Come on Man: Lets just look at the facts…
Afghanistan, a disastrous surrender and withdrawal
Inflation, prices are rising across the board for virtually everything
Southern Border, millions illegally crossing
A Gallon of Gas, ouch, every week we feel it at the pumps
Defund the Police, we paid dearly for this stupidity in many cities
Critical Race Theory, stoking racism for political gain is disgusting
Boys Playing Girls Sports, our daughter and granddaughters deserve better
…and now Ukraine. Half ass measures have the world watching women and children being murdered, cities demolished, historical landmarks decimated, and a refugee humanitarian crisis throughout Europe.
Joe Biden is a disaster and his policies are destroying the very fabric of our country. Elections have consequences.
Biden’s Ukraine Folly: The United Sates is providing Ukraine with plenty of lethal aid to help them fight the Russians…just NOT what they need to win.
Putin’s vicious massacre of civilians and terror bombing campaign of residential areas makes it clear that this war criminal couldn’t care less about any “rules of war.”
Ukraine’s neighbors and allies are offering the critical fighter jets and anti-aircraft defense systems the people of Ukraine need to have a chance. Biden has said NO?!?
You can’t be “half pregnant” when it comes to war. We are providing billions in lethal aid but denying the Ukrainians the weapons they need to defend their citizens, let alone win. Yes, they are valiantly fighting the Russian war criminals and I’m sure will continue their resistance for years to come, if necessary, but only because Biden wouldn’t allow them the weapons they need to stop this war, stop the Russians, and stop Putin in his steps.
First an embarrassing and disastrous surrender in Afghanistan and now Ukraine. Biden’s folly.
Putin’s Playbook: This last week I read ‘Putin’s Playbook’, an excellent book that lays out the long-term plan Putin and the Soviets have had. It openly predicts what is happening in Ukraine, and how it would happen. It discusses how the “left” was duped to engage in destroying America’s culture.
The author exposes the danger of America’s “socialist” movement.
It is a book worth reading and understanding what the Russians are thinking and how committed they are to a long-term plan for “controlled chaos” to undermine the west.
Please read it.
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
In this week’s video rewind- Gas propaganda rises faster than the price, Trump was put on notice by Lindsey Graham over January 6th riot, and Russia demands US return Alaska!
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Ukraine Is World War 2½
Virtually all of the world’s democracies have committed to repelling Russia.
In the rarest eclipse imaginable, Joe Biden and Donald Trump are in alignment on one thing: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shouldn’t be allowed to pull us into World War III. Sen. Marco Rubio has chipped in the same portentous thought.
Beware wars to come is always a useful idea, but let’s hope America’s political leadership has a clearer view of what is happening in the here and now.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has already produced World War 2½.
World War III is a decades-long Cold War concern. What we’re seeing now is something new—a spontaneous, crowd-funded world-wide effort to fight a war without springing the Armageddon tripwire.
Within three weeks, virtually all the world’s democratic nations and peoples have committed to repelling Russia’s invasion. The size, speed and depth of the response is almost incomprehensible.
Putin Doesn’t Want an ‘Off Ramp’
He isn’t looking for a way to end this war. He just wants to win this war
On the menu today: The vaunted Russian army is proving to be a shadow of its former self, and the Russian economy continues to freefall. Despite all this, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin is not only undeterred, he appears to be doubling down. How can Putin make it any clearer to those Western diplomats who are so convinced that some set of incentives and concessions will convince him to halt the fighting? Putin doesn’t want an “off ramp.” He isn’t looking for a way to end this war. He just wants to win this war, and he doesn’t care how much he and everyone else has to pay in blood and treasure to achieve his victory…
…How can Putin make it any clearer? He doesn’t want an “off ramp!” He doesn’t want to end his war, he wants to win his war. He doesn’t care how gargantuan a price he or his country must pay in blood and treasure to achieve victory. To a certain degree, Putin is dealing with the sunken-costs fallacy. He has already committed so much, nationally and personally, into this war that he cannot accept a relatively modest prize of Donetsk and Luhansk and a guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO. Russia’s big sacrifices in this war means Putin must bring home a big prize to justify the bloody endeavor.
The only way this war ends is with one side or the other devastated — or both in a bitter stalemate.
Putin will shift to the long game and bet that his willpower can outlast the West’s. Putin never has to worry about reelection. Putin likely believes the Russian people will accept any sacrifice he asks to restore Russia to greatness. Putin looks at the West and sees weakness, decadence, and fecklessness — a lot of tough talk but not much willingness to sacrifice.
