Open Letter to President Biden: Nuclear Deal with Iran Will Be a Disaster by Majid Rafizadeh

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18095/iran-biden-nuclear-deal

No amount of appeasement and no deal is going to change the core pillars of the Iranian mullahs’ revolutionary principles, which include anti-Americanism, antisemitism, supporting terror groups, and brutally repressing their own population. The theocratic establishment uses international and regional agreements, such as its election last April to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, to advance its revolutionary ideals.

The Biden administration might begin to understand, nearly four decades after the establishment of the mullahs’ regime, that, as Henry Kissinger remarked, “The exercise of diplomacy without the threat of force is without effect.”

The Biden administration’s Iran policy appears to be quite simple: keep negotiating with the ruling mullahs and offering concessions to revive the 2015 nuclear deal and eliminate the Iranian regime’s threat.

The nuclear deal reached in 2015, however, had already proved that it did not eliminate the Iranian regime’s threats. After the agreement, access to the considerable funds freed up by the deal had the reverse effect: it allowed Tehran to pour ever greater sums into the coffers of groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis. Nations such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain were largely ignored by the Western powers, despite their clear concerns over the direct threat that enriching these groups presented.

US President Joe Biden previously suggested that Iran, in the aftermath of the 2015 nuclear deal, had ceased being a “bad regional actor”, writing:

“… I will offer Tehran a credible path back to diplomacy If Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal, the United States would rejoin the agreement as a starting point for follow-on negotiations.”

This is an easy view for someone thousands of miles away from the Middle East, but for those living there, dealing with Hezbollah’s weapons caches and Syrian militias wreaking death and devastation, Iran, through its proxy networks, has become more malign than ever.

American Oligarchy The Left is correct to bewail the sordid and fallen state of “our democracy.” It just has no idea why. By Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/07/american-oligarchy/

To observe that the Left and its cheerleading media have treated the one-year anniversary of the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot as a solemn occasion would be to understate the point. For the Left, the (actually) mostly peaceful demonstrations of that day, which for a small percentage of demonstrators did entail illegal trespassing of the Capitol, represented a watershed moment in the history of our “democracy.” January 6 was the day, the narrative goes, where “deplorable” Trumpians attempted to effectuate an “insurrection” and a “coup,” seeking to “overturn” the results of the perfect and pristine 2020 presidential election.

The lead-up to the one-year January 6 anniversary was endlessly promoted by our insular and self-congratulatory Washington press corps as something akin to the one-year anniversary of September 11, 2001. The imbecilic and senile dolt who is our commander-in-chief dedicated his January 6, 2022, remarks to excoriating his predecessor for that predecessor’s alleged incitement of an “insurrection.” Defying parody, a candlelight vigil was held at the National Mall—”in remembrance of the attack on our democracy that occurred on January 6, 2021.”

In fairness, it is true that modern America no longer meets a threshold definition of “democracy.” But the Left is wrong as to why. America in the year 2022 is not a nation bedeviled by a great scourge of right-wing political violence, but it is a nation bedeviled by a monolithic and intellectually homogenous oligarchy that seeks to subjugate dissenting “deplorables” by any means necessary. Consider some examples.

American oligarchy is when a duly elected president of the United States is stymied from day one by cynical ruling class fabulists concocting a false story about that president’s alleged collusion with a foreign power, based on the primary “evidence” of a salacious and unverified “dossier” created in conjunction with the defeated opponent’s presidential campaign. American oligarchy is when the institutional media cheers on not one but two baseless and mind-numbing presidential impeachments based on nothing more than frothing partisan fealty to the oligarchs’ preferred political tribe, the Democratic Party.

What Role Did the FBI Play in January 6? During the Trump era, Democrats and Republicans abandoned their traditional positions on federal law enforcement. And with good reason. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/07/what-role-did-the-fbi-play-in-january-6/

Just as the investigation into the “terror attack” of January 6 was in full swing in the autumn of 2021, court proceedings in the alleged 2020 plot to kidnap of Governor Gretchen Whitmer began in Michigan. 

When 13 men allegedly tied to militia groups were arrested on October 7 of this year on federal and state charges for planning to kidnap Whitmer from her Michigan vacation cottage, Team Biden and Whitmer herself made the most of the timely political gift. “There is a through line from President Trump’s dog whistles and tolerance of hate, vengeance, and lawlessness to plots such as this one,” Biden said in an October 9 statement. “He is giving oxygen to the bigotry and hate we see on the march in our country.”

