Tag Archives: ukraine

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Daily Broadside | No Matter How Much You Hate Your Government, It’s Not Enough

On Saturday the Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives (cite) voted to pass a $95 billion aid package providing security assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Notably absent was any “aid” for securing our southern border from the foreign invasion taking place there.

WASHINGTON, April 20 (Reuters) – The U.S. House of Representatives on Saturday with broad bipartisan support passed a $95 billion legislative package providing security assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, over bitter objections from Republican hardliners.

The legislation now proceeds to the Democratic-majority Senate, which passed a similar measure more than two months ago. U.S. leaders from Democratic President Joe Biden to top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell had been urging embattled Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson to bring it up for a vote.

The Senate is set to begin considering the House-passed bill on Tuesday, with some preliminary votes that afternoon. Final passage was expected sometime next week, which would clear the way for Biden to sign it into law.

The bills provide $60.84 billion to address the conflict in Ukraine, including $23 billion to replenish U.S. weapons, stocks and facilities; $26 billion for Israel, including $9.1 billion for humanitarian needs, and $8.12 billion for the Indo-Pacific, including Taiwan.

On top of loading even more debt onto the backs of the American middle class, the Democrats showed how craven and insular they are by waving the Ukrainian national flag while cheering and chanting, “Ukraine! Ukraine! Ukraine!” on the U.S. House floor.

Disgusting.

The only thing I disagree with Clay Travis about is that “our taxpayer money” doesn’t exist; it will have to be printed, just like all the other multi-billion dollar grifts they’ve passed into law. Apparently inflation is here to stay.

The vote was 311-112 with “only” 101 Republicans in support. 101 traitors to the American experiment. Democrats don’t count because we already know they are anti-American.

Marjorie Taylor Green (MTG) sponsored an amendment to the bill that would immediately defund it. Needless to say, it was voted down. But she made her point.

This is your government “at work.” They sit around on their fat butts coming up with ludicrous spending ideas, stand up and make stupid and emotional arguments in favor of the spending—unsupported by facts—then vote to spend that money they don’t have because it doesn’t have any affect on them or their families, even though it will eventually have to be paid by you and your family, and that money they voted to give away eventually makes its way into their pockets or the pockets of their benefactors.

And to think that the Boston Tea Party in 1773 was sparked by a tax of 3 pennies on every pound of tea. We literally need a modern-day Samuel Adams to lead a new Sons of Liberty movement.

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Daily Broadside | ‘Not My Concern’: Pence Tanks His Campaign With Odd Response

When Trump chose Mike Pence as his VP, I thought that Pence was a good choice (and it made a funny “Trumpence” sound). By all accounts he was a seasoned Christian man, he guarded his marriage by not having a meal alone with another woman and, as governor of Indiana, he seemed to have done an adequate job.

But ever since the events of January 6 and its aftermath, when Pence refused to challenge the results of the 2020 election even though there was plenty of evidence of fraud, he has revealed himself to be more of an establishment figure.

One thing we don’t need right now is an establishment figure.

Fortunately, Pence did us all a favor and deep-sixed whatever minimal chance he might have had as a candidate.

But even though Tucker emerged as one of the stars of the evening, the show was not about him but about that clutch of GOP hopefuls. Who among that gang of six won?

It’s probably easier to start with the loser, chief among whom was Mike Pence, who might just as well have used the occasion to perform an act of self-immolation. The key moment came in an exchange about foreign policy, in particular U.S. policy with respect to the war in Ukraine. Pence said he was distressed that we had yet to send Ukraine the promised Abrams tanks or train Ukrainian pilots to fly F16s.

“You are distressed,” said Tucker, “that the Ukrainians don’t have enough American tanks. Every city in the United States has become much worse in the last three years. . . .and yet your concern is that the Ukrainians . . . don’t have enough tanks? Where’s the concern in the United States in that?”

“Well, that’s not my concern. Tucker, I’ve heard that routine from you before, but that’s not my concern.”

“Not my concern.”

