FILE - President Donald Trump arrives to speak during a rally protesting the electoral college certification of Joe Biden as President in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021. Members of the House committee investigating the events of Jan. 6 will hold their first prime time hearing Thursday, Jan. 9, to share what they have uncovered about former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, culminating in the deadly storming of the Capitol building. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
WASHINGTON (TND) — A Capitol Police timeline of the days and weeks surrounding Jan. 6 shows former President Donald Trump’s Department of Defense (DOD) offered the National Guard’s assistance in the days leading up to the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol, validating claims from Trump administration officials that were said to be false by liberal fact-checkers.
What we also know is that President Trump wanted to make sure that the people that came, that there was a safe environment for that kind of assembly,” former President Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told Fox News’s Sean Hannity.
And I’ve said that publicly before — the 10,000 National Guard troops that he wanted to make sure that everything was safe and secure,” Meadows said. “Obviously having those National Guards available, actually the reason they were able to respond when they did, was because President Trump had actually put them on alert.
Liberal “fact-checkers” like The Washington Post and PolitiFact argued the claim about National Guard assistance coming from Meadows and other top Trump administration officials was false, but an official timeline of the events leading up to Jan. 6 apparently shows differently.
According to the timeline, a DOD official reached out to Capitol Police Deputy Chief Sean Gallagher four days before the attack on the U.S. Capitol to inquire about whether Capitol Police anticipated they would request National Guard troops be deployed to prepare for Jan. 6.
“Carol Corbin (DOD) texts USCP Deputy Chief Sean Gallagher, Protective Service Bureau, to determine whether USCP is considering a request for National Guard soldiers for January 6, 2021 event,” the timeline reads in an entry listed for Saturday, Jan. 2, 2021.
The next morning, the timeline indicates, “Gallagher replies to DOD via text that a request for National Guard support not forthcoming at this time after consultation with COP Sund.”
However, that initial rejection from Capitol Police came as they were beginning to change their assessment of the potential threats of violence.
Just hours after Gallagher’s rejection of DOD’s offer for troops, Capitol Police issued a new warning to its commanders and executives, as well as to the two congressionally appointed House and Senate Sergeants at Arms responsible for congressional security, the timeline shows.
Due to the tense political environment following the 2020 election, the threat of disruptive actions or violence cannot be ruled out,” stated the new assessment, chronicled in Capitol Police’s Jan. 6 timeline. “Supporters of the current president see January 6, 2021 as the last opportunity to overturn the results of the presidential election. This sense of desperation and disappointment may lead to more of an incentive to become violent.
Within 24-hours of the new assessment’s circulation, then-chief of the Capitol Police Steve Sund changed course and began requesting permission to deploy National Guard troops from the House and Senate Sergeant at Arms – both of whom report to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer, respectively.
“COP Sund asks Senate Sergeant at Arms (SSAA) Michael Stenger and House Sergeant at Arms (HSAA) Paul Irving for authority to have National Guard to assist with security for the January 6, 2021 event based on briefing with law enforcement partner and revised intelligence Assessment,” the timeline notes. “COP Sund’s request is denied. SSAA and HSAA tell COP Sund to contact General Walker at DC National Guard to discuss the guard’s ability to support a request if needed.”
As Sund’s requests were denied, the Trump administration continued working on getting then-President Trump to formally authorize the deployment of as many as 20,000 National Guard troops to the Capitol ahead of the Jan. 6 rally, according to Just The News, which conducted interviews with then-acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and his Chief of Staff Kash Patel.
The Capitol Police timeline shows what we have been saying for the last year — that DOD support via the National Guard was refused by the House and Senate sergeant at arms, who report to Pelosi,” said Patel. “Now we have it in their own writing, days before Jan. 6. And despite the FBI warning of potential for serious disturbance, no perimeter was established, no agents put on the street, and no fence put up.
Furthermore, as word began circulating around Washington of the Capitol Police’s changing stance on the need for National Guard troops on Jan. 6, Democratic Mayor for the District of Columbia, Muriel Bowser, wrote a letter to Miller and other Departments of Defense and Justice officials asking that National Guard troops not be deployed unless the local Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) approved.
Bowser cited an earlier event from the summer of 2020, when National Guard troops were deployed to Lafayette Park outside the White House amid social justice protests that took place in the nation’s capital, spurred by the death of George Floyd. Bowser argued the deployment “caused confusion” and could have led to “a national security threat with no way for MPD and federal law enforcement to decipher armed groups.”
“To be clear, the District of Columbia is not requesting other federal law enforcement personnel and discourages any additional deployment without immediate notification to and consultation with MPD, if such plans are underway,” Bowser wrote in her letter, adding that MPD was “well trained and prepared to lead the way” on ensuring safety during the rally in the nation’s capital on Jan. 6.
QUESTION #1: Why do Democrats continue to insist that election fraud does not exist — and that such “baseless claims” have been “debunked” — when prominent Democrats insisted (in 2017 and 2018 and 2019 and 2020) that election fraud does exist and it’s a very big problem?
Did they all forget that we live in the age of video playback?
Did they all suffer from simultaneous amnesia about the hearings they held, the expert witnesses they gathered, and the interviews they gave (for documentaries like HBO’s “Kill Chain: The Cyber War on America’s Elections”) during the Trump Administration?
Thank you all for being election deniers before you became election fraud deniers!
