Displaying posts published in

August 2022

What About Democrats Who ‘Deny Elections’? Where is the concern about “election deniers” when the Left cries foul? Larry Elder

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/what-about-democrats-who-deny-elections-larry-elder/

After the recent annual Conservative Political Action Conference convention in Dallas, CNN published a video with the following headline: “Election deniers take over CPAC after primary victories.” In a recent appearance on CBS, Republican Rep. Paul Kinzinger, R-Ill., who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump and serves on the House Jan. 6 committee, said: “The only thing we need for democracy to survive is the knowledge that you can vote, that that vote counts, and we live with the winner and loser. If half the country believes that that wasn’t accurate, you can’t expect democracy to survive.”

Where was this concern about “election deniers” when Democrats have complained about “stolen” elections?

In 2018, Democrat Stacey Abrams claimed she lost her Georgia gubernatorial race due to voter “suppression.” In her speech after the election was called for her opponent, she refused to concede. Three years later, she told CNN that her opponent “won under the rules of the game at the time, but the game was rigged against the voters of Georgia.” A USA Today fact check said, “There is little empirical evidence (opponent Georgia then-Secretary of State Brian) Kemp stole the election.

Former Vice President Al Gore, in a Washington Post interview two years after his presidential defeat to George W. Bush, said, “I believe that if everyone in Florida who tried to vote had had his or her vote counted properly, that I would have won.”

Why Merrick Garland Is Losing the People Is the attorney general disingenuous or simply naïve? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/14/why-merrick-garland-is-losing-the-people/

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday held a belated press conference to explain that he had personally approved the FBI’s raid of Donald Trump’s Florida residence to seize documents deemed U.S. government property.

A clearly agitated and nervous Garland sought to exude confidence in the raid. He went on to heatedly defend the professionalism and integrity of the Justice Department and FBI.

But almost immediately after his sermon, the Justice Department and its affiliates were back to their usual selective leaking (“sources say” . . . “according to people familiar with the investigation”) to liberal newspapers.

In no time, the Washington Post claimed the raid was aimed at finding Trump Administration documents relating to “nuclear secrets.” The now-familiar desired effect was achieved. “Presidential historian” Michael Beschloss quickly tweeted a picture of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, noting that in the past revealing such nuclear secrets had led to the death penalty. Former CIA Director Michael Hayden, previously known for comparing Trump’s border detention facilities to Auschwitz and falsely claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian “disinformation,” replied: “Sounds about right.” That is, without any proof, it was legitimate to imagine that the former president of the United States, like the Rosenbergs, should be executed for passing nuclear secrets.

So, as intended, the Justice Department and FBI leaks touched off a round of intended liberal hysteria of the sort we saw during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian collusion with Trump’s 2016 campaign aimed at disguising government misdeeds or overreach.

Biden Puts IRS Funding Ahead of Military and Border Security Even mayors of sanctuary cities are starting to complain. Stephen Moore

https://townhall.com/columnists/stephenmoore/2022/08/09/biden-puts-irs-funding-ahead-of-military-and-border-security-n2611444

Everyone should be deeply troubled by the recent report that the Army is on pace to miss its recruiting goal by dozens of thousands of troops and by the report that followed a few days later, alleging that the Border Patrol is running short of agents in Arizona and Texas. The border is so porous these days that even mayors of sanctuary cities are starting to complain about illegal immigration.

So, what is Congress doing about these crises? They are going to spend tens of billions of dollars to increase the number of … IRS employees. The plan calls for spending some $80 billion to hire some 80,000 new agents and investigators. This will give the IRS the resources to double the number of people who get audited every year.

Is this about the most warped set of national priorities you’ve ever heard? If this $80 billion were rerouted to the Army and the Border Patrol, we could easily stop much of the tide of illegal immigration and staff up our military so we have the soldiers we need to defend our country.

According to official budget numbers, the overall cost of border security at the Department of Homeland Security is roughly $55 billion a year. That is less than just the increase in IRS funding to harass the public. Or consider this: The epidemic of opioid and other drug overdoses is killing close to 100,000 a year. We spend about $11 billion a year to prevent these tragic deaths. But the ironically named Inflation Reduction Act calls for 30 times more than this, or more than $300 billion, to try to combat climate change, while the number of those who die from CO2 emissions each year is close to zero.

All of this is to say that the Biden-Manchin-Schumer spending bill that has now passed the Senate is arguably the greatest misallocation of our federal dollars in American history. It spends money in areas where we should be cutting expenses and ignores national security priorities.

Internal Radical Service How the IRS abuses taxpayer dollars to advance leftwing causes illegally and unconstitutionally. David Horowitz and John Perazzo

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/internal-radical-service-david-horowitz-and-john-perazzo/

David Horowitz’s Introduction: On August 7, the Democrats passed a bill that authorizes a ten-year, $80 billion hike in federal funding for the Internal Revenue Service, which will make it possible for the IRS to hire 87,000 new agents and will make it larger than the Pentagon, the State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.

The IRS has already been weaponized as a national federal police force to harass, punish and obstruct conservative and religious organizations. Under President Obama, the IRS blocked the efforts of hundreds of Tea Party and other conservative groups to apply for tax-exempt status. The objective was to prevent those groups – and the millions of voters whom they might potentially have influenced – from having a voice in our democracy.

