FACTS: Don’t believe the Democrats’ phony claims about the filibuster. Last year when Republicans controlled the Senate, Democrats filibustered 327 times. This Congress, there have been ZERO.
“Woke” Capitalism: We have been concerned with the rise of corporate political activism. The growth of so-called ESG investing (Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance) has brought on a wave of “woke capitalism.” Multi-national corporations like Coca-Cola and Amazon are donating millions to radical groups and pushing leftist social and political agendas.
Corporate Democrats are eager (or kowtowing) to jump on to progressive threats and bullying. When Delta Airlines joined in with a pusillanimous error filled statement, Georgia Governor Kemp responded by saying: “At no point did Delta share any opposition to expanding early voting, strengthening voter ID measures, increasing the use of secure drop boxes statewide, and making it easier for local election officials to administer elections — which is exactly what this bill does,” Kemp said in a statement shared with The Hill.
We have been an active member of a coalition to fight this trend, and we encourage you to visit the new coalition website StopCorporateTyranny.org. Check their site regularly and join their email list so you can get updates on these dangerous developments and what you can do to push back against the left’s weaponization of corporate America
Racism: No, everyone is NOT racist and everybody who disagrees with the narrative of some leftist or BLM activist is NOT a racist…nor is it racism. This woke/cancel culture narrative is NOT good for America.
Yes, there is racism in our world. Yes, there are racist of all stripes. And yes, we should address, condemn and rationally deal with any and all racism until we ultimately meet the norms Martin Luther King Jr. professed, to judge people by their character versus the color of their skin.
I am fearful there are far too many blaming everything on racism. If they disagree with you or you say something controversial (free speech) it’s deemed racist.
I cringed as I decided to comment on racism, which in and of itself is reflective of the problem we face. I know fathers of black sons who experience very different day to day realities than my sons do and I know that we must, as a society, address those issues.
But collective guilt, institutional blame, reverse racism, and cheap inflammatory political rhetoric isn’t going to solve anything…rather, it is making things worse.
Censorship: Hard to believe, but the “do gooders” at YouTube deleted our weekly news video. The big tech overlords are upset at a senior citizen advocacy group for EXPOSING Joe Biden’s border crisis. Senior citizens are apparently DANGEROUS on YouTube now.
We reported the news, shared several mainstream media news stories that apparently hit a nerve, maybe too close to the truth, and we were censored. We moved the video to Rumble and you can view it there and see for yourself how biased these Orwellian “fact checkers” really are: https://rumble.com/vf3x0t-sauls-news-rewind-video-for-march-26-2021.html
Balance Budget Amendment: With Congress and the White House in the hands of progressive liberals, now more than ever we have to complete the effort to call for an Article 5 Constitutional Convention to pass a Balance Budget Amendment.
Join the effort at with the BBA Task Force which explains: The U.S. national debt ($24.6 trillion) is now 7 times federal revenue ($3.6 trillion), a serious imbalance that will cost us over $600 billion (16.5% of federal revenue) in 2020. We’ve already seen a $1 trillion spike in the 2020 deficit in just the last month as the Corona-virus stimulus starts to add up. It is hard to calculate where we will be at the end of the year, but the one thing we can say for certain is that it will be on for the record books.
The root cause of the problem was best explained by the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee when it concluded, “the many statutory constraints enacted over the years to control spending failed because no Congress can bind a succeeding Congress by simple statute.” Therefore, only a balanced budget amendment (BBA) will do. Given Congress’ 75-year failure to propose a BBA, the states must do so by calling an Article V convention.
Join this fight to get a Balance Budget Amendment and it will be much less important as to what political party controls Congress.
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
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60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
In this week’s video rewind- Saul Anuzis talks about the power of the senior vote, illegal immigrants allegedly get Social Security cards, and Biden tries to sneak the Green New Deal through Congress under a new name!
