From One Unapologetic Media Hoax To The Next

 

From One Unapologetic Media Hoax To The Next

Victor Davis Hanson, The Daily Caller 

Joe Biden lied repeatedly when he claimed he knew nothing of his son Hunter’s influence-peddling businesses.

The president further prevaricated that he had no involvement in Hunter’s various shake down schemes.

Yet, the media continued to misinform by serially ignoring these facts.

Had journalists just been honest and independent, then-candidate Joe Biden might have lost a presidential debate and even the 2020 election. The public would have learned that Hunter’s business associates and his laptop proved Joe was deeply involved in his son’s illicit businesses.

Later, as the evidence from IRS whistleblowers mounted, the White House stonewalled subpoenaed efforts and sought to craft an outrageous plea deal reduction in Hunter’s legal exposure.

Reporters ignored the Ukrainians who claimed Joe Biden himself talked to them about quid pro quo arrangements.

They again discounted Hunter’s laptop that explicitly demonstrated that Hunter was whining that he had handed over large percentages of his income to his father Joe — variously referred to as the Big Guy and a “ten percent” recipient on many deals.

They played dumb about Joe Biden’s use of pseudonyms and alias email accounts to hide thousands of his communications to Hunter and associates.

They attacked the former Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who now claims Biden was likely bribed by Ukrainians.

Yet the media can no longer hide the reality that the president of the United States likely took bribes to influence or alter U.S. policy to suit his payers. Those two crimes — bribery and treason — are specifically delineated in the Constitution as impeachable offenses.

In denial, the media has instead pivoted with hysterical glee over various weaponized prosecutions of former President Donald Trump.

But now, to use a progressive catchphrase, the proverbial “walls are closing in” on Joe Biden.

So will we at last expect the media finally to confront the truth?

Answer — only if Joe Biden’s cognitive and physical health continues to deteriorate geometrically to the point that he can no longer finish his term or run for reelection — and thus becomes expendable.

Such a cynical view of the media is justified given their record of both incompetence and unapologetic deceit.

From 2015 to 2019, we were suffocated 24/7 with lies like “Russian collusion,” “Putin’s puppet,” “election rigging” and the “Steele dossier.”

When all such “evidence” was proven to be a complete fraud cooked up through Hillary Clinton’s stealthy hiring of and collusion with a discredited ex-British spy, a Russian fabulist at the Brookings Institution and a Clinton toady in Moscow, did the media apologize for their untruth?

Was there any media confessional that perhaps Robert Mueller and his left wing legal team (the giddy media-dubbed “all-stars,” “dream team” and “hunter killers”) proved a colossal waste of time?

Not at all.

Instead, the media went next right on to “the phone call” and “impeachment.”

The country then wasted another year.

The same biased reporters now claimed that the heroic Alexander Vindman had caught Trump fabricating lies about the Bidens — given Joe Biden was a possible 2020 opponent — to force Ukraine to investigate them or lose American foreign aid.

On that accusation Trump was impeached.

Then the truth emerged that unlike Joe Biden, Trump never threatened to cancel aid, but merely to delay it.

Trump was right that the Bidens were knee deep in Ukrainian bribes and influence peddling.

And that the whistleblower had no first-hand knowledge of the Trump call but was spoon fed a script cooked up by the gadfly Vindman and California Rep. Adam Schiff.

The result was journalistic glee that we impeached a president for crimes that he did not commit but exempted another president, Biden, who had likely committed them.

Then came the next hoax of the Russian fabricated facsimile of Hunter’s laptop.

The 2020 Biden campaign along with an ex-CIA head rounded up “51 intelligence authorities” to mislead the country into believing that Russian gremlins in the Kremlin had fabricated a fake laptop.

Ponder that absurd fantasy: Moscow supposedly had created fake nude pictures, fake photos of Hunter’s drug use and fake email and text messages from Hunter to the other Bidens.

The media preposterously convinced the country that the Russians and by extension Trump had once again sandbagged the Biden campaign.

No apologies followed when the FBI later admitted it had kept the laptop under wraps for more than a year, knew it was authentic and yet said nothing as the media and former spooks misled the country and warped an election.

Now we are enmeshed in at least four court trials on cooked-up charges that could as easily apply to a host of Democrats as to Trump.