But this persecution of conservatives is only half the story. Over the years, the IRS has allowed hundreds of billions of tax-payer dollars to fund left-wing tax-exempt foundations violating its own rules, while denying conservative foundations the same access. This has had the effect of creating a lobby within the Democrat Party that has transformed it into a radical force bent on “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

China Gets a Great Leap Forward From Congress The Inflation Reduction Act’s damage to American energy and innovation is a gift to Xi Jinping. by Allysia Finley

https://www.wsj.com/articles/beijing-gets-a-great-leap-forward-from-congress-inflation-reduction-act-green-energy-subsidies-innovation-price-controls-capitalism-xi-jinping-11660502287?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

“Capitalism and free markets made the U.S. the world’s leading innovator, energy producer and economic superpower. Though alarms about China’s supplanting the U.S. in recent years have probably been overplayed, they could wind up being a self-fulfilling prophecy if Congress keeps passing self-defeating laws.”

China’s economy is limping under the weight of government-created market inefficiencies, draconian Covid lockdown policies, an imploding real-estate bubble, and an aging population. But Congress’s self-defeating Inflation Reduction Act gives President Xi Jinping something to celebrate this November at the Communist Party’s 20th National Congress.

With a single legislative act, Democrats have increased Beijing’s geopolitical leverage, reduced American living standards and global economic competitiveness, and assisted Mr. Xi’s ambitions to dominate biotech. The kicker is that Democrats have told Americans their bill will deal a blow to China. Americans will be in for a rude awakening when they discover the truth.

Take the legislation’s effect on American energy production. The U.S. has become the world’s top oil and natural-gas producer owing to its abundant natural resources, hydraulic shale fracturing and other technological advances. The Inflation Reduction Act, however, effectively concedes American energy supremacy to China by turbocharging the government’s green-energy transition with $370 billion in climate spending.

Renewable energy requires vast amounts of critical minerals such as cobalt, nickel, manganese, lithium and graphite. China controls a large share of the world’s supply of each and also maintains a chokehold on their refining. Its near-total global monopoly extends to the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries, cells and components as well as solar cells.

‘But Her Emails’? A Defense of ‘Whataboutism’ Mrs. Clinton should take her hat off. Treating like cases alike is crucial to the equal protection of the law.By Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.wsj.com/articles/but-her-emails-a-defense-of-whataboutism-trump-clinton-sandy-berger-fbi-equal-protection-double-standard-justice-presidential-records-act-11660482495?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

EXCERPT

Why didn’t the Justice Department seek to enforce the subpoena it apparently had issued, rather than seek a search warrant? Was this consistent with the “standard practice” Mr. Garland articulated in his statement—“to seek less intrusive alternatives to a search” whenever possible?

Why was the matter handled so differently from the prior investigations of Sandy Berger and Hillary Clinton, who were also suspected of mishandling classified material? Mrs. Clinton herself mocked that question by sporting a baseball cap with the logo “But her emails.”

Her hat is intended to deride the argument made by Trump supporters and some civil libertarians that the investigation of Mr. Trump’s alleged security breaches should be evaluated against the way in which earlier cases were handled. Berger and Mrs. Clinton were suspected of mishandling confidential materials—he by removing them from the National Archives in 2005, she by transmitting them over her private email server while serving as secretary of state. Berger was administratively fined, and Mrs. Clinton was rebuked by James Comey, then director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which might have cost her the 2016 election. But neither was subjected to broad search warrants or criminal prosecution.

Those who reject this comparison accuse those who make it of “whataboutism.” But treating like cases alike is crucial to the equal protection of the laws. The way in which Berger and Mrs. Clinton were treated is highly relevant in determining whether Mr. Trump is being subjected to a double standard of justice.

Did the Justice Department Already Know That No Classified Docs Were at Mar-a-Lago? Matt Vespa

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2022/08/13/the-justice-department-knew-that-no-classified-docs-were-at-mar-a-lago-last-june-n2611704

As if the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home wasn’t controversial enough, the Department of Justice might have known that there were no classified documents at the home of the former president since last June. One of Trump’s attorneys verified that no classified documents remained on-site, but someone at the Justice Department appears to have disregarded it as federal agents swarmed the residence last Monday (via NYT):

 At least one lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump signed a written statement in June asserting that all material marked as classified and held in boxes in a storage area at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and club had been returned to the government, four people with knowledge of the document said.

The written declaration was made after a visit on June 3 to Mar-a-Lago by Jay I. Bratt, the top counterintelligence official in the Justice Department’s national security division.

Despite Biden Denials, Most Say We’re In A Recession And Gov’t Is To Blame — I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/08/15/despite-biden-denials-most-say-were-in-a-recession-and-govt-is-to-blame-ii-tipp-poll/

While the big media and some economists might disagree, a majority of Americans believe that the U.S. economy is now in a recession, the latest I&I/TIPP data show. And voters, when asked what caused it, are clear in their response: Government.

Recently, a number of government economists, including Fed chief Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, along with non-economist President Joe Biden, have suggested that, despite two quarterly declines in U.S. GDP, the country is not in a recession.

“What is a recession? While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle,” a blog from the  White House Council of Economic Advisers noted in a typical response, calling a recession “unlikely.”

Well, most Americans don’t agree.