POLITICS Comments turned off

RINO Studies What happened when California replaced a Dem governor with “girly man” Schwarzenegger. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on September 28th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/rino-studies-lloyd-billingsley/

With aid from the postal service, illegal voters, and an audit-proof print-your-own-ballot scheme, Gavin Newsom remains at the helm in California. This outcome invites a look back at 2003, when Californians succeeded in replacing a Democrat governor, and what that might mean going forward.

Under Gray Davis, a former assemblyman and state controller, bands were adopting names such as “The Rolling Blackouts.” On October 7, 2003, 55.4 percent of Californians opted to remove Davis and replace him with actor Arnold Schwarzenegger. With 48.58 percent of the vote, he prevailed over more than 100 candidates, including actor Gary Coleman, Arianna Huffington, and pornographer Larry Flint.

The triumphant Schwarzenegger posed with a broom and promised to clean house. He declared war on government employee unions and promised to “blow up the boxes”—the maze of boards and commissions that serve as soft landing spots for washed-up politicians. For the “Governator,” it was just another acting job.

The star of Conan the Barbarian, The Terminator, and Kindergarten Cop quickly abandoned reform and became a strategic ally of left-wing Democrats. Like Harry Tasker’s terrorist foes in True Lies, they were “all bad.”

After Bay Area voters booted State Senator Carole Migden, known for verbally abusing her own staff, Schwarzenegger appointed the Democrat to the waste-management board at $132,000 a year. The Governator, a self-described fiscal conservative, was also a pal of Democrat insider Robert Klein, the wealthy real-estate developer who created the California Housing Finance Agency (CHFA) in 1973. Klein was the backer of the 2004 Proposition 71, which sought $3 billion for embryonic stem cell research.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tragedy, Therapy, and the Challenge of Jihad The cost of our therapeutic delusions and cultural arrogance. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on September 28th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/tragedy-therapy-and-challenge-jihad-bruce-thornton/

After a year of righteous anger and renewed patriotism, post-9/11 America returned to many of the dysfunctional orthodoxies and bad received wisdom that had helped pave the way for al Qaeda’s success. Foreign policy in particular quickly shifted from punitive kinetic realism to enhance our prestige and create deterrence, to nation-building idealism and cringing “diplomatic outreach.” But this “rules-based international order” foreign-policy thinking itself was a consequence of a long shift in Western culture from tragic realism to therapeutic idealism that permeates our culture and accounts for many of its utopian fantasies.

Twenty years later, the debacle in Afghanistan shows that when it comes to Islam, we are still crippled by our therapeutic delusions.

The tragic view of human life derives from both our Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian roots. It can be summed up in a line from Euripides: “To suffer is necessity for mortals.” We are beings driven by destructive passions and impulses, yet possessing as well conscious minds and free will. We live in a hostile natural world indifferent to our pain and suffering. We are bound by time and vulnerable to change and the consequence of choices that we can’t foresee. Our world is defined by those limits, and no human effort, no philosophy, no social or political order we create can transcend them or our destructive passions.

Modernity is defined by its claims to correct this tragic world through human knowledge, technology, and the progressive improvement of humanity by eliminating those tragic constants that create our misery and suffering. Educate people to know their true best interests, remove or reform tyrannical governments, provide adequate nutrition and health-care, and create freedom and prosperity, then people will become peaceful, free, and tolerant. Pain, suffering, the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” injustice, bigotry, cruelty, hunger, and even emotional pain caused by our own bad choices––remove these tragic conditions of human existence and we can create heaven on earth.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Biden Administration Blocks Rescue of Persecuted Christians from Afghanistan Just as the Obama administration did to the Christians of Syria. Raymond Ibrahim

Posted By on September 28th, 2021

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/09/biden-administration-blocks-rescue-persecuted-raymond-ibrahim/

The Biden administration is preventing the rescue of persecuted Christian minorities from the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, where they face certain and likely gruesome death.

