If Brian Laundrie Had Done Any Of These 5 Things, He’d Already Be In FBI Custody

We can hope the bureau succeeds in bringing justice to 

families like Petito's, instead of looking more and more like 

a political appendage to sic on partisan threats. 

by Elle Reynolds for The Federalist

The suspicious disappearance of 22-year-old vlogger Gabby Petito took a tragic turn on Sunday when the FBI announced that human remains found in Teton County, Wyoming, were “consistent” with her description. Petito’s family reported her missing on Sept. 11, after her fiance Brian Laundrie returned to Florida without her on Sept. 1. According to Laundrie’s family, he disappeared on Sept. 14, three full days after Petito’s disappearance was reported.

Laundrie is a high-profile person of interest in the case, with an attorney for the Petito family insisting “Brian is not missing, he is hiding.” Authorities have failed to find Laundrie, admitting on Friday that they don’t know where he is.

The lead agency on the case said on Monday that it “currently has no plans to conduct a major search” of the Carlton Reserve, an over 24,000-acre preserve in Sarasota County, Florida, where state police said they have “exhausted all avenues” in looking. The FBI also announced the execution of a search warrant at the Laundrie residence on Monday.

Laundrie was the only person with Petito on the couple’s Wyoming road trip and apparently failed to report her disappearance (or a potential explanation for it) when he returned. Yet the above efforts are taking place six days after Laundrie disappeared, nine days after Petito’s family reported her missing, and 19 days after Laundrie returned to Florida without his fiancee.

Meanwhile, the FBI spent the weekend worrying about a rally that turned out to be an uneventful, sparse showing of a few hundred people, with law enforcement agents outnumbering attendees. In the past, the FBI has shown its willingness to bring the full force of its investigative power down on cases and individuals where it was laughably unmerited (or worse, sinister).

The FBI should be doing its utmost to solve jurisdictionally appropriate crimeslike the Petito case appears to be, not running partisan ops, setups, or sham investigations. The FBI has an annual budget of over $10 million and employsmore than 35,000 people. Its failure to apprehend Laundrie in the days before he disappeared does not stem from a lack of resources but seems to reflect the FBI’s dissolution from a serious crimefighting apparatus to a dangerously political machine that’s bad at its job.

Why has the FBI let Brian Laundrie run away, while they’ve pulled out the stops for far less serious (but more political) investigations? If Laundrie had done any of the things below, he could very well already be in federal custody.

1. Leave a Pull Rope in His Garage

When NASCAR reported a “noose” found in the garage assigned to race car driver Bubba Wallace, the FBI launched an investigation into what Wallace called a “despicable act of racism and hatred.” After devoting 15 agents to the situation, however, the FBI admitted that the “noose” had been there since the year prior, far before anyone knew Wallace would be in that garage.

Furthermore, a NASCAR statement conceded that the FBI had found that the “noose” was actually a garage door pull rope.

2. Be a 71-Year-Old Grandmother Who Attended Trump’s Capitol Rally

Linda Menk, a 71-year-old grandmother and member of the Coweta County School Board in Georgia, told The Federalist in August that a pair of FBI agents visited her after she attended the ill-fated rally at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Menk reportedly “remained on the outskirts of the crowd at Trump’s White House speech, standing on the grounds of the Washington Monument to watch the jumbotron from afar,” before leaving about 10 minutes before the first rioters broke through the barriers at the Capitol.

But later that month, according to Menk, two agents called on her and “at first appeared suspicious with business cards … featuring hand-written phone numbers over blotches of white-out.” Neither presented a warrant or would tell her their badge numbers, she noted.

In the months that followed, “agents in all but one of the FBI’s 56 field offices have been drafted to track down” participants nationwide from the Jan. 6 events, USA Today noted. “Investigators who typically work cases involving the trafficking of drugs, child pornography and sex have taken calls from rioter’s angry ex-wives and former girlfriends and employers turned tipsters.”

