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Anna Netrebko, Russian soprano with ties to Putin, out at Metropolitan Opera – Armstrong Economics

Posted by M. C. on March 7, 2022

The West is committing financial suicide. This spills over into corporations making long-term decisions based upon the demonization of Putin, ignoring even the fact that Kamala Harris publically told Ukraine to join NATO and violated the neutrality of Ukraine agreed to in the 1991 Budapest Agreement. We are witnessing the decline and fall of the world economy as we have known it.

Welcoming the New World Order

The West is going crazy, and the decisions to throw out all ties to Russia are further escalating the risk of global war. The NY Metropolitan Opera even fired Anna Netrebko, a Russian soprano, because she has ties to Putin. Even in London, Gazprom PJSC’s energy-trading arm is being kicked out of its central London. Even Russia’s RT has been shut down by Direct TV. Then inside Russia, a host of Western companies are exiting including Apple, Mercedes-Benz, and BP.

Even Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has warned that China will now accelerate its plans to come up with alternatives to SWIFT after seeing Russia becoming isolated economically. We are looking at similar paranoia over COVID that is now sweeping through the world economy, which will cause a tremendous contraction and indeed set the stage for what our computer has been forecasting — China will become the new Financial Capital of the World post-2032.

The West is committing financial suicide. This spills over into corporations making long-term decisions based upon the demonization of Putin, ignoring even the fact that Kamala Harris publically told Ukraine to join NATO and violated the neutrality of Ukraine agreed to in the 1991 Budapest Agreement. We are witnessing the decline and fall of the world economy as we have known it. Those who have hated the dollar, always calling for its crash, will see a future where even cryptocurrencies will not survive. The false belief that somehow crypto will bypass the central banks and end fiat is such a joke. Ukraine’s power plant, the largest nuclear plant in all of Europe, has been captured and is on fire. Crypto is worthless without a power grid.

So welcome the New World Order, but it will be NOTHING as even Schwab expected.

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Is Washington Under Alien Control?, by Philip Giraldi – The Unz Review

Posted by M. C. on January 26, 2022

Biden and Blinken get everything backwards in terms of US interests

https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/is-washington-under-alien-control/#comments

Philip Giraldi

The drama currently unfolding in which the Biden Administration is doing everything it can to provoke a war with Russia over Ukraine is possibly the most frightening foreign policy misadventure since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1967 Lyndon Johnson attempt to sink the USS Liberty and blame it on Egypt, either of which could have gone nuclear. I can well recall the Robert Heinlein sci-fi book The Puppet Masters, later made into a movie, which described how alien-slugs, arriving by way of a flying saucer landing in Iowa, invaded the earth and parasitically attached themselves to the central nervous systems of humans and became able to completely control their minds. What the humans know, they know. What the slugs want, no matter what, the human will do. And the tale gets really scary in geopolitical terms when some Secret Service Agents are “occupied” by the invaders and they are thereby poised to capture the President of the United States. I would point out that the movie came out when Bill Clinton was president, which should have provoked some concerns about whether it was fact or fiction.

Well, does anyone currently wonder why I think of The Puppet Masters when an incoherent Joe Biden in particular makes a speech? And also consider the befuddled look of Secretary of State Tony Blinken or the bewildered expressions of Vice President Kamala Harris or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, all of which might also suggest that the slugs now completely control the Administration. The Biden and Blinken possibly slug-controlled automatons are now stating their conviction, based on no evidence whatsoever, that Russia is about to invade Ukraine and they are threatening sanctions like Putin “has never seen before.” There will no doubt be more slug-derived pronouncements to reinforce that warning in the next few days after the latest round of talks breaks down. Evacuation of US Embassy staff families in Kiev is already underway, deliberately escalating rather than attempting to defuse the crisis which could lead to nuclear war, destroying the human race and replacing it with the alien slugs.

