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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

The supreme outrage of Biden’s idiotic prisoner swap with Putin By Justin O. Smith

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/the_supreme_outrage_of_bidens_idiotic_prisoner_swap_with_putin.html

Joe Biden, our all-American  foul-up, is holding true to his nature, as he recently made the worst deal on a prisoner swap ever on December 8, 2022, aside from Obama’s deal that swapped Bowe Bergdahl for four top Taliban jihadi terrorists, who now run Afghanistan’s government.  Seeing the public relations fantasy dance through his head and hoping to get a win that would deflect from all his administration’s miserable failures, from the economy to the border and more, Biden ordered the release of Viktor Bout, a miserable, death-dealing arms merchant who has left thousands of dead in his wake.  In exchange?  The return of Brittney Griner, a black, lesbian, anti-American, anti-God, anti-family, pot-headed basketball player, who has turned her back on America more than once.  Biden chose this swap rather than using the full weight of the U.S.’s resources to secure the release of Paul Whelan, a Marine veteran and a heterosexual male, who has spent the past four years in a Russian prison on false charges of espionage. 

Yes.  The P.R. optics heavily favored Griner over Whelan.

On December 8, the day the swap was announced, Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) observed:

If [Joe Biden] is going to release a guy convicted of providing aid to a terrorist organization [and] conspiring to kill American citizens, he should have at least gotten BOTH Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan in return.

A U.S. Marine is left behind in another bad deal made by Biden.

All one is left to imagine is that the Biden regime really does want America’s enemies to win.

Why the ‘Smart’ Party Never Learns If your views by definition are enlightened and progressive, why should you bother understanding those of the other side? Barton Swaim

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-smart-party-never-learns-democrats-self-reflection-elite-culture-media-universities-covid-inflation-election-excuses-11670592902?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The most obvious change in American politics this century is the sorting of voters along educational lines. The Democrats are increasingly the party of educated urban elites; the GOP belongs to the white working class. The dispute is over suburban and minority voters. The latter still plump mostly for Democrats, although the party’s social radicalism is pushing them toward the GOP. Voters with impressive educational credentials tend to be Democrats, and those without them lean strongly Republican.

That one party is the educated party—that its members see themselves, in some respects accurately, as more cultured and informed than their opponents—has generated an intellectual pathology that is obvious to everyone but themselves. Adherents of the smart-people party have lost the capacity for self-criticism. Which on its face makes sense. If your views are by definition intelligent, those of your critics must be dumb. Who needs self-reflection?

We can start to understand the Democrats’ predicament by ridding ourselves of a set of metaphors. For a decade or more, we’ve been told that left and right live in “silos” or “bubbles” or “echo chambers” or “information cocoons.” The left watch MSNBC and read the New York Times, and the right watch Fox News and listen to talk radio.

Exacerbating this state of affairs, we’re told, are social-media platforms whose algorithms give politically attuned users only content they’re likely to agree with. Facile claims to the contrary, Facebook, Twitter and similar platforms don’t have this effect. A 2019 study, “Are Filter Bubbles Real?” by Axel Bruns of Queensland University Technology in Australia surveys a wide array of evidence and finds that social-media users on all sides get plenty of exposure to content with which they disagree. “Ironically,” Mr. Bruns writes in an aside, “echo chamber and filter bubble concepts may have become so popular with some journalists, media critics, and politicians because members of these professional classes are genuinely more likely to inhabit an information cocoon of sorts.”

Wholesale prices rose 0.3% in November, more than expected, despite hopes that inflation is cooling: Jeff Cox

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/09/wholesale-prices-rose-0point3percent-in-november-more-than-expected-despite-hopes-that-inflation-is-cooling.html

The producer price index, a measure of what companies get for their products in the pipeline, increased 0.3% for the month and 7.4% from a year ago.
A 38% surge in wholesale vegetable prices helped push the food index up by 3.3%, offsetting an identical 3.3% decline in energy costs.

Wholesale prices rose more than expected in November as food prices surged, dampening hopes that inflation could be headed lower, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The producer price index, a measure of what companies get for their products in the pipeline, increased 0.3% for the month and 7.4% from a year ago, which was the slowest 12-month pace since May 2021. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a 0.2% gain.

Excluding food and energy, core PPI was up 0.4%, also against a 0.2% estimate. Core PPI was up 6.2% from a year ago, compared with 6.6% in October.

Kyrsten Sinema leaves Democratic Party, registers as independent, cuts fragile margin in US Senate by Ronald J. Hansen

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/kyrsten-sinema-leaves-democratic-party-registers-as-independent-cuts-fragile-margin-in-us-senate/ar-AA155dHr

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema said Friday she is leaving the Democratic Party and will formally become an independent in a move that more fully places her at the center of a narrowly divided chamber.