QUESTION #2: Why were 78 million American votes from 800 counties in seven states sent overseas to be “handled” by a bankrupt Spanish company in Barcelona called SCYTL in 2020? Why is SCYTL’s biggest customer the Department of Defense? Why would the Department of Defense subcontract the “processing” of 78 million American votes to a foreign company?
For that matter, why is the Department of Defense involved in our elections at all?
Emerald Robinson’s The Right Way
America’s Elections Are Rigged (And Everybody Knows It)
If you want to unravel the mysterious results of the 2020 election, you must begin by asking a simple question: why were 78 million American votes from 800 counties in 7 states sent overseas to be “handled” by a bankrupt Spanish company in Barcelona…
QUESTION #3: Why did the Associated Press just publish an article that admitted Dominion voting machines are vulnerable to hacking — and must be fixed immediately with software patches in 16 states? Why did the federal government’s own cybersecurity agency (CISA) send out a bulletin to state election officials on June 3rd that warned them about nine security vulnerabilities that must be addressed?
From the AP article:
ATLANTA (AP) — Electronic voting machines from a leading vendor used in at least 16 states have software vulnerabilities that leave them susceptible to hacking if unaddressed, the nation’s leading cybersecurity agency says in an advisory sent to state election officials.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency, or CISA, said there is no evidence the flaws in the Dominion Voting Systems’ equipment have been exploited to alter election results. The advisory is based on testing by a prominent computer scientist and expert witness in a long-running lawsuit that is unrelated to false allegations of a stolen election pushed by former President Donald Trump after his 2020 election loss.
The advisory, obtained by The Associated Press in advance of its expected Friday release, details nine vulnerabilities and suggests protective measures to prevent or detect their exploitation. Amid a swirl of misinformation and disinformation about elections, CISA seems to be trying to walk a line between not alarming the public and stressing the need for election officials to take action.
Didn’t the Associated Press (and all the rest of the corrupt corporate media) spend the last 18 months telling the world that anyone who questioned the security of our elections was a conspiracy theorist?
Why is Judge Amy Totenberg opposed to the public release of J. Alex Halderman’s special report regarding the vulnerability of electronic voting machines?
Emerald Robinson’s The Right Way
The Federal Government Admits: Voting Machines Can Be Hacked!
President Trump blasted out my Substack article “Something Stinks in Georgia” (120,000 page views and climbing!) to his followers on TruthSocial yesterday — and it sent Biden’s unpaid staff in the media into a frenzy. Discredited media outlets for beta-males and aging hippies like…
a month ago · 251 likes · 32 comments · Emerald Robinson
Why has Judge Totenberg denied a request by the Louisiana secretary of state to review the special report? (Louisiana uses Dominion voting machines as well.) Why has Judge Totenberg denied access to the Halderman report to media outlets as well?
Media outlets such as Fox News and One America News (OAN) are currently being sued for defamation by Dominion — and a federal judge is refusing to release a report that reportedly shows the Dominion machines are not secure?
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Joe Biden (Photo illustration by Salon/Getty Images)
Visits: 19
I saw the Salon article yesterday and I finally stopped laughing long enough to write this little diddy. Washington was a military leader who led us to victory. Biden led us to the Afghanistan retreat. Jefferson was one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence. Biden was a plagiarizing author.
Now if the author just showed the defeats between the three, and how Washington and Jefferson owned slaves and Joe had KKK friends, I could see common ground. But to compare Joe’s destroying of the Trump economy with some of the great things the founding fathers did? Laughable.
Amazing how fast these PROFESSIONALLY printed signs showed up. Coincidence?
Visits: 34
Goodbye to 50 Years of the Great American Deception
By Rita Joseph For The Western Journal June 24, 2022 at 3:54pm
By overturning Roe, the court has opened the door for the states to restore the universal protection of two of the most basic constitutional rights
What a well-reasoned and long-awaited Supreme Court decision!
A great wrong has been righted.
Reason and the rule of law have triumphed over the fanatical pro-abortion ideology that refuses to recognize our children in the womb as human beings like ourselves.
Restoration of our duty to protect each new life
By overturning Roe, the court has opened the door for the states to restore the universal protection of two of the most basic constitutional rights — the right to life and the “no property in man” principle — found in the 14th and 13th Amendments, respectively.
Every human being, irrespective of age or size, has an equal and inalienable right to go on living. All human beings are to be treated as persons and never as property.
The Supreme Court has now overturned 50 years of the errant ideological theory that removed all protections from these newest and most vulnerable human beings.
What the court calls “Roe’s abuse of judicial authority” has been exposed: “Roe was remarkably loose in its treatment of the constitutional text. It held that the abortion right, which is not mentioned in the Constitution, is part of a right to privacy, which is also not mentioned.”
The court asserts, “Roe found that the Constitution implicitly conferred a right to obtain an abortion, but it failed to ground its decision in text, history, or precedent. It relied on an erroneous historical narrative. … We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion.”
Truth conquers illusion.
As in the tale of the emperor’s new clothes, con-men and swindlers back in 1973 pretended to weave abortion “rights” into existence out of nothing — out of “penumbras.” Without solid legal evidence, they refashioned the killing of the unborn as “women’s rights.”
Remember how the emperor’s weavers claimed that their cloth had a wonderful way of becoming invisible to anyone who was unfit for his office or who was unusually stupid? The inventors of abortion rights used the same tactic.