See the rest here

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You Might Be a Domestic Terrorist! – RPI 12 January Update

Posted by M. C. on January 13, 2022

The War on Us, Redux

https://mailchi.mp/ronpaulinstitute/domesticterror?e=4e0de347c8

Dear Friends:

While we at the Ron Paul Institute are the opposite of “partisan-political” in the conventional sense, let’s be honest whether our friends are from the libertarian wing, the right wing, or the progressive wing: President Biden is a dangerous authoritarian.

Or at least the people running President Biden are authoritarians (in his defense, Biden can’t seem to remember that he is the president, not Kamala Harris).

In pushing for the federalization of elections and “reforms” that include giving the vote to millions who are not even citizens – all the while claiming that those who oppose such moves are “domestic enemies” – the president and the leadership of his party appear to be settling on a scorched earth strategy for 2022. With the president’s approval at historic lows – and Covid raging while the economy burns – they are declaring war on that vast and rising pool of Americans who have jumped ship. It’s not a strategy that Sun-Tzu would endorse, but it seems to be what they’re running with.

But even CNN’s Jake Tapper (!!!) took issue with Biden claiming those who oppose federalized elections and votes for anything that breathes (and perhaps even those who don’t) are the reincarnation of Bull Connor and George Wallace. Tapper, whose butt-of-the-joke Russiagate/Lockdown network lost 90 percent of its viewers, asked Sen. Dick Durban: You’re comparing that to Bull Connor who literally set dogs upon civil rights protesters. George Wallace, who said segregation today, segregation forever… isn’t that a little stark? When Biden loses CNN…well…

Still there seems little self-reflection at this point.

This is our first RPI update for 2022 so I do want to thank all of your for subscribing. We view you as part of the movement and part of the family.

I want to thank from the bottom of my heart all of you who stepped up and made an end-of-year donation to the Ron Paul Institute – home of the Ron Paul Liberty Report. We are starting the year strong because of your fantastic vote of confidence in us!

Last summer the Ron Paul Institute returned to its Washington Conference with an event titled “The War on Us,” where we discussed how aggressive and hyper-interventionist US foreign policy had been turned inward to assault our own civil liberties. Much of this attack was about a “war on a virus” but the January 6th “insurrection” narrative played a critical role in establishing the false precept for establishing a domestic police state.

And sure as the sun rises in the east, the Biden Administration is now establishing a specialized unit of the Justice Department solely focused on the “threat” of “domestic terrorism.” 

Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen said: “We have seen a growing threat from those who are motivated by racial animus, as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority.”

Are you “anti-authority”? Turn yourselves in! There are open cells available in Guantanamo!

What does that mean in the real world? The absurd and crumbling narrative that Jan. 6th was an “insurrection” is providing the grounds for a deeply unpopular Administration to divert attention from its failings and unpopularity by scapegoating any dissenters as “domestic terrorists.”

Matt Taibbi is an honest progressive (and a long-time friend of mine) and he recently wrote of the Administration’s 1/6 propaganda: I don’t mean to understate the seriousness of January 6th, even though it’s been absurdly misreported for over a year now. No one from a country where these things actually happen could mistake 1/6 for ‘a coup .’ In the real version, the mob doesn’t take selfies and blaze doobies after seizing the palace, and the would-be dictator doesn’t spend 187 minutes snacking and watching Fox before tweeting ‘go home.’ Instead, he works the phones nonstop to rally precinct chiefs, generals, and airport officials to the cause, because a coup is a real attempt to seize power. Britannica says the ‘chief prerequisite for a coup is control of all or part of the armed forces, the police, and other military elements.’ We saw none of that on January 6th, but it’s become journalistic requirement to use either “coup” or “insurrection” in describing it. As someone, like Taibbi, who has been in the middle of a few actual insurrections during my time in eastern Europe, I can concur with his assessment. The reality of an insurrection is far more grim, as I also discovered in my travels sifting through blood-soaked clothes in the former Yugoslavia and Albania in the 1990s. I am always haunted by a cache of children’s clothing I found in a cave behind a church near Vukovar with bullet holes and blood stains. I cannot forget it even more than 20 years later. Actual insurrection is a horror that you can never wipe from your memory.

