Biden Black-eye (Taliban in Afghanistan

 BIDEN ADMINISTRATION HAS BEEN PAYING $300,000 PER FLIGHT TO TALIBAN TO ALLOW U.S. CITIZENS AND AFGHAN ALLIES TO CONTINUE EVACUATING:

NATO allies vehemently opposed Biden’s unconditional withdrawal to such a degree that Secretary Blinken had phoned his boss from a NATO summit to tell him he had gotten a “jolt” in “in quadraphonic sound” opposing the move. His own military advisers had told him not to do it.

Nothing Biden and his people said about their botched evacuation from Afghanistan was true.

After withdrawing forces while leaving thousands of Americans behind on the ground, Biden reluctantly approved a limited evacuation whose military personnel were cut off from the start. Mobs overran the airport, with mostly young men filling up planes which took off. The State Department failed to plan for an evacuation or vet evacuees leading to dozens of Afghans with terror ties coming to America and massive backups of Afghan evaucees abroad.

After its Saigon moment, the Biden administration has been paying “approximately $300,000 per flight to a Taliban controlled airline in order to allow U.S. citizens and Afghan allies to continue evacuating.” Air Taliban is being funded by the United States with State Department officials confirming “that the cash-strapped Taliban are profiting from these payments.“

The Taliban had every incentive to sabotage our evacuation to profit from Air Taliban.

As an Obama-era retread, Biden sure loves giving pallets full of cash to Islamic terrorists.

114Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll   

G

COVID Stole More Than a Year From Our Kids

 MARY KATHARINE HAM REVIEWS 

THE STOLEN YEAR:

 “The Stolen Year acknowledges the public schools’ COVID failures but refuses to hold anyone responsible. . . . Twelve years after he was acquitted of murder, O.J. Simpson and a ghostwriter penned a book called If I Did It. I was reminded of that when The Stolen Year arrived on my doorstep. A chronicling of the horrors wrought by COVID policies that kept American kids from their school buildings and childhood milestones for more than a year, this book was written by someone at the scene of the crime, intimate with the gory details, and ultimately uninterested in reckoning with who was responsible for it. This is a whodunnit without a culprit.”

Plus: “It seemed like depraved indifference to children’s welfare.”

27Posted at 8:06 am by Glenn Reynolds   

 August 23, 2022

So where do NEA teachers' union dues end up?

By Monica Showalter

 

Joe Biden has proudly touted a new tax break for teachers through his beefed-up IRS, allowing them to deduct the cost of $300 in classroom materials instead of $250, as his means of helping them beat the inflation monster he created.

Please clap.

The beleaguered teachers, a huge number of whom are leaving the profession in growing shortages of teachers, though, really do have bigger problems on their plates than that $300 chump change dangled by Biden can supposedly fix.

According to the New York Post:

The head of the most prominent teachers’ union in the United States raked in more than $500,000 in pay as the group showered liberal causes with money and fought to keep schools closed during the pandemic, tax forms provided to Fox News Digital show.

 

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association (NEA), the country’s largest teachers’ union, pocketed $534,243 in compensation from the NEA and its related organizations between September 2020 and August 2021, an increase of $25,000 from the previous calendar year, newest tax forms show.

“Becky Pringle lined her pockets with over half a million dollars and peddled politics at the expense of returning to in-person learning,” said Caitland Sutherland, executive director of Americans for Public Trust, who provided the tax forms to Fox News Digital.

 So while teachers were getting their $300 in Bidenbucks and supposed to bow down to him in gratitude for it, this well-larded whale was taking home a salary bigger than what the president of the United States makes.

It's not as if this person's money went to anything like performance. Teachers, after all, are leaving the profession, meaning fewer union dues payers. Worse still, this is the creature who was the hardest advocate of closed schools in the hysteria over COVID, doing humongous damage to the development of children, who were either forced to stay home and never see their friends, or else mask up for eight hours a day, and like prisoners, eat their breakfast on the ground in frozen winter conditions.

This was her doing. Worse still, with a big salary like that, one that tops that of probably everyone in the CDC, she was throwing her weight around at that agency, with her union literally giving it its marching orders on COVID shutdowns and lockdowns in schools. That was a bona fide scandal.

 

But big money can do that, and not just this below-mediocre functionary's salary, but in all the other stuff her union doled out their money on.

According to the Post:

The tax documents further reveal that the NEA gave millions to liberal groups in addition to cash to teachers’ associations.

According to the filings, the NEA sent $200,000 to the Democracy Alliance, a left-wing donor club co-founded by George Soros that helps set the Democratic agenda, while adding $100,000 to the Strategic Victory Fund, a nonprofit created by the donor network that has boosted progressive campaign infrastructure in battleground states.

In other words, those big union dues teachers must pay not only go to the inflated, bloated, positively sybaritic, salaries of the losers running the teachers' unions, they go to rabid Democrat causes, making them very, very influential among ruling Democrats and their agenda. Don't jump to their tune? No money for you.

