national wealth. It is assumed that somehow the hidden machine that produces national wealth will continue to function on its own. The golden goose will keep laying eggs; thus, we need to spread more around for everyone.
The reality that the incoming Biden administration will confront is that our trajectory is not sustainable. Today’s concerns about redistributing wealth will give way to worries about how to create wealth in the first place.
The most telling piece of data published over the last 12 months appeared last week, without attracting any comment: for the first time on record, the U.S. dollar no longer was the dominant currency in international payments, according to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). More transactions were conducted in euros. Eventually, China’s RMB will challenge the dollar as well.
This matters because the dollar’s status as the main global-reserve currency gives the U.S. trillions of dollars of cheap loans from the rest of the world. Central banks held $7 trillion in dollar reserves as of June 30, 2020, mostly invested in U.S. Treasury securities, and private companies hold many trillions more to pay for trade in goods and services.
https://www.businessinsider.com/barr-knew-hunter-biden-tax-probes-months-before
Attorney General William Barr knew about two criminal investigations into Hunter Biden’s financial dealings for months before the US general election but kept them from the public, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.
The news is a remarkable twist in Barr’s tenure as President Donald Trump’s attorney general, during which he repeatedly took steps to benefit the president and feed into his conspiracy theories.
According to The Journal, Barr knew about the Biden tax investigations since at least the spring but tried to keep them under wraps in accordance with Justice Department rules meant to keep prosecutors from taking overt investigative steps that could affect the outcome of an election.
The Journal’s report is likely to infuriate Trump, who has been frustrated with Barr in recent months and came close to firing him on several occasions before aides talked the president out of it.
Attorney General William Barr knew for months about two investigations into Hunter Biden’s financial activity but worked to shield them from the public, The Wall Street Journal reported late Thursday.
The news is a remarkable twist in Barr’s tenure as President Donald Trump’s attorney general, during which time he repeatedly took steps to aid the president and feed into his talking points about the Russia investigation, the Obama administration, and the 2020 election.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/12/pen_america_mocks_1st_amendm
On Saturday, I received an email from Stephen Fee, the Communications Director for PEN America, alerting me to a virtual gala celebration on December 8 to honor Barack Obama with its 2020 Voice of Influence Award.
Among other topics, Obama will share with the PEN audience how “disinformation — and media outlets willing to spread it — are an immediate threat to democracy.” PEN’s mission, so they tell us, is “to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide.”
Is this a hoax? Obama deserved the Nobel Peace Prize more than he deserves this award. A report released by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in October 2013 showed that only in Bizarro World would Obama merit such an honor.
In the way of background, a group of foreign journalists founded the CPJ in 1981 to protect their colleagues around the world from harassment by authoritarian governments. The CPJ is not exactly part of the much-bruited “right-wing noise machine.” Au contraire!
Over the years the CPJ board of directors has included any number of liberal luminaries, among them Christiane Amanpour, Gwen Ifill, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Clarence Page, and even serious leftists like Victor Navasky, longtime editor of the Nation. The principal author of the report was Leonard Downie, Jr., former executive editor of the Washington Post. In the opening paragraph of the report, Downie sliced right to the heart of the issue:
In the Obama administration’s Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press. Those suspected of discussing with reporters anything that the government has classified as secret are subject to investigation, including lie-detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and e-mail records. An “Insider Threat Program” being implemented in every government department requires all federal employees to help prevent unauthorized disclosures of information by monitoring the behavior of their colleagues.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/will-america-become-chinas-vassal-gary-gindler/
On election day, Fox News betrayed President Trump, and this has puzzled many patriots. The confusion vanishes if one assumes that this episode could be just a small part of the process of China’s colonization of America. China has already colonized some countries in the Pacific region, South America, and Africa for all practical purposes. Add to this list the de facto colonization of northern Italy and a large part of Russia in Eastern Siberia. Also, communist China greedily devours real estate and businesses in the United States.
Therefore, the 2020 presidential election should be seen as an integral part of this process.
From this perspective, Trump and Biden symbolize two diametrically opposed approaches to America’s future. If Biden made it clear that he was ready to swear allegiance to the new master, Trump is fighting for America’s economic and political independence. Biden is helped not only by the so-called “Democrats” and numerous anti-Trump Republicans but also by the world socialist movement.
The current leading force of palace intrigues in China is Xi Jinping’s group of supporters of Soviet methods: “Xi Jinping belongs to the faction long forgotten in China, which at one time was aligned with the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin.” When this group came to power, a wave of repressions swept across China, like two drops of water similar to Stalin’s repressions of the 30s and 40s. China’s economic policy is generally reminiscent of the Soviet one. For example, foreign companies’ penetration into Chinese markets is only possible if joint ventures with China are established, and all the know-how is transferred to the Chinese side.
