The Western Sanctions Against Russia and U.S. CBDC

posted by Sundance at Conservative Treehouse

I made the notation during the Tucker Carlson interview that Russian President Vladimir Putin knows everything below in this article about Russian Sanctions and the formation around a dollar-based U.S. CBDC. Unfortunately, Tucker Carlson does not know the specifics of how it is being constructed.

As I continue deep meetings and very granular discussions about the lessons within the EU that can be applied to the USA, it is worth revisiting this previously password protected post.

I went to the EU, because deep inside all of my research on Russia, things did not make sense.  I was very prepared and organized to expect everything sketchy, and what I found surprised me.  Putting boots on the ground, I now have a completely clear and different view.

Let me start by saying everything we have read about the Western sanctions against Russia is false.  What sanctions might exist do not have any impact, and Eastern Europe has no intention to anger Putin.  When Brussels threatens to kick Hungary out of the EU/NATO, I can almost hear Viktor Orban saying, “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”  Hungary doesn’t even use or rely on the €uro for domestic financial transactions; they still retain their own national currency, the Hungarian forint or HUF.

First things first with the Western financial sanctions- specifically the SWIFT exchange.  It is true you cannot use VISA, Mastercard or any mainstream Western financial tools to conduct business in Russia; however, the number of workarounds for this issue are numerous.  One of those tools is the use of a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin; and within that reality, you find something very ominous about the USA motive.

Crypto users are likely familiar with stories like Binance and the US regulatory control therein.  Factually, outside the USA Binance is being used to purchase and trade crypto without issue, but inside the USA it is regulated.  That brings me to the MEXC crypto exchange, a Mexican version, again available globally but not allowed in the USA.  The same applies to Metamask, used all over Europe but not permitted in the USA.  Start to ask yourself, why all these crypto exchanges are available to the rest of the world but not the USA, and you start to suspect the Russian sanctions, just like the Patriot Act, are something else entirely.

Then there’s app wallets.  You might be familiar with Apple Pay as a process to handle transactions from your iPhone.  Apple Pay is linked to your bank account.  Well, the “wallet feature” exists on other apps also, like Telegram; however, you can find the wallet feature, but if you try to use it from a USA cell phone… “This feature is not allowed in your region.”  Why are digital wallets available for the rest of the world but blocked by the U.S. government?

This brings me to several crypto conversations in the EU at various cafes with people who have a deep understanding.  The commonly accepted bottom line, the Western sanctions, organized by the Biden administration and US Treasury, were not intended to put financial walls around Russia; they were designed to put control walls around the USA.  Russia was the useful justification.

Here’s how it really looks from the outside looking at the USA.  The same way the Patriot Act was not designed to stop terrorism but rather to create a domestic surveillance system. So too were the “Russian Sanctions” not designed to sanction Russia, but rather to create the financial control system that will lead to a USA digital currency.

Now, does the exploding debt and seeming govt ambivalence take on a new perspective?  It should, because that unspoken motive explains everything.  This is not accidental folks.

Again, the western sanctions against Russia are not having an impact against Russia; they are having a quiet impact in the USA that no one is permitted to talk about.

♦LOGISTICS – Despite popular opinion to the contrary, it is entirely possible to travel all over Europe without being tracked.  If you pick an entry point into the EU (Schengen Area), once inside, you can travel without any national checkpoints or passport checks.  It is also entirely possible to fly all over the EU without ever giving a passport number when you book the flight.  The trick is to know which airline.  You are a name on a passenger manifest, nothing more.

Bottom line, travel around the EU is less controlled, tracked and monitored, than travel inside the USA.  Yes, let me emphasize; freedom of travel is greater in the EU than it is in the USA.  This was completely unexpected.

♦GROUND REPORT – You might ask how I know the Russian sanctions are ineffective – here’s an example.  After doing advanced research, I went to three separate banks as a random and innocuous customer.  I put my reason in the kiosk at each bank, got my ticket number and sat down to listen to the conversations. When my ticket number came up on the digital board, I just ignored it and sat for hours listening to conversations.  No one ever noticed or questioned me – not once.

At every one of the banks, the majority of the customers, at the “new account” desk, were foreign nationals asking about setting up business accounts to trade with Russia. In every bank the conversations were friendly and helpful, with the bank staff telling the customers exactly how to set up their account to accomplish the transactions.  No one was saying no; instead they were explaining how to do it in very helpful detail.

Within Russia, there are now 3rd party brokers with international accounts, an entirely new industry, which creates a layer of transactional capability for the outside company to sell goods into Russia.  A Samsung TV travels from South Korea to the destination in the RU with the financial transaction between manufacturer and retailer now passing through the new ‘broker’ intermediary. Essentially, that process is what was happening in the banks for small to medium sized companies.