If you didn’t agree with Roe’s faulty arguments, then the fault was in you personally. Anyone who did not go along with their invention was branded as unfit for office or stupid… or misogynist, patriarchal, sexist or racist.
The tactic worked. For too long, too many Americans lacked the courage to challenge error and speak truth to power by denouncing the officially accepted deception.
The weavers of abortion rights have forged a collective denial that any harm is done in choosing to abort these smallest and most vulnerable human beings in our power and under our care.
Two mistakes in Roe
Roe was wrong. The Constitution is not silent on our duties to our progeny. Our children are guaranteed the same blessings of liberty that we claim for ourselves. The blessings of liberty are promised by the Constitution to ourselves and our posterity — not exclusively to ourselves as women.
That natural entitlement bestowed by the Creator is affirmed as the very first right mentioned in the Constitution, together with the right to life and the pursuit of happiness. Once conceived, every human being is fully and seamlessly engaged in a benign, naturally ordered pursuit of happiness.
Should abortion be banned?
Yes: 91% (62 Votes)
No: 9% (6 Votes)
Nor is the Constitution silent on the injustice at the heart of every elective abortion — the toleration of maternal “ownership” and killing rights in regard to an innocent unborn child flourishing in her or his mother’s womb. Under the 13th Amendment, there can be no such ownership and killing rights over any human being — in utero or ex utero.
There is no self-centered liberty in the Constitution.
The Supreme Court warns that “liberty” is a capacious term.
There is no self-centered liberty in the Constitution. From the beginning of the republic, the Constitution set up equal entitlement across the generations, i.e., equal entitlement to the blessings of liberty for both mothers and their offspring.
Mothers can’t say to their children in the womb, “This is all about my enjoyment of the blessings of liberty, and to ensure my enjoyment, you must be denied the same blessings of liberty. You are not at liberty to go on flourishing as nature’s God intended you to do. You are not a unique and invaluable human being. You are my property. This is all about me. This is about my right to choose, my right to commission your killing.”
So wrong for so long…
Exposing delusion
Finally, wonderfully, the great day has come — Roe’s logical fallacy of treating children in their mothers’ wombs as their mothers’ disposable property has been exposed as make-believe. At last, Roe v. Wade has been formally invalidated, its faulty reasoning revealed.
Self-importance and self-deception shaped the emperor’s refusal to accept the truth about the weavers’ deception. His refusal to accept the truth once it had been revealed signified his detachment from reality.
Having been steeped so long in a fable of his own unchallenged power and authority, he refused to make a critical and objective examination of the facts that would have revealed the duplicity of the weavers’ spin job.
Once error is exposed, we can’t unknow the truth.
Once our eyes are opened, we can’t pretend that they are still closed to the truth. There’s no going back to naivety, to feigning ignorance of the terrible injustice unleashed in Roe.
We can’t recreate a suit of clothes from nothing — from what is not in the Constitution and was never in the Constitution.
One small voice — a common-sense voice, an unintimidated voice — has pierced the illusion.
Justice Samuel Alito has shattered the elaborate deception of Roe.
Common sense has prevailed.
Never again will large numbers of us be manipulated into accepting the illusion that it’s morally defensible for any mother to commission her unborn child to be deliberately killed by an abortionist.
Vale, Roe v. Wade. May your evil never be reinstated!
In recent years, many comedians have come under fire from the left for the subject matter they joke about. One English comic said in a recent interview these attacks demonstrate a misunderstanding of comedy.
“If I have to express myself visually, then I became a version of Mr. Bean.”
While Rowan Atkinson’s comedy is well-known in much of the United Kingdom, he is likely most famous in the United States for his character “Mr. Bean.” In an interview ahead of his new Netflix show, “Man vs. Bee,” he explained the character was the brainchild of himself and his colleague Richard Curtis.
“The odd thing about Mr. Bean is that he wasn’t created, he was just the person I naturally became when I was denied words to express myself,” Atkinson, 67, told The Irish Times. “If I have to express myself visually, then I became a version of Mr. Bean.”
“Mr. Bean” first debuted in the late 1970s, and the character became so popular that he earned his own sitcom in the early 1990s. Atkinson has been widely recognized for his comedic genius in portraying “Mr. Bean” using very few words.
As a respected comedian, Atkinson has extensive knowledge about the world of comedy. In his interview with the Times, he said the idea of cancel culture threatens the very existence of comedy.
“It does seem to me that the job of comedy is to offend, or have the potential to offend, and it cannot be drained of that potential,” Atkinson said.
While this comment alone is sure to infuriate some progressive leftists, Atkinson went even further.
“Every joke has a victim,” Atkinson said. “That’s the definition of a joke. Someone or something or an idea is made to look ridiculous.”
Atkinson is absolutely correct in this assessment. A joke is meant to poke fun at something, whether it is a person, an object or anything in between.
Do you agree with Atkinson?
Yes: 99% (1772 Votes) No: 1% (12 Votes)
Jokes have had the potential to offend people since the beginning of time, but most people used to be more willing to put aside their differences and recognize comedy for what it is. It is only in recent years that progressive leftists have attempted to tell people who they can and can’t make jokes about.
For example, comedian Dave Chappelle has been attacked — literally — for his jokes about the leftist fascination with transgenderism.
In an October 2021 article for NBC News, writer Michael Crawford wrote that Chappelle’s jokes were “giving narrow-minded people a safe space to deny the existence of trans people and make gays the focus of their taunts.”
