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As Biden’s Border Death Toll Hits Record Highs, Dems Are Mute

Posted By on January 24th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/24/as-bidens-border-death-toll-hit-record-highs-dems-are-mute/

In a data dump Friday, the Biden administration announced that more than a quarter million people crossed the border illegally in December – the highest ever recorded. The timing of this release was designed to bury the news, not that it mattered, since the mainstream media have ignored the growing border crisis with fierce determination. 

But that’s not the worst of it. Border deaths also reached all-time highs. That news is so bad, the “most transparent administration in history” tried to keep it hidden altogether, coughing it up only in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. When that data did come out … crickets.

This silence is particularly galling, given that the left was screaming bloody murder about border deaths during the Trump administration.

The publicly released news showed that Border Patrol agents stopped 251,487 illegal crossers in December. That’s a 7% increase from November, a 40% increase from the year before, and a 240% increase from December 2020.

Keep in mind that it’s not like Border Patrol agents caught a quarter million trying to sneak into the U.S. In Biden’s open-border world, illegal immigrants cross the border and then wait patiently wait for border agents to pick them up, process them in border facilities, and release them into the country, often with the sub-rosa help of NGOs. The Biden administration has turned illegal immigration into a well-oiled machine.

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FBI Agent Investigating Trump for Russia Ties Gets Arrested for Russia Ties By Kevin Downey Jr.

Posted By on January 24th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2023/01/23/fbi-agent-investigating-trump-for-russia-ties-gets-arrested-for-russia-ties-n1664212

Charles McGonigal — the former FBI agent who led the Trump-Russia investigation — has been arrested for “agreeing to provide services” to the billionaire Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

FACT-O-RAMA! It seems everything the left accuses Trump of doing – like hoarding classified documents and collusing with Russians- they are guilty of doing themselves.

Sergey Shestakov, a former Soviet, then Russian diplomat, now an American citizen, was arrested as well.

The two men are charged with trying to have Deripaska removed from the U.S. sanctions list.

“Both previously worked with Deripaska to attempt to have his sanctions removed, and, as public servants, they should have known better,” Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, claimed in a statement. “This Office will continue to prosecute those who violate U.S. sanctions enacted in response to Russian belligerence in Ukraine in order to line their own pockets.”

Charges against both men include:

A single count of violating the IEEPA (International Emergency Economic Powers Act)
One count of conspiring to commit money laundering
An additional count of money laundering

Each of these counts carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in a federal hoosegow. Shestakov was also charged with one count of lying to the FBI, which could snag him a maximum of five additional years.

In short, the high-ranking FBI agent sent to investigate Trump for colluding with Russia was busted for colluding with a Russian oligarch.

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Leading Democrats Abandon Biden’s Sinking Ship By Robert Spencer

Posted By on January 24th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2023/01/23/leading-democrats-abandon-bidens-sinking-ship-n1664342

As each new day brings fresh revelations of more classified documents discovered in Old Joe Biden’s garage and luxury beach home, the import of it all is clear: the people who are running this administration have tired of their dementia-ridden front man, and have determined to get rid of him. Another indication of this comes from the fact that the rats are abandoning the sinking ship in ever-increasing numbers. Or, as the Associated Press put it more politely on Sunday, “senior Democrats, dismayed by a steady stream of startling disclosures, expressed criticism Sunday of how President Joe Biden handled classified material after leaving office as vice president and disappointment that the White House has not been more forthcoming with the public.” Whether they want Joe to resign in disgrace or simply to bow out of contention for the 2024 Marxist party nomination is as yet unclear, but there’s no doubt that they want Old Joe to start packing sooner than January 2029.

Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, who is the Chou En-Lai of Senate Democrats — that is, their second-ranking member — declared that Old Joe should be “embarrassed by the situation,” as if the corrupt, venal, mendacious pretend president were capable of embarrassment. “Well, of course,” Durbin insisted. “Let’s be honest about it. When that information is found, it diminishes the stature of any person who is in possession of it because it’s not supposed to happen. … The elected official bears ultimate responsibility.”

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Climate Activism Has a Cult Problem As a member of Extinction Rebellion, writes Zion Lights, I watched people brainwashed into pulling outrageous stunts in the name of ‘saving the planet.’ *****

Posted By on January 24th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/climate-activism-has-a-cult-problem?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Maybe you saw Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” smeared with two cans of tomato soup. Or the 20-year-old man who set fire to his arm at a tennis tournament, wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the words “End UK Private Jets.” Or the traffic on London’s M25 highway blocked by protesters for days. One 24-year-old girl, Louise, climbed atop a crane on the highway. “I’m here because I don’t have a future,” she exclaimed between sobs.

