9-11 Tribute: Have you forgotten…how you felt that day.
God Bless America!
–Saul Anuzis
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
Big Government threatens the consumer drug market with price control scheme, Democrats confident they can push Senator Manchin into caving in on big spending bill, how we can honor our Afghanistan veterans, and we take a moment to remember the twentieth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://www.myjournalcourier.com/opinion/article/Commentary-Saul-Anuzis-Drug-price-16432768.php
https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/08/how-to-honor-the-9-11-generation-of-american-veterans/
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Country singer Darryl Worley reflects on his 9/11 song ‘Have You Forgotten?’ 20 years after attacks
Darryl Worley penned his song “Have You Forgotten?” almost 20 years ago after reflecting on the terror attacks of September 11.
The singer/songwriter wrote the memorial song with Wynn Varble and it was released in March 2003. “Have You Forgotten?” was a number one hit on the U.S. Billboard Hot Country Songs chart for seven weeks, and also reached No. 22 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100.
The country star spoke to Fox News about what the song means to him still, his emotions behind the ballad, and why we should never forget the men and women who tragically lost their lives.
Allies see rising prospect of Trump 2024 White House bid
Republicans angling for potential 2024 presidential runs are at risk of colliding with former President Trump.
For months, Trump has floated the idea of a 2024 rematch against President Biden. But in recent weeks, he has begun to signal that he may be more likely to run again than not, intensifying a collective headache for other would-be White House contenders who have already started laying the groundwork for their own campaigns.
There’s little appetite within the GOP to challenge Trump for the 2024 presidential nod. He’s still the most influential Republican in the country, and running against him in a primary would be a major political risk for any ambitious Republican. The little polling that has been done shows Trump dominating any potential primary opponent by wide, double-digit margins.
Buyer’s remorse: More Biden voters regretting their choice
Two significant polls now reveal that a considerable number of voters regret voting for President Biden back on Election Day 2020.
A new Zogby Poll finds that a fifth of likely U.S. voters who voted for Mr. Biden are now sorry that they chose him to lead the country.
“Why does this matter? If you take into consideration the size of the electorate, and how the last two presidential elections (2016 and 2020) were decided by tens of thousands of votes in a handful of battleground states, this could really hurt President Biden’s chances in 2024,” the poll analysis noted.
Biden tanks in 7 Democratic swing districts as poll says $3.5T spending too big
President Biden’s approval numbers have taken a hit in seven Democrat-controlled swing districts, according to a new poll commissioned by conservative advocacy group American Action Network released on Tuesday.
The survey — conducted by Remington Research Group — showed the president underwater by an average of 7 percentage points on the economy and 9 percent on foreign policy in the areas polled, which include California’s 10th Congressional District, Florida’s 7th Congressional District, Iowa’s 3rd Congressional District, Michigan’s 8th and 11th Congressional Districts, Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District and Washington’s 8th Congressional District.
The surveys found that Biden and the Democrats’ plan to move forward with a $3.5 trillion social spending could prove to be a liability for the party’s members that serve in the battleground districts, with an average of just 36 percent approving on average to the 55 percent that said they disapprove of the proposal.
Joe Biden Begins the Bid to Rewrite the History of His Bloody Botched Afghan Exit
Word out of the White House this week is that Joe Biden, or at least his handlers, intend to recapture the narrative on his colossal Afghan exit screw-up. Good luck with that tardy effort.
It’s as if saying something in Washington, even without attribution, makes it so in this White House wonderland. Especially after the shocking deaths Thursday of more than a dozen U.S. troops at the Kabul airport.
News Flash: The evacuation narrative train left the Kabul station more than a week ago when U.S. troops were finally gone, the Taliban was all over but so were countless thousands of Americans and Afghan allies.
But the reality won’t stop this president from reading the lines touting his immense evacuation. Nor keep his dysfunctional team from parroting the same glowing things about Biden’s plan in order to reach any Americans not paying close attention to the chaotic and now deadly withdrawal scene.
Upwards of 100,000 people have been flown out of Kabul, if you believe Biden’s numbers. For sure that’s a huge number of Americans, Afghan allies, and other nationals to get safely beyond the reach of the fundamentalist Taliban in a short period of time.