It's frankly, a scandal. These parasites draw money on one end from many federal sources as well as the dues of the little guy, and then turn around and finance far-left Democrat organizations -- to call the shots to government. It works like a washing machine. All the while, huge chunks of these union dues also go to ever-fatter salaries for ever worse union leaders. If there's one thing that needs hosing out when the next Republican Congress takes office, it's these teachers' unions and their vast, unaccountable, octopus of money machines. 

Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License

The Great Reset - Is What It Is!

 DAVID SOLWAY: 

The Great Reset: Testing, Testing…

It is disturbing to note that the greater portion of the public do not seem to be aware of the vast ideological movement for social transformation called the Great Reset. Those who are at least partially informed consider it merely another conspiracy theory. Some among the so-called elite—the media, the academy, the political stratum—consider the Great Reset as a rational and benevolent response to the specter of overpopulation and the threat of populist uprisings. Others among the patrician class, doubtless a majority, are engaged in promoting what they know to be a concerted attempt to destabilize and supplant the long-established order of ideally democratic governance that has slowly and incrementally characterized the liberal societies of the West, dating from the Magna Carta (1215) and the Peace of Westphalia (1648) to the approximate present.

We should make no mistake about this. The revolutionary project, whether denominated as the New World Order, the U.N.’s Agenda 2030, or the Davos-centered Great Reset—different terms for essentially the same impetus—under the influential leadership of Klaus Schwab is apocalyptic in its aims. It envisages a world in which the middle-class will have been expunged, the global census markedly winnowed, and a China-like social credit system introduced in which citizens will be under constant digital surveillance determining what they are allowed to possess, rent, use or spend.

Read the whole thing.

80Posted at 4:40 pm by Ed Driscoll   

W

Is modern environmentalism a pagan religion?

 YES. NEXT QUESTION?

 Is modern environmentalism a pagan religion?

The great Rush Limbaugh used to say that “the modern environmentalists worship the created, not the creator.” I was reminded of that after listening to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi once President Joe Biden signed the fiscally unconscionable $750 billion tax-and-spend Inflation Reduction Act, which gives another $300 billion to the climate change-industrial complex.

Pelosi (D-CA) claimed the wind, solar, and electric subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act would placate an “angry” planet. “Mother Earth gets angry from time to time, and this legislation will help us address all of that,” the speaker said.

This is a highly revealing statement. Do Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues really believe that spending $300 billion on Tesla subsidies (with batteries made in China), windmills (made in China), and solar panels (made in China) is going to save the planet, stop the rise of the oceans, and lower the global temperature?

This is the same gang in Congress that can’t stop the daily drive-by shootings in our cities, can’t secure the U.S.-Mexico border, can’t come anywhere near balancing the budget, and can’t provide the resources our military needs for our national security.

Even if this additional $300 billion were to work as planned, the Wall Street Journal reports that the impact on global temperatures in the coming decades would be to lower them by 0.001%. So, instead of the global temperature being an average of 59 degrees Fahrenheit, it will be 58.999 degrees. Thank God! We are saved from Armageddon.

But as Pelosi’s quote makes clear, this is about symbolism. It is about ruining the economy as a sacrifice to Mother Earth. Marc Morano, the journalist who runs the Climate Depot website, asks: “Will human sacrifices be next to appease the ‘angry’ Earth gods? Actually, this bill will create human sacrifice by imposing even more suffering from energy deprivation, supply chain issues, good shortages, inflation, debt, and bad science.”

As Tom Wolfe wrote in his epochal 1976 article, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening:” “It is entirely possible that in the long run historians will regard the entire New Left experience as not so much a political as a religious episode wrapped in semi military gear and guerrilla talk.” (That line was written with early ‘70s radical chic in mind, but reverberates quite nicely today, given Antifa’s current love of paramilitary cosplay.)

80Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll   

#H

Lake Mead and the Colorado River: Water Usage Cuts Coming

 

Takeaways from today's report on Lake Mead and the Colorado River

From CNN's Angela Fritz

  

The federal government announced that the Colorado River will operate in a Tier 2 shortage condition for the first time starting in January as the West’s historic drought has taken a severe toll on Lake Mead.

What this means:

• Arizona, Nevada and Mexico will have to further reduce their Colorado River use beginning in January. California will not yet have cuts made to the water it receives from the Colorado River.
• Of the impacted states, Arizona will face the largest cuts — 592,000 acre-feet — or about 21% of the state’s yearly allotment of river water.

Those cuts are part of a system that Colorado River states have already agreed to in the case of an unprecedented water shortage.

But experts say those mandatory cuts are not enough to save the river.

In June, Bureau of Reclamation chief Camille Touton told the river’s stakeholders to come up with a plan to reduce up to 25% of their water usage. 

She gave them an August 15 deadline, but negotiations have been difficult and are not finished. Touton did not specify on Tuesday any new deadlines that might be set for states to come up with a plan for the drastic cuts.

"Today we're starting the process and more information will follow as far as the actions we'll take in that process," Touton said on Tuesday. "I want to continue to push on the need for partnership in this space and the need for collaboration and finding a consensus solution. Not just for next year but for the future."

