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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

D.C. Drive For Statehood Reminds Us Of What’s Gone Wrong With Our Country

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/03/25/d-c-drive-for-statehood-reminds-us-of-whats-gone-wrong-with-our-country/

The campaign for Washington, D.C., statehood has come up yet again. If nothing else, this shows how far out of control the federal government has become.

The drive to make D.C. America’s 51st state isn’t new. But, with a Democratic president and a Democratic majority in Congress, the ruling class is in a mood to consolidate its power, and with the Democrat-media industrial complex demanding that everything must be seen through the lens of race, it’s now an overheated topic.

For decades the pro-statehood forces have complained about being subject to taxation without representation. (We’ll have more to say on this later.) Today’s argument is centered on race. It is “a historically black city,” according to the district government, with 47% of residents black, 41% white.

“This is not about politics. It’s about a fundamental voting and civil rights issue,” says House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney, who is of course a Democrat, the party that’s pushing hard for H.R. 51, which “provides for admission into the United States of the state of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth.” (We’ll have more about the party’s power grab later, too.)

To hear David Litt, a speechwriter for Barack Obama, tell it, “the D.C. statehood fight is part of an ugly effort to disenfranchise black and brown people.” Opposing views, he says, “echo the last gasps of the Jim Crow era.”

While the Democrats and the media put everything they have into dividing the country, allow us to shine a light on what many are missing: When Washington, D.C., was established as the nation’s capital, the founders didn’t foresee it being a city of permanent residents and the base for an intrusive leviathan command center. It was to be merely the seat of the federal government.

Taxation with Representation A fair and reasonable alternative to D.C. statehood John Steele Gordon

https://www.city-journal.org/an-alternative-to-dc-statehood

Though Democrats haven’t made any formal moves on the idea yet, statehood for the District of Columbia is very much on their wish list. Ostensibly, it would cure a constitutional anomaly that gives the residents of the District no voice in Congress other than a nonvoting delegate in the House. In a country born under the slogan, “No taxation without representation,” it’s more than a bit embarrassing that citizens of that country’s capital city are taxed without representation.

Yet everyone realizes that the real reason behind the move is to create two new Senate seats that would be held by Democrats for the foreseeable future. How certain are we of this? Consider that in 1984, voters reelected Ronald Reagan in one of the greatest landslides in American political history. He carried 49 states and only missed the 50th by a mere 3,761 votes, yet in the District of Columbia he captured just under 14 percent of the vote.

The Framers of the Constitution didn’t want the capital to be located in a state, fearing that the state would have too much influence as a result. So they authorized the creation of a “District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and by the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States.” In Article I, Section 8, the Constitution gives Congress the power “To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District.”

Maryland ceded 63 square miles and Virginia 37 to create the ten-miles-square district. In 1846, Congress agreed to retrocede the Virginia portion back to that state, which is why the Pentagon is in Arlington, Virginia, not the District of Columbia.

The disgrace that was the Biden press conference Joe Concha,

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/the-disgrace-that-was-the-biden-press-conference/ar-BB1eZV0j?li=BBnb7Kz

President Biden called on 10 reporters to answer 30-some questions during his long-awaited first formal press conference on Thursday. But the hour-plus event was a disgrace for some in the press and a dubious performance by the president.

The questions for the president were meek and vague, failing to extract any specific information about policies or solutions to the myriad problems faced by the administration. Take, for example, this activism disguised as a question from PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor on why the president needs to abolish the filibuster in the name of racial equality while combating evil Republicans in their efforts to prevent minorities from voting. Or something like that.

“When it comes to the filibuster, immigration is a big issue, of course, related to the filibuster, but there’s also Republicans who are passing bill after bill trying to restrict voting rights. [Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer’s calling it in an existential threat to democracy,” Alcindor, who plays an objective journalist on TV, said to the president after being the second reporter chosen by Biden’s handlers for him to call upon. “Why not back a filibuster rule that at least gets around issues, including voting rights or immigration? [South Carolina Congressman] Jim Clyburn, someone, of course, who you know very well, has backed the idea of a filibuster rule when it comes to civil rights and voting rights.”