♦ Back to the crypto and digital wallet angle.  In addition to financial/transactional brokers for durable goods into Russia, there is now an entire industry of selling telephone id’s with EU phone numbers to process the transactions that are blocked by the USA sanction regime.

Meaning, a person could buy a phone and register a phone number from within the EU, and then go back to the USA and access all the blocked/restricted financial processes [Binance (non-US), Metamask, MexC, Telegram digital wallet etc].  This would permit them to do untracked financial transactions into and out of Russia from the USA without the USG knowing about them (sanction workaround).

[DISCLAIMER: in the interest of my own legal risk, I did not do this; I’m just explaining.]

I am not smarter than the U.S. intelligence community, so what does this mean?

This means the U.S. government knows exactly why the Russian economy is thriving, the Ruble is stronger against the dollar, and there is nothing -not one thing- visible or different on the ground in Russia that an ordinary Russian citizen would notice.  In fact, the Russian economy is doing fine, better than before the Ukraine conflict initiated, albeit with new financial industries created by the sanctions.

If the US government knows this, then why the sanctions?

Asked and answered.  The Western sanctions created a financial wall around the USA, not to keep Russia out, but to keep us in.  The Western sanction regime, the financial mechanisms they created and authorized, creates the control gate that leads to a U.S. digital currency.

In essence, the Ukraine war response justified a system that creates a digital dollar.

I will have more, but for now just think about this aspect.

Examining the Controversy Surrounding Tucker Carlson’s Interview with Putin

A leitmotif in Putin’s remarks to Tucker in 

that marathon interview was, as he saw it,

 the serial betrayal of Russia by the West.

by Roger Kimball for American Greatness

I wonder if there is a central clearing office that issues regular updates about what nasty dictators one is allowed to engage with and which ones, for this week anyway, one must avoid.

It was okay for Gavin Newsom to remove the feces and the homeless from the streets of San Francisco in order to fête Xi Jinping. Likewise, it was just fine for CNN and the BBC to interview the leader of Hamas. And of course CNN’s Erin Burnett was on the case with Volodymyr Zelensky in her 2023 interview with the former comedian and crossdressing performance artist (though the soundtrack to this version of Burnett’s love fest is—special).

It was okay to interview or publish Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, and Sirajuddin Haqqani, deputy leader of the Taliban.  It was even okay, once upon a time, for journalists—well, some journalists—to interview Vladimir Putin.

But just let Tucker Carlson travel to Moscow to interview the Russian dictator, and pow!, the media and its minders go nuts. Did you know that Tucker Carlson is a “right-wing conspiracy,” a faux-journalist, and (according to Hillary Clinton) “a useful idiot.”  Really, the clip is just as amusing as those compilations of important people explaining why Donald Trump could not win in 2016 (“Take it to the bank,” said Nancy Pelosi). I watched the entire 2-hour-long interview and the 2-part, 10-minute post-mortem Tucker conducted in an ante-room of the Kremlin and then back at his hotel. I thought both were fascinating.

That does not, by the way—do I really have to say this?—that does not mean that I am “soft on Putin.”  Having published books highly critical of him at Encounter Books—including a scathing anatomy of the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko by plutonium—I am under no illusions about Putin’s brutality.

That said, I believe Donald Trump was right when he said, “It would be a good thing, not a bad thing,” if the United States were to get along with Russia. I have explained why I think so several times, for example, here.

Ever since Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, hysteria has ruled.  I’ve written about that too, for example, here.

A leitmotif in Putin’s remarks to Tucker in that marathon interview was, as he saw it, the serial betrayal of Russia by the West. There was a moment, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when it seemed as though Russia would be welcomed into the family of the West.  You’ll find the word “thaw” featured prominently in lots of stories from the period. And later: Remember Hillary Clinton presenting Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with her famous “reset button” in 2009? But that was then.  In 2014, Russia reabsorbed Crimea (which in truth never left the Russian sphere of influence), and then, in 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and the reset was definitively reset.

Data point: NATO was formed after World War II to counter Soviet aggression towards the West. Many commentators, including Irving Kristol, wondered why, with the demise of the Soviet Union, NATO continued to exist.  I think that is a good question. But it has continued to exist and, in fact, has greatly expanded. NATO originally had 12 members: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In 1990, Western leaders gave assurances to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand further east. After all, it was supposed to be the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, right? But today, NATO has 31 member states, including several that border Russia. The prospect of Ukraine’s joining NATO is intolerable and is one thing that sparked the current conflagration in Ukraine. Look at a map, and you will understand why.