Some of the river’s stakeholders are eager for the federal government to step in with a plan. John Entsminger, the general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, told CNN that so far not enough of the stakeholders have put forth proposals that would get the basin to Touton's target.

“There's only so much water, and mother nature will figure this out at some point," Entsminger said. "At some point, there's just not water in the river channel."

Afghan Pullout One Year Later

 Afghan Pullout One Year Later

August 15, 2022, marks one year since the Taliban retook the Afghan capital of Kabul following the Biden administration's catastrophic withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country. In that time, Afghanistan has become "a nation in anguish," Axios reported.

The Covid Reckoning Is Coming.

The Covid Reckoning Is Coming.

If Republicans retake the House next year, they should dedicate themselves to a full accounting of where this money went. Much of it did not find its way to the people who needed it. This spring, the Labor Department estimated that “at least” $163 billion in “overpayments” went to both legitimate recipients of unemployment benefits and fraudsters. The Paycheck Protection Act, which provided forgivable loans to businesses adversely affected by the pandemic, was described by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz as an “invitation” to defraud the government. “What didn’t happen was even minimal checks to make sure that the money was getting to the right people at the right time,” he said. That program has disbursed roughly $800 billion, about half of which has been forgiven.

And that’s just the unintended misuse of pandemic-related relief. What about the intended squandering of this taxpayer-funded largess? The Republican Study Committee’s review of where some of these funds were supposed to go is just as enraging as the abuse of those funds: “tree equity work,” environmental justice “boot camps,” “safe smoking kits,” and syringes for using illicit narcotics, refurbishing a minor-league baseball stadium in New York, upping the prize money at Arizona horse-racing tracks, and providing public-school staff with instruction in “high-need topics” like “implicit bias” training and “restorative practices.” As a Department of Education document averred, the pandemic was a perfect time to engineer a “culture shift” in America’s schools.

This investigative work is only one element of a comprehensive retrospective on the pandemic. Americans should confront the impulses that led governments to close houses of worship, abrogate the rights of property owners, and draft private enterprise into the work of law enforcement in what were patently obvious violations of the Constitution. There should be hearings into the conduct of teachers’ unions and into school boards in the major metropolitan areas that clung to school closures long after the terrible consequences for young people’s mental health and educational advancementwere known. And what connection was there between the engineered breakdown of society and the eruption of social tensions culminating in some of the costliest rioting the country has ever seen?

The public health apparatus’s reluctance, throughout this miserable event, to meet the public where it lives has become a cliché. They won’t budge, and the country is moving on without them. But moving on is impossible in the absence of a thorough reckoning. The Covid pandemic already seems unlikely to be “forgotten” by history like the outbreak of Spanish Influenza a century ago. Unlike our forebears, we marinate in our trauma. It’s incumbent on this generation to establish for posterity what went wrong over the last two and a half years, if only so that we will never do this again.

Indeed. Much more like this, please: The Elite Panic of 2022.

126Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll   

LEFT Rewrites History (Orwellian)

 I’LL TAKE HEADLINES FROM 2020, ALEX: Fueled By Two-Tiered Political Justice, The Left’s 1960s Violence Is Back.

The violent bear it away. That title of Flannery O’Connor’s 1960 novel still resonates. Some relentless atavism is at work in our culture, a monstrous irrationality that awakens what O’Connor called “the stuff of which madmen and fanatics are made.” Violence, no longer shunned, is now an accepted political tool.

The attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh—preceded by U.S Attorney General Merrick Garland’s refusal to enforce federal law against protesters at justices’ homes—exposed the fragile divide between constituted order and willed anarchy. In effect, the attorney general’s inaction acquiesced to mob intimidation and signaled a willingness to risk further lawlessness.

The descent into Third World-like threats against the judiciary did not come suddenly. The slouch toward selective law enforcement and politicized violence has a history. By whatever name we call it—wokeism nowadays—adversary culture has been loosening essential restraints for some six decades. Like the lifecycle of a parasite, the passion for repudiating established order mutates and reappears in successive stages. Today’s recurrence of the New Left virus keeps the inherited infection alive in a new generation of hosts.

When did it ever go away? Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson, Attempted Assassin Of Steve Scalise, Already Being Erased From History. And additional examples of leftist violence and eliminationist rhetoric at the link.

64Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll   

 DEM Blue History Rewright

MARKETS: YEAR-TO-DATE Aug 1, 2022

 

MARKETS: YEAR-TO-DATE

Nasdaq 12,390.69 -20.80%

S&P 4,130.29 -13.34%

Dow 32,845.13 -9.61%

10-Year 2.651% +113.7 bps

Bitcoin $23,611.05 -49.01%

Amazon $134.95 -19.05%

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 7:00pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean.

Markets: Investors head into the new month with surprisingly positive vibes—particularly in the battered tech sector. The Nasdaq’s 12.3% gain last month was its best since April 2020, and Amazon’s July was its best month in 13 years.