kunstler | Beach boy “Joe Biden” will be well-rested
when the plan for his impeachment rolls out after Labor Day. Just
because you’re not hearing any news about it now, with the county fairs
on all over the USA, and the pols busy scarfing corn-dogs and kissing
heifers, doesn’t mean that the key players aren’t confabbing among
themselves. Hey, have you noticed, you’re hardly hearing about anything
else these dwindling days of summer, either? Got any idea what’s up with
that war in Ukraine? Of course you don’t.
A preview for you then: Rep James
Comer’s House Oversight Committee has already assembled a bundle of
evidence tracking the exact ways and means of how the Biden family’s
global bribery operation worked. That includes the bank records, the
emails and deal memos, the chronology of meetings, the FBI documents,
the phone recordings, the photos of “JB” schmoozing with Hunter’s
“clients,” and the famous video of “Joe Biden” bragging onstage at the
Council on Foreign Relations about how he strong-armed Ukraine President
Poroshenko into firing General Prosecutor Viktor Shokin.
Next, Speaker McCarthy has to form an
actual impeachment inquiry committee. (If he tries to demur, there could
be a new Speaker of the House in short order.) That committee will
entertain witnesses, including figures in Justice Department who have
been reluctant to discuss these matters previously. This might entail a
Part B of the inquiry: the blatant obstructions of justice by DOJ
officials in the long-running case on various charges against Hunter
Biden, as supervised by federal attorney in Delaware, now Special
Counsel, David Weiss. Mr. Weiss dawdled so strenuously for five years
that he let the statute of limitations run out on the major tax evasion
charges, while he ignored all the allegations of Hunter’s FARA
violations in seeking money from officials of many foreign governments.
There’s reason to believe that
botching that case was well-coordinated with help from the Biden family
DOJ “mole,” one Alexander S. Mackler, who had served as Senator Joe
Biden’s press secretary in 2007-08, was campaign manager in 2010 for the
Senator’s son, Beau Biden (deceased 2015), when he ran for Delaware
Attorney General, and from 2014-16 was Deputy Counsel to Veep Joe Biden.
Mr. Mackler was later inserted into the Delaware US attorney’s office
as a prosecutor under David Weiss, from August 2016 to May 2019, while
Hunter B’s case was under investigation. Did he function as the Bidens’ consigliere?
Mr. Mackler was logged-in as a White House visitor five times after
“Joe Biden” came to occupy it in 2021. Mr. Mackler is alleged to be
currently serving as Chief Deputy Attorney General of Delaware (since
2019), but his name has been scrubbed by the agency’s website. See for
yourself:https://attorneygeneral.delaware.gov
Perhaps all this will be reserved for
the separate impeachments of Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI
Director Wray. Bribery, racketeering, and treason may be enough for a
presidential impeachment. Would the gravity of an impeachment proceeding
override witnesses’ refusal to testify on the grounds of “an ongoing
investigation?” How could it not, if those investigations are themselves
a subject of the inquiry? Would the mainstream news media ignore the
spectacle to suppress it? They can try, and then maybe we’ll get a test
of how irrelevant they’ve become. The House will surely televise the
proceedings. There are too many other alt.channels that will broadcast
impeachment hearings, probably led by X (formerly Twitter).
All of which raises the question: will
“Joe Biden” really endure this ordeal? Or will the next thirty days be
his window for exiting the scene? He is, after all, a mere prop in a
show directed by others. Those others would include Barack Obama, who
could easily be dragged into an inquiry about the Biden family’s
criminal adventures in global money-grubbbing when Joe was Veep. How is
it possible that President Obama didn’t know what the Bidens were up to?
(The Intel Community can’t be that incompetent.) You see how ugly this
thing could get?
newsweek | According to a conservative nonprofit, the National Archives and
Records Administration (NARA) acknowledged being in possession of nearly
5,400 emails, electronic records, and other documents that would
potentially show that Joe Biden used pseudonyms while emailing his son Hunter during his time as vice president.
The
claim came after a Freedom of Information Act request made by the
Atlanta-based legal advocacy group the Southeastern Legal Foundation
(SLF) in June 2022, the nonprofit organization said on Monday.
On the same day, SLF filed a federal lawsuit against NARA to obtain the thousands of emails in NARA's possession.
The emails, allegedly sent by the then-vice president using the three
different pseudonyms, have recently come under scrutiny as the House
Republican investigation continues over Hunter Biden's foreign business dealings.
Joe Biden has consistently rejected accusations of influence peddling,
denying any wrongdoing and saying there was "an absolute wall" between
the business dealings of his family and his role as vice president. Republicans have so far failed to produce any damning evidence tying the president to any wrongdoing.
SLF is a Georgia-based legal advocacy group "dedicated to defending
liberty and Rebuilding the American Republic," according to its own
mission statement. Founded in 1976, the nonprofit declares to act to
protect freedom of speech and property rights, as well as combating
government overreach.
In a press release accompanying the
announcement of its federal lawsuit against NARA, the group wrote that
it had initially requested "these now highly sought after emails" from
NARA on June 9, 2022, through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
request. But it added that "unfortunately, after identifying nearly
5,400 potentially responsive records, NARA has dragged its feet and
still has not produced a single email."
The conservative law firm
is now asking the court to order NARA to release all nearly 5,400 emails
and documents, which SLF claims might show that Joe Biden forwarded
government information and discussed government business with his son.
According
to the lawsuit, NARA's director of archival operations division
Stephannie Oriabure told them on June 24, 2022: "We have performed a
search of our collection for Vice Presidential records related to your
[June 9, 2022] request and have identified approximately 5,138 email
messages, 25 electronic files and 200 pages of potentially responsive
records that must be processed in order to respond to your request."
What Pseudonyms Did Biden Use?
In
a report from The New York Post in July 2021, the newspaper confirmed
that then-vice president Biden used three pseudonyms for private email
addresses during his time in office: Robert Peters, Robin Ware, and JRB
Ware.
Newsweek attempted to reach out to the
email address cited in that report—Robert.L.Peters@pci.gov—but received a
bounce back early on Tuesday.
Could The Emails Be Released?
A NARA case
record containing four emails featuring Joe Biden's alleged pseudonyms
was first made public by the archive in June. It contained two emails
that were withheld and two others that had redactions.
Two of
those emails were sent from then-Biden aide John Flynn to the then-vice
president on May 27, 2016, and June 15, 2016. Hunter Biden was a CC'd
recipient of those two emails.
"Joe
Biden has stated there was 'an absolute wall' between his family's
foreign business schemes and his duties as Vice President, but evidence
reveals that access was wide open for his family's influence peddling," Comer said in a statement on August 17.
thegatewaypundit | Author Peter Schweizer went on with Jesse Watters on Monday night
where he proceeded to drop another bomb on the Biden Crime Family.
