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    Is Biden's "Success" Our mess?

   Victor Davis Hanson / May 20, 2022

      If an administration deliberately wished to cause havoc on the
  border, to ensure fuel was nearly unaffordable, to create a crime
  wave, to spark 1970s hyperinflation, and to rekindle racial tensions
  what would it have done differently than what President Joe Biden
  has done?
      So is Biden malicious, incompetent, or a wannabe left-wing
  ideologue?
      When pressed about inflation and fuel price hikes, Biden either
  blames someone or something else, gets mad at the questioner, or
  claims former President Donald Trump did it.
      His administration apparently believes things are going well
  and according to plan.
      When polls disagree, his team either believes the American peo-
  ple are brainwashed or that they themselves have not supplied suf-
  ficient propaganda. So they never pivot or compromise, but rededi-
  cate themselves to continued failure.
      Why? Apparently, what most in the country see as disasters,
  Biden envisions as success.
      Take the border—or rather its disappearance.
      Never in U.S. history has an administration simply canceled im-
  migration laws, opened the border, and welcomed in millions of il-
  legal aliens. All arrive illegally, and without audit, or vaccina-
  tions and tests in times of a pandemic.
      Cartels now import lethal drugs at will into the United States.
  We have no idea how many terrorists walk across the border each day.
      Almost all the entering millions who break the law are poor,
  without high school diplomas or English skills, and in dire need of
  massive federal and state housing, food, education, legal, and
  health subsidies.
      Do the leftists in Washington believe that millions of dependent
  new residents will look to the left for decades of support and soon
  find ways to reciprocate with fealty at the polls? Is that why Demo-
  crats brag in unapologetic tribalist fashion about changing the de-
  mography of the electorate?
      Former President Barack Obama’s energy secretary-designate
  Steven Chu once gaffed in the 2008 campaign when he openly wished
  that U.S. gas prices would reach European levels.
      In truth, the left has always believed the only way to achieve
  its objectives of discouraging driving, forcing middle-class Ameri-
  cans onto trains and buses, and persuading them to live in urban
  high-rises rather than drive carbon-spewing cars from spacious sub-
  urban ranch-style homes was to encourage high fuel prices.
      Is that agenda why Biden, during the current energy crisis,
  simply canceled new federal oil and gas leases? As diesel hits $7 a
  gallon in California, why else did he refuse to finish the Keystone
  XL pipeline or reopen Alaskan oil fields?
      Inflation continues officially to exceed 8% per annum. Most
  consumers feel it is double that when they pay for food, fuel,
  building materials, houses, or rent—the essential stuff of life.
      What did the Biden administration expect would follow from keep-
  ing real interest rates at near zero, while printing trillions of
  dollars at the moment supplies were short and demand was spiking?
      Or did it think inflation more fairly “spreads the wealth”? Does
  it prompt new necessary attacks on “corporate greed”? Does it demand
  more federal intervention and socialist policies?
      If inflation is “bad” for most, it may not seem so to this left-
  wing administration.
      Violent crime is on its way to 1970s levels. The combination of
  defunding the police, radical city and county prosecutors who don’t
  charge or lock up criminals, and emptying jails and prisons have
  ignited a national crime wave.
      The Biden administration shrugs. It offers no new federal help
  to fund more police or charge freed criminals under applicable fed-
  eral statutes.
      Does it think it is more socially just to let criminals free
  than incarcerate them?
      Does it buy into “critical legal theory” that laws do not re-
  flect ancient ideas of right and wrong, but instead are “construct-
  ted" by the privileged to oppress the already oppressed?
      Is what Americans see as dangerous crime something the Biden
  zealots applaud as tough social karma?
      Americans are tired of the new woke tribalism. Judging indi-
  viduals on the basis of their race, gender, or superficial appear-
  ance is amoral, and contrary to the entire civil rights movement, 
  and the U.S. Constitution.
      It destroys any idea of meritocracy and divides the country
  artificially into supposed victims and victimizers.
      But do the Biden people see it that way?
      Or do they promote racial tensions and tribalism, as welcome
  revolutionary fervor?
      In that regard, the Bidenites promote identity politics as a
  good way to stir up the pot, to demonize supposed oppressors and
  deify the oppressed—all as a way of retaining political power. For
  the left, living in a socialist nation controlled by an elite is far
  preferable to living in a free and prosperous one answerable only
  to the people.
      The public believes the Biden administration has failed America,
  with disastrous results due either to its incompetence, belliger-
  ence, or left-wing zealotry.
      But Biden and his delusional team seem delighted with what they
  have wrought.

      In sum, what Americans see as an abject catastrophe, they cheer
  on as a stunning and planned success.
      Thank you, Victor
******
      SO, my hope is that Americans will learn from our previous dis-
  asterous experiences with liberal attempts to destroy our economy
  and use that to rebuild what Trump started and with God's grace
  we WILL Make America Great Again.

  Conservatively,
  John

      Green Energy and EVs are not a good plan.

