Russian Appeasement Was a Left-Wing Monopoly Forgotten in the Left’s hypocrisy on Russia is the terrible damage done to American security, institutions, and the lives of innocents.  By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/02/russian-appeasement-was-a-left-wing-monopoly/

One way of understanding the 2009-2014 Obama Administration policy of “reset” with Vladimir Putin’s Russia is to recall two iconic incidents. 

The first was the 2009 “reset.” 

Newly appointed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that she would pursue a “reset” détente with Russia. America would relax the prior Bush Administration’s mild ostracism of Russia after its 2008 invasion of Georgia and softly start anew. 

The second was President Barack Obama’s hot mic moment in March 2012 in Seoul, South Korea. Obama got caught asking Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to reassure Vladimir Putin. 

Or as Obama put it: “After my election I have more flexibility . . . On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him to give me space . . . This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility.”

Both Obama and Putin apparently got their quid pro quo wishes.

Obama was reelected in 2012. The United States was abandoning missile defense in Eastern Europe. Vladimir Putin gave space and so did not invade Eastern Ukraine and the Crimea—until 2014.

During this 2009-2014 reset, a confused United States invited Russia back into the Middle East after a nearly 40-year hiatus. It refused to provide a beleaguered Ukraine with offensive weapons. 

NATO members increasingly ignored their promised military contributions. The United States cut defense spending. 

Obama discouraged domestic gas and oil production. The world price of oil soared, enriching Putin’s Russia. 

At a time when Secretary of State Clinton was overseeing a controversial sale of North American uranium deposits to a Russian-affiliated company, her spouse Bill Clinton mysteriously received $500,000 for a single speech in Moscow. 

Renaissance Capital, a Russian bank with ties to the company, put up the cash. During the reset period, Russian-owned or affiliated companies gave several million dollars to the Clinton Foundation.

Contemporaneously, Hunter Biden, son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, received a mysterious $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina. She was supposedly the wealthiest woman in Russia and the widow of Yury Luzhkov, the former mayor of Moscow who had strong ties to the Putin government. 

Biden’s Borders: The Threat to America and the Threat to the Free World by Chris Farrell

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18180/biden-borders-threat

Putin seems to understand Biden. Putin also seems to understand hollow threats and ineffective sanctions.

Putin, in addition, reduced natural gas exports to Europe by 41% last month… It appears to be a “squeeze play.” Putin would appear to be choking off natural gas supplies to Europe as a wedge, to divide the United States from NATO allies over the threatened “severe sanctions.”

The Biden administration is desperately trying to convince an unidentified audience watching somewhere that the administration is very, very serious about Ukraine’s borders. The problem is, the administration, by its actions is not very, very serious about Ukraine’s borders. If it were, it would have sent Ukraine substantial military materiel and conducted corresponding military exercises in adjoining NATO countries such as Poland and Hungary.

Engaging NATO and exercising military airlift, logistics and ground combat capabilities has always been an effective deterrent. Remember deterrence? It is not just a quaint relic of the Cold War. It is inducing an adversary to adjust its cost-benefit analysis, making the cost of creating trouble prohibitively high and ultimately not worth the effort.

To Putin, a Russian invasion of Ukraine is arguably just the next step in what appears an ongoing plan to incrementally reconstruct the former Soviet Union, or at least a large part of it. Putin began with Georgia and the Crimea; it is hard to imagine him stopping with Ukraine.

While the Biden administration blusters and postures over Ukraine’s border, the administration has an increasingly dangerous situation along America’s border.

Biden’s deputy national security advisor, Jonathan Finer, was trotted out to lecture Americans about the fundamental principle for all nations – “that our borders should be inviolate, that our sovereignty should be respected.” Oh, really? What about America’s southern border?

Here is the shocking “fact sheet” – all you need to know about just how dangerous our border situation has become.

Colossal incompetence: Biden officials completely unprepared for fall of Afghanistan, leaked memo shows By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/02/colossal_incompetence_biden_officials_completely_unprepared_for_fall_of_afghanistan_leaked_memo_shows.html

It’s not huge news that the Biden administration was a colossal failure on Afghanistan, or that Joe Biden still thinks there’s nothing to apologize for.