In a press release announcing the arrest of six of the plotters on federal charges, the Justice Department detailed the elaborate plan. “This group used operational security measures, including communicating by encrypted messaging platforms. On two occasions, members of the alleged conspiracy conducted coordinated surveillance on the Governor’s vacation home . . . and discussed detonating explosive devices to divert police.” The wannabe kidnappers planned to use a taser gun on Whitmer then either abandon her in a boat on a nearby lake or transport her to Wisconsin to stand trial. “These alleged extremists undertook a plot to kidnap a sitting governor,” the assistant FBI special agent in charge said in the statement. “Whenever extremists move into the realm of actually planning violent acts, the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force stands ready to identify, disrupt, and dismantle their operations, preventing them from following through on those plans.”

Investigating—or Planning—the Plot?

But the Justice Department’s description failed to match reality as court documents and testimony would show. Far from the FBI thwarting the operation, the FBI itself enlisted participants, organized and funded training and surveillance trips, and used paid informants working with FBI agents to lure unsuspecting “militia” members into attempting to execute the plot. 

The scheme centered around a group called the Wolverine Watchmen, an unknown “militia” group formed online in late 2019 by another man who faced state, not federal, charges related to the plot. (The man, Joseph Morrison, created a Facebook page for the new group four days after he was arrested on a weapons charge, which was pleaded down to a misdemeanor with time served—one day in jail.) It was essentially a small online group of malcontents, more smoke than fire.

12 Questions the Justice Department and FBI Need to Answer About January 6 Republican rank-and-file are fed up with feckless GOP leadership, and are starting to see the Capitol protest as an inside job rather than a spontaneous uprising. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/07/12-questions-the-justice-department-and-fbi-need-to-answer-about-january-6/

There is a good chance Republicans can take control of both houses of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections. There is an even better chance they will wimp out and betray their supporters . . . again. This open letter is addressed to one especially disappointing group. 

—The Editors

Dear Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans:

Happy New Year! Hope you are ready and rested for the big political fights ahead in 2022. Republicans across the country are counting on you to stand tough against the Biden regime and your Democratic counterparts in advance of a potentially power-shifting election this November.

Just kidding.

Alas, informed Republicans know that even with all the uncertainties in the world, we can be certain that the Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee will always disappoint us. Even when you controlled this important committee for four years under a Republican president, you failed to fulfill one empty promise after another.

Remember all the promises to “get to the bottom” of Russiagate, the biggest political scandal and abuse of government power in history? (Well, until January 6.) 

Remember how you let Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Democratic activists hijack the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, which led to a humiliating and divisive showdown between the Supreme Court nominee and his half-baked accuser? 

Oh, and remember that lengthy investigative report you issued a few months later that accused people of lying to Congress and referred them to the Justice Department (which you purportedly oversee) on criminal charges but nothing ever happened?

Good times.

During the first year of the Biden Administration, you made nary a peep as Biden filled his cabinet with Obama loyalists and left-wing radicals. My favorite moment was when every member of the committee voted to advance the nomination of Lisa Monaco—Barack Obama’s hyperpartisan homeland security advisor, Russiagate architect, and former chief of staff to FBI Director Robert Mueller—to serve as deputy attorney general. She is what Andrew Weissmann was to Mueller when he was special counsel; the vengeful, Republican-hating prosecutor calling the shots behind the grandfatherly veneer of Attorney General Merrick Garland.

But don’t feel bad. Every Republican senator, except two, voted to confirm Monaco last April. As I wrote after her confirmation, “rather than act as any sort of barrier to protect America from the arsonist-in-chief hellbent on burning down every tradition, constitutional guardrail, and notion of common decency owed to fellow Americans, Senate Republicans are handing Joe Biden the matches.”

For Winsome Sears, Education Is the Key to Black Success America hasn’t always been perfect, says Virginia’s lieutenant governor-elect, but it isn’t 1963 anymore. By Tunku Varadarajan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/winsome-sears-education-key-black-success-virginia-governor-charter-school-choice-crt-critical-race-theory-11641574129?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

You don’t need a doctorate in futurology to be convinced that when Republican Glenn Youngkin is sworn in as governor of Virginia next Saturday, he’ll take his oath alongside someone who could likely be, four years hence, the first black woman elected chief executive of an American state.

The woman in question is Winsome Sears, Virginia’s lieutenant governor-elect and Mr. Youngkin’s running mate in the Republican sweep of the state’s highest offices in November. (A third Republican, Jason Miyares, won election as attorney general.) Virginia’s Constitution bars consecutive gubernatorial terms, and should Mr. Youngkin prove a success in office, Ms. Sears would be nearly certain to secure the Republican nomination for 2025. Mr. Miyares would also be a contender to succeed Mr. Youngkin as governor, but he’s a decade younger than Ms. Sears and will likely have to wait his turn.

