Article by Kurt Schlichter in Townhall

Democrats, Please Throw Us in the Filibuster Briar Patch

Chuck Schumer, the Inspector Clouseau of Senate Majority Leaders in comparison to Mitch McConnell’s Sherlock Holmes, has decided to try to strong-arm Joe Manchin and Kristin Sinema into dropping their opposition to killing the filibuster by making a big public show of it. Hey, that’s plan has worked great so far. I sure hope he succeeds – for once – for three reasons. 

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. 

As so often happens with the Dems, Napoleon’s injunction to never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake comes to mind. So does Br'er Rabbit’s plea to Br'er Fox not to toss him into the briar patch. 

Please please please lift the filibuster, Chuck. It totally will not come back and bite you on your Swalwell valve like it did Harry Reid after he did it for circuit court judges. No, your initiative to give the incoming GOP majority and incoming GOP president unlimited power is a smart plan that will cement your reputation as a strategic genius. And don’t worry, this cheesy expedient cannot possibly boomerang. 

We totally do not want us conservatives to have the unfettered power to enact our whole agenda. 

We don’t want national concealed carry. 

We don’t want to ban teachers' unions. 

We don’t want to regulate Big Tech.

We don’t want to repeal whatever pro-cheating laws you pass and then implement a real voting rights agenda of in-person voting only, on one day, with photo voter ID. 

Really. Trust us, we will definitely not do these things if you end the filibuster. Pinky swear! 

Now, you might point out that the potential downside assumes that the GOP will retake the House and Senate in 2022 and the presidency in 2024. Good point. Ignore that possibility! You should go forward on the assumption that a desiccated old pervert polling on par with cholera is not going to drag down all your marginal seats. Hey, it’s possible that a midterm election with a massively unpopular president of the majority party will go well for the incumbents. It’s also possible that Ted Lieu will win the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work in the fields of string theory and quantum mechanics. 

You might also argue that breaking the filibuster just a little bit for one teensy-weensy thing – your election cheating initiative – will not lead to a total destruction of the filibuster. This is akin to a horny, condom-less teenager in the backseat with his girlfriend trying to convince her that there’s nothing to worry about if they just go part of the way. 

Some might say, however, there’s no part of the way. Again, let’s review. 

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. 

But hey, maybe you’ll get a pass from the GOP this time. Maybe the Republicans won’t retaliate. This is not going to totally infuriate the incoming majority and its base and force even the most steadfast adherents to those norms and traditions to make the Democrats pay. Maybe the norms and traditions crowd will overlook your breach of the norms and traditions and not hit back. There’s always Romney to pin your hopes on to be a sap, and going all-in on him to be an invertebrate is always a sweet bet. But the Senate is not going to be 50/50. It’s going to be 53 or 54 Republicans to 47 or 46 Democrats, and that makes Romney even more superfluous than usual. But hey, I am sure that after you shaft the GOP when they are in the minority, they will totally forgive you when they take the majority. The GOP base will totally not primary any senator who fails to make your party pay. And Cocaine Mitch is a forgiving soul. He’s not vindictive at all. 

But maybe the GOP won’t win the White House in 2024. Maybe Biden will run again, but if not, Kamala Harris is a competent woman who the voters love. Your party has an innovative platform centered on making everything worse and calling voters racist, so why worry? Or maybe Trump will run again and America will focus on that scary insurrection you still hear so much about if you are part of the 0.5% of Americans who watch MSNBCNN. After all, outside the Beltway, the Republican threat to Our Democracy is all anyone talks about. Not gas prices. Not COVID panic. Not dead troops. No, everyone is totally focused on the minor skirmish of a year ago. Biden is a shoe-in – those poll numbers are just more evidence of the anti-Democrat bias of the mainstream media! 

You might also think that your “Voting Rights” law might seal the deal for permanent Democrat dominance. If you just squeak this federal takeover of elections through, then you never have to worry about Republicans winning ever again! Sure, the Latinx voters – who love being called that, by the way – your party was counting on to stay Democrat forever and ever are now splitting 50/50 for the GOP, but maybe your election fraud plot might work with half your coalition saying “Adiós.” Maybe. 