What’s news now is the colossal incompetence that went on inside that administration as Afghanistan was collapsing, according to a leaked memo that Axios got hold of:

Leaked notes from a White House Situation Room meeting the day before Kabul fell shed new light on just how unprepared the Biden administration was to evacuate Afghan nationals who’d helped the United States in its 20-year war against the Taliban.

Why it matters: Hours before the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan’s capital on Aug. 15, 2021, senior Biden administration officials were still discussing and assigning basic actions involved in a mass civilian evacuation.

Outsiders were frustrated and suspicious the administration was having plenty of meetings but was stuck in bureaucratic inertia and lacked urgency until the last minute.
While the word “immediately” peppers the document, it’s clear officials were still scrambling to finalize their plans — on the afternoon of Aug. 14.
For example, they’d just decided they needed to notify local Afghan staff “to begin to register their interest in relocation to the United States,” the document says.
And they were still determining which countries could serve as transit points for evacuees.

It’s nasty stuff.

Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Harvard Race-Discrimination Problem By Dan McLaughlin

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/ketanji-brown-jacksons-harvard-race-discrimination-problem/

If Biden selects this judge, she will have to answer for her service on the board of a racially discriminatory college.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson has a race-discrimination problem, and it just got a lot bigger. That problem could complicate her candidacy for the Supreme Court.

The D.C. Circuit judge is near the top of the very short list to replace Stephen Breyer; indeed, she is widely seen as the front-runner. Just as Brett Kavanaugh was once a law clerk for Anthony Kennedy and replaced him on the Supreme Court, Jackson once clerked for Breyer. A federal district-court judge since 2013, she was elevated last year to the D.C. Circuit, a court long treated by both parties as a farm team for Supreme Court picks. Former D.C. Circuit judges nominated to the Court include Kavanaugh, Merrick Garland, John Roberts, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Clarence Thomas, Douglas Ginsburg, Robert Bork, and Antonin Scalia. She just published her first D.C. Circuit opinion.

The firestorm over Joe Biden’s unpopular pledge to exclude everyone but African-American women from consideration for his first Supreme Court nomination has put Jackson and the other short-listers under a microscope. There are a number of concerns with her judicial record, from her record of reversals by the D.C. Circuit as a district judge to her turgid writing style.

But the timing of the nomination presents a more serious and polarizing issue: Harvard University’s policy of race discrimination against Asian students, which is currently being challenged in a lawsuit pending before the Supreme Court, in tandem with a parallel case involving the University of North Carolina. The parties to the case have just submitted a briefing schedule that would put the case over onto the fall 2022 calendar — after Breyer has left the Court. If Jackson were nominated and confirmed by October, she could potentially be in a position to hear the case.

We’re All Whoopi Goldberg Now Who sounds off in ignorance? These days, who doesn’t? By Rebecca Sugar

https://www.wsj.com/articles/were-all-whoopi-goldberg-now-anti-semitism-jews-holocaust-hitler-race-religion-extermination-the-view-11643820936?mod=opinion_lead_pos7

“Who speaks with presumed authority and moral superiority but next to no knowledge? In our culture, that would be everyone with a Twitter account, an iPhone, a classroom full of students, an election coming up, or a TV show. Our entire culture is marinated in people mindlessly mouthing off simply because they have an audience. Everyone is Whoopi Goldberg in his own small way.”

It was a bad moment when Whoopi Goldberg asserted on “The View” that the Holocaust wasn’t about race but about “man’s inhumanity to man.” Her comment, limited by her understanding of the American black-white binary of race, was historically uninformed. Hitler identified Jews as an inferior race and specifically targeted them for extermination. Nazi ideas were deeply influenced by Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816-82), who believed Germanic “Aryans” were superior to all other whites and nonwhites alike.

Adding to Ms. Goldberg’s confusion, and to the anger her words have generated, was her assertion that Jews were and are “white.”