But as Rahm Emmanuel famously said, “never let a good crisis go to waste.” If you have goofy guys with buffalo horns being led into the Capitol by highly suspicious military-looking men all coordinated in orange ski hats, you can spin it into an attack on the Winter Palace. 

Yes they are running with this. The Republicans should win the midterms if they can produce a pulse and somehow find the gumption to push back against the “reform” that would rig the vote.

But don’t expect the potentially victorious Republicans to be on “our side” when it comes to civil liberties. Even right-wing hero Ted Cruz labeled the Jan. 6 non-event a “terrorist attack.” Republicans are mostly cowards. Who among them with one or two exceptions has stood up and challenged covid tyranny – the greatest assault on our civil liberties since slavery?

Mainstream politics is a kabuki of paid-for politicos earnestly promising to represent us. There are only a tiny handful – Sen. Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie (an RPI Board Member) come to mind – who genuinely would give up the Ring to further the cause of liberty.

2022 is a weird year, but as Ron Paul says almost every day on his Liberty Report, we are winning. Sometimes I secretly doubt his enthusiasm, but I eventually discover that he is right as he is always right. 

Spread the word: Liberty is winning! Thank you for supporting the Ron Paul Institute and for watching the Ron Paul Liberty Report!
Sincerely yours,

Daniel McAdams
Executive Director
Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

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The Histrionics and Melodrama Around 1/6 Are Laughable, but They Serve Several Key Purposes

Posted by M. C. on January 7, 2022

Far too many centers of political and economic power benefit from an exaggerated and even false narrative about January 6 to expect it ever to end.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-histrionics-and-melodrama-around

Glenn Greenwald

The number of people killed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6 Capitol riot is equal to the number of pro-Trump supporters who brandished guns or knives inside the Capitol. That is the same number as the total of Americans who — after a full year of a Democrat-led DOJ conducting what is heralded as “the most expansive federal law enforcement investigation in US history” — have been charged with inciting insurrection, sedition, treason or conspiracy to overthrow the government as a result of that riot one year ago. Coincidentally, it is the same number as Americans who ended up being criminally charged by the Mueller probe of conspiring with Russia over the 2016 election, and the number of wounds — grave or light — which AOC, who finally emerged at night to assure an on-edge nation that she was “okay” while waiting in an office building away from the riot at the rotunda, sustained on that solemn day.

That number is zero. But just as these rather crucial facts do not prevent the dominant wing of the U.S. corporate media and Democratic Party leaders from continuing to insist that Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory was illegitimate due to his collusion with the Kremlin, it also does not prevent January 6 from being widely described in those same circles as an Insurrection, an attempted coup, an event as traumatizing as Pearl Harbor (2,403 dead) or the 9/11 attack (2,977 dead), and as the gravest attack on American democracy since the mid-19th Century Civil War (750,000 dead). The Huffington Post’s White House reporter S.V. Date said that it was wrong to compare 1/6 to 9/11, because the former — the three-hour riot at the Capitol — was “1,000 percent worse.”

Indeed, when it comes to melodrama, histrionics, and exploitation of fear levels from the 1/6 riot, there has never been any apparent limit. And today — the one-year anniversary of that three-hour riot — there is no apparent end in sight. Too many political and media elites are far too vested in this maximalist narrative for them to relinquish it voluntarily.

The orgy of psychodrama today was so much worse and more pathetic than I expected — and I expected it to be extremely bad and pathetic. “House Democrats [waited] their turn on the House floor to talk to Dick Cheney as a beacon for American democracy,” reported CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere; “One by one, Democrats are coming over to introduce themselves to former VP Dick Cheney and shake his hand,” added ABC News’ Ben Siegel. Nancy Pelosi gravely introduced Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast of Hamilton to sermonize and sing about the importance of American democracy. The Huffington Post‘s senior politics reporter Igor Bobic unironically expressed gratitude for “the four legged emotional support professionals roaming the Capitol this week, helping officers, staffers, and reporters alike” — meaning therapy dogs. Yesterday, CNN’s Kaise Hunt announced: “Tomorrow is going to be a tough one for those of us who were there or had loved ones in the building. Thinking of all of you and finding strength knowing I’m not alone in this.” Unsurprisingly but still repellently: Kamala Harris today compared 1/6 to 9/11.