For the last eight years, a discredited media has never expressed remorse for any of the damage they did to the country. And they will not again, when their latest mythological indictments are eventually exposed.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

The Biden clan's con is coming to an end

 

The Biden clan's con is coming to an end

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review   

Despite years of Biden family and media disinformation, we are finally learning that President Joe Biden really did fire Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for looking into state corruption involving the oil company Burisma and Hunter Biden -- and ultimately Joe Biden himself.

As vice president, Biden, in his own words, bragged that he had threatened to cancel the deliverance of American foreign aid to Ukraine unless Shokin was dismissed.

So what is Congress to do now -- un-impeach and exonerate an innocent impeached Donald Trump, and instead impeach a guilty Biden for essentially the same allegations?

After all, the Left redefined the impeachment bar in 2019 as leveraging foreign aid to Ukraine to benefit one's political career.

And that is exactly what Joe Biden did to ensure his son could continue to raise millions for the Biden family with foreign governments while being shielded from political consequences.

An impeached Trump also was accused of using the power of government to go after his likely 2020 presidential rival by suggesting that Joe Biden and his family were corrupt, and should be investigated by Ukrainian officials for fraud and bribery.

Despite Joe Biden's denials, Trump was right: there was plenty of evidence to link Ukrainian unwarranted payoffs going into Biden family coffers.

So Trump in 2019 had good reasons to ensure that none of the Bidens were still burrowed deeply into the Ukrainian payoff machine.

In contrast, Biden had far less grounds to unleash the full powers of government against his probable 2024 rival ex-president Trump.

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is not charging Trump with bribery of the Biden sort. He does not allege that Trump gave special foreign policy preferences for those foreigners who paid his family for such services.

Instead, Smith argues that Trump unlawfully took out classified presidential papers --although Joe Biden did nearly the same.

Biden kept quiet about his vast removal of classified documents for over a decade. Not until Trump was being investigated did Biden suddenly notify the government of his illegal removals.

In contrast, a combative and boisterous Trump fought openly and constantly with federal archivists over which of his papers at his Mar-a-Lago estate were truly classified.

Prosecutorial leaks floated all sorts of unproven nefarious agendas that had prompted Trump's disputes over his presidential papers.

But no one to this day has seriously asked why senator and then Vice President Biden secretly and weirdly removed and kept such sensitive material for years.

Recent reports allege that Hunter Biden may have been treated with kid gloves by prosecutors, partly because Hunter's lawyers had threatened otherwise to call Joe Biden to the stand as a favorable witness.

Government prosecutors under pressure from the White House apparently balked at the nightmare of a befuddled president of the United States testifying under oath about the supposed innocence of the very guilty Hunter Biden.

In truth, the former drug addict Hunter has played lots of such strange games with his own family.

In his laptop communications, Hunter whined that no one in the family appreciated his hard work at family grifting.

He sounded petulant that his father forced him to fork over half his income to the Joe and Jill Biden household.

At a time of universal scrutiny of Hunter, the last thing any sane first son might do would be to hawk his own childish paintings at exorbitant prices to those wishing to buy influence with his father the president.

In effect, Hunter was almost daring the White House to stop his blatant grifting artistry.

Instead, the Bidens moved Hunter into the White House, apparently to keep him under closer watch.

Hunter is still out of control. He could take the family down with him unless President Biden continues to shield him from prosecution.

Ironically, the double standard used by Biden and the media to hound Trump has only raised new questions of fairness.

Why had the Biden family -- with its far greater legal exposure -- never faced such serial indictments?

A Republican House of Representatives had ended prior Democratic protection given to the Bidens.

And the Ukraine war has again turned attention to the Biden-Burisma connection and Hunter's shaking down of Ukrainian officials.

Finally, Joe Biden can no longer work a full day. He mutters. He stumbles. He serially lies.

He hijacks solemn occasions commemorating national tragedies by trying to one-up the grieving with his own self-absorbed stories -- most of them irrelevant and narcissistic half-truths.

If a cognitively and criminally challenged Biden cannot finish his term, we will finally learn the full story of 15 years of Biden family corruption. The Bidens will lose the only impediment -- Joe Biden's political machinations -- left in the way of an honest, full-blown felony investigation into what is likely the most corrupt presidential family in American history.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, a professor of classics emeritus at California State University at Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.

The Most Dangerous Lie

The Most Dangerous Lie

Rebecca Weber, President,  AMAC Magazine

A dystopian nightmare is seizing America. A growing number of states are now directing public schools to help young students make gender transitions In certain cases, educators are even mandated to keep such information secret from parents.

