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November 2022

Biden’s Man in Venezuela The U.S. eases sanctions on Maduro in return for political promises.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-man-in-venezuela-nicolas-maduro-sanctions-11669674747?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

In negotiating with oil-producing dictators, the Biden Administration has a consistent strategy: Make concessions in hope the other side will return the favor. It hasn’t worked with Iran, and now the White House is trying with the thugs who run Venezuela. What could go wrong?

The U.S. lifted Trump-era sanctions on Caracas over the weekend, renewing a license for Chevron to pump oil again in its joint ventures with the state-owned oil company PdVSA. The U.S. will also unfreeze $3 billion in Venezuelan assets for what it says will be “humanitarian” needs. In exchange, dictator Nicolás Maduro is promising to negotiate free and fair elections in talks with the opposition in Mexico City.

Venezuela once produced 3.4 million barrels of oil a day and was the richest nation in Latin America. But two decades of socialism have degraded petroleum infrastructure and exiled human capital. PdVSA now pumps fewer than 700,000 barrels a day, and Mr. Maduro relies on narcotics trafficking to pay his military.

Mr. Maduro wants to produce more oil, and the Biden Administration also wants more oil to replace Russian supplies reduced by the Ukraine war. Easing permitting rules on U.S. federal land offends the Democratic Party’s climate donors. So the Administration has gone hat in hand to OPEC and the Saudis and now Venezuela. It’s mind-boggling to see the U.S. go begging to dictators when the U.S. has huge untapped reserves.

The Innocence of Jimmy Lai By pleading not guilty, he is forcing Hong Kong officials to own their lies. By William McGurn

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-innocence-of-jimmy-lai-china-censorship-free-speech-jail-prison-hong-kong-conviction-liberty-guilty-arrested-truth-11669673581?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Jimmy Lai’s whole life—as a refugee, as an entrepreneur, as a champion of Chinese liberty—has been one long exercise in boldness. Now comes his boldest move of all: insisting on his innocence in a Hong Kong court where he doesn’t have a prayer of winning.

On Thursday, Jimmy, 73, is scheduled to go to trial on three charges related to collusion with foreign forces and another involving conspiracy to publish and distribute seditious material. Others arrested for national security offenses have pleaded guilty with the aim of securing a lighter sentence. Not Jimmy.

This trial is the culmination of two years of prosecution on lesser charges, including a conviction for business fraud. There is a logic here, because prosecutors want more than a conviction and prison sentence. They want to paint Jimmy as a corrupt businessman who worked with foreigners to undermine China.

Under the new national security law, Jimmy faces the possibility of life in prison. There is not a man, woman or child in Hong Kong who doesn’t believe the verdict is already in. The authorities are taking no chances either, having Jimmy tried before three national security judges rather than a jury.

To what possible purpose, then, is his plea of not guilty? Certainly it isn’t for a better deal for himself. If that’s what he was looking for, Jimmy would have left Hong Kong and lived abroad in comfort when it became clear he was going to be arrested.

Simply put, Jimmy is making what may be his last stand for truth. The larger prosecution narrative is that Jimmy is selling out China to the West. But Jimmy has never, for example, advocated independence for Hong Kong or Taiwan and has always insisted protests must be peaceful.

Let’s Talk About Biden Corruption Francis Menton

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&id=9c163aa19e

It was back in September 2019 that there sprang into the news the story of Hunter Biden and his million-dollar-per-year gig as a board member for Ukrainian energy company Burisma. Hunter’s gig began in April 2014 — shortly after his dad Joe, then sitting VP, took on the role of “point man” as to U.S. policy toward Ukraine. The gig then ran until some time in 2017 — shortly after Joe had left office. It just happened that Burisma had gotten the lion’s share of Ukraine oil and gas lease deals under ousted (and Russia-aligned) President Viktor Yanukovich, and had strong reason to fear prosecution under a new Ukrainian President and chief prosecutor. In early 2016 VP Joe Biden got the new prosecutor fired, and later was caught on tape bragging about it.