      Batteries, they do not make electricity – they store electricity
  produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered
  plants, or diesel-fueled generators.  So, to say an EV is a zero-
  emission vehicle is not at all valid.
      Also, since forty percent of the electricity generated in the
  U.S. is from coal-fired plants, it follows that forty percent of the
  EVs on the road are coal-powered, do you see?"
      Einstein's formula, E=MC2, tells us it takes the same amount of
  energy to move a five-thousand-pound gasoline-driven automobile a
  mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what pro-
  duces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the
  battery is only the storage device, like a gas tank in a car.
      There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use.
  The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and
  lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium,
  silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically.
  Please note they all contain toxic, heavy metals.
      Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials,
  usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium. The
  United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year,
  and most are not recycled; they end up in landfills. California is
  the only state which requires all batteries be recycled. If you throw
  your small, used batteries in the trash, here is what happens to them.
      All batteries are self-discharging.  That means even when not in
  use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. You have likely ruined a
  flashlight or two from an old, ruptured battery. When a battery runs
  down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead;
  well, it is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity.
  As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the bat-
  tery's metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left in-
  side then ooze out. The ooze in your ruined flashlight is toxic, and
  so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a
  landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes recharge-
  able batteries longer to end up in the landfill.
      In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones
  used in automobiles, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about
  those is, ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we do
  not yet know how to recycle single-use ones properly.
      But that is not half of it.  For those of you excited about elec-
  tric cars and a green revolution, I want you to take a closer look at
  batteries and also windmills and solar panels. These three technolo-
  gies share what we call environmentally destructive production costs. 
      A typical EV battery weighs one thousand pounds, about the size
  of a travel trunk.  It contains twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty
  pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds cobalt, 200
  pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminum, steel, and plastic.
  Inside are over 6,000 individual lithium-ion cells.
      It should concern you that all those toxic components come from
  mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must
  process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore
  for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds
  of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's
  crust for just - one - battery."
      Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of
  a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution con-
  trols, and they employ children who die from handling this toxic ma-
  terial. Should we factor in these diseased kids as part of the cost
  of driving an electric car?"
      I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. California is building
  the largest battery in the world near San Francisco, and they intend
  to power it from solar panels and windmills. They claim this is the
  ultimate in being 'green,' but it is not.  This construction project
  is creating an environmental disaster.  Let me tell you why.
      The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to
  process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure
  enough silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sul-
  furic acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and
  acetone. In addition, they also need gallium, arsenide, copper-indium
  -gallium- di selenide, and cadmium-telluride, which also are highly
  toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot
  be recycled.
      Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental
  destruction. Each weighs 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and
  contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron,
  24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium,
  praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and
  will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We can-
  not recycle used blades.
      There may be a place for these technologies, but you must look
  beyond the myth of zero emissions.  
      "Going Green" may sound like the Utopian ideal but when you look
  at the hidden and embedded costs realistically with an open mind,
  you can see that Going Green is more destructive to the Earth's en-
  vironment than meets the eye, for sure.
  Anonymous contributor.

      Electric vehicles are a danger to the environment well above
  that of a gas powered vehicle.
      Imagine getting into a serious accident and being pinned under
  a half ton of toxic chemicals.
      Please don't fall for this scam being forced on the people who 
  have trusted the corrupt media for years.
      We must pray that this mess is stopped and God will heal our
  land.

  Conservatively,
  John

    Last Days of the Republic: Leftist Policies Could Push America
to Its Breaking Point
Victor Davis Hanson / @VDHanson / May 13, 2022

    In President Joe Biden’s America, the traditional bedrocks of the
American system—a stable economy, energy independence, law enforce-
ment, hallowed universities—are dissolving.
Americans are now entering uncharted, revolutionary territory.
    They may witness things over the next five months that once would
have seemed unimaginable.

    Until the Ukrainian conflict, we had never witnessed a major land
war inside Europe directly involving a nuclear power.
In desperation, Russia’s impaired and unhinged leader, Russian
President Vladimir Putin, now talks trash about the likelihood of
nuclear war.

    79-year-old President Joe Biden bellows back that his war-losing
nuclear adversary is a murderer, a war criminal, and a butcher who
should be removed from power.

    After a year of politicizing the U.S. military and its self-in-
duced catastrophe in Afghanistan, America has lost deterrence abroad.
China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia are conniving how best to ex-
ploit this rare window of global military opportunity.

    The traditional bedrocks of the American system—a stable economy,
energy independence, vast surpluses of food, hallowed universities,
a professional judiciary, law enforcement, and a credible criminal
justice system—are dissolving.

    Gas and diesel prices are hitting historic levels. Inflation is
at a 40-year high. New cars and homes are unaffordable. The necessary
remedy of high interest and tight money will be almost as bad as the
disease of hyperinflation.

    There is no southern border.

    Expect over 1 million foreign nationals to swarm this summer into
the United States without audit, COVID-19 testing, or vaccination.
None will have any worry of consequences for breaking U.S. immigra-
tion law.

    Police are underfunded and increasingly defunded. District at-
torneys deliberately release violent criminals without charges.
(Literally 10,000 people witnessed a deranged man with a knife attack
comedian Dave Chappelle on stage at the Hollywood Bowl last week, and
the Los Angeles County district attorney refused to press felony
charges.) Murder and assault are spiraling. Carjacking and smash-and
-grab thefts are now normal big-city events.
    Crime is now mostly a political matter. Ideology, race, and poli-
tics determine whether the law is even applied.

    Supermarket shelves are thinning, and meats are now beyond the
budgets of millions of Americans. An American president—in a first
—casually warns of food shortages. Baby formula has disappeared from
many shelves.

