“The American post-Cold War order from the Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush administration is over.
Barack Obama began its erosion with his tired lectures about the past sins of the United States.
Obama empowered radical Islamists. He invited Russia back into the Middle East after a forty-year hiatus. He snored while Vladimir Putin swallowed large areas of Ukraine. He nonchalantly allowed ISIS almost to take over Iraq. And he authored the Libyan misadventure.
Joe Biden has greatly amplified what Obama inaugurated. He accentuates the Obama-authored foreign policy disasters by his own family corruption.
If the U.S. had an honest media, a disinterested Department of Justice, and a professional FBI, the Biden family would likely be facing felony bribery charges and an impeachment vote for leveraging the interests of the U.S. for a few millions of Ukrainian and Chinese cash.
Biden has forfeited any moral credibility America once had in sermonizing to the world about the advantages of transparent democracy.
Instead, Washington under Biden went full Third-world. His family got rich from his offices, and Joe Biden warped government agencies in efforts to take out his next possible presidential rival.
Antony Blinken, Biden’s current Secretary of State, is known mostly for meekly accepting a dressing down from Chinese diplomats in 2021 and subsequent ritual humiliations.
Blinken was also the author of the 2020 election shenanigan of soliciting former intelligence authorities to publish a preposterous lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop had all the “hallmarks” of “Russian disinformation.” Blinken’s inspired farce was dreamed up to aid a then struggling candidate Biden in his last presidential debate.
The net result of the Obama-Biden continuum has been the moral and material collapse of U.S. foreign policy.
Americans are bewildered that China is now buzzing our jets. It plays chicken with American warships.
It mocks our homeland defenses by sending a spy balloon with impunity across the continental United States.
It is defiantly mum about its creation of a gain-of-function virus under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army, despite the ensuing Covid epidemic that killed over 1 million Americans.
The weird reaction of the Biden administration to these affronts is either to contextualize Beijing’s aggression or to ignore them entirely.
Under the earlier Obama-Biden “reset” of Russia, we also paid little attention to the past aggressions of Vladimir Putin, appeased his provocations, and earned the 2014 Russian take-over of the Ukrainian border and Crimea.
Then the resetters flipped during the Trump administration.
They now preposterously claimed that Donald Trump—who had neutered Putin by flooding the world with cheap oil, pulled out of an asymmetrical missile deal with Moscow, killed attacking Russian mercenaries in Syria, and greenlighted offensive weapons to Ukraine—was a Putin “puppet.”
After sleeping when Putin invaded Ukraine twice under Obama, and once under Biden (but not at all under Trump), the Left abruptly adopted Ukrainian resistance as their last chance to prove that Russians should have been guilty of “Russian collusion” and “disinformation.”
Their new legacy is a Chinese-Russian-Iranian anti-American axis.”
“All it has taken to bring the Supreme Court to the brink of destruction, we’re supposed to believe, is a critical mass of justices who try to hew to the U.S. Constitution.
The institution survived Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson, but is now hanging by a thread thanks to the ravages of Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett.
It is fashionable to say that the Supreme Court has “a crisis of legitimacy.” In this telling, the court has been buffeted by undisclosed luxury vacations paid for by wealthy associates of conservative justices and undermined by “stolen” seats. The court’s polling is terrible and it is now, as Democratic Senate hopeful Adam Schiff put it at a pro-court-packing news conference recently, “a political and partisan court with a reactionary social agenda.”
Of course, many of the people on the left who are lamenting a crisis of legitimacy of the court are hoping to create just such a crisis. It is understandable that they don’t like the composition or drift of the current court after largely having it on their side for decades, but their attacks are meritless.
No one “stole” any Supreme Court seats. The Senate decides whether and when to confirm a president’s nominee. The Senate majority under Minority Leader Mitch McConnell decided to keep the seat that came open after the death of Antonin Scalia vacant pending the 2016 election. If Hillary Clinton had won that election, the way most people expected, there would have been no “stolen” seat. The same applies if Democrats had won the Senate in 2018 — they would have been able to block former President Donald Trump’s appointment of Barrett after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.
There’s a difference between losing and being done dirty. The fact is that there was precedent both for a Senate majority blocking the nominee of a president of the opposite party in an election year and for a Senate majority rapidly confirming the nominee of a president of the same party in an election year; Senate control matters.
