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November 2021

Looks Like Joe Biden Just Lost The New York Times

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/11/17/looks-like-joe-biden-just-lost-the-new-york-times/

His crumbling public approval rating must be troubling to President Joe Biden. But can it possibly compare to learning that the liberal mainstream media is turning on him as well?

On Tuesday, the New York Times sent an email to its morning update subscribers with the headline: “Who’s to blame for inflation?”

“It is dragging down President Biden’s approval ratings and fueling discontent among Americans,” writes senior economics correspondent Neil Irwin. “How did we get here? Who is to blame?”

We fully expected the Times to make excuses for Biden. And at first, it looks as though that is what Irwin is going to do, writing that “presidents have less control over the economy than headlines might suggest.” But then he adds that “the current situation is an exception to the rule.”

And even more remarkable is what comes next. Irwin writes:

You can draw a direct line from a specific policy decision that Biden and congressional Democrats made this past winter to some of the inflation happening now.

In designing the stimulus that Congress passed in March, Biden’s administration went big, with $1.9 trillion in pandemic relief — on top of a separate $900 billion package that passed three months earlier. Put the two together, and $2.8 trillion in federal money has been coursing through the economy this year while economic activity has trended only a few hundred billion dollars a year short of what mainstream analysts would consider full health.

The fact that the Times, along with others in the mainstream media, admits that inflation is a problem is in itself a noteworthy development, since for months it insisted that it was just a data anomaly – one that Republicans were trying to exploit for political gain.

Now, with prices for many common household goods having gone up by double digits over the past few months and no end in sight for the trend, the inflation story is impossible to ignore. 

But the fact that any one of these “news” outlets is willing to blame Biden for the inflation spiral is a truly stunning development, given they’d spent months blasting out “fact checks” that aggressively slapped down any such claim.

In April, for example, a USA Today “fact check” told readers that COVID-19 was “to blame for spike in lumber prices, not Biden.” In June, it ran another saying that “Rising gas prices due to high demand and low supply, not Biden’s policies.”

The next month, AP declared that “House GOP falsely blames Biden for gas prices.”

Illegal Immigrants Would Get $10.5 Billion From Reconciliation Bill By Steven Camarota

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/11/16/illegal_immigrants_would_get_105_billion_from_reconciliation_bill_146739.html

The budget reconciliation package pushed by Democrats creates a new expanded child tax credit (CTC) that would pay illegal immigrants some $10.5 billion next year. All immigrants with children are eligible, regardless of how they got here and whether their children are U.S.-born. This includes the roughly 600,000 unaccompanied minors and persons in family units stopped at the border in FY2021 and released into the country pending a hearing. Cash welfare to illegal immigrants is not just costly; it also encourages more illegal immigration. 

Although it is referred to as a “refundable credit,” the new CTC, like the old additional child tax credit (ACTC) it replaces, pays cash to low-income families who do not pay any federal income tax. The new program significantly increases the maximum cash payment from $1,400 per child to $3,600 for children under 6, and to $3,000 for children ages 6 to 17. After 2022, the maximum payment would be $2,000 per child, but advocates hope the much larger payments will be extended. 

In an analysis conducted in October, my colleague Karen Zeigler and I estimated that illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children would receive $8.2 billion from the new CTC. However, we had assumed that the new program, like the old ACTC, would require children claimed as dependents to have Social Security numbers (SSNs).  But reconciliation (page 1452, line 14) would permanently repeal this requirement. 

Illegal immigrants are able to receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children, who are American citizens. In the case of the old ACTC, they simply acquired an individual taxpayer identification number, which is not hard, and then claimed their payment. In practice, only illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children could receive payments under the old system, since as American citizens those U.S.-born children receive SSNs. The permanent elimination of the SSN requirement means that even illegal immigrants whose children are also illegally in the country can receive the new expanded credit.  

China claims Biden denounced ‘Taiwan independence,’ but warns US is ‘playing with fire’ Interpretation differences on one-China policy could mean more trouble in South China Sea :Caitlin McFall

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/china-biden-denounced-taiwan-independence-warns-us-playing-fire

China claimed Tuesday that President Biden denounced Taiwanese independence from the communist nation, but warned the U.S. is “playing with fire” in the South China Sea.

The new round of threats arose following an hours-long virtual summit between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping that marked the most extensive talks the world leaders have engaged in since Biden took office.