In |une 2023. the New York State Education Department (NYSED) published new requirements for serving "transgender and gender expansive [TGE] students. The guidelines instruct teachers to lie to parents if a child wants to socially transition at school without their parents' consent.

"Only the student knows whether it is safe to share their identity with caregivers." the NYSED document explains. 'Schools should be mindful that some TGE students do not want or cannot have their parents/ guardians know about their trans-gender status."

If a student named Kevin wants to be called Kiml but does not want his parents to know, the document instructs, "The teachers call her Kiml and use she/her pronouns at school. When calling home for any reason, teachers use the name Kevin and he/ him pronouns."

New York has also recommended that all schools adopt the National Sex Education Standards, which introduce "gender identity" in kindergarten and teach children about puberty blockers by fifth grade. Elementary school is no place for these conversations. It is predatory behavior to talk to children about sex and gender changes behind the backs of their parents and even more so to twist the truth In such perverse ways.

Tragically, New York is not the only state that is propagating these harmful lies to children. Washington and Oregon have enacted legislation that enables children as young as 15 to transition from their biological sex, which includes hormone injections, puberty blockers, and irreversible destructive surgeries. Illinois has mandated that all public schools teach students from kindergarten through second grade about gender identity.

These so-called "gender-affirming" policies are a direct assault on our children. They endanger the health, safety, and future of an entire generation. Studies universally show that children are not neurologically advanced enough to make life-altering decisions. The prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for rational decision-making, is not fully developed until well Into a person's twenties, which leaves even older teenagers reliant on the highly emotional and reactive part of the brain known as the amygdala. Children need years of experience before conceptualizing the connection between cause and effect. Yet, these far-left gender policies confuse and abuse children when they are most vulnerable.

The Fight to Protect Our Children

Fortunately. Republican lawmakers have worked with uncharacteristic speed to stop these egregious practices before they are widespread in the United States Thus far in 2023. at least two Republican-led states have passed bills to ban or significantly restrict the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and mutilating gender reassignment surgeries for minors

While many Democratic leaders continue to aggressively pursue "gender-affirming" legislation, other Western nations have actually pulled back from such policies in five European countries—the United Kingdom. Sweden, Finland, Norway, and France—have recently reversed course after allowing gender reassignments for years urging caution due to the severe health risks for minors

In June 2023, the United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) issued a major decision to restrict the prescription of puberty blockers to clinical trials. The directive stated, "There Is not enough evidence to support their safety or clinical effectiveness as a routinely available treatment and that they should only be accessed as part of research,"

NHS's decision was made in response to an alarmingly sharp rise in refer¬rals for gender transition therapy, a dramatic change in the population of patients from predominantly biologi¬cal males to predominantly biological females, the high prevalence of serious preexisting mental health conditions among referrals, and a scarcity of evidence for any positive effects of gender transition therapy.

Instead of continuing to promote harmful transgender "therapy" for children. American lawmakers can learn from Europe's cautionary tale.

Victims Speak Out

Even in the United States, where until recently it was uncommon for doctors to offer teenagers puberty blockers, hormonal drugs, and sex-change surgeries, the evidence of the detrimental effects is quickly mounting.

American parents, teenagers, and even former workers in the industry are beginning to courageously speak out about their own truly horrific experiences.

Jamie Reed, self-described as a queer who is "politically to the left of Bcmic Sanders." worked as a case worker at the Washington University Transgender Center at St Louis Children's Hospital for four years. Last November, she left the clinic after she concluded that the medical "treatments" had "life-altering consequences'' that permanently harmed vulnerable patients. In February of this year, she published an article in The Free Press warning parents about the "morally and medically appalling" practices. She detailed case after case of the medical manipulation of parents and children—as well as the irreversibly damaging effects of hormonal and surgical transitions.

Parents have confirmed that their experiences were as horrifying as Reed described. One mother, Caroline, brought her son to the center when he was 14 years old. He had flipped between different labels of gender identity and was curious about being transgender. He had been experiencing psychological distress recently, and Caroline was told that a puberty blocker would help. When she voiced hesitations, the psychologist responded, In front of Caroline's son, with alarming and misleading statistics about suicides among children not allowed to transition.

