Displaying posts published in

October 2021

Whitmer Case Exposes Pattern of FBI Misconduct The conduct of FBI assets in the Whitmer case probably is not an outlier but rather, as increasingly appears to be the case, standard operating procedure at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2021/09/30/whitmer-case-exposes-pattern-of-fbi-misconduct/

As the first shoe related to the FBI’s involvement in the breach of the U.S. Capitol dropped—the New York Times last week reported at least two informants tied to the Proud Boys were working with the FBI before, during, and after January 6—another high-profile case continues to expose the bureau’s corrupt role in what the government also considers an act of domestic terrorism: a concocted plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer from her vacation cottage in October 2020.

In fact, Joe Biden’s Justice Department has tied the two events together in an attempt to convince the public that right-wing militiamen, ostensibly loyal to Donald Trump, pose a looming threat to the country. In a recent sentencing memorandum for one man who pleaded guilty in the Whitmer case, government prosecutors wrote, “as the Capitol riots demonstrated, an inchoate conspiracy can turn into a grave substantive offense on short notice.”

Especially when at least a dozen FBI agents and informants take charge.

The Whitmer caper came to light when six men were arrested on federal charges of “conspiracy to commit kidnapping,” a felony punishable by life in prison. (A superseding indictment filed in April added a charge of domestic terrorism to the five remaining defendants. Several others face state charges.)

Headlines blared the shocking news just as early voting was underway in the crucial swing state. Team Biden and the Democrats made the most of this timely political gift: “There is a through line from President Trump’s dog whistles and tolerance of hate, vengeance, and lawlessness to plots such as this one. He is giving oxygen to the bigotry and hate we see on the march in our country,” Biden said in a statement on October 9.

During a press conference the same day, Whitmer suggested Trump was responsible. “When our leaders meet with, encourage, and or fraternize with domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions. They are complicit.”

Blinken Gives Chinese Government His Congrats By Jimmy Quinn

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/blinken-gives-chinese-government-his-congrats/

The well wishes for the 72nd anniversary of the PRC come a month after Beijing’s new envoy told U.S. officials to ‘please shut up.’

S ecretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday congratulated China on the 72nd anniversary of the founding of the state controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, the latest in a flurry of activity that could undermine the Biden administration’s efforts to address Chinese atrocities and malign activity around the world.

The statement’s wording particularly could inflame worries that officials are willing to make concessions on core issues in order to jumpstart stalled cooperation.

“On behalf of the United States of America, I would like to extend our congratulations to the people of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the country celebrates its National Day on October 1. As the United States seeks to work cooperatively to solve the challenges we all face, we wish the people of the PRC peace, happiness, and prosperity over the coming year,” Blinken said.

In addition, China’s newly arrived ambassador to the United States, Qin Gang, tweeted a message on Tuesday evening thanking Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Kritenbrink and others for joining a virtual reception at the Chinese embassy.

Although Kritenbrink, who was confirmed to his role this month, did not appear on video, a State Department spokesperson confirmed that he “sent digital greetings to the Embassy extending his congratulations to the People’s Republic of China on their national day and wishing the people of the PRC peace, happiness, and prosperity.”

Like Blinken’s own statement, Kritenbrink’s is fairly anodyne, but it’s worth asking whether the department should have sent its greetings at all. For one, Qin arrived in Washington with a stridently anti-U.S. message. As National Review exclusively reported, during a virtual welcome event attended by members of the National Committee on U.S.–China Relations at the end of August, Qin was asked how the two countries could rebuild their relationship. “If we cannot resolve our differences, please shut up,” he advised U.S. officials, in remarks that shocked meeting participants and indicated the hard line he will take in this post.

Durham Issues New Subpoenas in Probe of FBI Russia Investigation, Targets Clinton Campaign Law Firm By Brittany Bernstein

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/durham-issues-new-subpoenas-including-to-clinton-campaign-law-firm/

Special Counsel John Durham, the attorney tapped by the Trump administration to audit the Russia investigation, has reportedly handed down a new set of subpoenas, including to a law firm with ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. 

The grand jury subpoenas for documents were issued earlier this month, according to CNN, after Durham charged Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann for allegedly knowingly making a false statement to the FBI.

Investigators from the special counsel’s office are seeking additional documents from Sussmann’s former law firm, Perkins Coie, an indication that Durham may be looking to add to Sussmann’s charges or to bring cases against other defendants.

Durham was reportedly investigating whether Sussmann lied to the FBI regarding who — if anyone — he was representing when he told the Bureau about communications between the Trump Organization and the Kremlin-connected Russian bank Alfa Bank.

