The holiday season is in full swing and millions of Americans are making their way to their Christmas destinations.
Whether it be by plane, car or public transport, Americans are set to travel this Christmas.
According to Triple A’s
annual holiday forecast, 84.5 million people are expected to travel
between Wednesday and January 3. While this is still a hefty number, the
total amount of travelers this year is nearly 30 percent, or 34
million, fewer travelers than last year.
Meanwhile, states and counties continue to impose varying travel restrictions due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
“Please
celebrate outside,” President of System Enterprises with Sutter Health
Dr. Rishi Sikka said. “Please wear your mask and please avoid
non-essential travel.”
However, for many, seeing family and loved ones is just too valuable to miss.
“We
know we’re taking a risk, but we want to see the family and it has been
a long time due to the COVID-19,” holiday traveler Daliza Rodriguez
stated. “We want to see them and have fun.”
Rodriguez is flying from New York to Texas to see her loved ones.
More
than 81 million people will travel to their holiday destination by car.
Another 2.9 million will fly, while the remaining 480,000 Americans
will use some form of public transportation, such as trains or busses
Wherever you are spending the holidays, One America News wishes you a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
This was not a politically motivated investigation. There is no deep state,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) last December, as she accused Attorney General William Barr of “unsupported attacks” on the FBI. Contrary to the California Democrat, there is a deep state and it does more than conduct covert operations like the Midyear Exam and Crossfire Hurricane. The central agency of the deep state is not the FBI but the SES, the Senior Executive Service, hiding in plain sight.
“The SES insignia or emblem represents a keystone—the center stone that holds all the stones of an arch in place,” the federal Office of Personnel Management explains. “This represents the critical role of the SES as a central coordinating point between Government’s political leadership which sets the political agenda and the line workers who implement it. Members of the SES translate that political agenda into reality.” The OPM helpfully elaborates.
SES leaders, “serve in the key positions just below the top Presidential appointees” as “the major link between these appointees and the rest of the Federal workforce. They operate and oversee nearly every government activity in approximately 75 Federal agencies,” including the State Department, the Army, Navy, the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security and the Department of Justice. Like the Gershwin brothers, people might wonder how long this has been going on.
The SES dates back to the Carter Era and the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, a response to the “moral and management failures of Watergate and Great Society program implementation.” The response was to create another bureaucracy more powerful than the others, “a cadre of high-level managers in the government.” In 1981, Karlyn Barker of the Washington Post noticed the SES wasn’t working as intended. The SES members complained about their pay and Barker provided little if any assessment of their success on the job.
From 2008 through 2011 SES bosses received bonuses of more than $340 million. The bonuses came on top of salaries ranging from $119,000 to $179,000, and were not subject to the budget cuts. By this time, the SES embodied the bureaucratic waste it allegedly had been created to fix. On the political side, SES influence continued to surge.
An SES report for 2015 charts salaries, ethnicity concerns, age trends and such, with no assessment of efficiency at streamlining the bureaucracy. As the report certifies, the SES cadre had grown, with 217 members in the Army, 318 in the Navy, 179 in the Air Force, 473 in the Department of Defense, 594 at Homeland Security, and a whopping 786 at the Department of Justice. “All other” federal agencies accounted for 1,785 SES members, with a grand total of 7,791.
“The corps isn’t operating the way it’s supposed to be,” contended Nora Kelly Lee in the Atlantic in 2016, describing the SES as “fairly obscure.” Officials from the president on down agreed, “they still haven’t perfected the art of running the federal government.” According to Lee, “Poor leadership can result in mission failure, a demoralized workforce, tarnished agency reputation, and public distrust of the agency or government as a whole.”
That is from a report from the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board, which no longer appears online. The board itself was created by the same 1978 Carter-era civil service “reforms” and functions as “an independent quasi-judicial agency in the Executive Branch that serves as the guardian of Federal merit systems.” As Lee explains, the MPPB report “credits the best career senior executives with improving national security and saving taxpayers billions of dollars,” with neither claim outlined in detail.
