Justice Must be Blind: Disagreeing with someone’s political views or harboring personal animosity is not a basis for criminal prosecution.
This isn’t about Donald Trump…it’s about the rule of law in our country. Politicizing law enforcement, government agencies, and personal political bias taken out on political enemies is wrong. It challenges the fundamental values that make this country unique worldwide.
When illegal immigrants and Democrat politicians receive different treatment, more consideration, and accommodations than a former President of the United States…we have a problem.
The political abuse of a Grand Jury is a serious breach of legal ethics. It is the duty of a prosecutor to see that justice is done, not to target an individual and contort the law to bring political prosecutions against political opponents. The bottom line, Pomerantz should face disbarment for his unconscionable conduct.
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–Saul Anuzis
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60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
This Week: House GOP unveils the Lower Energy Costs Act, former Vice President Mike Pence calls for common sense Social Security & Medicare reform, and the 2023 Farm Bill will be critical for the United States.
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
https://justthenews.com/government/congress/house-gop-unveils-lower-energy-costs-act
https://www.majorityleader.gov/uploadedfiles/hr1_lower_energy_costs_act.pdf
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House GOP passes parents’ rights bill in clash over schools
House Republicans on Friday narrowly passed legislation that would fulfill a campaign promise to give parents a role in what’s taught in public schools. It has little chance in the Democrat-run Senate and critics said it would propel a far-right movement that has led to book bans, restrictions aimed at transgender students and raucous school board meetings across the country.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. who made the Parents’ Bill of Rights Act a priority during the early weeks of his tenure, said Republicans were “keeping our promise, our commitment to America, that parents will have a say in their kids’ education.” The bill passed 213-208, with five Republicans — mostly members of the House Freedom Caucus — voting against it.
It would require schools to publish course studies and a list of books kept in libraries, as well as affirm parents’ ability to meet with educators, speak at school board meetings and examine school budgets.
In the Senate, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., promised that the legislation would face a “dead end.” He said it was further evidence that the House GOP had been overtaken by “hard right MAGA ideologues” — referencing former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan.
Taking Down the ‘Evil Empire’
Freedom triumphed over tyranny due in large measure to President Ronald Reagan, who summed up his strategy with four simple words: ‘We win, they lose.’
For nearly four decades following World War II, the United States and its allies followed a policy of containment of communism. That policy cost tens of thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. Yet in 1980, communism was not only alive and seemingly well in the Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe, mainland China, Cuba, and North Korea. It had also expanded into Vietnam, Cambodia, sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. Clearly, containment was not working.
A new American president, Ronald Reagan, determined to challenge directly the vital center of communism — the Soviet Union. He directed his national-security team to develop a plan to end the Cold War by winning it. As he put it, “We win, they lose.”
Based on intelligence reports and his life-long study of communism, President Reagan was convinced that the Soviet Union was cracking and ready to crumble. While the USSR projected an image of strength, in truth, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet general secretary who assumed power in 1985, took command of an imploding empire.
DA Alvin Bragg’s Expected Indictment Of Trump Resembles Stalin’s Notorious Tactics
“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” was the infamous boast of Joseph Stalin’s ruthless secret police chief, Lavrentiy Beria. His modus operandi was to target any man the Soviet dictator chose and then find or fabricate a crime against him.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has taken a page out of Stalin’s playbook and targeted Donald Trump. Driven by personal and political animus, the DA presumed the former president must be guilty of something. It was just a matter of devoting enough time and resources to hunt down the crime. Failing to find one, Bragg copied Beria’s paradigm and simply dreamed one up.
As I explained in my last column, the DA invented his case against Trump by taking an alleged misdemeanor business records violation and supercharging it into a felony by citing an imagined second crime arising out of a supposed campaign finance violation. The novelty of such a charge is exceeded only by its absurdity.
