HR 1 Hits the Senate
We like Texas Senator Ted Cruz, and we respect his keen eye both for Liberty and its enemies. Yesterday, he went after perhaps the most lethal of those enemies, House Bill HR 1. The Democrats’ power-grabbing bill, which is ridiculously dubbed the “For the People Act,” passed the House in early March without a single Republican vote and has now come before the 50-50 Senate.
“This legislation is profoundly dangerous,” Cruz said yesterday before the Senate Rules Committee, “and the reason it suppresses millions of votes is by allowing millions of people to vote illegally. That is the intended effect and that would be the actual effect of this bill. It dilutes the legal votes of American citizens.”
By now we’ve heard about the diabolical contents of HR 1: It takes over state elections and usurps state legislatures’ right to enact voting laws; it enables fraud by allowing door-to-door ballot harvesting and by eviscerating voter ID laws, both of which work to suppress the votes of legitimate voters; it funds career politicians and subsidizes their speech while suppressing the speech of private citizens; and it gives violent felons the vote, even for those who’ve yet to serve out their sentence.
In short, it’s a Democrat wish list, and a statist’s dream. Said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell yesterday, “The Democratic Party wants to rewrite the ground rules of American politics for partisan benefit. It’s hard to imagine anything that would erode public confidence in our democracy more drastically. This bill had purely partisan support in the House. It had bipartisan opposition.”
Not surprisingly, as The Hill’s Jordain Carney writes, “Democratic leadership views passing the For the People Act as their top legislative goal. To Republicans, their top priority is to sink the bill, pulling out all the stops to try to prevent what they view as an attempted ‘takeover’ of elections.”
Regarding those stops, Carney later noted that the bill still has an uphill battle. “Even as Democrats have seized on the bill,” he writes, “it faces a complicated path to making it to President socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s desk. With unified GOP opposition, it doesn’t have the support needed to defeat a 60-vote legislative filibuster. And it doesn’t unify Democrats, with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) suggesting his party should focus more narrowly on voting rights.”
The mercurial Manchin thus holds the keys to the Republic, and Patriots can do little more than light up his phone lines back home (Trump by 39%) to ensure that he knows, unequivocally, the will of his constituents.
Looking ahead, though, that uphill battle for passage makes HR 1 an even more destructive bill. Tuesday, November 8, 2022, is the date of the nation’s next midterm elections, and the status of HR 1 at that time may well gum up the electoral works. The Wall Street Journal editorial board argues it’s a midterm time bomb. “If Democrats pass H.R.1 this summer,” the editors write, “lawsuits would appear quickly. H.R.1 says legal challenges must be brought in the federal courts of the District of Columbia. Given the judicial makeup there, perhaps the law would be upheld at first. How long would it take to reach the Supreme Court? The midterms are 18 months out, and the first primaries are only 10 months away.”
The editors then suggest a scenario in which HR 1 goes to the Supreme Court just prior to the midterms, thereby casting a cloud of illegitimacy over an entire muddled election.
So HR 1 isn’t just awful policy. It’s pure political poison. ~The Patriot Post
Gas Panic Has socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden Looking Like Carter 2.0
A gas panic has set in across several states in the Southeast following the weekend cyberattack on Colonial Pipeline that forced the temporary shutdown of a 5,500-mile system of lines stretching from New Jersey to southeastern Texas. More than 1,000 gas stations across the Southeast are reportedly out of fuel, as people have rushed to hoard gas over fears of shortages and spiking prices.Colonial Pipeline announced plans to restart the pipeline by Wednesday evening, noting that it will take a few days to fully “ramp up operations.” By the end of the week, the pipeline should be back to normal. In the meantime, governors in four states — Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia — have declared a state of emergency, with North Carolina reporting the highest percentage (14.7%) of gas stations experiencing fuel shortages and metro areas generally being the hardest hit.
It appears that the gas shortage can be attributed more to panic buying than the pipeline shutdown itself. The Washington Examiner reports, “In Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Virginia, gasoline demand rose more than 40% on Monday.”
The rush on gas sent prices jumping as well. The average cost per gallon is now up to $2.99, and it’s almost certain to rise above $3 for the first time since 2014.