As for ethics, even if you think that Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito were imprudent in accepting free flights and nice trips, even if you think they should have disclosed these trips (they didn’t have to under the rules), it’s preposterous to believe that a lifetime of thought and jurisprudence that has been rigorously consistent for decades has been changed or influenced by a couple of vacations.
What’s the evidence for it? A common critique of Alito and Thomas is that they are too rigid.
Indeed, Thomas is the most fiercely independent mind and vote on the court. As for Alito, the smoking gun from ProPublica is supposed to be a case that came before the court involving a dispute over bonds between the government of Argentina and a hedge fund owned by Paul Singer, who six years earlier gave him a lift on his private jet to a fishing trip they both attended.
Alito was not a lone vote, sticking out from everyone else with an unconvincing defense of Singer’s hedge fund. Rather, he was part of a 7-vote majority finding for the hedge fund (the Singer connection didn’t have to be, and wasn’t, disclosed in the parties’ briefs).
It’s not unusual, by the way, for Supreme Court justices to take trips funded by others. In 2018 alone, Ginsburg took 14 and Justice Stephen Breyer took a dozen.
More fundamentally, the court’s jurisprudence isn’t political. This doesn’t mean that the court always gets it right, or the conservative justices don’t ever let their personal predilections and attitudes affect their jurisprudence — everyone is human.
But the conservative justices are trying to abide by a standard of the original meaning of the Constitution.
Originalism, too, isn’t flawless. There are different versions of it, and it’s a function of the difficulty of some of the questions that reach the court that originalists can come down in different places. But originalism is an internally consistent, intuitively appealing theory of how the court should work that hasn’t been matched by any alternate theory of interpretation by the other side, which is why even the progressive justices will sound, at times, like originalists.
Is originalism just a smoke screen for a political agenda? No.”
“Ana Navarro whipped out the tiny violins on ABC’s “The View” this week, declaring that the Biden corruption scandal “is a story of a father’s love, and Joe Biden has never and will never give up on his son Hunter . . .
“That is part of his heart.”
The “View” co-host was simply echoing the spin from the White House to get out from under the latest avalanche of damning evidence about the Biden family grift machine during Joe’s vice presidency: Honest Joe is guilty of nothing more than loving his wayward son.
The New York Times’ Nick Kristof echoed the sentiment in a cringeworthy piece titled “The Real Lesson From the Hunter Biden Saga: It isn’t about presidential corruption but a determined parent battling his son’s addiction with unconditional love.”
But the allegations against the president and his family are too credible to be wiped away by a secondhand sob story.
Every defendant has a hard-luck tale and it’s a little much from a family that has been the epitome of privilege for decades when they don’t even try to provide an explanation.
Nor will Biden’s on-brand defiance fly this time.
The optics of his son and Joe’s brother Jim Biden — who still is under federal investigation — at the White House in bow ties for a state dinner last week was so in-your-face that even the Times raised an eyebrow.
It was just two days after Hunter’s sweetheart plea deal, and Attorney General Merrick Garland was preposterously in attendance.
Very funny, Joe!
Another ruse to downplay the ballooning allegations was evident when the president joked last week during a meeting with the Indian prime minister that he had “sold a lot of state secrets.”
What, me, worry?
That’s why he laughs in reporters’ faces when they dare to shout a snatched question as he hurries by.
But the questions keep coming, nonetheless.
“President Biden, how involved were you in your son’s Chinese shakedown text message?” he was asked as he emerged from the White House Wednesday morning.
The question from Post journalist Steven Nelson was about a WhatsApp message, subpoenaed by the FBI from Hunter’s iCloud, that IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley had given to the House Ways and Means Committee as part of his damning testimony about DOJ interference in the five-year tax investigation into Hunter.
In the July 30, 2017, message released last Friday, Hunter threatens a Chinese business partner who owes his family money that his father “and every person he knows” will retaliate unless their directions are obeyed: “I am sitting here with my father, and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.”
Photographs on Hunter’s abandoned laptop place him at his father’s Delaware estate that Sunday.
So reporters have been asking the White House if Hunter was telling the truth; was his father in the room when he was shaking down an executive from Chinese energy company CEFC who would transfer $5.1 million to him over the next nine days?
It should not be a hard question to answer, one way or the other, but deflection, indignation and anger have been the only response.
At first, Biden responded to Nelson with derisive laughter, but the reporter kept pestering: “Were you sitting there? Were you involved?”
