Armed Forces Day

 

Today is Armed Forces Day.  A couple of weeks ago, Patriot Post ran a tribute to Sgt Alvin York, the World War I hero celebrated in the film Sergeant York, with Gary Cooper in the title role.  Here’s the conclusion of Mark Alexander’s article:

In January 1941, before the attack on Pearl Harbor, in a Memorial Day address at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, York said: “Liberty and freedom are so very precious that you do not fight and win them once and stop. They are prizes awarded only to those peoples who fight to win them and then keep fighting eternally to hold them!”

He added, “I think any man who talks against the interests of his own country ought to be arrested and put in jail, not excepting senators and colonels.”

It is well he is not witness to the disgraceful state of leftist “leadership” today, which disparages our nation and the American Liberty he and so many others have fought to defend.

Read the rest here.

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Every state is now a border state

 

Douglas Andrews at Patriot Post reports that

Governor Greg Abbott and his fellow Texans are under siege. So much so that he’s written an urgent letter to his 49 fellow governors to ask for their help. The letter begins:

President Joe Biden’s negligent disregard for America’s national security hit another devastating milestone last week when his Administration ended Title 42 expulsions. Since taking office, President Biden has willfully refused to enforce our nation’s immigration laws while systematically dismantling every effective border security policy that previously led to the lowest number of illegal border crossings in decades. The resultant surge in illegal immigration and transnational criminal activity is a direct consequence of these misguided actions, and yet President Biden further jeopardized our nation’s security by ending Title 42 expulsions on May 11, 2023.

Abbott then notes that while the flood of illegals hits Texas first, it doesn’t stay in Texas. “Emboldened Mexican drug cartels and other transnational criminal enterprises,” he writes, “profit off this chaos, smuggling people and dangerous drugs like fentanyl into communities nationwide.” Synthetic opioids including fentanyl, as the CDC reported Wednesday, killed 75,000 Americans in 2022.

Abbott’s message has apparently taken hold, as 24 Republican governors have responded.  . . .

Ohio’s governor is one of them.  Support includes human assets, equipment, vehicles, and the like.  The full report is here.

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Restrict Act ~ Another muzzle on free speech

Emmy Griffin at Patriot Post explains the “Restrict Act”, presently gaining support in the Senate:

RESTRICT stands for Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats That Risk Information and Communications Technology, and of the several bills presented to the Senate on the issue of social media abuses, this one has the most popular support.

. . .

However, one thing to take into consideration is that when crafting legislation that restricts or bans TikTok, other social media companies need to be part of the calculous as well. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat, and others all data-mine their users. It’s a good rule of thumb that if a product is free, the actual product is you, the user. In this case, data-mining and microphone-tapping are used to provide users with targeted ads. It is an invasion of privacy, albeit one that mostly feels innocuous — for now.

The RESTRICT Act would delegate regulation to a bureaucrat in the executive branch. The secretary of commerce would be given carte blanche to make several decisions that are troubling, to say the least. According to Senator Rand Paul: “The bill’s application is far from limited to Tiktok or other internet-based companies. The third section of the bill would enable the Secretary of Commerce to investigate any business that is in any way subject to the jurisdiction of a foreign adversary to determine if its transactions ‘pose an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States.’ Though the bill already designates China, Russia, Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba as foreign adversaries, the RESTRICT Act also empowers the Secretary of Commerce to unilaterally add any other country to this official enemies list.”

The current secretary of commerce, Gina M. Raimondo, has already stated that banning TikTok would be a politically deleterious move for the Democrats. In an interview, she said, “The politician in me thinks you’re gonna literally lose every voter under 35, forever.”

. . .

The RESTRICT Act takes away freedoms from the American people. It is just another thinly veiled attack against the First Amendment. The powers granted to the secretary of commerce give her the authority to remove, investigate, or outright censor companies that aren’t toeing the Democrat Party line. In fact, if any company resists her edicts, those responsible could go to jail for 20 years.

Do we really want that sort of power in the hands of an unelected bureaucrat?

That sane answer is no. . . .

Read the rest here.

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Top Secret recipe: meme

Seen at Patriot Post:

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Cartoonist A F Branco at the WEF

Seen at Patriot Post:

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Vance vs Ryan: Big Debate Moments

 

Gary Bauer at Patriot Post considered Ohio Senate candidate J D Vance’s response to Tim Ryan one of the “Big Debate Moments”:

In some states, like Ohio, the Democrat is trailing in the polls and feels he or she must debate. Monday night, Republican J.D. Vance directly confronted Democrat Tim Ryan about racist smears against his family.

“Here’s exactly what happens when the media and people like Tim Ryan accuse me of engaging in the great replacement theory… What happens is my own children, my biracial children, get attacked by scumbags … because you are so desperate for political power that you’ll accuse me, the father of three beautiful biracial babies, of engaging in racism. We are sick of it!”