The White House cautioned against panic. “There should be no cause for hoarding gasoline,” contended Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. “It’s not that we have a gasoline shortage. We have this supply crunch. Things will be back to normal soon.” Oh, not a shortage; a supply crunch. Got it.
The “nothing to see here” routine is predictable. Politically speaking, this is bad for socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden, as it has many folks likening him to Jimmy Carter, not just with lines at gas stations reminiscent of the 1970s, but with the recent dismal jobs report. Making it worse is the fact that one of socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s first moves upon taking office was to attack America’s energy sector with an executive order shutting down construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. It was a move to appease the radical Left, and it only served to make the country more vulnerable to attacks against our energy infrastructure. Now with this largest cyberattack in U.S. history being against a major infrastructure target like Colonial Pipeline, socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden looks even more feckless and asleep at the wheel. ~The Patriot Post
The CDC’s COVID Incompetence
For years, we’ve written story after story about how the government has earned every bit of distrust it faces from the public. During a pandemic, it’s vitally important that we be able to trust the information and guidelines being given by the government. Yet here we are, with a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that can’t be trusted to not politicize information or outright misinform the public.
Should anyone be wearing masks outside, and in what circumstances? We’ve discussed that question more than once. Now, the CDC has been busted giving bogus statistics about it to back up its guidelines.
“When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines last month for mask wearing, it announced that ‘less than 10 percent’ of Covid-19 transmission was occurring outdoors,” reports the New York Times of all places. “But the number is almost certainly misleading.” How misleading? “In truth, the share of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent.”
In other words, the CDC was off by an order of magnitude — not even in the outdoor ballpark for how risky being outside really is for contracting COVID. And yet the CDC is still recommending that children wear masks at summer camps virtually “at all times.” It’s still insisting that vaccinated people wear masks outdoors in “large public venues” and that unvaccinated people wear them pretty much all the time.
Misleading information can have far-reaching effects, including the fact that those of us who refuse to comply with this tyrannical stupidity are routinely scorned and harassed for it.
Meanwhile, speaking of the New York Times, remember its false story about Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick? The misinformation that he died due to being hit in the head by a fire extinguisher during the Capitol riot took hold so deeply that it was used in other Leftmedia “fact-checks” to discredit true statements. Only months later is the record being corrected for anyone still paying attention.
Why do we bring this up? Because when lies and misinformation take root, they are extremely hard to set right. Thus, when the CDC issues guidelines about outdoor masking, many organizations religiously adhere to that new dogma, regardless of its accuracy, later corrections, or reports debunking the bad information. When the CDC declared that social distancing meant six feet, schools around the country closed. By the time the CDC corrected that information and decided that the World Health Organization’s standard of three feet was actually sufficient all along, it was too late. Millions of Americans — especially our children — suffered unnecessarily because of wrong information.
A recent report on lockdowns themselves is likewise damning for the deadly effects of bad policy based on faulty science. And the hits keep on coming.
Yet here’s Dr. Anthony Fauci just this past weekend preparing us for another year of drummed up doom and gloom: “I hope that next Mother’s Day we’re going to see a dramatic difference from what we’re seeing right now. I believe that we will be about as close to back to normal as we can. And there’s some conditions to that.” Donald Trump should have fired Fauci a year ago.
Republican Senator Susan Collins has seen enough. “So here we have unnecessary barriers to reopening schools, exaggerating the risks of outdoor transmission, and unworkable restrictions on summer camps,” Collins told CDC Director Rochelle Walensky in a hearing Tuesday. “Why does this matter? It matters because it undermines public confidence in your recommendations, in the recommendations that do make sense, in the recommendations that Americans should be following.”
Her Louisiana colleague, Senator Bill Cassidy, agreed. “The American people are incredibly frustrated,” he said. “They’re beginning to disregard what you say that’s true, because … so much of what you say is patently not true.”
Collins gave the bottom line: “I used to have the utmost respect for the guidance from the CDC. I always considered the CDC to be the Gold Standard. I don’t anymore.”