    Politics are resembling the violent last days of the Roman Re-
public. An illegal leak of a possible impending Supreme Court rever-
sal of Roe v. Wade that would allow state voters to set their own
abortion laws has created a national hysteria.

    Never has a White House tacitly approved mobs of protesters
showing up at Supreme Court justices’ homes to rant and bully them
into altering their votes.

    *There is no free speech any more on campuses.*

    *Merit is disappearing. Admissions, hiring, promotion, retention,
grading, and advancement are predicated increasingly on mouthing the
right orthodoxies or belonging to the proper racial, gender, or
ethnic category.*

    When the new campus commissariat finally finishes absorbing the
last redoubts in science, math, engineering, medical, and profes-
sional schools, America will slide into permanent mediocrity and
irreversible declining standards of living.

    *What happened?

    Remember all these catastrophes are self-induced. They are
choices, not fate. The U.S. has the largest combined gas, coal,
and oil deposits in the world. It possesses the know-how to build
the safest pipelines and to ensure the cleanest energy development
on the planet.

    Inflation was a deliberate Biden choice. For short-term politi-
cal advantage, he kept printing trillions of dollars, incentivizing
labor nonparticipation, and keeping interest rates at historical
lows—at a time of pent-up global demand.

    The administration wanted no border. Only that way can politi-
cized, impoverished immigrants repay left-wing undermining of the
entire legal immigration system with their fealty at the ballot box.

    Once esoteric, crack-pot academic theories—“modern monetary
theory,” critical legal theory, critical race theory—now dominate
policymaking in the Biden administration.

    The common denominator in all of this is ideology overruling
empiricism, common sense, and pragmatism. Ruling elites would rather
be politically correct failures and unpopular than politically in-
correct, successful, and popular.

    Is that not the tired story of left-wing revolutionaries from
18th-century France to early 20th-century Russia to the contemporary
disasters in Cuba and Venezuela?

    The American people reject the calamitous policies of 2021-2022.
Yet the radical cadres surrounding a cognitively inert Biden still
push them through by executive orders, bureaucratic directives, and
deliberate Cabinet nonperformance.

    Why? The left has no confidence either in constitutional govern-
ment or common sense.
    So as the public pushes back, expect at the ground level more
doxing, cancel culture, deplatforming, ministries of disinformation,
swarming the private homes of officials they target for bullying, and
likely violent demonstrations in our streets this summer.

    Meanwhile, left-wing elites will do their best to ignore Supreme
Court decisions, illegally cancel student debts, and likely by the
fall issue more COVID-19 lockdowns. They will still dream of packing
the court, ending the filibuster, scrapping the Electoral College,
adding more states, and flooding the November balloting with hundreds
of millions more dollars of dark money from Silicon Valley.

    When revolutionaries undermine the system, earn the antipathy of
the people, and face looming disaster at the polls, it is then they
prove most dangerous—as we shall see over the next few months.
***************
    This is not an accident. No one could be this hate-filled and 
lack and morals or empathy for this country or the citizenry.
    We have to find a way to stop this evil. 
    Pray for God's grace and guidance before it is too late.

Conservatively,
John

    Losing the People? Then Change the Rules
    Victor Davis Hanson / @VDHanson / May 05, 2022
****
    Court-packing—the attempt to enlarge the size of the Supreme
Court for short-term political purposes—used to be a dirty word in
the history of American jurisprudence.

    The tradition of a nine-person Supreme Court is now 153 years
old. The last attempt to expand it for political gain was President
Franklin Roosevelt’s failed effort in 1937. FDR’s gambit was so
blatantly political that even his overwhelming Democratic majority
in Congress rebuffed him.

    Yet now “court packing” is a law school cause celebre. It is
hailed as a supposedly quick fix to reverse the current 5-4 conser-
vative majority.

    Recently, a rough draft of an opinion purportedly overturning
the Roe v. Wade decision that had legalized abortion in all 50 states
was leaked to the media by someone inside the court.

    That insider leak of a draft opinion was a first in the modern
history of the Supreme Court. It violated all court protocols. Yet it
was met with stunning approval from the American left.

    The leaker either intended to create a preemptive public backlash
against the purported court majority in the hope that one or two jus-
tices might cave and switch under pressure—or to gin up the progres-
sive base to fend off a likely disaster in the November midterm
elections.

    The recent leak, however, is consistent with a left-wing assault
on the court that has intensified over the last five years. Democrats
have gone ballistic ever since former President George W. Bush’s and
especially former President Donald Trump’s appointees solidified a
conservative majority.

    During Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in 2018, pro-
testers stormed the Senate chambers in protest. The left rallied
behind the now-convicted felon Michael Avenatti, who publicized
crazy, wildly untrue charges about a teenaged Kavanagh.

    Later in spring 2020, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., whipped up a
protest crowd right in front of the Supreme Court. He directly
threatened Justices Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh:
  (I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you
have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You won’t
know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.)

    What exactly did Schumer mean by “you will pay the price” or
“you won’t know what hit you”?

Who or what would hit the two justices—and how exactly?

    But it is not just the court the left is targeting. Long-standing
institutions and even constitutional directives are now fair game.

    At the 2020 funeral of Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., former President
Barack Obama crudely proposed bringing in Puerto Rico and Washington,
D.C., as states—and with them likely four left-wing senators.