Caroline felt that she had no choice but to agree to the puberty blocker. As she put it. "It's being implied that if I don't okay this, I don't care if my kid kills himself." While she had hoped that the puberty blockers would alleviate her son's depression, in reality, her son became increasingly depressed and anxious. He struggled to keep up in school or even get out of bed and became suicidal. At the onset of all these disturbing side effects, Caroline demanded the blocker's immediate removal. However, the clinic refused. To this day. the puberty blocker continues to wreak havoc on the physical and emotional well-being of this teenage boy without the consent of his mother.

Sadly, Caroline's story is not unique While "gender-affirming care" advocates claim that transition treatments lower the risk of suicide among trans youths, the evidence does not bear this out. In fact, a Swedish report found that the suicide rate for fully transitioned adults was 19 times higher than for the rest of the population, suggesting that gender reassignment is not an effective treatment to reduce suicide.

Even teenagers who have undergone these treatments are now warning their peers. Sydney Wright, now a young adult in Georgia, has bravely shared her own story. As a high school student, Sydney was insecure about her attraction to girls. After watching a number of transgender "success stories" on Instagram, she began seeing a gender therapist just after her I9th birthday, and she received testosterone hormones. Within months, she gained 50 pounds and became pre-diabetic. and was deeply depressed. No one encouraged her to stop until one day, her grandfather talked to her.

As Sydney recalls. "There was my grandpa, the man I respect most, pleading with me through tears. I just couldn't tell him no. That was a saving grace. I would have let this treatment kill me before admitting I'd screwed up. His intervention may have saved my life."

The Power of Grandparents

Sydney's heartbreaking story powerfully illustrates the crucial role that grandparents play in supporting their grandchildren. As grandparents, we often don't see how our relationships with our grandchildren build up their confidence and help them know that they are loved. But through our example and our encouragement, we can help our grandchildren find security in their true identity as beloved children of God.

Every child needs to know that he or she is loved. It's natural for teenagers to struggle with insecurities and to search for acceptance. No one wants to be an outsider.

Yet. major left-leaning institutions are trying to sell teenagers a lie that they will be happier if they change the bodies God gave them—if they become someone they are not Such a lie has taken many forms throughout history, but the current push to force gender transitions on teenagers is particularly cruel. So-called "gender-affirming care" is medical malpractice. Such efforts prey upon our children when they are most vulnerable.

We must expose the left's gender transition propaganda. Every American will play a crucial role in this effort but parents and grandparents have a special responsibility to protect their children and grandchildren from such dangerous lies. At AMAC, we will continue to stand for the truth and fight at every level to safeguard the innocence of our kids. Their lives and futures are too precious for us not to win this battle for the heart of America.*

https://amac.us

 

Sacrificing Students to Union Demands

 

Sacrificing Students to Union Demands

Michael Ramirez, Substack

Education Monopoly

Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

That’s the famous Monopoly game card instruction from the Community Chest, and it’s a sad admonition for too many unlucky kids who are failed by the broken public school system and are cheated out of a productive life.

It is the consequence of the bureaucratic monopoly of our educational systems, designed by politicians and unions who prioritize job security, wages, benefits, and pension plans of the teaching and administrative class over the quality of education children in America receive.

This cruel game continues because there are no choices for concerned parents who cannot homeschool or afford to send their children to private schools. The same liberal politicians who push failing public schools on everyone else happily take advantage of private education for their own children, of course.

During the Covid Pandemic, closing schools devastated our children's education and mental development.  Data showed that these school closures contributed to the largest learning drop ever recorded. Reading and writing comprehension, math, and science scores declined in every state. Many children are now reading or performing math well below their grade level. 

But poor results in the public school system existed before Covid and have never reflected how much America invests in public education.

I’ve noted that our nation performs poorly compared to other advanced industrialized nations while spending significantly MORE…

In the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA) average scores in math, science and reading, the United States ranked 25th. Among the 35 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. ranked 30th in math and 19th in science, even while spending 34% higher than the average of the OECD in elementary and secondary education and double the average in post-secondary education.

The Democratic legislature in Nevada recently refused to fund their small Opportunity Scholarship program. The program benefitted the poorest children. This is in a state where math proficiency for middle schoolers is just 22%. 60% of third, fourth, and fifth graders failed English proficiency at their respective grade levels.

Once again, Democrats have demonstrated that they care more about unions than children.  

I’m a free-market capitalist. The market is based on necessity, quality, and efficiency, responding to the consumer's needs. The consumer selects the best products for the best price. Those who innovate and produce preferable and more beneficial goods are rewarded with business. 

