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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Biden Made His Own Mess Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/06/biden-made-his-own-mess/

The president was dealt an excellent hand and has played it terribly. He has no one to blame for the sorry state of his administration but himself.

You’d think someone whose career in national politics goes all the way back to 1972 would have noticed this, but apparently President Biden hasn’t: Unpopular presidents tend to complain that they were dealt a bad hand, and then grouse that the media are making things look worse than they are. But Biden was dealt an excellent hand; he has no excuses for the mess he’s in.

When Biden took office, the U.S. was already bouncing back from economic calamity, and tens of millions of vaccine doses were in the pipeline. If he had made smart decisions, the U.S. would be doing fine right now. Instead, he is the primary cause of the crises that are swamping his presidency. The media could scarcely be more inclined to spin things in his favor, and yet even they can’t entirely ignore the dispiriting facts.

A sympathetic-sounding author, Chris Whipple, who is writing a book about White House chiefs of staff, told NBC News that Team Biden “came in with the most daunting set of challenges arguably since Franklin D. Roosevelt, only to then be hit by a perfect storm of crises, from Ukraine to inflation to the supply chain to baby formula. What’s next? Locusts?” Biden has himself, according to the same NBC News story, been sympathetic to the why-am-I-so-unlucky view.

Biden’s Approval Rating Is Now Lowest In Gallup’s History

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/14/bidens-approval-rating-drops-to-lowest-in-gallups-history/

On day 487 in office, President Joe Biden set a new record. He has the lowest approval rating of all presidents at this point in their presidencies since Gallup started tracking this in 1945.

According to Gallup’s Presidential Job Approval Center, just 41% approve of the job Biden is doing. That’s worse than Gerald Ford, or Lyndon Johnson, or even Jimmy Carter on day 487. Much worse than Ronald Reagan, the Bushes, Bill Clinton, or Barack Obama.

To add insult to injury, Biden’s approval rating is now lower than Trump’s was at this point in Trump’s first term.

Biden’s oh-so-presidential response to his cratering support: he is “seething.”

Instead of accepting blame, Biden and his “inner circle” are blaming everyone around them, including the White House staff. Politico reports that: “Members of Biden’s inner circle, including first lady Jill Biden and the president’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, have complained that West Wing staff has managed Biden with kid gloves, not putting him on the road more or allowing him to flash more of his genuine, relatable, albeit gaffe-prone self.”

Yeah, letting Biden be Biden will work.

A dangerous implosion of American politics Republican Congress facing a Democratic White House for two years would defer economic policy change until 2025 David Goldman

https://asiatimes.com/2022/06/a-dangerous-implosion-of-american-politics/

While working Americans suffer the worst decline in real income since the waning months of the Carter Administration, America’s political parties are in disarray with internal divisions almost as intense as the issues that have polarized “red state” and “blue state” America.

Neither party has a proposal – credible or otherwise – on the political agenda to alleviate the inflation that is crushing family income. And neither has the prospect of gaining a governing mandate, as opposed to a temporary majority.

It’s a national train wreck, and no one has a plan to stop it.

Unless his legal problems interfere, Donald Trump almost certainly will run for president again in 2024 and will be his party’s nominee. The Congressional commission investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot may have gathered enough information to motivate federal charges against the former president, but that remains unclear.

Trump’s obsessive belief that the Democrats stole the 2020 election damages him. More ominous is that his economic policies contributed to the present disaster, and Trump has no thoughts on the subject apart from assigning the whole of the blame to Biden.

Reactionary ‘progressives’ strike again Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/reactionary-progressives-strike-again/

A few ignoramuses with rainbow flags gathered on Sunday at New York City’s Chelsea Piers to protest the participation of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis in the Jewish Leadership Conference, held annually by the conservative Tikvah Fund. Other speakers at the event included former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer, former U.S. Deputy National Security Advisor and current Tikvah chairman Elliott Abrams, and a slew of conservative Jewish intellectuals.
The timing, at the height of Pride Month, couldn’t have been better from a propaganda perspective for the demonstrators present and behind the scenes. While countries around the Free World are going out of their way to celebrate the LGBTQ+ movement through parades, public-service announcements and all vehicles that highlight “choice” and “identity,” the very idea that any venue would dare to let DeSantis darken its premises presented a golden opportunity for bitching and moaning about victimhood.

