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http://Secrecy Is for Losers What Biden’s classified document scandal reveals about power in America

Secrecy—the first refuge of incompetents—must be at a bare minimum in a democratic society, for a fully informed public is the basis of self-government.
– From a 1960 report by the Committee on Government Operations, U.S. House of Representatives.

On Wednesday morning, Jamie Lee Curtis was trending on Twitter. Earlier in the week, the actress had posted a photo on Instagram showing off the handsome set of black Pollock chairs that furnish her office. It was not the chairs, however, that landed her on Twitter’s front page, but the photograph on the wall behind them. The Instagram photo has since been deleted, after thousands of amateur investigators online tweeted at Curtis to ask why there was a photo of a naked child stuffed into a suitcase hanging on her office wall.

Here was a clue pointing to Curtis’ involvement in the globalist pedophile ring known to dominate the political and cultural elite of the United States along with who knows how many other Western nations. This particular conspiracy theory, which has branches in Pizzagate and QAnon, has two great strengths. First, it can’t be disproved by contrary evidence. To take one example, the image on Curtis’ wall does not, in fact, show a child’s body crammed into a suitcase. The photo, taken by the artist Betsy Schneider, is of a young girl in a tub of water. Creepy it may be, but bad taste and ritualistic child sacrifice are not necessarily the same.

The conspiracy’s other source of strength is its basis in reality. Jeffrey Epstein really was enticing some of the world’s richest and most powerful people to a private island where he kept a harem that included underage girls trafficked into the sexual service of a global elite. Yet Epstein’s arrest, rather than dragging his horrible crimes out into the light of day, only deepened their mystery. For one thing, his well-timed suicide in a New York prison put an end to the chance that he might spill his secrets. But the secrecy remains as the FBI stonewalls requests to release files related to Epstein’s work as a Bureau source.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/3820478-big-spender-biden-to-blame-for-inflation-and-coming-debt-ceiling-brawl/

In just two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, our national debt has grown by $3.8 trillion. Beginning in 1929, it took the U.S. Treasury 61 years to accumulate that much borrowing.

Yet Biden has the temerity to call Republicans “fiscally demented.” 

The fight over raising the debt ceiling is just beginning, and already the embattled president is insulting those who oppose his reckless spending, which is, as I write this, crashing our economy. It will get worse — the downturn and the name-calling. 

President Biden tossed trillions in unnecessary COVID-19 relief onto a fast-recovering economy, punching up inflation to 40-year highs as too many dollars chased too few goods.   

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reckons Biden has added $4.8 trillion to our deficits through executive actions and legislation. This is in addition to our normal spending.

Meanwhile, no one – including many Republicans – has been minding the store. 

Now we see the beginning of the recession that the Federal Reserve deems necessary to drive down inflation. Retail sales, housing and manufacturing have turned down. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has said unemployment must go up and growth must go down in order to reach the central bank’s 2 percent official inflation target.   

We are, in effect, about to pay for Joe Biden’s largesse — with people losing their jobs and businesses going under. When our nation’s biggest banks set aside billions to cover expected loan losses, as they just did at the end of the year, it is because they expect companies to default on loans and people to get into trouble financially. This is not an act of God; this is because our leaders spent too much money.   

https://www.frontpagemag.com/never-mind-mishandling-classified-documents-is-no-big-deal/

Leftist abuses go through three steps.

1. Denial – It never happened

2. Bargaining – Even if it happened, it was very different

3. Acceptance – It’s no big deal and everyone does it

Here’s CNN hitting the third stage with Garagegate.

Washington’s little secret: ‘Spillage’ of classified information is a common occurrence – CNN

Remember that thing we were screaming our heads off about? It’s actually nothing to be outraged about.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2023/01/20/trump-warns-republicans-in-congress-not-to-cut-social-security-or-medicare-n1663562

Donald Trump has pretty good political instincts. He wouldn’t have been elected president without them. So when the former president issues a stark warning about the political consequences of Republicans advocating for cuts in Social Security and Medicare in the coming debt-limit battle, the GOP might do well to listen.

When it comes to old-age benefits, no good has ever come from advocating cuts in Social Security and/or Medicare. They’re not called the “third rail of politics” for nothing.

“Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security,” Trump said in a video that was previewed by Politico on Friday. “Cut waste, fraud, and abuse everywhere that we can find it, and there is plenty of it… But do not cut the benefits our seniors worked for and paid for their entire lives. Save Social Security. Don’t destroy it.”

According to Politico, Trump suggested “targeting foreign aid, cracking down on migration, ending ‘left-wing gender programs from our military,’ and end ‘billions being spent on climate extremism.’”

Trump’s position is entirely consistent with his past positions on entitlement reform: let the Democrats take the lead. But Democrats say there’s nothing wrong with either program that a little tweaking wouldn’t cure: raising the retirement age (again), increasing Medicare premiums, cutting payments to doctors and hospitals — all the usual half-baked fixes that have only delayed the inevitable.

When the GAO declares that both Social Security and Medicare are on an “unsustainable” path, no amount of “tweaking” by Congress will save those programs. Medicare is set to run out of cash by the end of this decade, while the Social Security trust fund will be drained by 2035. Both of those programs will end without massive intervention by Congress.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/2023-started-off-on-the-wrong-foot-for-this-rookie-officer/

Imagine starting a job and having quite simply the worst day you possibly can. A customer comes in and completely berates you while you’re learning the ropes; a boss ends up chewing out employees over lackluster performance; or something simply goes wrong with the business itself, such as uncontrollable weather conditions.