According to Schweizer, who wrote a best-seller “Secret Empires”
on the Biden Family crimes, told Jesse that one of Vlodomyr Zelensky’s
top officials was sitting in the room when they were discussing bribing
the Bidens, Joe and Hunter.
Ukrainian President Zelensky has a top official who was sitting in on meetings where they talked about bribing the Bidens.
Schweizer suggests Zelensky is using this as leverage over the Biden regime for weapons and billions in US dollars.
Peter Schweizer: We’ve been at this since 2018.
** They initially said there were no foreign deals.
** Then they shifted and said there were. There might have been foreign deals, but the Bidens made no money.
** Then it became Joe Biden didn’t know about any of the deals.
** Then it became Joe Biden didn’t participate in any of the deals.
** And now it’s that he was not in business with his son.
Look, the implications for this are huge, Jesse.
If you look at that 1023 form that the FBI released, if that document is true, that document reveals that one
of the people that was at those meetings that heard the conversations
about bribing the Bidens worked for – President Zelensky. Who
really wants to believe, if that meeting took place and that document is
accurate, that that individual did not go and report to President
Zelensky what he heard?
And again, if that document is true, who wants to believe
that President Zelensky and his administration have not used that as
leverage over Joe Biden when it comes to negotiations on Ukraine policy?
We may all have to start learning the Ukrainian word for compromise
because this is a very clear indication of how this has shaped this
administration’s policy towards Ukraine and also towards China.
It is also convenient for Zelensky that there is not a team of US auditors in his country tracking where all of this money went.
jonathanturley | Below is my column in the New York Post on the last ditch effort of
the members of Congress and the media to get the public to just “move
on” from the Biden corruption scandal. The message has been clear and
amplified, as former U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) insisted on
MSNBC, “Everybody needs to back off!” As
evidence and public interest increase, it is a bit late for spin or
shiny objects. This week, the scandal is likely to be even more serious
for the Bidens and the country. The media is increasingly taking on the appearance of Leslie Nielsen in Naked Gun yelling that there is “nothing to see here” in front of a virtual apocalyptic scene of fire and destruction.
Here is the column:
“I wonder after this plea happens if you would advise your party to move on?”
That question from CBS’s “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan to
Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie was raised just days
before a former business associate of Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, gives potentially explosive testimony to a House committee in the Biden corruption scandal.
The media’s desire to “move on” from the scandal is reaching an almost frantic level, as millions in foreign payments and dozens of corporate shell companies are revealed, and incriminating emails are released.
The same plaintive demand was made in congressional hearings.
What was most striking about the last hearing involving two respected
IRS whistleblowers was how Democratic members avoided virtually any
specific questions.
The members discussed everything from the Emmett Till murder in 1955 to whether the term “two-tiered justice system” is racially insensitive … and of course, Donald Trump.
It was clear that the release of the new evidence of corruption had
left no room to maneuver for both Democrat politicians and the media.
Any question would now trip a wire on the Bidens, so most avoid the
allegations in favor of talking about Trump or other shiny objects.
Goldman bizarrely raised one of the most damaging new pieces of evidence in the investigation.
He asked about a “lunch where Joe Biden came to say hello at the Four
Season’s hotel to a lunch that he was having with CEFC executives.”
He then read how Biden associate Rob Walker described the origins of
the meeting with the Chinese officials to get his dad to stop by:
“Hunter told his Dad that ‘I may be trying to start a company or try to
do something with these guys.’ “
Goldman asked slyly, “Now let me ask you something, that doesn’t
sound much like Joe Biden was involved in whatever Hunter was doing with
the CEFC, if Hunter Biden is telling him that he is trying to do
business with them, does it?”
That is when Shapley stated the obvious: “No, but it does show that
he told his father that he was trying to do business and . . . ” Goldman
finally saw that problem and cut him off with “OK, well that is true
that Hunter Biden does try to do business, that is correct.”
The problem is that Goldman just elicited sworn testimony on how Joe
Biden did in fact know about these business dealings despite years of
categorical denials of having any knowledge or interaction with Hunter
or his business associates.
Goldman demolished the Biden defense in less than five minutes.
jonathanturley | Starting with his campaign for the presidency and continuing until
this week, President Joe Biden has maintained one clear and consistent
position on his son’s influence peddling schemes. As a virtual mantra,
Biden — and the White House staff — have categorically maintained that he had no knowledge of any foreign dealings of his son. That
has been proven to be a lie, but Biden continued to maintain the
position. Yet, on the eve of the testimony of a key Biden associate, the
White House has changed its position. Now the President is only
claiming that he was “not in business” with his son.Some
of us have written multiple columns over the last four years arguing
that the President was clearly and knowingly lying in his denials of
knowledge and discussions of these deals. Even when he made the
statement, it was clearly untrue but most of the media shrugged and
happily walked away.
Then the evidence began to mount.
The laptop includes pictures
and appointments of Hunter’s foreign business associates with Joe
Biden. There is also a recording of Joe Biden discussing a Times report
on Dec. 12, 2018, detailing Hunter’s dealings with Ye Jianming, the head
of CEFC China Energy Company. He assures his son that “I think you’re clear” after lawyers worked on the New York Times before the story ran.
There is also a recording of his uncle James assuring Hunter that he and his father were going to arrange for “safe harbor” for him as his world began to collapse.
Then there is the July 30, 2017 Whatsapp message from Hunter Biden to
one of his Chinese associates, Henry Zhao, the director of Harvest Fund
Management and Communist Party official. Zhao was funneling money to
Hunter’s firm BHR Partners. Hunter is quoted as writing:
“I am sitting here with my father and we would like to
understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled. Tell the
director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of
hand, and now means tonight. And, Z, if I get a call or text from anyone
involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make
certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he
knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not
following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my
father.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was asked by Fox News journalist Gillian Turner:
“Chairman James Comer today says that the
Oversight Committee has evidence that the president in the past
communicated directly with foreign business associates of his son Hunter
Biden many times. Curious if the White House and the president still
stand behind his comment that he’s never been involved and has never
even spoken to his son about his business?”
The response from Jean-Pierre was surprising:
“So, I’ve been I’ve been asked this question a million times. The answer is not going to change. The answer remains the same. The president was never in business with his son. I just don’t have anything else to add.”
It takes an utter contempt for the intelligence of the public to
insist that “the answer remains the same” and then give an entirely new
answer. However, that is only if most of the public is informed of the
contradiction. None of the media in the White House press corp followed
up on Turner’s questions when Jean-Pierre immediately moved on.
sputnik | Tara
Reade, a US citizen, writer, and ex-assistant to Joe Biden, who has
recently arrived in Russia, told Sputnik she no longer feels safe in
Biden's America, adding that many Americans are ready to follow in her
footsteps.
Tara
Reade, a former Senate staffer, came forward in April 2020 and filed a
criminal complaint against then-presumptive Democratic presidential
hopeful Joe Biden, accusing him of sexual assault in 1993. Even though some Democratic congresswomen
said they believe her, not only were her claims downplayed by the US
mainstream press, but she was also subjected to smears, a criminal
probe, and intimidation.