The world seems to be divided in two. There are some who believe that Putin is a dangerous, Hitler-like dictator bent on reassembling the Soviet Union, if not, indeed, conquering all of Europe. In the course of his interview with Tucker, Putin several times insisted that he had no revanchist goals and, in response to a direct question from Tucker, said that he was open to a negotiated peace in Ukraine.

The people who most fear Putin scoff at such protestations. “Hitler kept saying he just wanted another piece of Europe, too, you know!”  My own suspicion is that, on this question anyway, Putin is telling the truth.  Russia is already, by a considerable margin, the biggest country on earth, with a dizzying variety of ethnicities.  They do not need Lebensraum. Moreover, Putin is presiding over a country beset by economic and demographic problems. Alcoholism is rampant. Life expectancy is among the lowest in the developed world.

As for Ukraine, I think Henry Kissinger was right when, back in 2014, after Putin officially retook Crimea, he rejected the simplistic morality play according to which Ukraine was on the side of the angels and Russia the side of the devil. Not everyone who is a paid-up member of the Zelensky fan club seems to be aware that he has suspended elections, exerted monopoly state control over the media, and ruthlessly suppressed dissent through the iron hand of neo-Nazi paramilitary units like the Azov Battalion. “Russian history began in what was called Kievan-Rus,” Kissinger wrote. “Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their histories were intertwined before then.” Putin made the same point to Tucker Carlson.

Whatever else can be said about the conflict in Ukraine, I believe that Kissinger was correct when he observed that “the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.” “Far too often,” he continued, “the Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or the West. But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be either side’s outpost against the other—it should function as a bridge between them.” Does that mean that I am somehow “pro-Putin?” No, it doesn’t.  But to appreciate that, you would need to appreciate that the Manichean temptation should be resisted in world affairs as well as in matters of theology.

X22, Christian Patriot News, and more- February 12 (NCISVerse premiere night!)

 

Respect for Authorities ‘Died Suddenly’

posted by J.B. Shurk at American Thinker 

Well, I guess we know where the Federal Aviation Administration got the idea to fill cockpits with pilots suffering from psychological disorders and mental deficiencies.  The FAA has been watching Dementia Joe Biden fly the United States directly into the ground for three years and decided to do for civil aviation what the White House has done for peace and prosperity.  Nothing better reflects a “crash and burn” leadership style than elevating unqualified people into positions where they can do the most harm.  It’s worked for the West Wing, the Pentagon, and the Treasury Department!  Why not for the agency responsible for air traffic control and passenger safety?  What could possibly go wrong?  

Oh, sure, perhaps flyers will die more frequently in fiery collisions or when unbolted aircraft doors shoot off into the clouds, but at least they will leave this mortal coil knowing that the people who build and pilot consumer aircraft represent such an amazing infusion of “diversity” that even the dumbest and most temperamentally unstable among us have been “included” in the life-and-death trust exercise of not falling out of the sky.  That’s what real “equity” requires — redistributing the earned responsibilities of those who have demonstrated merit and commitment to those who have demonstrated mediocrity and unreliability.  It’s why the globalists’ forced DEI standard (diversity, equity, and inclusion — barf!) across the public and private sectors should be more accurately returned to DIE — because wherever the deadly acronym dilutes excellence, living safely becomes less likely.

Come to think of it, Joe Biden is DIE’s perfect mascot.  Angry, confused, and incompetent Old Joe is the Chief Dolt and Grand Pooh-bah of an ass-backward system where the least capable in society thrive.

Given the U.S. government’s love affair with censorship and propaganda, I sometimes imagine future historians piecing through the shards of Western civilization in order to understand the reasons for its collapse.  According to the prevailing “narrative,” everything right now is tremendously great!  We are told that the economy is strong, that crime is under control, that our borders are secure, that paying twenty bucks for a fast-food hamburger is cheap, and that endless war produces endless peace.  According to the news media, Americans have never had it so good!  How then, third-millennium anthropologists might wonder, did everything go kaput so quickly?

Well, hopefully, someone in the future will stumble across a time capsule with Joe Biden’s linguistically challenged press conference from the other day, in which he angrily denounced the Potemkin special counsel’s legal conclusion that, while Decrepit Joe committed federal crimes damaging to America’s national security, he is nevertheless too senile to prosecute.  “The alleged ‘president’ of the allegedly ‘most powerful nation’ in the world betrayed his country, was too incompetent to stand trial, but remained perfectly competent to run for re-election?” some future human chronicler might ask before letting out a high-pitched, “Eureka!  Now I get why everything died suddenly!”

