WASHINGTON, D.C. — Republicans managed to once again foil the plans of Republicans to accomplish anything whatsoever in Congress.
Though the Republican party still holds a narrow majority in the House of Representatives, it has struggled to make progress on several aspects of its agenda due to the interference and obstacles placed in its way by the Republican party.
“We really stopped us in our tracks this time,” said Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. “We have plans to accomplish some big things to help the American people and fix some of the glaring problems facing our nation, but we keep facing strong opposition from us at every turn. If we can’t find a way to overcome us, we’ll continue to keep us from getting things done. We’ve become a real problem for us.”
The GOP’s latest embarrassing setbacks included failing to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas despite the ongoing migrant crisis at the southern border and a lopsided failure to pass Speaker Johnson’s Israel aid package. Republican lawmakers placed the blame squarely on the shoulders of Republican lawmakers. “It’s those darn Republicans blocking everything we do,” said Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz. “The Republicans would get a lot more accomplished if it weren’t for the Republicans.”
At publishing time, Republicans were making a renewed effort to emphasize the importance of voters electing Republicans to help the Republican party deal with the opposition of the Republican party.
Every four years we see American attention get sucked up into this empty puppet show about which soulless empire manager should be the temporary official figurehead at the front desk of the permanent imperial machine, and if you want to vote by all means go ahead and vote.
The special counsel assigned to investigate Joe Biden for mishandling classified documents reports that investigators “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” but concludes that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter.”
Which normally would be cause for a sigh of relief by this administration and its supporters, except that among the reasons given for this conclusion is that the president has gone senile.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Special Counsel Robert Hur writes to Attorney General Merrick Garland, saying that “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023. And his cooperation with our investigation… will likely convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting willfully — that is, with intent to break the law — as the statute requires.”
Hur reports that in interviews Biden couldn’t even remember things as fundamental as the years of his term as vice president, or when his son Beau died. Hur also writes that Biden’s memory had gotten worse between the aforementioned recorded 2017 interviews and the interviews with the president last year.
In short, the president’s brain don’t work. It’s shot. The “leader of the free world” has rusted out gray matter. It’s like swiss cheese in there.
And it is indeed getting worse. During a press conference in which Biden was ostensibly meant to reassure the world that his brain is working fine in light of the big news, the president referred to the president of Egypt as the president of Mexico and froze mid-speech when he unsuccessfully tried to remember where his son got the rosary he carries from. Just this week Biden has mistakenly referred to dead European leaders as still being in office, not once but twice.
Indeed, three other western hemisphere countries on the list above suggest quite clearly that is it is not murder and dictators that migrants are fleeing so much as it is socialism and poverty. Fully 462,000 or 19% of the “encounters” in FY 2022 were with citizens from Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela. The political refugees from Castro’s jails left the island for Miami decades ago—so today’s escapees are simply victims of communist poverty, as is essentially the case for Haiti and Venezuela, as well.
Donald Trump’s major talent in the political arena is blowing things up, and for once that attribute has come in extremely handy. We are referring to his apparent death-blow to the so-called bipartisan immigration reform package and the $118 billion potpourri of funding that went with it.
To be sure, that doesn’t make up for the $8 trillion he added to the public debt during his four short years in the Oval Office and the $6.5 trillion pandemic relief bacchanalia that his Lockdowns and the White House Task Force fueled Covid-hysteria triggered between March 2020 and March 2021. And that’s to say nothing of the 40-year high inflation, massive Fed money-printing spree, egregious Wall Street financial bubbles and speculation and continuing stagflationary legacy that flowed from the Donald’s misbegotten war on the virus.
While the demise of this package is therefore surely in the nature of an uncontrolled partisan demolition rather than a purposeful policy initiative, it does have some redeeming collateral virtues. Just maybe Washington’s foolish proxy war against Russia in Ukraine will collapse for lack of funding, thereby encouraging saner heads in the Ukraine military to send Zelensky to his CIA safe house in central America and to negotiate a peaceful partition of a fake country created by Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev that doesn’t want to be together anyway.
Likewise, Israel only needs to raise taxes by 2-3 percentage points of GDP to generate the $14 billion in aid that Uncle Sam flat-out doesn’t have. Even then, Israel’s defense budget would amount to a far lower burden on its $550 billion GDP than was the case for the first 50-years of its existence.
Besides, when the Israeli electorate is shown that the Netanyahu claque doesn’t have an ATM in the US Capitol Building, it might start electing governments willing to honestly pursue a modus vivendi with its Palestinian population and Arab neighbors.
