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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Barr-a-Lago William Barr remains the defender of the deep state at its worst. By Lloyd Billingsley

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/31/barr-a-lago/

The FBI’s August 8 raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence has called out commentary from all quarters. Last week, former Attorney General William Barr told the Bari Weiss podcast what he thought about it. 

“Number one is that I think a lot of the attacks on the FBI are over the top because a decision like this is not made by the FBI,” Barr said. “In fact, I don’t think the FBI would push a decision that it’s best to go in and search and obtain those documents after being jerked around for a year and a half. The decision would be made at the Department of Justice, by subordinates of the AG, and ultimately signed off on by the AG. The FBI would be told to go and execute it. I think the idea that the FBI is the problem here is misplaced.” 

Barr was more disturbed by “the constant pandering to outrage” on the Right, without discussion of whether the outrage had any merit. The FBI seized Trump’s passports, leaving the impression that the former president had committed a crime and was now a flight risk. FBI agents also rummaged through the closets and dressers of Melania Trump. While Trump attorneys were forced outside, the FBI easily could have planted or destroyed information. If anyone was outraged about that conduct, it would be hard to blame them. 

Weiss brought up the “Russiagate” episode, as the host explained, “the idea that Donald Trump was a compromised agent of Moscow. That there were deep connections between Trump’s people and Russian intelligence. That the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians, including by hacking Democratic National Committee emails.” Barr remained in his defensive stance. 

The Mysteries of Long COVID Long COVID may be one of many reasons why in a recession, labor paradoxically still remains scarce. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/31/the-mysteries-of-long-covid/

When the original strain of COVID-19 arrived in spring 2020, a pandemic soon swept the country. 

By far most survived COVID. But hundreds of thousands did not. American deaths now number well over 1 million.

Amid the tragedy, there initially was some hope that the pernicious effects of the disease would all disappear upon recovery among the nearly 99 percent who survived the initial infection. 

Vaccinations by late 2020 were promised to end the pandemic for good. But they did not. New mutant strains, while more infectious, were said to be less lethal, thus supposedly resulting in spreading natural immunity while causing fewer deaths from infection. 

But that too was not quite so. 

Instead, sometimes the original symptoms, sometimes frightening new ones, not only lingered after the acute phase, but were of increased morbidity. 

Now two-and-a-half years after the onset of the pandemic, there may be more than 20 million Americans who have had are are still suffering from what is currently known as “long COVID”—a less acute version but one ultimately as debilitating.

Some pessimistic analyses suggest well over 4 million once-active Americans are now disabled from this often-ignored pandemic and out of the workforce. 

Perhaps 10-30 percent of those originally infected with COVID-19 have some lingering symptoms six months to a year after the initial infection. And they are quite physically sick, desperate to get well, and certainly not crazy.

So far, no government Marshall plan exists to cure long COVID. 

The Rape of the American Mind The Left will never let truth interfere with their lust to have their way with America. Will Alexander

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/rape-american-mind-will-alexander/

“In the same decade that JFK, RFK, and MLK were assassinated; when America was bogged down in Vietnam; and one month before the grisly Manson murders – three men landing on the moon shouted to the world that, above it all, the American spirit still soared.”

Last week my better half and I, Tess, went to a Southern California thrift store to hunt for treasures that others had all but trashed.  Tess found a couple of delicate plates that a young clerk was about to wrap with an old yellowed-out newspaper that she had just torn at the fold.

“Wait a sec,” I said before the nonchalant clerk took another rip.  “That’s a pretty old newspaper.  Mind if I take it off your hands?”

“Sure,” she shrugged, quickly handing it to me then reaching for more paper to wrap the plates.

The dingy, old broadsheet turned out to be the torn top portion of the Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1969, published one day after Neil Armstrong became the first man on Earth to step foot on the moon.  

An estimated 650 million people around the world, including 93 percent of Americans, watched as Armstrong descended the ladder of spacecraft “Eagle” to plant his left boot onto the powdery lunar surface.  

Like many newspapers, the LA Times’ “Extra” edition packed it’s A-Section with headlines aimed at capturing every possible angle of the history-making.  

The story “Millions Over World Cheer Moon Landing” began: “Crowds screamed joyously in Trafalgar Square, people danced in Chile, a Russian yelled, ‘Hooray.’  Almost everyone on earth was somehow touched by man’s arrival on the moon.”