It is a competition of goods and ideas, a meritocracy, to win the patronization of the consumer. 

You can apply those fundamentals to education. Jeb Bush began the process in Florida almost two decades ago. Fourth graders in Florida were near the bottom level in reading and math. By incorporating school choice, Florida’s fourth graders advanced to fifth in the nation in reading and seventh in math.  Today at 90%, Florida is 7th in the nation for graduation rates.

Expanding on that success, Florida Governor DeSantis recently signed the largest private school voucher expansion in U.S. history. It is just one more reason people are relocating to Florida.

School choice allows parents to choose a school that benefits their children, but that is just part of it. Any public, private, or charter educational environment should be subject to market forces to maintain progress and competition to attract and retain students. This raises the overall quality of education for everyone.

In a competitive environment where the money follows the student, public schools have no choice but to stop sacrificing children, focus on results, and prioritize the fundamental elements of education. They are also forced to utilize their resources more efficiently rather than wasting them on social engineering and fashionable but ineffective teaching techniques. Ultimately, kids will achieve more and realize their potential despite the unions, so they can end up on Boardwalk or Park Place instead of just taking a chance on the Short Line.

Who will say 'No more!' to the current madness?

 

Who will say 'No more!' to the current madness?

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review 

Britain slept in the 1930s as an inevitable war with Hitler loomed.

A lonely Winston Churchill had only a few courageous partners to oppose the appeasement and incompetence of his conservative colleague Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

One of the most stalwart truth-tellers was a now little remembered politico and public servant — Leo Amery, a polymath and conservative member of Parliament.

Yet in two iconic moments of outrage against the Chamberlain government's temporizing, Amery galvanized Britain and helped end the government's disastrous policies.

In the hours after Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, there was real doubt whether Chamberlain would honor its treaty and declare war on Germany.

A Labour Party member, surrogate Arthur Greenwood, got up in the House of Commons to announce that he would be speaking for Labour on behalf of his ill party leader Clement Attlee.

Immediately Amery interrupted, shouting out, “Speak for England, Arthur!”

He was met with overwhelming applause and soon public acclamation.

After all, Amery was a political voice in the wilderness warning that neither his own party nor the opposition Labour party was speaking or acting for the real interest of the British people.

Amery, a shocked Greenwood, and others had finally had enough of the partisan nonsense, and demanded the nation unite against Nazi Germany.

Hours later, Britain declared war on Germany, the first major power to do so.

On a second iconic occasion on May 7, 1940, Amery voiced even stronger views — again, widely held by the public, but rarely voiced by the timid political class.

The inept Chamberlain government had just lost a winnable Norway campaign to Germany.

Amery responded with a blistering attack on the incompetence of the conservative Chamberlain administration by quoting Oliver Cromwell's hallmark 1653 order to the Long Parliament: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”

Three days later after Amery's speech and the invasion of France, an ill Chamberlain and most of his advisors resigned. Churchill became prime minister. The rest is history.

We need a voice like Amery's. Like Britain from 1939 to 1940, America is in existential danger.

The Biden administration has utterly destroyed the southern border — and immigration law with it.

Biden green lighted 7 million illegal aliens swarming into the U.S. without legal sanction or rudimentary audit.

China spies inside and over the U.S. with impunity. Beijing has never admitted to its responsibility for the gain-of-function COVID virus that killed a million Americans.

President Joe Biden printed $4 trillion at exactly the wrong time of soaring post-COVID consumer demand and supply shortages. No wonder he birthed the worst inflation in 40 years.

In response, interest rates tripled, gas prices doubled.

Our military is thousands of recruits short. It lacks sufficient munitions.

Following Biden's humiliating pullout from Afghanistan, vast troves of arms were abandoned in Kabul. Billions more in scarce weapons were sent to Ukraine.

The Pentagon's woke agenda trumps meritocracy in promotions and advancement.

Our enemies — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea — are on the move, while the U.S. seems listless.

The Biden renegade Department of Justice, CIA and FBI have become weaponized. Ideology, politics, and race — not the law — more often guide their investigations, intelligence operations and enforcement.

The downtowns of our once majestic major cities are becoming unlivable.

They are mired in refuse and trash, violent crime and homelessness. Stores and businesses leave. Millions each year flee the blue urban coasts to the red west and south.

To even say there are still two biological genders, that global warming may not be entirely manmade or necessarily destroying the planet, or that class, not race, is the proper barometer of inequality is to face ostracism and career cancellation.

