“Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone.” – Frédéric Bastiat
“It is not true that Congress spends money like a drunken sailor. Drunken sailors spend their own money. Congress spends our money.” – Dr. Art Laffer
Confession – I’m an Illegal Immigrant: I’m self-identifying as an illegal immigrant and want my Biden Bonus of $450,000!
Forget our homeless. Forget our veterans. Forget our poor American citizens.
It’s Biden Time…cross the border and collect your Biden Bonus. Elections have consequences!
The Big Lie: Biden is at it again. Somehow, he is trying to convince the American people that by spending $3.5 Trillion dollars that it will cost taxpayer zero.
Biden’s Big Lie. It’s 100% demonstrably false.
Revenge of the Parents: “Democrats are playing with fire by underestimating the power of parents who are fired up and ready to assert control over their kids’ educations.”
While the Democratic Party looked like a viable alternative to some during the Trump era and beyond, the takeover of the far-left progressives has left American voters surprised, disappointed, and frustrated.
From Critical Race Theory to mask mandates in the name of science, our society is being fractured neighborhood by neighborhood as the far left pushes their radical agenda in their Democratic Party. A party my parents wouldn’t recognize.
Today’s Democratic Party is pushing programs that will bankrupt Medicare, fund social engineering projects of the left, send pork funding to political friends and allies, and it is ALL at taxpayer’s expense. Voters are starting to pay attention.
ACLU & Free Speech: The 2018 ACLU “guidelines” now have their liberal “free speech fact checkers” determining which speech is free and which is not?!? Consider that conundrum from a first principles perspective.
As quoted in the Washington Post opinion piece shared below:
“Our defense of speech may have a greater or lesser harmful impact on the equality and justice work to which we are also committed depending on the potential effect on marginalized communities; the extent to which the speech may assist in advancing the goals of white supremacists or others whose views are contrary to our values; and the structural and power inequalities in the community in which the speech will occur.”
To paraphrase Stalin, it’s not the people who exercise their free speech that counts, but rather those who determine what is or is not free speech!
Cost of Thanksgiving: Thanks to Biden… The New York Times reports that “Thanksgiving 2021 is shaping up to be the most expensive meal in the history of the holiday. Nearly every ingredient, from the turkey to the after-dinner coffee, is expected to cost more than ever.”
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
Saul Anuzis calls out “Biden’s Big Lie” & takes progressive Democrats to task for threatening to bankrupt Medicare, and expect to pay a lot more for this year’s Thanksgiving Dinner!
https://www.salon.com/2021/10/26/progressives-draw-their-line-in-the-sand/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/thanksgiving-2021-higher-food-gas-prices/
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No surprise – Poll: 57 Percent of Americans Say Economy Worse Under Biden
Fifty-seven percent of Americans agree the U.S. economy has gotten worse under President Joe Biden, according to a Rasmussen poll released Friday.
The survey comes as the American economic recovery hit a roadblock in the third quarter due to a surge in the highly infectious delta variant, worker shortages, and supply chain issues. Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, grew 0.5% in the third quarter, down from 1.6% in the second quarter, according to the Commerce Department.
“In some places, things may be getting worse before they get better, in some areas they may be stabilizing before they get better,” Robert Rosener, senior U.S. economist at Morgan Stanley, told The New York Times. “It’s a very mixed picture, but there’s nothing that’s signaling immediate relief.”
The Return of the Grassroots Right
A surge of energetic conservative protests presents an unusual opportunity.
In America’s popular imagination, street protests — raised fists and colorful signs, marches and megaphone-led chants — are a distinctly left-wing phenomenon. From union strikes to Saul Alinsky–style “direct actions,” mass movements seem to carry far more romantic appeal for the Left than for the Right. Progressivism has traditionally understood itself as the politics of picket lines and sit-ins; conservatism tends to find its political center of gravity at Rotary Clubs, church meetings, and dinner tables in sleepy bedroom communities.