The Globalists’ COVID Narrative Collapses The rats are jumping ship – and trying to blame Trump. Glazov Gang

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/glazov-gang-globalists-covid-narrative-collapses-glazov-gang/

This new Glazov Gang episode features Leo Hohmann, a veteran investigative reporter and author whose book Stealth Invasion spent the majority of 2017 among Amazon.com’s top 10 books on immigration. Visit him at LeoHohmann.com.

Leo discusses: The Globalists’ COVID Narrative Collapses, analyzing how the rats are jumping ship – and trying to blame Trump.

Don’t miss it!

Our Ship of State is Becoming a Ship of Fools And our reckoning fast approaches. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/09/our-ship-state-becoming-ship-fools-bruce-thornton/

The Ship of Fools allegory first appears in Plato’s Republic, where Plato uses it to show how  a weak and badly trained captain creates chaos among the crew, who bicker over which of them should steer the ship, even though they have little of the knowledge and skills necessary for doing so. They end up mutinying against the captain and spending their time plundering the ship’s stores and eating and drinking, even as they sail towards disaster.

Plato, of course, was targeting the Athenian democracy, and its presumption that ordinary citizens have the capacity to govern, even though they lack the philosophical knowledge that shows what is good for people and the city they inhabit––not power, conquest, wealthy, or the pleasures of the body, but the virtue that comes from philosophical study. In other words, a technocratic oligarchy that Plato called “guardians” in his imagined perfect government.

For over a century the West has been evolving into such a government, whether it be socialism, communism, or the progressivism that has increasingly dominated our technocratic “managerial elite” and the numerous executive agencies staffed by credentialed “experts” who know better than the people what’s best for them.

This tyranny of the minority “managerial elite” has been more dangerous than the tyranny of the majority, assaulting our Constitutional structure that managed to avoid those extremes through divided and balanced government, along with the unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Democrats Are the Party of the Overclass From student loans to Covid restrictions, the left seeks to make the wealthy wealthier. By Batya Ungar-Sargon

https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-party-overclass-student-loans-working-vaccines-grocery-hourly-college-debt-university-progressives-elite-morals-virtue-11661961896?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

President Biden’s student-loan forgiveness plan will mostly benefit the elites. The majority of those loans are held by college graduates, who on average make $1 million more in their lives than people who don’t have a degree. How did progressives—who claim to care about the poor and working class, about fairness and equity—end up pushing a bailout for the wealthy at working people’s expense?

Well, consider who progressives are—the whitest and most highly educated members of the Democratic coalition. They’re advancing their own economic interests, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But they’re doing it under a false pretense, casting it as a moral battle for the indigent.

It isn’t the only example. Consider the push for open borders. Progressives cast it in moral terms, as a way of helping needy and oppressed foreigners. In truth, open borders benefit consumers at the expense of Americans who work in industries undercut by importing new laborers. To add insult to injury, they label you racist if you object.

The green agenda fits the pattern too. Progressives zip around in Teslas, a symbol of both affluence and virtue, while union members in the energy sector lose their jobs. Progressives push to release mentally ill drug addicts into working-class communities where they prey on vulnerable people of color—while they themselves live in nice neighborhoods with astronomical rents, polishing their halos.

Biden Misidentifies the Crime Culprit President Biden does political damage control amid rising urban disorder.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-biden-misidentifies-the-crime-culprit-democrats-pennsylvania-defund-the-police-11661983065?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

President Biden is stumping for Democrats in Pennsylvania this week, and law and order was his theme Tuesday in Wilkes-Barre. He was joined by Rep. Matt Cartwright, who is in a tight race to keep his House seat, and gubernatorial candidate Josh Shapiro. Democrats are worried about public anxiety over rising crime, and they should be.

Statewide, murders and non-negligent manslaughters increased 46% last year compared to 2019, according to Pennsylvania’s Uniform Crime Reporting System. Pittsburgh recorded 53 homicides last year, a 43% increase over 2019. Nonfatal shootings there were up 25% in 2021 compared to two years prior.

Earlier this year Pew reported that only 44% of Philadelphia residents said they felt safe in their neighborhood at night, while 65% said they’d heard gunshots near their homes in the past year. Some 362 people have been slain in the City of Brotherly Love so far this year, compared to 226 in the first eight months of 2019.

Mr. Biden was at pains Tuesday to neutralize the perception that Democrats want to defund the police. “When it comes to public safety in this nation, the answer is not defund the police. It’s fund the police. Fund the police.” That’s a welcome line, but remember that in 2020 such sentiments were heresy in the Democratic Party.