On December 12, 2015, President Obama issued executive order 13714 “Strengthening the Senior Executive Service.” The 2,301-word order set out to “facilitate career executive continuity between administrations.” By May 31, 2016, agencies with 20 or more SES positions shall develop a plan “to increase the number of SES members who are rotating to improve talent development, mission delivery and collaboration.” This will continue for a minimum of 120 days, including different departments, agencies and “non-federal partners.” This will continue “during FY 2017, and thereafter, in order to ensure the mobility of the corps while also maintaining stability of operations.”
That sounds like a major escalation of the original mandate. Americans might wonder what the nearly 800 SES bosses at the Department of Justice were doing while that department and the FBI took the lead against candidate and President Trump. Who were the “non-federal partners” with which the “mobile” SES interactacted? The agency was tasked to ensure “continuity between administrations,” and by all indications the SES did nothing to hinder James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Rod Rosenstein, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr or many of the others at the heart of the Russia collusion hoax.
Despite considerable evidence, none of those high-profile players have been charged for their role in the attempted coup against duly elected President Donald Trump. Perhaps one of those holdover SES bosses in the Department of Justice ordered U.S. Attorney John Durham to back off. A ballpark figure for the number of SES bosses disciplined or fired is zero.
Yes, Dianne, there is a deep state, and the SES is the command force. Those folks up there in Washington, as the late Frank Zappa put it, they just take care of number one. And number one ain’t you. You ain’t even number two.
The curious case of Texas v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was a short-lived but portentous controversy. Forty percent of the states joined forces to challenge the presidential election results maintained by roughly another 40 percent of states, with roughly 20 percent of states caught somewhere in the middle. The Supreme Court punted the case.
The Supreme Court seems to have made peace with its own irrelevance vis-à-vis the irremediable schism between two halves of the country. The Texas-led half is not, despite some people’s surface reading, a resurrection of the confederacy. Territorially the states that joined Texas’s case form a column reaching from the Mexican to the Canadian border, including the northernmost state, Alaska, and Indiana. Georgia and North Carolina, obviously, are not aligned with Texas anymore, while several northern states like Ohio are moving toward alignment with the red camp.
In cultural terms, the California-led states have reversed their historic position on civil rights and now oppose the fundamental purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment and equal protection under the law (which I review in some detail here.) In their successful pleading to the Supreme Court, they rejected the notion that outside forces can intervene in a state’s voting or judicial process, thereby resurrecting the arguments from former confederate states about their right to block African Americans from suffrage through practices like a poll tax, literacy test, or KKK-style voter intimidation.
“But the courts said so!” is a cold argument to raise given the history of Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu v. United States.
Similarly, the California-led states continue to claim that hundreds of sworn affidavits by allegedly disenfranchised Trump supporters are not real evidence. Most 19th century slave narratives were written by African Americans who fled to the north. Many slave narrators detail how southern courts would not permit black people’s eyewitness accounts as testimony in any case. Even though the narratives usually included authenticating documents as an appendix. White people had to attest to the truthfulness of black people for their accounts to be accepted as proof of anything.
Because Trump supporters haven’t been enslaved or, in most cases, descended from people who have, the blue states seem to believe that it is acceptable to treat their testimony as weightless, but the basic inequality of due process nonetheless undoes much of the civil rights movement.
The nation’s current divide is partly geographic but mostly cultural and juridical. The Texas-led states, despite including parts of the former confederacy, now stand for the rule of law and the civil rights protections of the 1868 14th Amendment. The California-led states now seek to undo over 150 years of human rights laws so that they can override the suffrage and petitions of a “suspect class” (Republicans).
Polling indicates that neither side is budging on the question that best serves as a litmus test: whether the election of Joe Biden is legitimate. About half the country believes it was not because they share Texas’s understanding of what citizen rights are and what constitutes evidence. Half the country believes the election was legitimate because they share California’s understanding of citizen rights as framed by context and by goals, with any means being justified by the right goals, depending on the group involved.