Oh, wait. There’s a problem. 

Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. 

Weird how those names keep coming up. But I’m sure they will allow you to impose a massive scheme to steal elections in perpetuity by nuking the idea of federalism via nuking the filibuster. Or not. 

Hey, it’s worth a try. What’s the worst that could happen? Could you end up eliminating the filibuster to pass a law to enable election fraud, but then have whatever parts remain intact after the Supreme Court vivisects it still not be enough to get outside the margin of fraud because the Democrats have polling numbers within the Lincoln Project’s preferred age range? 

Nah. 

So go for it. Please. And I am totally ready for it. I have already picked out my new go-to pistol for when California gets must-issue concealed carry jammed down its throat! 

 

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2022/01/06/democrats-please-throw-us-in-the-filibuster-briar-patch-n2601414 

Don't Forget to Recommend
and Follow us at our

W3P Homepage

Will We Reach Herd Immunity Against the Tyranny Variant?

The only hope is that enough Americans will have been inoculated after this bout of madness to be immune to, and deeply skeptical of, the next attempt to erode their rights.

by Ned Ryun for American Greatness

The fact that over 800,000 people in the United States have reportedly died from COVID-19 is barely noted by the corporate propagandists, no doubt because it isn’t politically useful now that Bad Orange Man is gone. Or it could be that the media doesn’t want to highlight yet another failure of the woefully incompetent Biden Administration with Grandpa Dementia barely cracking the 40 point approval mark. 

If Trump were still in the White House, we all know 800,000 deaths would have been trumpeted on every front page, the topic of every single leftist outlet’s headline for weeks. CNN would have already resurrected their morbid death count ticker claiming that every single death was due to great and terrible Trump.

The fact is 800,000 is probably inflated, much like everything else in this country right now. We have long suspected that hospitals and hospices have attributed more deaths to COVID than is accurate (particularly since they were literally financially incentivized to do so). You got hit by a bus? We’d better mark you down as another COVID death just to be on the safe side. Five gunshot wounds but positive for COVID? COVID for sure. Motorcycle crash death? Clearly the damnable COVID took another soul in mid-ride. Knife to the heart? COVID. Stage 4 cancer? COVID. 

The real question we need answered is whether people are dying with COVID or from it. Some of us have been asking for that debate since the spring of 2020. Plenty of people have gotten it and have recovered. Plenty of people have gotten it and died, but there were other factors leading to their deaths such as pneumonia, a weakened immune system or some other condition. Some doctors have suggested that the COVID deaths among otherwise healthy people with no underlying conditions or serious comorbidities is probably in the one percent range, or 8,000 total since this all began (let that sink in when you consider the utter carnage of our economy and small businesses). The CDCstats show very clearly that 94 percent of the individuals who supposedly died from COVID did so, on average, with three serious comorbidities. In fact, a lot of those comorbidities can probably be traced back to something most people don’t want to talk about: obesity.

According to some medical experts, nearly 78 percent of reported COVID deaths are directly linked to the patient’s weight. That’s a startling number and an uncomfortable one. If you start talking about obesity you start messing with all sorts of big corporations from fast food giants to big sugar—and we can’t have that. Heck, you might even be attacked for fat shaming. So we continue on like little children, ignoring reality in the hope it will somehow just vanish and we can go on our merry way. 

Such social delusion appears to be the goal of social media and news censorship of factual COVID information, which seems to know no bounds. No questions, peasants! Accept the so-called expert narrative as gospel truth. In fact, Facebook recently went so far as to censor an article about the dangers of COVID censorship. 

The good news is that the end of all of the COVID madness is apparently in sight. While low IQ pundits and hosts on MSNBC and CNN were doing their best to whip up one more frenzy of lockdowns and mandates over the “great and terrible” Omicron variant, the truth is Omicron, while highly contagious, is not evenly remotely deadly. It means most people, even the triple vaccinated (technically triple jabbed with a therapeutic medicine, as we don’t actually have a vaccine), multiple booster shots while wearing five masks Karens are probably going to get it—which means we’ll reach herd immunity and be back to normal within a few months. 