“You can believe in a border without being a racist. You can believe in the country without being a racist, and this just shows how desperate this guy is for political power.”

Source here.

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Ramirez : Hunter’s laptop

At Patriot Post, Michael P Ramirez has a rather brilliant cartoon on Hunter Biden and his laptop: 

René Magritte is smiling.

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A F Branco: Root Causes

 Another A F Branco cartoon that hits the mark:

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The IRS Will Target You Next

So you think the IRS was weaponized under the Obama administration (think Lois Lerner)?  Thomas Gallatin at Patriot Post has more bad news for you:

Democrats aim to supercharge the agency
 to hit up the middle class for more tax revenue

Democrats are one vote away from weaponizing the Internal Revenue Service against the American middle class. With Joe Manchin doing an about-face on his opposition to Joe Biden’s Build Back Better spending binge, now reduced in scope and dubiously called the Inflation Reduction Act, the IRS is on the cusp of a windfall to the tune of $80 billion.

To put that in perspective, the IRS’s annual budget is $12.6 billion. The additional $80 billion would be spread out over the next nine years, with the predictable Washington selling point that this IRS “investment” will reap a projected $200 billion in additional tax revenue thanks to more accurate tax collection.

And where will the lion’s share of this “lost” tax revenue come from? Despite the Democrats’ favorite talking point of making the wealthy pay their “fair share,” the vast majority of the collected tax revenue will come from hard-working middle-class Americans. . . .

Read the rest here.

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Patriot Post and energy dependence

 

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Discrediting our Founding Fathers: cont’d

 

The headline at the New York Post:  “Founding father James Madison sidelined by woke history in his own home”.  This blog recently linked to a similar reportabout Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia home Monticello.  And reader Ribicon at the Lucianne site – an aggregator – posted this comment and link:

Selection from 45 goals for the takeover of the USA by the communist party, as stated in 1963 [and as entered into the Congressional Record].

29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.

30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the 'common man.'"

31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the 'big picture.'"

The link: https://rense.com/politics6/com.htm [https://rense.com/politics6/com.htm]

Exit question: How many of these goals have been met?  (Spoiler Alert: most of them.)

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It's Memorial Day weekend

Mark Alexander at Patriot Post has a beautiful tribute to our fallen heroes.  Here’s a paragraph:

Fellow Patriots, on Memorial Day, we honor those who have died in the service of our nation’s Armed Services — those who have abided by their solemn oaths “to support and defend” the American Liberty too many take for granted. Memorial Day provides a stark contrast between the best of our nation’s selfless Patriot sons and daughters versus the worst of our nation’s selfish culture and consumerism. Astoundingly, some businesses disgracefully promote a “Memorial Day Sale.” But Memorial Day is NOT for sale — 1,354,664 Patriots have already paid the full price.

Read the rest here.  Cartoon by Gary Varvel at Liberty Loft. 

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Masks on a Plane

 

 

If you still thought the CDC had any credibility left, Nate Jackson at Patriot Post explains:

U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, an appointee of Donald Trump, on Monday issued a nationwide injunction against the CDC’s mask mandate on airlines and other public transportation. She ruled that the CDC had overstepped its statutory authority, for which it had pointed to the “sanitation” provision of the 1944 Public Health Service Act. She also said the CDC’s mandate violated the Administrative Procedure Act.

. . .

That doesn’t mean the White House pretended to be happy about it. “This is obviously a disappointing decision,” huffed Press Secretary Jen Psaki. “The CDC continues recommending wearing a mask in public transit.”

The CDC continues to be wrong and bereft of credibility.

 . . .

The dirty little secret is that we never needed to wear masks on planes, or pretty much anywhere else, for that matter. “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci on March 8, 2020. He and all the other experts correctly thought the same thing before COVID was politicized and it became a moral imperative to “do something.”

Read the full article here. 

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State of the Union: then and now

In the aftermath of the SOTU speech yesterday evening (some are reporting it as a comedy routine), A.F. Branco's cartoon about "the good ol' days" seems apropos:

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It’s official: Lockdowns were useless

 

Eric Lendrum at American Greatness has shocking news: 

A newly-released study from the prestigious Johns Hopkins University revealed that the sweeping lockdowns in response to the Chinese coronavirus had “little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.”

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the study was conducted through an analysis of 24 different studies that all focused on government mandates ordering the closure of various aspects of everyday life, including school and business shutdowns, mask and vaccine mandates, and stay-at-home orders, among others.

The comprehensive review, conducted by Johns Hopkins’ Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise, determined that these measures collectively reduced the rate of COVID fatalities in America and Europe by a mere 0.2 percent.

When the studies were narrowed down to individual types of lockdown measures, such as stay-at-home orders alone, the survey revealed that stay-at-home orders actually slightly increased the number of deaths during COVID. ...

Shocking!  Full report is here.

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Biden: I Did That!

 Another fun meme from Patriot Post: 

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Are you better off today?