Links to the articles discussed in the video:
Does the GOP’s Future Depend on Voters Over 65? (Saul Quoted in Article)
As a political observer and loyal Republican for nearly a half-century, I know well the GOP’s dependence on senior voters heading toward the 2022 midterm elections. But is it an over-dependence?
Over the last four presidential elections, the Republican candidate won 65-plus voters by an average marginal difference of eight percentage points – consistently the highest among the four standard voter age groups. Yet the 2020 election yielded the GOP’s smallest senior margin of victory when Donald Trump won only 52% compared to 47% for Joe Biden.
Even more concerning, those five percentage points were Trump’s largest victory margin among any age group. In second place were 45-to-64-year-old voters, whom he won by one percentage point, 50%-49%. Far behind were voters ages 30 to 44, whom Biden won by six percentage points, and he won 18-to-29-year-olds by a whopping 24 percentage points.
Nonetheless, my analysis last month for RealClearPolitics included some good news for seniors and the GOP: “In 2020, 65-plus were 22% of voters, while only 17% of the U.S. population, meaning seniors are ‘fighting above their weight’ by five percentage points.”
That fact prompted an email from Saul Anuzis, the president of “60 Plus” — an organization positioned as the conservative policy alternative to AARP, the political behemoth that tilts Democratic.
Anuzis, a former Michigan Republican Party chairman, activist, and strategist, wrote, “Older voters are key for Republicans not just in the presidential, but in taking back the Senate and the House in 2022.”
Woke and Weak CEOs
The public debate on Georgia’s new voting law has become a stew of falsehood, propaganda and panic. Part of the blame lies with the partisan distortion of Democrats, part with their media echoes, and now part with CEOs of major companies who are uninformed at best or cowardly at worst.
Start with President Biden, the great unifier, who on Wednesday to ESPN called the law “Jim Crow on steroids,” while saying he’d “strongly support” moving the Major League Baseball all-star game out of Atlanta. He’s picking up the smear about Georgia from Stacey Abrams, who still hasn’t accepted that she lost the race for Peach State Governor in 2018.
“You’re going to close a polling place at 5 o’clock, when working people just get off?” he said to ESPN. “This is all about keeping working folks, and ordinary folks that I grew up with, from being able to vote.” Mr. Biden either doesn’t know what’s in the Georgia bill or he is lying about it. We’d like to believe it’s the former, but that gets harder to credit as his falsehoods multiply.
Democrats used filibuster 327 times, compared to only once by GOP in 2020
President Joe Biden has been increasingly critical of the Senate filibuster, calling it a Jim Crow relic and saying it has been widely abused despite Democrats using it over 300 times in 2020, compared to once by Republicans.
“After @POTUS @JoeBiden denounced the rampant abuse of the filibuster last year, we did some digging,” Fox News anchor John Roberts tweeted Friday. “Republicans used it once. Democrats used it 327 times.”
In his first solo press conference since taking office, Biden said he agreed with former President Barack Obama’s newly adopted belief that the filibuster tactic is a “Jim Crow relic.”
Biden also expressed frustration with how often the filibuster has been used and specifically took issue with how it was “abused” last year.
The kind of leaders the conservative movement needs to stop the left
Conservative leaders must grow the movement without watering down its principles.
I’ve been involved in the conservative movement for over 30 years. One reason I’ve been doing it so long is because I know that conservatives have the solutions to the most pressing problems America faces.
We have the research and the data on how to eliminate most poverty, how to shore up the education gap, how to create jobs and build prosperity, how to fix our overpriced health care system, and so much more. In fact, many of the tremendously successful policies that are being implemented in the states and that were implemented during the last administration were products of the conservative movement.
It’s undeniable that when conservative ideas flourish, so does America.
It’s also undeniable that when the left has power, America experiences decline, and the effects can be felt long after they’re gone.
After having led the largest conservative think tank in the country for the past three years, I have some thoughts about the kind of leadership the conservative movement needs to defeat the most extreme onslaught of leftist ideology our country has ever seen.