    Obama’s “eulogy” also damned the 180-year-old Senate filibuster.
Yet as a senator, Obama himself resorted to the filibuster in an ef-
fort to block the nomination of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

    The Electoral College is under continued assault, especially
since Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016 were elected without winning the
popular vote.

    The Founders’ arguments for the Electoral College are never men-
tioned. But the drafters of the Constitution felt it forced candi-
dates to visit rural areas. They believed it would discourage Euro-
pean-style multiple splinter parties. It made voter fraud more dif-
ficult on a national scale. And it emphasized the United States of
America. That is, America today is 50 unique states that are repre-
sented as such in presidential elections.

    The Biden administration also narrowly failed to push through a
national voting law. Such legislation would have superseded the
states’ constitutional rights to set most of their own balloting
protocols in national elections.

    So what is behind leaking Supreme Court drafts of impending
opinions, or seeking to pack the Supreme Court with 15 justices, or
ending the Senate filibuster, or adding two more states to the 60-
year-old, 50-state union, or curtailing states’ rights to set their
own balloting procedures, or trashing the Constitution’s Electoral
College?

    The answer to those questions also applies to President Joe
Biden’s promise to cancel millions of contracted federally guaran-
teed student loans simply by a pre-midterm election executive fiat.

    And how can Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas open-
ly negate federal immigration law? How can he welcome millions to
cross illegally the southern border?

    The answers are obvious.

    The hard left had detoured from the mainstream of American voters
onto a radical trajectory. So it will never find 51% public approval
for any of its current extremist and crackpot initiatives.

    Instead, it sees success only through altering the rules of go-
vernance or changing the demography of the electorate—or both.

    Still, leftists should be careful about what they wish for.

    Latinos are historically transforming en masse into conservative
voters.

    Leftists are also greenlighting powerful precedents for the next
Republican president. He may follow their lead by simply changing any
rules, laws, customs, and traditions anytime he deems them
inconvenient.
****
    These are evil enemies of America and we must pray to God that He
will deliver us from evil. Pray without ceasing.

Conservatively,
John

    The Green Immoralists

Victor Davis Hanson / March 10, 2022

    Thousands are dying from Russian missiles and bombs in the
suburbs of Ukraine.
    In response, the Biden administration’s climate change envoy,
multimillionaire and private jet-owning John Kerry, laments that
Russian President Vladimir Putin might no longer remain his partner
in reducing global warming.
    “You’re going to lose people’s focus,” Kerry frets. “You’re
going to lose big-country attention because they will be diverted,
and I think it could have a damaging impact.”

    “Impact”?

    Did the global moralist Kerry mean by “impact” the over 650
Russian missiles that impacted Ukrainian buildings and tore apart
children?
    Are Russian soldiers losing their green “focus”? When Putin
threatens nuclear war is he merely “diverted”? Would letting off a
few nukes be “damaging” to the human environment?
    Climate change moralists love humanity so much in the abstract
that they must shut down its life-giving gas, coal, and oil in the
concrete. And they value humans so little that they don’t worry in
the here and now that ensuing fuel shortages and exorbitant costs
cause wars, spike inflation, and threaten people’s ability to travel
or keep warm.
    The Biden administration stopped all gas and oil production in
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge region of Alaska. It ended all
new federal leases for drilling. It is canceling major new pipelines.
    It is leveraging lending agencies not to finance oil and gas
drilling.
    It helped force the cancellation of the EastMed pipeline that
would have brought much-needed natural gas to southern Europe. And it
has in just a year managed to turn the greatest oil and gas producer
in the history of the world into a pathetic global fossil-fuel 
beggar.
    Now gas is heading to well over $5 a gallon. In over-regulated
blue states, it will likely hit $7.
    But how will the Biden administration square the circle of its
own ideological war against oil and natural gas versus handing the 
advantage to our oil- and gas-producing enemies, as Russia invades
Ukraine?
    Or put another way, when selfish theory hits deadly reality, who
loses? Answer: the American people.
    President Joe Biden lifted U.S. sanctions on the Russian-German
Nord Stream 2 pipeline designed to provide green Germany with loath-
some, but lifesaving, natural gas.
    But first Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline in the United
States. He has no problem with pipelines per se, just American ones.
    While Biden doesn’t like the idea of Germany burning carbon fuel,
or Putin reaping enormous profits from Berlin’s self-created depen-
dency, or Germans importing liquified natural gas from America, Biden
also does not like the idea of forcing German families to turn off
their thermostats in mid-winter when there is Russian-fed war not far
from Germany’s borders.
    Here at home, Biden gets even crazier. As our enemies around the
world reap huge profits from record high oil and gas prices, did
Biden ask Alaska, North Dakota, or Texas to ramp up production?
    In other words, did he ask Americans to save fellow cash-strapped
Americans from a self-created energy crisis, in the way he assured
the Germans that during war reality trumps theory?
    *Not at all.