Fewer and fewer Americans do, and that’s a real problem, self-inflicted by the CDC itself. ~The Patriot Post
NPR Marks 50 Years Promoting Big Government
For the last half-century, a small but significant slice of the federal tax revenue pie has been shuttled to National Public Radio. Even so, as the Media Research Center’s Tim Graham quipped last week, “National Public Radio is celebrating its 50th anniversary … in a classic way: asking its fans for money.” From its non-coverage of the “pure distraction” of the liar-Hunter Biden story last October to working to “undermine everything we believe in,” NPR is a favorite — and deserving — target of conservative scorn.
As a part of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (along with the PBS television network), NPR stations tend to sacrifice wide general appeal and specialize in broadcasting more eclectic musical genres such as jazz, classical, and world music, along with long-running programs like “All Things Considered” and (formerly) “A Prairie Home Companion.” Furthermore, many NPR stations are affiliated with colleges, which leads into one key complaint from those interested in smaller government: The strong tilt to the left promoted by the NPR news and programming is also the educational field for up-and-coming broadcasters. If there’s one thing the newbies learn, it’s that even when conservatives get a voice on NPR, it’s usually as part of a panel where they are significantly outnumbered.
While the prospect is a pipe dream under the socialist/ scumbag/liar- Biden administration, one could ask: What would happen if NPR suddenly lost federal funding? At this point, technically nothing, because direct federal funding is but a fraction of National Public Radio revenues. As they tell it, “A large portion of NPR’s revenue comes from dues and fees paid by our Member stations and underwriting from corporate sponsors. Other sources of revenue include institutional grants, individual contributions and fees paid by users of the Public Radio Satellite System.” All told, that amounts to about three-fourths of support. However, the local stations tend to be a pass-through for federally subsidized CPB funds, and that’s 34% of NPR’s revenue.
So it’s losing local station support that worries NPR the most, as the network explains:
Public radio stations receive annual grants directly from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) that make up an important part of a diverse revenue mix that includes listener support, corporate sponsorship and grants. Stations, in turn, draw on this mix of public and privately sourced revenue to pay NPR and other public radio producers for their programming.
These station programming fees comprise a significant portion of NPR’s largest source of revenue. The loss of federal funding would undermine the stations’ ability to pay NPR for programming, thereby weakening the institution.
Yet according to NPR’s own data, the federal government accounts for only about 12% of local station revenue, although that varies greatly by station. Stations in urban markets tend to be less dependent on Uncle Sam than NPR outlets in rural America and red states, where listenership is lower. But all those stations pay some amount of dues to NPR, depending on listenership, and purchase its programming, completing the pass-through of federal revenues accrued by the local stations back to the NPR mothership.
Frankly, if local affiliates could beg a little harder with hat in hand, they probably could survive without federal government support thanks to passionate fans, local and state government grants, and deeper corporate sponsorship. If they’re already at 88%, just working a bit harder can make up the gap, right? That’s what we in our humble shop do — and we don’t need (or take) a penny from the federal government.
Over the years, NPR has positioned itself as a supposedly unbiased alternative to conservative news/talk radio. Perhaps these talkingheads may believe their own rhetoric in a world where the mainstream media is solidly in the tank for big government, but in reality they’re nowhere near the middle of the road. If there’s reform to be had, it could start with offending the woke and deciding the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden administration is ripe for real investigative journalism. But we won’t hold our breath on that one.
Back in the old pre-digital tuner days, when there was still an FM dial and band, you could usually find an NPR station somewhere on the left side. Some things never change, even if they should. There’s no need in this nation and no constitutional authority for taxpayers to subsidize left-wing propaganda, especially when the mainstream media marketplace is already full of corporate Democrats. ~The Patriot Post
A Welcome CRT Backlash
“First and foremost, neither I nor my child have ‘white privilege,’ nor do we need to apologize for it. Suggesting I do is insulting. Suggesting to my 9-year-old child she does is child abuse, not education.”
That was Harvey Goldman, whose daughter attends the $43,000-per-year Heschel School in Manhattan. He’s clearly a fed-up parent, but now he’s fighting back. And he’s not alone.
As the New York Post reports, “Now he’s part of an underground network of parents in NYC and around the country, many of whom are left-leaning, fighting what they believe is the undue focus on race by schools as part of the new ‘woke’ culture. … Goldman, a businessman, was shocked by the amount of negative and inappropriate ‘anti-racist’ dogma he said was being aimed at his fourth-grader and her classmates. But when he reached out to the school with his concerns, administrators were ‘arrogant and dismissive.’”