Burgess Owens slams Biden’s ‘pathetic’ comparison of voter identification laws to Jim Crow
Rep. Burgess Owens called President Joe Biden’s comparison of voter identification requirements to Jim Crow laws “pathetic.”
Owens, who is one of two black Republicans serving in the House, came of age during the Jim Crow era, and he said Biden’s comments made it evident that the two were not on the same side of the laws that segregated white and black people at the time.
“I still remember seeing my father fighting violent white supremacists because my mother dared use a ‘whites only’ bathroom in the Jim Crow south. We were on different sides of Jim Crow laws Mr. Biden, or you’d understand how pathetic it is to compare showing I-D to them,” the Utah congressman tweeted Saturday.
Confessions of a Horrible Racist
I guess I never noticed before, but my eyes are open now: I’m a horrible racist. I want to thank Democrats, both in elected office and behind the anchor desks at CNN and MSNBC, for opening my eyes to the harsh reality I now face. And I want to apologize for my white privilege, for flaunting it and basking in it, but mostly for not realizing I was taking it for granted my whole life as I was bouncing from job to job before I embraced it by getting my act together. Sorry about that.
As an act of contrition, necessary for full repentance, I will now confess the racism and white privilege I engaged in without knowing it. May God forgive me.
Race and False Hate Crime Narratives
The reaction to the mass shootings in Boulder, Colorado, and Atlanta, Georgia, over the last week has revealed how invested the Democratic establishment is in one all-powerful narrative. Both shootings produced an immediate response from the media, Democratic politicians, and activists—that the slaughters were the result of white supremacy and that white Americans are the biggest threat facing the US. That interpretation was reached, in the case of the Boulder shooting, on the slimmest of evidence, and in the case of the Atlanta shooting, in the face of contradictory facts.
After the Boulder supermarket attacks, social media lit up with gloating pronouncements that the shooter was a violent white male and part of what Vice President Kamala Harris’s niece declared (in a since-deleted tweet) to be the “greatest terrorist threat to our country.” (Video of the handcuffed shooter being led away by the police appeared to show a white male.) Now that the shooter’s identity has been revealed as Syrian-American and his tirades against the “Islamophobia industry” unearthed, that line of thought has been quietly retired and replaced with the stand-by Democratic response to mass shootings—demands for gun control.
But the false narrative about the Atlanta spa shootings still has legs. It represents a double lie—first, that the massacre was the product of Trump-inspired xenophobic hatred, and second, that whites are the biggest perpetrators of violence against Asians. The most striking aspect of these untruths is the fact that they were fabricated in plain sight and in open defiance of reality. Given the enduring hold of the Atlanta story on mainstream discourse, it is worth examining in some detail.
The Hate Crimes False Narrative
I’ve said this before here on many occasions, but it still boggles my mind to think about how clueless the Left is about the way they are using race to demonize half the country, and to create the conditions for bitter racial hostility. In Oakland, a bunch of rich people have given money to be distributed, via the Mayor’s Office, to poor families in this Covid crisis — but not poor white families:
A program to give $500 monthly checks to low-income families of color in Oakland, California, has been criticized for explicitly excluding the 10,000 white residents living in poverty in the city.
The lottery system, funded by private philanthropists, will see the no-strings-attached checks go to households with an annual income of less than $59,000 if they have at least one child. The other half of the $500 checks will go to those earning under $30,000.
According to data from an Oakland Equity Indicators Report, cited by officials to justify favoring people of color, white households earn about three times that of African-American ones.
The same report states around 8 per cent of the city’s white residents, approximately 10,000 people, live in poverty.
Schaaf told the Associated Press the reason for limiting eligibility to black, indigenous and other people of color was that white households in Oakland make on average about three times as much as black households.
Mayor Schaaf said: ‘We have designed this demonstration project to add to the body of evidence, and to begin this relentless campaign to adopt a guaranteed income federally.’