“Died suddenly” might just become the catchall epithet (or maybe epitaph) for our age.  Right now the medical community continues to destroy what’s left of its reputation by refusing to connect the dots between increased rates of cancer and heart disease and the global rollout of the mostly mandated pharmaceutical injections not only falsely touted as cures to COVID, but also falsely labeled as “vaccines.”  Every time a fourteen-year-old athlete “dies suddenly” on the gridiron or basketball court, the ethically compromised killers in white coats throw out all kinds of ludicrous explanations for why healthy young people are losing their lives.  It was stress!  It was red meat!  It was racism!  Or the increasingly ubiquitous it must have been climate change!   

It’s funny, if not disturbing, to see all the people who changed their first name to “Doctor” struggle to reach the most obvious conclusion: that an experimental mRNA serum rushed to market without necessary testing or proper scrutiny might be to blame.  Elementary school children with a rudimentary understanding of the Scientific Method and medical ethics would understand the potential harm from requiring healthy patients unlikely to die from COVID to nonetheless be “treated” with untested “vaccines.”  Yet the “first, do no harm” swarm of group-thinkers, who have trouble realizing when pharmaceutical companies are using humans as guinea pigs to make billions in profits, jumped-to and insisted that the whole global population must be injected with possible poisons.

Why would you experiment on anybody unless it was absolutely necessary (and then done only with informed consent)?  Why would you recklessly expand that experiment to the whole human race?  Only the “scientific experts” could trip over such basic precepts of medical ethics on their way to creating a potential global catastrophe.

You would think that the same medical community that unwittingly conspired with evil pharmaceutical companies to hook millions of Americans on OxyContin and other opioids would have been more skeptical when magical COVID elixirs were quickly developed and marketed as cure-alls.  Alas, the gullible are getting only more gullible.  Perhaps this is why “climate change” is still the globalist boogeyman that haunts so many pliant imaginations around the world.  The unscrupulous authorities who lied about the efficacy of lockdowns, masks, and experimental “vaccines” would never lie about “climate change,” right?  What kind of monsters would tell the world that carbon is killing the planet if the science isn’t sound?  Maybe the same globalist monsters who used COVID as a propaganda vehicle for establishing a “Great Reset” are also interested in using “climate change” hysteria to convince people that they must surrender their private property, privacy, and human rights in order to survive.  Would an ethically challenged scientific community work with an even more ethically challenged political class to push a “climate change” hoax that justifies the erosion of individual liberties and the implementation of widespread communism prepackaged in an irrational fear of hydrocarbons?  Duh, of course it would.  When governments became the de facto funders of all academic research in the West, impartial, rigorous, and objective scientific inquiry “died suddenly,” too.

In the “died suddenly” era, authorities don’t seek truth; they seek politically convenient “narratives” that protect the entrenched power of the status quo.  False “experts” fabricate false “realities” that serve as intellectual prisons for weak minds.  The truly astounding thing is that some of today’s most “educated” people are the ones most susceptible to propaganda.  Designer degrees reflect not a proven capacity for critical thinking, but rather a cerebral vulnerability to rigid programming.

Case in point: the “trans” movement.  Nowhere in human history has any society struggled with the biological distinctions separating men from women.  Only in our absurd present age have the most credentialed twisted their neurons into such knots that they know less than those who never had a written language.  One psychologist informed doctors at a medical convention that parents who do not believe that their “trans” children should be pumped full of sterilizing puberty-blockers or have their bodies mutilated are the ones with a “mental illness.”  Increasingly, the “expert class” insists that people not suffering from psychological delusions are the ones who should be branded as delusional and dangerous.  

This State-sanctioned “trans” insanity reminds me of a recent “diversity” exhibition in London that pushed the preposterous lie that “Britain was black for 7,000 years” before any white people arrived.  For the academics involved, fraudulent history is good if it advances politically useful narratives.  For everyone else, DIE-obsessed “experts” just look crazy.

At some point, a critical mass of people will reject a governing system overrun by misanthropes, lunatics, sadists, and liars.  Populations do not obey those undeserving of respect.  When respect for authorities “dies suddenly,” old orders will not survive.

Joe Biden’s Presidency is Over

It has been clear since Joe Biden took the oath of office—and long before that—that he was never in charge of his mental faculties, let alone the country.

by Carpe Diem for American Greatness

One could effectively make the case that Joe Biden’s presidency ended on January 20th, 2021—the same day he was inaugurated. It has been clear since he took the oath of office—and long before that—that he was never in charge of his mental faculties, let alone the country.

We have long known that Biden was always a figurehead for a radical administration that has put America last while putting our enemies first.

There has not been a single day of his presidency in which Biden has exhibited even the most basic level of mental competence, alacrity, or physical readiness.