“I don’t want Chappelle to be canceled,” Crawford wrote. “I want him to pull out the threads of homophobia and transphobia that run through the quilt of his otherwise brilliant work.”
This line displayed a false idea many progressive leftists have about comedy. They claim they should be allowed to tell comedians what they can and cannot joke about, and Atkinson addressed this problem in his interview.
“I think you’ve got to be very, very careful about saying what you’re allowed to make jokes about,” Atkinson said. “You’ve always got to kick up? Really? What if there’s someone extremely smug, arrogant, aggressive, self-satisfied, who happens to be below in society?
“They’re not all in houses of Parliament or in monarchies. There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
In addition to this problem, leftists suggesting Chappelle is transphobic because his jokes lead to real world consequences when Chappelle was attacked on-stage.
As the left attempts to attack comedy and remove the very aspects that make Americans laugh — whether in movies, nightclubs, or the privacy of their own homes — this message from Atkinson was more needed than ever.
What happens when a respected Congressman is cleared by the Capitol Hill Police when he had a group of his constituents on tour the day before the To do about nothing protest?
They make up stuff and drag his good name threw the mud. Based on what? Who knows. But since that mud dragging we’ve seen that the Congressman has been receiving death threats. Please play the video below.
The left’s stupidity never ceases to amaze me. See below.
Rapper and Joe Biden supporter Cardi B took to Twitter on Sunday to ask when “they going to announce” that the United States is “going into a recession.”
“When y’all think they going to announce that we going into a recession?” Cardi B wrote Sunday in a tweet, which has since garnered more than 120,000 likes, and over 16,000 retweets.
Cardi B’s tweet also received thousands of replies, including many Twitter users who reminded the rapper that she had encouraged her fans to vote for President Joe Biden.
Weren’t you encouraging people to vote for Joe Biden?
Indeed, Joe Biden sat down for an Elle magazine interview with rap star Cardi B jut months before the 2020 presidential election.
Watch below:
“Thanks for helping elect Joe Biden,” another quipped.
Another Twitter user responded to those retorting, “But didn’t you vote for Biden?” saying, “Y’all realize literally MILLIONS of people regret voting for Biden right?”
“You don’t need ‘them’ to tell you anything you can see for yourself,” another tweeted.
A host of other Twitter users took to the comment section to claim that the U.S. is not in a recession.
“A recession is defined as 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, so we’d only know we are in a recession after it’s already started, and after the economic data comes in for those 2 quarters,” another tweeted.
A strong majority of Americans, however, believe that the U.S. economy is experiencing a recession, according to a recent poll from the Economist and YouGov.
This is bad news for Biden, who just last week declared that a record high number of Americans were comfortable. Moreover, the president’s approval ratings have tanked, as citizens have overwhelming rejected the Biden administration’s handling of gas prices, inflation, and the economy.
The baby formula plant whose February shutdown exacerbated a nationwide formula shortage resumed production over the weekend. “We will ramp production as quickly as we can while meeting all requirements,” Abbott Nutrition said in a Saturday statement.
Dr. Mehmet Oz secured his victory in Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary Friday after former hedge fund CEO David McCormick, who trailed Oz by less than 1,000 votes in the initial vote count, conceded that an in-progress recount would not eliminate that margin.
John Fetterman—Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor and Oz’s November opponent—is facing new questions about his health going into the general election, following a stroke last month that required hospitalization and the installation of a pacemaker. In a Friday statement, Fetterman, a Democrat, revealed he suffered from a heart condition and had “avoided going to the doctor,” and as a result he “almost died.”
Republicans and Democrats in the Senate say they’re making progress on gun legislation following a rash of mass shootings in recent weeks, although Sen. Pat Toomey said on Face the Nation Sunday that the discussions do not “guarantee any outcome.” The Washington Post reports that such legislation would potentially include encouraging states to implement red-flag laws that would allow courts to bar people thought to be a threat to themselves or others from accessing firearms.
Three people were killed and 11 more injured in a shooting in Philadelphia’s South Street nightlife corridor Saturday night. Police said two men got into a fight, then both produced guns and began firing at each other on the crowded street. One of the two shooters was killed in the initial confrontation; the other was wounded and fled the scene.
Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro was arrested on two misdemeanor charges of contempt of Congress Friday after Navarro refused to testify before or supply documents to the committee investigating the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Another former Trump associate, Steve Bannon, is scheduled to go on trial for comparable charges next month.
An attack on a Catholic church in southwest Nigeria has left more than 50 people feared dead, including many children, authorities said Sunday. It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack, which involved both firearms and explosives.
A Jobs Report from the Goldilocks Zone
(Photo by Culture Club / Getty Images.)
Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Goldilocks who really should’ve been booked for home invasion. Instead, she wound up granting her name to anything that’s “just right”—such as May’s job report.
We know that joke’s a stretch, but we’re running out of new ways to introduce solid jobs reports like the one the Labor Department released Friday. After nearly a year of the pandemic rebound with at least 400,000 new jobs per month, in May employers added 390,000 jobs—hardly cold, but not quite white-hot. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had predicted a slower uptick of 318,000 new jobs.
We’re still about 822,000 jobs short of pre-pandemic levels, but the gap could close by the end of summer. Meanwhile, labor force participation edged up 0.1 percent to 62.3 percent in May, still 1.1 percent below February 2020.
