Sunday, April 24, 2022

Unexplained Fires Engulf Russian Tank Farms; Oil Pipeline to Germany May Be at Risk

streiff reporting for RedState 

Early Monday morning (local time), explosions rocked two oil tank farms in Bryansk, Russia.  Bryansk is about 250 miles northeast of the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, and less than 70 miles from the Ukrainian border.

The tweets below are presented solely for the purpose of illustration; the opinions and conclusions expressed are those of the writers.

Here are my thoughts:

Over the past week, we’ve seen unexplained fires at three significant facilities inside Russia in just two days (read Bad Luck Strikes Russia as Three Major Fires in Two Days Damage Defense and Private Industry).

Last month, Ukraine carried out two strikes in Russian territory. It hit an ammunition storage area and a fuel storage depot (see Ukraine Attacks Fuel Depot Miles Inside of Russia—or Did It?).

The tank farms that are on fire would support ongoing Russian “special operations” in Eastern Ukraine.

One tank farm catching fire is careless; two flaming up is rather extravagant. Two tank farms, geographically separated, going Zippo on the same night pushes the laws of probabilities.

If the early stories of the fire/explosion affecting an oil pipeline to Germany, all of this just got a lot more interesting.



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‘Weren’t Gonna Back Down An Inch’: Gov. DeSantis Says Disney’s Special Privileges Were A Threat To The ‘Democratic Process’

 


Article by Nicole Silverio in The Daily Caller

 

‘Weren’t Gonna Back Down An Inch’: Gov. DeSantis Says Disney’s Special Privileges Were A Threat To The ‘Democratic Process’

Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Disney’s self-governing and push for LGBTQ content threatened the “democratic process” during a Friday appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

The governor signed legislation on Friday revoking Disney’s special tax status in effect through the 1967 Reedy Creek Improvement Act. Under the law, Disney had the power to regulate its taxes, land use, environmental and medical services.

“This company had a deal unlike any company or individual in all of the state of Florida, probably anywhere in the United States,” he began. “They were self-governing, they had extraordinary powers, they could build nuclear power plants, they didn’t have to go through permitting processes and obviously a lot of tax benefits. And that’s just inappropriate.”

“And it’s certainly inappropriate when you look… they pledged themselves to mobilize their considerable corporate resources out of the coffers of this Burbank, California, based corporation to overturn the rights of parents in the state of Florida – effectively commandeer our democratic process.”

The governor then pointed to leaked footage of Disney executives outlining ways to incorporate “sexuality” into their content. He said, therefore, that the decision was appropriate and that the corporation should be set to the same standard as all the other constituents of Florida. 

Fox host and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson said it is ironic that the executives speak of the importance of defending democracy when they stand against the legislative process rather than corporations. The governor said they will side with anyone who pushes their “leftist agenda.”

“I think what the left has come to is they want to see power exercised in advance of their leftist agenda. So yes, they used to be hostile to big corporations because they perceived corporations as being apolitical and that they wouldn’t support their agenda. Now they’ve figured out that they can try to subcontract out their leftism out of some of these big corporations and some of the executives will cave to the woke mob and then they’ll basically do the left’s dirty work,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis then said Florida Democrats believed getting Disney involved would convince him to back down from signing the “Parental Rights in Education” bill.

“We weren’t gonna back down an inch,” he said.

He said the majority of Floridians do not want “woke garbage” in American society, including biological men competing in women’s sports and have their children have sexual orientation “jammed down their throats.”

The governor urged the state legislature to pass the legislation after Disney came out in strong opposition to the parental rights bill that prohibits teaching sexual orientation and gender identity in K-3 classrooms. The entertainment giant called for the bill’s repeal or for the courts to strike it down.

https://dailycaller.com/2022/04/22/werent-gonna-back-down-gov-desantis-disney-threat-democratic-process/ 

 


 


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NCIS LA: Hetty will return for Season 14

 



Source: https://parade.com/1368863/paulettecohn/ncis-los-angeles-where-is-hetty/

Where’s Hetty Lange (Linda Hunt)? That’s the question on the mind of the majority of NCIS: Los Angeles fans. We’ve been given glimpses of our intrepid former operations manager off on a dangerous mission in Syria, but we don’t know what’s so important to her that she would forsake her team in Los Angeles, resulting in Admiral Kilbride (Gerald McRaney) being named her permanent replacement.

