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January 2023

Should Someone This Dumb Be the Special Counsel Investigating Biden’s Stolen Classified Documents Scandal? By Victoria Taft

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2023/01/12/should-someone-this-dumb-to-be-the-special-counsel-investigating-joe-bidens-stolen-classified-documents-scandal-n1661310

We’re assured that the person hired to be special counsel in the Joe Biden classified document scandal, Robert Hur, “has a great record. He is a superb lawyer.” He was a pivotal right-hand man in a high governmental office. He “has a long and distinguished career as a federal prosecutor.” And was a key person dealing with a very special, special counsel.

That guy sounds like a total legal dreamboat. Except that those accolades were spoken by none other than disgraced former-deputy attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who conspired with the fellow disgracee Andrew McCabe to wear a wire to catch Donald Trump in a 25th Amendment-worthy meltdown because they hated him so much.

Pardon me if I don’t swoon.

The high government official was at the right hand of the awful FBI Director Chris Wray, who has overseen the complete transmogrification of the bureau from a law enforcement agency to an intelligence entity that spies on Americans. And the man touting his “distinguished career” is none other than the most ideologically Leftist hack who’s ever disgraced the office of the attorney general, Merrick Garland. And that’s saying something. Looking at you, “wingman” Eric Holder.

And there’s more. Robert Hur is the man who served as the DOJ point man to Robert Mueller’s special counsel investigation looking into Donald Trump’s alleged side hustle as a Russian secret agent — Double 45.

He is the same guy who vetted retired British spy Christopher Steele, a disgraced (sensing a pattern here?) spy who was fired by the FBI (and then used on the QT by his cutout Bruce Ohr) and hired actual Russian spies on behalf of Hillary Clinton’s campaign to make up information on Trump.

Dem Classified Capers From Biden and Clinton to Berger and the FBI. Let the revelations begin. by Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/dem-classified-capers/

“Documents with classified markings were found inside an institution at which President Joe Biden worked before he took office,” The Epoch Times reports. Biden’s lawyer Richard Sauber found the documents at the Penn Biden Center last November 2, but did not disclose the finding until January 9, 2023.

Donald Trump and assorted Republicans wondered when the FBI would raid the home of Joe Biden and institutions where the Delaware Democrat stored government documents. A search could start with Biden’s Senate papers, now locked up at the University of Delaware.

In 2010, as Fox News reports, vice-president Biden expressed concern that “political sensitivities” could arise from releasing the papers. Biden associate counsel Katherine Oyama emailed Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner Eric Schwerin that the vice president and the White House “will have strong views on some of these items, especially those related to the timing and scope of any public release.” Similar concerns arose in the spring of 2020.

After Tara Reade accused Biden of sexual assault, the Delaware Democrat made a public request for a search of Senate records from 1993 for the alleged complaint. Senate secretary Julie Adams proclaimed that “disclosing the existence of such specific records would amount to a prohibited disclosure under the Government Employee Rights Act of 1991. Furthermore, we are not aware of any exceptions in law authorizing our office to disclose any such records that do exist, if any, even to original participants in a matter.”

Breathing Trouble New research shows the risks from prolonged use of face masks by Ugo Bardi and Harald Walach

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/breathing-trouble

There’s an old story about a guy who jumped into a thorn bush: He wanted to collect berries, but he failed to consider the adverse effects of the plan. Something similar happened with face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic: Masks were promoted, and often mandated, as necessary safeguards for reducing the chance of infection, while their possible adverse effects were brushed aside. While the science on the benefits of masking is still inconclusive, the latest research now shows that the prolonged use of face masks—especially those with tighter fits like the N95s—could harm wearers by exposing them to dangerously high levels of carbon dioxide.

The risks appear to be especially pronounced for young people. As part of a team of scientists, one of the authors of this article conducted a randomized study of the effects of masking on healthy school aged children in Germany. The results of this research, published in September 2022 in the peer reviewed journal Environmental Research, concluded that wearing masks raised the carbon dioxide (CO₂) “content in inhaled air quickly to a very high level in healthy children in a seated resting position that might be hazardous to children’s health.”

These results should not have come as a surprise. It has long been suspected that mask-wearing poses risks. In Germany, for instance, workers required to wear an N95/FFP2 respirator must get a certificate verifying their ability to do so, and even with said certificate, those workers are mandated to take a 30-minute break every 90 minutes.