    Instead, Biden came up with the most lunatic idea in recent dip-
lomatic history of begging autocratic and hostile regimes the world
over to pump more oil to lower America’s gas prices.
    For years, America has sanctioned the oil-rich Venezuelan dicta-
torship, a narco-terrorist state that wars on its own people and its
neighbors. Now Biden is begging strongman Venezuelan dictator Nicolas
Maduro to pump the supposedly dirty fuels America has in even greater
abundance but finds it too icky to produce.
    Biden also has beseeched the once sanctioned, terrorist Iranian
government. He wants Tehran to help us out by upping the very oil and
gas production that America has tried to curtail for years. So, in
return, Iran is demanding a new “Iran deal” that will soon ensure the
now petro-rich theocracy the acquisition of nuclear weapons.
    On the eve of the Russian invasion, Biden begged Putin to pump
even more oil to supplement its current Russian imports to the United
States.
    Did Putin see that surreal request as another sign of American
appeasement that might greenlight his upcoming planned invasion? In
Russian eyes, was it more proof of American weakness and craziness
after the humiliating flight from Afghanistan?
    Biden has blasted the human rights record of Saudi Arabia’s royal
family. Now he is begging the monarchy to pump more of its despised
carbon-spewing oil to make up for what his administration shut down
at home. Is that why the Saudi royals refused to take his call?

    *The moral of Biden’s oil madness?

    Elite ideology divorced from reality impoverishes people and can
get them killed.
By Victor Davis Hanson

    This was a good article to share though it is over 2 months old.
    Mr. V. Hanson is one of my favorites. Enjoy
    Put your faith in God and Pray that He will have mercy on the US

Conservatively,
John

    Biden's Budget Lies
  Terence Jeffrey / March 30, 2022
    President Joe Biden claims his budget is fiscally responsible.
    But it spends over $1 trillion a year more than it takes in over
the next 10 years, driving Americans deeper into debt. 

    “Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”

    When releasing his fiscal year 2023 budget proposal on Monday,
President Joe Biden said this was something his father had told him.
He then made a claim about a “value” his budget proposal purpor-
tedly advances.
    “The first value is fiscal responsibility,” Biden said.
    That is a lie.
    In his speech, Biden elaborated on this lie.
    “The previous administration, as you all know, ran up record bud-
get deficits. In fact, the deficit went up every year under my pre-
decessor,” he said.
    “My administration is turning that around,” Biden continued.
“Last year,” he said, “we cut the deficit by more than $350 bil-
lion. This year, we’re on track to cut the deficit by more than $1.3
trillion. $1.3 trillion. That would be the largest one-year reduction
in the deficit in U.S. history.”
    But what do the Treasury’s official numbers actually tell us
about the recent history of federal spending and deficits?
    In the first three years of the Trump administration, the deficit
grew—but never exceeded $1 trillion. In fiscal year 2017, it was
$665,826,000,000. In fiscal year 2018, it was $778,996,000,000. In
fiscal year 2019, it was $984,388,000,000.
    To be sure, these were very high deficits. But they were less
than what Biden has planned for post-COVID-19 America.
    In fiscal year 2019, before the pandemic, the federal government
spent $4,446,611,000,000. But, in fiscal year 2020, with the pandemic
on, federal spending climbed to $6,551,872,000,000—a one-year in-
crease of $2,105,261,000,000. The deficit that year jumped to a re-
cord $3,131,917,000,000.
    In fiscal year 2021, the fiscal year in which Biden took office,
government spending increased again to $6,821,532,000,000 and the
deficit was $2,775,553,000,000.
    This decline in the deficit from a pandemic-period record of
$3,131,917,000,000 to a still astronomical $2,775,553,000,000 is what
Biden was talking about when he said, “Last year, we cut the deficit
by more than $350 billion.”
    This year, the administration estimates the deficit will be
$1,415,000,000,000. That is what Biden meant when he said, “This
year, we’re on track to cut the deficit by more than $1.3 trillion.”
    Now, Biden has proposed a budget that projects continuing annual
deficits of more than $1 trillion—in the post-pandemic era.
    He will not bring the deficit back down, for example, to the
$778,996,000,000 deficit that the federal government ran in fiscal
year 2018, which was the first full fiscal year President Donald
Trump was in office.
    As of Monday, the total federal debt was $30,316,415,445,123.62.
Of that, $6,512,008,255,649.32 was in what the Treasury calls
“intragovernmental holdings.” That consists largely of money the
Treasury has borrowed from the Social Security trust fund to pay
current expenses that have nothing to do with Social Security.
    The other $23,804,407,189,474.30 in federal debt consists of what
the Treasury calls “debt held by the public.” This is debt that has
been financed through the sale of Treasury securities.
    Under Biden’s budget proposal, what is going to happen to this
$23.8 trillion in “debt held by the public”? Will it be paid off? No.
Will it be paid down? No.
    According to Table S-10 in Biden’s proposal, it is going to grow
to $39.542 trillion by 2032. That is an increase of approximately
$15.738 trillion from what the debt was Monday.
    In fiscal year 2023, according to the estimates Biden published
in Table S-10 of his budget proposal, the federal debt held by the
public will grow by $1.197 trillion. In each of the nine years after
that, it will grow by increasing amounts. In 2032, the last year es-
timated in Biden’s budget, the debt will increase by $1.815 trillion.
    “The value is fiscal responsibility,” Biden told America when he
released this budget.
    Anyone who actually looks at Biden’s budget proposal, which is
posted on the White House website, will know this is not true.
    As of March 29, the day after Biden released his proposal, the
U.S. population is 332,589,749, according to the Census Bureau.
    Biden’s plan to increase the federal debt held by the public by
$15.738 trillion would add approximately $47,320 in debt on behalf of
every person now living in this country.
    The total federal debt held by the public of $39,542,000,000,000
that Biden now projects for 2032 would equal approximately $181,891
for each of the 332,589,749 people now living in the country.
    That also would be approximately $250,707 for each of the
157,722,000 people in the United States who, according to the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, actually had a job as of February of this year.
And it would equal approximately $300,002 for each of the
131,806,000 who worked full time in February.
    According to Zillow, the value of a typical home in the United
States in January 2021, when Biden took office, was $272,000. (It has
now increased to $331,533.)
    According to Harvard University’s website, the 2021-22 school
year there will cost a student approximately $74,528 for tuition,
fees, board, and room. At that rate, four full years at Harvard would
cost $298,112.