Kudos to the aircrews and mechanics who’ve been tirelessly hauling humanity all over the region by the hundreds in huge cargo planes. And the Marines guarding the perimeter.
The real issue about this historic flight of humanity, however, is why such a gargantuan cramped effort was necessary in the first place? For months Team Biden will be trying to fog over that issue like the inside of your windshield in a rainstorm.
4 prisoners Obama exchanged for Bowe Bergdahl now in senior Taliban posts
Nearly all of those who hold senior positions have close ties to al Qaeda.
Four out of five Guantanamo detainees whom former President Barack Obama released in exchange for former U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in 2014 now hold senior positions in the interim government created by the Taliban in Afghanistan.
According to the Afghan television network TOLOnews, the Taliban-formed government gave leadership positions to Khairullah Khairkhwa, Norullah Noori, Abdul Haq Wasiq, and Mohammad Fazl; all of whom were released in a 2014 deal between the Obama administration and the Taliban to free Bergdahl, whom the Taliban had held as a prisoner since 2009.
On Tuesday, the Taliban announced that Khairkhwa would serve as acting minister for information and culture, Noori would serve as acting minister of borders and tribal affairs, Wasiq would serve as acting director of intelligence, and Fazl would serve as deputy defense minister.
Things Look Bright for US Diplomacy as Club Gitmo Alumni and Al Qaeda Terrorists Lead the New and Moderate Taliban Government of Afghanistan
The new Taliban government in Afghanistan is turning out to be just about what one might have imagined. For talent, it seems to draw heavily not only on men who were heavily involved in the 20-year war against the United States but on men who were officials in the Taliban regime we defenestrated in 2002. Via Fox News:
Indeed, the prison camp at Club Gitmo appears to have fulfilled the role for the Taliban that Harvard’s Kennedy School does for Democrats. In fact, you can almost hear a simpering Anthony Blinken bragging about the long association that many of the new Taliban leaders have with the United States and how that will be a very, very good thing.,,
,,, How much of this is real, and how much is trolling? I’m not an authority on who’s-up-who’s-down in Taliban world, but the fact that the leadership is composed of members of the old government, Gitmo graduates, and self-avowed al-Qaeda allies seems suspiciously like a way to rub our noses in the disaster that Joe Biden’s ineptitude has created. It is hard to believe that the commanders who bore the brunt of the battle and who were not US prisoners will step aside for a much older leadership generation. That said, the message being sent at this early stage is clear. The Taliban are who they said they are. They are not statesmen out to get invitations to Davos. They don’t aspire to be junior attendees at the next G-7 meeting. Instead, they are focused on establishing an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan. The open question is whether they will be satisfied with being a regional hub of radical Islam or pick up where they left off in 2002.
Biden’s Afghanistan Speech Fails to Fool America
His approval numbers are plummeting and taking his party’s 2022 prospects with them.
President Biden’s address to the nation concerning his surrender of Afghanistan to the Taliban was obviously a desperate attempt to convince the public that it wasn’t the disaster we watched in real time. The actual effect of his weirdly belligerent speech was to confirm that he is unable to grasp the military and foreign policy complexities associated with his role as Commander in Chief. This has sent his approval numbers into a nosedive from which it will be difficult to recover. A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll, for example, shows his approval rating at an all time low of 44 percent and that only a third of Americans believe he handled Afghanistan properly.
A new ABC/Washington Post survey shows Biden with a comparably dismal overall rating and even worse numbers on Afghanistan. According to that poll, only 26 percent of U.S. adults approve of his management of the withdrawal. The most significant overall damage has been among Independents, whose disapproval of Biden has risen from 43 to 57 percent. Several other recent polls, including NPR/PBS/Marist and Rasmussen, also show the bottom falling out of his approval ratings. This is about more than the Afghanistan debacle itself. It is clearly connected to ludicrous claims Biden made about it during last week’s speech.
The Masks Were Working All Along. Now we have definitive proof that masks really are effective.
The most urgent question in the world for the past 20 months has been: What’s the best way to stop the spread of the coronavirus? But it’s a frustrating question to answer definitively, since even the most logical solutions have been shrouded in what I’ve called the fog of pandemic.
