Senatrix Joni Ernst reportedly caving on opposition to Pete Hegseth

Many, many women have caved to Pete Hegseth.

Here.

Democrat gaslighting in the headlines

 

Dems Gaslit America for 4 Years in the Name of 'Democracy'

Gerard Baker, WSJ

 

Debate Exposed the Dem Media's Fabrications

Victor Davis Hanson, American Greatness

 

American Voters Rightly Feel They've Been Lied To

Mark Hemingway, The Federalist

 

Voters Should Punish Democrat Mendacity Up & Down the Ticket

David Sacks, X

 

Biden's Debate Disaster Reveals a Campaign Built on Lies

Julian Epstein, NY Post

 

Debate Takeaway is Biden Hasn't Actually Been in Charge

Chamath Palihapitiya, X

 

Aides Have Shielded Biden Since Beginning of Presidency

Alex Thompson, Axios

 

The Ruling Class' House of Cards Crumbles

David Deavel, AMAC

 

Now the Entire World Knows What Liars Dems & Media Are

Sasha Stone, Substack

 

Rarely Are So Many Lies Dispelled in a Single Moment

Bari Weiss, The Free Press

 

Why Dems & the Media Lied About Joe Biden's Frailty

Brendan O'Neill, Spiked

 

Dear Dems: The Gaslighting Isn't Helping Matters

Tim Miller, The Bulwark

Rasmussen: 17% of mail-in voters in 2020 admit voting in a state in which they were no longer a permanent resident

 Election officials report that of 159 million ballots cast in 2020, more than 68 million were submitted by mail, about 43 percent of the total. In addition, as the MIT Election Data and Science Lab noted, “the dramatic increase in the raw number of absentee ballots cast was accompanied by a significant decrease in the overall absentee rejection rate for the country: from 0.96 percent in 2016 to 0.79 percent in 2020.”

If the recent Heartland Institute/Rasmussen survey is accurate and one in five ballots were, in fact, fraudulent, that would suggest greater than 13 million ballots should not have been counted nationwide in 2020. That’s far more than the margin of victory for President Biden in the popular vote, about 7 million. ...

Another survey conducted in March and April by the Heartland Institute and Rasmussen shows that 28 percent of likely voters now say they would commit at least one form of illegal voting during the 2024 election, “if given the opportunity.” Interestingly, respondents’ willingness to commit fraud was similar among Republicans, Democrats, and independents.

More.

IRS team investigating Hunter Biden's alleged crimes never investigated the Ukraine-Burisma bribes allegations

Jerry Dunleavy, here:

Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian owner of Burisma, was the "foreign national" involved in the alleged "criminal bribery scheme" aimed at shaking an alleged investigation into Burisma by then-Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, according to sources familiar with the FBI record who described its contents to the Washington Examiner.

The sources said Zlochevsky said he believed it would be difficult to unravel the alleged bribery scheme for at least 10 years because of the number of bank accounts involved.

Amid the threat of being held in contempt of Congress, FBI Director Christopher Wray allowed members of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee to review an FD-1023 form this month that contained redacted versions of the allegations from the paid FBI informant.

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, repeatedly claimed following a late May FBI briefing that Barr and his “hand-picked prosecutor” — Scott Brady, then the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania — ended the investigation into the bribery claims in 2020. But Barr quickly said that is false.

“It’s not true,” Barr soon told multiple outlets in early June. “It wasn’t closed down. On the contrary, it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”...

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) also revealed this month that a less redacted version of the form he has viewed says Zlochevsky claimed to have 17 recordings of his conversations with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden (two of the former and 15 of the latter) as an "insurance policy." 

Zlochevsky’s alleged reference to Joe Biden as the “big guy” appears independent of the apparent reference to the now-president as the “big guy” by a Hunter Biden business associate during negotiations with Chinese intelligence-linked businessmen. The China-related reference occurred in a May 2017 email not made public until October 2020.

Shapley said that Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf instructed FBI and IRS investigators not to ask witnesses about “dad” (Joe Biden) or about “the big guy.”

Hunter Biden reached a plea deal on federal charges related to tax crimes and the illegal purchase of a handgun, Weiss’s office revealed in a court filing on Tuesday.

The IRS whistleblower claims detailing the politicization and slow-walking of the Justice Department investigation were made public on Thursday, including allegations that Weiss had sought special counsel status from the DOJ and sought to file charges in California and in the nation’s capital but was repeatedly denied. The whistleblowers also pointed to new apparent links between Joe Biden and his son’s China deals and that the FBI authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop by November 2019.