The indictment against Sussmann states that the former federal prosecutor lied to top FBI lawyer James Baker in a meeting on September 19, 2016. At that time, Sussmann presented data and analysis from cybersecurity researchers who suspected the Trump Organization was using a secret server to communicate with Alfa Bank.

The secret server theory was ultimately dismissed and never appeared in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report.

Durham uncovered discrepancies between Sussmann’s congressional testimony and his September interview with Baker. Before Congress, Sussmann testified that he was working on the Alfa Bank project for an unnamed cybersecurity expert, a contradiction of his claims to Baker that he wasn’t working for any specific client.

Meanwhile, Perkins Coie’s internal billing records obtained by Durham show that Sussmann billed hours spent on the Alfa Bank project to Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

Lies About Christopher Columbus Some reflections on Columbus Day — about defending our civilization. Armando Simón

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/we-havent-been-invaded-barbarians-armando-sim%C3%B3n/

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped.
—-George Orwell, 1984

Columbus Day is almost here (Monday, October 11) and we can expect leftists to, once again, crawl out to engage in their periodic acts of vandalism towards Columbus’ statues while feeling self-righteous, just as they have with statues of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Charles Dickens, the Virgin Mary, Gandhi, Churchill, Jefferson, Miguel de Cervantes, and many others, while conservatives do absolutely nothing to stop them other than shake their heads in disapproval and scratch their rear ends. In Providence, the vandalism was even done by a middle school teacher, which is not too surprising considering the state of education (notice that the desecration of the statues is not reported by the national media except to gloat over the Confederate statues).

And “punishment” for those acts of vandalism? A slap on the wrist. When Mike Forcia was told by the police that he would be charged with criminal damage to property for destroying a statue of Columbus, the AIM barbarian flippantly said, “I’m willing to take that.”

In regards to Churchill’s statue, a British woman declared, “Some say that he’s a racist; some that say he’s a hero. I haven’t personally met him.” These are the type of ignorant savages that are trying to reshape society in their image.

Yet, equally depressing—actually, worse—is that the few defenders appear to be equally ignorant, and have accepted the defamation, arguing that regardless of his “crimes,” Columbus’ exploratory achievements are praiseworthy.

Leftists’ animus towards Columbus is accompanied by accusations of genocide, rape, and mutilation of natives (however, he has not—yet—been accused of not providing transgender bathrooms in his ships). There is just one problem.

They are all a lie. Total fabrications—deliberate fabrications.

Some of the lies are so breathtakingly stupid as to leave one open-mouthed, such as the claims by some Native Americans that Columbus carried out genocide in this country, that he was responsible for “war crimes” committed in North America. State Rep. Rachel Talbot-Ross (D) of Maine called him “a war criminal.” So they have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day in a blatant act of cultural appropriation.

Columbus never set foot in North America.

Biden’s ‘Evacuation’ Was a Taliban Human Trafficking Scheme The Biden administration is covering up its final crime in Afghanistan. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/10/bidens-evacuation-was-taliban-human-trafficking-daniel-greenfield/

After Biden evacuated tens of thousands of Afghan “translators”, refugee resettlement groups are desperately looking for translators to translate to the translators.

Why do Afghan translators, who were supposed to be able to translate from English to their native language, need help from translators?

It’s because they’re not translators.

In the last two years, Front Page Magazine ran multiple articles like How the ‘Interpreter’ Scam Brought 75,000 Iraqis and Afghans to America and ‘Saving Afghan Interpreters’ is a Scam That Would Bring 100,000 Afghans to U.S. exposing the “translator” scam. Now tens of thousands of Afghans are arriving in this country and they need translators because they don’t speak English.

As I previously pointed out, there were more Afghan “translators” applying for visas than there were American soldiers for them to translate for. But the vast majority of SIV visa applicants were never translators. The number of actual translators, Afghans embedded with U.S. forces who risked their lives by working in the field, was miniscule and was its own special category.

But by the end, almost any Afghan who worked for any U.S. organization could apply for a visa.

Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan retreat made that existing scam so much worse because he didn’t evacuate the approved SIV visa holders who might have actually worked for the U.S.

State Department sources have said that the majority of SIVs were actually left behind.

The Biden administration claims to have evacuated 124,000 people, of them only 5,500 Americans, from Afghanistan. 60,000 have been brought into the United States. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas admitted that only 1,800 are SIV holders, another 8,000 are citizens or have green cards.