Failing to figure out how to exit a stage after virtually every single gaffe-prone 7-minute speech, forgetting the name of your Secretary of Defense, hiding from the propaganda press that bends over backwards for every Democrat, or constantly spewing gibberish doesn’t help dispel the myth that Biden is in fact the one making decisions from the Oval Office.

To be clear, diminished mental acuity and all, Biden certainly deserves the blame for allowing his handlers to destroy our country, because with whatever compromised willpower still remains, he could have tried to prevent the radicals in his administration from pursuing their disastrous agenda.

But instead, he decided to go to the beach and spend roughly 40 percent of his presidency on vacation, while the people in charge of Biden decided that we would no longer have a border that was worth defending—and anyone who wanted to come here, no matter how dangerous or threatening to our national security, should be able to do so.

The people in charge of Biden decided that they would pay government contractors not to finish building the wall after the materials and equipment had already been fully paid for by the previous administration—because walls are racist.

The people in charge of Biden decided that we would pull our troops out of Afghanistan regardless of how dangerous the situation on the ground was. After all, it was the 20th anniversary of 9/11, so time to pull the plug and declare victory in the “war on terror.”

The people in charge of Biden decided that they would cozy up to Iran, unfreeze sanctions, allow them to continue building their nuclear capabilities, and let them continuously attack our military with minimal pushback while getting absolutely nothing in return.

The people in charge of Biden decided that they would blame Israel for having the nerve to defend itself in the wake of the deadliest attack against the Jewish people since the Holocaust—and would still have the temerity to utter the words “two-state solution,” while innocent Israelis and Americans are still being held hostage by barbaric Hamas terrorists.

The people in charge of Biden decided that race-baiting and further dividing the country was the type of “unity” he would bring to the White House.

The people in charge of Biden decided that they would collude with radical leftist prosecutors and attempt to jail the former president of the United States and his leading political opponent over nonexistent crimes.

But what the people in charge of Biden probably did not realize is that his presidency would effectively end on the evening of February 8, 2024.

That was when Biden, perhaps for the first time since he became president, likely decided not to listen to his handlers and chose to give a primetime address to the nation—in response to the damning release of a special counsel report into his mishandling of classified documents—in a failed effort to reassure the American people that he is not a senile old man who does not remember such mundane life details, including when he became the vice president or when his son died.

It does not so much matter that Special Counsel Robert Hur inexplicably declined to prosecute Biden for his reckless behavior, which he described as overwhelming “evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”

What matters is that Biden not only did nothing to reassure the public that he is fully with it, but he arguably made things worse by forgetting where the rosary he wears in honor of his son came from, angrily snapping at reporters as though his meds were wearing off, and conflating the president of Egypt with the president of Mexico when talking about the conflict in the Middle East.

It is not an overstatement to conclude that the primetime address that Biden gave on Thursday evening was likely the single worst public appearance for any president in the modern TV era.

As of this writing, it is difficult to quantify just how bad it was, but it is hard to imagine that with an abysmal performance like that, Biden will remain on the Democratic ticket.

In the event that he somehow does remain on the ballot, it is almost impossible to imagine him receiving a plurality of the electoral vote.

For all intents and purposes, Joe Biden’s presidency is over.

Biden’s Climate Agenda Will Cost Taxpayers Nearly $800 Billion

Sarah Arnold reporting for Townhall 

President Joe Biden’s so-called “climate initiatives” will cost the United States hundreds of billions of dollars. 

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the President’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has a heftier price tag than initially thought. 

The CBO said Biden’s climate agenda was projected to cost $428 billion. In 2022, the CBO initially expected the IRA’s climate and energy provisions to tap out at $400 billion. However, experts admit that the estimate was too low. 

“The budgetary effects of energy-related tax provisions remain highly uncertain,” the CBO said. 

However, per the latest figures, the investment banking company Credit Suisse revealed that the Left’s radical climate policy will cost nearly $800 billion. 

The CBO explained that technical revisions resulted in substantially higher projections, most of which ($224 billion) arose from clean vehicle tax credits and revenues from excise taxes on gasoline. Of that total, $151 billion came from reductions in projected revenues, and $73 billion came from increases in projected outlays.  Apart from the cost of Biden’s climate initiatives, the CBO report didn’t lend a positive outlook for the nation’s economy.

The CBO projected that the nation’s deficit would steadily mount, reaching $2.6 trillion in 2034 from $1.6 trillion this fiscal year. In relation to GDP, the deficit is projected to reach 6.1% in 2034. The CBO said that these deficit levels were similar to those experienced during some of the greatest national crises. — the Daily Wire. 