Reiner, Klobuchar and the Big Lie of January 6 By Jack Cashill

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/08/reiner_klobuchar_and_the_big_lie_of_january_6.html

Dismayed by the failure of the courts to charge any of the protestors with “insurrection” the media have grasped at every proverbial straw within reach. When eleven members of the Oath Keepers were charged with “seditious conspiracy” a year after the riot, the zealots trumpeted their vindication across the fruited plain. Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, no Trump fan, quickly rained on their noisy parade.

“The charging of a relatively small number of extremists in this large protest belies rather than supports the broader allegations of an actual insurrection,” wrote Turley. “This remains a protest that became a riot.” More than six months after the incident, an informed FBI source was telling Reuters, “Ninety to ninety-five percent of these are one-off cases. Then you have five percent, maybe, of these militia groups that were more closely organized. But there was no grand scheme with Roger Stone and Alex Jones and all of these people to storm the Capitol and take hostages.”

To any fair minded observer, the incident at Capitol Hill was much closer to the on-air graphic—“fiery but largely peaceful protest”—that CNN used to euphemize scenes of a burning Kenosha. The difference between the Kenosha and Capitol Hill riots is that the rioters in Washington set no fires and destroyed about $50 million less property. Then, too, Kenosha was just one of scores of BLM-Antifa riots that summer that left as many as 30 people dead and caused some $2 billion in damage.

Obama-Era ‘Sisters’ Circle Trump Will the trio of Susan Rice, Avril Haines, and Lisa Monaco get their target or will their exaggerated sense of self finally catch up with them?  By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/08/30/obama-era-sisters-circle-trump/

Susan Rice describes the trio as family.

In her 2019 memoir, Rice, Barack Obama’s final national security advisor, wrote glowingly of the close bond she shared with two other women in Obama’s tight knit circle of confidants. “In my last two years as NSA, I was extremely fortunate to have the invaluable input, support, and counsel of my sisters, Avril Haines and Lisa Monaco,” Rice explained in her book, Tough Love: My Story of the Things Worth Fighting For. “Never before, I am sure, had such small packages wielded such national security punch. Confident in ourselves and each other, we wouldn’t let any outsider perceive, much less exploit, our differences. Woe unto anyone, especially any male counterpart, who tried to play one of us against another.”

Hard eye roll.

Rice’s self-aggrandizing flex notwithstanding, no one tried to “play” the little women off each other; to the contrary, Haines and Monaco—Obama’s deputy national security advisor and homeland security advisor, respectively—and Rice played the American people by helping engineer one of the biggest frauds in U.S. political history: the Trump-Russia election collusion hoax.

Their sisterhood presumably strengthened during secret huddles in the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. Working off alleged intelligence collected by CIA Director John Brennan, Haines’ former boss, indicating the Kremlin planned to sabotage America’s election, Rice, Monaco, and Haines “convened meetings in the Situation Room to weigh the mounting evidence of Russian interference and generate options for how to respond,” the Washington Post reported in June 2017.

Monaco accompanied then-FBI Director James Comey to Capitol Hill in September 2016 to “warn” top congressional leaders in both parties that Russia was up to no good. After the election, in a brazen attempt to sow doubt about its legitimacy, Monaco announced the intelligence community would conduct an assessment into how Russian “hacking” impacted the results. 

Bill Barr – All-In With the Mar-a-Lago Raid The defender of the deep state can be no friend of the people. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/08/trumps-attorney-general-explains-raid-trumps-lloyd-billingsley/

“Number one is that I think a lot of the attacks on the FBI are over the top because a decision like this is not made by the FBI,” former Attorney General William Barr told the Bari Weiss podcast on August 25.

“In fact, I don’t think the FBI would push a decision that it’s best to go in and search and obtain those documents after being jerked around for a year and a half. The decision would be made at the Department of Justice, by subordinates of the AG, and ultimately signed off on by the AG. The FBI would be told to go and execute it. I think the idea that the FBI is the problem here is misplaced.”

The former AG was more disturbed by “the constant pandering to outrage” on the right, without discussion of whether the outrage had any merit. The FBI seized Trump’s passports, leaving the impression that the former president had committed a crime and was now a flight risk. FBI agents also rummaged through the closets of Melania Trump, an act of pure intimidation. With Trump attorneys forced outside, the FBI could easily have planted or destroyed information. If that is not cause for outrage, it’s hard to imagine what might qualify.

Weiss brought up the “Russiagate” episode, as the host explained, “the idea that Donald Trump was a compromised agent of Moscow. That there were deep connections between Trump’s people and Russian intelligence. That the Trump campaign had colluded with the Russians, including by hacking Democratic National Committee emails.” Barr was all over it.