So, the question remains, will Hetty ever return?

“Her story continues,” NCIS: Los Angeles showrunner Scott R. Gemmill reassured Parade.com at PaleyFest—A Salute to the NCIS Universe event. “She was in at the beginning of this season and then we had her disappear. The plan is to follow that up next year with some reveal.”

While Hetty has been MIA, Callen has been doing an investigation into his childhood to ascertain exactly what he means to her. Was he just one of hundreds of young recruits she brought into the agency? Or is their relationship as special as he believes it to be?

“We’ve pitted her a little bit against Callen in terms of what he went through as a child, so that’s something we’re very eager to explore and have fun with,” Gemmill continued. “We saw a little bit of that confrontation earlier this year, but before they could really have it out, she disappeared again. That’ll be focus for us in season 14 when we come back.”

Linda Hunt, Chris O'Donnell Robert Voets/CBS
Linda Hunt, Chris O'Donnell (Robert Voets/CBS)

Callen has been on a journey of discovery as to his identity during the entire run of NCIS: Los Angeles. First it was to discover what the G. in G. Callen stood for. We now know his birth name was Grisha Aleksandrovich Nikolaev. His investigation went on until he finally found his father, now deceased, and a half-sister and nephew.

“I think he got to a point where he seemed he thought he knew who he was, and then suddenly there was a reveal,” Gemmill said. “I think he wants to truly believe that Hetty did this out of the goodness of her heart, took him under her wing, and not that he was just another project of hers that was not as emotional as his relationship with her is. I think he wants answers to that so that he doesn’t feel betrayed. Over time, we’ve helped to give him some closure. I think this is probably the final step and the real reckoning with his mother figure, which in this case is Hetty.” 

While we will have to wait until season 14 to discover more about Hetty’s whereabouts and what she’s been up to, Gemmill did fill us in a little bit about what to expect as we head toward the finale, especially because it had to be written before the show was picked up for the next season.

“What we really focused on because we weren’t sure what was happening, we really wanted to always leave the fans in a happy place,” he shared. ‘We never want to stress them out too much. Because we hit the 300th right before that, we focused on what really the show is about to all of us, which is about work and family. 

“In the finale you’ll see Kensi [Daniela Ruah] and Deeks [Eric Christian Olsen] moving onto the next place in their lives in terms of having a family. Callen, as well, will start to take some control over what his future is going to be. And even Sam’s [LL Cool J] character will be dealing with family issues, as well, in a way that we haven’t really seen yet and meet so much of his family that we haven’t met that we’ve alluded to, specifically his father.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

My thoughts:

Yes, this is the reason I was looking for to stick around for Season 14. And while 1 part of me is glad that she's staying, another part of me, a big one, is extremely skeptical about this, mainly because of the idiot who did this interview.

For starters, the whole 'the plan is for this' junk is the same crap that I've heard for how many years now?! And of course, they never happened, and were never given excuses, (or just got really weak explanations!). Plus, this fool has also lied about 98% of all Hetty teasers since Season 11, and he wants to be trusted now?! (remember the whole 'the team will get sucked into what she's doing in Syria' crap?? Remember 'The plan is for more Hetty'??? Where has any of that been this Season???!! 😡)

And there's nothing 'fun' about seeing 2 people who have had a special mother son like bond for a long time be on bad terms over rewritten crap, it's completely annoying, and poor writing. (and we all know Hetty did what she did out of the goodness of her heart! There's over 200 episodes of proof!!)

And as you can see, there was zero explanation as to whys he's been gone all Season. SOOOOOOOOO Typical!!! 🤬

Looks like it'll be the same damn cycle of broken promises and bad writing, all to keep from losing even more fans then they continue to lose each year because of all these bad choices. And if there's even 1 slight improvement over this Season, I'll be shocked.

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In Florida, a new law says Disney is no longer special

 



 Article by Andrea Widburg in The American Thinker


In Florida, a new law says Disney is no longer special

What Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature just accomplished vis-à-vis Disney is a big deal.

For decades, when it comes to leftism creeping into every American institution, conservatives have played the game two ways: either they've played defense or they've withdrawn from the fray entirely.  In this case, though, by withdrawing a unique legislative protection that the state granted Disney in 1967, Florida turned the tables and waged war on the woke.