But that’s only if conservatives decide to protest in the first place. There is a long tradition of right-wing protest movements, from the 1970s citizen tax revolts to Phyllis Schlafly’s campaign against the ERA to decades of pro-life demonstrations across the country. (The annual March for Life brings hundreds of thousands of protesters to Washington, D.C., every year.) But conservative constituencies, often clustered in rural and exurban areas, are typically composed of parents, middle-class Christians, and noncollege-educated small-business owners — a far cry from the “younger, male, educated, politically interested and trade-unionized” individuals that political-science research shows are “more likely to engage in protest activities.” Even as protests from across the political spectrum surged in 2020, the number and size of left-wing demonstrations far outnumbered their right-wing counterparts: Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative estimates that slightly more than 2,350 total protests associated with right-wing causes occurred in 2020, whereas Black Lives Matter alone topped out at more than 10,330.
Revenge of the Parents
Democrats are playing with fire by underestimating the power of parents who are fired up and ready to assert control over their kids’ educations.
This year began with teachers’ unions flexing their political muscles in a successful effort to delay school-reopening plans. But it is ending with parents’ striking back.
The starkest example currently is in Virginia. Over the summer, few political observers gave Republican Glenn Youngkin much of a chance against the seasoned Terry McAuliffe in a state that Joe Biden carried by double digits. Yet less than a week out from Election Day, the race is a tossup, and Democrats are so panicked that Biden, Kamala Harris, and Barack Obama had to plan late rallies in an effort to save the governor’s mansion. While it is unclear whether Youngkin will be able to overcome the substantial Democratic advantage and emerge victorious, it’s become clear that parents are a huge reason why polls are so close…
… The Virginia race is happening against the backdrop of a national backlash among parents that has been brewing over school closures, masking requirements, and critical race theory in the classroom.
School closures are likely to go down as one of the most destructive public policies in decades. Schools remained shut down months after the science was clear that children faced little risk of getting seriously ill from COVID-19 and that they were not major spreaders. In many districts, teachers’ unions dug in on closures even as their members skipped the line to get vaccinated before more vulnerable populations. Virtual learning was no substitute for in-person learning, and this led to unnecessary social isolation and increased depression among children. And for all the talk about equity, liberal closure policies disproportionately affected low-income, black, and Hispanic students. The harm done during the year-plus of closures will likely be irreparable.
Sen. Rick Scott: Suburban voters are rejecting Democrats’ radical agenda
It doesn’t take much searching to find analyses from political pundits and the media declaring the death of the Republican Party, due to losses among suburban voters.
“Why The Suburbs Have Shifted Blue,” wrote 538. “Suburbs pose challenge for GOP in post-Trump era,” declared The Hill. The American Enterprise Institute wrote a report titled “The GOP’s Suburban Dilemma.”
In July, the New York Times wrote about what it called “the Big Question of the 2022 Midterms: How Will the Suburbs Swing?”
Now we have an answer: suburban voters are ready to vote for Republicans because they are soundly rejecting the Democrats’ radical agenda.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee, which I chair, recently conducted a poll of suburban voters. Our goal was to figure out where suburban voters stand on the most important political issues and share that information with all Republican committees, campaigns, activists, and states parties.
What’s clear from our polling is that suburban voters have buyer’s remorse. They’re realizing that President Biden is not the moderate they thought he was – in fact, he’s much more liberal than anyone could have imagined. And his radical economic and foreign policy agenda is damaging our economy and our country.
President Biden’s approval is eight points underwater while a whopping 63 percent of suburban voters believe America is on the wrong track, compared to just 27 percent who believe we’re heading in the right direction. That number alone spells disaster for any Democrat on the ballot next year.
Attorney General Merrick Garland must call off war on parents
It’s time for Attorney General Merrick Garland to retract his memo siccing the FBI onto moms and dads.
Now that the National School Boards Association has recanted the scurrilous letter which he admitted was the sole basis for his decision to treat parents like domestic terrorists, he must call off the dogs.
He must recall the DOJ’s powerful counterterror arm, the National Security Division, from its new role of spying on parents exercising their First Amendment rights at school board meetings.