These progressives are so race-blind that they think — or at least behave like they think — that this is all white people:
Brushback for Capitol Riot Prosecutors
The Justice Department wants to make a firm statement about the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which was a national disgrace. But as the criminal cases make their way through the courts, there are signs of prosecutorial overreach.
Last week District Judge Amit Mehta threatened to issue a gag order after one Justice Department official gave an interview to CBS about cases, and others floated the possibility of sedition charges to the New York Times. The judge, who was appointed by President Obama, summoned a hearing “to make clear to everyone that this case will not be tried in the media.” He said government leaks “have the potential of affecting the jury pool and the rights of these defendants.”
Other judges are starting to question the government’s heavy-handed approach to defendants charged with unlawfully entering the Capitol but not attacking police or destroying property. Politico reported Tuesday that “at least five Jan. 6 defendants were released in recent days over prosecutors’ objections.”
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday clarified that the political significance of the Capitol riot does not supersede defendants’ right to due process. “We have a grave constitutional obligation to ensure that the facts and circumstances of each case warrant this exceptional treatment,” the court held in ordering a lower court to reconsider the detention of two defendants awaiting trial.
The scare-Crow tactics of Democrats
To Democrats and their media megaphones, Jim Crow has risen from history’s grave and stalks our land again. President Biden invoked the inflammatory racial imagery twice in his Thursday press conference, saying it described the Senate filibuster as well as GOP-led changes in state election laws.
He claimed the election changes “make Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle,” which makes no sense except to suggest he’s got birds on his brain. Biden did it again Friday, after Georgia’s election changes were signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp, saying the changes represent “Jim Crow in the 21st century.”
By then it was clear Jim Crow was the party’s official talking point. Stacey Abrams and Atlanta protesters both labeled the Georgia law “Jim Crow 2.0.” One activist called it “Jim Crow with makeup and cologne.” Another called it “Jim Crow in a suit and tie.”
The list goes on, but you get the point. The left is eager to racialize any dispute and, for shock effect, dredges up dark pages from out history that bear zero resemblance to the current situation.
Biden’s Migrant Hotels to Cost U.S. Taxpayers $72K per Border Crosser
President Joe Biden’s plan to house migrants in United States hotels is set to cost American taxpayers about $72,000 per border crosser awarded a room, analysis details.
This week, the Biden administration announced it awarded a Texas-based nonprofit an $86 million contract to pay for hotel rooms in the U.S. for border crossers. The contract is for six months and will provide rooms to about 1,200 migrant families.
The hotel rooms will be in Arizona and Texas near the southern border and serve as welcoming centers for border crossers whom the Biden administration hopes to quickly release into the U.S. interior.
Analysis by former federal immigration judge Andrew Arthur, a fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies, finds the cost to taxpayers is expensive.
Incredible Shrinking Income Inequality
The refrain is all too familiar: Widening income inequality is a fatal flaw in capitalism and an “existential” threat to democracy. From 1967 to 2017, income inequality in the U.S. spiked 21.4%, and everyone from U.S. senators to the pope says it’s an urgent problem. Yet the data upon which claims about income inequality are based are profoundly flawed.
We have shown on these pages that Census Bureau income data fail to count two-thirds of all government transfer payments—including Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and some 100 other government transfer payments—as income to the recipients. Furthermore, census data fail to count taxes paid as income lost to the taxpayer. When official government data are used to correct these deficiencies—when income is defined the way people actually define it—“income inequality” is reduced dramatically.
We can now show that if you count all government transfers (minus administrative costs) as income to the recipient household, reduce household income by taxes paid, and correct for two major discontinuities in the time-series data on income inequality that were caused solely by changes in Census Bureau data-collection methods, the claim that income inequality is growing on a secular basis collapses. Not only is income inequality in America not growing, it is lower today than it was 50 years ago.
Did China cross a new red line in cyberspace?