That’s not even bias in broad daylight. That’s outright activism in pressing the president on national television to move forward with abolishing the filibuster to advance an agenda she supports. Alcindor also failed to quote Biden’s own words back to him from a speech he called, at the time, one of the most important of his career: “It is not only a bad idea, it upsets the constitutional design and it disservices the country,” Biden argued in 2005 against eliminating the Senate filibuster. “No longer would the Senate be that ‘different kind of legislative body’ that the Founders intended. No longer would the Senate be the ‘saucer’ to cool the passions of the immediate majority.”

To the Parapets, Defenders of Free Speech! Anyone who aims to chill, curtail, infringe, or end free speech has outed themselves as an aspiring tyrant and must be stopped. By Thaddeus G. McCotter

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/26/to-the-parapets-defenders-of-free-speech/

To date, a number of observers have diagnosed and condemned the rancid ideology and insidious aims of the true threat to America: the radical Leftist American Communists or Am-coms. 

In his anti-socialist manifesto, Evan Sayet coined the term and dissected the totalitarian designs of The Woke Supremacy; Lisa De Pasquale satirically skewered the intrinsic insanity and hypocrisy of our self-anointed “moral superiors” in The Social Justice Warrior Handbook: A Practical Survival Guide for Snowflakes, Millennials, and Generation Z; and most recently, Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.), a leader of exceptional intellect and moral courage, condemned the intolerance behind the regressive policies and neo-racist practices of the often less-than-non-violent “woke folk.”

But it is not just observers from the center-Right decrying the Am-coms. Granted, this oppressive movement will be called many different things depending on who across the political spectrum is discussing it, but the recognition of its dangers remains. Some of the most poignant critiques have come from intellectually honest journalists who are not on the Right, such as Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi. Both ably set forth the Am-coms’ goal of controlling the media and Big Tech to censor political opponents. Taibbi, for example, exposes the “troubling views” of Columbia law professor Timothy Wu, who feels the First Amendment is “obsolete.” In doing so, Greenwald and Taibbi provide the first step in identifying and defeating the Am-coms.

There is no surer way to identify an Am-com than by his lust for censorship.

Joe Biden’s presidency is a reality TV series in a care home The President’s first press conference was nerve-wracking and enervating to watch: Dominic Green

Joe Biden is the face of the United States. But Joe Biden no longer looks like Joe Biden. And he no longer sounds like Joe Biden — especially in the long and excruciating silences when he forgets what he’s saying or fumbles for his cue cards.

The United States no longer looks like itself either. The sorry theatrical display of Biden’s first press conference is an accurate image of what has happened to American democracy. A carefully limited number of carefully selected journalists asked carefully vetted questions. A carefully chosen president read carefully written answers off his cue cards, and carefully avoided taking any questions from Fox or Newsmax.

The White House is no longer the home of democracy. It’s a reality TV series in a care home. Biden mused about how the country has lost its way, about how it used to be so much better, but he seemed fatalistically feeble, as if it was all too much and all too late, and he has already given up. As if the nation is in its twilight years.

‘We’ve got so much more to do,’ he said, as he continually does. But he also ad-libbed, ‘I’ve never been able to plan three-and-a-half, four years ahead.’

How funny. How sadly reflective of the senility of American democracy that he thought that was a smart answer. How shamefully embarrassing for the compliant, complicit media that not one of his questioners bothered to ask whether an inability to plan for the future was what the American people need in their president — especially a 78-year-old who says he expects to run, if that is really the word, in 2024, when he will be 82.

It’s true, Biden managed not to fall off the dais, or go completely blank, or fall over his dog. It’s true, he matched the topics on his cue cards to the subjects of the questions. But this press conference was nerve-wracking and enervating to watch. It’s obvious that Biden’s mind often has no idea what his mouth is saying. This press conference was supposed to dampen concerns about his mental acuity. Instead it confirmed that Biden is too old and complacent for the scale of the task.

He was, as old people tend to be, lucid in recalling details from his past. He was, as people whose minds are running down tend to be, unable to say anything coherent and spontaneous beyond quavering sentimentality. And that is not enough.

Congress, in a Five-Hour Hearing, Demands Tech CEOs Censor the Internet Even More Aggressively Glenn Greenwald

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-in-a-five-hour-hearing-demands-0cf?token=

“Words cannot convey how chilling and authoritarian this all is: watching government officials, hour after hour, demand censorship of political speech and threaten punishment for failures to obey.”

The repressive objective of the Democratic-controlled Congress is to transfer the power to police and censor political discourse from these tech giants to themselves.