Unemployment stayed at its near fifty-year low of 3.6 percent, and there are still nearly two open jobs for every one job-seeker. Coupled with high inflation, that ridiculously tight labor market has driven strong wage growth in recent months, causing economists to fret rising wages would in turn force businesses to increase prices, creating a wage-price spiral.
But average hourly wages for private, non-farm employees rose 0.3 percent in May from the previous month, a smidge shy of the 0.4 percent economists expected. And the three-month average of year-over-year wage growth hit 4.6 percent—about 1.7 percent above the pre-pandemic average but well below the peak of 7 percent in mid-2021, according to the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics.
That’s a lot of numbers just to say: Employers are still raising pay to attract workers, but they’ve chilled out a bit. “Firms seem to be less willing to raise wages sharply in order to fill openings than they were last winter,” as Peterson analysts put it. That’s not pleasant for the individual worker looking for a boost to the old paycheck, but it’s a good sign that the economy overall remains robust but not berserk. Meanwhile, as we’ve written previously, inflation seems to have peaked, at least for now.
All in all, a solid jobs report—but the markets reacted like they’d been served a bowl of chilly, lumpy porridge. The S&P 500 dropped 1.7 percent Friday after the report’s release, while the Dow Jones Industrial average fell 1 percent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite outdid them both by losing 2.6 percent. Meanwhile, Tesla owner and maybe someday Twitter owner Elon Musk declared he has a “super bad feeling” about the economy and needs to cut 10 percent of Tesla’s staff, Reutersreported.
We’re not sure what to tell you about Musk’s super bad feeling, but the market’s overall reaction is a perverse sign of the job report’s strength. “The economy’s doing quite well,” Brendan Walsh, co-founder of Markets Policy Partners, told The Dispatch. “The worry is that because the economy is doing well, the [Federal Reserve] will over-tighten and drive us into recession.”
In a bid to bring down inflation by taking its foot off the economy’s gas pedal, the central bank has already hiked interest rates twice this year, making loans to buy homes or expand businesses more expensive, discouraging demand. It’s signaling it plans a couple more hikes before September, and Fed vice chair Lael Brainard said Thursday the central bank would check its plan against the jobs report (among other markers). “We’ll be looking closely to the data to see that kind of cooling in demand, and moderation—better balance—in the labor market,” Brainard toldCNBC. “With our number one challenge being the need to get inflation down, we do expect to see some cooling of a very, very strong economy over time.” The solid jobs report is another indicator that the economy can handle the Fed’s cooling measures.
In remarks trumpeting the report, President Joe Biden said it was an indicator that the economy can handle the Fed’s cooling measures. “As we move to a new period of stable, steady growth, we should expect to see more moderation,” Biden told reporters Friday. “We aren’t likely to see the kind of blockbuster job reports month after month like we had over this past year, but that’s a good thing. … That stability puts us in a strong position to tackle what is clearly a problem: inflation.”
Which returns us to the market worry that after letting inflation shoot up the Fed will overcorrect and strangle U.S. economic growth into a recession. “Right now, it’s kind of sunny, things are doing fine,” JPMorgan Chase head Jamie Dimon warned Tuesday at an investors’ conference, arguing that the combination of pandemic stimulus, Fed policy, and the war in Ukraine are bearing down on the economy. “Everyone thinks the Fed can handle this. That hurricane is right out there, down the road, coming our way. We just don’t know if it’s a minor one or superstorm Sandy.”
But at least for the next few months, Walsh is sanguine. “The economy is too strong,” he said. “The risk is much more [for] 2023, that the Fed does over-tighten, we come off of this COVID rebound.” But, he predicted, “It’s a bit of a lull. It’s not like a crisis.”
So… a lukewarm economic porridge? We’ll see ourselves out.
Worth Your Time
So-called red-flag laws have emerged as a rare point of possible bipartisan agreement on gun issues in recent years, particularly following the crush of shootings this Spring. But they’ve also been criticized as a potentially spotty countermeasure, with several prominent mass shooters in states with red-flag laws having been able to obtain firearms despite making public threats of violence ahead of time. A New York Times feature over the weekend examines one county that has taken its red-flag ordinance seriously: Suffolk County in New York, where more than 160 guns have been removed by court order since 2019. “The filings are filled with people threatening to shoot up courthouses or schoolhouses, amped-up men in cars with weapons and ammunition, people behaving erratically at a gun shop or military-base checkpoint or firing randomly into a neighbor’s yard,” the reporters write. “People who text friends and loved ones ‘Goodbye forever’ or ‘I have a gun next to my bed bro’ or post, ‘When I kill everyone know it’s my dad’s fault.’”
Speaking of the Times, Maggie Haberman’s latest contains remarkable new reporting about former Vice President Mike Pence’s experience of the January 6 riot: “The day before a mob of President Donald J. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol … Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff called Mr. Pence’s lead Secret Service agent to his West Wing office. The chief of staff, Marc Short, had a message for the agent, Tim Giebels: The president was going to turn publicly against the vice president, and there could be a security risk to Mr. Pence because of it.” Haberman goes on to detail the remarkable pressure Pence was put under by a rogue’s gallery of Trump supporters in the days leading up to his Jan. 6 decision not to obey Trump’s command to interfere with the counting of the electoral vote: “At the end of December, Mr. Pence traveled to Vail, Colo., for a family vacation. While he was there, his aides received a request for him to meet with Sidney Powell, a lawyer who promoted some of the more far-fetched conspiracy theories about flaws in voting machines, and whom Mr. Trump wanted to bring into the White House, ostensibly to investigate his false claims of widespread voter fraud.”