The public assumes that Biden is severely cognitively challenged, likely corrupt, and a serial fabricator.

Most know what must be done, but few will tell the truth: Balance the budget. Return to legal only immigration. Restore a well-funded, but unwoke Pentagon.

Insist on racial unity. Curb the overweening administrative state. Enforce the rule of law.

Produce more gas and oil. Reestablish civic education. Insist universities protect free speech and due process — and stop proselytizing.

In other words, restore what until recently made America the strongest, most prosperous, and freest nation in the world. And quit undoing all the great good that eight generations of prior Americans bequeathed to us.

Somewhere out there an American Leo Amery is growing infuriated over what is being done to America.

And if he finally stands up like Amery to call out our bankrupt political class, the American people will echo his famous order to this disastrous government:

“Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”

The Fiscal Folly of Free Stuff

 

The Fiscal Folly of Free Stuff

Mountain of Debt

Michael Ramirez, Substack 

Our national debt is $32,604,452,931,788.00. Have a great week!

…Okay, you probably need a little more from my Substack… So, the White House was surprised this week when Fitch Ratings downgraded the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA+. 

Why would anyone be surprised?

As I mentioned before, the U.S. National debt is currently more than $32.6 TRILLION… which breaks down to about $97,521 per person. The debt is bad enough. We have added $12.25 TRILLION Value of debt in just the last six years. 

To put it in perspective, our combined additional debt in six years is larger than the 2022 GDP of all countries in the world except the United States and China. Our national debt is almost twice the size of the GDP of all the countries in the European Union combined.

The GDP forecast for the United States in 2023 is $26.854 trillion. So even if we took the complete value of all the goods and services produced in the United States in 2023 and used it to pay off our gross national debt, we would be short by $5.75 trillion, which, again, to put that in perspective, is higher than the GDP of every country in the world, except the United States and China. 

Now the U.S. economy is a goliath. Our economic output alone constitutes about a quarter of the global economy. Our problem is the failure of our political leadership to rein in spending. 

Democrats like to blame the debt on the Trump tax cuts and COVID, but mostly, Trump and the Republicans. The truth is that we have been taking in record amounts of federal revenue every single year. We are just spending at historic levels… every single year. 

You can’t read the news without finding another government giveaway, another entitlement program added by this administration to the burgeoning debt load we already have. Student Loan forgiveness in every pot is the latest election bribe.

This administration has lost its mind. But so has Congress. This has probably been more of a factor in the credit downgrade than anything else, combined with an acceleration of government spending. The ability of the US government to be a guarantor of its debt plays a larger role in each debt ceiling debate. Political gamesmanship has superseded common sense. Playing chicken with the debt ceiling has raised the specter of a U.S. default. 

The last time we had a credit downgrade was when Standard & Poor dropped our rating because of our debt during the Obama administration in 2011. As the Wall Street Journal points out, the ratio of U.S. debt held by the public to GDP in 2011 was 65.5%. The CBO projects it to be 98.2% this year. 

The gross national debt is the combined publicly held debt and intragovernmental debt. The intragovernmental debt is the money the government owes itself, like government trust funds invested in Treasury securities, i.e., the Social Security trust fund, etc. 

Fortunately for us, U.S. treasuries are still the gold standard for securities. What else are investors going to turn to? The Yuan? Not likely. 

The top ten countries which hold our debt are Japan, China, The U.K., Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, The Cayman Islands, Canada, Ireland, and Taiwan. And the dollar is still the global reserve currency… for now. 

But with the possible rematch of the two knuckleheads looking more likely every day, the dumbing down of Congress, and a rapidly aging population putting more demands on the budget, America’s fiscal health is looking more uncertain.

Any Americans who managed their fiscal house like our politicians would end up homeless or in jail.

What is the legacy of the debt we leave future generations of Americans? The answer lies in this cartoon from 2009, except that mountain is now almost three times larger...

In just the time it took to write this, America accrued $7 million more in debt. 

Have a great week… And I mean it this time. 

"Stone Cold Crooked"

 

 "Stone Cold Crooked"

The Bidens: "Stone Cold Crooked" (7) -- How Is It Even Possible To Keep Spinning This?