A couple of days ago, Jesse Kelly made an interesting point on Twitter — for decades, Republicans have made losing their comfort zone:

 

 

He's right, and we all know it.  There are too many people (I won't name names, but you know whom I mean) who found Trump terrifying because he was finally going to make "Conservative Inc." live up to its promises.  So they joined with the left to destroy Trump.

Currently, no one is destroying Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature.  Instead, they're doing something unique in the annals of modern conservatism: they're bringing the fight to the ideological enemy.

In this case, sad to say, that enemy is Disney.  Walt Disney founded the company with a vision of entertaining the child in every person and reinforcing the core American values that made up his childhood.  Now, though, the Disney company is dedicated to exploiting every child and reinforcing disturbing values about race and sex that will tear American society apart.

 Disney didn't have to go to war with Florida.  When the Florida Legislature passed and DeSantis signed a bill saying teachers in kindergarten through third-grade classes should not deliberately address the fantasy of gender identity, and other sexual matters, with the five- to eight- (or nine-) year-olds in their charge, Disney could have said nothing.  Most people support the law.

 But for Disney, the pressure from the LGBTQ++ contingent within the company was too great to bear.  Disney, therefore, announced that it was going to war with Florida to ensure that weird, pierced teachers pumped full of gender hormones could continue to proselytize their warped views to rooms full of trapped, vulnerable children:

 

 

At around the same time, America got to see videos showing high-level Disney employees boasting about their commitment to inserting LGBTQ++ content into everything possible.

Thanks to Disney's misbegotten idea to get involved in state politics affecting children and to use its products to push children into the LGBTQ++ mindset, two things happened.  First, Disney's stock tanked:

 

 

 

Second, the Florida Legislature passed, and DeSantis signed, a bill stripping Disney of its special status as a self-governing district.  Florida granted that privilege (not a right — a privilege) to Disney in 1967 based on Disney's plan to build an entire community in what was then pastureland and swamp.  Because the counties in which the land was located lacked the resources to support that kind of development, Florida established the Reedy Creek Improvement District, allowing Disney to act like a county government on that land.  This special status has been very profitable for Disney.

The Disney company must currently be shell-shocked to find that it had to pay a price, in the form of losing that profitable privilege, "just because" it went to war against the Florida state government.  After all, woke companies have been declaring war against so many things lately, all without suffering any significant consequences.  They've gotten used to the fact that, as Jesse Kelly said, Republicans are comfortable losing.  Republicans will usually huff and puff, but take no action on and bear no responsibility for anything.

In DeSantis, though, there's a new sheriff in town, and he's here to clean up the scourge of wokeness that is destroying America from within, one child at a time.  Disney just happens to be the first company affected by this clean-up.

And please, ignore those leftists who are squealing that Disney is being punished for speech.  The Legislature always has the right to remove special privileges that it once granted.  Disney has the right to stay on exactly the same path as before, including wading into politics.  However, a company that built its brand on entertaining the child in all of us might want to rethink its strategy of rebuilding its brand on grooming children. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/04/in_florida_a_new_law_says_disney_is_no_longer_special.html



 

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On the Fringe-April 24

 



Eventful day! I have a NCIS LA article coming up in a bit, keep an eye out!


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Leftists Aren’t Losers

When progressives lose, they only try harder. On the other hand, conservatives are too easily satisfied with small victories.


Progressives and conservatives understand victory and defeat in starkly different ways. I’ve seen it illustrated many times in my years in academia, government, and media. Those outcomes have not been evenly distributed to the parties on the Left and Right, not in recent decades, and certainly not in the areas of culture and education. Progressives have a much better win-loss record, beating conservatives on one front after another in the worlds of art, education, media and entertainment, even corporate America—beyond politics, government, and the courts. 

But progressives rarely seem happy with their wins. They still act as if they’re on the defensive as if the conservative threat remains daunting and growing, and that, as the progressive motto goes, “There’s so much more to do.” That’s the attitude they have toward their own triumphs: dissatisfaction, inadequacy, do more! Barack Obama embodied it well, never letting the air of sober urgency fall from his countenance as his administration careened from one audacious progressive act to another, be it the insertion (by fiat) of gender identity into Title IX or the appointment of activist judges to the bench. 