After Biden's 2024 re-election announcement, Reade reiterated her accusations and expressed willingness to testify in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives. However, in early May, Tara released a cryptic message saying that if something happens to her, all roads would lead to Biden. Reade opted to come to Russia to protect her life.
On May 30, Member of the State Duma Committee on International Affairs Maria Butina, who herself fell victim to the US punitive machine,
promised to discuss the possibility of granting Russian citizenship to
Reade and ask Russian President Vladimir Putin to fast track her
citizenship request.
Tara
Reade is not the only American truth-seeker who has come to Russia in
order to evade political persecution from the US authorities. Earlier,
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden found refuge in the Russian Federation
after revealing a US global spying program which targeted American
citizens in sharp violation of the US Constitution. In September 2022,
Vladimir Putin signed a decree granting Russian citizenship to Edward.
He is now a full-fledged citizen of Russia.
As
per Reade, there are a lot of people in the US who feel unsafe. Her
message to them is to take action to protect themselves and their
families "and to really look at who you're voting for."
"We
need systemic change. So participate in that process and try to take
command of your democracy if you want a democracy, because right now
it's in disarray," Reade said, addressing her fellow Americans. "And
that's the problem. And as far as like going to another safe haven, I
mean, there are many Americans here, and I don't want to out a bunch of
Americans, but there are people here that are coming to Russia - much
like back in the day when Soviet Union people defected over to the US -
now you have the opposite. Now you have US and European citizens looking
for safe haven here. And luckily, the Kremlin is accommodating. So
we're lucky."
gilbertdoctorow | The many months long battle for the provincial Donbas city of
Bakhmut, or Artyomovsk as it is known in Russia, has been described
variously from on high in Washington, London and Berlin. When the likely
outcome was unclear, the defense of Bakhmut was called heroic and
demonstrative of the brave fighting spirit of the Ukrainians.
π΄πΊπΈπΊπ¦π·πΊ"The Russians have suffered over 100 000 cssualties in Bakhmut...I'ts hard to make up. It's hard to make up" - Joe Biden
— AZ π°πππ (@AZgeopolitics) May 21, 2023
Casualty figures issued by Kiev and then trumpeted from Washington
suggested that the Russians were stupidly throwing away the lives of
their fighting men by using WWI style human waves of attackers who were
decimated by the defenders. Russian lives are cheap was the message. The
fact that Russian artillery on site outnumbered and outperformed
Ukrainian artillery by a factor of five or seven to one was freely
admitted by the Western propagandists as they pleaded for increased
supplies to Kiev. They, nonetheless, issued casualty reports for the
Russians that inverted the force correlation. It was assumed, obviously
with reason, that the public was too lazy or too uninterested to do the
arithmetic.
At one moment, the spin doctors in Washington, London and Berlin said
that Ukrainian defense of Bakhmut made sense because it was pinning
down Russian forces and giving time to the Ukrainians to train and
position their men for the heralded “counter offensive” during which
they would overrun Russian positions at chosen points in the 600 mile
line of combat and drive a wedge through to the Sea of Azov, opening the
way for recapture of Crimea. Those were grand words and ambitions to
justify continued and ever rising Western military assistance to Kiev.
At another point, the spin doctors said it would be better if Ukraine
stopped losing men in Bakhmut and launched instead that much vaunted
counter-offensive. Now we were told that Bakhmut is just a Russian
fantasy, that it has no strategic value.
In the past couple of weeks, the Russian command has issued daily
reports on the progressive capture by Russian forces of Bakhmut, square
kilometer after square kilometer. We were told they controlled 75%, then
80% and most recently more than 90% of the city proper while artillery
bombardment of the remaining blocks of high rise residential buildings
that were being used by Ukrainian defenders for their sniper attacks and
intelligence reports on Russian troop movements pulverized everything
in their path.
At this point, the attention of Western media defending truth against
Russian disinformation was directed at the Ukrainian “successes” in
recapturing settlements on the flanks of Bakhmut. Just three days ago The New York Times
was telling its readers that these “breakthroughs” by the Ukrainians
put in jeopardy the Russian forces holding the city proper: they might
be surrounded and compelled to surrender or die. The possibility that
the offensives on the flanks were only intended to facilitate withdrawal
of remaining Ukrainian soldiers from Bakhmut and were tolerated by the
Russians to avoid bloody fights to the death – that possibility crossed
no one’s mind at the NYT, it seems.
Midday yesterday, 20 May, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner
Group which did most of the fighting for Bakhmut on the ground, claimed
total victory. In the evening, President Vladimir Putin announced to
the Russian public that Bakhmut was taken. Joyous messages of
congratulations filled the internet message services in Russia as the
broad public celebrated a victory as iconic as the Battle for
Stalingrad.
Meanwhile, the defenders of the Western public against Russian
“disinformation” were hard at work, straining their brains to find what
to say. This morning’s New York Times still speaks of the battle for Bakhmut as undecided, pointing yet again to the Ukrainian hold on the flanks.
Given their losses in men and materiel defending Bakhmut, the
surrender of the city to the Russians will be a great blow to Ukrainian
fighting morale when it is finally admitted. So will the fate of their
Commander in Chief General Zaluzhny who, according to Russian sources,
has been hospitalized for the past two weeks and remains in critical
condition after falling victim to a Russian strike on a provincial
command center which killed most of the high officers around him. If
nothing else, this speaks to the amazing success of Russian military
intelligence directing their firepower.
Meanwhile, Western media attention to Ukraine is conveniently
redirected at the nonstop travels of President Zalensky who went from
his European tour on to the Middle East, where he attended the meeting
of the Arab League, and thence via French military jet to the G7
gathering in Hiroshima where he held talks with fellow heads of state
and joined them for the obligatory group photos. All the talk was about
when the U.S. will formally give its consent to the dispatch of F16s to
Kiev. For the disseminators of Western disinformation this is a
wonderful distraction from a war that clearly is going badly for Kiev
and in particular a distraction from the counter offensive that looks
less likely with each passing day of Russian military strikes on the
command centers and weapons stores of the Ukrainian side.
The plume of radioactive smoke and ash that rose from the Khmelnitsky
store of British depleted uranium artillery shells in Western Ukraine
after a Russian missile strike, just like the extensive damage to the
Patriot air defense installation near Kiev by a Russian Kinzhal
hypersonic missile tell us all what will be the fate of future Western
arms deliveries to Ukraine. It is an interesting question how much
longer the Ukrainian military or politicians will put up with their high
flying, good life President while the country is well on its way to
hell.
After all, a good deal
of evidence suggests that the administration’s real—if only
semi-acknowledged—objective is to topple Russia’s government. The
draconian sanctions that the United States imposed on Russia were
designed to crash its economy. As the New York Times reported, these sanctions have
ignited questions in Washington and in European capitals over whether
cascading events in Russia could lead to “regime change,” or rulership
collapse, which President Biden and European leaders are careful to
avoid mentioning.
