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August 2023

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Vivek Ramaswamy Speaks About an ‘American Revival’ By Chris Queen

By on August 20th, 2023

https://pjmedia.com/columns/chris-queen/2023/08/19/vivek-ramaswamy-speaks-about-an-american-revival-n1720536

The last 2024 GOP presidential hopeful to speak at Erick Erickson’s Gathering in Atlanta on Saturday was Vivek Ramaswamy. I’ll confess that he’s the top-tier candidate I knew the least about, but he sat with Erickson for a fascinating conversation.

Before introducing Ramaswamy, Erickson joked that he didn’t like the idea of a presidential candidate who is younger than he is — Ramaswamy just turned 38 — but the candidate spoke with polish and wisdom beyond his years. Erickson led off by asking Ramaswamy about the tragic fires in Maui, which PJ Media’s own Lincoln Brown reported were at least partially the result of government mismanagement.

“If we don’t learn from our mistakes, we’re destined to make them again,” Ramaswamy stated. “There was an Obama appointee, a climate change activist who also believes as part of this broader Gaia-centric world view of the earth that water rights are to be protected, which led to a five-to-six-hour delay in the critical window of getting waters to put out those fires, and we will never know, although certain signs point to the fact that we very well could have avoided those catastrophic deaths, many of them if water had made it to the site of the fires on top.”

Ramaswamy transitioned to talking about the invasion of wokeness into every part of our culture, including education and the military. He pointed to patriotism and faith as the way to make our way out of the cultural fights that rage in America today. The phrase that he returned to time and time again was “American revival.”

The candidate said that Americans are missing that combination of faith and patriotism, and he asserted that “we have to fill that vacuum with our vision of what it means to be a citizen of this nation, do it without apology, and that is how we will dilute these woke agendas to irrelevance.”

The candidate stated that the key to “American revival” was to replace the focus on race, gender, class, and identity with the individual, family, country, and God.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

The media sure do hate democracy when it doesn’t suit them! By Jack Hellner

By on August 20th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/the_media_sure_do_hate_democracy_when_it_doesnt_suit_them.html

This piece by Washington Post writers is reasonable in a lot of respects.  It decries super-majorities in most states that essentially run roughshod over the minority party.  This is especially true in states like California, New York, and Illinois, and I am sure it is true in Republican states. 

“American democracy is cracking. These forces help explain why.”

As the number of swing districts has declined, another phenomenon has become evident: Even in open-seat races, which historically have been more contested than those involving incumbents, the number of landslide victories by members of both major parties has increased dramatically. …

In just two states is the legislature split between Republicans and Democrats. In more than half of the states, the dominant party enjoys a supermajority, which means they can override vetoes by a governor of a different party or generally have their will on legislation.

Similarly, full control of state government — the legislature and the governor’s office — is the rule rather than the exception. Today 39 states fit this definition. The result is a sharper and sharper divergence in the public policy agendas of the states.

The dominant party has been able to move aggressively to enact its governing priorities. …

These divisions have made it possible for the dominant party to govern with little regard to the interests of those with allegiance to the minority party and often little accountability as well. The result is two Americas with competing agendas and values.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Woke white air force colonel who claimed other white colonels were racists gets promoted to brigadier general By Monica Showalter

By on August 20th, 2023

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/08/woke_white_air_force_colonel_who_declared_other_white_colonels_racists_gets_promoted_to_brigadier_general.html

The Pentagon has gone to great ends to hide its wokery whenever it gets caught.

They’ve shut down drag shows on U.S. military bases. They’ve kicked openly white-hating wokesters teaching military kids upstairs to other things. They’ve taken down their Pride Month flags and tweets. They’ve changed course on hunting for “extremists” in the ranks when news emerged that they missed actual miscreants under their noses. They’ve investigated dog-sex officer pervert rings that had been going on for a long time in Hawaii. They’ve also denied, in testimony to Congress at appropriations time, that they are wokesters.

But personnel is policy and a look at who they’re promoting tells another story.

Get a load of this charmer, as noted by Kevin Downey at PJMedia:

Enter USAF Col. Benjamin Jonsson. He was nominated by *President Biden to be promoted to brigadier general. Col. Jonsson is white. And “woke.”

Col. Jonsson believes the “problem” with the Air Force is “white colonels” like himself—but not really him, just all the other white colonels.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel’s Elites Revolt Against Democracy The architects of the anti-Bibi protests are clear about their motives: defending elites from the masses by Gadi Taub

By on August 20th, 2023

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/israel-elite-revolt-against-democracy

In his New York Times opinion piece titled “The U.S. Reassessment of Netanyahu’s Government Has Begun,” Thomas Friedman wrote that he likes to say of his job that he is “a translator from English to English”: He takes complex things and renders them understandable. Israel, he explained, is turning its back on the shared values which have underpinned the friendship between the American superpower and the Jewish state. As Friedman explains it, the judicial reform proposed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition poses a grave threat to democracy because it would “change the long-established balance of power between the government and the Supreme Court, the only independent check on political power.”