As for the losses the Left has suffered, President Obama showed the way as well. The many Democratic defeats in Congress in the 2010 midterms didn’t moderate his progressive aims at all. Nor did the legal decisions that struck down his administration’s positions on employment and religious liberty curb its leftist enthusiasms. He kept going for a full eight years. 

The pattern is typical. When progressives lose, they only try harder. Defeat doesn’t demoralize them—it energizes them. They have the zeal of true believers, and setbacks seem to them a species of persecution that confirms their rightness. When conservatives beat them, leftists return the next day with the same demands asserted in the same language. They have stamina and confidence and dedication. Defeat doesn’t lead to retreat. They aren’t losers. 

As for conservatives, things go in reverse. I have seen them lose and lose and lose, then finally get a win, and proceed to celebrate that win as a mighty accomplishment. They have the dud’s habit of accepting a batting average that keeps a player in the Double-A league; a single here and a home run there are enough to keep their egos intact despite the team’s cellar-dweller standing. They chuckle at Texas Governor Greg Abbott sending a few buses of illegals to Washington, D.C., which is, indeed, a clever tweak at Biden Administration policy. But let’s not overdo the impact. A genuine victory would be 100 busloads sent to the White House with notes telling the administration, “You help these people.” 

Conservatives hail the University of Austin as a rebuke of and alternative to the illiberal campus, and it is. But again, don’t exaggerate. Conservatives shouldn’t be satisfied with the project until 25 University of Austins open across the country. 

But conservatives don’t think that way. They accept small advances, and they resist sweeping victories. They are cautious, prudent, careful, and realistic. Their Burkean instincts steer them into “gradualist” acts. Don’t think big, don’t overreach. Grand ambitions and radical change are the purview of the Left. We’re more circumspect, more heedful. We know the damage that revolutions do. 

The Left conducts experiments against reality while we live by the reality principle. They push affirmative action in college admissions against empirical evidence of how the mismatch effect harms its beneficiaries. Reality for them is merely the current state of affairs, ever up for reshaping. They have the “audacity of hope.” Conservatives mock and chide that arrogance, but deep down, it frightens them. 

So, when conservatives lose, they pull back, reflect, and revise their aims. After the 2012 Mitt Romney loss, the Republican National Committee commissioned a postelection review that included recommendations for ways the party might avoid future defeats. The result sounded like a diversity and inclusion statement composed by a college dean. It told conservatives to stop being conservatives—exactly the opposite lesson a progressive would draw from setbacks (“We’re not left enough! We must be more progressive!”). 

This Republican reaction explains the establishment’s abhorrence of Donald Trump. Trump ignored all the recommendations in the 2012 report. When critics hit him, he hit back. The fighting posture shone a spotlight on the low-energy establishment types, humiliating and discrediting them, and they hated him for doing that. Republicans long in office or otherwise comfortable in D.C. and state capitals felt a newfound pressure every time Trump spoke. He set a higher standard of vigor and action, a standard Barack Obama upheld quite well. 

Peggy Noonan in late November 2012 wrote a column on Obama’s high-octane style titled, “The Drawn-Out Crisis: It’s the Obama Way.” In it, she asked: “Why does it always have to be cliffs with this president? Why is it always a high-stakes battle?”

She was correct in her attribution of exigency to the president but incorrect in confining it to him. The omnipresent crisis is the progressive mode of being. Republicans need to admit it and realize that principles and facts alone cannot overcome it. This is always a battle of personalities. We need stalwart men and women at the helm, a never-say-die attitude, and a recognition of the full animosity of the other side—of the Left’s relentless verve. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has those virtues, and we need at least 10 more of him.


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Who Is Running This Show, Anyway?

Things boil down to a question of "Who rules"? 
Is it the people or a hive of bureaucratic would-be experts?


Some people, including me, are inclined to disparage social media as an insidious and anencephalic force. Insidious it may be, but it is not entirely brainless. As proof, I offer the fact that I just learned the valuable word “quockerwodger” from a Tweet proffered by a friend. Who or what is a quockerwodger? It is, my friend observed, the perfect word to describe the current president of the United States, Joe Biden, to wit, “a puppet figure or individual whose strings are pulled entirely by someone else.”