The trouble is that this reactionary method of manipulation to silence all voices that don’t align perfectly with a “progressive” point of view works—at least, on liberals. Afraid to be labeled as Neanderthal right-wingers, the latter cave to pressure at the drop of a threat.
This is how the above conference, titled “Jews, Israel and the Future of the West,” got booted last month from the agenda of its originally planned location: The Museum of Jewish Heritage–A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. The excuse for the travesty was that the institution doesn’t “do politics.” Leaning on this phony assertion, the museum ultimately refused to sign a contract with Tikvah.

The Selfish Californian The Silicon Valley motto should be “I create inequality by hating inequality.” By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/06/12/the-selfish-californian/

We hear plenty of reasons for the perfect storm that imploded California. One-party, progressive government, of course. Decades of unchecked illegal immigration, without doubt. Years of mass flight out of state of the productive middle classes, certainly. 

But perhaps the most important, but overlooked, reason has been the infusion of trillions of dollars of mostly tech capital into the state. Unimaginable sums of market capital warped politics and led to a top-down, feudal society, run by progressive elites who are shielded from the ramifications of their own toxic ideologies.

More specifically, the common denominator was the emergence in California of a selfish, monied, left-wing political class. In concrete terms, it cared little for others but masked that unconcern with abstract leftism, emulating medieval penance and indulgences to assuage guilt over its enjoyment of sheltered and very good lives. 

California’s recent premier politicians at the local, state, and federal levels—Jerry Brown, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Gavin Newsom, and Nancy Pelosi—all enjoyed wealth and power, whether by inherited money and family brand names, through marriage, or using their positions to leverage lucrative family and personal business with the Chinese. 

Their lifestyles before, during, and after office-holding reflected both their privileges and the vast material differences between their own lives and the millions of Californians who suffered enormously from their utopian bromides. Yet a world away from their homes in Grass Valley, Kentfield, Lake Tahoe, Napa, Pacific Heights, or Rancho Mirage, the rest of the state’s residents who voted for them currently cannot afford a house, a full tank of gas, a chuck steak, or an air-conditioned afternoon.

Congress Must Hold Hearings on Biden Administration’s Domestic Terror Ties Forget Jan 6. Where’s the investigation into Democrat domestic terrorism? Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/congress-must-hold-hearings-biden-administrations-daniel-greenfield/

A few weeks after the Buffalo mass shooting, another domestic terrorist attack occurred in the upstate New York city. CompassCare, a pregnancy care clinic guiding new mothers away from abortion, was firebombed by the pro-abortion hate group, Jane’s Revenge. The group has been linked to the firebombing of at least two other pro-life offices and organizations last month.

Its threatening graffiti included the warning, “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either.”

“We demand the disbanding of all anti-choice establishments, fake clinics, and violent anti-choice groups within the next thirty days,” the Jane’s Revenge communique threatened. “We are forced to adopt the minimum military requirement for a political struggle.”

While Congressional Democrats are moving ahead with their Jan 6 hearings which seek to falsely blame Republicans and conservatives for the Capitol riot, they have no interest in allowing similar hearings about the ongoing campaign of domestic terrorism by their leftist allies.

Instead, the Biden administration is giving a pass to even the worst offenders.

The Biden administration’s DOJ decided to reduce a plea for Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, two radical lawyers who were handing out and throwing Molotov cocktails during the Black Lives Matter race riots, from 10 years in prison to 18 months.

The Democrats’ Politicized Gun Control Script There’s far more at stake than gun-control laws. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/democrats-politicized-gun-control-script-bruce-thornton/

For those of us of a certain age, we know that every time some psychopath shoots up a school and murders students, the Democrats will respond with their clichéd demagogic script. Exploiting the natural horror and pathos of such events, the Donks will trot out all the usual gun-policy suspects, the majority of which would not have prevented most of the attacks.

But that’s not really the point for Dems. Their aim is to smear Republicans and conservatives for political gain. With a mid-term shellacking looming, the recent attacks in Buffalo and Uvalde have the Democrats shamelessly politicizing those tragedies more than usual in order to distract voters from the Biden administration’s manifold failures.

Such attempts must be called-out and vigorously countered, for there’s more at stake than gun-control laws: the long progressive program to weaken our unalienable rights, especially the Second Amendment.

The roster of “solutions” to the problem of school shootings is a catalogue of failure and irrelevance. Background checks are a favorite, but if, like the Uvalde school shooter, there is no criminal record or paper-trail documenting that a purchaser poses an immediate danger, a background check is useless. Moreover, according to a National Institute of Justice’s mass shootings database, most mass killers steal their weapons––80% of them from family members––instead of legally buying them.