 

No, Joe, We’re Not Better Off

The Biden administration keeps lying
 about how bad things were a year ago.

Douglas Andrews at PatriotPost starts off with a whopper of a statement by White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain:

“Things are a lot better in this country than they were a year ago.”

Let that sentence sink in. That was Joe Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, in what has to be the most surreal string of words ever uttered by a guy whose boss is polling at 38%. . . .

Klain’s straight man was CNN’s increasingly malleable Jake Tapper, a once-proud lefty who too often bows to his network and his audience and just sort of sits there looking like a guy with a fishbone caught in his throat. On this day, though, Tapper pressed his guest about the mess he’d helped create: “So, how do you . . . fix this?” Tapper asked. “Obviously, I cover you guys every day. You do this every day. And you are talking about the economy. You are talking about coronavirus, but there’s obviously some sort of disconnect here.”

And in fairness to Klain, he qualified the remark above by limiting it to COVID and the economy. Still, who thinks his statement rings true even when it’s so narrowly tailored?

Not us, certainly, nor Oliver North or David Goetsch, who today revisited the question posed by Ronald Reagan to Jimmy Carter during their lone debate of the 1980 presidential campaign: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”

The full article is here, including video and an extractfrom and link to the Oliver North/David Goetsch opinion piece. 

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A Glimmer of Hope

 

Patriot Post meme via PowerLine

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse is always a step ahead of everyone else. Here’s a chunk from his weekend column:

Andrew Breitbart famously said that politics was downstream from pop culture.  Andrew’s ability to engage any audience that generally didn’t care about politics, while displaying the Machiavellian manipulators in a way that was brutally effective, made him an enemy to those who avoid sunlight.

What we are seeing amid college football games, and recently any venue where a large audience is assembling, is really quite remarkable.  The cultural shift within the modern political sphere was triggered by Donald Trump; his election was the biggest middle finger to the elites, and ultimately the scale of his support amid a global population that was disenfranchised is why they needed to eliminate him.

The leftist Marxist’s have power.  However, their unquenchable lust for power, specifically showcased in their COVID-19 reaction, has put them in a place where they are in power but losing the cultural argument.

Free people can only tolerate and internalize so much frustration before it starts to come out. Specifically, because frustration is now palpable anger, the sense that screams freedom has become snarky, raw, unapologetic and now often vulgar.

Yeah, it’s a weird thing to find alignment with vulgarity, but when your life and liberty is on the line… well, you fight like the third monkey on the ramp to Noah’s ark – and you appreciate anyone that stands beside you.

If  “F**k Joe Biden” bothers you, don’t watch this [video] . . .

I didn’t watch the video, but I am certainly following the phenomenon.  Full article with video is here.

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Wolves Are Coming

 My caption would be "They smell weakness":

meme via Patriot Post

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CDC : another about-face on COVID "guidelines"

Here’s Tony Perkins at Patriot Post

CDC: Why Mask? Don’t Ask

The CDC’s latest decision “is just going to create more vaccine hesitancy. It’s going to backfire.”

On Tuesday, new CDC guidance directed vaccinated persons to wear masks indoors over most of the country, and urged everyone in K-12 schools to wear masks in the fall. The guidance reversed the rules the CDC issued earlier this year, which recognized that people vaccinated against COVID-19 do not need to wear masks because they are immune, at least to its most harmful effects.

“Why do people who have the vaccine need to now wear masks the same as people who have not had it?” That’s the question Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki. Psaki’s response was telling, “Because the public health leaders in our administration have made the determination.” That response was not much different from a parent looking upon a questioning child with, “because I said so.” But there is one big difference, Americans aren’t children, we are rational adults with a responsibility to hold the government accountable. Why won’t the Biden administration give us a straight answer?

Apparently, because they don’t have one.  . . .

Full report is here.

RELATED:  And here's Nick Arama at RedState : “Get Ready for the Whiplash With What CDC Director Says About 'Two Weeks'” [my emphasis]

Here we go all over again.

The CDC has flipped and is once again recommending that people go back to wearing masks, even if fully vaccinated, in areas where the Delta variant is “surging” (which they are defining as most of the country). As my colleague Kate Paul Dillon wrote earlier, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky claimed data showed some vaccinated people could be infected with the Delta variant and spread it to others, but didn’t show her work as to that data.

Walensky was making the round on the shows and it was like a throwback to last year in what they were trying to sell us.

According to the AP, Dr. Walensky told “CBS This Morning” something that may sound awfully familiar.

“We can halt the chain of transmission,” she said. “We can do something if we unify together, if we get people vaccinated who are not yet vaccinated, if we mask in the interim, we can halt this in just a matter of a couple of weeks.”

Oh, my, suddenly, we’re back to “15 days to slow the spread” more than a year later. We were told that 16 months ago. How did that work out when we acceded to that before?  . . .

Full article is here.

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