In a read-out following the talks, Chinese officials said Biden reiterated U.S. support for the one-China policy and claimed the U.S. president “does not support ‘Taiwan independence’.”

Taiwan and China have shared a complex history since the government of the Republic of China (ROC) relocated to the island in the western Pacific in 1949 amid conflict with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 

Taiwan identifies as a sovereign nation, but it is officially recognized by China, the United Nations and the U.S. as part of the one-China policy. 

China made it clear Tuesday that it has every intention of bringing the island under “complete reunification” with mainland China and threatened action if forces attempt to stop this.

“Should the separatist forces for ‘Taiwan independence’ provoke us, force our hands or even cross the red line, we will be compelled to take resolute measures,” the readout said. “On this question bearing on China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, there is no room for compromise.”

The U.S. and its western allies have backed the security of Taiwan and reports have shown the U.S. is working to shore up defenses in the Indo-Pacific as Chinese aggression in the region escalates. 

The White House did not contradict China’s claim that the U.S. continues to acknowledge the one-China principle, but the tone was far less placatory.

Biden Admin Looking to Dump Kamala Harris? Fox Reporter Given Tip to ‘Familiarize Yourself With Confirmation Process’ for Replacing a Vice President by Kristinn Taylor

https://www.lucianne.com/2021/11/17/biden_admin_looking_to_dump_kamala_harris_

Fox News Congressional reporter Chad Pergram reported Tuesday evening that he had been given a tip about Kamala Harris several weeks ago that said he should familiarize himself with the nomination process for a vice president in the House and the Senate. Pergram’s report comes after a bombshell CNN report Sunday that the White House was rife with rumors about Joe Biden contemplating nominating the flailing Harris to the Supreme Court to get her out of his administration and out of the line of succession. Jill Biden was asking about using the 25th Amendment to sideline Harris.

Supply chain for dummies: a fairy tale President Biden thinks Americans are too stupid to understand why the shelves are empty: Charles Lipson

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/supply-chain-for-dummies-a-fairy-tale/

Joe Biden cheerfully told Americans that most of them are too thick to understand what a “supply chain” is. Naturally, he understands it thoroughly. You can see with your very own eyes how well he has handled it. Since, as Joe said, you must be wondering why so many shelves are empty, I’m here to explain. Following the president’s wise advice, I will use small words and a simple story.

Let’s begin in the good ol’ days, not too long ago, when the shelves were magically full.

The story begins in a land ever so far away, where happy people worked and worked to make Christmas toys for children in Kansas.

When they finished making the toys, they placed each one in a little box and then placed lots of them in a great big box. They took that big box and many others like it to a good and sturdy ship to sail to America. Finally, after weeks at sea, the ship came close to the golden shore of California.

High up on the mast, a ship’s mate cried, “Eureka! I spy land ahoy!” and the ship sailed into a big dock near the City of Angels. But even the tallest, strongest men could not move the big boxes off the ship.

“Oh, my,” said someone on the dock. “Let’s get a hundred people together and see if we can move the boxes.” They tried and tried but the boxes still wouldn’t move. Finally, a very, very smart person came up with a good idea. “Let’s use a big crane and see if that works.”

And it did work. The big crane lifted the big boxes lift off the ship and lowered them very carefully onto the dock.

“But this is still a long way from Kansas,” sniffed one grumpy man. “The crane won’t reach that far.”

A very smart little girl said, “What about putting the boxes on top of train cars? The engineer and the conductor could take them to Kansas?”

“Oh yes,” said her friend. “Some of the other boxes could go on big trucks, too.”

Kyle Rittenhouse, Project Veritas, and the Inability to Think in Terms of Principles Those whose worldview is bereft of universally applied principles, and based solely on tribal allegiances, assume everyone else is plagued by this very deficiency. Glenn Greenwald

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/kyle-rittenhouse-project-veritas?token=

The FBI has executed a string of search warrants targeting the homes and cell phones of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and several others associated with that organization. It should require no effort to understand why it is a cause for concern that a Democratic administration is using the FBI to aggressively target an organization devoted to obtaining and reporting incriminating information about Democratic Party leaders and their liberal allies.