Republican members largely confined their grievances to the opposite concern: that these social media giants were excessively silencing conservative voices in order to promote a liberal political agenda (that complaint is only partially true: a good amount of online censorship, like growing law enforcement domestic monitoring generally, focuses on all anti-establishment ideologies, not just the right-wing variant). This editorial censoring, many Republicans insisted, rendered the tech companies’ Section 230 immunity obsolete, since they are now acting as publishers rather than mere neutral transmitters of information. Some Republicans did join with Democrats in demanding greater censorship, though typically in the name of protecting children from mental health disorders and predators rather than ideological conformity.

As they have done in prior hearings, both Zuckerberg and Pichai spoke like the super-scripted, programmed automatons that they are, eager to please their Congressional overseers (though they did periodically issue what should have been unnecessary warnings that excessive “content moderation” can cripple free political discourse). Dorsey, by contrast, seemed at the end of his line of patience and tolerance for vapid, moronic censorship demands, and — sitting in a kitchen in front of a pile of plates and glasses — he, refreshingly, barely bothered to hide that indifference. At one point, he flatly stated in response to demands that Twitter do more to remove “disinformation”: “I don’t think we should be the arbiters of truth and I don’t think the government should be either.”

Where is GOP Outrage Over Justice Department’s Capitol Probe?By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/03/25/where-is-gop-outrage-over-justice-departments-capitol-probe/
The U.S. government now holds political prisoners in jail in the nation’s capital, and the party that purports to stand for freedom, liberty, and rule of law refuses to defend them.

A federal judge this week blasted a top Justice Department official for publicly bragging about the agency’s sprawling investigation into the January 6 Capitol melee. In an emergency hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta warned government prosecutors to keep quiet or face a gag order.

Mehta fumed over comments made in a television interview by former acting U.S. Attorney Michael Sherwin—he led the first two months of the nationwide manhunt for suspected “insurrectionists”—that could imperil the already shaky case against ten alleged members of the Oath Keepers. The lawyers of the defendants facing several charges including conspiracy, attended the virtual hearing on Tuesday.

“The Justice Department needs to understand that these types of public statements can jeopardize the integrity of a criminal case and affect the rights of the defendants,” Mehta said. (Sherwin reportedly is under internal investigation himself for giving the “60 Minutes” interview last week.) “No matter how much press attention this matter gets, it will be clear these defendants are entitled to a fair trial. The government, quite frankly in my view, should know better.”

The Obama-appointed judge, with those few sentences, said more to defend the rights of Trump-supporting protesters than the totality of Republican leadership in Washington, D.C.. Top Biden officials are accelerating the weaponization of powerful federal agencies against regular Americans who dared, not just to vote for Donald Trump, but also to doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election. The Justice Department’s Capitol breach probe, its official name, gives cover to inflict severe punishment for those verboten acts and beliefs.

The same cabal that wielded its authority against the former president and his associates for more than four years has aimed its arsenal at hundreds of Trump supporters—yet the GOP remains silent.

Crickets from Congressional Republicans

Early on, Republicans joined Democrats in overhyping the events of January 6. “This failed insurrection only underscores how crucial the task before us is for our republic,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) preached in a statement released that evening. “They tried to disrupt our democracy. They failed. They failed to attempt to obstruct the Congress.”

Senator Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), in a typically dramatic speech the next day, claimed the Capitol “has been desecrated. Blood has been spilled in the hallways.” (He also warned we should not tell our children that American institutions “can’t be trusted,” despite all evidence to the contrary.)

America at the End of Empire Is civilizational decline reversible? Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/03/america-at-the-end-of-empire-mark-tapson/

In a recent monologue on HBO’s Real Time, host Bill Maher called Americans a “silly people” for allowing themselves to be mired in culture war struggles, such as the politically correct cancelling of children’s books, while our superpower competition China is laser-focused on political, economic, and military dominance.

“You’re not going to win the battle for the 21st century if you are a silly people. And Americans are a silly people,” Maher asserted. He then referenced the latest “cancel culture” controversy – the woke mob’s targeting of children’s author Dr. Seuss over purported racism in his books: “Do you know who doesn’t care that there’s a stereotype of a Chinese man in a Dr. Seuss book? China. All 1.4 billion of them couldn’t give a crouching tiger flying fuck because they’re not a silly people. If anything, they are as serious as a prison fight.”