Everyone knows this. Who or what that “someone else” is remains something of a mystery. As I have had occasion to observe in this space and elsewhere, I am wont to refer to this puppet magisterium as “The Committee.” I do not know who populates this agency or even whether it is a deliberate body or merely an anonymous aggregation of shared sentiment. 

It could certainly be more expert. If it were, Joe Biden’s verbal emissions would be less incontinent and more truthful. He would not, for example, say that he had “flown over every major wildfire” in the country. The puppeteer would have pulled up on the mouth string when Biden claimed to have traveled 17,000 miles in the “foothills of the Himalayas” with Xi Jinping. 

The puppeteer could be more adroit, but no one can doubt his presence, whoever or whatever he is. 

The late political commentator Joe Sobran called this locationless body “the Hive.” Just as in a beehive, Sobran observed, members of the coven feel they are free, yet their attitudes and behavior are utterly predictable. “Liberals laugh at conspiracy theories that assume that because there is a pattern there must be some central control; but the fact that there is no central control doesn’t mean that there is no pattern.”

Sobran is especially good on the honey that coats the Hive’s often unspoken program. “By using pragmatic language for its agenda,” he notes, “the Hive misleads the general public about its ultimate goals.”

It gains power as ordinary people adopt its language without grasping the implications. After all, who could oppose such worthy causes as ‘civil rights,’ ‘a woman’s right to choose,’ ‘protecting our children’ and ‘saving the environment’? The news media use the buzzwords of the Hive so habitually that they have become virtual organs of the Hive.

In other words, the Hive triumphs insofar as people mistake its blandishments for the good. Here’s how it goes: “We’re in favor of Disney/CRT/lockdowns/higher taxes/less freedom/the welfare state because we believe that good people must endorse those things. We like to think of ourselves as good people. Therefore, we endorse whatever the Hive proposes.”

These days, most commentators refer to the Hive as the “deep state,” “the administrative state,” or “the regulatory state.” There has been a lot of hand-wringing about the activities and influence of this shadowy force. I have written about it many times myself, often drawing upon an observation Edmund Burke made in his 1770 essay, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. Criticizing the court of George III for circumventing Parliament and establishing by stealth what amounted to a new regime of royal prerogative and influence-peddling, Burke showed how the king and his courtiers maintained the appearance of parliamentary supremacy while covertly dismantling it. 

“It was soon discovered,” Burke wrote with sly understatement, “that the forms of a free, and the ends of an arbitrary Government, were things not altogether incompatible” (my emphasis). That discovery stands behind the growth of the administrative state. We still vote. We still have a bicameral legislature. But behind these forms of a free government, the essentially undemocratic activities of an increasingly arbitrary and unaccountable regime pursues an expansionist agenda that threatens liberty in the most comprehensive way, by circumventing the law. 

The Biden Administration is the intermittently smiling, if vacant and dozy, face of this project. The reality of this enterprise is more widely felt than understood. One of the best contributions to articulating exactly what is at stake in the machinations of the administrative state is “What Trump and Covid Revealed,” a recent essay by Glenn Ellmers for The American Mind. Based on an earlier essay by John Marini, who more than anyone has plumbed the stygian depths of the administrative state, Ellmers zeros in on the essential tension between constitutional government, which is based upon a broadly shared common sense, and its would-be replacement: technocratic government, which is populated by an unaccountable elite, “experts” whose leading characteristic is faith in their own prerogatives. This “permanent government,” Ellmers writes, “is a powerful force.” 

It has established its own legitimacy apart from its political or constitutional authority, within the ranks of both political parties and the courts. Bureaucratic rule is defended as essential to solving, in a non-partisan way, the problems of modern government and society. But the bureaucracy has become a political faction on behalf of its own interests. Moreover, the party that defends progressivism and elite authority is increasingly open about politicizing the last vestiges of non-partisan government, including the Justice Department and federal law enforcement. As their power has grown, these defenders of administrative government are increasingly unable to understand, let alone tolerate, anyone who fails to recognize the legitimacy of the administrative state.

It is important to note that this progressive project is as much a Republican as a Democratic pursuit. Despite some rhetorical differences, both parties are fully paid up worker bees in this hive. The “pragmatic” cover they give themselves is the supposed “complexity” of modern life and complication of contemporary governance. Who but they are equipped to manage the machinery of the state, the minutiae of government? Ellmers nails it: “The pursuit of progress, social justice, and equity becomes for them the moral equivalent of constitutional authority.”