 

I don't know but I'm guessing her initials are Lesley Wolf

The question remains who within the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office withheld the FD-1023 from Shapley and his team when Barr had directed that the CHS’s reporting be sent there for further investigation. Further, Barr has recently confirmed the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office was briefed on the detailed allegations contained in the FD-1023, following then-U.S. Attorney Scott Brady’s conclusion that the CHS’s reporting did not appear to be misinformation. ...

Every indication suggests it was the FD-1023 that the FBI HQ’s team falsely labeled disinformation, which raises the specter that individuals in the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office were colluding with FBI HQ to protect the Biden family. It is now up to Sen. Chuck Grassley’s whistleblower to close the circle.

More.

J6 Hysteria Is How Media And Other Democrats Are Avoiding Accountability For Their Rigging Of The 2020 Election

 https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/06/j6-hysteria-is-how-media-and-other-democrats-are-avoiding-accountability-for-their-rigging-of-the-2020-election/

Michael Anton doesn't have a clue about the immense value of the periphery

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Taiwan is "peripheral" to our interests, Michael Anton says over and over again, here.

Well then, so is Hawaii.

Keep thinking like that and eventually Catalina Island becomes peripheral, too.

If you want to legitimize China's nine-dash line, something he never mentions, giving up Taiwan is the fastest way to do it. 

There is MUCH more at stake than Taiwan's relative freedom and independence. All of southeast Asia is at risk if China retakes Taiwan.

The answer isn't to accept the fact, as Anton does, that our Navy is rotten to the core and unable to defend Taiwan. The answer is to reform the Navy before it's too late.

If the Chicoms kill all our woke Navy in a battle over Taiwan, that wouldn't be the start we want, but it would be a start to the reform we most need.

Sean Davis of The Federalist only pretends that wars in Ukraine and Taiwan will be wars of our choosing

We can bolster the defenses of these nominally free states in order to prevent Russia and China from attacking them, or we can do what he says and do nothing, inviting their demise.

He is profoundly mistaken.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/09/following-debacles-in-iraq-and-afghanistan-failed-interventionists-are-now-agitating-for-wars-in-ukraine-and-taiwan/

According to Mitch Daniels, injuries from mass vaccination with experimental new technologies which do not have FDA approval are just collateral damage

"That, just as medicines have side effects, almost all actions produce collateral consequences, often collateral damage."

His remarks are a cavalcade of crazy, not the least of which is:

"We can overcome even the biggest obstacles and be the masters of our fates and our futures."

You know, just like Amelia Earhart and Gus Grissom.

Rush Limbaugh reverts to the status quo ante Trump, reads Ben Domenech article on the air caricaturing Capitol MAGA

Here's Domenech, the husband of Megan McCain, daughter of John:

An apolitical viewer of the summer of 2020 would learn one distinct lesson: If you want to be heard, if you want to be listened to, you need to go into the streets, make a ruckus, set things on fire, and tear down icons of America. This disrespect will be welcomed, hailed, and supported if your cause is just and your motives are righteous.

Just about everyone who showed up on Capitol Hill yesterday believed that about why they were there . . ..

Anyone remotely familiar with the sequence of events on Wednesday January 6 recognizes that while Trump was still speaking at 1:07pm, and boring the huge crowd to death far away on the Ellipse, a smaller faction was already over at the Capitol breaking in at 1:03pm. The Blaze's Elijah Schaffer was there documenting the whole thing, and frankly, inflaming the situation as "revolution" when what it was was a juvenile stunt. Just look at the left's similar reaction to the event. This is an elementary playground squabble by grown-ups who never grew up, elevated to national importance by the children running the media and the Democrat Party.

We are not a serious country. But I repeat myself.

The bios of some of these flamboyant mental cases whose pictures you have probably seen after they broke into the Capitol reveal them to be anything but Trumpists, yet Domenech, and Limbaugh, are as content to lump them all together as the GOP House and Senate is to ignore the efforts of Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to investigate Election 2020 improprieties.

Business as usual. The left and the media caricature the right, and Con Inc. joins right in.

The left wins because the right eats it own. Every. Damn. Time.

Does Carson Holloway for The Federalist even live in America 2020, torn by $2 billion in damages from rioting and looting?

 From his essay here:

Tocqueville was certainly correct that the dire legacy of slavery would not be eliminated immediately upon its abolition. America’s path toward racial justice was long and difficult, continuing for many decades after the end of the Civil War. Nevertheless, over time the process turned out better than Tocqueville expected. The country was not engulfed in a race war, and whites and black Americans gradually learned to live with each other as fellow citizens.