By repeatedly labeling Putin a “war criminal” and a murderous
dictator, President Biden (using the same febrile rhetoric that his
predecessors deployed against Noriega, MiloΕ‘eviΔ, Qaddafi, and Saddam
Hussein) has circumscribed Washington’s diplomatic options, rendering
regime change the war’s only acceptable outcome.
I counted 30 Patriot PAC-3 MSE launches here.
The FY2024 costs of these per missile is about $$5,275,000
That was $158,250,000 fired in about two minutes. And as we see, the battery or something else likely got blown up. So it failed in its mission. pic.twitter.com/9rwPnHkNGu
Diplomacy requires an
understanding of an adversary’s interests and motives and an ability to
make judicious compromises. But by assuming a Manichaean view of world
politics, as has become Washington’s reflexive posture, “compromise, the
virtue of the old diplomacy, becomes the treason of the new,” as the
foreign policy scholar Hans Morgenthau put it, “for the mutual
accommodation of conflicting claims . . . amounts to surrender when the
moral standards themselves are the stakes of the conflict.”
Washington, then, will not entertain an end to the conflict until
Russia is handed a decisive defeat. Echoing previous comments by Biden,
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared in April 2022 that the goal
is to weaken Russia militarily. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has
repeatedly dismissed the idea of negotiating, insisting that Moscow is
not serious about peace. For its part, Kyiv has indicated that it will
settle for nothing less than the return of all Ukrainian territory
occupied by Russia, including Crimea. Ukraine’s foreign minister Dmytro
Kuleba has endorsed the strategy of applying enough military pressure on
Russia to induce its political collapse.
Of course, the same momentum pushing toward a war in pursuit of
overweening ends catapults Washington into pursuing a war employing
unlimited means, an impulse encapsulated in the formula, endlessly
invoked by Washington policymakers and politicians: “Whatever it takes,
for as long as it takes.” As the United States and its NATO allies pour
ever more sophisticated weapons onto the battlefield, Moscow will likely
be compelled (from military necessity, if not from popular domestic
pressure) to interdict the lines of communication that convey these
weapons shipments to Ukraine’s forces, which could lead to a direct
clash with NATO forces. More importantly, as Russian casualties
inevitably mount, animosity toward the West will intensify. A strategy
guided by “whatever it takes, for as long as it takes” vastly increases
the risk of accidents and escalation.
The proxy war embraced by Washington today would
have been shunned by the Washington of the Cold War. And some of the
very misapprehensions that have contributed to the start of this war
make it far more dangerous than Washington acknowledges. America’s NATO
expansion strategy and its pursuit of nuclear primacy both emerge from
its self-appointed role as “the indispensable nation.” The menace Russia
perceives in that role—and therefore what it sees as being at stake in
this war—further multiply the danger. Meanwhile, nuclear
deterrence—which demands careful, cool, and even cooperative monitoring
and adjustment between potential adversaries—has been rendered wobbly
both by U.S. strategy and by the hostility and suspicion created by this
heated proxy war. Rarely have what Morgenthau praised as the virtues of
the old diplomacy been more needed; rarely have they been more abjured.
Neither Moscow nor Kyiv appears capable of attaining its stated war
aims in full. Notwithstanding its proclaimed annexation of the Luhansk,
Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson administrative districts, Moscow is
unlikely to establish complete control over them. Ukraine is similarly
unlikely to recapture all of its pre-2014 territory lost to Moscow.
Barring either side’s complete collapse, the war can end only with
compromise.
Reaching such an accord would be extremely difficult. Russia would
need to disgorge its post-invasion gains in the Donbas and contribute
significantly to an international fund to reconstruct Ukraine. For its
part, Ukraine would need to accept the loss of some territory in Luhansk
and Donetsk and perhaps submit to an arrangement, possibly supervised
by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, that would
grant a degree of cultural and local political autonomy to additional
Russian-speaking areas of the Donbas. More painfully, Kyiv would need to
concede Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea while ceding territory for a
land bridge between the peninsula and Russia. A peace settlement would
need to permit Ukraine simultaneously to conduct close economic
relations with the Eurasian Economic Union and with the European Union
(to allow for this arrangement, Brussels would need to adjust its
rules). Most important of all—given that the specter of Ukraine’s NATO
membership was the precipitating cause of the war—Kyiv would need to
forswear membership and accept permanent neutrality.
Washington’s endorsement of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s
goal of recovering the “entire territory” occupied by Russia since 2014,
and Washington’s pledge, held now for more than fifteen years, that
Ukraine will become a NATO member, are major impediments to ending the
war. Make no mistake, such an accord would need to make allowances for
Russia’s security interests in what it has long called its “near-abroad”
(that is, its sphere of influence)—and, in so doing, would require the
imposition of limits on Kyiv’s freedom of action in its foreign and
defense policies (that is, on its sovereignty).
Such a compromise, guided by the ethos of the old diplomacy, would be
anathema to Washington’s ambitions and professed values. Here, again,
the lessons, real and otherwise, of the Cuban Missile Crisis apply. To
enhance his reputation for toughness, Kennedy and his closest advisers
spread the story that they forced Moscow to back down and unilaterally
withdraw its missiles in the face of steely American resolve. In fact,
Kennedy—shaken by the apocalyptic potentialities of the crisis that he
had largely provoked—secretly acceded to Moscow’s offer to withdraw its
missiles from Cuba in exchange for Washington’s withdrawing its missiles
from Turkey and Italy. The Cuban Missile Crisis was therefore resolved
not by steadfastness but by compromise.
But because that quid pro quo was successfully hidden from a
generation of foreign policy makers and strategists, from the American
public, and even from Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s own vice president,
JFK and his team reinforced the dangerous notion that firmness in the
face of what the United States construes as aggression, together with
the graduated escalation of military threats and action in countering
that aggression, define a successful national security strategy. These
false lessons of the Cuban Missile Crisis were one of the main reasons
that Johnson was impelled to confront supposed Communist aggression in
Vietnam, regardless of the costs and risks. The same false lessons have
informed a host of Washington’s interventions and regime-change wars
ever since—and now help frame the dichotomy of “appeasement” and
“resistance” that defines Washington’s response to the war in Ukraine—a
response that, in its embrace of Wilsonian belligerence, eschews
compromise and discrimination based on power, interest, and
circumstance.