As for the extra $10 billion for humanitarian aid, good riddance to that. It amounts to a 20% tip on top of the $50 billion already in the Federal budget for foreign aid and security assistance—none of which adds to the homeland security of America.
So putting the kibosh on the “foreign adventures” components of the package would save $85 billion and constitutes a halting first step toward fiscal sanity on the banks of the Potomac.
But the irony is that the even bigger waste in the package is the $20 billion to stop the so-called border invasion. Except the “invasion” is self-inflicted by an utterly broken US immigration control regime that literally invites millions of migrants to come to the US border and break the law in the guise of seeking “asylum” under international law and safeguards.
So fix the immigration system and you won’t even need the $30 billion in the current Federal budget for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and the Customs and Border Protection operations, to say nothing of the extra 50% or $15 billion provided to these agencies by the Senate deal.
No individual or organization that claims to believe in the Constitution, fiscal conservatism, free markets, or limited government should be taken seriously when calling for tax increases instead of drastic spending cuts. Only real cuts will solve the problem: not bogus plans to balance the budget in 10 years or limiting spending increases to some measure.
But it’s not just liberals who are clamoring for tax increases.
The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a right-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C., “dedicated to tackling our nation’s greatest challenges by producing work that promotes our institute’s core values: free people, free markets, and limited government.”
Too bad that the AEI thinks that increasing taxes on Americans is in line with its core values.
Exhibit A
Alan D. Viard is a senior fellow emeritus at AEI, “where he studies federal tax and budget policy.” In his recent testimony before the House Committee on Ways and Means Subcommittee on Tax Policy, Viard advocated that the United States institute a European-style value-added tax (VAT) because “the United States faces a large long-term fiscal imbalance that will burden future generations and that threatens long-term economic growth.” Said Viard:
The United States should follow the lead of 170 other countries and territories by adding a VAT to the federal tax system. The VAT is economically similar, but administratively preferable, to a retail sales tax. The VAT is far less regressive than entitlement benefit cuts, although it cannot match the progressivity of high-income tax increases. The VAT also avoids most of the economic distortions induced by high-income tax increases, although it is not as economically efficient as entitlement benefit cuts. Because it occupies a middle ground between those two alternatives, it offers a plausible basis for bipartisan compromise, particularly once the limitations of the alternative options are understood.
Scores of millions of Americans are about to be enlightened on a whole plethora of issues which, until now, their own media have lied to them about. To call this interview a bombshell would be an understatement. Tucker Carleson is about to bring the truth to the American people. But are they ready for it?
In the seventies, when the cold war was at its peak, Donald Rumsfeld was convinced that the Atlantic Ocean, off the U.S. coast, was teaming with Russian submarines. The U.S. navy couldn’t detect them because, he was convinced, the Soviets had a new ‘acoustic technology’ which made them effectively invisible. Rumsfeld went ahead and ploughed billions of dollars into developing a new technology which could detect the non-acoustic subs. But that failed and is still costing the U.S. taxpayer today. The truth was in fact, the Soviet subs just weren’t there.
The error on the part of Rumsfeld, it could be argued, still paid dividends as scaring the American public into believing a threat is real and imminent – on your doorstep in fact – is very profitable for a government which wishes to achieve two clear objectives: pouring billions into the pockets of defence contractors; and secondly whipping up fear of an imminent war with an enemy, with the sold objective of distracting the public away from a failing economy and abysmal foreign policy.
It’s happening today. If we look at the mainstream news all we see is talk of war with Russia. And yet there isn’t a single shred of intel which these outlets can offer to substantiate this claim. It will remind many of the weeks leading up the Iraq invasion in 2003 when the U.S. and UK faked intel to show that Saddam Hussein had WMDs.
Western elites are guiding journalists to write this nonsense as their bigger plan is to stir up a frenzy of war talk so as to prepare the public for much bigger defence spending and, in the case of the UK, even conscription. This is really about covering up one of the biggest cock-ups in contemporary history which western governments have made – sanctions against Russia and the NATO campaign in Ukraine – which have backfired so spectacularly that the Biden administration and a number of EU governments are united in this scaremongering, believing it’s a winner.
Of course the “we’re going to war with Russia” comes from the White House. Where else?
The federal government is now controlled by actual Jacobins. They’re inclined to engage in lawfare against citizens—especially those who don’t share their views.