That does not mean the FBI investigation is inherently improper. Journalists are no more entitled than any other citizen to commit crimes. If there is reasonable cause to believe O’Keefe and his associates committed federal crimes, then an FBI investigation is warranted as it is for any other case. But there has been no evidence presented that O’Keefe or Project Veritas employees have done anything of the sort, nor any explanation provided to justify these invasive searches. That we should want and need that is self-evident: if the Trump-era FBI had executed search warrants inside the newsrooms of The New York Times and NBC News, we would be demanding evidence to prove it was legally justified. Yet virtually nothing has been provided to justify the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe and his colleagues, and the little that has been disclosed by way of justifying this makes no sense.

The FBI investigation concerns the theft last year of the diary of Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley, yet Project Veritas, while admitting they received a copy from an anonymous source, chose not to publish that diary because they were unable to verify it. Nobody and nothing thus far suggests that Project Veritas played any role in its acquisition, legal or otherwise. There is a cryptic reference in the search warrant to transmitting stolen material across state lines, but it is not illegal for journalists to receive and use material illegally acquired by a source: the most mainstream organizations spent the last month touting documents pilfered from Facebook by their heroic “whistleblower” Frances Haugen.

On Monday night, we produced an in-depth video report examining the FBI’s targeting of O’Keefe and Project Veritas and the dangers it presents (as we do for all of our Rumble videos, the transcript will soon be made available to subscribers here; for now, you can watch the video at the Rumble link or on the player below). One of the primary topics of our report was the authoritarian tactic that is typically used to justify governmental attacks on those who report news and disseminate information: namely, to decree that the target is not a real journalist and therefore has no entitlement to claim the First Amendment guarantee of a free press.

China’s Military Modernization by Judith Bergman

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17944/china-military-modernization

“[W]e are being more effectively challenged militarily today than at any…any other time in our history.” — US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, September 20, 2021.

China aims to “complete national defense and military modernization by 2035.” — Jamestown.org, March 26, 2021

China’s modernization of its military is taking place on all levels.

“The PLA [People’s Liberation Army] … seeks a force capable of winning a number of high-end regional conflicts, including the forcible unification of Taiwan, while dissuading, deterring, or defeating third-party military intervention.” — Lieutenant General Scott Berrier, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, before the Senate US Armed Services Committee, April 26, 2021.

“Hypersonic weapons, a full range of anti-satellite systems, plus cyber, electronic warfare, and challenging air to air missiles are all part of the growing inventory of Chinese capabilities.” — US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, September 20, 2021.

“In 2019, the private PRC-based company Ziyan UAV exhibited armed swarming drones….. During the past five years, China has made achievements in AI-enabled unmanned surface vessels, which China plans to use to patrol and bolster its territorial claims in the South China Sea.” — The Pentagon, Annual 2020 Report to Congress on the Chinese military.

“We’re not a decade ahead.” — Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman and CEO of Google and the chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, National Defense Magazine, October 30, 2020.

“Since 2010, I have been pounding the drum about how serious a threat the People’s Republic of China’s military modernization program is to the ability of the United States to project power into the Indo Pacific, and more broadly our ability to protect our interests and values around the world…. While America is still the dominant military power on the planet, we are being more effectively challenged militarily today than at any…any other time in our history.” These were the words of US Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space & Cyber Convention on September 20.

A Conversation with Anne Marie Waters by Grégoire Canlorbe

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17865/anne-marie-waters

Anne Marie Dorothy Waters is a politician and activist in the United Kingdom. She founded and leads the For Britain Party.

“We live in a UK where free speech is a thing of the past, our media is merely a mouthpiece of government diktats, and where decent people are demonized and smeared for holding informed opinions. We are in a Britain that resembles the communist Soviet Union: fear, censorship, excessive government control.”

“Please do not forget that many Muslims, especially women and children, are the victims, as well. Those people are entirely unrepresented.”

“We do not want to ‘Build Back Better’ as the globalists keep demanding; we want to Bring Back Britain.”

“The political and media elite are entirely wedded to the global project of bringing down nation-states. This cannot be done without mass migration.”

“We are a society of science, and reason, and evidence, and just as we achieve that, we open to the door to medievalism and are catapulted back in time. Secularism and free speech, equal rights between the sexes, the protection of children, all of this is being sacrifice for ‘political correctness'”.