3. Be a Crackpot Who Dislikes Gretchen Whitmer

After the hubbub of hysteria about an apparent plot to kill Democrat Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who has drawn the ire of many residents for strict lockdowns that even she doesn’t follow, it turned out that “of 14 people indicted, five (or more) were working as informants for the FBI.”

“The five people who seem to be the FBI informants were also the people who seemed to have all the kidnapping ideas and access to all the equipment needed for a paramilitary assault on Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s vacation home,” Matthew Braun noted for The Federalist. “At one point, the leadership of the conspiracy met, and three of the five people in that discussion were FBI.”

These revelations prompted outrage that the FBI may have instigated a plot that, without their leadership, likely would never have moved from thought to action. A defense attorney for one of the accused insisted his client was only engaging in “big talk between crackpots” and was “never going to do anything” in what looks like FBI entrapment.

4. Bribe Colleges into Accepting His Kids

The FBI made hay out of rich parents’ fraud while ignoring its own fraudulent behavior, irking many who believed a college admissions fiasco should not be the greatest concern of the nation’s domestic law enforcement agency.

While parents paying under the table for their children to be listed as recruited athletes or for their children’s test scores to be altered is undoubtedly wrong, pigeonholing these behaviors into charges of “honest services mail fraud” to allow for federal criminal prosecution hardly seems like the way the system was intended to work. Why did the FBI devote such emphasis to this case, rather than letting college authorities fire and expel as needed while the bureau focused on more urgent and jurisdictional matters?

5. Run for President Against Hillary Clinton

Since Donald Trump ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016, it’s been revealed that the FBI used a “defensive” briefing to spy on the Trump campaign, part of the Crossfire Hurricane attempt to meddle in the election and undermine the Trump transition team. Related to that corrupt investigation, the FBI spied on phone calls of the vice president of Fox News.

Gabby Petito and her family deserve the best efforts from law enforcement in bringing the facts of her death to light and, if she was murdered, her killer to justice. We can hope the bureau succeeds in bringing justice to families like Petito’s, instead of looking more and more like a political appendage to sic on partisan threats.

X22, SGT Report, and more-Sept 20

 

Happy NCIS Monday! Here's tonight's news:

 

Article by Nick Arama in RedState

Former Senior Military Official: Milley Had 'Pattern of Behavior' of Exceeding His Authority and Undermining Trump

A former assistant secretary of the Army under President Trump, E. Casey Wardynski, is accusing Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley of overstepping his authority and undermining President Donald Trump.

Wardynski also alleged the Chief of Staff of the Army, James McConville, did the same thing.

We’ve been reporting how Milley allegedly contacted the Chinese and told them that he would give them a heads up if we had any plans to attack them. He also intervened in the nuclear command authority of Trump by telling officers that they should not listen to anything unless it came through him, a breach of his authority because he had no operational command authority. He did that after being pushed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) in what amounted to her trying to overthrow the constitutional authority of the elected president of the United States.

But Wardynski said that this was just one instance of a “pattern of behavior.”

From Fox News:

“These kind of behaviors and this willingness for military leaders to exceed their authorities and ignore authorities of the civilian officials appointed over them … positions under the Constitution and laws of the country was not something that came to them on Jan. 8,” Wardynski said. “It was something that they had done for a while.”

According to Wardynski, there were “stunning” instances in which he saw, firsthand, high-ranking military officials exceed their authority.

“It was in and around the riots in D.C.,” Wardynski said. “Gen. Milley, as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – first thing to know, is he is a staff officer, he is an adviser, he’s not a commander – he ordered elements of the 82nd Airborne and the 10th Mountain Division to fly overnight to D.C. to Fort Belvoir and Andrews without consulting the Army chain of command and reaching around the chain of command to do that. I know that for a fact.”

Wardynski said McConville told him that he “would not be obeying any illegal orders from the president” amid several violent riots across the nation in the summer of 2020, particularly in D.C.

“That’s not something in 30 years of service in that uniform I thought I’d ever hear,” Wardynski said. “My interpretation of that was he was talking about any use of the Insurrection Act by the president.”