Biden: “No, I wasn’t.”
Nelson pressed: “Were you?”
Biden leaned in and barked “No!” in a telling outburst.
But Biden bullying reporters will not make the evidence disappear — and it leads to the president.”
AB 665 in California has passed the senate. It is predicted that it will pass the assembly, and Newsom has already sworn to sign it into law. 12 year olds will be given the ability to decide if they want to live at home, or if they want to go under the care of the State of…
Yes! The pieces are already in place to remove these children. Saying a court needs to decide if the child is "suffering" assumes you don't have prejudiced leaders who promote gender affirming care at the ready, willing to provide evidence of "abuse."
He’s clearly attended the John Fetterman School of Speech Reading.
BIDEN: "Less than a y—a guy driving a truck hit a b—anyway—knocked down a whole bridge and—the whole block—four lanes of the highway!" pic.twitter.com/FAVVUO6rXO
But they keep funding risky research in Ukraine and Wuhan….
“Biden Admin Secretly Ended Trump Policy of Cooperation With Israeli Science and Tech Institutions in Judea and Samaria
Former Ambassador David M. Friedman on U.S. boycott of Israeli institutions in the so-called West Bank: “Make no mistake. The United States, by this action, is embracing the BDS Movement.””
“Two weeks ago, the State Department informed Israel that the United States would no longer fund research projects in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem with Israeli science and tech institutions, the Times of Israel reports. The move restores the policy that was in place from 1967 until late 2020, when President Trump reversed it, removing existing bans on taxpayer-funded cooperation with entities in those restricted areas.
In fact, as reported in Axios, the decision to reinstate the prior policy banning cooperation with projects in the settlements was made early on in Biden’s presidency. But it came to light only recently when one of the institutions in those areas submitted an application for research funding. Its hand now forced, the State Department re-implemented the prior policy restrictions.
From the State Department spokesperson’s statement to Axios:
“The Department of State recently circulated foreign policy guidance to relevant agencies advising that engaging in bilateral scientific and technological cooperation with Israel” in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights “is inconsistent with U.S. foreign policy.”
…
The spokesperson said that the U.S. “strongly values scientific and technological cooperation” with Israel and such cooperation continues.
“This guidance is simply reflective of the longstanding U.S. position … that the ultimate disposition of the geographic areas which came under the administration of Israel after June 5, 1967 is a final status matter and that we are working towards a negotiated two-state solution in which Israel lives in peace and security alongside a viable Palestinian state,” the spokesperson added.
But critics say this “longstanding U.S. position” is nothing less than a U.S. government boycott of Israeli Jews based on where they live. That was Senator Ted Cruz’s take this past Sunday when he blasted the Biden administration for its quiet re-implementation of the pre-Trump era prohibitions:
Joe Biden and Biden administration officials are pathologically obsessed with undermining Israel. Since day one of their administration they have launched campaigns against our Israeli allies that are granular, whole of government, and done in secret.
“This new boycott of Israeli Jews is yet another example. The State Department is telling the entire U.S. government not to cooperate with Jews in Judea and Samaria. And of course it was sent to Congress in secret, and only revealed because reporters found out.
“The Biden administration defends funding scientific research in Wuhan with the Chinese Communist Party, but they’re discriminating against and banning cooperation with Jews based on where they live.
“I will do everything possible to reverse this decision and prohibit such antisemitic discrimination by the U.S. government in the future.””
—
“Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman agrees. Friedman and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed the Trump Administration agreement removing the barriers to cooperation with research entities in the settlements. “But apparently that’s now over as the Biden Administration has restored the boycott,” Friedman tweeted on Sunday:
Make no mistake. The United States, by this action, is embracing the BDS Movement, violating a binding bilateral agreement with Israel, and creating a lose/lose dynamic whereby the people of the region — Israelis and Palestinians — will lose the most.”
“You can see how this happened, and even understand why. When reality is upside-down, people act upside-down.
An Assistant Principal in Rhode Island solicited funds from her colleagues to help pay off human traffickers who were extorting money from a child they smuggled to the United States–and who, apparently, was living without any adult caretaker–out of a sense of compassion.
It never occurred to her to get law enforcement, or child services for that matter, involved. Instead, she asked her colleagues to all chip in to pay off the “coyotes” who smuggled the child across the border.
This is, of course, insane. But it is also the inevitable consequence of an ideology that approves of people being smuggled into the United States and that disdains the idea that children require adult supervision.”
