IT’S WEIRD, DEMOCRATS WERE IN POWER FOR MOST OF THOSE YEARS: Why federal minimum wage remains unchanged after 13 years.
Archive for 2022
July 31, 2022
TO BE FAIR, PRETTY MUCH EVERY PUBLIC HEALTH ISSUE BECOMES A PUBLIC HEALTH FAILURE NOWADAYS: Monkeypox is about to become the next public health failure.
To be fair, none of that stuff did any good. But that never stops them!
Plus: CDC Declares Gay Orgies An ‘Essential Activity.’ It’s the Bee, of course, but I feel like if this were primarily affecting heterosexual males the reaction would be different, and probably include a lot of mockery.
OPEN THREAD: The world is waiting to hear your thoughts.
ONE CRIMINAL ORGANIZATION COLLUDES WITH ANOTHER: Democrats and the FBI Collude Again on a Russia Smear against Republicans: This time, they’ve been able to turn Democratic collusion with foreign powers into an illusion of disinformation.
Not since Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers has a couple gone cheek-to-cheek quite like Democrats and the FBI.
This spring, we watched special counsel John Durham’s first Russiagate trial blow up on him, not because he lacked evidence of a 2016 fraudulent scheme to portray Donald Trump as a clandestine agent of the Kremlin, but because he portrayed one of the two main schemers, the FBI, as if it were a victim. In Durham’s indictment, the Clinton campaign lies to the bureau’s babes in the woods, gulling them into opening a baseless foreign-counterintelligence probe of whether her Republican rival is a Putin puppet. In Durham’s proof at trial, however, top FBI officials turn out to be fully aware that they are colluding with Clinton campaign operatives in exploiting political opposition research to try to nail Trump — and then labor to cover their tracks.
It’s an unfortunate blind spot. Durham has one conviction so far: a guilty plea from FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, whose manipulation of a document caused the FISA court to be deceived into granting a surveillance warrant to monitor a former Trump campaign adviser — again, substantially based on the Clinton campaign’s bogus opposition research. Except the case wasn’t charged as a fraud on the court. It was charged as a false statement to another FBI official. Yes, it seems even when the FBI itself lies, the victim is . . . the FBI.
And now we learn how adaptable the Democrat–FBI Russia two-step is: You can run it in reverse! Not only can the scheme distort actual disinformation into an illusion of Republican collusion with foreign powers. It also can turn actual Democratic collusion with foreign powers into an illusion of disinformation. Now, that’s some choreography, right there.
We’ve written a good bit about how Democrats and the Biden campaign, aided and abetted by their collaborators in media, social media, and the distressingly partisan network of current and former government national-security officials (pillars of the so-called Deep State, which I am going to have to stop describing as “so-called”), tried to con the country into believing Hunter Biden’s patently authentic “Laptop from Hell” was Russian disinformation. Well, now we see the fuller picture of how, far from pulling this tall tale out of the sky when the New York Post exposed the Hunter laptop in October 2020, these operatives simply incorporated it into a Biden campaign narrative that Democrats and pliant FBI officials had concocted two months earlier.
FBI Knew That Fear the Bidens Were Compromised Was Not Based on Disinformation
Republicans controlled the Senate in the 116th Congress in 2019, when Chairman Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) of the Finance Committee and Chairman Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) of the Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs began probing the Biden family business of cashing in on Joe’s political influence. The focus was fishy foreign financial transactions. By then, the Justice Department and the FBI had been onto Hunter’s shenanigans for a year — again, long before the laptop’s existence emerged.The government’s national-security apparatus had every reason to know the Bidens were compromised. As I’ve detailed, one of the family’s most lucrative deals had it partnering with a Shanghai-based conglomerate called CEFC, which turned out to be a Chinese intelligence operation. This is the deal where Joe Biden — “the big guy” — was to get a 10 percent cut . . . which may explain why he was so relieved that a New York Times exposé seemed only minimally damaging that he called Hunter (the son with whom he never talked business, no siree) to opine that Hunter was “in the clear.”
Among CEFC’s key executives was Patrick Ho, once described by Hunter as “the f***ing spy chief of China.” Ho was prosecuted by the Justice Department on foreign-corruption charges. Months before his arrest, CEFC’s top executive (and Xi Jinping protégé) Ye Jianming paid Hunter $1 million to snoop around and try to find out what the government had on Ho. That turned out to be a lot. In February 2018, federal prosecutors advised the defense that Hunter’s client, Ho, had been the subject of national-security surveillance under FISA. Within a week of this notice, the Chinese regime arrested Ye. He has not been seen in public since, and the regime quietly let the multibillion-dollar conglomerate go bust.
The Bidens were being lavishly paid by CEFC: It is documented that $6 million went into the family coffers.
Worst, most corrupt, president ever. And the worst, most corrupt FBI and Justice Department and national security bureaucracy ever — along with the worst, most corrupt media ever.
YEP: “[T]here has been an unrelenting effort to make ‘insurrection’ a litmus test for anyone speaking about January 6th.” Plus: “If one does not use that term (and, worse yet, expresses doubts about its accuracy), you run the risk of immediate condemnation as someone excusing or supporting insurrection. This framing also reduces the need to address the question of how this riot was allowed to spiral out of control…. The effort to mandate ‘insurrection’ as the only acceptable description prevents the country from speaking with a unified voice. It clearly serves political purposes but only makes a national resolution more difficult as we approach a new presidential election.”
And I’ll venture this prediction: If the Biden Administration’s catastrophic downward spiral continues, the January 6 “insurrectionists” will eventually come to be seen as martyrs who tried to prevent a tragedy.