That’s the good news. The bad news? Once COVID fades into the background, most if not all of our major institutions will still be broken. The CDC and NIH need serious reform. Corporate propagandists will still be around, acting not so much as “news sources” but as outlets for administrative state narratives. Tyrants from the federal to the local level will be looking for the next fear tactic to scare Americans into abdicating more power to the state. Big Tech will still be censoring and shutting down anything it disagrees with as it tramples the Bill of Rights. 

The only hope is that enough Americans will have been inoculated after this bout of madness to be immune to, and deeply skeptical of, the next attempt to erode their rights. We will get some inkling of whether that’s the case in the coming elections. If Americans are acquiring a herd immunity to tyranny, look for them to actually demand their supposed representatives look out for and defend their rights.

X22, On the Fringe, and more-Jan 6

 

I hate cold snaps so much. Here's tonight's news:

Who Are the Real Insurrectionists? ~ VDH

Stone-cold sober elites are systematically waging a far more dangerous and insidious revolution in the shadows than anything threatened by the American Right.

by Victor Davis Hanson for American Greatness

Recently, Democrats have been despondent over Joe Biden’s sinking polls. His policies on the economy, energy, foreign policy, the border, and COVID-19 all have lost majority support. 

As a result, the Left now variously alleges that either in 2022, when they expect to lose the Congress, or in 2024, when they fear losing the presidency, Republicans will “destroy democracy” or stage a coup. 

A cynic might suggest that they praise democracy when they get elected—only to claim it is broken when they lose. Or they hope to avoid their defeat by trying to terrify the electorate. Or they mask their own revolutionary propensities by projecting them onto their opponents.

After all, who is trying to federalize election laws in national elections contrary to the spirit of the Constitution? Who wishes to repeal or circumvent the Electoral College? Who wishes to destroy the more than 180-year-old Senate filibuster, the over 150-year-old nine-justice Supreme Court, and the more than 60-year-old, 50-state union? 

Who is attacking the founding constitutional idea of two senators per state?

The Constitution also clearly states that “When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside.” Who slammed through the impeachment of Donald Trump without a presiding chief justice?

Never had a president been either impeached twice or tried in the Senate as a private citizen. Who did both?

The Left further broke prior precedent by impeaching Trump without a special counsel’s report, formal hearings, witnesses, and cross-examinations.

Who exactly is violating federal civil rights legislation?

New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in December decided to ration potentially lifesaving new COVID-19 medicines, partially on the basis of race, in the name of “equity.” 

The agency also allegedly used racial preferences to determine who would be first tested for COVID-19. 

Yet such racial discrimination seems in direct violation of various title clauses of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

That law makes it clear that no public agency can use race to deny “equal utilization of any public facility which is owned, operated, or managed by or on behalf of any State or subdivision thereof.” Who is behind the new racial discrimination?

In summer 2020, many local and state-mandated quarantines and bans on public assemblies were simply ignored with impunity—if demonstrators were associated with Black Lives Matter or protesting the police.

Currently, the Biden Administration is also flagrantly embracing the neo-Confederate idea of nullifying federal law. 

The Biden Administration has allowed nearly 2 million foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally across the southern border—in hopes they will soon be loyal constituents.

The administration has not asked illegal entrants either to be tested for or vaccinated against COVID-19. Yet all U.S. citizens in the military and employed by the federal government are threatened with dismissal if they fail to become vaccinated. 

Such selective exemption of lawbreaking non-U.S. citizens, but not millions of U.S. citizens, seems in conflict with the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

After entering the United States illegally, millions of immigrants are protected by some 550 “sanctuary city” jurisdictions. These revolutionary areas all brazenly nullify immigration law by refusing to allow federal immigration authorities to deport illegal immigrant lawbreakers. 

At various times in our nation’s history—1832, 1861-65, and 1961-63—America was either racked by internal violence or fought a civil war over similar state nullification of federal laws.

In the last five years, we have indeed seen many internal threats to democracy. 