The Insurrection Act of 1807 allows a president to deploy U.S. militarized forces and National Guard troops should there be extreme civil disobedience or an insurrection.

“There was a lot of talk about governors and mayors not enforcing the law,” he added, providing context to the nature of ongoing events at that time. “A lot of Secret Service agents were hurt at the White House, a lot of national guardsmen were hurt at the White House, at one point it was reported that they evacuated the president to the emergency operations center, and of course Milley ordered these two units flown to D.C.”

Wardynski said that McConville repeated that he would “not obey illegal orders from the president” in October 2020, which prompted Wardynski to call his lawyer, the number-three attorney for the Army at the time, to advise him as to what was going on and saying he was concerned they would refuse an order of the president in regard to the Insurrection Act.

“My impression is, for some time, these people had no intention of supporting the president,” Wardynski noted. “Milley, in staff meetings, was routinely a bully. He would sit at the head of the table with the secretary, the secretary would say we’re going to do the following, and Milley would look at the gathered staff and tell them, ‘Let me tell you what the secretary just said’ and it was pretty much something different.”

Wardynski also noted that Milley, who he was around multiple times for meetings, went into his portfolio on multiple occasions without prior approval.

“He reached into my portfolio at least three times without my authority and then came to me for sort of forgiveness afterwards, which he did not get,” Wardynski said of Milley, whom he described as a “manipulator.”

Wardynski said Milley’s “business with the nuclear weapons and the nuclear command and control is part of a pattern of behavior.” “I believe it reached, at least, across the top of the Army in military leadership,” Wardynski added.

Neither Milley nor McConville responded to Fox’s requests for comment.

Milley has already said he thought his contacts with the Chinese were normal, with his spokesperson saying he had regular contact with them. So Wardynski raises even more questions about how long all this has been going on and where else Milley may have been exceeding his authority. Not to mention how many other people were acting this way.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/09/20/former-senior-military-official-milley-had-pattern-of-behavior-of-exceeding-his-authority-and-undermining-trump-n445466

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Green Pass required for access into Vatican from 1 October

 

From 1 October, entry into Vatican City State will only be permitted to persons who are in possession of a Vatican "Green Pass", a "European Green Pass," or a foreign Covid-19 green pass attesting to vaccination or recovery from SARS-COV-2. Entry will also be granted to those who have a negative molecular or antigenic test for the SARS-COV-2 virus.

The new measures come in the form of a decree from the office of the President of the Pontifical Commission of Vatican City State on the subject of Public Health emergencies, issued in response to a request made by Pope Francis during an audience on 7 September.

The Pope affirmed the necessity of ensuring “the health and well-being of the working community while respecting the dignity, rights and fundamental freedoms of each of its members," and requested the Governorate to "adopt every suitable measure to prevent, control and counteract the health emergency."

The control of access to the State is the responsibility of the Gendarmerie Corps, the Decree notes, and its provisions “apply to citizens, residents of the State, personnel serving in any capacity in the Governorate of Vatican City State, in the various bodies of the Roman Curia and related institutions, and to all visitors and users of services.”

 

An exception to the Decree is granted for those participating in liturgical celebrations, but only “for the time strictly necessary for the celebration,” during which health regulations regarding distancing, the use of personal protective equipment, limitation of movement and the assembly of people, and the adoption of specific hygiene norms must be respected.

Verification of compliance with the new norms will be carried out by the Service for the Health and Safety of Workers in the workplaces of the Directorate of Health and Hygiene.

 

https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2021-09/vatican-coronavirus-green-pass-october.html 

 

 

Critical Analysis vs. the Party of Science

Is the party of science actually the party of political science?

by Art Kleinschmidt for American Greatness

How scientific are those who constantly cite “science” as the basis for dictating our lives? 

During a recent press conference, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki blamed the 80 million unvaccinated Americans for the current COVID-19 plight confronting America, even though, throughout the presidential campaign both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris professed a profound distrust of the vaccines. In an attempt to obscure this unfortunate reality, Yahoo! News parsed the vice president’s words by reporting that she only said, “she did not trust Trump and would wait for more credible sources of information.” 