Eric Adams Seems Serious About Crime. Is Biden? The president meets the new mayor in New York as the city buries its second police officer in a week. By Heather Mac Donald

https://www.wsj.com/articles/eric-adams-serious-about-crime-is-biden-new-york-police-nypd-attacks-black-civilian-shooting-violent-crime-mora-rivera-11643833722?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

President Biden will meet with New York City Mayor Eric Adams Thursday, in a belated acknowledgment of the violent crime surge that began with the George Floyd riots of 2020. Mr. Biden arrives in New York following the second funeral for a policeman in less than a week. Officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora were responding to a domestic-violence call at a Harlem apartment on Jan. 21. A man emerged from a bedroom, shooting, and continued to shoot Rivera and Mora as they lay on the ground, in what a police source calls an “execution.” Rivera, 22, died at the scene; Mora, 27, a bullet lodged in his brain, was taken off life support four days later.

Such ambush attacks on officers were up 115% nationwide in 2021, the National Fraternal Order of Police reported. All told, 73 officers were intentionally killed in 2021, the highest number since 1995 (apart from the 9/11 attacks) and at least a 56% increase over 2020. This January’s casualties included a Houston-area corporal gunned down during a car stop before he even got out of his cruiser; a St. Louis officer who had been following a car connected to a homicide and who was critically shot in the abdomen; a Milwaukee County deputy shot seven times by a suspect fleeing a car stop; and three Houston officers shot during a vehicle pursuit. On Dec. 16 in Baltimore, Officer Keona Holley was assassinated with two bullets to the head while sitting alone in her patrol car at 1.30 a.m.

Mr. Biden will want to talk about gun control and federal funding for social services and police hiring. Expect him to ignore the root cause of record-breaking violence—the demonization of law enforcement, to which he has contributed. During his presidential campaign, Mr. Biden asserted that black parents were right to fear for their children’s lives at the hands of the police. On April 12, 2021, the president tweeted about the need to address the “trauma that Black America experiences every day” from police shootings. On Oct. 16, during the National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service in Washington, he lamented that the promise of “equal and impartial justice” was denied in “too many communities—black and brown” and that too many families “are grieving unnecessary losses of their sons, their daughters, their fathers, their brothers” from police violence.

‘No’ on Sarah Bloom Raskin Biden’s appointee for Fed vice chairman is intent on destroying fossil fuels, no matter the economic cost. By Tim Stewart and Kathleen Sgamma

https://www.wsj.com/articles/sarah-bloom-raskin-federal-reserve-vice-chair-supervision-nomination-confirmation-oil-gas-energy-prices-biden-11643833586?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

These are precarious times for the American economy. Inflation has reached generational highs while the stock market is experiencing its most significant pullback since March 2020. As it responds, the Federal Reserve is walking a financial tightrope: Raise interest rates too little and inflation gets worse; raise interest rates too much and the economy crashes. But while central bankers are trying to maintain their balance, President Biden is cutting the rope.

Last month the president nominated Sarah Bloom Raskin, a former Obama financial regulator, to serve as the Fed’s new vice chairman for supervision. The Federal Reserve’s mission, as outlined by Congress, is explicitly nonpolitical. Good monetary policy requires the Fed’s leaders to set partisanship and personal preferences aside. But judging by her past public statements, Ms. Raskin would have a hard time doing that.

A hallmark of Ms. Raskin’s career has been her vendetta against U.S. energy producers—a vendetta she likely plans to take with her to the Fed. Last summer she advocated using the Fed’s stress tests to penalize banks that serve fossil-fuel companies. She has also urged the Fed to use its risk-based capital standards to drive capital away from oil and natural-gas firms toward “sustainable investments.” She has even gone so far as to suggest that the Fed should de-bank energy companies by establishing portfolio or concentration limits for banks on “high-emission assets.”

JAMES AGRESTI:CENSOR THIS-SCIENCE SAYS MASK MANDATES DON’T WORK

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/02/03/censor-this-science-says-mask-mandates-dont-work/

Allegations that “masks work” and “don’t cause harm” have been enforced by governments and corporations around the world for more than 18 months through arrests, firings, censorship, fines, and denial of access to schools, supermarkets, hospitals, streets, and other public spaces. This has made it virtually impossible for many people to live without complying with mask mandates.