In his Sunday French Press, David draws a distinction between the healthy safety- and rights-focused gun culture that America has long enjoyed and the reactionary gun fetishism that has grown more ubiquitous in recent years. “The gun fetish rears its head when politicians pose with AR-15s in their campaign posters, or when a powerful senator makes ‘machine-gun bacon’ to demonstrate just how much he loves the Second Amendment,” he writes. “Spend much time at gun shows or at gun shops, and you’ll quickly become familiar with something called the ‘tactical’ or ‘black gun’ lifestyle, where civilians intentionally equip themselves in gear designed for the ‘daily gunfight.’ It’s often a form of elaborate special forces cosplay, except the weapons (and sometimes the body armor) are very real.”
In his Friday G-File, Jonah took aim at “the most fatal flaw of Democrats”: “that they take it as a given that government can do the normal stuff well.” “If progressives really wanted to restore faith in government, they’d concentrate all of their energies on tackling the stuff already on the government’s plate,” he writes. “Execute the job you’ve been given well, and then we’ll talk about giving you more responsibility. Walk, then run, and then we’ll get into a fun argument about whether it’s stupid you think you can fly.”
Don’t forget the podcasts: In Friday’s Remnant, Jonah dove solo into topics ranging from the somber to the downright bizarre: television, republicanism, superstition, and the like. In this week’s Good Faith, David and Curtis discuss the tensions between gun rights and gun control and the hyper-polarization that engulfs the issue. And on the Dispatch Podcast, the gang discusses the first 100 days of war in Ukraine, the gun question, and next week’s January 6 hearings on Capitol Hill.
Let Us Know
When you read the sentence “Republicans and Democrats in the Senate say they’re making progress on gun legislation following a rash of mass shootings in recent weeks,” what color did your mood ring turn?
It’s a well known fact that the corporate news industry attracts dumb people who want to be on television in the same way the porn industry attracts troubled kids from broken homes. This is especially true at Fox News — where the talent contracts seem to come, these days, with a full-frontal lobotomy.
Just consider Sandra Smith.
Smith is not a journalist —she’s pretending to be one on TV. She’s never done any investigative reporting in her life. She was a stock trader who briefly worked at Bloomberg News before moving to the Fox Business channel — and she did not distinguish herself in any of these roles. This was self-evident when Fox’s top airhead conducted an interview with Rep. Mo Brooks this weekend that went viral on Twitter because Mo Brooks essentially ended her career on air.
Sandra Smith felt the need to make one of those idiotic “there was no cheating in the 2020 election” statements probably written by Paul Ryan himself. She then pushed back on Mo Brooks because she “had been reading the Wall Street Journal” — another Rupert Murdoch media property! — which she wanted to be very clear she was quoting from verbate!
That really sums up the TV career of Sandra Smith in one word: verbate!
She means verbatim, of course, but what do you want from a woman whose reporting experience in the world of politics is so thin that it might as well be a starving model? (Could she pass a 5th grade civics exam? I have my doubts. Mo Brooks has to explain to her that Congress is in charge of federal election law!) Sandra is also the only human being who thinks that the old British propaganda outfit Reuters is some kind of international fact-checking NGO! She’s a wacky liberal who probably declined to vote for Joe Biden in 2020 because, at the last minute, she filled out her ballot with the name of the more deserving candidate: her hairdresser.
This leads to my final point: the only reason to watch Sandra Smith is because you want to get your information from someone who knows less than you do.
The rest of the interview was just as disgraceful: Smith harassed Brooks about so-called “red flag” gun laws, about the NRA’s endorsement of Brooks, and about calling for a return to traditional moral values.
Now you would think that a call for returning to traditional moral values would be uncontroversial at Fox News — but you would be wrong. You forgot that you’re dealing with Sandra Smith who manages to twists the words of Mo Brooks into an insult of single parents!
Just watch the entire interview.
Notice that Sandra Smith is trying to talk over Mo Brooks throughout the interview. She thinks it’s her job to get the last word on everything. When he brings up various facts about election fraud, she interrupts him to bring up whether he’s been “subpoenaed about January 6th.” It’s a hostile hit-and-run interview conducted by a Murdoch bimbo.
This is the smirking face of neo-liberalism haunting America. “How can anyone bring up election fraud on our channel? We’re Fox News! And we called it early for Biden!”
The good news is that Sandra Smith will soon join her discredited Fox News colleagues Chris Wallace (“Jen Psaki is the greatest press secretary in history!”) and Melissa Francis (“Don’t bring up George Soros!’) and Jedediah Bila (“Who cares if Josh Hawley’s book gets canceled!”) in the dustbin of history where they belong. There was a time when closet liberals could work at Fox News in plain sight without annoying their core audience — but those days are long gone. There’s no middle ground left in American politics (or in American society) in the post-Trump wasteland created by the Biden regime.
We’re all living in the nightmare created by the frauds who called Arizona early. Pissed off doesn’t even begin to describe the mood of the GOP electorate. There’s no time slot in existence where Fox News can hide Sandra Smith from the wrath of its viewers until the whole thing blows over — because it’s never going to blow over.
“Never underestimate Joe’s ability to f*ck things up.”