Are we now to believe that the efficacy of a medicine is determined by the outcome of an election? Can Americans mail in enough ballots and elect aspirin as the cure to cancer? Or was the vice president just playing games with a life-threatening ailment in an effort to acquire power? 

While hiding in his basement, Joe Biden routinely castigated Trump’s COVID-19 response in his daily mutterings to the press, even though the speedy manufacture of the vaccines was a focal point of Trump’s response. Political science focuses on the theory and practice of government and politics at the local, state, national and international levels. So, was it virology, biology, or political science that enabled the Left to successfully weaponize COVID as a means to gain control of the White House? Is the party of science actually the party of political science?

When considering social media, we have been told that private companies and private citizens are free to impede a person’s commerce, career, and speech. It’s no harm, no foul, as long as you’re only getting hosed by private actors. 

Attorney General Merrick Garland, however, is suing the state of Texas out of concern that private citizens will preclude a person’s right to abortion. Is the attorney general making a legal admission that a band of private citizens can actually trample the constitutional rights of other people? Furthermore, and putting aside any moral judgments, is there a scientific justification for why abortion rights have superseded the rights explicitly enumerated in the U.S. Constitution?

What is the science or axiom behind the Left’s accusations of cultural appropriation? Small businesses and local eateries have been dinged as cultural appropriators, while major corporations such as Taco Bell are granted a pass. Do menu items such as nacho fries or the Crunchwrap Supreme merit an authenticity exemption? Or could it be the science of economics, where major corporations fund all the proper causes? The cultural appropriation guidelines governing personal appearance are equally as murky. High profile leftists such as Jimmy Kimmel, Joy Behar, Justin Trudeau, and Virginia Governor Ralph Northam have all donned blackface, yet each has forged a successful career out of self-righteously calling other people racist. Equally confusing is how white people with hair braids are bad and subject to social media ridicule, while those rocking a tribal tattoo are especially trendy. 

When I was a kid in grammar school, we were taught that a new ice age was coming and risked freezing to death. Is it possible that climate experts overcorrected the ice age trajectory and put us on course towards global warming? Researchers think that 6,000 years ago the Sahara Desert was covered in grass and received plenty of water. Could the climate experts enact the Green New Deal in the Sahara and restore this desert wasteland back to a tropical paradise? Such an endeavor could create countless green jobs, reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and shut up climate deniers by highlighting their climate control abilities. 

Why does the homicide rate of African Americans receive such scant attention? For each statistic there is a real family grieving the loss of a loved one. Yet, those who pretend to care so much seem more interested in Robin DiAngelo’s lectures on white fragility. Interestingly, DiAngelo does not seem to study the human mind like other psychological schools of thought, in as much as she attempts to mold it to support preferred policy prescriptions. 

In a similar vein, Charlamagne tha God, a very popular radio host, recently landed a television show on Comedy Central and his commercials include witty comments about white privilege. Congrats to Charlamagne on his new show. He and DiAngelo are free to sell their ideas, but it does seem contradictory that whites are simultaneously fragile and guilty of supremacy. The contradiction may be resolved by the simple fact that resentments are more marketable than gratitude, and victimhood more celebrated than resiliency.

As a Washington, D.C. resident I see bumper stickers “I believe in science” “science is real,” but no such references to self-awareness. 

The Afghanistization of America - VDH

We are doing our best to become a Third-World country of incompetency, 

constitutional erosion, a fractious and politicized military elite, 

and racially and ethnically obsessed warring tribes.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

The United States should be at its pinnacle of strength. It still produces more goods and services than any other nation—China included, which has a population over four times as large. Its fuel and food industries are globally preeminent, as are its graduate science, computer, engineering, medical, and technology university programs. Its constitution is the oldest of current free nations. And the U.S. military is by far the best funded in the world. And yet something has gone terribly wrong within America, from the southern border to Afghanistan. 