Donald Trump, of course, is fighting for the presidency. Nevertheless, for Trump, the presidency is only part of a more significant challenge. Trump seeks not only to win these elections but to destroy once and for all the leftist movements in general. Obviously, it includes China and the so-called “Democrats.” That is a much more important goal, and it looks like Trump would prevail. What if Trump loses? In this case, all his actions will be aimed at ensuring that by the next electoral cycle – in 2022 – no one in his or her right mind would even think to vote for (D)ecadence.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/12/what-truly-source-native-american-poverty-jason-d-hill/
The dire conditions under which Native Americans live in the United States are pitiful. Statistics grow dated by the month. According to the American Community Survey, one in three Native Americans live in poverty with a median income of around $23,000 per year.
Self-proclaimed experts on Native American poverty such as sociologist Beth Redbird point out that despite heavy investments in education, up to 80% of Native Americans move back to their rural communities. Given that poverty tends to be higher in rural areas, the poverty gap between Native Americans who live in rural areas and urban areas is larger than the white rural and urban gap. The conclusion is that poverty is not driven by the propensity of Native Americans to live in rural areas.
Redbird concludes that amazing things would happen if Native Americans had the same employment rates, occupations, levels of education, lived in the same geographic locations and were in the same types of white households as white Americans. She claims the payoff to education is not nearly as great as the payoff to jobs. In other words, if such conditions held, Native American poverty would decrease because poverty could be reduced for the Indian-only population by nearly 20% with employment.
She cites the abysmal failures of Native Americans to address their own economic development through tribal gaming and energy. Reports from the census show that when tribes started gaming establishments or energy projects that poverty rates did not decrease, and that few lasting jobs were created. In 2015 alone, casinos created about only 25 jobs, while energy had hardly any effect on reservations with more than 2,000 residents on average.
The solution? Redbird wants tribes to invest in a variety of job initiatives and to diversify economic opportunities. This will require federal negotiations and, Redbird admits, “Indians don’t have the highest trust in federal policy.”
Let us pause here and state the obvious. Autonomy, sovereignty and self-determination have simply not worked for American Indians. Their self-determination and alleged autonomy really rest on one set of collective entitlements after another to preserve their distinct tribal heritages to the detriment of economic growth and well-being. Even Redbird admits that economic well-being at the local level might look different for a tribe in Wyoming versus one in California—all of which lead to a variety of outcomes.
https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2020/12/10/the-four-horsemen-of-the-american-apocalypse-n1202939
EXCERPTS
“In our “time and setting,” one might think that we are witnessing the last days of the American Republic, following massive electoral fraud, the suppression of facts by the media, the ubiquitous practice of censorship by the tech platforms, and the (so far) pusillanimous refusal of the courts to rectify the greatest electoral scandal, by several orders of magnitude, since the defeat of Andrew Jackson in the “corrupt bargain” of 1824.”
Given the cultural forces that have been at work undermining the joists and beams of the nation, the impending calamity comes as no surprise. The four horsemen are riding again, and their names are Feminism, Climate, COVID-19, and the Democratic Party.
Feminism sits astride the white horse, obviously, crowned in ostensible purity. This destructive and malicious ideology of spurious “equality” has dissolved the vigorous masculine spirit that has long sustained the greatest nation on the planet, and it shows no sign of relenting. A nation that has been radically feminized will not survive in the carnal jungle of politics and war. As Michael Ignatieff writes in The Lesser Evil, “liberal societies cannot be defended by herbivores. We need carnivores to save us.”
Climate, aka the red horse of Global Warming, is taking the peace of daily living from domestic assurances, depriving the country of reliable sources of energy, fouling the landscape, polluting the environment, empowering a class of robber barons profiting at the expense of the people, and establishing infrastructural control by a cadre of demagogues—it could also be called the green horse. (Watermelon environmentalism: green on the outside, red on the inside.)
The black horse of COVID—or, more accurately, the official response to the virus, replete with false information as the First Trust COVID-19 Tracker points out—has panicked the populace, led to misguided draconian measures, caused shortages of consumer goods, promoted the manifest injustice of elite immunity to law, inflicted disproportionate suffering and increased lethality, and facilitated mammoth economic collapse from which there may be no full recovery. The black horse has trampled the nation’s prospects for both the present and the future.
And the Democratic Party, charging on the pale horse of corruption, lies, calumny, hypocrisy, vandalism, corporate welfare, racial conflict, electoral treachery, the murder of innocents called “abortion on demand,” and totalitarian principles associated with socialism and communism, followed by the Hell of the Press, the academy, the jesters of Hollywood and social media, has plausibly ensured the ideological transformation of the Republic into the two-headed Babylon of secular idolatry and political control, or alternately, the Roman Empire of harassment and persecution. In any case, it signifies the Death of legitimate governance.
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