Other reports anticipate that Biden’s energy policies will cost taxpayers over $1 trillion. 

Public debt is expected to increase to 116 percent of GDP by 2034— or $48.3 trillion. This would mark a record-breaking high for the U.S. 

NYT Editorial Shows How Special Counsel's Report Has the Left Absolutely Terrified for Biden

Jeff Charles reporting for RedState 

It’s official. Democrats and their close friends and allies in the activist media are terrified. The impetus of their horror?

Special counsel Robert Hur’s damning report further revealing the extent of President Joe Biden’s mental decline. A recent op-ed published by the New York Times’ editorial board shows just how damaging the report is becoming.

In the op-ed, the authors acknowledged that a “remarkably broad swath of the American public” has shown “increasing doubts about [Biden’s] ability to serve for another five years because of his age.” The piece noted recent polling showing that nearly 86 percent of Americans believe that Biden is too old to serve another term. 

The authors then pivoted to a recent press conference in which President Biden became visibly peeved at the suggestion that he might be too old to continue running the country.

Mr. Biden’s performance at his news conference on Thursday night was intended to assure the public that his memory is fine and argue that Mr. Hur was out of line; instead, the president raised more questions about his cognitive sharpness and temperament, as he delivered emotional and snappish retorts in a moment when people were looking for steady, even and capable responses to fair questions about his fitness.

His assurances, in other words, didn’t work. He must do better — the stakes in this presidential election are too high for Mr. Biden to hope that he can skate through a campaign with the help of teleprompters and aides and somehow defeat as manifestly unfit an opponent as Donald Trump, who has a very real chance of retaking the White House.

Mr. Biden’s allies are already going to the usual Washington playbook of dismissing the special counsel’s report as partisan. Regardless of Mr. Hur’s motivation, the details that he presented spoke to worries voters already had. The president has to reassure and build confidence with the public by doing things that he has so far been unwilling to do convincingly. He needs to be out campaigning with voters far more in unrehearsed interactions. He could undertake more town hall meetings in communities and on national television. He should hold regular news conferences to demonstrate his command of and direction for leading the country.

The piece concludes by highlighting the gravity of the situation.

This is a dark moment for Mr. Biden’s presidency, when many voters are relying on him to provide the country with a compelling alternative to the unique danger of Mr. Trump.

Regular folks might argue that it is a dark moment in America’s history when a news outlet claiming to be objective has openly become a propaganda outlet for the current regime and the Democratic Party.

The New York Times decision to publish campaign advice for a politician unwittingly reveals more about the state of journalism in the United States than the opinion molders of society would like to admit. But it also highlights the reality that Hur’s report has the left absolutely terror-stricken. Their fears are understandable, as the report told of the president’s severe memory loss problems.

It gets better. Why is Biden getting a pass? He's an "elderly man with a poor memory."

"We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during out interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory," the report states. "Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness."

"Mr. Biden's memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023

This is devastating. Biden cannot even remember when he was vice president or even within the past several years, when his son died. This is pitiful.

Since the report was published last week, the left has been in full spin mode, attempting to mollify concerns among Democrats and Independent voters that Biden’s cognitive issues could be harmful to the country if he is allowed to remain in the White House.

Now, outlets like the New York Times are in the unenviable position of having to work even harder to ensure their guy gets reelected, and they seem to realize that even they cannot convince the public that Biden’s mind is functioning like a well-oiled machine. This is why they have published this piece advising Team Biden on how it can “do better.”

However, it is unlikely that Biden’s cognitive issues will improve, and his team cannot shield him from scrutiny. Their only hope at this point is to get enough people afraid of the possibility of former President Donald Trump serving another term to pull the lever for Biden.

Border Czar Mayorkas Blames Congress for Immigration Crisis

Sarah Arnold reporting for Townhall 

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas refuses to take responsibility for the country's ongoing border crisis, adding that the Biden Administration doesn't "bear responsibility for a broken system." 

During an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press," Mayorkas blamed the nation's damning immigration crisis on Congress not passing legislation despite him repeatedly claiming the border is secure. 

NBC host Kristen Welker asked Mayorkas if he takes any responsibility for tens of millions of illegal migrants crossing the border. In response, the Biden official agreed it was a crisis but refused to take accountability for his administration's reckless open border policies. 

"There is no question that we have a broken system," he said. "There is no question that we have a challenge, a crisis at the border. And there is no question that Congress needs to fix it. And we're doing everything we can within that broken system, short of legislation, to address what is not just a challenge for the United States but one throughout our region."