Born in Jamaica’s capital, Kingston, some months after her father emigrated to New York in 1963, Ms. Sears is quick to acknowledge a political debt to her native island, from which she, too, emigrated as a child. She claims descent from Nanny of the Maroons, an 18th-century leader of runaway slaves who fought Jamaica’s British rulers in a guerrilla war. “Nanny was an African princess, and my mother comes from those people,” Ms. Sears tells me from her home outside Winchester, Va. Less dramatically, she ascribes her own political confidence—and her belief that there are “no limits to what black people can achieve”—to her quotidian experience of Jamaica, where “the generals are black, the lawyers are black, the doctors are black, the Rhodes scholars are black.”

New York’s Race-Based Preferential Covid Treatments New guidelines say whites may not be eligible for antibodies and antivirals, while nonwhites are. By John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira

https://www.wsj.com/articles/new-york-race-based-covid-treatment-white-hispanic-inequity-monoclonal-antibodies-antiviral-pfizer-omicron-11641573991?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

New York state recently published guidelines for dispensing potentially life-saving monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals like Paxlovid to people suffering from mild to moderate symptoms of Covid-19. These treatments are in short supply, and they must be allocated to those most in need.

According to these guidelines, sick people who have tested positive for Covid should be eligible to receive these drugs if they have “a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness.” These include standard criteria like age and comorbidities like cancer, diabetes and heart disease—but, startlingly, they also include simply being of “non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity,” which “should be considered a risk factor, as longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19.”

Consider the following cases: A middle-aged investment banker born in Colombia shows up at a physician’s office in Manhattan; a laid-off middle-aged worker of Italian ancestry shows up at a doctor’s office in Rochester, N.Y. Neither has medical risk factors, but both have mild to moderate symptoms of Covid-19. The wealthy Colombian-American could be given Paxlovid; the laid-off auto worker would be turned away. You can construct thousands of these comparative cases using well-off Hispanics, Asians or blacks and working-class whites.

This is unfair and possibly illegal. With these kinds of regulations, the Democrats who control New York reinforce the racial and ethnic divisions that grew during Donald Trump’s presidency. These state officials have been abetted by social scientists who collect survey data in a manner that, intentionally or not, confirms their presuppositions.

New study of Pfizer’s COVID vaccine has some disturbing findings By Bill Hansmann

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/new_study_of_pfizers_covid_vaccine_has_some_disturbing_findings.html

I just read a disturbing study of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine’s efficacy by the Canadian COVID Care Alliance.  This organization comprises over 500 independent Canadian doctors, scientists, and health care practitioners.  The title of the article, “The Pfizer Inoculations for COVID-19: More Harm Than Good,” is disturbing. The article itself, which discusses the many nuances of this study, is even more distressing.

You may recall the much-reported “95% efficacy” of the vaccine against COVID-19.  We all assumed that if we were vaccinated, we would then only have a 5% chance of becoming infected.  Sounds great, but the statement is misleading.  In the Pfizer study, only 8 out of 18,198, or 0.043% of participants who received the vaccine, contracted COVID, while 162 out of 18,325, 0.884% in the control group who received injections of saline became infected.  Therefore, while there was a Relative Risk Reduction of 95%, the Actual Risk Reduction was a mere 0.84%.

This disparity certainly changes one’s perspective on just how effective the vaccine is.  Everyone in the study, including the control group, had a less than 1% chance of infection.  Of course, as the virus spread throughout the population, a higher percentage of people became infected.  The conclusions of the study remain the same insofar as the likelihood of the vaccine preventing infection in any given controlled group of persons.

The article also asserts, among other things, that the study was conducted on relatively young and healthy persons but was then recommended to be used first on old, less healthy individuals.  The trials did not follow scientific protocols, owing to the desire for rapid deployment.  Follow-up studies were made virtually impossible because as subjects were unblinded — made aware of whether they had received the vaccine or the placebo.  The unvaccinated largely chose to receive the vaccine.  Thus, there is no control group remaining to study

The most damning findings concerned lack of disclosure of possible, or even likely long-term health risks on vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals.  These findings revealed significant increases for the vaccinated.  It also pointed out that for adolescents and children, the vaccine posed all risk with virtually no benefit, since those young individuals, even if they became infected, had a near universal good outcome.  Myocarditis and other afflictions are a substantial health hazard facing vaccinated young people.

Defund Progressive Prosecutors? City leaders have little leverage against renegade prosecutors—but they do retain the power of the purse. Thomas Hogan

https://www.city-journal.org/defund-progressive-prosecutors

Mayors and city councils are increasingly exasperated with “progressive prosecutors,” but they have little leverage to control them. It may be time to exercise a traditional check on underperforming public agencies: the power of the purse.