This information surfaced on August 26, 2021, during an interview between Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson on Fox News.  Through his charity, the Nazarene Fund, Beck had managed to charter planes to airlift 5,100 Christians out of Afghanistan and into neighboring nations.  Before long, however, U.S. officials intervened and prevented the escape of a batch of 500 Christians, mostly women and children, who were ordered outside of the airport’s protection zone:  “I have pictures of them pleading to get back through the gate,” Beck continued:

And then I have pictures of blood and body parts and nothing but death in that same area [where they were confined].  We believe that our State Department is directly responsible…  I don’t know how many [of these 500 Christians] survived.  The State Department has blocked us every step of the way.  The State Department and the White House have been the biggest problem.  Everyone else, everyone else, has been working together, putting aside differences and trying to get these people to safety.  The State Department and the White House have blocked us every single step of the way.  In fact, an ambassador was called in Macedonia last night and told not to accept any of these people, as we were trying to get them off of the tarmac here, to keep the airport flowing, and getting these Christians out. We haven’t really been able to move anybody for about 12 hours.  Our mission is now changing greatly.  We have to send people into even greater danger to try to smuggle these Christians out, who are marked not just for death, but to be set on fire alive because they’re converted Christians.

Beck, it should be noted, is not exaggerating.  According to one recent report, “Taliban militants are even pulling people off public transport and killing them on the spot if they’re Christians.”  Similarly, any Afghan caught with a Bible app on their phone is executed.  “How we survive daily only God knows,” a Christian Afghani said earlier this year on condition of anonymity.  “But we are tired of all the death around us.”

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Schadenfreude to start the week: Biden and the Dems’ plans are collapsing By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on September 28th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/schadenfreude_to_start_the_week_biden_and_the_dems_plans_are_collapsing.htmlTop Articles By

Only eight months into the Biden presidency, disaster looms for the Democrats, and boy, do they deserve every bit of humiliation and voter repudiation that looks to be in prospect.  Yes, it is almost fourteen months until the midterm election gives the public a chance to correct the electoral results that were proclaimed as genuine, and that’s an eternity in politics.  But two factors give me a fair degree of confidence that the trend we see now will continue and accelerate:

Biden is not going to get more coherent.  He is visibly declining, the victim of his pathologically status-seeking wife, who surely realized that his ongoing dementia made him unsuitable for office.  And his potential replacement is so repulsive that Vice President Harris is kept hidden from the pubic as much as possible.
With the slimmest of congressional vote margins, the Dems have committed themselves to a far-reaching transformation demanded by the far-left faction of the party that would spell doom for the few remaining non-extremists in the party.

Biden’s polls are collapsing.  Becket Adams in the WashEx:

Only 43% of respondents in a survey conducted between Sept. 13–19 believe the phrase “mentally sharp” describes Biden “well.”

This represents an 11-point drop from March, when Pew found 54% of respondents said “mentally sharp” was a fitting descriptor for the president.

On top of the border crisis, cratering approval numbers, infighting among congressional Democrats, incompetent federal health officials bumbling their way through the coronavirus pandemic, and the chaotic, disorderly withdrawal from Afghanistan, there’s also a growing consensus the president is not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Rasmussen finds Trump beating Biden by ten points in a hypothetical rematch.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Xi’s desperate roll of the dice By Peter Skurkiss

Posted By on September 28th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/09/xis_desperate_roll_of_the_dice.html

Wall Street and the big international corporations have suddenly awakened to the threat China poses.  And no, it has nothing to do with the danger China poses to American national security, the massive theft of U.S. intellectual property, the release of the Wuhan virus on the world, or even its use of Uighur Muslims in forced labor.  Rather, it has to do with the threat to Wall Street profits.  This is what had George Soros criticizing BlackRock’s recent investments in China and the Wall Street Journal clutching its pearls.  Here’s the backdrop to the story.

As the WSJ put it, Xi is trying to forcibly get the country back to the vision of Mao Zedong, who saw capitalism as mere transition phase on the road to socialism.  Accordingly, Xi’s plans call for more government intervention in the economy.  Since he has consolidated power, the Chinese president is putting the entire state apparatus behind making private companies serve the state.  Also, private business and the wealthy are now being “encouraged” to donate more of their wealth and profits toward Xi’s “common prosperity” goals.  Alibaba alone has pledged the equivalent of $15.5 billion.  And Western investments in China are not being ignored by Xi.