In April 2023, Mayorkas said the border was secured during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing. Since then, 1.5 million illegal aliens have crossed the border into the U.S. In less than a year, Border Patrol agents made 1,589,148 migrant encounters at the southern border despite the Biden Administration claiming there is no crisis. This is 300,000 more than the combined total number of encounters for fiscal years 2019 and 2020 when former President Trump was in office. 

During the hearing, Mayorkas was asked if the U.S.-Mexico border was secure. The Biden official said the answer was not black and white but believed that "the border is secure." 

Welker asked why Mayorkas believes he deserves to keep his job, considering that more than 85 percent of illegal migrants who have crossed the border are being released into the U.S. as they await their court dates— which, for most, are years into the future. 

"The data that you cite is a powerful example of why we need legislation to fix what everyone agrees is a broken immigration system," Mayorkas said. "Before the last three years, that case backlog, which is about 3 million cases, has been growing year over year over year. The time between when we encounter an individual at the border and the time of final adjudication of an asylum claim case has been years, five to seven years, for years and years."

Mayorkas claimed the border has been broken for 30 years, once again blaming Congress for the broken border. 

"A bipartisan group of senators has now presented us with the tools and resources we need – a bipartisan group. And yet, Congress killed it before even reading it," he said, referring to when the Senate failed to pass a $118 billion supplemental spending agreement that included funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. It also contained a border security package that drew criticism from several Republicans. 

He also claimed President Joe Biden has tried to secure the border numerous times but is always "challenged in court." He said the administration has taken "tremendous" steps to stem the flow of migrants, adding that it's not like the president has "done nothing." 

We Are So Screwed: Inside America's Political Mess

posted by Andrew Malcolm at RedStateVIP 

James Carville, the Democrat consultant who helped get a serial adulterer elected president, said something interesting and true the other day:

“The most damaging thing that can happen to a politician is to have an existing negative suspicion confirmed.”

That’s what just happened to Joe Biden. I say “happened,” but it was really more of a self-fulfilling destiny than anything else. The man has been shuffling along tempting disaster for a very long time.

On Thursday, Special Prosecutor Robert Hur released his report. Devastating is too gentle a word. Biden willfully took, then kept, Top Secret documents illegally and in unsecure places for years. 

He shared secrets with a writer, a federal crime that earned Gen. David Petraeus a $100,000 fine and two years of probation.

And, oh, look! 

Hunter Biden, who knew nothing of natural gas but was getting $80K a month from a Ukraine gas company for having a nice last name, just happened to be living in his father’s house when those Top Secret documents were lying around unsecured in the garage, brment, and drawers.

Perhaps most damaging to Biden’s fading hopes of a second term is Hur’s description of the president’s inability to remember the dates of his vice presidency or when his own son died. Even I can remember that was in 2015 in a Maryland hospital room, not, as Joe Biden often falsely implies, during military service in Iraq. 

Age, or more accurately, the effects of advanced age, is an intractable issue for Biden, who turns 82 this year. Once, age connoted wisdom. But with so much video evidence of Biden’s incoherent rambles, mental freezes, falls, and even getting lost on stages, an overwhelming majority of voters is now seriously concerned. 

One poll found 70 percent of them in key swing states agreed that Joe Biden is “just too old to be an effective president.” Trump, who has his own intractable legal problems, is four years younger than Biden. The Republican has committed a few verbal miscues, confusing Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi, for instance. But nothing on the scale of the incumbent.

Biden reportedly exploded in a tantrum on word of the special prosecutor’s detailed statement on his intentional, illegal holding of Top Secret documents and chronic forgetfulness.

I can just picture Biden shocking aides by announcing that he was going to correct the record himself and do it immediately.

And the aides saying, "No, No, wait, sir? We can handle this for you." Because they knew, like Barack Obama and numerous other colleagues, that Joe Biden will screw up pretty much everything he touches or says. And their powers, fates, and jobs are tied to his muddled mind and dissolving career.

Biden did react publicly and angrily to the report. He declared, “My memory is fine,” and then proved it wasn't. Other than that, things went well.

Assistants have been protecting Biden from himself throughout recent years. As evidence of his foggy thinking, the powerful (alleged) leader of the free world often admits publicly that an unidentified “They” doesn’t want him to take questions or do something.

No president, certainly in modern memory, has admitted openly that he’s obeying the orders of someone else. Not recognizing that such a public admission is, in fact, evidence of his mental weakness.

Forget the election — what about dumping Biden now as unfit to remain president?

Even during the 2020 campaign, they used COVID as the convenient cover to minimize the old man’s public contacts by keeping him in his brment for very short workdays. Since then, you may have noticed, Biden has spent 40 percent of his term on vacation, where, not by coincidence, visitors and activities are not recorded.