In his woeful impersonation of Sgt. Schultz in a House Judiciary Committee hearing last Thursday, Garland vowed that FBI agents will not be attending local school board meetings.
But according to one northern Virginia mom, the feds showed up in force that very night to spy on a group of 25 parents and grandparents who were protesting outside a Fairfax County school board meeting.
“We had several unmarked federal government vehicles there watching us, and we had DHS [Department of Homeland Security] in marked vehicles and we had a helicopter overhead [which] circled for about 30 minutes and were shining their spotlight down on us,” Stacy Langton told WMAL radio Friday, after posting a photograph of the vehicles on social media…
… As board members walk off stage, parents chant “Shame!”
SEE ALSOSo, yes, it was a raucous meeting. But are parents supposed to meekly accept that their children are subjected to this sort of filth?
Apparently. This is the whole point of Garland’s notorious memo: to place a chill on free speech. It was designed to frighten parents into not showing up at school board meetings to complain about ideological propaganda being shoved down their kids’ throats, whether critical race theory, gender fluidity, transgender bathrooms, pornography, or other pet perversions of the extreme left.
The Wrong Way to Fight Progressive Indoctrination in Public Schools
Attacking woke curricula on First Amendment grounds won’t work. Parents must instead hold school boards accountable in local elections.
When it comes to exposing the illegitimacy of the administrative state, Columbia Law School constitutional scholar Philip Hamburger’s work has been invaluable. This past weekend, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, he turned his attention to another pernicious progressive project: the conversion of the nation’s public schools into ideological-indoctrination factories that peddle woke, race-obsessed anti-Americanism…
… Constitutional conservatives have too often fallen into the trap of believing the courts will save us from the progressive onslaught — even when constitutional counterclaims were strong, as for example were the First Amendment free-speech objections to campaign-finance legislation and the commerce-clause objections to Obamacare. The judiciary is not going to rescue parents from the Left’s abuse of scholastic instruction through means that ought to be anathema to constitutional conservatives regardless: a federal judicial diktat based on an unsupportable reading of free-speech principles.
The First Amendment offers no quick fix here. The only way to solve the problem is through democratic accountability at the local level: Parents, who have the greatest interest in their children’s education, must get themselves elected to school boards and make their voices heard in protest against progressive indoctrination.
Biden’s Folly… Top Pentagon official: ISIS-K could attack US in ‘6 or 12 months’
The ISIS terror group’s affiliate in Afghanistan, known as ISIS-K, could develop the ability to carry out attacks against America within a year, a top Defense Department official told lawmakers Tuesday.
Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Jack Reed (D-RI), had asked Pentagon undersecretary for policy Colin Kahl if he agreed with a recent assessment by Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that “there may be a resurgence of international terrorism emanating from the region within 12 to 36 months.”
Kahl responded: “I think the assessment depends on which group we’re talking about.”
“I think the intelligence community currently assesses that both ISIS-K and Al Qaeda have the intent to conduct external operations, including against the United States, but neither currently has the capability to do so,” Kahl explained.
“We could see ISIS-K generate that capability in somewhere between 6 or 12 months,” he went on. “I think the current assessments by the intelligence community is that Al Qaeda would take a year or two to reconstitute that capability, and … we have to remain vigilant against that possibility.”
Wis. Election Panel Told Nursing Home Staffers To Illegally Cast Ballots
One of the family members said his mother would ask him who he was, meaning she didn’t recognize her own son. She hadn’t voted since 2012 — yet MyVote Wisconsin revealed she voted twice in 2020.
Racine County, Wisconsin law enforcement blew the 2020 election integrity question wide open on Thursday after an investigation into one nursing home. It revealed not only that state election officials flagrantly broke the law and ordered health-care employees to help them, but that the problem likely runs much deeper throughout the swing state’s other 71 counties.
An “election statute was in fact not just broken, but shattered by members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said during a Thursday press conference in which he and Sgt. Michael Luell detailed the findings of an investigation into Ridgewood Care Facility.