I truly believe that it never occurred to her that she was participating in and helping fund a human trafficking ring, or for that matter leaving a student in a situation where there was no responsible adult was totally unacceptable.
When they come illegal, they usually give them a time frame to make a payment of $5000 dollors to those, who bring them illegal. Our student has been working extra hours to pay them and to support his family in Guatemala. Not ignoring that this kid lives here by himself and has no support from anyone. He only owes $2000 out of the $5000, but if he does not pay that by February 1, they will kill his family in his country. He works so hard and does not sleep trying to get that money together, but he is so stressed out. We want to reach out to everyone to ask for help. IF we can get people to donate whatever you guys can to help him out with this debt that will be great. He comes late some time because he works until late but we don’t want him to drop out of school. We want to support him with anything that we can.
Schools, after all, are assuming more and more responsibility for the mental well-being of students, and are committed to the idea that children know what is good for them and should be affirmed in that belief. Given this ideological commitment, why would anybody even consider the idea that this request was totally inappropriate even occur to them?”
There are so many red flags in this story — how is it possible that an assistant principal would think it appropriate to fundraise for a human trafficking operation instead of alerting law enforcement?
“Smuggling people into the United States is these days seen as a positive good and ardently to be desired. The Biden Administration itself engages in these practices, and even ships unaccompanied kids around the country, where they often wind up performing dangerous jobs in order to pay off the coyotes who transported them to the border.
The Administration freely admits that they have “lost” tens of thousands of them, having simply abandoned them in random places around the country. Is it any wonder that government employees such as this Assistant Principal think it is normal to pick up some of the slack in the process?
When the whole story blew up in right-wing media, employees and a School Board member were disgusted by the PR disaster, not the behavior itself.”
Yes, pray for the USA. It is where we live, but does not appear in present situation to be a country we can claim as our own. It has been stolen in so many bits and pieces. Yet we still pay our taxes as honest law-abiding citizens.
Wandering Views 
Like NJ said last night, while the world watches this train wreck. VDH agrees, he’s a disaster.
“The American post-Cold War order from the Ronald Reagan through George W. Bush administration is over.
Barack Obama began its erosion with his tired lectures about the past sins of the United States.
Obama empowered radical Islamists. He invited Russia back into the Middle East after a forty-year hiatus. He snored while Vladimir Putin swallowed large areas of Ukraine. He nonchalantly allowed ISIS almost to take over Iraq. And he authored the Libyan misadventure.
Joe Biden has greatly amplified what Obama inaugurated. He accentuates the Obama-authored foreign policy disasters by his own family corruption.
If the U.S. had an honest media, a disinterested Department of Justice, and a professional FBI, the Biden family would likely be facing felony bribery charges and an impeachment vote for leveraging the interests of the U.S. for a few millions of Ukrainian and Chinese cash.
Biden has forfeited any moral credibility America once had in sermonizing to the world about the advantages of transparent democracy.
Instead, Washington under Biden went full Third-world. His family got rich from his offices, and Joe Biden warped government agencies in efforts to take out his next possible presidential rival.
Antony Blinken, Biden’s current Secretary of State, is known mostly for meekly accepting a dressing down from Chinese diplomats in 2021 and subsequent ritual humiliations.
Blinken was also the author of the 2020 election shenanigan of soliciting former intelligence authorities to publish a preposterous lie that Hunter Biden’s laptop had all the “hallmarks” of “Russian disinformation.” Blinken’s inspired farce was dreamed up to aid a then struggling candidate Biden in his last presidential debate.
The net result of the Obama-Biden continuum has been the moral and material collapse of U.S. foreign policy.
Americans are bewildered that China is now buzzing our jets. It plays chicken with American warships.
It mocks our homeland defenses by sending a spy balloon with impunity across the continental United States.
It is defiantly mum about its creation of a gain-of-function virus under the auspices of the People’s Liberation Army, despite the ensuing Covid epidemic that killed over 1 million Americans.
The weird reaction of the Biden administration to these affronts is either to contextualize Beijing’s aggression or to ignore them entirely.
Under the earlier Obama-Biden “reset” of Russia, we also paid little attention to the past aggressions of Vladimir Putin, appeased his provocations, and earned the 2014 Russian take-over of the Ukrainian border and Crimea.
Then the resetters flipped during the Trump administration.