Hillary Clinton hired a foreign national to concoct a dossier of dirt against her presidential opponent. She disguised her own role by projecting her efforts to use Russian sources onto Trump. She used her contacts in government and media to seed the dossier to create a national hysteria about “Russian collusion.” Clinton urged Biden not to accept the 2020 result if he lost, and she also claimed Trump was not a legitimately elected president.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has violated laws governing the chain of command. Some retired officers violated Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice by slandering their commander-in-chief. Others publicly were on record calling for the military to intervene to remove an elected president.

Some of the nation’s top officials in the FBI and intelligence committee have misled or lied under oath either to federal investigators or the U.S. Congress—again mostly with impunity.

All these sustained revolutionary activities were justified as necessary to achieve the supposedly noble ends of removing Donald Trump. 

The result is Third World-like jurisprudence in America aimed at rewarding friends and punishing enemies, masked by service to social justice.

We are in a dangerous revolutionary cycle. But the threat is not so much from loud, buffoonish one-day rioters on January 6. Such clownish characters did not for 120 days loot, burn, attack courthouses and police precincts, cause over 30 deaths, injure 2,000 policemen, and destroy at least $2 billion in property—all under the banner of revolutionary justice. Even more ominously, stone-cold sober elites are systematically waging an insidious revolution in the shadows that seeks to dismantle America’s institutions and the rule of law as we have known them.

January 6 Defendant Deserves Justice Tempered with Leniency and Reason

Bruno Cua’s case isn’t just about him. It is about ensuring that justice in America is even-handed and dispensed with leniency and reason.

posted by Matt Mayer at American Greatness

I know the Cua family: Joe, Alise, Bruno, Nina, and Nico. Joe and I went to high school and college together in Ohio, so my friendship with him runs 35 years. After I was class president our junior year, Joe was student body president our senior year as well as captain of the football team. A year ago, my kids and I drove down to Marco Island for winter vacation. On our way back to Ohio, we stopped and spent time with the Cuas at their home in Georgia on Christmas Day and December 26, less than two weeks before January 6, 2021. 

During our time together, the kids explored the Cua’s horse barn, scaled a three-story treehouse Bruno had built, and watched football. I spent some time with Bruno, who had recently turned 18, talking about our shared passion for America. Bruno showed me his truck, the rigging he built to hold big flags, and the enormous Trump and American flags he would fly on the truck at political events. 

Bruno was clearly proud of his truck and its flags. He even showed me a video clip when Ivanka Trump noticed the Trump flag during a speech and pointed it out to the crowd. He hoped the clip would go viral on social media. I sent the clip to a mutual contact I shared with Ivanka hoping she or one of her brothers would give Bruno a shout-out on social media to boost his following (they didn’t). He talked about how excited he was to take the flags with his parents to Washington, D.C., for the big Trump rally on January 6, 2021, so tens of thousands would see the truck with its flags.

Our families prayed and had dinner together where we talked about the good old days, Nina’s equestrian riding aspirations, and a million other topics. As avid hunters who live in a more rural area, the Cuas own guns and a hunting dog, which I would have taken with me given how amazing he was. The next morning, we had a great breakfast of Joe’s delicious German pancakes, as the kids continued to play with the Cua’s cats and dogs. 

Before we left, Joe, Alise, and I talked about their D.C. plans and I urged them to be careful given the reports of Antifa and Black Lives Matter activists planning to disrupt the rally. We remembered all too well the violence by those groups in D.C. after Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and during 2020. They promised they would be. There was no discussion of anything other than the rally.

About a month later, my niece sent me an article reporting that Bruno had been arrested for entering the Capitol. He was the youngest January 6 protester to be arrested. I followed his case as best I could from afar, as I didn’t want to bother the Cuas knowing how chaotic their lives had become. I read that Bruno had been denied bail and tossed into solitary confinement. Eventually, he was sent to Oklahoma where he was beaten and caught COVID. I was shocked. It wasn’t like Bruno was accused of being one of the people who physically broke into the Capitol Building or violently assaulted police officers. 

From everything I read, he was just a kid who got caught up in the moment and made a few bad decisions—who hasn’t at 18? He entered the Capitol with throngs of others, he may have had physical contact with a man in a suit (video isn’t clear and the suited man doesn’t recall the exchange), and he had one of those little batons so many people have, which he isn’t accused of actually using against anyone.