See the rest here

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Watch “Thomas Sowell on Kamala Harris’ Communist Video” on YouTube

Posted by M. C. on November 28, 2021

In this video, Thomas Sowell debunks Kamala Harris’ video about using government power to achieve equality among groups.

https://youtu.be/XMn5YcGU0x4

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Why Kamala Harris? – American Thinker

Posted by M. C. on August 30, 2021

It is now amply obvious why Biden’s handlers chose Kamala.

They saw in her someone who was so inept and amateurish that she made the somnambulist Joe look like the brighter one.

Kamala Harris has made Joe unimpeachable.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/why_kamala_harris.html

When Joe Biden declared Kamala Harris his running mate in the 2020 election, it perplexed many among his allies and detractors.

Why on earth did Joe opt for a relatively youthful individual who makes him look even older than he is in contrast?

What caused Joe to choose somebody who lambasted him during the primaries and accused him of racism?

It has to be remembered that Kamala couldn’t win a single state during the primaries and was compelled to drop out before the election commenced. She, therefore, brought no electoral benefits to Joe.

Joe had pledged to select a female running mate.

But among the myriad able, capable, and respectable female politicians in Washington and around the country, why Kamala?

Before there could be any more questions or speculations, the liberal media began the celebrations — even where I am, in India.

She was a woman who had pigment in her skin. She was biracial, her mother is from India while her father is black and from Jamaica. Since diversity is the flavor of the moment, she satisfied all the criteria with flying colors.

There were fawning interviews, obsequious television profiles, and copious flattering magazine articles.

Conspiracy theorists claimed that the sinister puppet-masters pulling Joe’s strings were behind this, they knew Joe wouldn’t last long owing to his rapidly declining cognitive abilities. At some point, Kamala Harris would replace Joe as president so that the far-left agenda can be implemented.

That would make her the first female president. There would be the reason for more flattering and slobbering by the media. Some even had already begun fawning.

The fact that Joe kept referring to his government as the Harris Biden administration and on some occasions called her President Harris further fuelled conspiracies

It, therefore, wasn’t a matter of if but when Kamala Harris replaced Joe Biden.

See the rest here

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Kamala Harris Staffers Are Leaking — And Her Office Is A ‘Dysfunctional’ Mess | ZeroHedge

Posted by M. C. on July 1, 2021

Politico paints a different picture – having developed a reputation for being Kamala’s gatekeeper, often refusing to delegate while second-guessing others in Harris’ office.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/kamala-harris-staffers-are-leaking-and-her-office-dysfunctional-mess

Tyler Durden's Photoby Tyler Durden

“It all starts at the top,” said one administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity (as they all did).

“People are thrown under the bus from the very top, there are short fuses and it’s an abusive environment,” said another person with direct knowledge of Harris’ office. “It’s not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated. It’s not a place where people feel supported but a place where people feel treated like shit.”

As Politico notes, “The dysfunction in the VP’s ranks threatens to complicate the White House’s carefully crafted image as a place staffed by a close-knit group of professionals working in concert to advance the president’s agenda. It’s pronounced enough that members of the president’s own team have taken notice and are concerned about the way Harris’ staffers are treated.”

Harris spokeswoman Symone Sanders – a racist who mocked a white Trump supporter after he was beaten by a group of black men – and was passed over for Biden’s press secretary, pushed back against the nearly two-dozen accounts of dysfunction, saying Flournoy has an “open door policy,” and that “Black women like me would not have the opportunity to work in politics without Tina.”

Symone Sanders

Sanders called the anonymous sources “cowards.”

“We are not making rainbows and bunnies all day. What I hear is that people have hard jobs and I’m like ‘welcome to the club,'” Sanders continued. “We have created a culture where people, if there is anything anyone would like to raise, there are avenues for them to do so. Whoever has something they would like to raise, they should raise it directly.”