As a result, the growth and consolidation of the administrative state have made it more difficult to control the apparatus of government by political means alone. It is no longer clear that the bureaucracy understands itself as the willing servant of its political masters, when the ‘masters’ are perceived as a threat to the administrative state.

And this is where that strangest of strange messengers, Donald Trump, comes in. Trump understood—and more to the point, he articulated for millions of Americans—what was at stake in the battle between constitutional government as traditionally understood and its technocratic doppelgänger. Challenging the hegemony of experts requires a widespread reassertion of that “common sense morality” to which the founders appealed but which is regarded by our would-be masters as an impediment to utopia. A key problem, as Ellmers sees, is that “what is left of public morality is now understood in terms of ‘values,’ or subjective preferences based only on individual will. Even in the small handful of healthy institutions in civil society, the political and civil rights of the ordinary citizen rest upon a precarious foundation, threatened and undermined by the powerful claims of social progress.”

Those claims are nearly irresistible, as anyone who has dared to question the dominant narrative on issues from “climate change” to COVID policy to race and identity politics will know. The question, as I have put it elsewhere, revolves around the location of sovereignty. Who rules? The people, articulating their interests through the metabolism of ordinary politics? Or the bureaucratic elite, who claim to discern the inevitable direction and goal of history and are prepared to marshal the coercive power of the state to prevent anything from cluttering up that highway to enlightenment? 


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Black Clergy Call on Corporations to Distance Themselves From Black Lives Matter

Black Clergy Call on Corporations to Distance Themselves From Black Lives Matter

Chris Queen - PJ Media
AP Photo/Jeff Chiu

Since the advent of Black Lives Matter in the mid-2010s and especially since the organization went front and center in 2020, corporations have fallen head over heels for BLM.

It’s an easy way for corporations to virtue-signal, and there’s plenty of pressure on companies to show their support or face accusations of racism, true or not.

Corporations have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker, but there’s a movement afoot to call on companies to back away from Black Lives Matter. A group of black clergy leaders approached some corporate headquarters in Atlanta this week, urging them to distance themselves from BLM.

“Concerned Communities for America, a non-profit led by Black clergy, delivered a pledge for signing to the headquarters of Papa John’s Pizza and Coca Cola in Atlanta on Wednesday to renounce BLM’s charity operation and the movement’s push to defund police,” reports ADN America. “The pledge asks the corporations to renounce their past support and donations to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, which has been embroiled in scandals over the use of donations for lavish personal expenses.”

Leaders of this non-profit seek to make corporations aware of the difference between the sentiment that “black lives matter,” which everyone except ardent racists can get behind, and the organization Black Lives Matter, which promotes Marxism while its leaders live high on the hog and waste donors’ money.

“Woke corporations in their misguided financial support for BLMGNF have failed Black America and the movement but supporting Marxism, and anarchy on the streets and in our communities,” said DaQuawn Bruce, CCA’s executive director. “Our hope is to educate them on how they might support the communities in which they operate while uplifting those who swear to serve and protect.”

Public safety is a key tenet of what CCA is promoting, and in a city like Atlanta where woke leadership has contributed to a crime wave, business leaders are aware of the importance of a secure metro area.

Bruce LaVell, a businessman and Trump acolyte who is also running for Congress in Georgia’s 6th district, which covers a suburban area north of Atlanta, agrees.

“Never in my wildest dream that I’d ever think that I would be having a conversation about defund the police and some of these great companies, who funded BLM for the sake of defunding the police,” LaVell told reporters. “And I was scratching my head, like, does anyone realize that in order for great economic returns or good communities, you have to have good public safety?”

Other leaders are emphasizing the financial corruption that’s rife in the Black Lives Matter Global Foundation.

“For these people, black lives don’t matter. Mansions matter,” stated Marc Little, pastor and founder of another non-profit, Cure America Action.

Concerned Communities for America was planning on delivering pledges to more corporate headquarters later in the week. The efforts of these pastors may not make a difference for any of these corporations, but at least they’re making their voices heard, which is more than BLM has done for anybody.


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Robert Lighthizer Discusses Biden Trade Policy and Potential for Administration to Remove Chinese Tariffs


Robert Lighthizer was the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) under the Trump administration.  Lighthizer was exceptionally strong in developing and structuring the America First trade policy that included the effective use of tariffs to get fair trade outcomes.