Francis Menton, Manhattan Contrarian

I want you to imagine that you have recently taken a job as a senior editor at the New York Times.  Your mission, well understood by you, is to co-ordinate the coverage to spin the news of the day in a way to present Democrats in as favorable as possible a light, and Republicans as unfavorably as possible.  In particular, you understand that Donald Trump must be shown as the devil incarnate, while Joe Biden is a kindly fellow who just loves his family.  No problem.

But now you are suddenly presented with the news of the past few days.  The “Justice” Department, under the control of Biden henchman Merrick Garland, has just taken the unprecedented step of indicting Trump, who currently holds a commanding lead in the polls to be the Republican candidate in the next presidential election, for the supposed “crime” of repeatedly asserting that the last election was stolen — an assertion that has been a perennial in presidential politics for decades without anybody ever being indicted for it.  Meanwhile, a transcript of a witness’s testimony before a House committee earlier this week has just been released, with the witness having offered testimony to close the loop with the last piece of a clear quid pro quo bribery scheme involving millions going not just to Hunter Biden, but also Joe, with U.S. taxpayer funds used to the benefit of corrupt Russia-allied Ukrainians.

OK, this is a tough one.  How are you possibly going to spin your way out of it?

Before getting to how the real New York Times approaches this situation, let’s consider how bad it has gotten for Joe in the Ukraine/Burisma bribery matter.  

    It is well-established that Hunter Biden received $83,000 per month, or $1 million per year, for service on the Burisma board, beginning in May 2014 when Joe Biden was Vice President and continuing until some time after Joe left office.  (The recent FD-1023 form released by the House Oversight Committee also contained allegations that Burisma had separately paid Joe Biden $5 million directly, but let’s take that as unproven for the moment.).

    Then there is the November 2, 2015 email chain between and among Hunter Biden and his Burisma paymasters, released by congressional Republicans.  The email chain is discussed by Margot Cleveland of the Federalist today, and by Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post on July 17.   Both quote Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi in the chain as stating that his “only concern” was that they [Burisma and Hunter] were on the “same page re our final goals,” with the Burisma executive confirming that the “the ultimate purpose” was “to close down” “any cases/pursuits against Nikolay in Ukraine.”  “Nikolay” refers to Burisma’s chairman, Mykola Zlochevsky.  

    And now we have the fresh testimony earlier this week of Hunter Biden’s business partner and fellow Burisma board member Devon Archer.  From Cleveland’s piece at the Federalist: “Devon Archer . . . testified . . . that in December 2015, Zlochevsky and Pozharskyi “placed constant pressure” on Hunter Biden to get help from D.C. regarding the Ukrainian investigation. In response to such pressure, according to Archer’s testimony, Hunter Biden called his then-vice president father with Zlochevsky and Pozharskyi in tow.”

    Within days after that, Joe Biden appeared in Ukraine and demanded that the prosecutor be fired, or else some $1 billion of badly-needed U.S. aid would be withheld.  And a couple of months after that, the prosecutor was indeed fired.

In other words, there is now lay-down evidence of all the elements of a multi-million dollar bribery scheme in which our current President was directly involved, and in which a billion dollars of taxpayer-funded U.S. aid was leveraged to secure a direct benefit for a Ukrainian oligarch and a big personal payday for the President and his son.  Has there ever been a comparable political corruption scandal in U.S. history?  Not that I am aware of.

OK now, over to the New York Times.  How can they possibly spin this to keep up their narrative?  Here is the front page of the print edition from yesterday:

Yes, the entire front page was occupied with the completely phony new charges against Trump, characterized as matters of “destabilizing lies” that put “the essence of American democracy” at stake.  I guess that was to be expected.  

But how about even a word about the new revelations making it definitive that our current President headed up a multi-million dollar bribery scheme to enrich his family while he was Vice President?  Maybe we can find that somewhere deep in the interior pages some time this week?  Yes!  Here is a shot of the bottom half of page A13 from today’s print edition:

That’s right:  this whole Biden bribery thing is just Trump’s “whataboutism defense.”  It’s not even worth coverage in its own story outside of that context.    

I’ll bet in your prospective role as Times senior editor you could never come up with a level of spin so completely preposterous and outside the realm of reality.  It looks like you will never qualify for such a prestigious position.  Perhaps you should stick to your current job as a manual laborer or whatever.

Meanwhile, if you are interested, go to this link at PowerLine, for a full 12 minute video of Democrats asserting that election results they did not like involved fraud.  Somehow the “Justice” Department did not think that any of these statements warranted investigation, let alone indictment.