Why Did Vladimir Putin Invade Ukraine?
Nearly three weeks have passed since Russian President Vladimir Putin began his invasion of Ukraine, but it still is not clear why he did so and what he hopes to achieve. Western analysts, commentators and government officials have put forward more than a dozen theories to explain Putin’s actions, motives, and objectives.
Some analysts posit that Putin is motivated by a desire to rebuild the Russian Empire. Others say he is obsessed with bringing Ukraine back into Russia’s sphere of influence. Some believe that Putin wants to control Ukraine’s vast offshore energy resources. Still others speculate that Putin, an aging autocrat, is seeking to maintain his grip on power.
While some argue that Putin has a long-term proactive strategy aimed at establishing Russian primacy in Europe, others believe he is a short-term reactionary seeking to preserve what remains of Russia’s diminishing position on the world stage.
Following is a compilation of eight differing but complementary theories that try to explain why Putin invaded Ukraine.
The Russia Hawks Were Right
“If you want peace, prepare for war” — it is so simple and yet so counterintuitive, at least to significant swaths of Americans.
On the menu today: As Russian forces accelerate their shelling of Ukrainian cities and targeting of civilians, the world confronts a great evil — one that is not easily explained or addressed by so-called realist foreign-policy thinkers. The Russia hawks were right about Vladimir Putin; KGB men don’t turn over a new leaf. Now, as ever, if Americans want to live in a peaceful world, we must prepare to fight and win in a warring one.
For a long while — perhaps since the failure to find the expected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003? — when Americans pay attention to foreign policy, it has been almost de rigueur to scoff at “hawks” — or those who prefer larger defense budgets, a larger military, and a more assertive or even aggressive response to potential threats overseas.
This is well-trod, even exhausted territory that has been debated most of my adult life: “Neocons.” “Warmongers.” “Fighting for oil companies.” “The military industrial complex.” “Nation-building.” “Forever wars.”
Anger over the loss of blood and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan is easily justified, as is fury over U.S. inability to guide either country to a smooth and stable future. No serious observer of American foreign policy can deny that over the past 20 to 30 years, the U.S. has made extraordinarily consequential mistakes. The U.S. government has demonstrated an ability to win wars in the form of destroying enemy forces, but not an ability to turn a defeated territory into a stable country, run by a competent and decent government. (The Iraq of 2022 is a big step up from the regime of Saddam Hussein, but still has a long way to go.)
But the world beyond our borders will not just go away, and it is deadly naïvete to think that the world’s motley crew of thugs, brutes, and other menaces — from powerful autocrats such as Putin and Xi Jinping; to rogue states such as North Korea and Iran; to terror groups such as al-Qaeda and ISIS; to transnational criminal groups such as drug cartels, organized crime, or private-mercenary groups — will ever just go away and not be a threat to Americans at home or abroad. The world is full of bullies who can only be deterred by a metaphorical punch in the face, or by the fear of a literal punch in the face.
‘We told you so!’ How the West didn’t listen to the countries that know Russia best
Poland and the Baltic states understand the Kremlin better than Western governments but found their warnings about Putin ignored.
For years, Western Europeans have been dismissive of politicians from Poland and the Baltic countries whenever they sounded the alarm over the expansionist threat posed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
They now realize they should have listened to countries with a far deeper knowledge of the Kremlin and a bitter historical memory of the violence that Moscow is willing to unleash to pursue its goals.
Instead, the Westerners followed a path of commercial and political appeasement of Putin, led by former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which has now spectacularly backfired with the invasion of Ukraine, the bombardment of its cities and mass emigration.
“The Western Europeans pooh-poohed and patronized us for these last 30 years,” said Radosław Sikorski, a former Polish foreign minister. “For years [they] were patronizing us about our attitude: ‘Oh, you know, you over-nervous, over-sensitive Central Europeans are prejudiced against Russia.’”
The Easterners say they ran into a brick wall when they made pleas for increased NATO deployments, drew attention to cyberattacks and called on Berlin not to let the EU be held hostage by giant pipelines pumping gas straight into Germany. The outspoken, pugnacious Sikorski, then defense minister, triggered outrage in thin-skinned diplomatic circles in 2006 when he dared compare the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream gas pipeline project, which bypassed Poland, to the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 that divided Poland between the Nazis and Soviets.