For foreign businesses, the campaign likely means more turbulence ahead. Western companies always had to toe the party line in China, but they are increasingly asked to do more, including sharing personal user data and accepting party members as employees. They could be pressed to sacrifice more profits to help Beijing achieve its goals.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The United States and the West are in the Grip of Delusional Madness By Steve McCann

Posted By on September 28th, 2021

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/09/the_united_states_and_the_west_are_in_the_grip_of_delusional_madness_.html

The politically motivated and unprecedented overreaction to a virus with a 99.5% survival rate was launched in March of 2020, thus unleashing what can best be described as a once-in-a-century fiasco. Nineteen months later it is impossible to look at the United States and the world and not conclude that this country and much of the West is in the grip, not of a virus, but of delusional madness and malevolence.

The governing elites have been so successful in propagandizing and fear-mongering the populace in many western nations, including the United States, that the virus has made far too many people blind to the madness as they wallow in anxiety, depression, and hopelessness — deliberately and with forethought brought about by these malevolent cabals.

The noted British historian Kenneth Clark in his book and television series Civilisation said that empires fall not just to barbarians and other external enemies, but more so on account of exhaustion and loss of confidence within.  He warned of the evolutionary process of destruction of self-confidence leading to exhaustion and culminating in the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity. As any civilized nation, in order to survive, requires confidence in the society in which one lives as well as belief in its philosophy and in its laws and confidence in one’s own mental powers.

In the United States, the left-wing dominated ruling class, determined to transform the nation into a one-party oligarchy, has long focused on demoralizing and fomenting hopelessness among the American people so they would be amenable to this transformation. In a society already beset with self-doubt and disquiet about the future, they gaslighted the populace through the gross and near-criminal exaggeration of the threat of Covid-19, combined with manipulated data, unprecedented societal and economic lockdowns, social distancing, mandatory masking and now de facto vaccination passports. Thus, exacerbating the feeling of hopelessness among the citizenry.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s Vaccine Mandate Gets More Pointless Every Day

Posted By on September 28th, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/28/bidens-vaccine-mandate-gets-more-pointless-every-day/

Three weeks ago, President Joe Biden told America he’d ordered his regulators to draw up “emergency” workplace rules requiring vaccinations for everyone working for big companies. Those rules have yet to emerge. And they might not emerge for another month and a half.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration announced on Friday – which is the day politicians choose to release news when they want minimal coverage – that federal contractors will have until Dec. 8 to comply with that part of his mandate. More than two months from now.

In other words, Biden hasn’t managed to get his federal mandate implemented yet, and won’t for some time. What he has managed to achieve is dissension, confusion, lawsuits, and worker shortages – as well as a steady decline in daily vaccination rates. (See the chart below.)Mark it down as another Biden “success.”

Biden directed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to create those “emergency” rules. Businesses will need them to know who can be exempted from the mandate and why, what the penalty will be for failing to comply, paperwork requirements, etc. These businesses will also need to know that they aren’t violating the Americans with Disabilities Act while enforcing the Biden vaccine mandate.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s New Spending Whopper From trillions to zero in a Beltway minute. By James Freeman

Posted By on September 28th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-new-spending-whopper-11632780042?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Where have all the “fact checkers” gone? On Saturday night President Joe Biden took to social media to repeat his new multi-trillion-dollar falsehood. And much of the press corps has nothing to offer in response but approbation.

A Journal editorial published online Friday night noted the latest Biden tall tale about his effort to enact a historic spending binge, estimated to cost $3.5 trillion, but perhaps as much as $5 trillion or more:

The agenda that was being sold a few weeks ago as the modern equivalent of the New Deal or Great Society is actually so modest it doesn’t cost a thing.
“Every time I hear this is going to cost A, B, C, or D—the truth is, based on the commitment that I made, it’s going to cost nothing,” President Biden said at a press conference Friday, trying to restore momentum to the reconciliation package, “because we’re going to raise the revenue.”
We didn’t know that when you pay for something that makes it free… And so a talking point is born, or at least trying to be: The largest tax increase as a share of GDP and the largest entitlement expansion since the 1960s costs nothing. And money grows on trees.

Instead of correcting his multi-trillion-dollar whopper, the President then took to Twitter on Saturday night to falsely claim:

My Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars.

One does not need to venture beyond Mr. Biden’s own website to see that the costs of his agenda are enormous, and therefore that this claim is false.