All these stories feature young members of a movement that claims to fight climate change by demanding their governments stop using and producing fossil fuels immediately.  

Their methods seem unorthodox, and you’re probably wondering how defacing artwork or gluing your hand to the floor of a Volkswagen showroom reduces carbon emissions. I don’t blame you. 

The difference between me and you is I used to be one of them.  

For the past 16 years, I was part of one environmental organization or another as an activist or paid employee. First it was Camp for Climate Action, where we protested a different corporation every year. Once, in a demonstration outside a bank in Edinburgh, we wore garbage bags and painted ourselves in molasses—a nod to the tar sands that the bank was investing in—and stormed the Royal Bank of Scotland headquarters, where I was arrested.

I became a mother in 2011, and swore off putting myself in danger, but I doubled down on my commitment to the movement. I wrote a book on ecologically minded parenting. I was the co-editor of a magazine, Juno, on the same subject. I gave talks, made television appearances, and wrote articles about the threat posed by unlivable temperatures that come from our reliance on fossil fuels.

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Iran’s Newest Commitments by Khaled Abu Toameh

Posted By on January 23rd, 2023

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19339/iran-newest-commitments

The Arabs are not only anxious about Iran’s efforts to achieve obtain nuclear weapons, but also about its ongoing meddling in the internal affairs of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.

In a sign reflecting the Arab concern over the Biden administration’s perceived lenient policy towards the mullahs and their nuclear ambitions, Egypt and Saudi Arabia announced in mid-January that they have “agreed on the need for Iran to fully respect its obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in a way that prevents it from acquiring nuclear weapons.”

“[W]e need negotiations on specific issues that allow us to eliminate security risks, support stability and bring an end to Iran’s interference in Arab affairs.” — Tariq Al-Homayed, Saudi journalist, former editor-in-chief of Asharq Al-Awsat, January 15, 2023.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran will continue supporting the Islamic Resistance in Lebanon and Palestine.” — Iranian Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahain, iranintel.com, January 13, 2023.

The mullahs are telling the Arabs that they can continue barking to their hearts’ content, but Iran will do whatever it wants in their countries.

When the Iranian foreign minister says his country will continue supporting the “resistance” in Lebanon, he means that Tehran will continue to provide weapons and money to Hezbollah, the terrorist organization that effectively controls Lebanon and has turned the country into a state of anarchy and lawlessness.

Like Hezbollah, the Palestinian groups are largely responsible for the misery of the people living under their rule.

“As for foreign policy, ‘Khomeinism’ produced a country that lives in an economic blockade for decades and that no longer knows a language other than weapons for dialogue with its neighbors and countries of the world.” — Baha’ Al-Awwam, Syrian journalist, Al-Ain, December 3, 2022.

“During the era of former US President Barack Obama, the US wanted to unleash the hand of political Islam in the region, so it supported the ‘sons of Khomeini’ and ‘the grandchildren of [Muslim Brotherhood founder] Hassan al-Banna.'” — Baha’ Al-Awwam, Al-Ain, December 3, 2022.

It seems as though the Obama and Biden administrations are ultimately willing to agree to almost anything the mullahs want and throw in a trillion dollars if the mullahs just please do not use their nuclear weapons — as Obama candidly put it in 2015 — “on my watch.”

The Arab countries are still extremely anxious about the possibility that the Biden administration will return to the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPOA — signed in 2015 between Tehran and several world powers, including the US — promises Iran’s regime, after a short time, the ability to possess as many nuclear weapons as it likes, the missiles to deliver them, and no constraints on its terrorism or “revolutionary” expansionism.

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Reckless Reparations Reckoning The lesson from the $22 trillion record of Great Society compensatory payouts is that massive infusions of federal money are more apt to ensure social disruption and dislocation than alleviate them. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 23rd, 2023

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/22/reckless-reparations-reckoning/

The last time racial reparations made the major news was on the eve of September 11, 2001 attacks. The loss of 3,000 Americans, which for a time fueled a new national unity, quickly dispelled the absurdities of the reparation movement, and turned our attention toward more existential issues. 

Now the idea is back in vogue again. Here are 10 reasons why the nation’s—and especially California’s—discussions of reparatory payouts are dangerous in a multiracial state, and why reparations are not viable either in an insolvent state or a bankrupt nation at large.