Even more repellent to Washington’s self-styling as the world’s sole
superpower would be the conditions required to reach a comprehensive
European settlement in the aftermath of the Ukraine war. That
settlement, also guided by the old diplomacy, would need to resemble the
vision, thwarted by Washington, that Genscher, Mitterrand, and
Gorbachev sought to ratify at the end of the Cold War. It would need to
resemble Gorbachev’s notion of a “common European home” and Charles
de Gaulle’s vision of a European community “from the Atlantic to the
Urals.” And it would have to recognize NATO for what it is (and for what
de Gaulle labeled it): an instrument to further the primacy of a
superpower across the Atlantic.
seymourhersh |
The Ukraine government, headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, has been using
American taxpayers’ funds to pay dearly for the vitally needed diesel
fuel that is keeping the Ukrainian army on the move in its war with
Russia. It is unknown how much the Zalensky government is paying per
gallon for the fuel, but the Pentagon was paying as much as $400 per
gallon to transport gasoline from a port in Pakistan, via truck or
parachute, into Afghanistan during the decades-long American war there.
What also is unknown is that Zalensky has been buying the fuel from
Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the
Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold
millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments.
One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the
embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least; another expert
compared the level of corruption in Kiev as approaching that of the
Afghan war, “although there will be no professional audit reports
emerging from the Ukraine.”
“Zelensky’s been buying discount diesel from the Russians,” one
knowledgeable American intelligence official told me. “And who’s paying
for the gas and oil? We are. Putin and his oligarchs are making
millions” on it.
Many government ministries in Kiev have been literally “competing,” I
was told, to set up front companies for export contracts for weapons
and ammunition with private arms dealers around the world, all of which
provide kickbacks. Many of those companies are in Poland and Czechia,
but others are thought to exist in the Persian Gulf and Israel. “I
wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are others in places like the
Cayman Islands and Panama, and there are lots of Americans involved,” an
American expert on international trade told me.
The issue of corruption was directly raised with Zelensky in a
meeting last January in Kiev with CIA Director William Burns. His
message to the Ukrainian president, I was told by an intelligence
official with direct knowledge of the meeting, was out of a 1950s mob
movie. The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry
at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian
president, because “he was taking a larger share of the skim money than
was going to the generals.”
Burns also presented Zelensky with a list of thirty-five generals and
senior officials whose corruption was known to the CIA and others in
the American government. Zelensky responded to the American pressure ten
days later by publicly dismissing ten of the most ostentatious
officials on the list and doing little else. “The ten he got rid of were
brazenly bragging about the money they had—driving around Kiev in their
new Mercedes,” the intelligence official told me.
Zelensky’s half-hearted response and the White House’s lack of
concern was seen, the intelligence official added, as another sign of a
lack of leadership that is leading to a “total breakdown” of trust
between the White House and some elements of the intelligence community.
Another divisive issue, I have been repeatedly told in my recent
reporting, is the strident ideology and lack of political skill shown by
Secretary of State Tony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake
Sullivan. The president and his two main foreign policy advisers “live
in different worlds” than the experienced diplomats and military and
intelligence officers assigned to the White House;. “They have no
experience, judgment, and moral integrity. They just tell lies, make up
stories. Diplomatic deniability is something else,” the intelligence
official said. “That has to be done.”
A prominent retired American diplomat who strenuously opposes Biden’s
foreign policy toward China and Russia depicted Blinken as little more
than a “jumped-up congressional staffer” and Sullivan as “a political
campaign manager” who suddenly find themselves front and center in the
world of high-powered diplomacy “with no empathy for the opposition.
They’re decent pols,” he added, “but now we have the political and
energy world all upside down. China and India are now selling refined
gasoline to the Western world. It’s just business.”
The current crisis is not helped by the fact that Putin also is
acting irrationally. The intelligence official told me that everything
Putin has been “doing in Ukraine is counter to Russia’s long-term
interests. Emotion has overcome rationality and he’s doing things that
are totally nonproductive. And so are we going to sit down with Zelensky
and Putin and work it out? Not a chance.”
“There is a total breakdown between the White House leadership and
the intelligence community,” the intelligence official said. The rift
dates back to the fall, when, as I reported in early February, Biden
ordered the covertdestruction of the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic
Sea. “Destroying the Nord Stream pipelines was never discussed, or even
known in advance, by the community,” the official told me. “And there
is no strategy for ending the war. The US spent two years planning for
the Normandy invasion in World War II. What are we going to do if China
decides to invade Taiwan?” The official added that the National
Intelligence Council has yet to order a National Intelligence Estimate
(NIE) on defending Taiwan from China, which would provide national
security and political guidance in case such does happen. There is no
reason yet, despite repeated American political provocation from both
Democrats and Republicans, the official said, to suspect that China has
any intention of invading Taiwan. It has lost billions building its
wildly ambitious Belt and Road Initiative aimed at linking East Asia to
Europe and investing, perhaps foolishly, in seaports around the world.
“The point is,” the official told me, “there is no working NIE process
anymore.
“Burns is not the problem,” the official said. “The problem is Biden
and his principal lieutenants—Blinken and Sullivan and their court of
worshippers—who see those who criticize Zelensky as being pro-Putin. ‘We
are against evil. Ukraine will fight ’til the last military shell is
gone, and still fight.’ And here’s Biden who is telling America that
we’re going to fight as long as it takes.”
The official cited the little-known and rarely discussed deployment,
authorized by Biden, of two brigades with thousands of America’s best
army combat units to the region. A brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division
has been intensively training and exercising from its base inside
Poland within a few miles of the Ukrainian border. It was reinforced
late last year by a brigade from the 101st Airborne Division that was
deployed in Romania. The actual manpower of the two brigades, when
administrative and support units—with the trucks and drivers who haul
the constant stream of arms and military equipment flowing by sea to
keep the units combat ready—could total more than 20,000.
The intelligence officials told me that “there is no evidence that
any senior official in the White House really knows what’s going on in
the 82nd and 101st. Are they there as part of a NATO exercise or to
serve with NATO combat units if the West decides to engage Russians
units inside Ukraine? Are they there to train or to be a trigger? The
rules of engagement say they can’t attack Russians unless our boys are
getting attacked.”
“But the juniors are running the show here,” the official added.
“There’s no NSC coordination and the US army is getting ready to go to
war. There’s no idea whether the White House knows what’s going on. Has
the president gone to the American people with an informative broadcast
about what is going on? The only briefings the press and the public get
today are from White House spokespeople.
“This is not just bad leadership. There is none. Zero.” The official
added that a team of Ukrainian combat pilots are now getting trained
here in America to fly US-built F-16 fighter jets, with the goal, if
needed, of flying in combat against Russian troops and other targets
inside Ukraine.” No decision about such deployment has been made.
The clearest statements of American policy have come not from the
White House, but from the Pentagon. Army General Mark A. Milley, who is
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of the war last March 15:
“Russia remains isolated. Their military stocks are rapidly depleting.
Their soldiers are demoralized, untrained, unmotivated conscripts and
convicts, and their leadership is failing them. Having already failed in
their strategic objectives, Russia is increasingly relying on other
countries, such as Iran and North Korea. . . . This relationship is
built on the cruel bonds of repressing freedom, subverting liberty and
maintaining their tyranny. . . . Ukraine remains strong. They are
capable and trained. Ukrainian soldiers are . . . strong in their combat
units. Their tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and armored vehicles are
only going to bolster the front line.”