The indictment appears to hinge on the DA’s argument that a 2016 payment made to porn star, Stormy Daniels, was intended to help Trump’s presidential bid and should have been accounted for as a campaign contribution, not legal fees, when he reimbursed his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, who paid Daniels to keep her mouth shut about a purported 2006 affair that Trump vigorously denies. Confused yet? You should be.
The flaw in Bragg’s tortured logic is two-fold. First, non-disclosure agreements in exchange for money are perfectly legal. Second, Cohen long ago stated that the payment had nothing to do with the campaign but was made to protect Melania Trump from an embarrassing, albeit false, accusation. As such, it is not an illegal campaign donation under the law. Hence there is no crime.
Why Leaders Are Not Supposed to Be Demagogues
On the menu today: We’ve often heard Donald Trump denounced as a demagogue, but that argument often skips past the first step: Why is it bad for a leader to be a demagogue? What are the likely consequences when a leader starts to act like a demagogue?
Why are leaders not supposed to be demagogues?
Merriam-Webster defines a demagogue as “a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.” I would expand that a bit to define it as a leader who presses the emotional buttons of fear and anger in an excessive or unjustifiable manner, appealing to those base, irrational emotions to stir up the public into a frenzy, getting people to choose a path they would otherwise never choose and act in manners they otherwise never would embrace.
The amygdalae are clusters of almond-shaped cells located in the brain’s base that activate the body’s fight-or-flight response. This part of our brain evolved to handle direct physical threats — “The tiger is going to eat me.” Thankfully, in today’s modern society, we (hopefully) encounter fewer life-or-death physical threats. But we can still face all kinds of other threats, and our body responds similarly — quickened pulse rate, expanded airways to transport more oxygen, dilated pupils. Some people, when encountering stress, experience what’s called an “amygdala hijack” — emotions take over, the brain’s frontal lobes are effectively shoved away from the steering wheel, and the person often reacts with extreme, inappropriate, or irrational behavior.
We all like to believe that we are rational, calm, clear-thinking people. But if, God forbid, someone called and said one of your loved ones had just been taken hostage by a deranged gunman, your amygdala would kick into overdrive. Very few of us would be good at making clear, rational, patient decisions with careful measurements of risk. We would want to race in to confront the gunman, or have the cops confront the gunman, and save our loved one as soon as humanly possible. Our amygdala is very hard to overrule when the fear of losing someone or something dear to us is so strong.
The 2024 GOP field: How they win, how they lose
The race for the GOP presidential has a set of historic firsts: a former president seeking an Oval Office comeback, a vice president who refused to go along with a plot to steal the last election, the most politically accomplished woman ever to run as a Republican — and an already-popular governor waiting in the wings.
Who ultimately wins out will take on President Joe Biden in a likely reelection bid — and potentially secure the White House.
There are also other candidates and would-be candidates, too. We’ve put the entire field into three categories — based roughly on their chances to capture the nod — along with full scouting reports for everything that could go right or wrong along the road to the 2024 convention in Milwaukee.
The most likely nominee(s). The Favorites have established major campaign infrastructure — plenty of money, staff in key states, outside groups ready to bombard the airwaves with advertising — built broad coalitions in polling and garnered endorsements from party leaders.
How Midwest roots shaped Ron DeSantis’ political values and perspective
Youngstown, Ohio, plays a large — and largely untold — role in the origins of Florida’s governor and the cultural grievances he carries as a possible presidential candidate.
Ron DeSantis, now a likely candidate for president, has never lived here. But this once-overwhelmingly Democratic corner of the industrial Midwest — where the economic populism and social conservatism that realigned the Republican Party and helped elect Donald Trump have intersected after decades of despair — offers an instructive origin story. Places such as Youngstown and Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, where his father also grew up in the shadows of now-shuttered steel mills, have become incubators for the kinds of cultural grievances that DeSantis nurtures.
“I was geographically raised in Tampa Bay,” DeSantis writes in his recently published political memoir, “but culturally my upbringing reflected the working-class communities in western Pennsylvania and northeast Ohio — from weekly church attendance to the expectation that one would earn his keep. This made me God-fearing, hard-working and America-loving.”