Former President Barack Obama shakes hands with Joe Biden after Biden spoke about the Affordable Care Act, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
Visits: 28
Left critics and self-hating Democrats believe that Obama was a Republican-indulging compromiser. So did Biden and his appointees, who were determined to outdo Obama using narrow Democratic control of Congress. Why they blew it.
This is a piece from a new source for me called the Washington Monthly. Many of the articles are left leaning, but this one does make some sense. I’ll highlight some of the comments I agree with. Most of this article is Bullshit. But I felt all should see how the left thinks.
In July 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank banking bill. Its passage marked his administration’s third major legislative accomplishment, joining the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Affordable Care Act. The former, known as “the stimulus,” helped cut short the Great Recession. It also powered a clean energy revolution. From the beginning to the end of the Obama administration, wind power capacity tripled and solar power capacity increased by an astonishing 2,500 percent. The ACA, or “Obamacare,” expanded health insurance coverage, helping to reduce the percentage of uninsured Americans from 14.7 in 2008 to 9.2 in 2021. To fund expanded coverage, the ACA imposed new taxes on the wealthy, which, in concert with subsequent tax code changes, subjected the richest 1 percent of households to their highest tax burden since 1979. And Dodd-Frank’s reorganization of the financial regulatory system, according to the financial reformers at Better Markets, succeeded in “making a financial crash much less likely.”
At the same point, 486 days into his administration, Joe Biden’s scorecard is not as full. His biggest victory is the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Biden signed was significant as well, but his failure to extend the law’s poverty-fighting child tax credit expansion beyond December 2021 mars its legacy.
From the new book This Will Not Pass by the New York Times reporters Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin, we know that Biden had hoped to surpass Obama’s legislative output and impact. The president is quoted as saying to an adviser, “I am confident that Barack is not happy with the coverage of this administration as more transformative than his.” (And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is quoted as having told a friend, “Obama is jealous of Biden.”)
But 16 months into Biden’s presidency, it seems unlikely to be as transformative as Obama’s. It may succeed in many respects; great foreign policy achievements may be in store; a burst of bipartisanship could dampen our polarization. But the window for sweeping progressive legislation appears to be closed. Any last-ditch “reconciliation” bill this year, somehow earning Senator Joe Manchin’s approval and a barely sufficient 50 Senate votes, will have to be much smaller than the Build Back Better bill, meant to be Biden’s crowning legislative achievement. Truly ambitious party line legislation beyond this year would necessitate a Republican collapse, allowing Democrats to control Congress despite high inflation and Biden’s poor approval ratings.
The value of comparing these two administrations is not to settle some presidential pissing contest but to determine how best to enact progressive change.
We learn from This Will Not Pass that the Biden administration was heavily influenced by critics of Obama’s conciliatory approach, some of whom came from within that administration itself. According to Burns and Martin,
The people [Biden] had put in place at the highest levels of the White House largely aligned with [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer and Pelosi in their view of congressional Republicans. Mostly veterans of the Obama administration, they were haunted by their party’s last experience governing in an economic crisis, in 2009, when a newly inaugurated Democratic president and his top staff had spent months pleading and horse-trading for Republican support on various essential priorities and come away with little to show for it. [White House Chief of Staff] Ron Klain was among the Biden aides who [were] clear-eyed about the early missteps of the Obama administration …
The Obama administration, Klain believed, had moved too slowly in its early days to address the recession, and it had done too little to explain to the public what it was doing … Klain fretted that there was a risk Democrats would make the same mistakes again: allowing a drawn-out negotiation over dollar figures and time-tables to overshadow the real benefits the administration wanted to give voters.
Such a narrative became popular in progressive circles, driven by pundits like the New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman. In January 2009, Krugman deemed Obama’s $775 billion stimulus proposal “not enough” to deal with an estimated $2.1 trillion of lost production in the Great Recession. Five years later, Krugman called the stimulus, despite its positive policy elements, a “political disaster” that ended up “discrediting the very idea of stimulus.” Krugman also criticized Obama in August 2009 in response to reports that he was “backing away” from a “public option” during health care negotiations: “It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased.”
Obama revealed his real-time response to such complaints in his memoir, A Promised Land. Attempts to include a public option were dropped toward the end of the process at the behest of moderates in the Democratic caucus, enraging many progressives. Obama wrote,
I found the whole brouhaha exasperating. “What is it about sixty votes these folks don’t understand?” I groused to my staff. “Should I tell the thirty million people who can’t get covered that they’re going to have to wait another ten years because we can’t get them a public option?” It wasn’t just that criticism from friends always stung the most. The carping carried immediate political consequences for Democrats … all the great social-welfare advances in American history, including Social Security and Medicare, had started off incomplete and had been built upon gradually, over time. By preemptively spinning what could be a monumental, if imperfect, victory into a bitter defeat, the criticism contributed to a potential long-term demoralization of Democratic voters—otherwise known as the “What’s the point of voting if nothing ever changes?” syndrome—making it even harder for us to win elections and move progressive legislation forward in the future.
I find Obama’s explanation sensible. Yet inexplicably to me, many Obama administration veterans favor the Krugman view. Even more bizarre, Biden, after pushing back on progressive Obama critics in the 2020 primaries, surrounded himself with such critics once in office. The result was a Biden administration less attuned than his Democratic predecessor’s at determining what could be achieved with the Senate votes available.