In recent weeks, however, more medical scholars and media outlets are coming to grips with facts about masks that Just Facts has been documenting for more than a year and painstakingly compiled in a September 2021 article sourced with more than 50 peer-reviewed science journals. Here’s a sample of people who are speaking up about the facts and their implications:

Dr. Vinay Prasad – an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco – has written an article that examines the scientific evidence for masking children and concludes that:

“Most of the masks worn by most kids for most of the pandemic have likely done nothing to change the velocity or trajectory of the virus.”
“There are downsides to face coverings for pupils and students, including detrimental impacts on communication in the classroom.”
“Masking is now little more than an appealing delusion.”
Decisions to mask schoolchildren are “ignorant, cruel, fearful, and cowardly.”

Amnesty International Wants to End the Jewish State by Richard Kemp

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18199/amnesty-international-israel

Unfortunately for the inveterate peace-processors and their followers, the Arab world has moved on from their own opposition to Israel. They see the country for what it is: a source of stability and prosperity in the region. They understand the dangers of continuing Palestinian intransigence and animosity and have denied them a veto on progress — a veto that Amnesty and its fellow Israel rejectionists want to see reinstated.

This report will also provoke increased violence, abuse and boycotts against Jews in Israel and Jews who support Israel in the diaspora, in an era where antisemitic attacks are already at a high point and on the rise. That may not be Amnesty’s aim in producing this twisted document, but they cannot be so blind as to fail to see its bloody consequences, which have played out over decades following similar distorted reports, debates, resolutions and media fabrications.

The definition of antisemitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) includes: “Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor”. The British government has signed up to the IHRA definition. Amnesty is based in the UK and the UK police should now investigate it for spreading these grievous antisemitic lies.

The latest grotesque exhibition of anti-Israel vitriol among NGOs is this week’s publication of a report by Amnesty International that recycles tired, repeatedly disproven yet deliberately provocative antisemitic tropes and accusations of racism. This from an organization that was itself last year branded as “systemically racist”.

The title of the report, “Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and crime against humanity”, is not only a blatant and unsubstantiated lie but also an insult to black South Africans who suffered so horrifically under a genuinely apartheid regime. Few will read this 200+ page diatribe of falsehoods, distortions and half-truths, but many will see and absorb its title, which has already been plastered greedily across left-leaning newspapers and disseminated to millions in social media. The BBC, for example, trumpeted “Israel’s policies against Palestinians amount to apartheid” in an online article, giving full weight to Amnesty’s claims, quoting several people who support them, but allowing only the briefest opposing view from the Israeli government at the end.

Tom Cotton Freezes Confirmation of DOJ Nominees Over Failure to Address Antifa Riots By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/02/tom-cotton-freezes-confirmation-of-doj-nominees-over-failure-to-address-antifa-riots/

At least eight of Joe Biden’s nominations for the Department of Justice have been placed on hold by Senator Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), due to the Department’s failure to answer Cotton’s questions about its inaction over the Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots of 2020.

As reported by Fox News, Cotton’s criticisms have focused specifically on the DOJ’s failure to properly defend a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, which ended up under siege by far-left domestic terrorists on a daily basis throughout 2020 and even into 2021. Cotton has already sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland pointing out that, on top of letting the courthouse itself be attacked, the DOJ has not offered any legal assistance to several U.S. Marshals who have been sued for defending the courthouse against rioters.

“These courageous officers were attacked by left-wing street militants with weapons such as mortar fire, ball bearings, and blinding lasers,” Cotton’s letter reads in part. “A refusal to represent these Deputy Marshals would violate the Department’s long-standing practice — not to mention its moral duty — to defend law-enforcement officers when they’re sued for actions in the line of duty.”

Cotton imposed a deadline of 3:00 PM EST on Tuesday for the Department to provide him with a “satisfactory answer.” When the Department failed to respond in time, he followed through on his threat to use his role on the Senate Judiciary Committee to block multiple nominations to the DOJ. Of the eight nominees, four are U.S. attorney nominees currently waiting on full Senate votes, two are U.S. attorney nominees still waiting to be approved by the committee, and the remaining two are U.S. Marshal nominees also waiting for the committee vote. Although they cannot be delayed indefinitely by a single senator, Cotton’s actions could see these nominations delayed by weeks.