1) Identity Politics Absurdities

We live in an absurd woke age of retribalization. It has witnessed Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), for mutual advantage, advertised as Harvard’s first Native-American law professor. 

Fellow Montecito mansion denizens Duchess of Sussex Meghan Markle and multibillionaire Oprah Winfrey swap ridiculous televised stories of their own racial victimization. 

“Empire” actor Jussie Smollett initially was canonized by our top elected leaders and exempted for months by Chicago legal authorities after claiming the following absurdity: two white, MAGA-hatted racists, on their apparently routine nightly racist patrols in a liberal Chicago neighborhood and equipped both with special bleach that does not freeze in subzero temperatures and an ever-ready, just-in-case noose, assaulted Jussie. They put a rope around his neck and libeled his predominately black “Empire” soap-opera show—only to be repulsed single-footedly by a courageous Smollett, while retaining in one hand his cell phone and in the other his late night Subway sandwich. 

Note that in these nutty cases and thousands like them, there is the cynical assumption that current American society, and the government as well, reward claims of racial victimization. That is why a Ward Churchill or Rachel Dolezal constructed new racial identities to game the system for profit. 

One of the racialist universities’ current admissions challenges is their checkbox of “mixed race.” Whites and Asians often feign mixed parentages in hopes of being assumed either part black, Latino, or Native American. Any such partial lineage is seen as preferable to their own race. In our old racist society, one used to attempt to pass for white; in our new racist society, one attempts to pass for non-white. 

Current racial tribalization obsessions have descended into a nadir that makes Al Sharpton’s 1990s Tawana Brawley/Crown-Heights career start (“If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”/ “We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it.”) look amateurish in comparison. In this context, new calls arise for ludicrous reparations simply because we have become a ludicrous society.

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Biden Lawyer Has History of Finding and Releasing Elusive Documents By Jack Cashill

Posted By on January 23rd, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/biden_lawyer_has_history_of_finding_and_releasing_elusive_documents.html

In his own discreet way, President Joe Biden’s “personal” attorney Bob Bauer is back in the news again. On Saturday, Bauer released a statement about a new discovery of documents chez Biden.

According to Bauer, the Justice Department “took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President’s service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President.”

This same CBS News report notes that this new find comes after 10 or so classified documents “were discovered by Mr. Biden’s personal lawyers at the Penn Biden Center on Nov. 2.” Others were found at his home on December 20.

Bauer goes unmentioned in those earlier finds, but he almost surely had to be one of those “personal lawyers.” Six days before the midterms, these attorneys made the strategic decision not to go public with their find. In Bauer’s case, I suspect the decision to go public after the election was strategic as well—but not necessarily on Biden’s behalf.

Bauer, of course, has a history of blocking the release of certain documents and then strategically releasing them. In the way of background, on August 21, 2008, a week prior to the Democratic National Convention, Democratic attorney Philip Berg filed a federal suit in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania challenging Barack Obama’s constitutional eligibility to be president.

A former deputy attorney general for the State of Pennsylvania and a credible pro-choice gubernatorial candidate in a Democratic primary against sitting governor Robert Casey, Berg expected to be taken seriously. He wasn’t. The media expressed zero interest in his suit.

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Let Them Eat Bugs! By Janet Levy

Posted By on January 23rd, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/let_them_eat_bugs.html

Give up cheeseburgers, and eat bugs instead.  That’s what the Davos elite want you to do, while they dine on $50 burritos and slabs of steak.  They would even have you feel good about being a meat- and diary-free insectivore.  To this end, they have carefully manufactured the cult of environmental alarmism, whose virtue-signaling adherents have been duped into thinking an ecological disaster is at hand.

The cult’s latest scapegoat is agriculture.  The wise global leaders of the World Economic Forum (WEF) have decreed that farming must be restricted to “save the planet.”  By 2030, they dictate, plebs must adopt the ecologically sound practice of entomophagy, or insect-eating.

In sardonic response to this vision — as Orwellian as it’s quixotic — Michael Shellenberger, the author of Apocalypse Never and a relentless campaigner against environmental hysterics, says pollution from farming is negligible compared to that from jet-setting around the world promoting bug cuisine.  He calls out the “woke” elite’s “festival of narcissism,” in which brazen hypocrisy is a flaunting of power.  He describes the WEF as a “cult wrapped in a grift wrapped in an enigma” that seeks world domination through business.

The strategy is to create a need (in this case, to protect the environment), through fear-mongering if necessary; make people feel virtuous about having that need; and only then launch products that will upend millennia-old paradigms, and hence earn massive profits.  Not surprisingly, millions of dollars have already been invested in bug farms.