Only in the 19th century, with the development of germ theory, did masks begin being used as health devices. Then in the early 20th century, masks gained a foothold in hospitals, usually worn by doctors and nurses. The “Spanish flu” pandemic of 1918-20 was perhaps the first case of masks being worn by the general public, but we only have scattered photographic pictures of masked people and don’t know how frequently they were worn.

Is Day Of Reckoning At Hand For Biden Family’s Influence Peddling?

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/01/13/is-day-of-reckoning-at-hand-for-biden-familys-influence-peddling/

After more than two months, the Justice Department has finally named a special counsel to look into President Joe Biden’s possession of classified government documents at his namesake think tank and his Delaware home. For this, give credit to the newly elected Republican Congress.

As the saying goes, a new broom sweeps clean. And with a new Congress, comes new priorities. That includes investigating the Biden family’s possible criminal corruption in its “business ties” to Chinese, Ukrainian and Russian state-linked organizations.

It took Attorney General Merrick Garland just days following Trump’s Nov. 16 announcement that he would run for president in 2024 to name a special counsel.

“Based on recent developments, including the former president’s announcement that he is a candidate for president in the next election and the sitting president’s stated intention to be a candidate as well,” Garland said “I have concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint a special counsel.”

That timing is interesting, since it was on Nov. 2, six days before the Nov. 8 midterm elections, that classified documents were found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a think tank affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania just miles from the White House.

But it took until Monday for the Justice Department to announce the “discovery.” Would it have made a difference in the midterm elections? Who knows? We do know, however, that Garland waited until after the midterms and the epic battle over House leadership, to finally name a special counsel.

No doubt, after seeing the 20 GOP Freedom Caucus members’ willingness to fight for what they wanted, including a congressional investigation into the whole sordid Hunter Biden laptop affair, followed by the discovery this week of a new trove of classified documents stashed at Biden’s Delaware home garage right next to his beloved Corvette Stingray, Garland knew he had to act.

Biden’s jokey response was feeble bordering on pathetic.

RECAPTURING HIGHER EDUCATION On the plan to transform New College of Florida into a classical liberal arts institution. Christopher Rufo

https://www.city-journal.org/recapturing-higher-education

The most significant political story of the past half-century is the activist Left’s “long march through the institutions.” Beginning in the 1960s, left-wing activists and intellectuals, inspired by theorists such as Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci and New Left philosopher Herbert Marcuse, made a concerted effort to embed their ideas in education, government, philanthropy, media, and other important sectors.

This process came to spectacular fruition following the 2020 death of George Floyd, when it seemed that every prestige institution in the United States got busy advancing the same ideological line on race, gender, and culture—which, whether they knew it or not, mimicked the precise themes that the old radicals had originally proposed. 

The long march through the institutions, in other words, was complete.

But conservatives, too, have updated their playbook. They have read their Gramsci and have begun to understand that ideological capture poses a grave threat to the American system. President Donald Trump shook conservatives out of their complacency with instinctual, if sometimes crude, cultural countermeasures. Florida governor Ron DeSantis has built on this approach, offering a sophisticated policy agenda for protecting families against captured bureaucracies.

Last week, DeSantis raised the stakes and proposed, for the first time, a strategy for reversing the long march through the institutions, beginning with what Marcuse believed was the initial revolutionary institution: the university. The governor appointed a slate of new trustees to the board of the New College of Florida, a notoriously left-wing campus, similar to that of Evergreen State in Olympia, Washington. DeSantis tasked the new board with transforming it into, to quote the governor’s chief of staff, the “Hillsdale of the South”—in other words, a classical liberal arts college that provides a distinctly traditional brand of education and scholarship.

Don’t buy Biden’s ‘surprise’ — classified documents were moved at least twice Jonathan Turley

https://nypost.com/2023/01/11/dont-buy-bidens-surprise-classified-documents-were-moved-at-least-twice/

With the reported discovery of a second batch of highly classified documents connected to President Biden, the decisions of Attorney General Merrick Garland are fast moving from inexplicable to incomprehensible.

Garland was presumably briefed that classified documents were discovered in Joe Biden’s old office on Nov. 2. He also presumably knew about the Biden documents when he appointed a special counsel to investigate the classified documents at Mar-a-Lago 16 days later.