Most Americans Skeptical That Democrats’ Jan. 6 Investigation Seeks The Truth: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/06/13/most-americans-skeptical-that-democrats-jan-6-investigation-seeks-the-truth-ii-tipp-poll/

Fewer than half of all Americans are convinced that the Democrats’ Jan. 6 Commission is making an honest attempt at discovering the truth about the mostly peaceful political demonstrations that took place on Capitol Hill that day, the latest data from the I&I/TIPP Poll show.

Some 44% of Americans said they were either “very confident” (21%) in the committee’s investigation or “somewhat confident” (23%) that the Democrat-dominated Jan. 6 Commission “will make a genuine effort to uncover the truth.”

The online poll of 1,310 adults was taken from June 8 to June 10. It has a margin of error of +/- 2.8 percentage points.

Fully 40% in June’s poll said they weren’t confident, with equal parts saying they were “not at all confident” (20%) and “not very confident” (20%). As the pie chart below shows, another 15% said they were “not sure.”

A Permanent Pandemic Means a Huge Medicaid Expansion The need for an official emergency is long past, but the Administration keeps it going to retain 14.4 million more people on the rolls. By Joel Zinberg and Gary D. Alexander

https://www.wsj.com/articles/permanent-pandemic-means-medicaid-expansion-rolls-remove-health-care-public-health-emergency-covid-biden-welfare-government-spending-11655057229?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Covid is now endemic, yet the Biden administration keeps extending the public-health emergency. Its goal is to preserve the expansion of the welfare state through Medicaid, even though large and growing numbers of enrollees are ineligible for the benefit.

Medicaid, the federal-state entitlement that provides health insurance to nearly 1 in 4 Americans, ballooned during the pandemic. Enrollments had declined in 2018 and 2019, but jumped by 15.9 million—about 25%—between February 2020 and February 2022. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the increase was “due, in large part, to the continuous enrollment condition” in Congress’s March 2020 Covid relief package, which encouraged enrollments by temporarily increasing the federal government’s share of total Medicaid costs by 6.2% while prohibiting states that accepted Washington’s help from redetermining Medicaid eligibility and removing ineligible people from the rolls until the emergency ended.

In other words, so long as the emergency persists, so too does the expansion of the welfare state. More than two years later, the Biden administration is intent on making permanent what were meant to be emergency measures.

States routinely redetermine Medicaid recipients’ eligibility. As the program grows, so too do the chances for improper payment. Medicaid’s national improper-payment rate, which includes payments to ineligible beneficiaries, soared under the ObamaCare Medicaid expansion. The most recent rate, which incorporates three years of data through the first five months of the pandemic, reached an all-time high of 22%, a cost of $99 billion.

Meet Your Fact-Checkers: AP Report Includes Quote From Radio Host Who Has Been Dead Since 2020 By Robert Spencer

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2022/06/12/meet-your-fact-checkers-ap-report-includes-quote-from-radio-host-who-has-been-dead-since-2020-n1604928

On Thursday, the Associated Press (AP), one of the most trusted names in news (as another Leftist propaganda outfit claims about itself), published a story about how some Cubans in Miami oppose a Democrat Party effort to buy up Spanish-language radio stations in South Florida. The article said that one Trump supporter insisted that this would not lead to editorial changes, but added that “Martha Flores, who hosts an evening show on Radio Mambi, isn’t sure about that. She attended the news conference but declined to speak.” The article continued: “‘Look at this,’ Flores said, pointing at her eyes watering. I know I would just cry.’” This was touching, but there was just one problem: Martha Flores was not actually at the news conference. She died in 2020. This is AP: the people who claim the ability and authority to tell you what news is accurate and what isn’t.

In response to AP’s massive error, conservative pundit Giancarlo Sopo was savage, tweeting: “I’m so confused by this article. The AP says it interviewed Miami Radio host Martha Flores on Wednesday, but she’s been dead for two years. How the hell did they pull this off? Séance? An ouija board? Did they hire a babalawo to talk to her?” He added a screenshot of a July 19, 2020 article announcing Flores’ death with the caption: “Context: Martha Flores was considered Miami’s ‘Queen of Radio.’ She was a pioneer of Spanish talk radio and died two years ago at the age of 92. It was widely reported at the time.” Sopo concluded: “All I’m going to say is that if you saw Martha at a press conference this week, don’t call your editor. Call these guys…,” and he attached a gif of the main characters from the movie Ghostbusters.