“I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington,” she wrote.

Sinema maintained she doesn’t plan to change her voting habits: often aligning with Democrats but backing Republicans on certain issues. And she won’t dispense with the legislative filibuster that has led many Democrats to call for her to face a primary challenge in 2024.

Sinema’s move will jar Democrats who had hoped Sen. Raphael Warnock’s runoff victory in Georgia on Tuesday would provide the party a measure of breathing room on difficult votes that often hinged on Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.

“We’ve seen in recent years that the parties have pulled folks to the political edges,” Sinema said during a 45-minute interview with The Republic. “There’s an increasing demand that you kind of fit in with one political orthodoxy or the other. … I’ve never fit that.”

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose In victory and defeat, Democrats continue to push the voter-suppression myth. Jason L. Riley

https://www.city-journal.org/georgia-senate-race-demolishes-voter-suppression-myth

“The voter suppression we’re seeing in Georgia and across the country is Jim Crow in new clothes,” Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia wrote on Facebook last year while campaigning for reelection. Such rhetoric has become commonplace on the political left, even while it has never been more divorced from reality.

In January, President Biden traveled to Atlanta and used similarly charged language to describe voting rules supported by Republican lawmakers in Georgia and other states. “Jim Crow 2.0 is about two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion,” Biden said. “It’s no longer about who gets to vote. It’s about making it harder to vote.” Vice President Kamala Harris added that she would “not stop fighting against the anti-voter legislation that Republican legislatures continue to push at the state level.” Anti-voter legislation?

Democrats insist that Republicans have made it harder to cast a ballot by passing voter ID laws, limiting the timeframe for early voting, and reverting to pre-Covid voting protocols now that the pandemic has subsided. But if that’s true, why has voter participation been rising, including among the minority groups that Democrats claim are being targeted for disenfranchisement?

Warnock defeated his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, in a runoff election on Tuesday that saw voter turnout exceed what it was on Election Day last month. It “surpassed expectations of election officials, who expected fewer voters to show up for the second round of voting,” reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Instead, turnout “increased by 200,000 voters from the 1.4 million people who cast ballots in Nov. 8 in the general election.”

Twitter Files Damn the Government and the Media They show a coordinated attempt to suppress speech and cover up Hunter Biden’s laptop: Charles Lipson

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-twitter-files-are-damning-to-government-and-the-media/

There are two pieces of deeply disturbing news to emerge from the “Twitter Files” released by Elon Musk. The first is that Twitter, under its old management, was not the open, politically neutral platform it pretended to be. Journalist Bari Weiss has shown that Twitter had secret “blacklists” and related methods specifically designed to limit the reach of conservative commentators. When Twitter’s old management denied that bias, as it did repeatedly, it was lying.

Second, we are learning that Twitter worked closely with like-minded government bureaucrats to squelch legitimate news, information, and discussion. They did so to protect favored candidates (Democrats) and political positions (progressive). We will undoubtedly learn that Facebook, Google and other media giants had similar ties to Washington. We certainly need to know.

The government’s role here is damning. Its primary job under the First Amendment is to protect free speech, not to kill it. It botched that vital job, and it did so deliberately to increase its own control over private speech in public fora and, apparently, to promote certain political views.

The only good news here is that Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, is exposing the old management’s efforts to suppress speech and promote political bias on its platform. To expose those malign efforts, he ordered some of Twitter’s internal documents be given to two journalists: Matt Taibbi (who quickly published some of his findings as tweets) and Bari Weiss (who is beginning to publish some findings and promises to publish a longer analysis).

These 7 Trump-Critical GOP Senators Have No Plan To Deal With Unconstitutional, Election-Altering Censorship By: Evita Duffy

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/08/these-7-trump-critical-gop-senators-have-no-plan-to-deal-with-unconstitutional-election-altering-censorship/

The Federalist asked the seven senators if they have a plan to remedy the unconstitutional censorship of voters and news during the 2020 election. Not one of them responded.

Seven Republican U.S. senators who slammed former President Trump for suggesting that new censorship revelations warranted a reconsideration of the 2020 presidential election results have no plan to address the First Amendment-violating censorship Trump was reacting to in “The Twitter Files.”

More and more evidence is exposing how our corrupt FBI brazenly violated the Constitution by dictating to social media monopolies what speech to censor from public and private discourse ahead of the 2020 election. Yet GOP senators are more preoccupied with Trump talking about altering the Constitution than they are with the deep state committing actual violations of it.

After revelations uncovered that Twitter colluded with the Biden campaign to censor content in the lead-up to the election and misused its “hacked material policy” to annihilate the Hunter Biden laptop story, Trump posted to Truth Social:

So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!