VIA A FRIEND:
THE KIDS AREN’T ALRIGHT: The Crisis of Generation Z.
GREAT MOMENTS IN TIMING: Biden Pushes Massive Tax Hike on Workers as Recession Begins.
The best way to revive an economy as you head into a recession is to slap businesses and workers with a massive tax hike. Said no legitimate economist ever.
Yet that’s apparently the best plan President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress can come up with. Their new so-called “Inflation Reduction Act,” which would do almost nothing to reduce inflation, also includes a $315 billion tax on businesses. This comes in the form of a 15% “minimum corporate tax” applied to major U.S. corporations.
Biden says that this tax will allow him to spend huge sums on green energy subsidies and tax credits and “pay for all of this by requiring big corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, with no tax increases at all for families making under $400,000 a year.”
Yeah, right.
While this may be literally true in the sense that Biden will levy the tax on corporations, in reality, it will burden everyday people the most. Most economists agree that much of the true burden of corporate taxes is borne by workers through lower wages. There’s some dispute about exactly what percentage is ultimately absorbed by workers, but even the most favorable, left-leaning analyses acknowledge that it’s a significant chunk. Meanwhile, most research says it’s the majority!
Or as America’s Newspaper of Record notes: Democrats To Try Bold Strategy Of Doing Exactly What Got Us Into This Mess In The First Place.
UDPATE (FROM GLENN): Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.
TIM GRAHAM: Politico Scolds ‘Pouty Republicans Who Stiff Reporters,’ They’re ‘Making a Big Mistake.’
Politico senior media writer Jack Shafer typed an article titled “Unsolicited Advice for the Pouty Republicans Who Stiff Reporters: 2024 GOP contenders are making a big mistake by only talking to themselves.” The problem here is you don’t have to be “pouty” to make a decision to restrict media access. And not all “reporters” are liberal (so-called “mainstream”) reporters. That’s an insult to conservative reporters.
Shafer, like others, is referring to Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Republican Party restricting media access to their “Sunshine Summit.” At least Shafer refers to Barack Obama, who “saw the good politics in freezing the press out.” Joe Biden greatly restricted media access in his 2020 “basement” campaign. Was that “pouty”?
I can’t imagine why Republicans would want to stiff Democratic Party operatives with bylines, after this November 2nd, 2020 admission from Tim Alberta, Politico Magazine’s chief political correspondent, that “most of us are suffering from this collective PTSD from 2016.”
OUT: MAKING FUN OF PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES THAT PUT WOMEN IN HUTS DURING THEIR PERIODS.
IN: Paid Menstrual Leave Is a Worker’s Rights Issue That Employers Should Guarantee.
FIERY, BUT MOSTLY AWARD-WINNING: CNN Journo Who Reported ‘Fiery But Mostly Peaceful Protests’ Gets Emmy Nomination.
REMEMBERING THE GREAT ECONOMIST AND CHAMPION OF LIBERTY, MILTON FRIEDMAN:
Today marks the 110th birthday of economist Milton Friedman, one of history’s most consequential free-market advocates. Heeding the work of Friedman this year reminds us how much more sound and sustainable the nation’s policies could be.
Born July 31, 1912 to working class immigrants from Hungary in New York City, what made Milton Friedman unique not only was his grasp of economics, but also his ability to simply explain complex ideas.
He opined, for example, that “the most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.”
What Milton Friedman understood better than most was that individuals, with private interests and expertise, were best able to advance society.
“Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own,” he said. “Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.”
While others of his time advocated for redistribution and central planning of sorts, Friedman argued competition would be the catalyst for success. He understood that merely having good intentions is an inadequate basis for sound public policy.
“When government — in pursuit of good intentions — tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom,” he said. “Government should be a referee, not an active player.”
“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people,” Friedman once said. “The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.”
Not coincidentally: The ghost of Milton Friedman is haunting President Biden.
PAY NO ATTENTION, IT’S JUST A TRANSITORY TRANSITIONY THING: Reuters: The global recession drum beat is getting louder.
MILTON FRIEDMAN ISN’T RUNNING THE SHOW ANYMORE: The ‘Recession or Not’ Argument Is a Distraction: Our Economy Is Worse Than Almost All Major Countries.
This is the moment an army veteran was arrested by police for ‘causing anxiety’ after retweeting a picture of a swastika made out of Pride flags on social media.
Darren Brady, 51, has slammed Hampshire Police for ‘impeding his right to free speech’ after he was placed into handcuffs on Friday at his home in Aldershot for sharing a meme.
Footage of the arrest was widely shared on social media and showed an officer who told Mr Brady he was being apprehended because his post had ’caused anxiety’ and been reported to authorities.
The image Mr Brady retweeted was of a swastika that had been digitally manipulated and was made out of four LGBT pride flags.
In the video, shot on a mobile phone, Mr Brady can be heard asking the three police officers: ‘Why am I in cuffs?’
One officer responds: ‘It didn’t have to come to this at all.’
Mr Brady replied: ‘Tell us why you escalated it to this level because I don’t understand.’
The officer adds: ‘Someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post. That is why you have been arrested.’
Not The Bee adds, “This is some insane-level 1984 stuff right here. Apparently this meme arranging 4 transgender flags into a swastika is what he posted. He was ARRESTED for posting this!”
In 2018, when British cops were threatening social media critics after the NHS banished 23-month-old Alfie Evans to the Spartan hillside, British ex-pat Charles C.W. Cooke tweeted, “Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out to me that police in the U.K. spend all their time on Twitter threatening people with jail time for frivolous things, and now I can’t stop seeing it.”
As a wise woman once wrote, “There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them.”
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: What Is Polyamory? Queer Relationship Experts Explain Everything You Need to Know.