At the time of the appointment of Jack Smith, some of us noted the inexplicable refusal of Garland to appoint a special counsel to look into alleged Biden influence peddling and other crimes.

Garland continued to refuse such an appointment even as he justified the appointment of Smith on the basis that Donald Trump was running for the presidency. Joe Biden is the president. What is the difference?

Biden, meanwhile, is feigning ignorance, simply saying he was “surprised” the documents were there.

By not discussing the content of the documents, Biden minimizes his vulnerability to charges of obstruction or false statements. He can simply declare “surprise,” knowing that many in the media will welcome his silence as they spin the scandal.

 The documents were discovered six days before the midterm elections at a think tank affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania.

Despite the lack of information, the press and pundits have already declared there is no real national security danger and certainly no comparison to Mar-a-Lago. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) declared, “There is no comparison. They were in a locked closet. They were not accessible.”

So that is the standard? A locked closet? The Mar-a-Lago storage room was locked and later the security was enhanced at the request of the FBI.

It is fair to note that Trump and his staff are accused of false statements and obstruction. However, that does not change the same alleged crime of unlawful removal and possession.

Amnesty International’s latest excuse to accuse Israel of ‘apartheid’ By Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-728435

Amnesty International doesn’t need an excuse to bash Israel, regardless of the makeup of the ruling coalition in Jerusalem. Indeed, it makes no bones about its view that since the state’s establishment in 1948, “successive governments have created and maintained a system of laws, policies and practices designed to oppress and dominate Palestinians.”

But the fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is back in power, this time solely with right-wing and religious partners, makes the country that the UK-based “human rights” NGO loves to hate particularly tempting as a target. The hysteria at home and abroad surrounding the appointment of firebrand Itamar Ben-Gvir as national security minister provided the bullseye.

Interestingly, it wasn’t Ben-Gvir’s January 3 visit to the Temple Mount that spurred Amnesty into action. Perhaps the radical-leftist organization decided to sit back and let the outrage that its liberal counterparts around the world were expressing over the event take center stage.

In any case, none of the predictions about the turmoil that the Otzma Yehudit Party leader’s short excursion to the holy site was likely to provoke came true. Amnesty, therefore, maybe did well by waiting a few days before joining the fray with customary vengeance.

The opportunity arose on Sunday, when Ben-Gvir announced that he’d ordered Israel Police Commissioner Kobi Shabtai to authorize officers, in the course of their work, to remove Palestinian flags from public places. The minister’s measure came in response to the way in which the banner was used last week to celebrate the release from prison of Arab terrorist Karim Younis.

Younis spent 40 years in jail for kidnapping and killing IDF Cpl. Avraham Bromberg on the Golan Heights in 1983. Upon his arrival on January 5 in his hometown of Ara in the Haifa district, he was hailed as a hero.

What Caused the Political Hysteria? Karma, Nemesis, payback . . . and all that stuff. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/01/11/what-caused-the-political-hysteria/

The Left has gone mad over Donald J. Trump—past, present, and future. 

The current Democratic Party and NeverTrump “conservatives” assumed that Trump was and remains so obviously toxic that they do not have to define exactly what his evil entails. 

Accordingly, they believe that any means necessary are justified to stop him. And furthermore, these zealots, when out of power, insist such extraordinary measures should not be emulated and institutionalized by their opponents, much less ever boomeranged back upon their creators. 

In this context, the Republicans retaking control of  the House of Representatives once again raises the question whether they should reply in kind. 

Given the current investigation following the Mar-a-Lago raid, should there also be a mirror-image special prosecutor to examine President Biden’s lost stash of classified documents in his insecure office following his vice presidency? 

Can House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) ever be considered too inflammatory, given that his predecessor, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tore up the president’s State of the Union address on national television? 

How many Democratic House members should be denied committee assignments to remind the Congress that Pelosi’s rejection of Republican nominees was a terrible precedent? 

How many congressional subpoenas with threats of criminal prosecution and performance-art arrests should be issued to Democratic politicos to stop the criminalization of political differences? 

In our current age, will all former president’s private homes, closets, and drawers now be subject to FBI raids to ensure that “classified” documents were not wrongly stored there? 

Are Joe Biden’s current homes also a logical target, given his sloppy handling of classified foreign policy papers—eerily reminiscent of an abandoned laptop belonging to son Hunter Biden and daughter Ashley Biden’s lost diary? 