There is evidence that Milley is as optimistic as he sounds. I was
told that two months ago the Joint Chiefs had ordered members of the
staff—the military phrase is “tasked”—to draft an end-of-war treaty to
present to the Russians after their defeat on the Ukraine battlefield.
If worse comes to worst for the undermanned and outgunned Ukraine
army in the next few months, will the two American brigades join forces
with NATO troops and face off with the Russian army inside Ukraine? Is
this the plan, or hope, of the American president? Is this the fireside
chat he wants to give? If Biden decides to share his thoughts with the
American people, he might want to explain what two army brigades, fully
staffed and supplied, are doing so close to the war zone.
kunstler | Since banks today exist in a vast matrix of
interconnected obligations — promises to pay this-and-that — fear grows
that the rot from one bank, such as SVB, will infect many other banks
that are no longer able to keep their promises about paying
this-and-that, leading to a daisy-chain of things not getting paid. For
an economy, that’s about the same as the blood ceasing to circulate in a
body.
The practice in situations such as
this (say, as in 2008-09) is for the governing authorities — who
supposedly rule over the banking world like gods — to rush to rescue
these outfits with “liquidity,” money (or representations of it) as
required to re-balance things, or, maybe provide the impression of
re-balancing until something else can be figured out. The Jupiter and
Minerva of American banking, Jay Powell and Janet Yellen, were faced
with just that sort of call for divine intervention over the weekend as
fear seeped into every nook and crevice of the money world that wealth
was flaring away in the long-feared-of conflagration out of the dumpster
banking had become.
Sunday morning, Ms. Yellen told CBS
News “bailouts, no way” but by the afternoon Mr. Powell cried “bailouts,
way,” and they had to get their story straight. They offered up
$25-billion to bail out depositors for a smoldering system that will
arguably require a trillion dollars or more of liquidity to quench the
spreading fires. One thing looks for sure: the interest rate hikes that
Mr. Powell spoke of so confidently only days ago just got stashed into
his folder labeled “Fuggeddabowdit.” So, the campaign to control
inflation must now yield to the urgent need to create a whole lot of
money to spray over those fires.
You may have noticed that the value
of your money has been slip-sliding away the past year or so. Peanut
butter at five bucks a jar, and all. The situation at hand kind of
guarantees that we’ll be seeing a whole ole lot more of that. And then
the gods of money will have lost control of the interest rate console
altogether. No more tweaking the broken knobs. More inflation will
prompt US treasury paper holders to dump what they can while there’s
still some value to retrieve. But the US has to issue more debt for all
the bail-outs and theoretical buyers of new debt will perforce bid up
the rates to keep up with inflation… and yet the US can’t possibly bear
the burden of paying higher interest on its debt. Looks like the
business model for running the USA is breaking down before our eyes.
Luckily, Cap’n “Joe Biden” is at the
helm of this steaming garbage barge. His conference room full of
geniuses is ready with the solution to our predicament: the
long-mythologized Central Bank Digital Currency — a dream-come-true for
would be tyrants… the Godzilla of unicorns whinnying atop the biggest
rainbow of all: the promise of endless magic money for everybody,
forever. All you have to do to get it is: surrender your decision-making
power over your own life. The government will amalgamate your few
remaining assets in a CBDC account, tell you exactly what to spend it
on, and shut off your little card if you show any contrary impulses.
Well, they can try it. I doubt it will
work. Instead, the government will melt down in its own rancid puddle
of insolvency, the meta-grift will grind to an end, and it will be
everyone for his / her / they self in the broke-down Palace of Chaos for
a while… until things emergently reconstruct. But I get a little ahead
of myself. It’s not even ten o’clock on Monday morning.
simplicius76 | An important distinction has been long overdue in the making, as
pertains to a topic of much confusion and misinterpretation to a great
many people.
There’s an inherent misconception about the
conceptual differences between Soviet/Russian military systems (read:
weapons) and those of NATO/Western equivalents. Endless debate has been
made not only about which side’s weapons are ‘better’, but the doctrinal
purpose behind their respective philosophies.
The most inane of
these debates revolve around the reductive arguments that Russian
weapons are made ‘to be mass-produced’ and ‘cheap’, like some chintzy
dollar-store toy, while Western weapons are made to be high-value,
advanced, but prohibitively expensive, complexes. This is often
supported with the usual assortment of examples, like mass-produced
Russian tanks in WW2 getting killed in 10:1 ratios against the much more
advanced but fewer in number German tanks. And a generous handful of
mis-attributed quotes is then sprinkled in to justify this view. Like
Stalin’s purported “quantity has a quality of its own”, etc., not to
mention the tired references to Soviet ‘human wave’ tactics.
One need only to look at the Leopard 2 disaster that befell NATO-member Turkey, during an incursion into ISIS-controlled Syria:
The ‘top-tier’ Western tanks were picked off as easily as if they
were Saddam’s knock-off T-72 ‘Asad Babils’, presaging the types of
losses Western forces could expect against an actual peer foe with
modern weaponry.
But going back for a moment to crew
sizes, the American M777’s handed over to Ukraine require a whopping 8
man crew to operate properly. Here a ‘speedy’ Ukrainian team shows their operations on the system with all 8 positions. Meanwhile, a comparable Russian D-30 gun crew
does a breakdown in roughly the same time, but with half the men per
gun. There’s an anecdote about the Somali Battalion legend, commander
‘Givi’, who taught one of his recruits to shoot a D-20 howitzer at UA
positions in the Donetsk Airport by himself. That’s right—a single man loading, aiming, and operating the howitzer—because in Total War, necessity is the virtue which begets victory.
In
areas where it lends itself to more utility, Russia shrewdly invests in
automation, and shuns it in areas where too much of it makes logistics
operations overly reliant and vulnerable to breakdown.
Russian MBT’s (Main Battle Tanks), too, can be quickly and conveniently
snorkeled for safe underwater operation—giving them the rare ability to
traverse riverbeds.
Nobody’s blackmailing Biden to escalate in Ukraine. Ukraine has been his project going back to 2008 (and his time on the Senate Intelligence Committee likely pushes it further back). Ukraine is his personal project. His favorites from the Clinton State Department that assisted him back then all got nice promotions in his administration. The whole reason he ran in 2020 was to execute the Ukraine plan because Trump had messed it up and nobody in the field was going to be reliable enough to really run with it. Old Cornpop's a violent and angry man. He wanted more war in Yugoslavia, he was all in on Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the Spring he was publicly talking about bringing down Putin as well as informing enlisted soldiers in Poland that they’d be in Ukraine soon. If anything, people are holding Joe back. Consider the documents could be used to get Joe out of the way because Ukraine can’t be wound down as long as he’s POTUS. Per his autobiography, as a freshman senator in the mid 70s, he was introduced to the opportunities of southeast Europe by his mentor, Averell Harriman.
amgreatness |Biden and his allies have continued their vendetta against Trump, exposing his tax returns andraiding his home
for possessing documents he supposedly owed the National Archives. This
did not go over as well as Attorney General (and all-around hack)
Merrick Garland anticipated, and it seemsGarland and theJanuary 6 Committee have each decided to scale back their demands.