    In other words, under Biden’s budget projections, in just 10 yrs,
the share of the federal debt per the current number of full-time
workers in this country will be approximately equivalent to the
current cost of a typical American home or a Harvard education.

    "I think it is obvious that Biden has no clue as to what his
handlers are doing behind his back or while he weekends in Delaware.
    I fear that we are experiencing 'elder abuse' on a daily basis
and only God can save our nation..

Conservatively,
John

    It was never "Don't say gay."

    It’s Not a ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Law. It’s an Anti-Indoctrination Law.
Douglas Blair / April 12, 2022

    LGBT activists deliberately misrepresent what Florida's new
Parental Rights in Education law does and doesn't do. 
    The radical left just can’t stop talking about Florida Gov. Ron
DeSantis’ anti-“grooming” law.  
    The left’s warped worldview prevents them from understanding why
DeSantis signed Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill into law
March 28, or why parents don’t want their children being indoctri-
nated into LGBT ideology. 
    The rabid response to the bill’s passage has been just as tell-
ing as the left’s initial opposition.  
    Consider Hollywood’s response at the Oscars on March 27, the
night before DeSantis signed the bill. Hosts Wanda Sykes, Amy Schu-
mer and Regina Hall opened the awards telecast by saying, “We’re
going to have a great night tonight—and for you people in Florida, 
going to have a gay night." They then repeated the word “gay” over
and over again.  
    Similarly, a new ad campaign from New York Mayor Eric Adams saw
several billboards erected in Florida cities such as Orlando, Tampa,
and West Palm Beach aimed at luring LGBT Americans to move to
Gotham.  
    One billboard features the text “Come to the city where you can
say whatever you want,” surrounded by the word “gay” in bright,
colorful letters. Another billboard reads: “People say a lot of
ridiculous things in New York. ‘Don’t Say Gay’ isn’t one of them.” 
    It’s comical how one-dimensional this line of attack is. In a
childish criticism of genuine parental concern, woke activists ac-
cuse anyone in favor of the new Florida law of trying to ban the
word “gay” from the collective vocabulary.  
    More insidiously, they claim that trying to ban classroom in-
struction of LGBT topics to young kids in kindergarten through
third grade is the same as banning gay people from existing at all.

    That’s a lie. 

    Americans concerned with LGBT indoctrination in schools don’t
want to ban gays from existing or saying the word “gay.” Their con-
cern lies squarely with activists in classrooms grooming children. 
    Try as they might to pretend this type of wildly inappropriate
instruction isn’t happening, the radical left can’t resist showing
their hand.  
    Starting in September, New Jersey’s first graders will be re-
quired to learn about gender identities, and how boys can be girls
if they want.  
    A lesson plan, titled “Pink, Blue, and Purple,” would have stu-
dents “discuss the range of ways people express their gender and
how gender-role stereotypes may limit behavior.”   
    The lesson plan suggests teachers tell students that their bio-
logical sex doesn’t matter, and that they can identify as  however
they feel. 
    “You might feel like you are a boy; you might feel like you are
a girl,” New Jersey’s lesson plan reads. “You might feel like you’re
a boy even if you have body parts that some people might tell you
are ‘girl’ parts. You might feel like you’re a girl even if you have
body parts that some people might tell you are ‘boy’ parts.” 
    This is the sort of indoctrination that the Florida law is try-
to explicitly avoid. It’s not the word “gay,” nor is it gay peo-
plein the wider world. It’s leftists infecting kids’ classrooms
with LGBT propaganda and grooming your child before he or she can
understand what’s happening.  
    Thankfully, Americans are beginning to wake up to the rot inflic-
ted by gender ideology. And as much as the left tries to pretend
that concerned parents are just homophobic bigots and that Florida’s
legislation is aimed at denying gays exist, that argument just does
not hold water.  
    Polling data from Politico shows that a majority of Americans
favor banning the teaching of gender identity and sexual orienta-
tion to kids from kindergarten through third grade. That number in-
cludes 46% of independents who also support the ban, making it dif-
ficult to claim this is an effort led purely by “evil” Republicans. 

    The “Don’t Say Gay” label is unfair. The bill stipulates no such
thing.
    Leftists should feel free to say, shout, or whisper the word
“gay” as much as they want. Just leave the kids out of it. 
    D. Blair

    So it seems that the Left feed the media their made-up lies and
then expect everyone to believe it. Most Democrats have a long and
notorious reputation for lying their way through their terms and
time in DC. 
    If they get caught, they blame Republicans for what they were
actually doing.
    They also have a habit of expecting everyone to be dumb enough
to repeat the same thing, often expecting a different result.
    The stunt they pulled in 2020 will assuredly come back to haunt
them this coming November. Just watch.
    Pray the God will heal our land by giving them enough rope to
hang themselves this time.