Harris and Flournoy’s defenders are pulling the race card – saying that “Black women in particular—are subjected to standards that men often don’t have to clear. A tough and demanding office environment may be seen as a virtue for one and a sign of disorder and lack of leadership acumen for another.”

Staffers looking for an exit.

According to the report, some of Harris’ aides are looking for other employment opportunities, while others have left already. In recent days, two top advance staffers, Karly Satkowiak and Gabrielle DeFranceschi, left the ‘dysfunctional’ office. And while Harris’ team said the departures were ‘long-planned’, two people familiar with the departures call bullshit.

For DeFranceschi, the deputy director of advance, the departure came down to a “difference in opinion on how things should run,” according to another person familiar with the matter, who said that Harris’ office is run “very different” from the Obama operation, where DeFranceschi previously worked. “If you have an opinion about how things should run and it’s not listened to, that can be frustrating.”

DeFranceschi did not respond to a request for comment.

A third Harris aide who worked on her digital team, Rajan Kaur, left the staff after opting not to relocate to Washington from Brooklyn.

Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to the president, defended Flournoy as well as the decision to keep news of the border trip contained among a small group of people, saying Harris’ office didn’t want it to leak or “turn it into a spectacle.”

“It was closely held and there may be people whose feelings were a little hurt on her staff that they weren’t brought into the discussion,” Dunn said. “But any suggestion that it was mishandled or kept a secret from people who needed to know about the arrangements or needed to know about it is absolutely not true.”

Asked if she was aware of the complaints about the VP’s office, Dunn replied that it was “not anywhere near what you are describing.” -Politico

Flournoy, a veteran of the Clinton White House and Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, is part of an ‘informal group of Black women who’ve worked together for decades in Democratic politics, which includes Donna Brazile, Minyon Moore, Leah Daughtry and Yolanda Caraway,’ according to the report.

“Look, [Tina’s] strong, she’s intelligent, she’s driven, and she expects strong, intelligent, driven people around her,” said Daughtry, adding “But some people may find strong, driven, smart people intimidating, but I think that’s more projection than reality because that’s just not Tina’s intent or style. And nothing in her experience would lead you to think that she’s an intimidating person.”

So the staffers are the problem? Hilarious.

pic.twitter.com/wpk52U3Q1h — Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) June 30, 2021

Politico paints a different picture – having developed a reputation for being Kamala’s gatekeeper, often refusing to delegate while second-guessing others in Harris’ office.

Apparently, she did the same thing as Bill Clinton’s post-presidential chief of staff.

“People who Clinton knew for decades all of a sudden couldn’t get through to him because Tina choked off contact,” one of the people said. “Because Clinton didn’t use email,” just his blackberry, “she was able to keep many FOBs [friends of Bill] out.”

Morale is “rough,” and in many ways ‘similar to the failed presidential campaign and her Senate office,’ according to a former Senate aide who speaks with Harris’ staffers.

Read the rest of the report here.

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Guatemala: The Human Rights Nightmare That Is the US Drug War | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on June 9, 2021

Guatemala was a struggling Third World nation striving to overcome decades of genocide and civil strife. Unfortunately, it was also increasingly victimized by chemical warfare. To blight any suspected marijuana or poppy plants, the US government was dousing broad swaths of Guatemala with toxins to preemptively destroy anything growing below. The year before I visited, a group of Guatemalan beekeepers sued the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), claiming that the spraying had destroyed half of their industry. Herbicides had contaminated local drinking water and many residents had required hospitalization after exposure to the chemicals.

https://mises.org/wire/guatemala-human-rights-nightmare-us-drug-war

James Bovard

Vice President Kamala Harris visited Guatemala earlier this week to bestow millions of dollars in new foreign aid on that government. The Biden administration is pretending that giving more US tax dollars to Central American governments will miraculously reduce the surge of illegal immigrants that Biden’s appointees are welcoming in Arizona, Texas, and elsewhere. The purpose of Harris’s trip and the new handouts is not to solve that problem but simply to make the Biden administration appear to give a damn about the issue.