Maher pointed out that China has “built 500 entire cities from scratch, moved the majority of their huge population from poverty to the middle class, and mostly cornered the market in 5G and pharmaceuticals” in two generations. Meanwhile in America, “half the country is having a never-ending woke competition deciding whether Mr. Potato Head has a dick and the other half believes we have to stop the lizard people because they’re eating babies. We are a silly people,” he continued.

“Do you think China’s doing that, letting political correctness get in the way of nurturing their best and brightest?” Maher added. “Do you think Chinese colleges are offering courses in ‘The Philosophy of Star Trek, ‘The Sociology of Seinfeld,’ and ‘Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse’? Those are real and so is China. And they are eating our lunch. And believe me, in an hour, they’ll be hungry again.”

Maher’s prescient lecture came just before the Chinese delegation ate their American counterparts for lunch at last week’s U.S.-China meeting in Alaska, telling Secretary of State Antony Blinken to his face that China does not view America as operating “from a position of strength.” With a new American President so decrepit he is shielded from the public by his handlers; with our southern border collapsing under tsunami of illegal aliens; and with Americans at each other’s throats in a not-so-Cold Civil War, China’s not wrong about that.

Unlike his fellow political propagandists on late-night TV, Maher occasionally comes down on the right side of an issue, and this is one of them.

Joe Biden Immediately Gives His Handlers Nightmares After Appearing Confused at Times During First Presser By Sister Toldjah |

https://redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2021/03/25/joe-biden-immediately-gives-his-handlers-nightmares-after-appearing-confused-at-times-during-first-presser-n350192

EXCERPT

““Tired”? Really? We all know what tired actually looks like, and it’s an insult to our intelligence to pass off Biden’s mid-sentence freezes as nothing more than being “tired.”

As I said yesterday, that the leader of the free world essentially had to be shamed into doing a formal press conference two months into his time in the Oval Office should set off alarm bells everywhere. But when you see how things get progressively worse during these events – no matter how tightly staged they are, it begins to make more sense as to why they’re keeping him on leash in carefully controlled settings.

It’s quite terrifying, to be honest, and the more it happens the worse it looks. World leaders seem to be taking notice, too, which makes all of this even more concerning. But Biden IS the POTUS, and he should be expected to be able to appear in public and before the press and to coherently answer questions.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Joe Biden does not just look unwell, he doesn’t appear to actually be well, either. It’s no wonder he’s turning over meetings with Vice President Kamala Harris to his Chief of Staff Ron Klain and kicking the press out when they try to get answers from him.

That they continue to ignore the elephant in the room here is a disgrace, made doubly so by the fact that they were questioning Trump’s mental fitness to lead well before he even took office.

Questions about Biden’s state of mind and mental health are issues the American people deserve answers to. It’s just too bad members of the mainstream press had an hour or so today to do just that, and not a single one of them took the opportunity to do so. They didn’t hesitate to do it with Trump, and they shouldn’t have any hesitancy doing it with this President, either.

Biden Presser Was Such a Disaster, There Was One Moment That Showed What Elder Abuse It Was By Nick Arama

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/03/25/biden-presser-was-such-a-disaster-there-was-one-moment-that-showed-what-elder-abuse-it-was-n350185

Oh my gosh, as I type this, I’m watching this utter disaster that is the Joe Biden press conference.

It sounds like many in the press came ready with real substantive questions but Biden failed to show up with his mind, as my colleague Sister Toldjah just explained.

It seemed like he was trying to go from a script, he had reporters’ names on a list that he was calling on. Were there any prepared questions would be my question? Like this one that basically was Yamiche Alcindor praising him saying it’s his morality that’s causing them to come. Yeesh, propagandist.

He takes credit for that and then turns around and blames President Donald Trump for the surge.

But even with apparent preparation He was negative, when he didn’t know or couldn’t answer, which was a lot, he was combative with reporters, saying “Come on, man!”

It was awful, not sure how anyone could have thought he’d make it through it, it was a complete train wreck. He kept talking and talking and talking, but it was often just rambling gibberish.

But perhaps the mistake that was most emblematic of the huge problem he has is what he said about when he joined the Senate.

“With regard to the filibuster, I believe we should go back to a position with the filibuster that existed when I came to the United States Senate 120 years ago.”