In this video Ambassador Lighthizer discusses the current trade policy of the Biden administration with former National Economic Council Chair Larry Kudlow.  The discussion centers around U.S-China trade policy, the phase-1 trade deal that was interrupted by the pandemic, and the future of the existing trade tariffs against Beijing that Biden is reportedly going to remove.  WATCH:


As noted by Lighthizer, if Biden drops the Chinese tariffs, it will only make the trade imbalance worse and push the U.S. deeper into the cycle of lost jobs and economic contraction.  He’s correct.




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FedEx Founder and CEO Lays Out Just How Democrats Caused the Current Inflation Spike

FedEx Founder and CEO Lays Out Just How Democrats Caused the Current Inflation Spike

By Randy DeSoto  April 22, 2022 at 12:40pm

FedEx founder and CEO Fred Smith says that Democratic policies are clearly to blame, in part, for the current levels of inflation the U.S. is experiencing.

The consumer price index surged 8.5 percent in March compared to a year ago, up from 7.9 percent in February, CNBC reported. The rate was the highest since December 1981.

By way of comparison, the month former President Donald Trump left office, January 2021, the inflation rate was 1.4 percent.

Asked by Fox News host Bret Baier Wednesday to give his overview of where the nation’s economy stands, Smith addressed inflation.

“We still have substantial growth, but as you mentioned substantial inflation. I think the best person that commented on the current situation before it got started was Larry Summers, the former Democratic treasury secretary who forewarned about these inflation pressures,” Smith said.

“It’s a combination of a lot of things that began with the pandemic and the instant reduction of demand and then the stimulus payments created demand for goods and then the third stimulus payment about a year ago created a significant labor shortage,” he added.

In a February 2021 Washington Post opinion piece, Summers wrote that passing the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, given the economy was already well into a recovery, “will set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar and financial stability.”

After it passed the following month, the former Clinton administration treasury secretary called it “the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years.”

Smith referenced his own experience at FedEx with the impact of the legislation.

“I’m not making any political statement one way or the other, but we know from our own statistics and can track exactly when the stimulus checks went out in April and May of last year, and we had about 50,000 [job] applications the first week in May,” he told Baier.

FedEx CEO Fred Smith said his company’s job application numbers show exactly how the Dems’ stimulus $1.9T bill helped contribute to inflation. https://t.co/TpCs6GcGpN

— Randy DeSoto (@RandyDeSoto) April 21, 2022

“It took us to December to get back to about 120,000 applications,” Smith further stated.

“So it’s simply quantitative data. I’m not saying anything based on anybody’s politics. It’s just the numbers,” he reiterated.

The business leader elaborated on the point in a recent interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Smith explained much of the supply-chain crisis was created by government payments incentivizing people not to work.

The Foundation for Government Accountability calculated last summer that when the enhanced unemployment payments and monthly child tax credits being sent at the time were added to existing benefits for lower-income Americans, that worked out to about $3,700 per month for a two-child family, or $44,300 per year in payments.

During this period, Smith told the Journal, “We were 40,000 package-handlers short, and there were people in the media saying that the stimulus checks didn’t have anything to do with that.” Such people are “divorced from the world we’re living in.”

“If I’m getting a government check,” he said, there’s less incentive to “go into a warehouse.”

Smith contended the U.S. dodged a hyperinflation bullet last fall when the Democrats’ Build Back Better legislation, which some estimated would cost $5 trillion over ten years, fell short.

“Had we passed the Build Back Better bill that [President Joe] Biden wanted, my guess is that we would be [1920s] Weimar Germany right now,” he said. “We’d have 25% inflation rather than 9% or 10%.”

Smith credited Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia for saving the U.S. from this fate.

They were “like the Dutch kid with the finger in the dike,” he said.

The CEO noted that much of the spending would have been paid for with Federal Reserve “printed” money, which is inflationary.

Smith said you can’t “print money without regard to the fundamental laws of economics.”





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Oops: NY Post Finds Hunter's Closest Business Partner Visited the Obama WH 19 Times, Met With Biden


Mike Miller reporting for RedState 

Although the lapdog media continues to ignore the Hunter Biden email scandal like the plague, the walls continue to close in on Joe Biden’s grifter son and Joe himself, despite insistence by “The Big Guy” that he has never talked to Hunter about his business dealings or partners, nor knowingly met with any of them.