Conservatively,
John

    Eye Surgeries

    At the end of March, I had eye surgery on my right eye for
Pterygium. (Look it up)
    It required me to keep my eye bandaged for several days and 
an eye protector at night for 2 weeks.
    The surgery was successful but painful for almost 2 weeks as
the growth was large and almost invasive into my line of sight
    I will be having the left eye done in a couple of weeks but
this eye is nowhere near as bad but it hindered my ability to look
into the computer screen for long.
    I am still putting special drops in my eye for a couple more
days and all should be well until early May.
    Last year I had cataract surgery so I will have it all taken 
care of by the end of May.
    This growing old is not for the faint of heart.
    Have a blessed day and stay safe and may God continue to bless
our land and delivery us from all evil.

Conservatively,
John

    The state of Joe Biden’s United States
By Brooke Rollins in The Washington Times

    President Biden delivered his first State of the Union address
this week, and its theatrics proved a testament to his disastrous
first year in office. Frightened by the twin specters of continued
protests against draconian COVID-19 mandates and general American
disapproval, his administration caused the United States Capitol to
be ringed with new fencing — and they’ve put the National Guard on
alert. Perhaps nothing synopsizes the capsizing vessel that is the
Biden White House than this: They’re building a fortress around the
seat of the American people’s government but refuse to protect our
nation’s southern border.
    The sense of dread felt by the president’s apparatus is justified
because Americans deeply dislike the president. A pair of new polls
tell the tale.
    One of them, from NBC/PBS NewsHour/Marist, puts the president at
a mere 39% approval. That approval number is smaller than the lone
strong-disapproval cohort, which sits at 41% — with 55% disapproving
at large. All the subject-matter indicators are similarly bad. Only
36% approve of Mr. Biden’s economic record. A stunning 67%, more than
two-thirds of Americans, believe the country is going in the wrong
direction.
    Among Americans at large, 56% consider his first year in office
to be a failure. That last numbers gets more interesting when you
break it down: Mr. Biden’s first year is a failure according to 61%
of whites, 28% of Blacks and 56% of Hispanics. Every single age and
area cohort puts up a majority believing he’s failed.

    We should pause here to reflect on what these figures mean. Sent-
iment figures are not predictive of election or candidate-preference
outcomes, but they are suggestive. What these numbers suggest, espec-
ially as the president is the de facto stand-in for national Demo-
crats, is that Democrats won’t win nationally again for a generation.
    This may seem like hyperbole, but the numbers alone bear it on the
race/ethnicity figures. A Democratic candidate who loses more than a
quarter of the black vote, and a majority of the Hispanic vote, isn’t
going anywhere. A Democratic candidate who squanders the usual Demo-
cratic advantage among young voters isn’t going anywhere.
    An alert observer might note that this is consistent with the
unfolding reorientation of the Democratic coalition toward a mostly
white, mostly college-educated core demographic. That’s probably ac-
curate. But that even among them, Biden’s year-one failure is stark:
He loses a majority of men and musters only a plurality among women.
This is a coalition in collapse.
    The other poll, from WaPo/ABC, offers even worse news in its
approval rating for the president. It sits at a historic low of 37%.
    A figure this low in the era of modern polling usually represents
the nadir of a president’s fortunes. It also usually requires some-
thing catastrophic to have occurred that imparts upon the Nation a
sense of humiliation. That’s why, according to Gallup’s numbers,
President Lyndon B. Johnson got into this territory after Tet, and
President Ronald Reagan got into it after the Beirut massacre. Mr.
Biden has his own foreign-policy disasters to answer for — chief
among them the American defeat in Afghanistan and the failure to
prevent the Russian war upon Ukraine — but that is hardly the whole
bill of indictment against him.
    This second poll also illuminates the first’s picture of a col-
lapsing Democratic coalition with sentiment numbers speaking directly
to their likely electoral consequences. With midterm elections ra-
pidly approaching, Americans prefer Republican control of Congress by
a bare majority. They intend to vote for a Republican Congressional
candidate by a seven-point plurality. They give the Republicans just
shy of a 20-point advantage in efficacy on the economy.

    What does all this mean? A presidential-approval rating isn’t a
baseball score. It signifies something consequential — not just about
the state of the president, but about the state of America. Just over
a year after Mr. Biden took office, the country he helms is suffering
thanks to his leadership or absence thereof. We have endured defeat
abroad, war in Europe, economic insecurity, a historical border
crisis, generational inflation and more. The kicker to it is he’s
just getting started: This is only year one, and this administration
will last through to January 2025.