“Arrogant and dismissive” is one thing if you’re eating at Ed’s. Heck, it’s what you’re paying for. But it’s another thing entirely if the folks you pay good money to teach your daughter are telling you to pound sand.
And we thought our government-run public schools were the pits.
The worm may well have turned, though. As the editors of National Review write, “Recent weeks have brought welcome pushback against the spread of critical race theory (CRT) and related dogmas of division in our nation’s schools. Contrary to what many of CRT’s advocates often claim, the theory is about more than just teaching kids to ‘think critically’ about the role that race has played in American history. It’s the conceptual apparatus of a self-avowedly activist political movement seeking to renovate the American social order from root to branch using state power.”
But we needn’t take NR’s word for it. Instead, we can consider the words of CRT’s highest-profile proponent, Ibram X. Kendi: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
So, he says, two wrongs make a right. We must discriminate by race in order to end discrimination by race. Perhaps Chief Justice John Roberts should straighten this guy out.
Our Mark Alexander has written extensively on the indoctrination of our children and the Left’s “insidious curriculum,” and he rejects CRT and its “institutional” premise. As he notes, our nation’s most consequential “systemic racism” is the Democrats’ social policies, “which have enslaved poor black citizens on Demo-controlled urban poverty plantations for generations.” In fact, “The Democrat Party platform has, by design, kept poor people in bondage to the welfare state and, consequently, is the blueprint for the most enduring racial exploitation architecture in America.”
The backlash is building, and it includes local- and state-level action across the nation, from New York City to Chicago to Tallahassee to Boise to Southlake, Texas, and elsewhere. It’s even happening at Fox News, where news anchor Martha MacCallum earlier this week dressed down American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on CRT and her support of the atrociously ahistorical “1619 Project.”
MacCallum called out Weingarten’s “very simplistic take” on the wretched project, arguing that it indoctrinates our children to believe that their country was founded first and foremost on a desire to preserve slavery. “But that is not factual,” said MacCallum. “That is not true. In fact, scholars say there’s no evidence that colonists were motivated by that in coming to the United States. So it would be wrong as a historian to want to teach them something that is not true … that we live in a systemically racist country.”
Weingarten and her teachers union brethren would do well to read this letter, which comes from another New York City parent, Andrew Gutmann, and is a thoughtful and hard-hitting take-down of the Left’s “anti-racism” scheme. “I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin,” he writes, “but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died.”
We’re a long way from consigning Critical Race Theory and the 1619 Project to the dustbin of fake history, but the pendulum has clearly begun to swing back. As NR’s editors conclude, “There’s obviously a place in American education for sober reflection and instruction about the legacy of racism in the United States, but CRT is not that.” ~The Patriot Post
GARY BAUER
A Tale of Two Pipelines
We’ve all been shocked by the news that the largest gasoline pipeline in America was totally shut down by a cyberattack. The Colonial Pipeline moves 100 million gallons of gas every day from Gulf Coast refineries up the East Coast to the New York metro area.
The attack does not appear to have caused lasting damage, and the pipeline operators hope to have it up and running by the weekend. But already there are scattered fuel shortages in multiple states and gas lines, bringing back bad memories of the Carter years.
This is just the latest in a series of cyber terrorism attacks against American infrastructure. Some cyberattacks have been launched from North Korea. Others from communist China and Iran. This one appears to have come from Russia.
So, it was disappointing Monday to see President socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden go soft on Russia, suggesting he would discuss the issue with Vladimir Putin at their meeting next month.
That brings me to another attack on a pipeline vital to America’s economic and national security. Sadly, that attack was successful. The pipeline was shut down. Thousands of Americans lost their jobs, and we became more vulnerable to attacks like the one against the Colonial Pipeline.
Of course, I’m talking about the Keystone XL Pipeline coming from Canada. It wasn’t attacked by Russian hackers, but socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe Biden just hours after he took office.
The Colonial Pipeline can fight back against Russian hackers. The Keystone Pipeline couldn’t fight back against a president who foolishly declared war on our energy industry. So, it’s only our president who was able to successfully “sabotage” a U.S. pipeline.