If you subscribe to ideology qua ideology, you can pretend that what your lyin' eyes are trying to tell you isn't true. And Holloway explicitly embraces the ideological habit of mind which blinds him to our reality:

Moreover, the northern settlers — and particularly the Puritans of New England — came to America not only with the general habits of freedom characteristic of all the English but with a peculiarly intense inclination toward self-government. They came, Tocqueville says, driven by a “purely intellectual craving,” seeking the “triumph of an idea.”

Accordingly, he embraces a sharp, ideological distinction between North and South, which is nothing but a caricature, as if neither love of lucre nor racism existed in the North: 

Tocqueville clearly regards the original southern settlers as less moral and less enlightened than their northern counterparts. The northerners came to America primarily to found self-governing communities based upon their (lofty and demanding) religious vision of a righteous society. The original Virginians came primarily in the pursuit of gain.

You will hardly find in American "conservatism" anywhere any rumination on the founding of the colonies as corporations, entities which were explicitly formed for gain for and by the English Crown in cooperation with the Bank of England. That was the whole point of Samuel Johnson's "Taxation No Tyranny", which ridiculed Americans with "Why do we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negroes?", which is the main reason why no one reads it. The American colonists broke the business deal with the Crown, violating their contracts. We responded by gussying up our thefts with lofty bs about freedom and equality and rights. French loans, and the French navy, helped us get away with it.

Tocqueville's antipathy toward the South is an artifact of French affinity for the excesses of those Enlightenment ideas which enjoyed a higher traffic in the American North, but also of immemorial French hatred for England which enjoyed free trade with the American South. He is hardly the guide Holloway makes him out to be. 

If there is any commonality left with the French vein in 2020 America, we have seen it in our streets with the violence, destruction, and blood-letting too reminiscent of the excesses of the French Revolution. The difference is that French republicanism sought to literally behead aristocrats, whereas now the rage is explicitly racial, focused on whites.

We have not learned to live with each other as fellow citizens. Cancel culture is everywhere, a euphemism for murder. The triumph of the ideas of BLM will literally mean the death of whitey. 

Any conservatism which pretends otherwise isn't worthy of the name.

NSC official Tim Morrison: Trump-Ukraine phone call transcript accurately and completely reflects the substance of the call

“I want to be clear, I was not concerned that anything illegal was discussed,” former NSC Senior Director for European Affairs Tim Morrison testified today, according to a record of his remarks obtained by The Federalist.

More here.

California's fire problems are its own fault, not the climate's

For decades, environmental protection schemes have usurped common sense. For example, most fire ecologists say that the surest way of preventing massive forest fires is to use prescribed burns. ... Prescribed burns keep forests healthy by burning up the underbrush that accumulates on the forest floor and by thinning trees. ... Despite scientific evidence, the federal government continues spending more money on fire suppression than prescribed burns. The Forest Service has performed prescribed burns on an average of 2,187,64 2 acres a year for the past ten years, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. This means the Forest Service has only performed prescribed burns on 11.3 percent of the land they manage. ...

President Bill Clinton introduced a rule that restricted the construction of new roads on 49 million acres of national forest. This limited the ability of the Forest Service from thinning trees. In 1993, 1,797,574 acres of wildlands burned, but in 2017 this number jumped to 10,026,086 acres. From 1960 to 1990, 10.3 billion board feet of timber were removed from federal forest land each year. From 1991 to 2000 that numbered dropped to 2.1 billion board feet of timber per year. ...

When trees are too close together, they fight for resources. Many of the trees are weakened and become more susceptible to disease and insect infestation. These conditions turn entire forests into tinder boxes.

 More at the link.

The Intel community secretly changed the whistleblower rules to allow hearsay just days before the current Ukraine filing

Intel Community Secretly Gutted Requirement Of First-Hand Whistleblower Knowledge

Federal records show that the intelligence community secretly revised the formal whistleblower complaint form in August 2019 to eliminate the requirement of direct, first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing.

Mollie Hemingway: Joe Biden thought Anita Hill was a liar in 1998, and lies about it now

Joe Biden On Anita Hill In 1998: ‘She Was Lying’

The modus operandi of progressivism is to take everything beautiful and shit all over it

Because only the future can be good, therefore everything from the past is evil, including Obamacare which no Democrat running for president in 2020 is defending, and even "Edelweiss" by Rogers and Hammerstein. Yes, a song from a beloved old musical.

Maggie Haberman Thinks It’s Weird For The White House To Play ‘Edelweiss’:

“Edelweiss” is original to the Rogers and Hammerstein musical, “The Sound of Music,” and dates back to 1959. More recently, a version of “Edelweiss” was used by the Amazon series, “The Man in the High Castle.”