In her official statements during the visit, Harris included no admission of how the US drug war has been a pox on Guatemala. Her silence was no surprise considering Joe Biden’s nearly half century of fanaticism for that pointless crusade.

I learned about the wreckage of US drug policies when I visited Guatemala in 1992. I had been writing articles bashing drug prohibition for almost a decade at that point. But before that trip, I had only vague notions of the ravages being inflicted on hapless foreigners.

I went to Guatemala to give a couple speeches on the follies of protectionist trade policy, spurred by the publication the previous year of my book The Fair Trade Fraud (St. Martin’s Press). I was hosted by the president of Francisco Marroquín University, Manuel Ayau, a genial yet fearless fighter for free markets. I didn’t realize until I arrived that Ayau had recently been the presidential candidate of the “party of organized violence” and was on several left-wing “death lists.” Guatemala had shortages of almost everything except political assassinations. Ayau, a compact dynamo, was hepped up because he’d just gotten a laser sighting attachment for his Clint Eastwood/Dirty Harry caliber .44 Magnum. As his chauffeur-bodyguard drove us around the capital city, Ayau trained that red dot on all sorts of targets. I was happy I was sitting behind him.

Guatemala was a struggling Third World nation striving to overcome decades of genocide and civil strife. Unfortunately, it was also increasingly victimized by chemical warfare. To blight any suspected marijuana or poppy plants, the US government was dousing broad swaths of Guatemala with toxins to preemptively destroy anything growing below. The year before I visited, a group of Guatemalan beekeepers sued the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), claiming that the spraying had destroyed half of their industry. Herbicides had contaminated local drinking water and many residents had required hospitalization after exposure to the chemicals. A Guatemalan human rights commission asserted that the spraying had destroyed so many farmers’ corn and bean crops that serious food shortages could result.

US policymakers presumed that the solution was to further militarize the drug war. After farmers began shooting at the planes, the US government sent in Black Hawk helicopter gunships to accompany the crop dusters and suppress peasant revolts. I called the US embassy to ask about the controversy and was told that the complaints came from “illiterate Indians” and were nothing but “drug war disinformation.”

Outside of Guatemala City, I met farmers and small businessmen and pumped them for information on the US drug war. A manager of a large farm in central Guatemala told me that many of his shipments of yucca cane to Europe were rejected because they arrived in Rotterdam and were rotting as a result of DEA’s drug spraying. Another farmer bewailed how his harvests exported to the United States were routinely destroyed during Customs Service searches for illicit drugs (he never received compensation even though no drugs were found). A Guatemalan banker told me that the DEA was involved in shooting down or forcing crash landings of small planes suspected of carrying drugs. A prominent Guatemalan politician told me, “If you criticize the Drug Enforcement Agency, you might lose your visa” and be banned from visiting the US. Guatemalans were outraged when the US ambassador revoked the visa of a Guatemalan judge who refused to vigorously prosecute an alleged drug smuggler.

After I returned to Washington, I hounded drug policy activists, human rights groups, and environmentalists to learn more about the US drug war run amok south of the border. A Peace Corps volunteer who had spent eighteen months working with Guatemalan farmers told me that the pilots were spraying much more toxic concentrations than the US embassy admitted. No wonder crops were dying.

See the rest here

Author:

James Bovard

James Bovard is the author of ten books, including 2012’s Public Policy Hooligan, and 2006’s Attention Deficit Democracy. He has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and many other publications.

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Democratic Showdown: Kamala vs. Manchin – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on June 5, 2021

As for Manchin, he is sitting in the catbird seat in the Democratic Party. He holds the whip hand over both Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Biden. For if the West Virginian refuses to bend or break on the filibuster, then not only will the voting rights bill fail in the Senate, so, too, could gun control, D.C. statehood, climate change, and immigration legislation.

If Joe Manchin holds his ground this June, he will prevail, the filibuster will survive, the For the People Act will die a deserved death, and Joe will become legend in West Virginia.