Displeasure with progressive prosecutors has been simmering for a while but is starting to boil over. San Francisco mayor London Breed, seeing the chaos unleashed by District Attorney Chesa Boudin, recently said, “It’s time the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it come to an end.” Philadelphia’s city council president and mayor took turns bashing the lack of leadership and cooperation from District Attorney Larry Krasner, even as the city set a new record for homicides. Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot traded barbs with Cook County state’s attorney Kim Foxx over Foxx’s decision not to charge violent criminals, in a year when Chicago topped 800 homicides.

But very few tools exist to stop a rogue prosecutor. A prosecutor seeking convictions must get through an arrest, preliminary hearing, pre-trial motions, trial, and appeals. A prosecutor who doesn’t want to prosecute criminals can simply announce that he or she is not prosecuting. The criminals will then walk free; there is no oversight and no appeal. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the United States saw a tremendous surge in violent crime, legislators and prosecutors worked together to figure out solutions. Today, certain prosecutors seem intent on fueling the violence rather than trying to stop it.

How, then, can these radical prosecutors be curbed? Voters may eventually catch on and send them packing, of course, though both Foxx and Krasner were recently reelected handily in low-turnout elections. But officials could also cut funding. Local prosecutors’ offices, like other agencies, get funded from municipal and state coffers. The progressive prosecutor movement has made much about arresting less, prosecuting less, incarcerating less: in short, doing less work than traditional prosecutors. District attorneys’ offices can accordingly see their budgets adjusted to reflect that diminished role. Progressive candidates in the Manhattan district attorney’s race explicitly promised to cut the size of the office in half because the office would be doing less prosecuting under their leadership. If Chesa Boudin is only prosecuting or convicting half as many people in San Francisco, then shouldn’t his budget be cut by half? The remaining funds could be repurposed to provide other city services.

Half of NYC Covid Hospitalizations Were Admitted for Other Reasons, State Data Shows By Isaac Schorr

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/new-data-out-of-new-york-differentiates-between-patients-hospitalized-as-a-result-of-covid-19-and-those-who-later-tested-positive/

New York released data on Friday differentiating between those hospitalized with coronavirus and those hospitalized with other maladies who tested positive for it after being admitted for the first time.

While there are 11,548 New Yorkers hospitalized who have tested positive for Covid, only 6,620 were admitted as a result of Covid or complications from the disease. That means that 43 percent of those counted were admitted for reasons believed to be unrelated to the coronavirus.

In New York City, 51 percent of those considered to be hospitalized with Covid were for reasons other than the virus itself.

This marks the first time that the state has counted and reported these numbers as separate groups. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which shows hospitalization data for all fifty states, does not presently make that distinction. It reports a 41.1 percent increase in its seven-day average of hospitalizations.

American Slavery in the Global Context By Dan McLaughlin

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/01/24/american-slavery-in-the-global-context/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=top-of-nav&utm_content=hero-module

No topic in American history is more enduringly controversial than slavery. It sits at the heart of every indictment of America and our founding principles. It is central to battles over critical race theory, the removal of monuments, and the renaming of places and institutions. It is invoked in debates over policing and welfare.

For the New York Times’ 1619 Project, slavery is foundational to American identity. Its beginning is our “true founding.” We should “reframe our understanding of U.S. history by considering 1619 as our country’s origin point.” Slavery is “the seed of so much of what has made us unique” and should sit at “the center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are as a country.” Yet this claim lacks the global perspective we need to examine what is actually uniquely American. Where did American slavery come from? How did it differ from other systems of bondage and forced labor?

Slavery was a human crime of which Americans were one part. It proliferated for millennia before slaves are first known to have been sold in Virginia, in 1619. It persisted long after it was abolished in the United States in 1865. It was practiced by people far from our shores without American influence. People were enslaved in virtually every society from which American slaves were descended. Few of the world’s major civilizations have been innocent of it.

In the story of world slavery, Americans loom much larger in the history of abolition than in the history of enslavement. Seymour Drescher, one of the great historians of slavery, summarizes the landscape in 1775:

Personal bondage was the prevailing form of labor in most of the world. Personal freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution. In 1772, Arthur Young estimated that only 33 million of the world’s 775 million inhabitants could be called free. Adam Smith offered a similarly somber ratio to his students and prophesied that slavery was unlikely to disappear for ages, if ever.

Slavery and its close cousin, serfdom, were the lot of a vast proportion of the human race, beginning in ancient times and continuing for over 1,300 years after the fall of Rome in the fifth century a.d. Slavery’s origins cannot be located; it predates history, and in many parts of the world it appears as early as there are historical records. It appears in Genesis, Exodus, and the Code of Hammurabi. It was pervasive in classical Athens and Sparta and in republican and imperial Rome. Under Augustus Caesar, a third of the population of Italy were slaves. Aristotle defended slavery as the natural order of humanity — among non-Greeks. Few other ancient writers even considered the morality of slavery.