Yes, Obama had more Senate Democrats to work with than Biden’s 50. Obama began his presidency with 58 Democrats. In late April 2009, Senator Arlen Specter switched parties to make it 59. In early July 2009, Al Franken was sworn in as the 60th Democratic senator following a grueling recount. Then the number was knocked back to 59 in February 2010 after Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown won the special election to succeed the deceased Senator Ted Kennedy.
With such a big majority, you might think that Obama could have plucked just about anything off the progressive wish list and made it law, using budget reconciliation—the procedurally complex filibuster-proof process Biden used last year to pass the American Rescue Plan with just 50 Senate Democrats. But Obama’s big majority included a sizable and stingy moderate faction, and not just in the Senate. In 2009, the House had 255 Democrats, but 49 were moderate Blue Dogs, more than enough to deny Pelosi a majority.
As Michael Grunwald explained in his history of the 2009 stimulus, The New New Deal, Obama “had to make sure Blue Dogs in the House and centrist Democrats in the Senate didn’t jump ship,” because even before the inauguration, “they were already sounding alarms about runaway spending.” In December 2008, then Vice President–elect Biden was compelled to publicly state that the emerging package “will not become a Democratic Christmas tree.” That effectively cut off any talk about using reconciliation for the first major bill of the Obama administration. And when a Senate version of the stimulus grew to $930 billion, a group of moderate Republicans and Democrats came together to scale it back to $780 billion.
Following the February 2009 passage of the Recovery Act, Democratic leaders wanted reconciliation available for the rest of Obama’s agenda, but fellow Democrats stymied them. When putting together the budget resolution—the parliamentary precursor to a budget reconciliation bill—Democrats agreed to include health care and education as eligible for the reconciliation process. But a Republican motion explicitly denying the same privilege for any climate change bill was embraced by 26 Senate Democrats and passed overwhelmingly—an omen that the Senate was not going to be hospitable to any ambitious climate change bill.
Even though health care made the cut, Democrats said at the time that the reconciliation option was a last resort. Reconciliation bills can only include budget-related provisions, and many health care reform proposals wouldn’t qualify (a procedural obstacle that fatally compromised Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare using reconciliation in 2017). Then Senate Budget Committee Chair Kent Conrad said, “Virtually everyone who has been part of these discussions recognizes that reconciliation is not the preferred way to write this legislation. But the administration wants to have a reconciliation instruction as an insurance policy.”
In turn, Obama calibrated his legislative agenda to meet the limits of what the 60th vote would allow. For the Recovery Act, after helping to limit the price tag, the 58th, 59th, and 60th Senate votes came from Maine Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, and—before his switch—Specter. (Senate Democrats were united in support, though eight House Democrats broke ranks.) For Obamacare, the 60th vote came from Democrat-turned-independent moderate Joe Lieberman, who refused both the public option as well as a Medicare buy-in option for those turning 55. For Dodd-Frank, it came from Scott Brown (offsetting the loss of progressive Democrat Russ Feingold), who demanded that a proposed tax on banks be stricken from the bill. It was.
Student loan reform did piggyback on a reconciliation package used to finish up the Obamacare process, accommodating changes sought by the House weeks after Senate Democrats lost their 60th seat. Fifty-six Senate Democrats passed that follow-up bill, with three Democrats joining Republicans in opposition.
Some progressives never cottoned to the horse trades required to win those votes and partly blamed watered-down legislation for the poor Democratic performances in the 2010 and 2014 midterms and even Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. The Biden presidency offered the opportunity to prove the alternate theory of the case. Don’t strain for the 60th vote. Use the reconciliation process. Go big with 50 votes. Don’t even bother with Republicans.
But whatever the merits of reconciliation, basic legislative competence still requires accommodating the determining vote, be it the 60th vote in regular order or the 50th vote in reconciliation.
Biden simply did not do that in his pursuit of a wide-ranging Build Back Better bill. In December, he didn’t rush to take Manchin’s $1.8 trillion offer, apparently because it left out an extension of the expanded child tax credit. As Biden hesitated, Manchin announced his opposition to the entire bill and revoked the offer. Biden was understandably reluctant to give up on a program that had successfully slashed child poverty and had the makings of a signature policy achievement. But it was politically foolish to presume that the one-year expansion of the credit—slipped into the American Rescue Plan reconciliation measure—would be extended indefinitely without first securing Manchin’s support.
Krugman and others charged Obama with having “wasted time” by trying for months to win Republican support for the Affordable Care Act, support that never materialized. But Obama wasn’t just chasing Republicans; he was also chasing Senate Democrat moderates. However long it took, he found the votes he needed. Notably, Obamacare (and the student loan reform that rode along with it) was an anomaly. Every other bill Obama signed into law was passed thanks to mathematically necessary Republican support. It’s far more accurate to charge Biden with having wasted time on Build Back Better, as he spent months trying to wear down Manchin and ended up with nothing. Biden took less time getting the 60 Senate votes needed to pass an infrastructure bill precisely because he let those moderates who held the determining votes take the lead on negotiations.
Getting the historical narrative correct matters. Democrats should have been telling a positive story of Obama’s presidency, one where landmark laws made America better, and he became the first Democratic president to win reelection with more than 50 percent of the popular vote since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Instead, Democrats told a narrative that lacked historical perspective, blaming an inevitably imperfect legislative record for midterm losses, even though such defeats are common for the president’s party. Amazingly, Joe Biden, of all politicians, a figure who has lived through decades of Washington history, got suckered into accepting a flawed narrative. No wonder his legislative strategy was similarly flawed.
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