This is why the recent exposure of top secretdocuments in Biden’s old office, his garage, and a mysteriousthird location
suggests something is afoot. We went from a Monday disclosure to a
special counsel being appointed on Thursday. Nothing like this happens
this quickly unless it is by design.
There are, of course, ways to deal
with this situation that do not involve public exposure. Couldn’t Biden
or his staff order some FBI agents or White House people to pick them up
and take them to wherever they’re supposed to be stored?
It’s in the news because somehow his lawyers found the documents and reported them
before the story could go through White House channels. And, lawyers
being lawyers, they followed the street-lawyer rule that if someone has
to go to jail, make sure it’s your client and not you. Concerned about
individual culpability for obstruction or mishandling documents, they
made this hot potato someone else’s problem as fast as possible.
Someone is responsible for the way
this information came out, and that someone is an enemy of Biden. There
are plenty of possibilities: some secret Republicans at the Justice
Department, Kamala Harris and her people, a committee of Democratic
Party insiders concerned about Dementia Joe being president for another
four years. The whole thing has a whiff of a conspiracy, and, like the
various allegations and pretexts employed to investigate Trump, it may
very well originate in the intelligence community.
As Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) oncesaid,
“You take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday
at getting back at you.” In this instance, the hypothesis is not
completely satisfying. Biden has not really taken on the intelligence
community, so far as I can tell, unless they’re still smarting about how
he ended the Afghanistan boondoggle.
trendingpoliticsnews | “In 2018 Hunter Biden claimed he owned the house where Joe Biden kept
classified documents alongside his Corvette in the garage ,” reported
journalist Miranda Devine.
In 2018 Hunter Biden claimed he owned the house where Joe Biden kept classified documents alongside his Corvette in the garage Via @jj_talkingpic.twitter.com/L7c80MRRiS
Was this Hunter Biden’s way of funneling the money he earned with his father’s political connections back to his father?
After Hunter’s divorce was finalized in May of 2017, he was included
in an email from his business partner James Gilliar about a venture with
Chinese state-funded energy company CEFC China Energy. The email stated
that Hunter and his partners would receive 20% of the shares in the new
business, with 10% going to Hunter’s uncle James Biden and the other
10% being “held by H for the big guy.”
Tony Bobulinski, another one of Hunter’s former business partners,
claims that he had a meeting with Joe Biden regarding the CEFC venture
on May 2, 2017, and that the president was the individual referred to as
the “big guy” in Gilliar’s email. Additionally, Gilliar himself
confirmed that Joe Biden was the “big guy” mentioned in a message found
on the laptop.
The New York Post reports: “The following year, federal investigators
began looking into whether Hunter and his business associates violated
tax and money laundering laws during their dealings in China and other
countries. Emails and other records related to the deals were found on
the laptop, which Hunter dropped off at a Delaware repair shop in 2019
and never reclaimed.”
According to text messages found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, the
president’s son was on the hook for 50% of family expenses. How did
Hunter Biden get this money back to his father?
“I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this
entire family for 30 years,” a furious Hunter Biden said to his daughter
Naomi in January of 2019. “It’s really hard. But don’t worry, unlike
pop, I won’t make you give me half your salary.”
The New York Post continues:
The laptop doesn’t contain any direct evidence of such
money transfers but shows Hunter was routinely on the hook for household
expenses — including repairs to the Wilmington home.
In December 2020, weeks after his father was elected president,
Hunter Biden announced that his “tax affairs” were being investigated by
federal authorities in Delaware, and said he was “confident that a
professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that
I handled my affairs legally and appropriately.”
Recent reports have indicated investigators believe they have enough
evidence to charge the first son with tax crimes — as well as with lying
about his drug abuse on a federal form so he could buy a gun in 2018.
kunstler | Historians of the future, grilling spatchcocked plovers over their
campfires, will need not ponder for even a New York minute who started
World War Three in the rockin’ 2020s. They will point straight to the
waxy, furtive, larval figure known as “Joe Biden,” by then judged a
moral weevil of such epic low degree that he became an embarrassment to
all the other sewer-dwelling denizens of the dank DC underworld,
including the roaches, the rats, the humble shipworms eating through
sunk oaken foundations of buildings long forgotten, the writhing maggots
rinsed from a thousand restaurant dumpsters, the slithering
hellgrammites, millipedes, silverfish, pillbugs, termites, dung-beetles,
woodlice, and, not least, the scaly lawyers spawned out of the
infestation beneath K Street called Perkins Coie LLP. Even these would
loathe and disdain the thing that came into this world as “Joe Biden.”
Let us agree that the place called Ukraine was never any of America’s
business. For centuries we ignored it, through all the colorful cavalry
charges to-and-fro of Turks and Tatars, the reign of the dashing
Zaporozhian Cossacks, the cruel abuses of Stalin, then Hitler, and the
dull, gray Khrushchev-to-Yeltsin years. But then, having destroyed Iraq,
Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia and sundry other places all on a great
hegemonic lark, the professional warmongers of our land and their
catamites in Washington made Ukraine their next special project. They
engineered the 2014 coup in Kiev that ousted the elected president, Mr.
Yanyukovich, to set up a giant grifting parlor and international
money-laundromat. The other strategic aim was to prepare Ukraine for
NATO membership, which would have made it, in effect, a forward missile
base right up against Russia’s border. Because, well, Russia, Russia,
Russia!
An early beneficiary of these arrangements, you might recall, was one
Hunter Biden, the drug-addicted, sex-obsessed, no-account son of Barack
Obama’s no-account vice-president then known simply as Joe Biden sans
quote-marks — because in 2014, he was a closer approximation of a real
person than is sadly now the case. In fact, he was known as “The Big
Guy” among Hunter’s business coterie (though listed as “Pedo Peter” on
Hunter’s speed-dial). After the 2014 coup, and for years beyond, Hunter
pulled a steady revenue stream out of Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings, a
natgas distributor (among other things), serving as a know-nothing,
no-show board member. When this monkey business came to the attention of
President Trump, and he made a telephone inquiry about it, he was
instantly beset by swarms of DC swamp vermin hoisting writs of
impeachment.