For the first time in anyone’s living memory, we have to contend with the real possibility that the United States will split into separate nations. The split will not look like the 19th century Civil War and may not even be a war at all. Looking at history, I’ve come upon the following possible precedents in history that may help us understand the potential outcomes.
The Fall of Western Rome
In 476, the western half of the Roman Empire fell, sacked repeatedly by “barbarians.” The last Roman emperor was deposed by outsiders invading the city. The eastern half, later known as the Byzantine Empire, carried on until the Turks crushed the last stronghold in 1453.
The California-led states look a lot like the western half of the Roman empire heading into the 5th century. Their territory contains much of the history and glamor of the United States, including Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Washington, D.C.. But like the ancient city of Rome, the concentration of wealth and power brings its own instabilities, which is why, ironically, the half of the empire that actually contained Rome fell 1,000 years before the eastern offshoot.
The eastern half of Rome was Greek-speaking and contained Egypt, the province that produced most of Rome’s grain. Justinian, arguably the first eastern emperor severed from the west, took the complex laws of Rome’s history and compiled them into a famous legal code. The Byzantines considered themselves Roman.
The Texas-led states could likely become something akin to the Byzantine Empire as the California-led states collapse under their own decadence. The California-led states will probably have more riots, greater class conflict, more tension due to unregulated immigration, and greater psychological dysfunction due to their rejection of Christianity and the nuclear family.
Perhaps the blue states descend further into anarchy as the red states pursue increasing levels of administrative separation to keep their chaos at bay. The Texas-led states, like the Byzantine Empire, are less glamorous but contain a great deal of natural resources and agriculture. If they hold the line against chaos, they have a viable chance of surviving and carrying on the traditions dear to the Republic.
The Division of Israel Into North and South
After King Solomon’s death, Israel split into a northern and southern kingdom. They had separate dynastic successions even though both of them claimed, on some level, to worship the same deity. The southern kingdom, containing Judah, had much of the same depravity that infected the northern kingdom, but benefited from several good kings that managed to bring moments of reform: people like Asa, Hezekiah, and Josiah. The northern kingdom had particularly awful figures like Ahab and his wife Jezebel.
The mismanagement in the two kingdoms doomed them both, though Judah lasted about 136 years longer than the northern kingdom. By 722 B.C., the northern kingdom was wiped out by the Assyrians. By 586 B.C., the southern kingdom was wiped out by Babylon.
While arguably less likely than the Roman example, the Israel example could give us a glimpse of how a United States split might proceed. Constant movement around the country has rendered it practically impossible for the Texas-led states to shield themselves from the prevailing culture of the California-led states. While we saw an ethical distinction between the two realms in Texas v. Pennsylvania, that distinction might be superficial or short-lived. If the Texas-led states are bound to become an only slightly less offensive version of the California-led states, then we may be heading toward a twofold disaster like Israel’s.
Blue America might collapse a century before red America, but red America would not, in this model, last 1,000 years more the way the Byzantine Empire outlived Rome.
The Breakup of the Soviet Union
In the Soviet Union’s demise, one major nation emerged with contiguous territory and a large population, Russia. Around its margins, 15 independent nations emerged, with smaller populations.
While I would never grant moral equivalency between the United States and the USSR, consider the 1990s breakup as a framework for a 2020s or 2030s breakup of the United States. The California-led states are not a contiguous territory, but rather fragmented and isolated regions: two coastal arcs with outlying states like Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois, Colorado, and New Mexico. In many ways Georgia and Oregon have about as much in common as Lithuania had with Armenia.
The blue states are not only geographically removed from each other but also culturally conflicted between themselves. New York and Los Angeles are together in their Democratic affiliations, but if there were no Republicans, what would unite them? What would keep them together as they face the mundane strains of taxation, shared security burdens, and intraparty rivalries like Hillary Clinton versus Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden versus Andrew Yang?
The Soviet Union model is persuasive inasmuch as the Texas-led states are easier to conceptualize as a coherent nation with common cultural and religious values. The California-led states would easily break up into a smattering of smaller republics each going its own way.