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After Georgia Police Kill Left-Wing Activist, Antifa Riots in Atlanta Matt Vespa

Posted By on January 23rd, 2023

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/01/22/after-georgia-police-kill-antifa-comrade-leftist-brethren-riot-in-atlanta-n2618590

Julio had this story first. A left-wing agitator encamped near Atlanta’s future training facility for law enforcement, dubbed “cop city,” was killed this week as police executed a raid. The forested location is the new ground zero for leftists hoping to impede the construction of the new building. The city is looking to complete the center later this year. Left-wingers have flocked to the area, setting up barricades and occupying the location in a situation reminiscent of the CHAZ zone in Seattle during the 2020 election.

When police arrived, a confrontation ensued as the protester refused to leave his tent. He ignored repeated orders to vacate and then opened fire on officers, wounding one. Police returned fire, killing the suspect, which has infuriated leftists, calling for a night of rage to avenge their fallen “comrade.” Manuel Teran was identified as the protester killed in the officer-involved shooting. At least four others were also arrested: 

“An individual, without warning, shot a Georgia State Patrol trooper,” Register said. “Other law enforcement personnel returned fire in self-defense and evacuated the trooper to a safe area. The individual who fired upon law enforcement and shot the trooper was killed in the exchange of gunfire.” 

The injured state trooper is in stable condition in ICU after completing surgery. He was shot in the “pelvic-area” and he was wearing a bullet-proof vest. 

Last December, Police rounded up five others who were later charged with domestic terrorism (via Axios):

Five activists arrested during … [a] clash with law enforcement at the proposed site of Atlanta’s new public safety academy have been charged with domestic terrorism, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced Wednesday.

Why it matters: The domestic terrorism charges are the most serious to date since activists started building camps and living among the trees more than a year ago in the dense city-owned forest in DeKalb County.

Details: Tuesday, according to the GBI, a task force of local, state and federal law enforcement attempted to remove barricades installed by activists to block access to the property.

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A Disaster For Every Month: The Worst Scandals, Abuses, And Embarrassments Of Joe Biden’s Second Year In Office By: Elle Purnell

Posted By on January 23rd, 2023

https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/20/a-disaster-for-every-month-the-worst-scandals-abuses-and-embarrassments-of-joe-bidens-second-year-in-office/

At the end of last year’s roundup, I expressed hope that 2022 would see fewer Biden disasters. Unfortunately for the country, year No. 2 was just as grim.

he first year of Joe Biden’s presidency prolifically delivered examples of corruption and incompetence, and his second year in office — which drew to a close on Thursday — has been no different.

Last year, The Federalist collected “A Scandal For Every Month: The Biggest Botches, Failures, And Mess-Ups Of Joe Biden’s First 12 Months In Office.” At the end of that piece, I expressed hope that 2022 would see fewer disasters flow from the White House. Unfortunately for the country, the roundup from year No. 2 is just as grim.

January: Biden Compared Filibuster Defenders to Historical Racists

Last year’s list concluded with a bonus item for January 2022: Biden comparing his agenda’s critics — which include Democrat Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona — to former Alabama Gov. George Wallace and Confederate leader Jefferson Davis.

In a Jan. 11 speech urging the U.S. Senate to ditch filibuster rules in order to pass his radical and unconstitutional federalization of election laws, Biden asked, “Do you want to be the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

February: Incompetent Response to Russia-Ukraine War

Before, during, and since Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine in February, the Biden administration’s response has been marked by incompetence. Biden waived sanctions on the Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline before the war in 2021, crippled American energy production, and turned to Russian ally Venezuela for oil after the conflict erupted. In January 2022, right before Russia’s invasion, Biden signaled a green light to Russian President Vladimir Putin, responding to a question about potential plans to impose sanctions on Russia with the comments, “It’s one thing if it’s a minor incursion [into Ukraine],” and “My guess is [Putin] will move in. He has to do something.”

“Are you effectively giving Putin permission to make a small incursion into the country?” a reporter asked. Biden’s answer: “That’s how it did sound like, didn’t it?”

A month into the Russia-Ukraine war, Biden recklessly called for regime change in Russia, before reversing course and insisting he did no such thing. By November 2022, the United States had shipped out a whopping $68 billion in aid to Ukraine, with Biden requesting another $37.7 billion to put total aid in the 12-figure range.

March: Hunter Biden Corruption Scandal Resurfaces as NYT Admits Laptop’s Legitimacy