And if Manchin stands his ground, the big loser is Kamala Harris.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/06/patrick-j-buchanan/democratic-showdown-kamala-vs-manchin/

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Speaking in Tulsa on the 100th anniversary of the racial atrocity there, Joe Biden belatedly turned to the issue of voting rights, to explain why he is having such difficulty winning passage of the party’s priority legislation.

“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’”

“Well, because Biden only has a majority of, effectively, four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.”

Biden was referring to Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

“But we’re not giving up,” Biden hastily added.

“Earlier this year, the House of Representatives passed For the People Act to protect our democracy. The Senate will take it up later this month, and I’m going to fight like heck with every tool at my disposal for its passage.

“To signify the importance of our efforts, today I’m asking Vice President Harris to help … lead them. … With her leadership and your support, we’re going to overcome again, I promise you. But it’s going to take a hell of a lot of work.”

Thus did Biden designate Kamala Harris as his field commander in winning Senate passage of a voting rights bill that would cancel out many GOP victories in state legislatures in enacting voting reforms.

Sunday, Harris, who is also Biden’s point person on the border crisis, will be in Guatemala to learn what causes Latin American peoples of color to leave the land they were born in and travel 1,000 miles for a chance to live, work and raise their families in a nation established by and for white supremacists.

But when she returns, Harris will face a showdown — with Joe Manchin.

For Manchin, who has the decisive Democratic vote in the Senate, not only opposes elements of the Democrats’ voting rights bill. He has declared that ending the Senate filibuster would “be to destroy our government,” and he will never cast a vote to kill it.

In April, Manchin was emphatic in The Washington Post, “There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster.”

Yet, as long as that filibuster exists, 60 Senate votes are needed to pass major legislation. And if the filibuster is not eliminated, Democratic voting rights proposals don’t have a snowball’s chance of being enacted.

Hence, if Manchin is telling the truth and holds his ground, Harris is headed for a fruitless and failed assignment this June that will reveal her to be a leader without clout in the Senate whence she came.

Thus, in publicly handing Harris the portfolio on both the Democrats’ voting rights bill and border crisis, Biden may have set up his vice president for a great fall and a major humiliation. Yet, Harris is said to have asked Biden for the assignment.

As for Manchin, he is sitting in the catbird seat in the Democratic Party. He holds the whip hand over both Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Biden. For if the West Virginian refuses to bend or break on the filibuster, then not only will the voting rights bill fail in the Senate, so, too, could gun control, D.C. statehood, climate change, and immigration legislation.

All could suffer the same fate as the Jan. 6 Commission.

The Washington Post reports Senate staffers are saying that there is “panic” in the Democratic caucus that Manchin will stand his ground and refuse to kill the filibuster, no matter the pressure the party puts on him.

Recognition by the White House of the leverage Manchin and Sinema wield was evident in press secretary Jen Psaki’s effort to soften Biden’s crack about “the two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.”

Psaki brushed aside any suggestion that Biden was being caustic about the two senators saying, “I don’t think he was intending to convey anything other than a little bit of commentary on TV punditry.”

But the issues and stakes involved are becoming evident to everyone.

A coalition of progressive groups, on Thursday, called on Schumer to hold a Senate vote to kill the filibuster. More than 100 groups sent a letter to the majority leader arguing that the Republican senators who blocked a bill to create a commission to probe the Jan. 6 Capitol attack showed, “it is clearer than ever that the filibuster needs to be eliminated.”

The groups added: “We call on you and the Senate Democratic caucus to eliminate the filibuster as a weapon that Sen. McConnell can use to block efforts to defend and strengthen our democracy and make our government work for the American people.”

If Joe Manchin holds his ground this June, he will prevail, the filibuster will survive, the For the People Act will die a deserved death, and Joe will become legend in West Virginia.

And if Manchin stands his ground, the big loser is Kamala Harris.

Patrick J. Buchanan is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever See his website.

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Biden vs. Biden on ‘Is America a Racist Country?’ – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on May 6, 2021

Biden is scrambling to keep one foot in every camp in his coalition by appearing to agree, at times, with them all.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/05/patrick-j-buchanan/biden-vs-biden-on-is-america-a-racist-country/

By Patrick J. Buchanan

“Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country.”