Can a split be avoided? Time will tell. A president other than Biden might hold more promise, but I anticipate that he and Kamala Harris will be too weak and ungenerous toward the country’s other half to soothe tensions and hold the country together. It will probably just get worse from here.
So now that the vaccines have arrived (through the auspices of President Donald Trump), we can look forward to people getting vaccinated and then things opening up more, right?
Well, not so fast, according to Joe Biden. His whole platform was how terrible Trump was in response to the Wuhan coronavirus and he was going to be able to address it, starting day 1 in ways Trump was not, right?
Except as it turns out, not so much. As with anything Biden, it’s never what he claimed, now that he thinks he’s got power.
Listen to what he says now. Things are not going to get better under him, he says, they’re going to get even worse.
Well, of course, we knew things would be worse under him if he got in. All days would be dark. But when he admits it, you know it’s not good. What happened to that plan he said was going to solve everything?
If you thought states were trying to control you already, sounds like it’s going to get worse with Biden, despite the over 99% survivability of the virus for most Americans and the new vaccines developed with Trump’s help.
So how are they going to justify more stringent controls? Prepare, sounds like it’s coming.
Some are already suggesting that children are more susceptible to this new U.K. strain, despite the fact they don’t have enough evidence yet.
Now there isn’t any reason to suggest yet that even if it’s more contagious it’s more virulent or that the vaccine wouldn’t cover it as well. Viruses like this are always mutating. We’ve already had multiple strains already.
But, bottom line? They like the control that we’ve ceded to them and they’re not going to give it up easily. They’re going to do all they can to hold onto it and nothing helps that more than to keep everything in constant crisis.
They have no care for the harm they’ve already caused, which is incalculable from lost lives, lost businesses, lost jobs and moments that we can never have back that were stolen. But perhaps one of the worst things is how many Americans have just willingly ceded their rights and their freedoms for “safety.”
What will those folks say now when Joe Biden is telling them there’s no apparent end in sight yet, that things will get even worse?
Remember that Seinfeld episode where George is lying facedown on the floor, pants around his ankles, and Jerry sarcastically proclaims “and you want to be my latex salesman?” Replace George with Joe Biden and being a latex salesman with being president, and the question has never been more pertinent. Every time I see Biden stumble around in public, I can’t help but ask “this guy wants to be my president?”
Biden’s probably dementia ridden brain was on full display today as he gave prepared remarks. Fox News’ Peter Doocy dared to ask him about Hunter Biden, who is currently under multiple federal criminal investigations. Biden attempted an insult, but he couldn’t stick the landing.
What the heck is a “one horse pony?” And why is he laughing? Does he think his son’s corrupt conduct, some of which could land him in jail, is funny? Further, why is no other “journalist” that is following him around as part of the press pool asking him these questions? Why is it left up to Doocy to be the only one? Oh, who am I kidding. We know the answer to that.
Biden is not here. I mean, he’s here, but he’s not here. This is a man who can’t even deliver a routine quip without screwing it up. He routinely loses his train of thought and muddles his words. He doesn’t even appear to know the names of people he’s appointing to powerful positions (see Joe Biden’s Latest Speech Shows the Democrat Bait and Switch is a Scandal).
Even on substance, this Biden exchange is nuts. How can he still believe the stories about his son are “Russian misinformation?” That’s not the position of a man still in control of all his mental faculties. Hunter Biden’s actions are public record to such an extent that even the careerists at the DOJ and FBI can’t look the other way. It’s been completely debunked that the Russians had anything to do with any of this. Yet, there’s Biden repeating an obvious lie and the rest of the media just shrug.
The next four years are going to be a nightmare, not because of what Biden will do, but because of what his condition will allow others to do. This guy is just a stand in at this point.
While President-elect Joe Biden’s son Hunter has dominated headlines about the Biden family business, landing lucrative overseas deals trading on his father’s name, Joe Biden’s brother, James, is too often overlooked in the corruption saga.