The inexplicable in Afghanistan—surrendering Bagram Air Base in the middle of the night, abandoning tens of billions of dollars of military equipment to the Taliban, and forsaking both trapped Americans and loyalist Afghans—has now become the new Biden model of inattention and incompetence. 

Or to put it another way, when we seek to implant our culture abroad, do we instead come to emulate what we are trying to change?

COVID Chaos

Take COVID-19. Joe Biden in 2020 (along with Kamala Harris) trashed Trump’s impending Operation Warp Speed vaccinations. Then, after inauguration, Biden falsely claimed no one had been vaccinated until his ascension (in fact, 1million a day were being vaccinated before he assumed office). Then again, Biden claimed ad nauseam that he didn’t believe in mandates to force the new and largely experimental vaccinations on the public. Then, once more, he promised that they were so effective and so many Americans had received vaccines that by July 4 the country would return to a virtual pre-COVID normality. 

Then came the delta variant and his self-created disaster in Afghanistan. 

To divert his attention away from the Afghan morass, Biden weirdly focused on an equally confused new presidential COVID-19 mandate, seeking to subject federal employees, soldiers, and employees of larger firms to mandatory vaccinations—right as the contagious delta variant seemed to be slowly tapering off, given the millions who have either been vaxxed, have developed natural immunity, or both.

Consider other paradoxes. American citizens must be vaccinated, but not the forecasted 2 million noncitizens expected to cross the southern border illegally into the United States over the current fiscal year. Soldiers who bravely helped more than 100,000 Afghan refugees escape must be vaccinated, but not the unvetted foreign nationals from a premodern country? 

Scientists now are convinced naturally acquired COVID-19 immunity from a previous infection likely provides longer and better protection than does any of the current vaccinations. 

Yet those who suffered COVID-19, and now have antibodies and other natural defenses, must likewise be vaccinated. That anomaly raises the obvious logical absurdities: will those with vaccinations—in reciprocal fashion—be forced to be exposed to the virus to obtain additional and superior natural immunity, given the Biden logic of the need for both acquired and vaccinated immunity? 

Tribal Lands 

We have Afghanistanized the border as well, turning the United States into a pre-state whose badlands borders are absolutely porous and fluid. There is no audit of newcomers, no vaccinations required, no COVID-19 tests—none of the requirements that millions of citizens must meet either entering the United States or working at their jobs. Our Bagram abandonment is matched by abruptly abandoning the border wall in mid-course. 

Yet where the barrier exists, there is some order; where Joe Biden abandoned the wall, there is a veritable stampede of illegal migration. 

October 7, 2019. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Coups, Juntas and Such

Third-World countries suffer military coups when unelected top brass and caudillos often insidiously take control of the country’s governance in slow-motion fashion. The latest Bob Woodward “I heard,” “they say,” and “sources reveal” mythography now claims that General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, discussed separating an elected commander-in-chief from control of the military. Woodward and co-author Robert Costa also assert that Milley promised his Chinese Communist military counterpart that he would tip off the People’s Liberation Army of any planned U.S. aggressive action—an odd paranoia when Donald Trump, of the last five presidents, has proved the most reluctant to send U.S. troops into harm’s way. 

If that bizarre assertion is true, Milley himself might have essentially risked starting a war by eroding U.S. deterrence in apprising an enemy of perceived internal instability inside the executive branch, and the lack of a unified command. (So, Woodward wrote: “‘General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable, and everything is going to be okay,’ Milley said. ‘We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you.’ Milley then added, ‘If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.’”)

More germanely, when Milley called in senior officers and laid down his own operational directives concerning nuclear weapons, he was clearly violating the law as established and strengthened in 1947, 1953, and 1986 that clearly states the Joint Chiefs are advisors to the president and are not in the chain of command and are to be bypassed, at least operationally, by the president.

The commander in chief sets policy. And if it requires the use of force, he directs the secretary of defense to relay presidential orders to the relevant theater commanders. Milley had no authority to discuss changing nuclear procedures, much less to convey a smear to an enemy that his commander in chief was non compos mentis.