Polish and Baltic leaders saw Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 as a defining threshold that signaled that Putin needed to be stopped with a genuine show of force from the West, or otherwise he would go on to attack more targets. In fruitless meetings in Brussels, however, Polish and Baltic diplomats found that most of the European Union was reluctant to impose heavy sanctions on Moscow despite its invasion of an EU ally. The furious anti-Putin camp dubbed the Italian-led opposition to sanctions as the “Club Med” grouping.
Their wariness of Moscow has centuries-old roots.
Russians voting with their feet — fleeing Putin and neo-Soviet misery
Vladimir Putin waxed nostalgic for the days of the Soviet Union, and appears poised to deliver Russia back to the heady days of bread lines and forced service. Russians have responded by taking a page out of the old Soviet playbook, too — fleeing across the border. The New York Times reports that the war in Ukraine and the economic sanctions imposed as a result has created a large and growing exodus:
They lined up at ATM’s, desperate for cash after Visa and Mastercard suspended operations in Russia, swapping intelligence on where they could still get dollars. At Istanbul cafes, they sat quietly studying Telegram chats or Google Maps on their phones. They organized support groups to help other Russian exiles find housing.
Tens of thousands of Russians have fled to Istanbul since Russia invaded Ukraine last month, outraged about what they see as a criminal war, worried about conscription or the possibility of a closed Russian border, or concerned that their livelihoods are no longer viable back home.
And they are just the tip of the iceberg. Tens of thousands more traveled to countries like Armenia, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan which are better known as sources of migration to Russia. At the land border with Latvia — open only to those with European visas — travelers reported waits lasting hours.
No one has seen anything like it in a century, one Russian expert tells the NYT:
That has created a flight — though much smaller than in Ukraine — that some are comparing to 1920, when more than 100,000 opponents of the Communist Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War left to seek refuge in what was then Constantinople.
“There has never been anything like this before in peacetime,” said Konstantin Sonin, a Russian economist at the University of Chicago. “There is no war on Russian territory. As a single event, it is pretty huge.”
The Stench of Spygate
It won’t go away, no matter how much the media ignores it.
The more we learn about the Obama administration’s spying on Donald Trump, the worse it looks. The investigation into his alleged collusion with Russia never had any foundation to it. Feverish partisans pushed for the probe. Chief among them were John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director who despised Trump, and Peter Strzok, Brennan’s FBI liaison who texted his mistress that he was going to “stop” Trump.
The partisan origins of the probe are impossible to deny. But were they illegal? Can an administration just open up an investigation on a political opponent based on partisan hunches? This remains to be seen. Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe has said that “quite a few more indictments” are likely to come from special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the probe. “[Then-Attorney General] Bill Barr, John Durham, and I, all looking at this intelligence, agreed there was not a proper predicate to open a criminal investigation into the Trump campaign, yet that happened,” he said.
The probe was a partisan fishing expedition from the beginning, evident in the fact that the FBI resorted to the outlandish use of a quasi-Republican spy, Stefan Halper, to infiltrate the Trump campaign. The media has almost completely ignored this sensational part of the story. But Mark Hemingway at RealClearInvestigations has done the reporting on Halper that the mainstream media won’t. His illuminating story on Halper raises more embarrassing questions for the FBI — questions that Durham’s final report will hopefully answer.
America’s Fight: Conservative School Board Member Blows the Lid off Inner Workings of the Left’s Monopoly on Education
The battle over the nation’s children – from flagrant indoctrination to forced masking – has emerged in the national spotlight during the last two years, becoming a widely-known issue as parents take matters into their own hands after years of the left maintaining a monopoly on the educational system, doing their best to keep the leftist agenda moving forward.
However, in the last year, the woke left’s agenda has been exposed, leading to massive conservative victories, as with Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R) monumental victory in Virginia last November. Parents are fired up and taking power back, but this battle started years ago, as parents such as Bridget Ziegler waged a war against the radical left at the local level, even before it became a commonly known national issue. Ziegler shared her story in an exclusive interview with Breitbart News.