Yes, it’s true that Hunter Biden spent years raking in upwards of $50,000 a month on the board of a Ukrainian energy company despite no prior experience in the industry. It’s true that Hunter Biden’s father was serving as the “public face” of White House policy towards Ukraine at the same time.
It’s true that Joe Biden, who spent his entire presidential campaign denying that he ever spoke business with his son, wasintroducedto an executive of Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian firm, introduced by Hunter Biden. It’s true that Senate investigators found Hunter Bidentook$3.5 million from the wife of an ex-Moscow mayor.
It’s true that Hunter Biden parlayed his father’s position into receiving an $80,000 diamond from a Chinese businessman with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party. It’s true that Hunter Biden was discussing a $10 million annual contract with the same Chinese businessmen paid for “introductions alone.” It’s true that Hunter Biden was discussing 10 percent of that sum flowing to Joe Biden.
It’s also true that Hunter Biden was one of three individuals showered in a six-figure shopping spree paid for by the same Chinese business leaders flagged as potential criminal activity by Senate investigators. The other two were James Biden, and James’ wife, Sara Biden.
The Senate report released in September after a three-year investigation expanded the public scope of the Biden family’s decades-long conflicts of interest featuring Joe Biden in the upper echelons of government. By unveiling ties between James Biden and the same Chinese businessmen courting the former vice president through Hunter, the family web of interests interlaced with the Chinese has given rise to new questions regarding Joe Biden’s knowledge and involvement with the family business.
Those questions began to be answered by business partner-turned whistleblower Tony Bobulinski. In a full-hour interview with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson in October, he claimed the family business activity in China had been corrupt to the point the current president-elect is “compromised” by the Chinese Communist Party.
“I just don’t see, given the history here and the facts, how Joe can’t be influenced in some manner based on the history,” Bobulinski said in prime time.
Bobulinski emphasized the family’s sensitivity about Joe Biden’s involvement. Bobulinski said when he raised concerns with James Biden over the former vice president’s role, James Biden dismissed them, reassuring Bobulinski the family would simply employ “plausible deniability.”
Public reporting of James Biden’s business deals alongside Hunter in China have almost certainly only scratched the surface. What we do know, however, beyond the Chinese business activity that featured an extravagant shopping spree, is that James Biden is under ongoing investigation by federal authorities in Western Pennsylvania over a series of hospital deals struck under Americore Health, a firm built on the model of buying and operating rural hospitals.
FBI agents raided one of the now-bankrupt firm’s hospitals in January, along with the home of its CEO, Grant White. James Biden’s home was not raided, James, a heavy investor in the company, became the subject of a lawsuit from White, accusing him of fraud and racketeering. This ultimately toppled the firm to the ground.
In court documents reported by The Federalist’s Mark Hemingway this spring, White accused James Biden of diverting funds for the struggling Americore for his own, partly used to save a vacation residence in Florida. White says James Biden never paid the company back as the firm was going under.
James, however, had been leveraging his family name to cultivate trust in his ability to grow the business.
“[Biden told me] there’s not a single door in the country that we can’t open. So if I wanted to meet, you know, the head of Google, it’s a phone call,” White said, as Hemingway reported. “He always represented himself as the fundraiser for his brother’s campaigns… he was the guy raising the money and so he knew everybody.”
But the company collapsed and lawsuits followed. Now James Biden is the subject of a federal probe.
In February, however, a lengthy report published by ProPublica chronicled James leveraging the family name through the decades to land six- and seven-figure loans through donors to his older brother’s campaigns.
“The vice president and his brother have always understood and agreed that James’ business ventures are separate from and independent of Joe Biden’s career in public life,” Bates said.
We’ve heard that line before, such as when Joe Biden fat-shamed an Iowa voter for bringing up his son’s Ukrainian business dealings.
“Yet on occasion,” ProPublica reported, “as Jim pursued opportunities, Joe met with his potential clients or partners, at Jim’s request.”