The investigation came about when a woman named Judy signed a sworn affidavit with the Wisconsin Elections Commission after she discovered that her mother, who had died on Oct. 9, 2020 after a period of severe cognitive decline, had voted in the 2020 presidential election. The affidavit was later passed along as a complaint to the county district attorney.
Don’t Let Democrats Turn US Into Europe With the Spending Bill
More destructive than any specific policy item modern Democrats are pushing this year are the ideas they use to justify their agenda.
The $3.5 trillion bill that President Joe Biden and Democrats are now attempting to cram through Congress via reconciliation is meant to create a European-style cradle-to-grave welfare state here in the United States. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the bill’s Senate author, has, for years, praised systems across the Atlantic. As have many other Democrats.
There are numerous specific arguments against the agenda that further expands an already onerous bureaucratic state, but it is the idea that traditional American life needs reimagining that should be rejected first. Because the most vociferous champions of the European-style governance are invariably the most passionate critics of the dynamism and glorious messiness of American life.
The factors that propel our economic superiority—the unplanned and lightly regulated, individualistic and seemingly disordered free markets—chafe against the technocratic sensibilities of Democrats. For them, even American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States occupies a unique position in world history, is ugly and plainly wrong.
So, they now perpetuate a corrosive culture of victimhood and dependence that already often permeates many European nations. And one of the most destructive untruths of the Europhile is his contention that the meritocracy doesn’t even exist. To convince people of this, he will fearmonger about growing poverty, the shrinking “middle class,” the rise of inequality, and the inability of Americans to achieve their dreams without the paternalistic help of technocrats. (I debunk many of these claims in my new book “Eurotrash: Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent“).
Americans have long touted the value of personal responsibility, though they have often been mocked by elites as hopelessly simplistic when they do. Yet, according to the World Values Survey, 70% of Americans still believe that the poor can escape poverty if they work hard enough—though you wouldn’t know it listening to today’s Democrats…
… What Democrats refuse to acknowledge are the trade-offs that accompany their utopianism. They either ignore or dismiss the economic downsides of dependency, and they dismiss the numerous core freedoms, both individual and communal, that are lost when living under the bureaucratic thumb of a monolithic, centralized, soul-sucking enterprise like the European Union.
The all-encompassing welfare system progressives champion is reliant on transfer programs that pose moral hazards for society. As the money and benefits of redistribution become more generous, increasing numbers of citizens are incentivized to set aside their traditionally strong work ethic and rely on the state.
We see this today, as the largest number of people who have left the work force during COVID-19 and not returned—despite the availability of jobs—are those making more money from unemployment benefits than their former job.
Virginia parents slam Obama’s ‘tone-deaf’ dismissal of education issues amid alleged sexual assault
Obama suggested that an alleged sexual assault cover-up in school is ‘fake outrage’ and a ‘trumped-up’ issue.
Former President Obama condemned Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin for focusing on hot-button education issues during the campaign, dismissing those issues as unserious and “fake outrage.” Virginia parents and parent advocates shot back at Obama’s remarks, calling them “tone deaf” and “clueless.”
“We don’t have time to be wasting on these phony trumped-up culture wars, this fake outrage that right-wing media peddles to juice their ratings,” Obama said while campaigning for Democrat Terry McAuliffe on Saturday. He accused Youngkin of avoiding “serious problems that affect serious people” and suggested that outrage over the actions of school boards is unjustified.
“Instead of stoking anger aimed at school boards and administrators, who are just trying to keep our kids safe… we should be making it easier for teachers and schools to give our kids the world-class education they deserve, and to do so safely while they are in the classroom,” Obama said.
Parents did not take kindly to Obama’s remarks.
“That is the most tone-deaf statement I have ever heard,” Brandon Michon, a frustrated father of three in Loudoun County, Virginia, told Fox News on Sunday. “First and foremost, everything that has come up with the cover-up in Loudoun County has to do with a sexual assault on girls. To say that this is trumped-up as a political thing is laughable.”