In fact, I think virtually all of the video of Bruno shows him recording on his phone—what better way to go viral on social media as so many teens, including my own daughter, try to do than to have amazing footage from January 6?—and not doing anything with the baton. As I learned much later, Joe gave him the baton for protection because of those reports of Antifa and BLM thugs being in D.C.

That’s it. Bruno was arrested and shipped off to Oklahoma essentially for trespassing, bumping a cop, and carrying a small baton. I won’t insult you by listing the countless Antifa and BLM activists who routinely attacked police officers and threw bricks and other projectiles who, if arrested (a big if), were not only given bail but had their bail paid for by Hollywood elites and politicians like Kamala Harris. A simple Google search results in thousands of videos showing equal or far more violent encounters with police than anything that happened on January 6. 

In 2020, Antifa and BLM rioters burned down police buildings, tried to burn down courthouses, and even made attempts on the White House, including physically assaulting Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and his wife. There were no massive manhunts conducted to find the 2020 rioters. Many of those activists have had their cases dropped or, at most, have been slapped on the wrist with minor jail times, fines, or community service. A few weeks ago, rioter Gabriel Agard-Berryhill, 18, took a plea deal for throwing an explosive device that started a fire at a federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon and put police officers’ lives at risk—a felony. The result? He was sentenced to time served with two years of supervised release. Several January 6 defendents have received far harsher sentences for doing much less. (I’ve previously detailed this double standard of justice between 2020 rioters and January 6 protesters.)

Bruno finally was released and allowed to return home to his parents after nearly two months in jail. Despite having no criminal record—not so much as a speeding ticket—and no passport, Bruno is required to wear an ankle monitor as the prosecutor and judge believe he is a risk to the community due to his actions on January 6 and a few over-the-top social media posts and retweets. He surely isn’t a flight risk. It made me think back to some of the things I said and did when I was 18. I am grateful social media didn’t exist back then because I can only imagine how my immature and impulsive actions could have been used against me. 

As they say, to err is human. If you have teenagers, the saying should be, to err a lot is being a teen.

Three critical points can’t be emphasized enough: First, if there was intent or a plan to “storm the Capitol” to shut down the government through an insurrection, the Cuas clearly didn’t know about it. Given that not a single person has been charged with insurrection after nearly a year of the federal government pouring endless resources to find evidence of such a plan, it seems fairly obvious there was no plan. 

Second, if Bruno thought he had committed a crime, he certainly wouldn’t have posted his video from the Capitol on his social media posts knowing how easily such posts go viral and could be vacuumed up by the FBI. The fact that he did speaks to his state of mind: an 18-year-old who followed the crowd and then posted his activities to gain “likes” and followers from like-minded Americans.

Finally, and it can’t be emphasized enough, Bruno was barely 18-years-old when he messed up. Unlike most of the January 6 protesters who had years-to-decades of adult experiences to help them gauge their actions on that day, Bruno, separated from his parents in his effort to get good video shots, had little-to-no adult experience to guide his decision-making. It is one thing for an adult who’s been around the block a time or two to do what Bruno did and not have a legitimate excuse to explain his conduct. For Bruno, however, being an impulsive teenager who gets caught up in the events around him calls for those judging him to exercise some leniency and reasonableness. He was functionally just a kid.

In Bill Buford’s excellent book, Among the Thugs, which chronicles the British football hooligans who caused so much destruction, injuries, and deaths in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he devotes a whole chapter to the psychology of belonging and crowds. As I tweeted in September after reading the book, the chapter is “like a case study on how protests/crowd can turn violent rapidly . . . especially relevant post-2020 and 1/6/21 riots.” 

I was struck to see the parallels between what happened on Premier League game days in England and what happened so often in 2020 with Antifa and BLM rioters and on January 6, 2021 with Trump protestors and rioters. There is significant research on how peaceful crowds can suddenly turn violent. Bruno’s story is not much different from those of the teens caught up in the hooliganism of British football fans.