They now preposterously claimed that Donald Trump—who had neutered Putin by flooding the world with cheap oil, pulled out of an asymmetrical missile deal with Moscow, killed attacking Russian mercenaries in Syria, and greenlighted offensive weapons to Ukraine—was a Putin “puppet.”
After sleeping when Putin invaded Ukraine twice under Obama, and once under Biden (but not at all under Trump), the Left abruptly adopted Ukrainian resistance as their last chance to prove that Russians should have been guilty of “Russian collusion” and “disinformation.”
Their new legacy is a Chinese-Russian-Iranian anti-American axis.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
“The Left’s Campaign to Destroy the Supreme Court”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/29/fake-crisis-supreme-court-00104106
“All it has taken to bring the Supreme Court to the brink of destruction, we’re supposed to believe, is a critical mass of justices who try to hew to the U.S. Constitution.
The institution survived Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson, but is now hanging by a thread thanks to the ravages of Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett.
It is fashionable to say that the Supreme Court has “a crisis of legitimacy.” In this telling, the court has been buffeted by undisclosed luxury vacations paid for by wealthy associates of conservative justices and undermined by “stolen” seats. The court’s polling is terrible and it is now, as Democratic Senate hopeful Adam Schiff put it at a pro-court-packing news conference recently, “a political and partisan court with a reactionary social agenda.”
Of course, many of the people on the left who are lamenting a crisis of legitimacy of the court are hoping to create just such a crisis. It is understandable that they don’t like the composition or drift of the current court after largely having it on their side for decades, but their attacks are meritless.
No one “stole” any Supreme Court seats. The Senate decides whether and when to confirm a president’s nominee. The Senate majority under Minority Leader Mitch McConnell decided to keep the seat that came open after the death of Antonin Scalia vacant pending the 2016 election. If Hillary Clinton had won that election, the way most people expected, there would have been no “stolen” seat. The same applies if Democrats had won the Senate in 2018 — they would have been able to block former President Donald Trump’s appointment of Barrett after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.
There’s a difference between losing and being done dirty. The fact is that there was precedent both for a Senate majority blocking the nominee of a president of the opposite party in an election year and for a Senate majority rapidly confirming the nominee of a president of the same party in an election year; Senate control matters.
As for ethics, even if you think that Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito were imprudent in accepting free flights and nice trips, even if you think they should have disclosed these trips (they didn’t have to under the rules), it’s preposterous to believe that a lifetime of thought and jurisprudence that has been rigorously consistent for decades has been changed or influenced by a couple of vacations.
What’s the evidence for it? A common critique of Alito and Thomas is that they are too rigid.
Indeed, Thomas is the most fiercely independent mind and vote on the court. As for Alito, the smoking gun from ProPublica is supposed to be a case that came before the court involving a dispute over bonds between the government of Argentina and a hedge fund owned by Paul Singer, who six years earlier gave him a lift on his private jet to a fishing trip they both attended.
Alito was not a lone vote, sticking out from everyone else with an unconvincing defense of Singer’s hedge fund. Rather, he was part of a 7-vote majority finding for the hedge fund (the Singer connection didn’t have to be, and wasn’t, disclosed in the parties’ briefs).
It’s not unusual, by the way, for Supreme Court justices to take trips funded by others. In 2018 alone, Ginsburg took 14 and Justice Stephen Breyer took a dozen.
More fundamentally, the court’s jurisprudence isn’t political. This doesn’t mean that the court always gets it right, or the conservative justices don’t ever let their personal predilections and attitudes affect their jurisprudence — everyone is human.
But the conservative justices are trying to abide by a standard of the original meaning of the Constitution.
Originalism, too, isn’t flawless. There are different versions of it, and it’s a function of the difficulty of some of the questions that reach the court that originalists can come down in different places. But originalism is an internally consistent, intuitively appealing theory of how the court should work that hasn’t been matched by any alternate theory of interpretation by the other side, which is why even the progressive justices will sound, at times, like originalists.
Is originalism just a smoke screen for a political agenda? No.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
The media have received their WH talking points…..
The rest of America see this for what it is, corruption at the highest levels. Their sob story won’t change that.
“Allegations against Biden and his family are too credible to wipe away with ‘father’s love’ sob story”
https://nypost.com/2023/06/28/allegations-against-biden-and-his-family-are-too-credible-to-wipe-away-with-fathers-love-sob-story/
“Ana Navarro whipped out the tiny violins on ABC’s “The View” this week, declaring that the Biden corruption scandal “is a story of a father’s love, and Joe Biden has never and will never give up on his son Hunter . . .