Milley has been reduced to a caricature of a caricature right out of “Dr. Strangelove”—and is himself a danger to national security. After Milley’s summer 2020 virtue-signaling “apology” for alleged presidential photo-op misbehavior (found to be completely false by the interior department’s inspector general); after leaked news reports that Milley considered resignation (promises, promises) to signal his anger at Trump in summer 2020; after his dismissal of the 120 days of rioting, 28 deaths, 14,000 arrests, and $2 billion in damage as mere “penny packet protests”; after his “white rage” blathering before Congress; after the collapse of the U.S. military command in Kabul; and after his premature and hasty assessment of a U.S. drone strike that killed 10 innocent civilians as “righteous,” Woodward’s sensationalism may not sound as impossible as his usual fare. 

Milley should either deny the Woodward charges and demand a real apology or resign immediately. He has violated the law governing the chain of command, misused his office of chairman of the Joint Chiefs, politicized the military, proved inept in his military judgment and advice, and may well have committed a felony in revealing to a hostile military leader that the United States was, in his opinion, in a crisis mode. 

Yet, Milley did not act in isolation. Where did this low-bar Pentagon coup talk originate? And who are those responsible for creating a culture in which unelected current and retired military officers, sworn to uphold the constitutional order and the law of civilian control of the military, believe that they can arbitrarily declare an elected president either incompetent or criminal—and thus subject to their own renegade sort of freelancing justice?

As a footnote, remember that after little more than a week of the Trump presidency, Rosa Brooks, an Obama-era Pentagon appointee, published in Foreign Policy various ways to remove the newly inaugurated president. Among those mentioned was a military coup, in which top officers were to collude to obstruct a presidential order, on the basis of their own perceptions of a lack of presidential rectitude or competence. 

We note additionally that over a dozen high-ranking retired generals and admirals have serially violated the uniform code of military justice in demonizing publicly their commander in chief with the worst sort of smears and slanders. And they have done so with complete exemption and in mockery of the very code they have sworn to abide. 

Two retired army officers, colonels John Nagl and Paul Yingling, on the eve of the 2020 election, urged Milley to order U.S. army forces to remove Trump from office if in their opinion he obstructed the results of the election—superseding in effect a president’s elected powers as well as those constitutional checks and balances of the legislative and judicial branches upon him. 

We know that these were all partisan and not principled concerns about an alleged non compos mentis president, because none of these same outspoken “Seven Days in May” generals have similarly violated the military code by negatively commenting publicly on the current dangerous cognitive decline of Joe Biden and the real national security dangers of his impairment, as evidenced by the disastrous skedaddle from Afghanistan and often inability to speak coherently or remember key names and places.

In short, is our new freelancing and partisan military also in the process of becoming Afghanized—too many of its leadership electively appealing to pseudo-higher principles to contextualize violating the Constitution of the United States and, sadly, too many trying to reflect the general woke landscape of the corporate board to which so many have retired? Like tribal warlords, our top brass simply do as they please, and then message to us “so what are you going to do about it?”

Achin, Afghanistan, 2011. John Moore/Getty Images

The Constitution as Construct

How paradoxical that the United States has sent teams of constitutional specialists to Iraq and Afghanistan to help tribal societies to draft legal, ordered, and sustainable Western consensual government charters that are not subject to the whims of particular tribes and parties. Yet America itself is descending in the exact opposite direction. 

Suddenly in 2021 America, if ancient consensual rules, customs, and constitutional mandates do not facilitate and advance the progressive project, then by all means they must end—by a mere one vote in the Senate. It is as if the centuries of our history, the Constitution, and the logic of the founders were analogous to a shouting match among a squabbling Taliban tribal council of elders.

Junk the 233-year-old Electoral College and the constitutional directive to the states to assume primary responsibilities in establishing voting procedures in national elections. End the 180-year-old Senate filibuster. Do away with the now bothersome 150-year nine-justice Supreme Court. And scrap the 60-year-old tradition of a 50-state union.  