Bang. “Not my concern.”

While Mollie Hemingway was generous in her critique of the comment, that phrase is going to haunt Pence for the remainder of his campaign. It was not at all clear what was “not” Pence’s concern, but it sure sounded like it was America and its problems, rather than a proxy war in which we have almost no vested interest.

My take on it is that whether he was referring to our support of the war in Ukraine or he was referring to the sad state of American cities, saying that either is “not my concern” is a rather stunning backhand to the question.

And Carlson is no slouch — he was direct with all the candidates who sat with him in the forum.

Carlson is free to ask difficult questions since he is not working for the establishment media. He lost his evening TV show because his populist questions prompted Fox’s establishment board to shut him down, despite the resulting huge loss of viewers.

By the way, Fox News aired their “new and improved” lineup last night of Ingram, Watters, Hannity and Gutfeld. Do they really think that rearranging the deck chairs is going to save this sinking ship? More to the point, do they even care?

In fact, Carlson has a pocketbook and a ratings incentive to keep the pressure on politicians. Millions of ordinary Americans have given up on the establishment’s media coverage of the establishment’s political priorities. That popularity was made clear the next day when Carlson spoke at the TPUSA Conference in Florida:

[…]

Several of the politicians stared daggers at Carlson — and the leading candidate refused to sit in the hot seat.

That’s what I find refreshing about Carlson — he seems to be fearless and isn’t interested in soft focus interviews. That’s also what I found refreshing about Trump: he didn’t play the game — he disrupted it. That’s what Tucker is doing — disrupting the “normal” routine we’re used to seeing with political figures.

Carlson is doing the American public a favor by exposing the thinking underneath what they say on the surface.

If the participants thought this was going to be another tongue bath, they were certainly surprised. He asked hard questions, and some of their answers exposed their muddled thinking. At least two of them – Asa Hutchinson and Mike Pence — were clear losers and can now be safely considered out of the running.

For what it’s worth, of all the candidates not named Trump, I currently like Ramaswamy and DeSantis.

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Daily Broadside | Guess What? You’re Paying Retired Ukrainians the 20 Percent Now That You’ll Lose in 10 Years

I don’t know how bloggers who write every day manage the curveballs that life throws at them, or even how they make blogging a priority when competing priorities squeeze down on what discretionary time they have. I’ve got a little of both (curveballs and competing priorities) going on right now, so I’ve been offline for a couple of days.

The Resident keeps ramping up his support for Ukraine in their war with Russia. He “snuck” into Kyiv on America’s “President’s Day” for a five-hour photo op with Zelensky, promising more money, artillery, ammunition and US support for the long haul. While he was there, the air raid siren went off, even though the US had told Vladimir Putin that our so-called “president” would be in Ukraine and to not nuke him while he was there.

The siren was there for effect, to make it seem more dangerous than it was, and thereby make Biden seem more courageous than he is. Indeed, the legacy media went out of its way to laud him as some kind of hero.

So the Resident goes jet-setting to some country that no one knows about and which has no strategic value to the US while ignoring the immediate crisis in East Palatine, Ohio while Americans are suffering under the neglect of his administration. But most infuriating of all is the revelation that the dollars the U.S. government takes from me in taxes, without my permission and without me having a say in it, are going to fund Ukrainian pensions.

As American taxpayers paying into Social Security today stare down the barrel toward substantial cuts to their own benefits, estimated to take place in 2034, they can at least take solace in knowing that all categories of Ukrainian pensioners will get a 20% raise in March 2023.  “As early as this March,” says Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, “the government will index pensions by 20%” for about 10 million Ukrainians.

Indexing the payments “is not mandatory according to the Law of Ukraine on the State Budget for 2023,” but benevolent President Zelensky has instructed them to reprice the benefits upwards anyway.

And why wouldn’t he?  His government is swimming in American cash.

Americans have spent more than $100 billion on aid to Ukraine.  And, as the notoriously corrupt Ukrainian government is undoubtedly well aware, money is fungible.