At any rate, Joe isn’t the kind of dad who makes excuses for his kids. He has taught them to be self-reliant, honest, and decent young Americans. Joe also has taught them to be accountable for their actions. What Bruno did on January 6 was dumb and wrong. Joe knows that. Bruno knows that. In any other situation disconnected from the hyperpartisan environment we now live in, coming to a reasonable deal with prosecutors would have been easy and done by now. But Bruno was a Trump supporter who did what he did in D.C.—in other words, for supporting the wrong party, in the wrong city, and at the wrong government building.  

We all know what would have happened to Bruno’s case if he had been part of the group that stormed the Senate building to interrupt an official government proceeding during the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court hearings and did exactly what he did on January 6. Watch this video and listen as CNN describes the slap on the wrist those protestors got for doing virtually the same thing Bruno did. He never would have been denied bail, sent to Oklahoma, tagged with an ankle monitor, and watched his parents bankrupted by legal bills because his choice now rests between extensive jail time and rolling the dice with a trial . . . for trespassing.

Too bad Bruno didn’t make his mistakes a few months earlier when he was still 17. Then his minor status may have gotten him excused entirely. But it shouldn’t matter. Any reasonable person reviewing Bruno’s case would conclude he deserves some leniency and reasonableness. An 18-year-old first-time offender who trespassed and got slightly carried away with thousands of other people in any other time, city, or event would get hit with time served, a fine, probation, and community service. Many of the January 6 defendants deserve similar treatment.

The Cuas are good people. Like so many January 6 defendants, the nightmare they have endured since Bruno’s arrest has bled them dry financially. They need help to ensure that their teenage son’s life isn’t forever ruined by a dumb decision he made that didn’t hurt another person. A family friend started a GiveSendGo crowdfunding account to try to raise funds to cover Bruno’s legal defense, as so far there has not been prosecutorial leniency when it comes to his case. If you can help, please do. As parents with teens know, there but for the grace of God go we, given how impulsive and shortsighted they can be. 

After all, Bruno’s case isn’t just about Bruno. It is about ensuring that justice in America is even-handed and dispensed with leniency and reason. If we don’t fight for Bruno today, who knows what they will do to another family’s kid tomorrow.

 

Article by Pat Buchanan in NewsMax

Our Great Challenge Is China — Not Russia

While all facts are true, not all facts are relevant.

And what are the relevant facts in this crisis where 100,000 Russian troops are now stationed along the Ukrainian border?

Fact one: There is not now and never has been a vital U.S. interest in Ukraine to justify risking a war with Russia.

History tells us that. Even as Ukraine was suffering in the Stalin-induced Holodomor, the terror-famine of 1932-33, President Franklin Roosevelt granted diplomatic recognition to the Bolshevik regime.

During four decades of Cold War, the U.S. never regarded Moscow's control of Ukraine as any threat to the USA.

President Joe Biden was thus right to rule out military action in response to any Russian incursion or invasion of Ukraine.

Moreover, as it is declared U.S. policy not to retaliate militarily to an invasion of Ukraine, Biden should make it clear that Ukrainian membership in NATO is a closed question.

Not going to happen.

Ukraine is not going to be invited to join NATO and be given Article 5 U.S. war guarantees that are the primary benefit of membership.

Hence, with U.S. negotiations with Moscow over Ukraine impending, what is the state of play?

Russia is demanding that the U.S. give formal assurances that Ukraine and Georgia will never be admitted to NATO, and no nation bordering Russia will ever accept offensive NATO weapons that could imperil Russia's security.

If Moscow cannot get such assurances that Ukraine will never become a member of NATO, Russian President Vladimir Putin warns, Russia may invade and occupy Ukraine to neutralize that threat.

The U.S. position?

While we will not resist Russia militarily, the most severe sanctions in history will be imposed on Russia, possibly including cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany.

Putin has lately issued a counterthreat.

If such severe sanctions are imposed on Russia, this will result in a "complete rupture of relations" and be a blunder "which our descendants will later appreciate as a huge one."

Not long ago, a total severing of relations was the prelude to war.

While Putin and Russia initiated this crisis with the deployment of 100,000 troops to Ukraine's borders, we should try to see this crisis through Putin's eyes.