Michon referenced allegations that Loudoun County Superintendent Scott Ziegler and the school board covered up the report that a male student in a skirt allegedly assaulted a female student in a girls’ bathroom – while the board was considering a controversial transgender rule. A bombshell email last week revealed that Ziegler had notified the board about the assault about a month before he publicly declared that he had no record of bathroom assaults. Prosecutors confirmed that the same young man who stands accused in that May incident also stands accused of sexual assault in an October incident in another school.
Meet Ray Epps: The Fed-Protected Provocateur Who Appears To Have Led The Very First 1/6 Attack On The U.S. Capitol
In a House hearing on Thursday, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) questioned AG Merrick Garland about a mysterious man, Ray Epps, instructing protesters to enter the US Capitol building on January 5, and who later shepherded crowds towards the Capitol on January 6.
The story of the mystery man, Ray Epps, featured in Rep. Massie’s video above is in fact far more shocking than even the good Congressman implies in the hearing. It’s a story so strange, and so scandalous at every turn, that it threatens to shatter the entire official narrative of the “Capitol Breach” and expose yet another dimension of proactive federal involvement in the so-called “insurrection” of January 6th.
If Revolver News’s previous reporting points to a proactive role of the federal government in relation to the conspiracy cases against Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, the Ray Epps story that follows suggests a similar, yet more egregious, explicit, direct and immediate degree of federal involvement in the breach of the Capitol itself.
Here is a transcript of Thomas Massie’s exchange with the Attorney General, just in case you skipped past the video above…
… Given the damning evidence in this and previous Revolver reports, there is increasingly little doubt that key agencies in the federal government — and key figures such as AG Merrick Garland — take the same approach to infiltration operations today as they did in the 90s. In order to defeat the boogeyman of right-wing “patriot” militia groups, the government has to become them. In order to preempt the fictional possibility of a right-wing insurrection, then, we might say the feds had to become that insurrection.
In light of the overwhelming weight of evidence, this damning conclusion seems unavoidable. We don’t expect a straight answer from AG Garland or FBI Director Wray on this matter just yet, and neither should you. Such answers only come with sufficient pressure, and such pressure only arises from repeated exposure.
China’s Infiltration Playbook
CCP operatives are making headway with politicians, in universities, and even at major news agencies in America and the broader West.
In December of 2020 an information leak of unprecedented scale revealed how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has successfully infiltrated strategic political, cultural, and academic actors in the West.
An investigation from the Australian uncovered nearly two million CCP members, including their national ID number, birth date, and party position. The database, recovered in 2016 by a Chinese dissident in Shanghai, contained information on almost 80,000 party branches, showing these CCP members working inside international corporations, universities, and even government agencies around the world. The newspaper also indicated the names of several companies that have employed CCP members, such as Volkswagen, Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan, Astrazeneca, and Pfizer.
This news did not come as a surprise to many observers. U.S. authorities were already well-aware of the CCP’s infiltration of the country, as exposed in July 2020 by the FBI:
We’ve now reached the point where the FBI is opening a new China-related counterintelligence case about every 10 hours. Of the nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases currently underway across the country, almost half are related to China. And at this very moment, China is working to compromise American health care organizations, pharmaceutical companies, and academic institutions conducting essential COVID-19 research.
The CCP’s strategy of infiltration is more or less the same regardless of the country where it is implemented. It does not only affect the United States and Australia, but other Western allies as well, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and countries of the European Union, as China aims to achieve economic, political, and technological hegemony worldwide.
This is a multi-level strategy, as the Chinese regime pays strong attention to all sectors, from politics to institutions, from the academy to the media, aware of the extreme effectiveness of an offensive on several fronts. Each context is examined to understand its weaknesses and strengths. The actors potentially more receptive to the regime’s propaganda are identified and the system is infiltrated and worked from within in order to drag it to China’s side.
China launches suspected anti-satellite weapon into space
China has launched a new satellite that analysts say can be used as a weapon capable of grabbing and crushing American satellites.
The Shijian-21 satellite was sent aloft on Sunday atop a rocket booster from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, ostensibly for cleaning “space debris,” according to the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, Beijing’s state-run space company. The company stated that the satellite is “tasked with demonstrating technologies to alleviate and neutralize space debris.”