The governor and his parents did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article.
But the DeSantis family roots here — never before reported in great detail — help fill in the blanks of a politician who rose to national prominence only five years ago, after Trump endorsed him for governor, and now stands as the former president’s toughest prospective competitor for the GOP nomination in 2024. From his grandfather’s work in local politics to the blossoming romance of his parents on the campus of Youngstown State University, certain moments in time provide texture and points of contrast.
Nikki Haley walks fine line on race, gender in appeal to GOP base
As she campaigns, Haley is at once seeking to accentuate her differences as a woman of color and offer reassurances that they are not impediments to achieving success
As a Republican candidate for president, Nikki Haley introduces herself as the proud daughter of Indian immigrants. She says it’s time for a new generation of leaders and the best way to accomplish that is to put a “badass woman” in the White House.
At the same time, Haley has underscored that she does not believe there are “glass ceilings” limiting women. She rejects identity politics as a form of divisiveness and “woke self-loathing.” And she stated her belief in a speech kicking off her campaign last month that “America is not a racist country.”
With her underdog White House bid, Haley, 51, a former governor of South Carolina and U.N. ambassador, is the first prominent woman of color to seek the GOP nomination. As she campaigns around the country, she is at once seeking to accentuate her differences from White male candidates and offer reassurances that they are not impediments to achieving success.
Her pitch is directed at a Republican primary electorate that largely rejects the idea that institutions are plagued by systemic racism and other forms of discrimination, as well as the suggestion that the country ought to reckon more openly with past injustices.
JFK Understood Tax Competition. Biden Does Not
2023 marks the 60th anniversary of House passage of President John F. Kennedy’s historic tax cuts. Kennedy throughout 1963 consistently emphasized U.S. competitiveness as the key reason to reduce our corporate, personal, and capital gains taxes.
The deeply internalized philosophical contrast between the two men is striking. Kennedy repeatedly spoke of how a reduced tax burden would allow Americans to keep more of what they earn and would harness the industriousness of the American people. Biden on the other hand seems angry at successful individuals and businesses.
Black Lives Matter Activists Executed A Shocking $83 Billion Shakedown Of American Corporations
Our database tracking contributions and pledges made to the BLM movement shows a historic transfer of wealth to divisive leftwing causes.
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots of 2020 were the largest and most successful shakedown in American history. These “mostly peaceful protests” — which burned more than 200 American cities and wreaked more than $2 billion in damages — achieved more than anyone could have predicted: changes in laws, private sector policies, and perhaps most importantly, a historic transfer of wealth to racial and leftwing causes. As a result, American corporations gave or pledged more than $83 billion to either BLM or BLM-related causes.
We created a database tracking contributions and pledges made to the BLM movement and related causes, which we define as organizations and initiatives that advance one or more aspects of BLM’s agenda, and which were made in the wake of the BLM riots of 2020. To date, our data spans more than 400 companies and $83 billion in pledges and contributions.
The famed consulting firm McKinsey and Company thinks the number is far larger. They calculated that from May 2020 to October 2022 companies pledged about $340 billion “to racial equity, specifically for Black Americans after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.” Our number is conservative by comparison. But unlike McKinsey, we provide details about the pledges and contributions of specific companies.
We are surprised at some of the incredulity in our calculations. So too is BLM, which suggests that objections to wealth transfers of this scale are rooted in “white supremacy,” and “a pathology that Black organizations don’t deserve to be funded.”
BLM called for reparations. In a sense, they succeeded, as these reparations were paid out to BLM itself (approximately $122 million) and to its vast NGO archipelago and other racialized causes and schemes under various names.
While the money was given or pledged in different ways, it was unmistakable for so-called “racial justice.” Sometimes this meant cash transfers to partners of BLM, like the Color of Change, the NAACP, the Equal Justice Initiative, and the ACLU.