I dunno, during an existential struggle for survival, don’t you and your countrymen sacrifice everything to preserve and sustain your existence? Nothing else matters, right?

Nope.

But we all know that few Americans would have signed on to billions in foreign aid if the impetus was to preserve Ukraine’s pension infrastructure.  What’s truly amazing, though, is that Joe Biden and the media are just coming right out and saying exactly that — the government is using your money to pay Ukraine’s obligations to ten million of its pensioners.  American aid to Ukraine, Biden says, is “going to allow pensions and social support to be paid to the Ukrainian people.”

Biden and his henchmen are running the US economy into the ground, wrecking our 401ks with inflation and saddling our children’s children and their children with mountains of debt while padding Ukrainian retirement accounts with your money. And don’t you get any ideas about getting a 20% raise in what Social Security owes you.

This cycle will continue until roughly 2034, until the IOUs from the Treasury run out, and the Treasury is no longer obligated to pay for the shortfall between what is owed to beneficiaries and payroll tax receipts.  God only knows what the national debt will be at that time, but what we do know is that you, your children, and grandchildren will be on the hook for whatever is owed by the Treasury.  And at that time, again, barring any intercession, all Americans on Social Security are expected to get a 20%+ pay cut.

It’s all I can do to bite my tongue so that I don’t say something I’ll regret.

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Daily Broadside | Bombshell Email Reveals Who the “Big Guy” Really Is

Daily Verse | Isaiah 22:16
What are you doing here and who gave you permission to cut out a grave for yourself here, hewing your grave on the height and chiseling your resting place in the rock?

Friday’s Reading: Isaiah 24-27
Saturday’s Reading: Isaiah 28-30

Happy Friday and welcome to my last post for July 2022.

As I’ve written before, one of the biggest challenges writing this blog is that I run into limitations on my time when I’m required to be away and that’s happening again. I will be without access to the Internet next week, so the Daily Broadside will be on hiatus until August 8. I’m working on a solution to that dilemma, but not sure how it will eventually work out.

Before I sign off for the next week, I need to point out that we no longer have a fair and impartial system of justice but have rather a two-tiered system; one for the ruling elites and their people, and another for the peasants.

It’s not hard to find examples: how about Hillary Clinton’s home-brew server that she used to illegally bypass our governmental system, potentially exposing classified information or top-secret documents to our enemies, especially China? Instead of being punished, James Comey let her skate with nothing more than a harsh rebuke. Anyone lesser—a Republican, maybe—who had done something like that would have faced criminal charges and been fined or imprisoned, or both.

How about Adam Schiff-for-Brains and his outright lies about the “evidence” he claimed to have that proved Trump colluded with Russia? Or Anthony Fauci’s claims that NIH never funded gain-of-function research?

If you or I lied to Congress we’d face the consequences, including jail time. Our dear leaders, however, continue to draw paychecks and lead institutions that investigate fake insurrections or demand universal compliance with virus protocols that destroy people’s lives.

Enter Hunter Biden.

On Thursday, Miranda Devine reported that the same day the New York Post broke the story about Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop (in 2020), including an email “from an executive at the corrupt Ukrainian energy firm Burisma, thanking Hunter for introducing him to Hunter’s then-VP ­father in Washington” …

… panicked phone calls and messages started flying between Hunter’s business partners and their advisers, even as social media giants Facebook and Twitter moved to censor the story and lock The Post’s account, while candidate Biden went into hiding.

That was because the email undermined Brandon’s claim that he didn’t know anything about Hunter’s overseas business dealings, which put his presidential campaign in jeopardy.

But whistleblowers have now shared emails with congressional investigators in which one of Hunter’s business associates, James Gilliar, unambiguously calls Joe Biden “the Big Guy.”

“It would be crazy to do that with all the information and all the facts we have [but what happens if] they try to make it ‘Oh, we were never involved. That was [Joe Biden’s brother] James’ idea . . . and try to basically make us collateral damage?” the person asks Gilliar in a message provided by a whistleblower to Republican congressional investigators and obtained by The Post.