Did China cause the blackouts in Mumbai last year? Nearly six months later, the answer is still unclear, but if recent reports that a Chinese cyber operation bears partial responsibility are accurate, Beijing just signaled a willingness to use its cyber power to target civilian lifeline infrastructure during a crisis. Even more worrying, the hackers used hard-to-control cyberattack tools in a destructive manner against a nuclear-armed country, India.
In a report last month, threat analysts at the cybersecurity firm Recorded Future detailed their discovery of China’s systematic penetration of India’s electricity infrastructure. Given the event’s concurrence with the border skirmishes in the disputed area of Galwan Valley, the Chinese hackers appear to have targeted nodes of India’s electric grid to demonstrate Beijing’s capabilities and to convince New Delhi that it should not oppose China’s claims over the area.
Without analysis of the malware or confirmation from Indian officials, we will not know if malware was responsible for the Mumbai blackout, if the outage was caused by operator error while responding to the malware, or if the outage was some kind of combination of these. But the possibility that Chinese hackers planted malware in India’s grid that has no economic or espionage value suggests that Beijing had malicious intent, aiming either to coerce New Delhi by threatening the country’s critical infrastructure or to activate the malware and cripple India’s strategic capabilities.
The breach of critical infrastructure is more concerning than the recent Russian espionage exploiting SolarWinds and other software supply chain vulnerabilities. While the SolarWinds hack helped Russia gain insight into US decision making practices and sensitive information, Moscow’s hackers were targeted and methodical in their exploitation of America’s cyber vulnerabilities, wary of causing collateral damage.
Biden’s Weakness On The World Stage Is Dangerous
A series of embarrassing incidents in recent days shows that while the left may control the media narrative, it’s not fooling Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin into thinking President Joe Biden is strong.
Biden had a beyond-friendly interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, former press secretary to President Bill Clinton, on March 16 in which he allowed Stephanopoulos to lure him into calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “killer” with “no soul.” It would be one thing if there were some purpose behind Biden’s hostile utterance about his Russian counterpart, but it didn’t appear tied to any strategic foreign policy goal.
Other than some largely symbolic sanctions on Moscow for the poisoning and wrongful imprisonment of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, Biden’s response to the January resumption of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany, which the United States had succeeded in halting under the Trump administration, has been “half-hearted.” The Biden team says it just wants to move cautiously, but observers say if they wait any longer to act against Berlin and Moscow, it will be too late.
Putin took full advantage of the blunder. After vintage philosophical musings about how Biden may be projecting his own inadequacies, he said the United States has a dark history. He quickly challenged Biden to a public debate. He condescendingly said the sooner it could be done, the better, even if Biden needed a bit of rest and time to prepare. The White House declined the offer for such a public conversation, as Putin surely knew they would.
Russia also recalled its ambassador, the first time such a move had been necessary in decades.
No, Georgia’s new voting law is not a return to Jim Crow
Democrats have been tarnishing Georgia’s new voting law, saying it represents a return to Jim Crow. That calumny besmirches an effort that largely succeeds at balancing extensive voter access with strong election integrity.
Jim Crow was a heinous system that systematically denied Black Americans — and many poor Whites — their constitutional right to vote through bogus “literacy tests,” poll taxes and other measures such as “Whites only” Democratic primaries in states where Democrats were sure to win. Backed by racist law enforcement and threats of violence or lynching by the Ku Klux Klan and similar groups, even Black people who were able to vote often chose not to. It took the civil rights revolution, and especially the Voting Rights Act of 1965, to undo this system.
The new Georgia law does nothing to return the state to this terrible time. Black voters will still be able to register without hindrance. And they, like all other Georgians, will be able to vote in many different ways: on Election Day, in-person before Election Day, or by mail without an excuse if they are 65 or older.
The Death of Density?
After vanquishing everything from newsprint to retail stores, the pulverizing, inescapable power of the Internet has its sights set on cities, or, more precisely, density—aided and abetted by its accomplice, Covid-19.