Biden never has been a nice guy or a smart guy. He just seemed harmlessly goofy during a long Senate career built on inertia and a vice presidency that included luxury foreign trips with children and grandchildren. 

On one 2013 overnight stay in Paris, Biden and his entourage ran up a $585,000 bill and a half-million more taxpayer dollars for one night in London. Their mini-bars must have been maxi.

Signs of Biden’s failing mind became apparent to those with clear eyes and no ambitions for White House jobs back in 2019-20. Biden calling questioners nonsense derogatory names, yelling at and lecturing radio hosts, mistaking Iowa for Ohio, calling on dead people.

Voters then seemed more disturbed by Donald Trump’s turmoil and mean Tweets. And his love for media attention and ample access gave them many occasions to witness that.

Joe Biden’s failing faculties have been failing faster and more frequently in recent months. With virtually every public appearance, RedState contributors have chronicled Biden’s steady stream of gaffes, fables, lies, and mental freezes, even when reading from notes.

So bad did Biden’s health and behavior look that 14 months ago, one of my favorite pundits raised the provocative question of if Joe Biden could even make it into a second term, let alone finish it in 2029, when he’d be 86.

GOP candidate Nikki Haley has been reminding audiences ominously that a vote for Joe Biden in November is really a vote for Vice President Kamala Harris, whose job approval and intelligence are even worse than Biden’s.

Harris’ frequent incomprehensible word salads, in place of any substantive policy achievements, have become laugh-rich fodder for stand-up comedians.

Prosecutors do have discretion on what cases to charge and what to let pass. Despite compelling evidence, Hur decided not to charge Biden, he said, because the president would likely appeal to a jury's sympathies:

We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,

That’s a strikingly similar decision to FBI Director James Comey’s decision in 2016 to recommend against charges on Hillary Clinton for her egregious and intentional abuse of Top Secret information on unsecured emails. Clinton and Biden are both Democrats.

For a long time, mainstream media ignored obvious signs of Biden’s fraying mind, as they ignored Hunter Biden’s incriminating laptop contents. But it’s all out now and from an official source.

The damaging revelations can be spun and criticized all the way to Nov. 5, but not ignored. And every denial or even mention is a sticky-note reminder of all of Biden’s mental failings for anyone who sees it.

It’s tempting but unwise in politics to assert what you are not. Recall Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook.” Biden hastily called the disastrous rebuttal news conference to claim his memory is excellent, then confused the presidents of Egypt and Mexico.

Just as his four trials do not seem to affect Republicans’ views of Trump’s candidacy, it seems unlikely these disturbing revelations by a special prosecutor will derail Biden’s primary bid for renomination at the August party convention in Chicago.

That would seem to suggest the country has become a collection of political tribes with members holding stout fealty to their chief, regardless of outside allegations or party ideology. Or regardless of what’s best for the country.

It’s always dangerous to make political predictions. Recall how the 2015 "Hollywood Access" tape doomed Trump’s political career forever. But this year, you easily could imagine in the end, voters facing this choice between:

• A loudmouth, arrogant narcissist facing 91 criminal charges who presided over a strong job market, no new foreign military adventures, tax cuts, energy independence, and foreign adversaries held at bay in puzzlement over his tough exterior and unpredictability or,
• An even more unlikable, older senior who shuffles and mumbles, who ignited the invisible tax of historic inflation by wild spending, consciously opened the southern border to more than 9.2 million illegal aliens (two million more than Nicaragua’s entire population), killed energy independence, had no response to Russia downing a U.S. drone in international air space and a week-long aerial balloon Chinese espionage mission across the entire country. 

And whose family faces documented questions about suspicious money transfers of large sums to them from China.

Not exactly a Founding Father-like choice. 

I have suspected in recent months that Biden’s melting mind would prevent his nomination. That would be a major mess, dumping an incumbent or convincing him to quit and likely elevating his partner of dubious intelligence. 

With little to sell about Biden, his campaign and PAC will now launch an advertising blitz to distract attention by attacking Trump nonstop. Obama did a similar job on Mitt Romney in 2012 before the Republican got public campaign money. It worked.

History reminds that postwar presidents who abandon reelection bids (Lyndon Johnson 1968 and Harry Truman 1952, both Democrats) condemn their party to two consecutive terms of Republicans in the White House.

It would take something dramatic to alter our country’s political plight right now – Trump getting disqualified somehow through legal outcomes and accepting it, or Biden dropping out voluntarily or otherwise. I recently outlined one possible scenario involving Michelle Obama.

The convoluted possibilities of this Leap Year’s politics would be more entertaining than Super Bowl ads — if only our nation’s security and near future were not at stake.