The heart of Greater Russia as one ethnic, cultural and historic nation consists not only of Russia but also of Belarus and Ukraine.

Yet, consider the political condition of that core nation today.

Ukraine has broken from Moscow and seeks its future in the West, the EU and NATO.

Belarus, a nation of 10 million, just went through an election where only fraud guaranteed victory for its 67-year-old autocrat, Alexander Lukashenko, who has ruled Belarus for a quarter-century.

Though an ally of Putin, Lukashenko is not the future.

And Putin himself, while popular, has been in power for two decades and is bedeviled by rising democratic resistance in Russia.

Now the Americans — who have, in a quarter-century, moved NATO across Germany into Eastern Europe and the Baltic states — are planning to bring into an alliance established to contain Russia the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine.

Putin has to see himself as the ruler of a diminishing Russia, not a rising power.

Time is not on Russia's side or Putin's side.

His principal ally, China, has 10 times the population of Russia and an economy 10 times Putin's. Moreover, China harbors ancestral claims to Russian territory in the Far East, which, in 1969, caused a border clash between the two countries.

Putin has decided that the long retreat of Russian power must end, that the eastward march of a NATO alliance created to contain and resist Russia must end, and if this means risking war over Ukraine, so be it.

Putin may see this as a now-or-never moment to halt the decades-long attrition of Russian territorial and national power.

And the U.S.?

In the Cold War, President Dwight Eisenhower did not intervene militarily to save the Hungarian rebels who rose against Moscow in 1956. Nor did President John F. Kennedy act to stop the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Nor did President Lyndon B. Johnson intervene to prevent Moscow's crushing of the "Prague Spring" in 1968. Nor did President Ronald Reagan act when Solidarity was crushed in Poland in 1981.

Historically, those presidents who refused to use force in Central or Eastern Europe, to avoid a war with Russia where U.S. vital interests were not imperiled, were proven right.

Time was on America's side in the Cold War. And, with Russia, time is still on America's side.

Our great challenge in the 21^st century is not Russia.

Indeed, in the long term, we want Russia on our side in the long struggle between the U.S. and the West, and Communist China.

What the U.S. should do in this Ukrainian crisis is to avoid a war with Russia, avoid an escalation, and leave our adversary with an honorable avenue of retreat. Again, with Russia, time is on our side.

 

https://www.newsmax.com/patrickbuchanan/russia-china-rival/2022/01/05/id/1051159/ 

 

Don't Forget to Recommend
and Follow us at our

W3P Homepage

They Know What’s Coming, White House Puts Port Envoy on Podium to Discuss Supply Chain Issues

Sundance reporting for Conservative Treehouse

The U.S. government does not operate in a vacuum without knowledge of what is happening and a solid perspective on what is likely to happen.  Whether they listen to the commonsense advisors, or whether the control officers intentionally keep counter positions away from the principle, is another matter; however, the officials generally know what is most likely to happen.

The White House put Port Envoy John D. Porcari, who is also intricately involved in the supply chain taskforce, on the podium today to discuss supply chain issues.   The full video of his remarks is posted below, but my spidey sense is telling me they know what we know, and they are starting to prepare for what will ultimately become impossible to ignore.  WATCH:

It’s not just a port issue, as we have discussed on these pages, the interventionist policies and regulations from the people creating the COVID response (writ large) have been fubar from the beginning. {Go Deep} When they shut down the restaurants and hospitality sector (2020 lockdowns), the advisors and bureaucrats triggered a cascading series of events inside the food supply chain.

I know it sounds weird to try and wrap your arms around, but those early decisions in 2020 created a problem that only a very few people could see and follow to its natural conclusion.

The 60/40 supply chain for food away from home (restaurants, fast-food locales, schools, cafeterias etc.), and food at home (supermarkets and grocery stores etc.), is not something you can just fiddle around with. {Go Deep}

Supply chains are challenging on their own. However, within the various supply chains, the supply chain for U.S. food distribution is the most complex supply chain in the world.  There’s nothing even close.  It was created by decades of free market operators following efficiencies of scale to produce the best, most wholesome and reliable food supply chain ever created.  In many ways it is our best national security advantage.