“That is part of his heart.”
The “View” co-host was simply echoing the spin from the White House to get out from under the latest avalanche of damning evidence about the Biden family grift machine during Joe’s vice presidency: Honest Joe is guilty of nothing more than loving his wayward son.
The New York Times’ Nick Kristof echoed the sentiment in a cringeworthy piece titled “The Real Lesson From the Hunter Biden Saga: It isn’t about presidential corruption but a determined parent battling his son’s addiction with unconditional love.”
But the allegations against the president and his family are too credible to be wiped away by a secondhand sob story.
Every defendant has a hard-luck tale and it’s a little much from a family that has been the epitome of privilege for decades when they don’t even try to provide an explanation.
Nor will Biden’s on-brand defiance fly this time.
The optics of his son and Joe’s brother Jim Biden — who still is under federal investigation — at the White House in bow ties for a state dinner last week was so in-your-face that even the Times raised an eyebrow.
It was just two days after Hunter’s sweetheart plea deal, and Attorney General Merrick Garland was preposterously in attendance.
Very funny, Joe!
Another ruse to downplay the ballooning allegations was evident when the president joked last week during a meeting with the Indian prime minister that he had “sold a lot of state secrets.”
What, me, worry?
That’s why he laughs in reporters’ faces when they dare to shout a snatched question as he hurries by.
But the questions keep coming, nonetheless.
“President Biden, how involved were you in your son’s Chinese shakedown text message?” he was asked as he emerged from the White House Wednesday morning.
The question from Post journalist Steven Nelson was about a WhatsApp message, subpoenaed by the FBI from Hunter’s iCloud, that IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley had given to the House Ways and Means Committee as part of his damning testimony about DOJ interference in the five-year tax investigation into Hunter.
In the July 30, 2017, message released last Friday, Hunter threatens a Chinese business partner who owes his family money that his father “and every person he knows” will retaliate unless their directions are obeyed: “I am sitting here with my father, and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.”
Photographs on Hunter’s abandoned laptop place him at his father’s Delaware estate that Sunday.
So reporters have been asking the White House if Hunter was telling the truth; was his father in the room when he was shaking down an executive from Chinese energy company CEFC who would transfer $5.1 million to him over the next nine days?
It should not be a hard question to answer, one way or the other, but deflection, indignation and anger have been the only response.
At first, Biden responded to Nelson with derisive laughter, but the reporter kept pestering: “Were you sitting there? Were you involved?”
Biden: “No, I wasn’t.”
Nelson pressed: “Were you?”
Biden leaned in and barked “No!” in a telling outburst.
But Biden bullying reporters will not make the evidence disappear — and it leads to the president.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
The groomers are at it again.
LikeLiked by 2 people
This is fine.
He’s clearly attended the John Fetterman School of Speech Reading.
LikeLiked by 1 person
LikeLiked by 2 people
But they keep funding risky research in Ukraine and Wuhan….
“Biden Admin Secretly Ended Trump Policy of Cooperation With Israeli Science and Tech Institutions in Judea and Samaria
Former Ambassador David M. Friedman on U.S. boycott of Israeli institutions in the so-called West Bank: “Make no mistake. The United States, by this action, is embracing the BDS Movement.””
https://legalinsurrection.com/2023/06/biden-admin-secretly-ended-trump-policy-of-cooperation-with-israeli-science-and-tech-institutions-in-judea-and-samaria/
“Two weeks ago, the State Department informed Israel that the United States would no longer fund research projects in the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem with Israeli science and tech institutions, the Times of Israel reports. The move restores the policy that was in place from 1967 until late 2020, when President Trump reversed it, removing existing bans on taxpayer-funded cooperation with entities in those restricted areas.
In fact, as reported in Axios, the decision to reinstate the prior policy banning cooperation with projects in the settlements was made early on in Biden’s presidency. But it came to light only recently when one of the institutions in those areas submitted an application for research funding. Its hand now forced, the State Department re-implemented the prior policy restrictions.
From the State Department spokesperson’s statement to Axios:
“The Department of State recently circulated foreign policy guidance to relevant agencies advising that engaging in bilateral scientific and technological cooperation with Israel” in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights “is inconsistent with U.S. foreign policy.”