Ziegler, a mom of three and member of the Sarasota County School Board in Florida, has been at the helm of this fight since joining the board in 2014 – long before wokeness in school was a mainstream topic. At the time, she was the mother of an 8 month old and worked in the private sector, as she still does to this day. Her husband is heavily involved in politics, now serving as the vice chairman of the Florida GOP. But at the time, in 2014, a vacancy appeared on the school board, and he encouraged his wife to run, as she is “passionate” about children’s issues. She ultimately filed and former Gov. Rick Scott (R), now a Florida senator, appointed her at the time. She went on to win the election in a close race and stood out as a “staunch” supporter of school choice, which she said was more of a “taboo at the time.” But the union, she said, “just lost it.”
Ziegler said she began to see things that were “shocking” to her upon joining the board, as it operates very differently than the business world. She described going to the Florida School Board Association meeting, a chapter of the National School Board Association, and at the time the unions were suing the governor and legislature for taxpayer scholarships — something she advocated for. It was odd, she said, for them to utilize taxpayer dollars to send her to this conference where they were touting issues she was against. Seeing this, she and other conservative board members formed the Florida Coalition of School Board Members, which she described as a “small but mighty group” that passed a ton of legislation. While effective, she said the group did not grow exponentially, despite others showing their support, because there was “very much of an indoctrination to school board members, to policy makers.”
ICE Report Shows Deportations Dropped to 26 Year Low in Biden’s First Term
Biden’s foreign policy is reshaping the interior of America as millions of illegal aliens flood through our borders.
On March 11th, the federal government released the ICE Annual Report for the fiscal year of 2021. This report shows what many predicted from Joe Biden’s first term in office: a huge influx of illegal immigration and a drastic decline in deportations.
During Trump’s last term in office, he deported 185,884 illegal aliens. Joe Biden, who falsely campaigned as a moderate, brought these numbers down to just 59,011 deportations in 2021. Such a low deportation rate hasn’t been seen in 26 years.
This decline in deportations was to be expected from the radical policies Biden’s administration pursued.
Biden’s Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has pursued ICE policies and personally met with officers to urge them to use “more discretion” before making arrests.
In other words, Mayorkas wants to treat illegal aliens who break our immigration laws with compassion rather than law enforcement. This goes against any ideas of equal administration of justice, which shows that as Secretary of Homeland Security, Mayorkas has only served to make our homeland less secure.
Reality is catching up to Biden on the border
If President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security was proud of its record on immigration enforcement, its annual U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations report would have come out as it normally does: shortly after the fiscal year ended last September.
But Biden doesn’t want voters to know just how radically he has changed this nation’s immigration enforcement policies. So the fiscal 2021 report was delayed for months and months until its release last week. It confirmed what every immigration observer already knew: Deportations have plummeted under Biden.
Over the last 10 years, across both the Obama and Trump administrations, ICE deported between 226,000 and 410,000 illegal immigrants every year. Under Biden in fiscal year 2021, they deported just 59,000.
Even that number is misleading. The Biden DHS memo severely restricting ICE agents’ ability to arrest and deport illegal immigrants wasn’t issued until Feb. 18, 2021. More than half of the deportations that occurred in fiscal 2021 actually occurred in the first 4 1/2 months of the fiscal year under former President Donald Trump’s enforcement regimen. That means next year, when the data cover a full year of Biden enforcement policies, the deportation numbers will be substantially lower.
| (If you want to better understand Putin’s goals… a good read. -Saul) Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America |
Putin’s Playbook is urgently essential reading. A former U.S. intelligence specialist who was born and raised in the Soviet Union explains what Vladimir Putin wants and how he plans to get it. Russia’s ruler is following a carefully devised plan to defeat the United States.
Rebekah Koffler came to America as a young woman. After 9/11, she joined the Defense Intelligence Agency, devoting her career to protecting her new country. Now she reveals in chilling detail Putin’s long-range plan—his “playbook”—to weaken and subdue the United States, preparing for the war that he believes is inevitable.
With the insight of a native, Koffler explains how Russians, formed by centuries of war-torn history, understand the world and their national destiny. The collapse of the Soviet empire, which Putin experienced as a vulnerable KGB agent in East Germany, was a catastrophic humiliation. Seeing himself as the modern “Czar Vladimir” of a unique Slavic nation at war with the West, he is determined to restore Russia to its place as a great power.
Koffler’s analysis is enriched by her deeply personal account of her life in the Soviet Union. Devoted to her adopted homeland but concerned about the complacency of her fellow citizens, she appreciates American freedoms as only a survivor of totalitarianism can. An opportunity to view ourselves and the world through the eyes of our adversary, Putin’s Playbook is a rare and compelling testimony that we ignore at our peril.