Impeachment was intended by the founders as a rare reset of the executive branch in extremis. Now it is to be a pro formaattack on the president in his first term by the opposite party as soon as it gains control of the House—without a special counsel, without witnesses and cross-examinations, without any specific high crimes and misdemeanors or bribery and treason charges. And why not from now on impeach a president twice within a year—or try him in the Senate when he is out of office as a private citizen? 

When private citizen Joe Biden is retired from the presidency, will his political enemies dig up his sketchy IRS records alleging that he never paid income taxes on the “big guy’s” “10 percent” of the income from the Hunter Biden money machine?

American Tribes

 We may think virtue-signaling pride flags, gender studies, and George Floyd murals in Kabul remind the world of our postmodern sophistication. Yet, in truth, we are becoming far more like Afghanistan in the current tribalization of America—where tribal, racial, and ethnic loyalties are now essential to an American’s primary identity and loyalty—than we were ever able to make Afghanistan like us.

When we read leftist heartthrob Ibram X. Kendi’s endorsement of overt racial discrimination or academic and media obsessions with a supposed near-satanic “whiteness,” or the current fixations on skin color and first loyalties to those who share superficial racial affinities, then we are not much different from the Afghan tribalists. We in America apparently have decided the warring badlands of the Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks have their advantages over a racially blind, consensual republic. They are the model to us, not us of the now-discredited melting pot to them.

How sad in our blinkered arrogance that we go across the globe to the tribal Third World to teach the impoverished a supposedly preferrable culture and politics, while at home we are doing our best to become a Third-World country of incompetency, constitutional erosion, a fractious and politicized military elite, and racially and ethnically obsessed warring tribes. 

Senate Parliamentarian Rules Immigration Amnesty Cannot Be Permitted in $3.5 Trillion Infrastructure Package

It sounds obvious on its face, you cannot consider immigration reform as a spending bill, but that’s what the Democrats were attempting to do regardless of the constitutional limits.  Immigration reform is not a spending issue, and the Senate parliamentarian has denied the scheme by Senate Democrats in their $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” bill. (pic: migrant caravan)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats can’t use their $3.5 trillion package bolstering social and climate programs for their plan to give millions of immigrants a chance to become citizens, the Senate’s parliamentarian said late Sunday, a crushing blow to what was the party’s clearest pathway in years to attaining that long-sought goal.

The decision by Elizabeth MacDonough, the Senate’s nonpartisan interpreter of its often enigmatic rules, is a damaging and disheartening setback for President Joe Biden, congressional Democrats and their allies in the pro-immigration and progressive communities. It badly wounds Democrats’ hopes of unilaterally enacting — over Republican opposition — changes letting several categories of immigrants gain permanent residence and possibly citizenship.

The parliamentarian opinion is crucial because it means the immigration provisions could not be included in an immense $3.5 trillion measure that’s been shielded from GOP filibusters. Left vulnerable to those bill-killing delays, which require 60 Senate votes to defuse, the immigration language has virtually no chance in the 50-50 Senate.

In a three-page memo to senators obtained by The Associated Press, MacDonough noted that under Senate rules, provisions are not allowed in such bills if their budget effect is “merely incidental” to their overall policy impact. (read more)

Democrats Get Big Mad That Republicans Won't Do Their Dirty Work for Them

Bonchie reporting for RedState

While much of the legislative attention has been on the bipartisan infrastructure deal and the far-left $3.5T reconciliation bill, a more pressing battle is taking shape. In order to avoid default and to pay for all the Democrats’ wildest dreams, the debt ceiling needs to be raised. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has already called Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell in a desperate plea to get Republicans to play along.

He was having none of it though, as McConnell let it be known that Democrats were on their own in their quest to further blow out the budget. Now, the media blitz is on to paint that move as some kind of national betrayal.