That leaves over 50,000 Afghans who were just brought here with no legal basis.

Covid Will Soon Be Endemic, Thank Goodness Widespread immunity, vaccinated and natural, will bring control and a full return to normal. By Monica Gandhi

https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-endemic-vaccines-measles-smallpox-pandemic-coronavirus-11633015316?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Gandhi is an infectious-disease physician and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

Covid-19 will soon become endemic—and the sooner the better.

An epidemic causes widespread disease in a region. A pandemic affects multiple countries or continents. A disease becomes endemic when it is manageable—defined, for instance, as not causing an undue burden on hospitals or other healthcare resources—but is unlikely to be eliminated because of the pathogen’s inherent properties.

Australia, China and New Zealand have pursued “zero Covid” policies that aim at elimination (reducing incidence in a region to zero) or even eradication (world-wide elimination). That goal is unrealistic. Smallpox is the only human disease that has ever been eradicated. The smallpox virus has had four properties that made it eradicable: the lack of an animal reservoir, clear and distinctive signs and symptoms, a short period of infectiousness, and both lifelong natural immunity after survival and a highly effective vaccine.

SARS-CoV-2, by contrast, is unlikely to be eradicated. It has animal reservoirs, a high level of transmissibility (especially of the Delta variant), and overlapping symptoms with other respiratory diseases. It has, as well, a prolonged period of infectiousness, caused by its propensity to spread from asymptomatic or presymptomatic carriers.

That’s why reducing the disease from epidemic to endemic is the best case—one that will allow a full return to normal. Many ineradicable infections are controlled by vaccination and treatment. Measles, a highly transmissible respiratory virus, created high levels of immunity among adults who were exposed as children. But until a vaccine was developed in 1963, some nonimmune adults died every year. Pertussis (whooping cough) is caused by a highly contagious bacterium (with syndromes that overlap some respiratory viruses), but it is controlled in the U.S. through vaccination of children, antibiotics and other treatments. (Vaccine hesitancy among parents in the U.S., however, has led to outbreaks of both pertussis and measles over the past decade.)

Biden’s Dishonesty And Dementia Are Causing Problems For Him – And The Nation Henry I. Miller

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/09/30/bidens-dishonesty-and-dementia-are-causing-problems-for-him-and-the-nation/

As both a baseball fan and an observer of politics, I often hark back to Yogi Berra’s memorable quip, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” However, I think I nailed it in this concluding paragraph of an April article:

One thing is for certain; we can expect to see continuing validation from President (Joe) Biden of the old quip, ‘How can you tell when a politician is lying? His lips are moving.’ But in the same way that you can’t take your eyes off a train wreck in progress, it will be fascinating to see whether the salient feature of Biden’s presidency will be his mendacity or his dementia — or some incendiary admixture of the two.

It seems clear that we’re seeing the effects of both.

First, some recent examples of Biden’s ongoing unfamiliarity with the truth. His insistence that there was “unanimity” among his civilian and military advisers about the disastrous plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan and about the “success” of his border and immigration policies is patently absurd. Military leaders understand how to conduct strategic withdrawals, and our southern border leaks like a sieve. The president’s Sept. 24 comments about the costs of the massive “infrastructure” legislation favored by the administration were both ludicrous and barely coherent, both of which are current Biden trademarks:

“We talk about price tags. The – it is zero price tag on the debt.  We’re paying – we’re going to pay for everything we spend.  So they say it’s not – you know, people, understandably – ‘Well, you know, it started off at $6 trillion, now it’s $3.5 trillion. Now it’s – is it going to be $2.9? Is it …’
 
“It’s going to be zero – zero. Because in the – in that plan that I put forward – and I said from the outset – I said, ‘I’m running to change the dynamic of how the economy grows.’” 

A zero price tag? As Gerard Baker observed in a Wall Street Journal column, “The Biden bill is paid for by the largest tax increase in history. You are entitled to argue that is a cost worth paying, but you can’t argue it costs nothing.” The Babylon Bee offered this amusing take on the Biden claim:

Wife Claims $3.5 Trillion Spending Spree At Target Actually Cost $0

As Inflation Fears Rise, Biden Starts Looking For Scapegoats

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/10/01/as-inflation-fears-rise-biden-starts-looking-for-scapegoats/

You know inflation is a problem when it gets harder to find something for $1 at Dollar Tree stores. And that’s exactly what’s happening as the discount chain announced that many of its goods would carry a price of up to $1.50.

There’s been more bad news on the inflation front this week, so, naturally, Biden is looking for someone or something else to blame – other than his own economic policies.