For example, covering your nose and mouth seems like a sensible way to block virus particles that come out of the mouth and go into the nose. But designing a perfect masking study is hard when state-by-state behavior differs from official masking policies, and when everybody’s wearing a different material over their face. Limiting indoor dining seems like it would help contain a virus that spreads via indoor talking, but we don’t have enough high-quality data to know for sure whether it makes a huge difference. Targeted shutdowns seem likely to prevent social mixing in the short term, but designing an experiment that proves their long-term effectiveness is devilishly difficult.
By contrast, the trials that proved the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccines used the gold standard of scientific research, by randomly assigning people to treatment and control groups and then carefully measuring the effect of the medical intervention. If only we had something almost like this for, say, masking: a careful, randomized, real-world experiment on the effect of masks.
China Sees Its Nuclear Arsenal as More Than a Deterrent
Beijing is adding warheads, missiles and subs at an alarming rate. The goal is global dominance.
The military threat from Beijing is accelerating at a pace few anticipated. Recently released satellite imagery shows that China is rapidly constructing nearly 300 hardened underground silos in its western desert to house intercontinental ballistic missiles. Also unexpected was the revelation that China recently began work on a third site of similar size near Ordos City that was not previously associated with ICBMs.
This indicates that the Chinese have dramatically increased their operationally deployed strategic nuclear warheads beyond even what was forecast by the Defense Department a year ago. The type of Chinese missile expected to be loaded into these particular silos is currently in serial production, so it won’t be long before these sites reach their full capability. According to Adm. Charles Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, the scope and scale of these activities should be considered a “strategic breakout by China.”
Why was the West caught so off-guard? The U.S. and its allies have a persistent difficulty grasping the underlying aspirations of China’s economic, foreign and defense policy, resulting in dangerous misestimations of China’s security advances. The U.S. assumed China would always retain Mao’s “minimum deterrence” approach to nuclear weapons.
Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower
At this point, most everyone is now familiar with a certain narrative about China. Namely, the narrative about how China will soon be the most economically powerful country in the world, and how its military power will soon eclipse that of the United States.
Many believe this has happened already. According to a March Gallup poll, for instance, half of Americans polled believe China to be the world’s “leading economic power,” and more than 60 percent believe China to be a “critical threat.”
But is China really poised to rival the United States as a major global power?
In his book, Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower, Michael Beckley certainly doesn’t think China is in a position to do any such thing.
Beckley, a fellow in the International Security Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School, delves into the available economic, demographic, and military data on China to determine whether the Chinese regime can really hope to become a global power in the same league as the United States.
His answer? Such a scenario is extremely unlikely. Rather than heading in the direction of rivaling the United States, China is a rapidly aging, inefficient, conflict-ridden, and relatively poor country that simply is not on the road to seriously challenging the US’s hegemony…
…As a resource for countering anti-China militarism, however, Unrivaled is an invaluable resource replete with a myriad of useful statistics, facts, and explanations of demographic, economic, and military trends. Beckley even addresses the military realities of specific cases like a possible future invasion of Taiwan, or China’s attempt at taking over the South China Sea. But in every case, the Chinese regime’s dreams of regional or global hegemony continue to break up upon the rocks of China’s sizable economic and demographic problems. These are problems that must be acknowledged by any politician or pundit seeking to use China as an excuse for continued aggressive American foreign policy.
Democrats shouldn’t bet on abortion in 2022
A majority of Americans are ready for reasonable protections for the unborn.
Here we go again. Democrats are confident they will ride the rabid outrage over new abortion laws to victory in the 2022 midterms. They shouldn’t bet on it.
It is likely that Roe vs. Wade will not be overturned next year due to the Supreme Court’s pending decision on the Mississippi abortion law challenge. What is more likely to happen is that in upholding the Mississippi law, the Court will restrict the “undue burden” test established by prior precedent.
This outcome would likely render the Texas abortion law unconstitutional while forging an important legal middle ground between the Left’s abortion-on-demand culture and one that is morally and scientifically more correct. It will still save countless lives.
Unfortunately for Biden, Sanders, Pelosi, and the abortion industry, like climate change and immigration, the public takes a more nuanced view of abortion than the Left likes to admit.
According to Gallup, the country is evenly split between those who consider themselves pro-life and pro-choice, with the gap between the sides standing at a mere two points. In 1996, the spread was 23 points in favor of abortion rights.