The minority, which the GOP is in the Senate, doesn’t “allow” anything. That’s the entire thing with being a minority and having no real power. So why are Democrats so angry that Republicans won’t do their dirty work for them? After all, the Democrats could pass a debt ceiling increase via reconciliation all on their own. Yet, not only are they pretending that’s not an option, but Nancy Pelosi has already rejected the idea.

The Washington Post seems to believe that Democrats have leverage here, and I’m just not seeing it.

Now, almost two years later, Democrats have set up a similar type of strategy that, if successful, will force Republicans to accept their fair share of the national debt that now tops $28 trillion. If this strategy fails, the federal government could run out of funding authority and enter another congressionally forced shutdown — the fourth in less than a decade — and create a debt crisis that could rattle global financial markets.

The “similar type of strategy” being cited is the one Pelosi used in regards Trump’s first impeachment, where she sent over baseless articles of impeachment in hopes of shaming McConnell into creating the spectacle she wanted. To his credit, he didn’t take the bait, took the media lumps, and quickly moved to a vote that ultimately failed.

I think Pelosi has even less ability to bully McConnell this time around. Republicans are not in power, and the party that’s in power is who will be blamed for a shutdown if the debt ceiling isn’t raised. And they should be, given they have the votes to raise it themselves. No GOP member should oblige in taking any share of the blame for yet more inflation.

But you can expect the media to keep pushing this idea that it’s somehow the Republicans who won’t raise the debt ceiling. No, it’s Democrats who could do it, but don’t want to do it alone. Well, tough luck. If they want their massive reconciliation bill, they need to own every bit of it. Frankly, I think a shutdown battle will only help the GOP going into 2022. Their position is strong. There’s no reason to give in now.

Biden Budget Plan Provision Would Let IRS Look Into….

 Biden Budget Plan Provision Would Let IRS Look Into Virtually Everyone's Bank Account

Nick Arama - Red State  Sep 19, 2021 3:00 PM ET

AP Photo/Evan Vucci

People didn’t put up enough of a fight when the Democrats tried to grab President Donald Trump’s private tax information. They were trying to do that for a fishing expedition, not based upon any specific action of wrongdoing. When his information was improperly leaked, nobody seemed to care enough to prosecute that, either.

The problem is when you go down that slippery slope, it starts to get more slippery pretty fast.

Now, the Biden team wants not just to look into Trump’s account, but into the accounts of virtually every American, as well.

As part of their budget plan, they want to empower the IRS to be able to look into the account of any American with at least $600 in inflow/or outflow in the year, imposing a requirement on the banks to report such information, which is pretty much any adult.

From WFAA: 

Financial institutions would be responsible for reporting your withdrawals and deposits – breaking down physical cash, transactions with a foreign account and transfers to and from another account with the same owner. This would apply to all business and personal accounts with at least $600 in it.

According to the testimony, the purpose of this plan would be to “…improve tax administration and provide the IRS with a blueprint to address various facets of the tax gap.”

The plan however has been met with major criticism. Arkansas Congressman Steve Womack joined other lawmakers in writing a letter expressing their concern with the data collection proposal saying, “The requirements of this proposal would impose significant compliance costs on our banks, credit unions, and related financial institutions, but also infringe on the privacy of millions of Americans.”

Listen as Joe Biden tries to explain it.

So, he just wants to know what’s going into and out of the accounts of the “super wealthy.” Not because there’s any evidence of wrongdoing or a warrant, but just because he thinks he wants to do it. Forget about the Fourth Amendment — the government is entitled to people’s private information because they’re “wealthy.” Oh, and now, the “super wealthy” apparently includes anyone who has at least $600 going into or out of their account in a year.

Now, it’s one thing to ask for account information, when you have probable cause. It’s quite another when the banks are reporting the information on everyone without cause to the government. As we’ve seen in the past under the Obama-Biden administration, there were all kinds of questions about the IRS being used politically against against people of the other party. Like many Obama scandals, folks who should have been prosecuted for doing that never were.

So what prevents that from happening again, if the IRS now would have the private bank records of virtually every American? Just one more reason that Biden’s budget plan is an unimaginable power grab for the Democrats.