The free-market distribution system would eventually overcome the problem and reestablish its efficiencies.   However, given the scale of disruption -and the fact that catch up harvests are seasonal- it was obviously taking several years.

Most Americans were not aware going into the COVID mitigation effort that food consumption in the U.S. was a 60/40 proposition. Approximately 60% of all food was consumed “outside the home” (or food away from home), and 40% of all food consumed was food “inside the home” (grocery shoppers).

Food ‘outside the home’ includes restaurants, fast food locales, schools, corporate cafeterias, university lunchrooms, manufacturing cafeterias, hotels, food trucks, park and amusement food sellers and many more. Many of those venues are not thought about when people evaluate the overall U.S. food delivery system; however, this network was approximately 60 percent of all food consumption on a daily basis.

The ‘food away from home‘ sector has its own supply chain. Very few restaurants and venues (cited above) purchase food products from retail grocery outlets. As a result of the coronavirus mitigation effort, the ‘food away from home’ sector was reduced by 75% of daily food delivery operations. However, people still needed to eat. That meant retail food outlets, grocers, would see sales increases of 25 to 50 percent, depending on the area.

The retail consumer supply chain for manufactured and processed food products includes bulk storage to compensate for seasonality. As Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue noted in 2020, “There are over 800 commercial and public warehouses in the continental 48 states that store frozen products.”

Here is a snapshot of the food we had in storage at the end of February 2020: over 302 million pounds of frozen butter; 1.36 billion pounds of frozen cheese; 925 million pounds of frozen chicken; over 1 billion pounds of frozen fruit; nearly 2.04 billion pounds of frozen vegetables; 491 million pounds of frozen beef; and nearly 662 million pounds of frozen pork.

This bulk food storage is how the total U.S. consumer food supply ensures consistent availability even with weather impacts.  As a nation, we essentially stay one harvest ahead of demand by storing it and smoothing out any peak/valley shortfalls. There are a total of 175,642 commercial facilities involved in this supply chain across the country

The stored food supply is the originating resource for food manufacturers who process the ingredients into a variety of branded food products and distribute to your local supermarket. That bulk stored food, and the subsequent supply chain, is entirely separate from the fresh food supply chain used by restaurants, hotels, cafeterias etc.

For almost four months in 2020, the retail supply chain was operating way beyond capacity, as most “food away from home” was turned off or severely limited.  The burn rate of raw food products in storage jumped a stunning 40 percent.  Those bulk warehouses, the feeder pools for retail/consumer manufactured food products, started to run low as the various states kept making rules about restaurant capacity and venue availability due to COVID.

Believe me, we don’t want to find out what happens when those 800 mass storage facilities run out.  This “bigger picture” was not being considered by politically minded governors, DC politicians, and public health-centric advisors who focused exclusively on using the politics of the virus for control.

Here we are, two years later, and the currently empty shelves, in combination with layers of new short-sighted policy, are a downstream consequence of that originating disruption.

The best thing government could do to avoid a crisis would have been to do nothing.  Just let people go back to normal, and that would have allowed the market process to eventually correct itself.  However, they didn’t stop -and worse- the Biden administration started implementing massive policy changes (energy policy, regulatory policy, legislative policy, monetary policy) while simultaneously pumping COVID bailout money into the economy.

As the food sector tried to gain its footing, the wave of price increases driven by energy policy only made things worse.   We have been seeing these staggering price increases at the grocery store.  Then, at the worst possible time, the new Omicron narrative “a winter of death awaits” was pushed.  Now, the labor side of the supply chain equation is hit even harder stressing out every facet of the food distribution system.

Instead of just preparing for massive price increases, we are now preparing for massive shortages in this most important sector.

People are starting to see completely blown-out empty shelves and slow replenishment.   Soon, as a result of this situation worsening, there is very likely to be public pressure on government to solve the problem which, ironically and insufferably, the government intervention created.

How will the White House respond to demands that someone fix the problem of empty shelves?

You already know the answer to that question, and it isn’t good.

Here’s the full presser with John D. Porcari (prompted):