What’s in it for them? When they perform a civil asset forfeiture, a certain percentage goes to the agency that does it.
That money can buy cop toys and training to pad their resumes. That gives them a personal incentive to do things that are, in fact, criminal.
If you use a safety deposit box, lose it. You can be locked out of it at any time and as this shows the government can walk in and steal your stuff.
International Man: Recently, the FBI raided 700 safe deposit boxes in Beverly Hills.
They opened and searched through the content of every single box, regardless of whether there was any probable cause that individual box owners had committed any crime.
The FBI then attempted to confiscate anything worth more than $5,000 through civil asset forfeiture proceedings. Again, this was regardless of whether there was any evidence of wrongdoing by the individual box owners.
What do you make of this story?
Doug Casey: This is another of many indications that the FBI is totally corrupt and out of control. There’s no indication the agent-in-charge was even reprimanded, much less fired. It’s just one agency, but the fifteen other Praetorian agencies are no better.
An even bigger problem is that the rule of law itself is dead. At this point, almost any federal agency can do whatever they want. If you don’t like it and want to fight them, it’s going to cost a ton of legal fees.
The federal government is now controlled by actual Jacobins. They’re inclined to engage in lawfare against citizens—especially those who don’t share their views.
What’s in it for them? When they perform a civil asset forfeiture, a certain percentage goes to the agency that does it.
That money can buy cop toys and training to pad their resumes. That gives them a personal incentive to do things that are, in fact, criminal. It’s a very serious matter. It’s only going to get worse when CBDCs are initiated—they’ll make civil asset forfeitures, fines, and asset freezes much easier when all your money is visible and available at the central bank. It’s one more reason to own gold—but not store it in a US safe deposit box.
International Man: A federal appeals court recently found that the FBI violated the Fourth Amendment with their actions.
While this is good news, the individual box owners invested considerable time and money in uncertain legal actions to get their property returned to them. It seems there will be no consequences for the FBI agents who flagrantly violated the individual box owners’ Constitutional rights.
It sends the message that the government can engage in gross violation of rights with near impunity. The only consequence is that the courts might reverse their actions years later. No government agents will be punished for violating the law. Such a standard does not apply to regular citizens, of course.
What’s your take?
Doug Casey: Individual agents are a protected class. It’s extremely hard and very expensive to prosecute them as individuals. Remember that the first loyalty of agents is to each other, and the second is to their employer. The public, who they’re supposed to “protect and serve,” is in third place.
Federal law enforcement agencies have become much more aggressive over the years and increasingly recruit and retain the kind of people who fit in that culture. They have every incentive to continue and no incentive to change course.
What about the Constitution? Isn’t it supposed to protect us? Yes, in theory. But it’s simultaneously a dead letter and a “living document” that can be altered to suit. It’s so selectively enforced and has been so grotesquely reinterpreted that it basically doesn’t mean anything anymore. There’s an occasional victory, but the trend has been downhill for many years. The next major crisis will allow lots of emergency measures to further subvert it. The type of people who are attracted to the US government never let a good crisis go to waste.
International Man: Civil asset forfeiture lets the government seize your property under the flimsiest pretexts.
Mass media outlets like The Guardian, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have been allowing the publication of some amazingly racist pieces these last few days. All are directed at middle easterners and those of middle eastern descent, just as the western empire drops more and more bombs on more and more countries in the middle east.
On Monday The Guardian published a political cartoon which would be indistinguishable from Nazi propaganda of the 1930s, except that it happens to depict a Muslim instead of a Jew. The cartoon features Iranian leader Ali Khamenei holding puppet strings to so-called Iranian proxy groups in the middle east like the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas, in exactly the same way Nazis used to depict Jews as malignant puppet masters manipulating world affairs.
Compare this:
to Nazi propaganda about Jews puppeting world leaders during the lead-up to the Holocaust:
To this day it’s understood by the mainstream press that it’s unacceptable to depict anyone of the Jewish faith as any kind of puppet-master figure in any context at all. Fox News, the Dutch paper De Volkskrant, the Indian Bharatiya Janata Party and right wing political cartoonist Ben Garrison have all come under fire in recent years for depicting Jewish people in that way, so it’s safe to say that if The Guardian had published a similar cartoon about Israeli influence featuring an Israeli leader it would have been a massive scandal subject to international outcry.
In fact the bar is quite a bit lower for what qualifies as an outrageous racist trope when it comes to criticism of Israel
MCViewPoint 