The Biden tweet then made another claim which essentially refuted the first one—acknowledging that there will be significant costs, and that taxpayers will bear them:

Instead of wasting money on tax breaks, loopholes, and tax evasion for big corporations and the wealthy, we can make a once-in-a-generation investment in working America.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger :Congress – the co-equal and systematic ally of Israel

Posted By on September 28th, 2021

https://bit.ly/3uii0cw

Presidents propose and Congress disposes

On September 23, 2021, the US House of Representatives voted 420:9 to replenish the Israeli-developed defensive “Iron Dome” missiles, which are increasingly manufactured – and eventually exported – by the US defense company Raytheon, that benefits from the battle-tested “Israeli laboratory.”

The overwhelming vote reflects Congressional realization that the “Iron Dome”:  

*Enhances Israel’s posture of deterrence, which is critical to the survival of all pro-US Arab regimes and minimization of regional instability;
*Reduces the need for full-scale Israeli wars on Palestinian and Islamic terrorism;
*Provides an alternative to Israeli military ground-operations against Palestinian terrorists, which would entail substantial Israeli and Palestinian fatalities;
*Represents joint US-Israel interests, militarily and technologically, in the face of mutual threats (e.g., Islamic terrorism) and mutual challenges (e.g., developing world-class, game-changing technologies).  
*Constitutes another example of the systematic support by Congress of enhanced US-Israel cooperation.

The decisive role played by Congress in the replenishment of the “Iron Dome” underscores the cardinal rule of the US political system: The President proposes, but Congress disposes. 

The involvement of Senators and House Representatives in foreign policy and national security-related issues has surged since the Vietnam War, Watergate and Iran Gate scandals, the dismantling of the USSR (which transformed the world from a bi-polar to a multi-polar) and rapidly-expanding globalization.   

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Climate Policy Meets Cold Reality in Europe The rush to renewables causes severe energy price spikes and shortages. Biden’s policies would do the same in the U.S. by Allysia Finley

Posted By on September 28th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-policy-reality-europe-energy-costs-gas-coal-11632754849?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

European leaders at the United Nations last week applauded themselves as they doubled down on their pledges to slash CO2 emissions. And Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the U.K. “will lead by example, keeping the environment on the global agenda and serving as a launch pad for a global green industrial revolution.” Such vows of carbon chastity are, to say the least, ironic as Europe grapples with a severe energy shortage and surging prices wrought by its green industrial revolution.

In the past decade the U.K. and Europe have shut down hundreds of coal plants, and Britain has only two remaining. Spain shut down half of its coal plants last summer. European countries have spent trillions of dollars subsidizing renewables, which last year for the first time exceeded fossil fuels as a share of electricity production.

But renewables don’t provide reliable power around the clock, and wind power this summer has waned across Europe and in the U.K., forcing them to turn to gas and coal for backup power. Yet demand for these fossil fuels is also surging across Asia and South America, where drought has crimped hydropower. Manufacturers there are also consuming more energy to supply Western countries with goods.

Japan has become especially dependent on liquefied natural gas imports since it shut down most of its nuclear power plants after Fukushima in 2011. Even China has been forced to ration electricity to energy-hungry aluminum smelters because of a coal power shortfall. This has sent global aluminum prices soaring.

Increased global demand has caused the price of coal to triple and the price of natural gas to increase fivefold over the past year. Europe’s cap-and-trade scheme has pushed prices even higher. Under the program, manufacturers and power suppliers must buy carbon credits on an open trading market to offset their emissions. The price of credits has spiked this year as demand for them from coal plants and other manufacturers has increased while government regulators have tightened supply.

Russia is exploiting Europe’s energy difficulties by reducing gas deliveries, perhaps to pressure Germany to complete certification of its Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which bypasses Ukraine. Russia’s Gazprom has booked only a third of the available transportation capacity through its Yamal pipeline for October and no additional deliveries via its Ukraine pipeline. Europe has become ever more dependent on Russia—the world’s second largest gas producer, after the U.S.—for energy because the U.K. and Germany have banned hydraulic fracturing, letting their rich gas shale resources go to waste. Meantime, the Netherlands is shutting down Europe’s biggest gas field.

In short, all of Europe’s green chickens are coming home to roost. Several U.K. retail electricity providers have collapsed in recent weeks because of the surging price of gas. Energy experts warn that some German power suppliers are in danger of going insolvent. Germany’s electricity prices, which were already the highest in Europe because of heavy reliance on renewables, have more than doubled since February.