Was it ever a good idea to impeach a first-term president the moment he lost his party’s majority in the House—but without any hope of a conviction in the Senate? Would such a similar impeachment send a warning to Biden to honor his oath of office and start enforcing U.S. immigration law? 

Does a phone call now an impeachment make, on the grounds that Trump mixed domestic politics with foreign policy? 

But was Trump’s Ukrainian call that much different from Barack Obama’s 2012 quid pro quo in Seoul, South Korea, where he asked the Russian president to convey a deal to Vladmir Putin: stay calm and give Obama space during his reelection bid while Obama in turn would be flexible on missile defense. 

WHO IS THE LIBERAL? SYDNEY WILLIAMS

https://swtotd.blogspot.com

The word liberal reminds one of Humpty Dumpty’s proclamation. It means different things to different people. The word is polysemous. To the Left it means big government, which actively supports social change. To the Right it refers to less government interference, the endorsement of individual rights, civil liberties, and free markets. The word stems from the Latin, liber, meaning free or unimpeded. In Lewis Carroll’s story, the word that caused the skirmish was glory, when used as a verb. “They’ve a temper – some of them, particularly verbs,” Humpty Dumpty says to a puzzled Alice. The word liberal is not temperamental (at least as far as I know), but it can self-camouflage, to ambush the unsuspecting.

Over the years, the Left has usurped the word. so that for most the word refers to those who prefer a large role for government in their lives, while conservatives have become deplorables, birthers, conspirators, or just plain racists or right-wing nuts. We on the right should seize the word back. In his 1953 book The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk wrote of Edmund Burke (1729-1797), of how he defended the liberties of Englishmen against their king and of Americans against king and parliament. He defended those liberties not because they were innovations, “…but because they were ancient prerogatives, guaranteed by immemorial usage. Burke was liberal because he was conservative.” (Highlights mine.)

It is amusing to consider how the definition of liberal has morphed over time, so that today’s social liberals consider themselves the sole owners of the word, “even as,” Daniel Henninger wrote in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, “they surrender to the state an array of long assumed freedoms – of opinion, speech, and privacy.” Classical liberals believe that such rights, along with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” are natural; they are God-given. The purpose of government is to secure and ensure those rights, not to dictate social behavior. 

A Call from Alexander Hamilton By Eileen F. Toplansky

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

In light of the dismaying set of events that has put our country at great risk, it is intriguing to read the words of Alexander Hamilton to George Clinton dated February 13, 1778.  Written from Valley Forge immediately after his arrival at headquarters, Hamilton expressed his deep concern about the “degeneracy of representation in the great council of America.”

Hamilton notes that each day Americans “see and feel, that there is not so much wisdom in a certain body, as there ought to be, and as the success of our affairs absolutely demands.”

Many members of it are no doubt men in every respect, fit for the trust, but this cannot be said of it as a body. Folly, caprice, a want of foresight, comprehension and dignity, characterise the general tenor of their actions.

Of relevant concern to 21st century Americans is Hamilton’s assertion that

Their conduct with respect to the army especially is feeble, indecisive and improvident — insomuch, that we are reduced to a more terrible situation than you can conceive.

Furthermore, “[this] has produced such carelessness and indifference to the service, as is subversive of every officer-like quality.”

Consider how the current American military brass is betraying the United States by “embracing leftist racism and anti-Americanism.  Their radicalism is pushing conservatives out of the armed forces while undermining unit cohesion and troop morale.”  Critical Race Theory (CRT) has infiltrated the military and dividing members of the armed forces into opposing camps of ‘oppressors’ and ‘oppressed’ [.]” 

Defense Secretary­­­­­­­­ Lloyd Austin is an advocate of anti-American views and has required CRT and the 1619 Project as part of the military training programs.

Moreover, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has worked to “divide and weaken the military by bringing the Black Lives Matter curriculum of anti-white and anti-American hate into its ranks.”

In 2020, Admiral Michael Gilday, Chief of Naval Operations vowed to eliminate “systemic racism.” 

Although Marxism is the animating feature of the above, Alexander Hamilton’s words highlight that “they have disgusted the army by repeated instances of the most whimsical favouritism in their promotions; and by an absurd prodigality of rank to foreigners and to the meanest staff of the army. They have not been able to summon resolution enough to withstand the impudent importunity and vain boasting of foreign pretenders [.]”