“Most of these people are coming here illegally and this is simply allowed to take place while we watch. What is even harder to take is how these illegal immigrants are elevated above the native population. There are thousands of homeless British people in the UK, and yet illegal immigrants are housed in hotels until permanent accommodation is provided to them. No such relief or help is available to homeless Britons.”

“Now that we are about to receive a massive influx of Afghans, some of whom are already responsible for crimes throughout Europe, there are plans in place to give them homes, medical care, training and employment, and even free university attendance. Britons must pay thousands of pounds per year per year to attend university. It is a profound injustice.”

“White children are actively taught that they are racists, colonisers and oppressors.”

“First and foremost, we must stop the immigration. We cannot deal with these problems while the borders are still open…. The rights of terrorists and rapists are considered more important than the safety of the British public….We must scrap all ‘hate speech’ laws and allow our citizens to speak freely. We must enact laws that prevent the press smearing political candidates as ‘fascists’ for daring to tell the truth….We must… deport those who engage in honour violence, FGM, or child marriage… It is also absolutely essential that all of those who express support for jihad, who support terrorists, or who want sharia law, and who are not British citizens, are deported from our country…. These steps are just the beginning but if we were to take them, we would be in a completely different place. The world would no longer see Britain as a soft touch or a hub of jihad.”

Leftists continue their assaults on language to achieve political goals By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/11/leftists_continue_their_assaults_on_language_to_achieve_political_goals.html

People have been noticing lately that leftists are working hard to change the language to achieve their goals. Leftists are fully aware of the fact that, as George Orwell argued, when you change the available vocabulary, you also change people’s ability to think about things. If you erase from the English language any words tied to liberty (e.g., freedom, individuality, liberal, etc.), people will eventually lose entirely the whole concept of freedom. It’s with that thought in mind that some in the LGBTQ+ crowd are working to rebrand pedophilia. The latest euphemism is “Minor-Attracted Person” but it’s the same old sick idea.

Certain words decline with value over the years. The word beldam, or old hag, comes from the French belle dame, meaning beautiful lady. Once, young people respectfully called elderly women, especially grandmothers, belle dame, and then the word degraded.

Another word that degraded was spinster. Once, it meant a woman who would spin for a living. Eventually, it came to mean a repressed, desiccated, permanently unwed woman. Now, of course, the word is gone entirely because there’s no stigma attached to remaining unmarried.

And then there’s the word “pedophile.” It’s a neologism that psychiatrists created in the 1950s, from the Greek for “loving children,” something the ancient Greeks proudly did. Isn’t that sweet? Except, of course, there’s nothing sweet about it. Pedophiles are people who are sexually attracted to children and, in the worst cases, they act on that attraction. Since its inception, that word has had purely negative connotations.

Well, it turns out that, in today’s progressive world, pedophiles don’t feel that they should be stigmatized in that way. Allyn Walker, an assistant professor at Old Dominion University, in Virginia, is one such person, and Walker is willing to go on the record to make that point.

A Word About Democracy from a Man Brought Up in a Dictatorship By Alex Gordon

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/11/a_word_about_democracy_from_a_man_brought_up_in_a_dictatorship.html

I am a Jew, and like many Jews, I fled the land where I was born. That was the Soviet Union. I am far from alone. Seems that at every stage of history, someone has been sure to throw the Jews into the sea. The Jews, however, had already been to the sea – when they left Egypt – and got out safely. That sea was the Red Sea. When I got out of the red, socialist sea, I found a sea of democracy in Israel. And here is what I have since learned:

Under Soviet socialism, there was no democracy. The state controlled the press to the extent that there were no automobile disasters, no mine collapses, no factory fires, no train, streetcar or airplane crashes, no earthquakes nor floods.

There were no natural disasters under socialism. If cold winds blew in the USSR, they came from the West. Imported cold currents and cyclones also came from there. If hot winds blew, they were called Afghans. If there were organized thefts of socialist property, their authors were known to have Jewish surnames.

Bad news was forbidden under socialism. And it seems that people got used to it. How much easier it is to live as a person who is not constantly bombarded with reports of catastrophes and crimes, right? Such a person has a life of calm, other than the aspect of life that was streamlined in long queues for food and goods, all of which were sorely lacking under “developed socialism.”

In a totalitarian state, the majority of the population is doomed to be content, for the alternative is dangerous.

In a democracy, the majority of the population is condemned to dissatisfaction, for the alternative is boring: one is too free to enjoy freedom.