…
The spokesperson said that the U.S. “strongly values scientific and technological cooperation” with Israel and such cooperation continues.
“This guidance is simply reflective of the longstanding U.S. position … that the ultimate disposition of the geographic areas which came under the administration of Israel after June 5, 1967 is a final status matter and that we are working towards a negotiated two-state solution in which Israel lives in peace and security alongside a viable Palestinian state,” the spokesperson added.
But critics say this “longstanding U.S. position” is nothing less than a U.S. government boycott of Israeli Jews based on where they live. That was Senator Ted Cruz’s take this past Sunday when he blasted the Biden administration for its quiet re-implementation of the pre-Trump era prohibitions:
Joe Biden and Biden administration officials are pathologically obsessed with undermining Israel. Since day one of their administration they have launched campaigns against our Israeli allies that are granular, whole of government, and done in secret.
“This new boycott of Israeli Jews is yet another example. The State Department is telling the entire U.S. government not to cooperate with Jews in Judea and Samaria. And of course it was sent to Congress in secret, and only revealed because reporters found out.
“The Biden administration defends funding scientific research in Wuhan with the Chinese Communist Party, but they’re discriminating against and banning cooperation with Jews based on where they live.
“I will do everything possible to reverse this decision and prohibit such antisemitic discrimination by the U.S. government in the future.””
—
“Former U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman agrees. Friedman and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu signed the Trump Administration agreement removing the barriers to cooperation with research entities in the settlements. “But apparently that’s now over as the Biden Administration has restored the boycott,” Friedman tweeted on Sunday:
Make no mistake. The United States, by this action, is embracing the BDS Movement, violating a binding bilateral agreement with Israel, and creating a lose/lose dynamic whereby the people of the region — Israelis and Palestinians — will lose the most.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Red flags galore, but these educators missed them all.
“Rhode Island school raised money for human traffickers”
https://hotair.com/david-strom/2023/06/29/rhode-island-school-raised-money-for-human-traffickers-n561293
“You can see how this happened, and even understand why. When reality is upside-down, people act upside-down.
An Assistant Principal in Rhode Island solicited funds from her colleagues to help pay off human traffickers who were extorting money from a child they smuggled to the United States–and who, apparently, was living without any adult caretaker–out of a sense of compassion.
It never occurred to her to get law enforcement, or child services for that matter, involved. Instead, she asked her colleagues to all chip in to pay off the “coyotes” who smuggled the child across the border.
This is, of course, insane. But it is also the inevitable consequence of an ideology that approves of people being smuggled into the United States and that disdains the idea that children require adult supervision.”
I truly believe that it never occurred to her that she was participating in and helping fund a human trafficking ring, or for that matter leaving a student in a situation where there was no responsible adult was totally unacceptable.
When they come illegal, they usually give them a time frame to make a payment of $5000 dollors to those, who bring them illegal. Our student has been working extra hours to pay them and to support his family in Guatemala. Not ignoring that this kid lives here by himself and has no support from anyone. He only owes $2000 out of the $5000, but if he does not pay that by February 1, they will kill his family in his country. He works so hard and does not sleep trying to get that money together, but he is so stressed out. We want to reach out to everyone to ask for help. IF we can get people to donate whatever you guys can to help him out with this debt that will be great. He comes late some time because he works until late but we don’t want him to drop out of school. We want to support him with anything that we can.
Schools, after all, are assuming more and more responsibility for the mental well-being of students, and are committed to the idea that children know what is good for them and should be affirmed in that belief. Given this ideological commitment, why would anybody even consider the idea that this request was totally inappropriate even occur to them?”
“Smuggling people into the United States is these days seen as a positive good and ardently to be desired. The Biden Administration itself engages in these practices, and even ships unaccompanied kids around the country, where they often wind up performing dangerous jobs in order to pay off the coyotes who transported them to the border.
The Administration freely admits that they have “lost” tens of thousands of them, having simply abandoned them in random places around the country. Is it any wonder that government employees such as this Assistant Principal think it is normal to pick up some of the slack in the process?
When the whole story blew up in right-wing media, employees and a School Board member were disgusted by the PR disaster, not the behavior itself.”
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Pray for our country.
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Yes, pray for the USA. It is where we live, but does not appear in present situation to be a country we can claim as our own. It has been stolen in so many bits and pieces. Yet we still pay our taxes as honest law-abiding citizens.
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