Essentially the entire story about these events in the state media since 2019 has been the story of minimization and/or suppression of the facts and their significance. The suppression went to a whole new level a year later, in October 2020, when the New York Post broke the story of a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden that had been abandoned at a computer repair shop in Delaware. This was now just a few weeks before the 2020 election, with Joe Biden the Democratic candidate for President. The laptop contained extensive emails and other documents detailing Hunter’s business dealings in places where his father had major influence on U.S. foreign policy, including not just Ukraine, but also China, Kazakhstan, and other countries, as well as father Joe’s involvement in same.

Promptly, some 50 former U.S. intelligence officials issued a letter stating that the laptop had all the “earmarks” of “a Russian information operation.” The state media adopted that line as gospel. Most shamefully, all of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube (Google) explicitly suppressed the story by either banning any information about it or minimizing its distribution on their platforms.

Canada: The Culture of Death and the Death of Culture Diane Bederman

https://dianebederman.com/canada-the-culture-of-death-and-the-death-of-culture/

Population control used to be the result of nature: natural disasters like hurricanes, volcanoes, earthquakes, disease. Thomas Malthus gave us The Malthusian Theory of Population: the theory of exponential population and arithmetic food supply growth. Nature has its own ways of keeping a check on the increasing population. It brings the population level to the level of the available food supply. When the increasing population rate is greater than the food supply, disequilibrium exists. As a result, people will not get enough food even for survival. People will die due to a lack of food supply. Adversities such as epidemics, wars, starvation, famines and other natural calamities will crop up which are named as positive checks by Malthus because they increase mortality rates, thus keeping the population in check. They are countered by man-made “preventive checks,” which also control the population by reducing fertility rates; preventive checks include birth control and celibacy.

We have fired up preventive checks with a culture of death. In my view, this culture of death began with the promotion of abortion. Abortion started as safe and rare to safe and always. Change your mind in the third trimester – no problem – we can get rid of that fetus. Change your mind at birth – not a problem – you can have abortion at birth. I heard one young woman say that she felt it was kinder to abort a baby with severe deformities later in term than have the baby suffer at birth. Really? Does she know that the fetus is torn limb from limb to remove the baby; especially if performed by Planned Parenthood who harvest organs for sale? She had no concept of holding the baby and saying goodbye, lovingly with care and compassion. How did that happen? How did we get here?

The Palestinians had a great Thanksgiving, Israel not so much Shoshana Bryen

 https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/insight/

While you were still trying to figure out how to seat 12 people at a table for 10, seven-year-old Israeli Demir Ladigin and his brother were burying their father Michael. On the same day, Tamir Avihai and Motti Ashkenazi were buried as well. Eleven children were robbed of their fathers by Palestinian terrorists.

While you were cooking your turkey, an 18-year-old Israeli, Tiran Fero, was in a car accident in the Palestinian-ruled city of Jenin. He was taken to a Jenin hospital and put on life support, but was then snatched by Palestinian gunmen. Later, his lifeless body was returned. His uncle, Edri Fero, who was at the hospital, said his nephew was still alive when he was taken.

“They were shooting in the air and shouting in Arabic,” he said, “nobody dared to stop them. They disconnected him from the machines and tossed him into a car.” A senior Palestinian official said the suspects kidnapped Tiran because they thought the teen was an undercover Israeli soldier.

While you were setting the table last Wednesday, two terror bombings at Jerusalem bus stops killed 15-year-old Aryeh Shechopek and injured 18 other people. While you were cleaning up on Friday, Tedsa Tschuma, a father of three, died of his injuries.

Was San Francisco Election Official Not Rehired Because He Wasn’t ‘Diverse’ Enough? by Alan M. Dershowitz

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19171/san-francisco-discrimination

The City of San Francisco is a state actor that is constitutionally prohibited from disqualifying job applicants on the basis of race. That is precisely what occurred here, despite the phony claim that Arntz can reapply for his job.

There is one important benefit to the San Francisco decision — at least as compared to university admissions decisions. The San Francisco panel did not try to disguise the racial criteria they are employing, whereas most universities go to great length to deny that race alone is often a dispositive factor in ranking applicants. This will make it easier for the courts to hold Arntz’s firing as a clear violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

In the bad old days, race was often used to discriminate against Black applicants. Today race is often used to discriminate in favor of Black applicants. I guess that is some sort of progress. But real progress will be achieved only if and when race is no longer a factor that trumps meritocracy. Only then will Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of how his children and ours should be judged become a reality.