Trump clarified his comments on Monday, saying that he does not want to terminate the Constitution, but that there was “‘MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION’” that has been “irrefutably proven in the 2020 Presidential Election” and “steps must be immediately taken to RIGHT THE WRONG.”

The Fake, and Real, Domestic Terrorists Who successfully sought a “revolution” in Washington—a bunch of random dudes in Michigan or the most powerful law enforcement agency in the world? By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/08/the-fake-and-real-domestic-terrorists/

To hear the government tell it, a homeless guy who lived in the dilapidated basement of a vacuum repair shop with no running water is as much a danger to society as was Timothy McVeigh and the Tsarnaev brothers.

Adam Fox, according to the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Michigan, should spend the rest of his life in prison for conspiring to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020. After a jury could not reach a verdict in Fox’s case last April, the Department of Justice retried Fox and his remaining co-defendant Barry Croft, Jr. in August; both men were found guilty the second time around.

In what must be one of the most dishonest motions filed by the government perhaps in recent history—for example, prosecutors insist two men acquitted during the same April trial are Fox’s co-conspirators despite being cleared of all charges by a jury—the Justice Department described the kidnapping plot as an act of domestic terrorism in a memo arguing 

Fox, 38, should die in jail. Fox, who had to use the Mexican restaurant in the same strip mall where his vacuum repair flophouse was located to brush his teeth, somehow had the wherewithal to attempt to “light the fire of a second revolution,” assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Birge wrote in Fox’s sentencing memo.

“While the plot to kidnap a sitting state governor is shocking for its temerity, it is not without recent antecedents. For Fox’s paranoid fantasies of government ‘tyranny,’ one need look no further than the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The defendant’s plan to use homemade explosive devices to kill and maim recalls the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.” (Fox also was convicted of planning to use a weapon of mass destruction.)

Setting aside the government’s despicable comparison of Fox’s half-baked (and sometimes, literally baked) bull-session planning to two deadly terror attacks, both of which resulted in the murder of children, the plot to kidnap Whitmer existed only in the “paranoid fantasies” of agents and informants working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

A Beheading in Philadelphia Are Islamic honor killings really just “domestic violence”? by Thom Nickels

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-beheading-in-philadelphia/

EXCERPT

In the Lawndale section of Philadelphia recently, a 41-year-old woman, Leila al Raheel, was decapitated by her 34-year-old husband in the kitchen of their home. Ahmad Shareef was apprehended six blocks from the scene of the murder, hiding behind a clump of bushes. The mainstream news media reported the crime as yet another example of “generic” domestic violence. The police even called it a “domestic homicide,” without elaborating or speculating on a motive, as well as hiding the fact that the alleged killer was Muslim.

Joanne Otero-Cruz, who runs Women Against Abuse, a nonprofit in Philadelphia, was quoted in reference to the above murder as saying, “A lot of people actually experience this. There is help out there.”

Let’s step back a moment.

Most female domestic abuse victims do not experience decapitation. Decapitation with a knife by a “loved one” has a decidedly Muslim flavor — but of course it was impossible for Otero-Cruz to reference this subtext, or to bring up the possibility of an honor killing. Had she done so this would have led to charges of stereotyping and “Islamophobia,” as every mainstream news reporter by now realizes. Multiple reports of the Lawndale murder kept to the “generic” domestic abuse scenario, as if something had gone terribly wrong in (yet another) Brady Bunch household.

Freedom Center website Jihad Watch, the notable exception when it came to reporting about the murder, published the following headline:

“Philadelphia: Muslim accused of beheading woman who was treated like a slave.”

Finally, some honesty…

Most of the big news media outlets mentioned nothing about the victim being treated like a slave, although NBC10 did manage to quote a neighbor of the victim, who said, “The woman…they treat her like a slave. She runs in and out of the house barefoot. She really never goes anywhere else. She carries all of their bags in. They scream at her…”

The neighbor, Nyiha Richardson, also told reporters that she had witnessed “several problems at the home in the past, including Shareef running outside half naked and threatening neighbors to the point in which one family moved away.”

What is treason? By Bob Ryan

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/what_is_treason.html

“Some 1.7 billion dollars was sent by Obama and Kerry to Tehran, in cash. There was no consent by Congress. That cash was the giving of aid and comfort to funders of international terrorism while America remains at war. That is the very definition of treason.”

The charge of treason is thrown around by people on both ends of the political aisle who fail to show an understanding of what the word legally means in America.

Treason has a very narrow definition that prevents most people accused from having committed actual treason.

18 USC Ch. 115, S2381 defines Treason as:

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.

In order for an American to commit treason, war must be declared by Congress. Without war against a declared enemy, there can be no aid and comfort given to an enemy, which means there can be no treasonous activity committed.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were not tried for treason since war was not declared against the Soviets. They were convicted and sentenced to death for espionage.