Au contraire — squared. 

First, as RedState reported in May 2021, Biden has met with Hunter’s various business partners multiple times. On one occasion, Vadym Pozharskyi, a Ukrainian executive at Burisma, thanked Hunter for introducing him to his father. Hunter was on the Burisma board at the time.

Saturday morning, it got even better — depending on one’s perspective.

As reported by the New York Post, Hunter’s closest business partner made at least 19 visits to the White House and other official locations between 2009 and 2015 — while Joe was vice president — including a sitdown with The Big Guy in the West Wing. Via the NY Post:

Visitor logs from the White House of former President Barack Obama reviewed by The Post cast further doubt over Joe Biden’s claims that he knew nothing of his son’s dealings.

Eric Schwerin met with Vice President Biden on November 17, 2010 in the West Wing, when he was the president of the since-dissolved investment fund Rosemont Seneca Partners.

The logs also reveal that Schwerin met with various close aides of both Joe and Jill Biden at key moments in Hunter’s life when he was striking multi-million dollar deals in foreign countries, including China.

Yet President Biden has long insisted he had no involvement in his son’s foreign affairs. “I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings,” he said in 2019.

Virtually every word Biden has uttered in response to Hunter’s business deals has been a lie; much of which has been contradictory as hell, if not mutually exclusive. How can Biden insist he’s never spoken to Hunter about his business dealings, while at the same time declaring his wayward son has never broken the law?

Republican Senator Ron Johnson (Wis.) reacted to the White House news, as transcribed by the NY Post:

Not everyone gets to meet the Vice President of the United States in the White House. The press should be asking why Hunter Biden’s business associates — like Eric Schwerin — had that privilege and were given access to the Obama White House.

This is additional evidence that Joe Biden lied when he said he never discussed Hunter’s foreign business dealings. It’s well past time for the corporate media to demand the truth from Joe Biden. The corruption of Biden Inc. must be exposed.

As the publication noted, Eric Schwerin had the most intimate access to the Joe Biden’s personal finances of all Hunter’s “associates.”

Emails contained on the infamous laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden revealed that Schwerin was involved in Joe Biden’s personal finances and taxes, to the point of having signature privileges over Joe’s money. They also discussed Biden’s future finances after he left the White House.

Let me just say, as a former Certified Financial Planner, it was incumbent on me to know virtually everything about my clients’ assets, including how they were accumulated — mostly from a tax-based perspective — as well as the source of all cash flow. So, I assume Schwerin knew the same about the Bidens. Whether or not he was aware of any “off the books” assets or cash flow of the Bidens, I can’t say. But I can speculate.

Here’s more, via the NY Post:

Schwerin met with Vice President Biden on November 17, 2010, in the West Wing, when he was the president of the since-dissolved investment fund Rosemont Seneca Partners.

Logs also reveal that Schwerin met with various close aides of both Joe and Jill Biden at key moments in Hunter’s life when he was striking multi-million dollar deals in foreign countries, including China.

On August 18, 2011, Vice President Biden arrived in China for three days of high-level meetings with top leaders there including future Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Just days later, on August 22, Schwerin was in a meeting in the West Wing with Kellen Suber, an executive assistant to Vice President Biden.

In June 2013 Hunter Biden entered into an agreement with Chinese businessman Jonathan Li to create BHR Partners. Schwerin met with Joe Biden aides in March and May of that same year.

In a July 6, 2010, email titled “JRB Future Memo,” Schwerin said he was in touch with the vice president about personal financial matters and was eager to start discussions with him about how to cash in when he left office.

The list of “coincidences” continues.

Margaret Campbell, a former Special Assistant to Jill Biden told the NY Post it was perfectly fine for Schwerin to visit the White House so many times while Joe was VP.

He did financial stuff for the family but that’s really all I know. It would make sense if he stopped into the White House.

Ah, “financial stuff,” indeed. The question was and remains, what kind of financial stuff and for whom, exactly? As the walls continue to close in on the Biden Family Syndicate, there’s a better-than-even chance we’ll soon find out.

Perhaps not, as it relates to Lyin’ Biden™ — but his grifter son Hunter will soon be toast.



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