John Arntz has held the job of San Francisco’s director of the Department of Elections for two decades. He has been repeatedly praised for his excellent performance at this increasingly important job — important because of so many election challenges and doubts. Just two years ago, the election commission commended him for his “incredible leadership.” But now they are essentially firing him because he is apparently of the wrong race to satisfy their “racial equity plan.”

Was Trump Our Captain Queeg? And will the NeverTrumpers finally be exposed to have been as contemptible as the NeverQueegers were in The Caine Mutiny? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/27/was-trump-our-captain-queeg/

The Left, the NeverTrump Right, and many independents are tiring of Donald Trump’s recitations of prior, however justified, grievances at the hands of the media, the Democratic Party, the administrative state, and hard-core Left.

The conventional wisdom runs that Trump’s whines and victimization recitations reveal deep paranoias, and increasingly to an obsessive degree. We are told that his near neurotic obsessions with the unfairness of his critics are alienating the independent voter, who finds Trump’s strolls down 2020-21 memory lane the same-old, same-old ad nauseam.

True, Trump’s occasional recklessness contributed to many of his misadventures. At least at some point, friendly critics suggest, he might have realized that his nationalist/populist agenda, his orphaned outsider status, his lack of prior political experience, and his estrangement from the Republican political hierarchy, bipartisan Washington, D.C. media and government fixtures gave him no margin of error—despite what prior presidents and our current commander-in-chief have been accorded.

The haters would have hated Trump regardless, But his tweets and ad hominem retorts served to disguise their peremptory venom while instead highlighting his own retaliatory crudity.

“Fact-checkers” doted on every Trump statement, nitpicking them to find some exaggeration, or untruth. Fine. But then these same hypercritics simply went comatose during the Biden Administration, with little care that Biden spins fantasies daily, from a son lost in the Iraq War to insulting claims that he passed his student loan amnesty in the Congress by a close vote, and on and on. With Trump, voters got real achievement with coarseness, with Biden utter failure with near senility.

The media lied about supposed felonious behavior of the two Trump sons during the Russian collusion mania. The same reporters snoozed when Hunter Biden all but served up a guilty writ of felonious behavior on his laptop. Yet Hunter and the Biden accomplices were given de facto exemption by the Department of Justice and “50 former intelligence officials” who were willing to lie about the laptop’s authenticity rather than risk the chance of seeing Trump reelected.

The coup-attempt party By David Zukerman

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/11/the_coupattempt_party.html

A political light bulb went on regarding Adam Schiff’s remark on CNN’s “State of the Union” as reported by Breitbart’ s Pam Key.  In the interview, Schiff again mentioned the Russia hoax he has promoted for five years, if not longer.  (Note that Dana Bash did not call Schiff on this huge lie.).  With Schiff continuing to assert this gross falsehood, the Democrat Party has, for years, switched from being a loyal opposition party to priding itself as a party of the permanently-attempted coup.

How dumb of me not to have taken seriously the Democrat cries of “Resistance,” as of the Trump inauguration, January 20, 2017 — but I then understood such cries to be figurative and fanciful references of a politically romantic nature.

But where were the Republican political experts like House Speaker Paul Ryan back in early 2017 when the “Resistance” was gearing up?   Alas, the anti-Trump Ryan was silently supporting the Resistance.  How could the Democrats have succeeded with the Mueller probe if Ryan had spoken out forcefully against what was apparently a coup attempt to oust the legitimately-elected president?

CNN published a list of Democrats who announced that they would boycott the Trump administration.  The late Rep. John Lewis, citing, in effect, the Russia hoax, refused to accept President Trump’s legitimacy.  Rep. Zoe Lofgren accepted the fact Trump was president, but still, would not attend his inaugural, and went on to become one of the Nine Members of the phony-baloney House Select Committee Against President Trump.

If the GOP House leadership did not recognize, five years ago, that it was opposed by the coup-attempt party, the leadership has no excuse now for failing to see the Democrats for the permanent coup-attempt party they have become.  And how well to understand, now, that when the Democrats accused Russia of “sowing chaos and discord” in the U.S., the Democrats were (falsely) projecting their own bad conduct.