Fast forward through the past eight years and you have Kiev’s
persecution of the Russian-speaking Donbas provinces, the constant
shelling and harassment by Banderite Nazis. Between that and the ever
more strident urgings for Ukraine to join NATO, President Putin of
Russia, Russia, Russia apparently had enough. In February of this year,
he started the Special Military Operation to put an end to these
hostilities. By April, when whole battalions of Ukrainian Nazis had been
exterminated, a call to peace talks was issued by Mr. Lavrov, the
Russian foreign minister. This was shot-down without ceremony by “Joe
Biden” (that is, by the junta behind him). The genius strategists in
Foggy Bottom aimed to “weaken” Russia. To what end? (you might ask).
Okay: Reasons….
Hence, many hard-fought battles on-the-ground later, Ukraine has lost
roughly 70,000 troops killed to Russia’s roughly 6,000 KIA. The USA
pours $10-billion-a-month into this venture, including missiles aplenty
and other ordnance, in a stupid effort to prolong the conflict and
bankrupt our own land. Thus, Mr. Putin has decided to stop pussyfooting
around Ukraine, and declared an upgrade in Russia’s effort to put a
conclusive end to these shenanigans. He set this forth clearly in a
sober speech Wednesday, which included a reminder to the geniuses in the
White House basement game room that Russia is a nuclear power.
“Joe Biden” (looking like the ghost of Konstantin Chernenko) answered
in a speech to the UN General Assembly the next day, a maundering
recitation of sanctimonious bluster, larded with climate hysteria to
alarm and bamboozle the UN’s scores of Third World delegates, with not a
word about any possible peace talks — because peaceful resolution of
the conflict is the last thing that our government wants. It wants war,
meaning we citizens of this land will get it, good and hard, if the
puppeteers working “Joe Biden’s” mouth get their way. Prepare to live in
an ashtray.
"It is a lunatic conspiracy theory to believe we are controlled by a secret cabal of child snuffing globalist snake human hybrids bent on microchipping all of us into slavery and then liquifying us into a tasty stew"
RT | US President Joe Biden has apparently made a 180-degree turn on the
alleged dangers posed by Donald Trump supporters, saying he doesn’t
consider his predecessor’s backers to be a threat to America.
“I don’t consider any Trump supporter to be a threat to the country,” Biden told reporters on Friday at the White House. “I
do think anyone who calls for the use of violence, fails to condemn
violence when it’s used, refuses to acknowledge an election has been
won, insists upon changing the way in which the rule you count votes,
that is a threat to democracy.”
The comment was a far cry
from the political rhetoric that Biden has used in recent days,
including a scathing speech he gave on Thursday night at Philadelphia’s
Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence was signed in
1776. He argued that “MAGA forces” – referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan – are an existential threat to American democracy.
“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic,” Biden said in the speech. He added in a Twitter post that “Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country.”
Biden
altered that message dramatically on Friday, saying he was only talking
about people who fail to condemn political violence, those who try to
manipulate electoral outcomes and those who refuse to acknowledge the
results of an election.
“When people voted for Donald Trump and support him now, they weren’t voting for attacking the Capitol,” Biden said. “They weren’t voting for overruling an election. They were voting for a philosophy he put forward.”
However, just last week, Biden likened Trump’s “MAGA philosophy” to “semi-fascism.”
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre essentially confirmed
the president’s view when challenged on his controversial attack, saying
Biden is “never going to shy away from calling out what he sees.”
Biden
is apparently trying to stoke fear of pro-Trump Republicans as this
November’s midterm congressional elections approach. But the strategy
may be risky, given reaction to past condemnations of large voting
blocs. For instance, Hillary Clinton may have helped energize her
opponent’s supporters when she said during the 2016 presidential
election that half of Trump backers belong in “the basket of deplorables.”
FoxNews | President Biden took another swipe at supporters of the Second Amendment during his speech in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.
Biden
appeared in the battleground state to tout his latest "Safer America"
agenda to promote efforts to support law enforcement and deter crime.
Biden: "He used to go down in the East Side, what they call the bucket. Highest crime rate in the country. Theres a place where I was the only white guy that worked, was a lifeguard down in that area.... you could always tell where the best basketball in the state is." pic.twitter.com/Hl3o3ZwTe3
Although his speech was primarily focused on his policies, Biden later
turned his attention towards his political opponents, attacking Republicans for opposing actions on gun control.
Specifically,
he attacked defenders of the Second Amendment who argue that the right
is necessary for self-defense against foreign enemies and a tyrannical
government.
"For
those brave right-wing Americans who say it’s all about keeping America
independent and safe, if you want to fight against the country, you
need an F-15. You need something more than a gun," Biden said.
Social media users attacked the comment for being tone-deaf and
criticizing American citizens. Others pointed out that this claim
followed the one-year anniversary of Biden’s Afghanistan pullout, where
several weapons, including F-15s, were left behind for Taliban forces.
"The
only F-15s the Taliban had when they fought against our country were
the ones Biden left in Afghanistan for them," X Strategies senior
digital strategist Greg Price tweeted.
"The president has been
saying this for years but it's less and less congruent with how even his
own administration has played out. How many F-15s did the Taliban have
when Biden decided to surrender Afghanistan to them?" The Reload founder
Stephen Gutowski wrote.
Red State deputy managing editor Brandon Morse joked, "I'd say he's
ignoring the Eric Holder ‘Fast and Furious’ scandal but it's Biden and
it's very likely that he actually forgot."
RT | The US will not be able to replace Russian uranium in the event of an
import ban, Assistant Secretary of Energy Kathryn Huff has warned,
saying Washington must develop enrichment capabilities domestically.
"Worldwide, there's not enough capacity to replace that gap from trusted sources," Huff told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday, adding that it was the US’s responsibility to “encourage and incentivize that enrichment and conversion capability” on American soil.
Huff
told the Examiner that US reliance on Russian-sourced uranium posed
unique energy security and national security risks, and noted that
Russia still provides about 20% of the low enriched uranium at existing
US reactors.
“We have the largest nuclear fleet in the world,
and we currently do not have the capability to provide fuel for all of
our reactors,” she said, claiming that Russia is “no longer a trustworthy source of our fuel, and we need to find alternatives here and build up that supply chain.”
Russia reportedly accounted for 16.5% of the uranium imported into
the US in 2020 and 23% of the enriched uranium needed to power the
country’s commercial nuclear reactors. Currently there is nowhere else
to turn to fill the gap if uranium imports are banned, Huff said.
Legislation
before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee would indeed
ban Russian uranium imports, just as Congress previously banned imports
of Russian fossil fuels following the launch of Moscow’s military
offensive in Ukraine in February.
Huff, who has a PhD in nuclear engineering, said a "tiger team" at the energy department was currently strategizing how to expand the domestic supply chain.
US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has also previously called Washington's reliance on imports from Moscow a "vulnerability" for economic and national security.
The
US maintains the capacity to mine uranium, but relies heavily on Russia
for enrichment. Kick-starting the domestic uranium industry is not a
simple process, the department said previously, given that the country
has only one commercial enrichment facility remaining — a plant run by
British-German-Dutch consortium Urenco in New Mexico.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