So declared Sen. Tim Scott, a Black Republican, in his televised rebuttal to Joe Biden’s address to Congress.

Asked the next day what he thought of Scott’s statement, Biden said he agrees. “No, I don’t think the American people are racist.”

Vice President Kamala Harris also agreed with Scott, “No, I don’t think America is a racist country.”

What makes these rejections of the charge of racism against America significant is that Biden and Harris both seemed to say the opposite after Derek Chauvin was convicted.

Biden had called George Floyd’s death “a murder (that) ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism… that is a stain on our nation’s soul.”

Harris had said much the same: “America has a long history of systemic racism. Black Americans — and Black men, in particular — have been treated throughout the course of our history as less than human.”

But which is the predominant view of Biden and Harris about the moral character of the country they were elected to lead?

Is it a vicious slander, as Scott implied, to call America a “racist country”? Or is America’s soul, as Biden and Harris said, so stained by “systemic racism” that this country has treated Black Americans “as less than human” for the 400 years of her existence.

Has America been a curse for the 40 million Black people whose numbers have multiplied 10-fold since the abolition of slavery in 1865, and whose freedoms and material prosperity have grown accordingly?

Or has America been a blessing to Black people?

This is not just a gotcha question.

For the clashing commentaries of Biden and Harris reflect an ideological divide within their own coalition over a most basic issue: Is America a good country?

We have been on this terrain before.

Between LBJ’s landslide in 1964 and the breaking of his presidency in 1968, the Democratic Party had split into three factions, all at war with one another.

There was the Lyndon Johnson-Hubert Humphrey establishment that controlled the presidency and the party machinery. There was the Robert Kennedy-Gene McCarthy-George McGovern anti-establishment and anti-war left.

And there was the populist-right George Wallace bloc, containing millions of flag-waving blue-collar Democrats in northern industrial states and Southern Dixiecrats who detested the leftist radicals on cultural and patriotic grounds.

That Democratic Party disintegrated in the convention hall and the streets of Chicago in August of 1968, opening the door to the GOP era of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Today’s Democratic Party encompasses three similar blocs.

There is the Biden liberal establishment that controls the media, the academy, the Congress, the administration. There is the Bernie Sanders-Elizabeth Warren-AOC progressive-socialist wing. And there is, today, a new militant and radical third force.

Included in its ranks are Black Lives Matter, antifa and protesters who burn Old Glory, tear down statues, monuments and memorials, assault cops, smash and loot stores and riot at will.

This is the “Abolish Ice!” and “Defund the Police!” faction of the party that detests the old America and favors open borders to alter it forever. This anarchic element is rendered moral sanction by journalists and politicians who share its malignant view of American history.

The Biden-Harris statements on the conviction of Chauvin were tailored to pander to this crowd.

Yet, in his address to Congress, Biden also made a statement that sounded like a Biden plagiarism of Trumpian nationalism:

“All the investments in the American Jobs Plan will be guided by one principle: ‘Buy American.’ American tax dollars are going to be used to buy American products made in America that create American jobs.”

Biden is scrambling to keep one foot in every camp in his coalition by appearing to agree, at times, with them all.

The problem: While one part of his party believes America is a good and great country deserving of loyalty and love, another believes America is racist in its soul — a land whose character is defined, as it has ever been, by white supremacy, white privilege and white rule of people of color.

This leftist rage, however, is partly rooted in urban myth.

Consider. Last year, in D.C., our nation’s capital, there were 200 homicides and 980 people shot, mostly Blacks.

How many were the victims of rogue cops or Proud Boys?

Can you lead a country about whose history you profess shame?

And how long will Americans follow leaders who appear to agree with those who hate what America was and, yes, what America is?

In 2020, Trump united the Democrats. But with Trump gone, Biden must do the uniting of his disparate party himself.

And his need to behave, at times, like a believer in the racial indictment of the America he grew up in is probably not something Joe Biden can credibly and indefinitely pull off.

Patrick J. Buchanan is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever See his website.

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