Gilliar is unconcerned about potential backlash from the Biden family and Joe’s campaign: “I don’t see how that would work for them,” he replies.

“I think in the scenario that he wins they would just leave sleeping dogs lie.

“If they lose, honestly, I don’t think that the Big Guy really cares about that because he’ll be too busy focusing on all the other s–t he is doing.”

The communication, obtained by The Post Wednesday, is significant because it bolsters the claim by ex-Hunter business partner Tony Bobulinski that the Big Guy was a code name for Joe Biden.

The only person positioned to “win” or “lose” a campaign at that moment was Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.

The reason the identity of the “Big Guy” is important is because it adds to the weight of evidence suggesting that Joe Biden not only knew about Hunter’s international influence-peddling scheme, but allegedly was cut in for a slice of the profits.

In an email written by Gilliar to Hunter on May 13, 2017, the “Big Guy” was allocated a 10% stake in a lucrative joint venture with Chinese energy conglomerate CEFC.

“10 [percent] held by H[unter] for the Big Guy,” Gilliar wrote.

The evidence that Hunter Biden and his father are corrupt, grifting leaches on the body politic has been building for years. Now we’ve got strong evidence that the “Big Guy” is, in fact, Joe Brandon.

Hello?

Where is the DOJ? The FBI?

Why hasn’t Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to investigate the overwhelming evidence we now have?

Didn’t “whistleblowers” cause the whole of Washington, D.C. to jump all over President Donald J. Trump on the thinnest of pretexts? Didn’t a whistleblower lead to his impeachment?

Where is the urgency to root out the corruption and self-dealing of U.S. presidents that Congress and the DOJ showed during the last administration? Aren’t they still concerned about our precious (*spit*) democracy?

No, they’re not concerned about any of that because Hunter Biden and Joe Biden are the right people. Donald J. Trump is the wrong people.

Imagine if the situation was reversed: Donald J. Trump is still in the White House but the evidence the Post has concerns Donald J. Trump, Jr. Do you have any doubt that Congress, the FBI, the DOJ and every other alphabet agency would be all over it like white on rice?

I don’t.

If any of what we now know about the Biden’s is true (and there’s very little reason to doubt it is) then it raises all kinds of questions about just how beholden Biden and his son are to the Chinese or to the Ukrainians. Is Biden making policy decisions based on the money he got or is still getting? How much money did Biden make off Hunter’s deals with the Ukrainians or the Chinese while Vice President of the United States? What do the Chinese or the Ukrainians hold over him or Hunter?

The answers to these questions potentially rise to the level of treason and betrayal—certainly to an abuse of office—and there’s a lot more evidence that Biden personally profited from the corruption than what was cited as an excuse to impeach Trump.

No, the system of justice has been weaponized by the progressive elites—especially the Democrats—to punish their political enemies, while they themselves get away with crimes that under a fair and impartial system would remove them from power.

It’s part of the corruption that has moved our country away from a government of the people, by the people and for the people. And that has a lot of normal Americans wondering what it’s going to take to restore our rightful form of government.

Have a good week. I’ll see you August 8.

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Daily Broadside | Big Talk Is Only Big if You Can Back it Up

Daily Verse | Deuteronomy 10:12-13
And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?

Friday’s Reading: Deuteronomy 13-17
Saturday’s Reading: Deuteronomy 18-21

It’s Friday and by some accounts, we are now on the cusp of World War III. Russia has indeed invaded its neighbor and former satellite in a campaign to reunite with so-called breakaway regions of eastern Ukraine. Vladimir Putin called Ukraine part of “ancient Russian lands” in an address on Monday.

While I’m doubtful that the Russian minor incursion invasion will lead to a broader conflict, all bets are off if Putin pushes beyond the western border of Ukraine where lie Poland, Slovakia and Hungary, all of whom are members of NATO. If Russia crosses the border of any of these nations, it would be considered an attack on all members, including US and the UK.