Some Will Run, and Some Will Stay By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/11/some_will_run_and_some_will_stay.html

A lot of clear-eyed, hardworking, patriotic Americans are down in the dumps right now.  Understandably so.  The midterms were an utter disappointment.  Midnight mail-in ballot hauls have completely upended elections, transforming almost certain MAGA victories in Arizona and elsewhere into uphill legal battles likely to suffer slow strangulation in Establishment-coddling courts.  If America had properly functioning democratic elections where only legal citizens voted secretly and securely after first establishing their identification, Republicans would have a hundred-seat margin in the House.  Instead, centrist dullard McCarthy will “lead” a threadbare majority ripe for rancor and future Democrat flipping.  

In the Senate, globalist shill Turtle McConnell succeeded in manipulating Alaskan election law to ensure that despicable Democrat Lisa Murkowski — and not Alaskans’ actual Republican nominee — retained her aristocratic sinecure in the U.S. Senate.  Predictably, after corporate Republicans’ “little tent” electioneering shenanigans, a red state that President Trump won by over ten percent in 2020 now has a Democrat representing it in the House and Leftist Lisa reinstalled for six more years of conservative backstabbing in the Senate.  What fetid nonsense RINO, Inc. hath wrought!

In a remarkable display of chutzpah (even by their own insane standards), the same Uniparty Republicans that went out of their way to tank “America First” campaigns of outsider candidates by choking their funding and turning a blind eye to Democrats’ extensive mail-in ballot manipulations then turned around to blame lackluster results on the energetic base of MAGA Americans who actually outvoted the Democrats by millions across the country.  When Paul Ryan (whose 2012 campaign ticket with holier-than-thou, prissy patrician Romney lost a winnable election to Obama by more than five million votes) argues that he and his kind of corporate sycophants should take back the party from Donald Trump and the New Republicans’ MAGA coalition (who won fifteen million more votes than any other Republican candidate in history — and ten million more than Obama’s 2012 total!), then Ryan’s RINO rump obviously lives obliviously in cloud cuckoo land, where cuckservatives’ delusions of stale grandeur still reign supreme!

When Journalists Become Speech Police Charles C. W. Cooke

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/11/when-journalists-become-speech-police/

Too many in the media now seek to neuter free expression in the name of saving it.

EXCERPTS

Call it Cooke’s First Law: Whatever the story, however complex its details, members of the American press will react by announcing who must be forbidden to speak going forward.

That is what too many journalists are now — not firefighters, not mediators, not conveyors of vital information, but zealous obscurantists staffing would-be censorship agencies. In comes the news, and, within minutes, out comes the latest justification for shutting everyone up. A mentally ill homeless man attacks Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer? That’s the Republican Party’s fault for running political ads against Pelosi — and it must stop. A disturbed man shoots up a gay club in Colorado Springs, Colo.? That’s the fault of Americans who object to drag shows for kindergartners — and they must be quiet. Elon Musk plans to moderate Twitter with a lighter hand? That will cause “havoc” and put lives at risk — and it must be prevented at all costs.

Worse still is the grotesque tendency for members of the press to cast their transparently self-serving determinations as raw scientific truths. It’s not the opinion of NBC, Axios, or the Washington Post that Twitter would be better left as is; it’s a fact — as determined by the “experts.” That these “experts” have been repeatedly proven to be full of it — remember when the entirely legitimate Hunter Biden laptop story was “a Russian disinformation campaign,” and therefore needed to be suppressed just before the election? — seems not to matter. Nor, indeed, does it seem to matter that a great many of our arbiters of truth are rank hypocrites and contemptible lunatics. The temptation to cast one’s preferences as fact is a remarkably strong one, and, for now at least, many modern journalists seem entirely incapable of resisting it.

How else might one explain the contemporary New York Times, which has gotten into the infuriating habit of simultaneously contributing to, and complaining about, America’s “speech problem”? Earlier this year, the Times’ editorial board complained that “Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.” This development, the editors concluded, was the inevitable product of “the political left and the right” being “caught in a destructive loop of condemnation and recrimination around cancel culture.”

Which . . . well, would that, by any chance, be the “condemnation and recrimination” of which the Times is routinely guilty itself?