The series, based on a novel by Phillip K. Dick, takes place in an alternate version of the United States in the 1960s. In the show’s version, the Axis powers won World War II and have split up the United States as German states and Japanese states.

So the version of “Edelweiss” used by the series is meant to sound creepy and uncomfortable. Those unfamiliar with the origins of the song might even think it was supposed to sound like a German folk song now being sung in a zombie-like chorus in the fictionally occupied United States. ...

While the Amazon series created its own version of the song that guts its emotional sentiment and original purpose, “Edelweiss” was written for “The Sound of Music” as a tear-jerking tribute to Captain von Trapp’s homeland of Austria.

In the musical, based on a true story, the von Trapps are forced to flee their homeland following the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany. The captain was no fascist, and while he loved Austria and its beautiful, pillowy, alpine flowers greeting him every morning, he knew he must escape to preserve his integrity and protect his family.

In “The Sound of Music,” Captain von Trapp singing “Edelweiss” is one of the most emotional musical numbers of the entire film. He attempts to softly strum a guitar and deliver the lyrics to a small crowd but becomes overwhelmed with emotion when he reaches the line “bless my homeland forever.” His family joins him on stage to help him finish. That night, they flee Nazi persecutors who are trying to recruit the captain into the Nazi war effort.

The namesake flower of the song is also associated with anti-Nazi Austrian Resistance groups, like the “Edelweiss Pirates,” which was comprised mainly of children and teens. Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, both Jewish and fiercely anti-Nazi, wrote the song at a later point in the musical production because they felt Captain von Trapp’s patriotism needed to be underscored.

Bradley Manning finally goes all the way and gets a chopadickoffamy as Trump sides with chromosomes

Chelsea Manning posts post-surgery Twitter photos following gender reassignment surgery

The Trump Administration Is Right To Define Gender Biologically:

The Trump administration is moving forward with efforts to define gender on the basis of biological sex, reversing decisions under the Obama administration that essentially allowed individuals to choose their own sex for federal government purposes. A new memo from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services argues federal agencies need a definition of sex and gender that is defined “on a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.”

The changes are to take place under Title IX section of a 1972 law that bars sex-based discrimination in federally funded education institutions, but could have far broader implications, in areas such as single sex settings and set aside programs. ...

The fact of the matter is that while academics and activists have been running around willy nilly changing the definition of sex and inventing 72 (at least) new pronouns, none of this has been rooted in any kind of confirmable science. It is farcical to think that the state can somehow keep up with such changes or pursue policies regarding sex without a workable and consistent definition.

Most Americans see the difference between out-and-out lies and Trump's self-evident hyperbole

Yeah, but mostly only in flyover country where there is still a connection with reality. Contemporary liberalism is untethered to reality and is incapable of such distinctions. That's why liberalism is rightly seen to be coterminous with the "creative" class on the coasts and in the academy, the spinners of yarns and fictions and fantastic tales.

Trump would gain more traction in the current contretemps if he made more fun of them.

"Ridicule is man's most potent weapon".

Lee Edwards, here.

DOJ did not inform the FISA court of FBI interviews with Papadopoulos and Mifsud, but should have

From the story here:

These facts indicate that the DOJ did not inform the FISA court of the FBI interviews with Papadopoulos and Mifsud. But it should have, especially if Mifsud denied Papadopoulos’ claim that the Maltese professor had bragged that the Russians had dirt on Hillary. Or was Mifsud an FBI informant or an asset of a foreign government, and was that instead what the DOJ told the FISA court?

It’s time for the FBI to come clean: Who was Mifsud, and what was his role in the launch of Crossfire Hurricane? And did the State Department assist the FBI in handling Mifsud? Congress and the president supposedly hold power over these agencies. They, and we, need the answers.

A Democrat is troubled by the FBI's excuses for Hillary's crimes

Saritha Prabhu in "I’m A Democrat, And The Left’s Russia Gaslighting Scares Me More Than Trump Does":

But I sense a bigger problem on the Democratic side, both among ordinary Democrats and prominent left-leaning pundits. In the Trump era, many seem unable to grasp irony and facts as it applies to their own side. For instance, when they talk about Trump violating the rule of law or obstructing justice, don’t they realize that some of us are thinking: Yes, but where were you when the FBI didn’t apply the rule of law to Hillary Clinton, and why didn’t you object when Hillary obstructed justice by deleting emails under subpoena? Shouldn’t the rule of law apply to everyone?