It turns out that translating from English to English may not be the most useful skill when you need to understand something that is happening in Hebrew. Friedman is right that Israel’s democracy is in danger, but Netanyahu’s government is not the source of peril. The real danger comes from the court itself, which is now asserting a made-up “right” to remove a sitting prime minister—that is, to nullify the results of a legal election and eclipse Israel’s democratic politics and institutions through its own self-perpetuating fiat. The protest movement that arose to defend the court’s power (and its backers among the country’s economic and military elite) are together attempting to block the redemocratization of Israeli politics, as the reforms intended to do.

This is not some innovative hypothesis. If you read Hebrew, you can hear some protesters and their backers in the country’s establishments announcing their intentions more or less explicitly: Democracy is the very thing they are out to prevent. The movement’s ideologues are longtime staunch opponents of the democratic form of government who have devoted whole academic careers to opposing it; their political leaders in parliament and outside it use the term “democracy” in a deliberately deceptive way, as they sometimes admit; and their street-level ringleaders more or less openly confess disdain for the mass of enfranchised citizens. Most poignantly, when it comes to the rebelling IDF reservists—virtually all of them from elite unites, mostly in the air force—they don’t even bother with lip service to the idea of majoritarian decision-making. Rather, they express open contempt for the majority of Israel’s citizens, peppered with thinly veiled references to ethnicity, religiosity, and class.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The Maui wildfires are proof that carbon zealotry can kill By Betsy McCaughey

By on August 20th, 2023

https://nypost.com/2023/08/18/the-maui-wildfires-are-proof-that-carbon-zealotry-can-kill/

Zero carbon zealotry can be dangerous to your health. In fact, in the hands of government officials, it can kill.

Ask the grieving families of Maui, the Hawaiian island ravaged by wildfires last week.

As the fires raged, liberal media blamed the devastation on climate change.

“How Climate Change Turned Lush Hawaii into a Tinderbox,” announced The New York Times. 

Sorry, the evidence is piling up that the opposite is true.

Zero carbon extremism diverted the island’s main electrical producer, Hawaiian Electric, from insulating wires, clearing areas around vulnerable transmission sites and taking other precautions to prevent wildfires it knew were likely to occur.  

It dithered on prevention, while pouring funds and manpower into meeting the Hawaiian government’s mandate that all electricity must be produced from renewables by 2045.

The death toll from Lahaina Fire has reached 111, but will go higher, because much of the island hasn’t  been searched. 

The fire’s already the deadliest in US history. But wildfires ignited by inadequately maintained electrical transmission systems — uninsulated wires, flimsy poles, out-of-control plant growth — have also devastated Texas, Colorado and California.

Six out of 20 recent wildfires in California, including the 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85, the Kinkade fire in Sonoma in 2019 and the Dixie Fire in 2022, were caused by sparks due to aging transmission equipment and poor maintenance.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Biden’s Drug Price ‘Transparency’ Rule Is Just Back-Door Price Controls Peter J. Pitts

By on August 20th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/18/bidens-drug-pricing-transparency-rule-is-just-back-door-price-controls/

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services just proposed a rule supposedly designed to improve transparency in Medicaid.

That’s hardly the real objective, however. The proposal is a back-door effort to expand price controls in Medicaid and beyond, a surefire way to derail the next generation of medical breakthroughs.

The CMS rule would require certain drug makers to participate in annual “price verification surveys.” The agency claims the surveys will shed light on why certain drugs are priced the way they are. The kicker is that through this “survey” process, drug companies would have to share proprietary and confidential data with the government.

CMS has offered drug makers an escape route, however — much the way blackmailers and extortionists offer their victims a way out. All a company has to do to excuse itself from these annual audits is agree to set its drug prices at whatever level the government deems fair — or, as an alternative, to hand over larger rebates to Medicaid. It’s an offer they can’t refuse.

Those who don’t play ball and cut prices “voluntarily” can look forward to selective release or leaks of confidential material that activists will pounce on to apply outside pressure on prices.  

This is a flagrant abuse of government power. But more worrying still is the harm the rule would do to patients.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Joe Biden’s odd but revealing claim about inflation

By on August 20th, 2023

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4158523-joe-bidens-odd-but-revealing-claim-about-inflation/

President Biden brandished a brand-new claim in his recent talk about the wonders of the Inflation Reduction Act:

“Now, one reason we’ve seen inflation fall by two thirds without losing jobs is corporate profits are coming back down to earth. The excesses are being eliminated by the corporations.”

In other words, “excess” company profits are dropping, and that has brought price increases under control. By Biden’s logic, if Corporate America went bankrupt, the economy would really be humming.  

Hasn’t anyone ever explained to Biden that it is profits that lead to investment, to productivity gains and to higher wages? Apparently not. Biden thinks inflation stems from corporate greed, not too much spending — no wonder the White House got it so wrong.

Biden’s anti-business mindset reminds us of the Obama years, during which the country experienced the slowest-ever recovery from a recession. Liberals like Paul Krugman continue to argue that former President Obama’s failure to boost U.S. growth stemmed from an undersized stimulus program. No, the problem was that Obama stomped on the green shoots of economic revival with a tsunami of regulatory changes that confounded employers and decision-makers, stymied investment and prolonged the downturn.

We are seeing much the same today. Biden keeps talking about building the economy from the middle out; I doubt even he knows what he is talking about. In reality, he is building the economy from the top down, with the government at the tip of the pyramid, issuing ever-more rules and making significant decisions about the allocation of capital and direction of industry.

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