The robotic satellite launch followed a suspected recent test of a new hypersonic missile that Chinese officials said was a peaceful space experiment.
The commander of the U.S. Space Command, Air Force Gen. James Dickinson told Congress in April that spacecraft like the Shijian-21 is part of an effort by China to seek “space superiority through space and space-attack systems.”
“One notable object is the Shijian-17, a Chinese satellite with a robotic arm,” Gen. Dickinson said. “Space-based robotic arm technology could be used in a future system for grappling other satellites.”
How a ‘Deal With the Devil’ Backfired and Changed History
Just six months after arriving in Petrograd with the help of Germany, the Russian communist Vladimir Lenin had engineered the October Revolution. The story does not end there, however.
On this date—April 16—in the fateful year of 1917, the Russian communist Vladimir Lenin arrived in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) from exile in Switzerland.
The Germans, with whom Russia had been at war since the summer of 1914, secretly arranged his return, granted him safe passage through Germany, and even gave him millions in gold. They hoped he would stir up enough trouble that Russia would withdraw from World War I.
A vaccine is supposed to inoculate a person against a virus. Injecting Russia with Lenin was tantamount to administering the virus itself. British historian Edward Crankshaw noted that Germany saw “in this obscure fanatic one more bacillus to let loose in tottering and exhausted Russia to spread infection.”
Within six months, Lenin engineered the October Revolution. His new regime made peace with Germany in March 1918.
So, the Germans got their wish for the near term, but it availed them worse than nothing. They lost the war anyway in November. The monster Lenin created would swallow half of Germany in 1945 and build the infamous Berlin Wall in 1961. The first communist state enslaved millions and bedeviled the world until its collapse in 1991.
Lenin is the same cold-blooded thug who famously wrote, “We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, law-breaking, withholding and concealing truth[.] … We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.”
Elsewhere, Lenin declared that “The proletariat needs state power, the centralized organization of force, the organization of violence, for the purpose of crushing the resistance…and for the purpose of leading the great mass of the population…in the work of organizing a socialist economy.”
The Moral Chasm That Has Opened Up Between Left and Right Is Widening
There has been a remarkable erosion in public tolerance of “offensive expression about race, gender and religion,” according to a paper Dennis Chong and Morris Levy, political scientists at the University of Southern California, and Jack Citrin, a political scientist at Berkeley, presented in September at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association.
“Tolerance has declined overall,” they add, particularly “for a category of speech that is considered unworthy of First Amendment protection because it violates the goal of equality.”…
… In other words, whether we evaluate the current conflict-ridden political climate in terms of moral foundations theory, feminism or the political group conflict hypothesis, the trends are not favorable, especially if the outcome of the 2024 presidential election is close.
If the continuing anger, resentment and denial among Republicans in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential contest are precursors of the next election, current trends, in combination with the politicization of election administration by Republican state legislatures, suggest that the loser in 2024, Republican or Democratic, will not take defeat lying down.
The forces fracturing the political system are clearly stronger than the forces pushing for consensus.
25 of the Greatest Quotes on Economics and Capitalism (That You’ve Probably Never Heard) – Timeless insights from some of the greatest thinkers in economic history
Economics in One Lesson and Free to Choose, the classic works written by Henry Hazlitt and Milton Friedman, respectively, are on that list. A personal favorite is Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics, a book that kindled my own interest in economics many years ago.
From The Wealth of Nations (1776) to Freakonomics (2005), there are many and more works in between that people would argue are must-read economics texts, including Ludwig von Mises’ Human Action.
Though I’d encourage people to read in full all the best economics books, it’s unlikely most will find the time. Fortunately, with David L. Bahnsen’s forthcoming book There’s No Free Lunch: 250 Economic Truths, they don’t necessarily have to.
In his latest work, Bahnsen—a National Review contributor, Chief Investment Officer of The Bahnsen Group, and FEE supporter—has collected centuries worth of economic wisdom into a single text to show precisely what the title implies: there are no free lunches.