    The good news, though, is that, if the State of the Union is
tested and divided, then the state of America is strong — because
unlike their fenced-in and heavily guarded elites in Washington,
Americans are strong. It’s easy to look at our leadership and feel
despair, but that would be a mistake. All we need to do is look to
one another to feel hope. This country isn’t done yet. The greatest
legacy of the failed administration of Jimmy Carter is it ushered in
the freedom, hope and prosperity of Reagan. Similarly, I am confident
Mr. Biden will usher in the return of America First!
By Brooke Rollins, The Washington Times

    I found this on my computer and it needs a few facts with it.
    It is now late April 2022 and we are still rolling downhill and
we seem to be picking up speed. Inflation has passed 10%, Gas prices
have reached beyond $4.40 a gallon. It fell back a little when old
Joe started drawing out of our limited reserves. He is now buying our
oil from Russia while the Fed went back to buying securities that the
smart investors sold off in an effort to hold the stock market from
collapsing.
    People are hurting and Joe doesn't seem to care.
And then there is the war in Ukraine that Joe refuses help, as 
thousands of innocent Ukrainians have been slaughtered. Putin is just
blowing anything from schools to entire housing complexes.
Biden is incapable of acting on his own or re-act until a crisis
has reached the point of "Why bother?"
    It is time to ask God to save us because our so-called leaders
lack empathy, morals, ethics and unable to tell the truth. They just
continue to throw money at everything.
    Lord, please heal our land.

Conservatively,
John    

    Why Is Everything the Left Doesn’t Like ‘Misinformation’?
Douglas Blair / March 07, 2022

    The government’s Big Brother-style crusade to control what gets
posted online continues apace. 
    U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy on March 3 demanded that
Big Tech companies provide the government with data surrounding
COVID-19 “misinformation” on their platforms. 
    The New York Times reported that Murthy asked the companies to
reveal “exactly how many users saw or may have been exposed to in-
stances of COVID-19 misinformation,” on top of providing the demo-
graphic data of those users.
    The request follows on the heels of an advisory released last
July, in which Murthy said misinformation “can cause confusion, sow
distrust, and undermine public health efforts, including our ongoing
work to end the COVID-19 pandemic.”
    The term “misinformation” has become a bit of a catch-all in the
COVID-19 era. It certainly can apply to actual untruths, such as that
the COVID-19 vaccine contains microchips. But far more frequently,
the term is weaponized against ideas the powers-that-be don’t like. 
     Take, for example, the ever-evolving tale of the Chinese lab-leak
hypothesis regarding COVID-19. 
    Ground zero for the initial outbreak of COVID-19 was quickly de-
termined to be Wuhan, China. The city is home to the Wuhan Institute
of Virology, a lab known for conducting gain-of-function research
into coronaviruses. When people started suggesting the two were
linked, the response from health authorities and corporate media was
instantaneous. 
    The hypothesis was lambasted as a racist conspiracy theory, and
anyone who tried to disseminate it was quickly labeled a fringe kook
or censored entirely on social media. Back in February 2020, Facebook
banned an article from the New York Post claiming COVID-19 could have
leaked from a lab. 
    Fast-forward a year to 2021 and suddenly the lab leak was no
longer misinformation worthy of exile from the internet. The same
outlets and experts who had gone to great lengths to smear anyone who
dared go against their medical decrees were suddenly singing a very
different tune.
    Facebook itself was forced to recant, and announced it would stop
removing posts that asserted COVID-19 leaked from a lab. 
    That brings us back to the issue of Murthy demanding data on
“misinformation” from these Big Tech platforms. As the lab-leak saga
demonstrated, the definition of what qualifies as misinformation is
incredibly nebulous and can change with the political winds. 
    Murthy’s fishing expedition to find “misinformation” is for one
purpose only; namely, control of our lives and of what we think. 
    As the pandemic dragged on, the government and Big Tech used the
label of “misinformation” to ban ideas and outlets they dislike. They
found that strategy to be incredibly effective and want to continue
using it into the future. 
    The strategy is no longer limited to COVID-19, either. The pop-
ular streaming site Twitch announced March 3 that it plans to ban
users who spread “misinformation” on other topics, including elec-
tion fraud, and chillingly undefined “misinformation that may impact
public safety.”
    Once censorship becomes a common strategy against perceived “mis-
information,” free speech is effectively dead. Don’t like what your
political opposition is saying? Label it “misinformation,” ban it,
and call it a day. 
    Many censorious tyrants have cloaked their actions in the name
of “public safety” as Murthy has. And as those definitions of “public
safety” rest on foundations as solid as shifting sands, it’s inevit-
able that the term “misinformation” will be abused further in the
future. 
    For the sake of free speech, it’s essential that Murthy and the
“misinformation” mob be countered at every turn. Americans should be
empowered to discover the truth on their own, and not have their
experiences curated by a biased bureaucracy or unelected tech czars. 
    The truth is out there. We don’t need Murthy to tell us what it
is. 
Douglas Blair

    Misinformation seems to be a catch-all used to attack those that
disagree with the liberal left.
    Virtually every story about the ANTIFA and BLM's attempt to de-
stroy America for over a year.
    The lame excuses for fencing off the "People's House" is yet
to be told.
    The truth about the Covid-19 pandemic and all things pertaining
like masking, social distancing, vaccine proof, death count, actual
number of Covid cases, etc.
    The true events of Jan. 6, 2021 are still being hidden along with
14,000 different videos of the truth.
    We are still waiting for the truth about the disaster called the
abandonment of our people in Afghanistan.
    One can call out everything that comes out of the White House but
in truth, they are just the typical lies that Americans are being fed
by the corrupt media and the accomplished liars that walk the halls
of Congress.
    Don't we deserve better? We endured 8 years of Obama and after a
prosperous 4 years we have been forced back into the swamp.
    It is time to call the liars what they are.
    They are like the little boy who cried wolf until no one believed
him anymore.
    Let's stand up and take back our country.
    Pray for God's mercy and His grace.

Conservatively,
John