In view of this latest attack, socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden should reverse his decision and reopen the Keystone XL Pipeline. But I’m not holding my breath.
socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s Open Borders Agenda
If you needed more evidence of socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden’s open borders agenda, look no further than his latest White House appointment. Natalie Montelongo has been named White House deputy director for political strategy and outreach.
Prior to joining the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden White House, Montelongo was an open borders activist at the ACLU, where she spent her time raging against Donald Trump’s immigration policies, and backed outrageous demands by the radical left to abolish ICE.
In May of 2018, she tweeted: “[The Trump] administration’s actions are not motivated by public safety concerns – they’re terrorizing immigrant communities. #ICE didn’t exist 15 years ago, it doesn’t have to exist now.”
A month later, Montelongo urged radical leftists to shut down ICE facilities, tweeting, “If you’re looking for a way to help - look up your nearest ICE office and shut-it-down.”
As we recently reported, the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden Administration is imposing sanctuary policies on the entire country by handcuffing ICE. While the border is wide open and illegal crossings are at a record high, deportations are at a record low. That means thousands of criminal aliens are walking free on our streets today.
Thanks for nothing, socialist/scumbag/liar-Joe.
Palestinian Violence Escalates
Palestinian militants in Hamas and Islamic Jihad escalated their attacks against Israeli civilians. More than 600 rockets were fired at Israeli communities, including the major cities of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. In response, the Israeli Defense Forces launched airstrikes against scores of terrorist targets.
The socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden Administration must be feeling really good about its decision to restore funding to the Palestinian Authority. Once again, we see just how unserious Mahmoud Abbas is about making peace with the Jewish state!
As we previously noted, the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden Administration initially called on Israel to ensure that all religious institutions were open for worship in Jerusalem. But the pressure on Israel is outrageous and totally misplaced.
Radical Palestinians, spurred on by Abbas and Iran’s supreme leader, took rocks and other weapons to the Temple Mount. It has been a common occurrence over the years for Muslim extremists to rain those rocks down on Jews worshipping at the Western Wall. Israeli police moved in to stop these attacks.
That’s why services at the Al Aqsa mosque were disrupted over the weekend — because the Palestinians were rioting.
When Ayatollah Khamenei declared it was a “public duty” for Muslims to fight against Israel, there were no statements from the White House or State Department demanding Iran end its calls for genocide and a second Holocaust. Why are we negotiating sanctions relief with this terrorist regime?
And then there is the American media. Multiple networks said that this violence is because Israel “captured” Jerusalem in the 1967 Six-Day War. Israel did not “capture” Jerusalem. Israel liberated Jerusalem.
Jerusalem has never been the capital of any other nation other than Israel. That was true in biblical times, and it is true in modern times since the state of Israel was recognized in 1948.
From 1948 to 1967 East Jerusalem was under Jordanian control. Jordan made no attempt to establish a Palestinian state. Nor did it make any attempt to guarantee religious freedom in East Jerusalem. Israeli Jews who approached the Western Wall were shot at by snipers.
Religious liberty was only restored in all of Jerusalem the night it was restored as the capital of all of Israel.
Meanwhile, politicians and diplomats are either condemning Israel or urging “restraint from both sides,” as if there is any moral equivalency between the state of Israel and the terrorists of Hamas.
Gilad Erdan, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, rejected such claims, saying, “Israel has no other choice but to defend its citizens from these indiscriminate attacks, and we demand that the international community hold the Palestinians accountable and forcibly condemn their actions.”
Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel, condemned this not-so-subtle form of anti-Semitism, telling Newsweek:
“The international community needs to cease treating Israel differently than all other democracies on earth. Treating Israel as a second-class citizen among the nations and holding the Jewish state to a double standard in the context of self-defense is nothing more than the apotheosis of international anti-Semitism.”
Religious Freedom Under Siege
Check out my latest interview with David Brody of The Water Cooler on the growing threat of government overreach against religious liberty. You’ll be shocked at what’s happening not in communist China, but in Canada! We also discussed the socialist/scumbag/liar-Biden Administration’s latest assault on conscience rights.
~The Patriot Post
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