But never fear! Brandon reassured us that with him in charge, ol’ Putin would be shakin’ in his boots.

And there was also this before that:

Biden similarly said in a Twitter video in October 2019 that Putin’s “days of tyranny” would be over when he was president.

“I’m going to stand up to him, he’s a bully,” then-presidential candidate Biden said.

“Putin knows that when I am president of the United States his days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over,” he continued.

How’s everybody liking the end of Putin’s tyranny?

I’m not sure Putin was as impressed going toe to toe with Biden as Biden was going toe to toe with Putin. In fact, Brandon is rather enamored with himself, isn’t he?

Like everything else that Biden says, it was empty rhetoric, his words hollow theatrics that he could never live up to, the boasting of a feeble-brained idiot who has no moral center—unless you call enriching himself on the backs of taxpayers a “moral center.”

What has Brandon done to dissuade the Russian tyrant? Besides supporting Germany in shutting down the Russian-led Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline (which Biden had green-lighted while shutting down the Keystone Pipeline on his first day in office), the Resident is now introducing sanctions specifically targeting Russian financial markets.

Biden said that the sanctions will target Russian elites, banks, and technology exports which he claimed will cripple Russia’s ability to modernize its military and will damage the Russian economy.

Say, do you think Putin might have anticipated such a response? Here’s what Putin has said about anyone thinking about interfering with his “special operations.”

“To anyone who would consider interfering from outside: If you do, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history. All the relevant decisions have been taken. I hope you hear me,” Mr Putin said.

Does anyone doubt that he has the manpower, willpower and firepower to back up his Trumpian-style threat?

Still, what we should be concerned about is not so much what’s happening in eastern Europe, but what the fallout will be here in the U.S.

The Russian attack caused the price of Brent crude to spike more than 8 percent to as much as $105 a barrel. The price of U.S. crude also jumped 7.5 percent to about $99 a barrel. Russia is the world’s second largest producer of oil, and the second largest exporter of crude oil. Europe is particularly reliant on Russian energy.

How will that translate into the price of filling up your car?

The price of gas continues to soar in this era of Bidenflation. It is getting so bad, some experts are warning that we could see prices as outrageously high as $7 per gallon in some parts of the country.

The current high prices are not new, either. Gasoline has been on the rise for seven straight weeks, according to GasBuddy data reported by Fox Carolina.

“Veteran energy strategist Dan Dicker said he can see gas prices going up to $5 a gallon. Dicker said some areas might even get to $6.50 or $7,” Fox Carolina added.

GasBuddy noted that the national average is almost twenty cents a gallon higher than a month ago and is nearly a dollar higher than one year ago.

In just over a year we went from being energy independent and a net exporter of oil to reverting to 70’s-era gas pricing.

Norms restored!

Just know that the Democrats and their accessories in the media will blame the war in Ukraine for the rising gas prices. But don’t let them.

Left-wing news sources continue to lay the blame for these skyrocketing prices at the door of Russia’s threatened invasion of Ukraine.

Indeed, the Associated Press is only worried over the high costs of gasoline because it will likely have a political impact for Biden and the Democrats in the 2022 elections, which are only seven months away.

“Americans are already dismayed by Inflation at a 40-year high, and Biden is warning that gas prices could get higher if Russian President Vladimir Putin chooses to invade. It’s a recognition of Biden’s own risks ahead of the 2022 midterm elections: Inflation has become an albatross for Democrats despite the nation’s strong economic growth last year,” the Associated Press wrote last week.

But this is misleading. Gasoline has been rising since Biden took office, and the Russian threat to Ukraine was not great enough to impact gas prices when Biden entered the White House in January of last year.

Brandon is a colossal failure, putting America and the rest of the world at risk. He failed in Afghanistan, he failed in our energy independence, he’s failed on our southern border, and he’s failed in uniting the country.

And now he’s failed to deter Putin from mischief in eastern Europe. Biden might think he went “toe to toe” with Putin, but it turns out he was only tripping over his own feet.

Have a good weekend.