As soon as Biden conjured up his reckless $1.9 trillion “rescue” plan, economists left and right said that pumping that much deficit-financed spending into a fast-growing economy risked sparking an inflationary spiral, to which team Biden said “nonsense.”

When prices did spike in the spring, Biden insisted that “the overwhelming consensus is it’s going to pop up a little bit and then go back down.” 

That didn’t happen. This week, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell, who’d previously dismissed inflation fears, said price increases have “been larger and longer-lasting than anticipated,” and that this will “likely remain so in coming months before moderating.” The Fed now predicts that inflation this year will be 4.2%, up from its June forecast of 3.4%.

Also this week, the London-based research firm Capital Economics said that the U.S. may be heading into an “era of higher inflation.”

A government of drunken sailors Shame on Congress and Joe Biden for their gigantic spending packages by Matt Purple

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/government-drunken-sailors-spending-debt/

It seems strange, but just two decades ago the United States government had a balanced budget. Bill Clinton had run for president as a new type of Democrat, calling for an end to the deficits that had so bedeviled George H.W. Bush.

Thanks in large part to pressure from Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress, he pulled it off. Clinton trimmed military spending and signed into law a package of tax increases. This cued haunted house noises in the parlors of center-right think tanks, but Biden also approved more conservative-friendly measures like domestic spending cuts and welfare reform. This bipartisan approach, in conjunction with a galloping economy, led to the unthinkable: budget surpluses for four fiscal years in a row.

Such were the 1990s, baby, when champagne corks were flying and tech investors would dump $10 million into fishfood.homestead.com on a dare. Let’s return now to our own time, when the fiscal scene looks more like a nuclear winter crossed with a zombie apocalypse. Congress this year is set to run up a budget deficit of $3 trillion. The national debt, meanwhile, is about $2,881,600,000,000.00. And that isn’t even accurate. I left out a zero. But who can even tell anymore? And what’s a decimal place or two between generations treading red ink?

Into this overflowed fiscal pool has come crashing the cannonball of Joe Biden’s spending program. The centerpiece of the President’s domestic agenda is another $3.5 trillion bonanza, with all the usual Democratic goodies: universal pre-K, green initiatives, adding dental and vision to Medicare, free community college, child care. And then enter a separate package to rebuild America’s infrastructure, actual retail price, $1 trillion. And then bring on another $768 billion for a Defense Department that seems to believe the Cold War never ended.

When tallied up with other Biden proposals, the total tab comes to $6 trillion. That’s more than the United States spent on World War Two and Vietnam combined. It’s about seven times the cost of the New Deal and 10 times the cost of the moon landing. It’s enough to buy 30 Jeff Bezoses and launch them all into space on separate phallic-suggestive rockets. Let’s say Biden abruptly decided that America needed to become the world’s premier cat lady. With that much money, we could purchase 60 billion cats, enough to throw off the rest of the planet’s ecosystem.

Blame Biden for the sinking infrastructure bill He forced a showdown within his own party, one that’s likely to leave him empty-handed by Amber Athey

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/republicans-infrastructure-bill-biden-democrats/

President Joe Biden, facing a crisis on the southern border, a Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, and a breakdown of relations with foreign allies, desperately needs a win on his domestic agenda. It looks increasingly unlikely, however, that the ambitious spending bills he wants passed will ever make it to his desk. The usually unified Democratic party is so fractured over the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package that it appears Speaker Nancy Pelosi no longer has the votes to pass either.

Biden is primarily to blame for negotiations going this way. He said back in June that he would not sign the infrastructure bill without the reconciliation bill, describing the bills as being in ‘tandem’. This set up the perfect showdown between the two factions within the Democratic party. Progressives warned that they wouldn’t vote for the infrastructure bill unless the reconciliation bill also had enough votes to pass. Moderates responded that they wouldn’t be bullied into supporting the reconciliation bill and demanded a standalone vote on infrastructure.

Pelosi tried to call the progressives’ bluff, scheduling a vote for the infrastructure bill — known as the ‘BIF’ — on Thursday. The progressives refused to be rolled, with at least two dozen of them promising to block the legislation; without their votes, it would likely not pass. Unless, that is, dozens of Republicans made up the gap.

Senate Republicans, some of whom helped negotiate the BIF, urged their colleagues in the House to go ahead and vote for it.

‘It’s a good bill; it’s right there for the country, so I’m encouraging Republicans to support it,’ Sen. Rob Portman said. ‘There’ll be some that have told me they will, but they’re under a lot of pressure.’