Well, that’s all child’s play compared to what Paul went through. Paul is a rookie New York Police Department officer that was getting his start on the force on New Year’s Eve. That’s right, probably one of the busiest days you could ever expect. Especially when you’re patrolling around Times Square, one of the most iconic places you can be to celebrate 2023.

But then something hit unexpectedly that threw Paul’s world into turmoil. While working alongside two other officers around 9:30 PM, a 19-year old “radicalized” Islamic extremist struck.

What’s more, he struck with an unusual weapon – a machete. Not a firearm or a knife, but rather a dangerous, sharp weapon that can really do some damage. And boy, did it. Paul ended up receiving a large laceration, as well as a skull fracture. What’s more, even after a fellow officer fired upon him, the suspect actually injured them with a laceration as well.

The suspect was taken into custody, and, thankfully, Paul and the other officer are recovering from their wounds. But I totally feel for this kid, mainly because no one deserves to have a first day like that. An argument over a traffic infraction, sure. Even an altercation in which they need to arrest someone. But an all-out attack? With a machete?

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-wests-last-chance/

Those who make a business of projecting trends often neglect the acceleration factor.  The march of history may be usefully described as “slowly” followed by “suddenly.” Yet we are rarely prepared for those times when history seems to “speed up,” and decades of change are compressed into years or even months.  We assume that current trends will continue, and we are surprised when they don’t.

An excellent book on the subject is Tony Blankley’s The West’s Last Chance.  Blankley, a nationally syndicated columnist who served President Reagan as a speechwriter and senior policy adviser, began the book with an overview of sudden changes in the course of history:  the conquests of Alexander the Great, the French Revolution, the American Civil War, and the Nazi’s rapid takeover of much of Europe.

He then made the case that we are on the brink of another historical reversal of massive proportions—namely, the takeover of Europe by Islam. He suggested that the takeover would be accomplished through demographic changes rather than war and he further suggested that Europeans would mount little resistance to it.

According to Blankley, the lack of resistance would have its source in the fact that demographic changes move slowly and are thus less noticeable.  One can see that an attacking army ought to be resisted, but the threat of rising birth rates seems a much less urgent matter.

Moreover, for much of the world the pre- 9/11 decades were a time of relative calm.  For one thing, the differences between the West and the Soviet Union had been patched up. The liberal elites claimed that it was merely a case of mutual misunderstanding.   The solution to most problems, it was asserted, was to understand the “other.” The best way to do that was to practice “political correctness”—a non-judgmental approach to political and social issues. Ironically, political correctness was the prelude to the highly judgmental ideology of “woke.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/01/has_covid_backlash_sparked_a_movement.html

Friends of freedom generally agree about four points:

(1) Protections for expansive individual liberty and respect for limited government are essential for the promotion of human rights, self-determination, and prosperity.

(2) Over the course of American history, the U.S. government has strayed far beyond the original limitations of its enumerated powers as set forth in the Constitution.

(3) Globalism, international government, plutocracy, rule by “elite” experts, unchecked bureaucracy, and the steady erosion of inalienable rights all work to maximize the power of centralized authority while minimizing the power of individual citizens.

(4) The most important conflict raging today is between individual liberty and coercive State control.

Where defenders of liberty disagree is in their assessment of the future.  Some believe that so much ground has now been lost in humanity’s centuries-long struggle for freedom that centralized government control over each individual is all but certain.  Technology’s rapid intrusion into the private sphere, the exponential expansion of the national security surveillance State, the rise of government-directed mass censorship, the successful efforts of multinational corporations and banks to influence national government directives, and the Intelligence Community’s vast programs for manipulating public opinion on a global scale all lend support to this admittedly pessimistic point of view.  

On the other hand, there are those who see the ebb and flow of human liberty as a natural occurrence, technology as a set of instruments that can just as ably expand freedom as curtail it (conquerors and liberators use the same weapons, after all), and encroaching totalitarianism as a necessary precursor for sparking popular revolt.  From this vantage point, the darker things get, the more likely real change is afoot.  I fall into this latter camp, and I will repeat a couple truths I hold dear: (1) before any system can be overhauled, there must first be a revolutionary shift in social consciousness, and (2) transformational change often occurs when people least expect it.  

https://thefederalist.com/2023/01/19/d-c-journalist-proves-biden-did-absolutely-nothing-wrong-by-assuming-he-did-absolutely-nothing-wrong/

Missing classified documents are only a problem when a president that the bureaucracy doesn’t like has them.

If the entire news media, plus Biden’s vindictive Justice Department, hadn’t put the country through months of insanity over the petty “confidential documents” drama at Mar-a-Lago, Biden’s own scandal of having illegally retained government material when he was a private citizen would be a pretty boring affair.

But they didn’t. They decided to get cute and make this a criminal matter. Now they get the same treatment.

Wait! they claim in unison. This is different! Biden did the right thing and Trump did the wrong thing!

Admittedly, that’s a totally fair and obvious point when you start with the assumption that over the six years Biden was in wrongful possession of government secrets, the material just sat there, untouched and unread (and make the concurrent assumption that the same wasn’t true of the Trump documents). They simply gathered dust, month by month, sound asleep in office drawers and garage boxes, forgotten by Biden, time, and the federal bureaucracy. Then, when one fateful day Biden’s lawyers happened upon the documents, they immediately dialed the National Archives for a swift transfer to the proper authorities.