If this future—call it the death of density—comes to pass, it spells the unraveling of physical urbanity as we know it, placing cities, especially high-cost cities, in grave danger of descending into a vicious circle of depopulation, followed by de-commercialization, de-monetization, declining services, and so on.
The events of 2020 crippled the machinery that undergirds density. Taxpaying workers, revenue-generating shoppers, free-spending tourists—the people and activities that finance the infrastructure, mass transit, and municipal workers—are disappearing. And as they head for the exits, we’re left with an urbanism that’s coarser, less forgiving, more dangerous, more radical, and more expensive. If cities won’t dematerialize overnight, they risk, like General MacArthur, slowly fading away.
The fallout would be profound. If the demand for density declines—with consequent declines in population, commerce, and tax revenues—cities will operate in a perpetual state of fiscal crisis. Once the federal stimulus subsidies and stop-gap measures run out, how will cities fund mass transit, to say nothing of capital construction, schools, police, and the multitude of other services city dwellers rely upon? The service-laden system of governance that has long defined the American metropolis is in for a cataclysmic unraveling.
Take, for example, New York’s gleaming new Moynihan-Penn Station (on whose board I once served). Built to handle the largest volume of passenger traffic in the Western Hemisphere—500,000 people a day—the station has drawn only a trickle of riders since opening in January. It’s just the latest costly addition to our increasingly unsustainable urban infrastructure—and an example of the promise of a city going unfulfilled (in this case, unused), as urbanist Fred Siegel suggested in his book, The Future Once Happened Here.
New York’s high-rent office buildings are also being repurposed for residential use, raising questions about lost tax revenues from the businesses that have abandoned those buildings—and about where the affluent residents to occupy those buildings will come from if the high-end jobs that make them affluent disappear. It’s no surprise that the average office-occupancy rate for America’s top ten cities is a disheartening 24 percent, per Kastle Back-to-Work Barometer.
The Future of Taiwan: Communist China Will Not Take Taiwan Unless the U.S. Allows It
Despite bellicose rhetoric, the obstacles to a military conquest of Taiwan are nearly insurmountable.
Just as Adolph Hitler characterized Czechoslovakia as a “dagger pointed at the heart of Germany,” so the Chinese Communist Party regards Taiwan. Geographically, Taiwan is the tip of a salient—a bulge in a military line—with the Philippines forming the southern base and Japan the northern. Politically, Taiwan represents the last bastion of Nationalist opposition to CCP rule of China. The resistance of Taiwan must be broken if the People’s Republic of China is to fully exercise unrivaled control of a unified China, a reported goal of President Xi Jinping.
Can the PRC capture its “renegade province?” Technically, yes. Can the PRC’s People’s Liberation Army invade Taiwan successfully? The short answer is, no. An amphibious assault would be a disaster for the CCP, and the party knows it. The longer answer is, possibly, but the political permutations required to bring about the needed conditions for a viable attempt are nearly beyond calculation. It is not that the PRC doesn’t have the troops necessary to take Taiwan; it’s that the cost is deemed too great.
An amphibious landing against a well-armed opponent is an artifact from history, like the cavalry charge, kept alive in popular imagination long past its freshness date by stories of past glory. Yet élan nearly always fails in the face of firepower and is too slim a margin to hang your entire regime on. And if the PRC fails to take Taiwan in a direct assault, it would be a mortal failure.
This is not to say that amphibious operations have no role in modern warfare. Quite the opposite. Well-trained and well-equipped forces arriving from the sea at unguarded points can make all the difference in the overall success of a military campaign.
Since World War II, several nations have conducted high-profile and successful amphibious assaults against prepared enemy positions ashore. The largest of these were essentially under WW2-like conditions, such as General Douglas MacArthur’s descent on Inchon during the Korean War in 1950 and, most instructively, the PLA’s seizure of the large island of Hainan under the control of Nationalist forces in 1949. Both of these operations were successful, but they also were the last of their kind. For our purposes, the latter is more important because it informs PLA notions about seizing the island of Taiwan.
