US Politics Thread 2021-24

[Rockstar]

Another SCOTUS ruling. The government is not allowed to control the means of production of private business owners and protects the business owners sincere convictions.

https://thehill.com/wp-content/uploa...1-476_c185.pdf

https://thehill.com/regulation/court...e-free-speech/

The things is in a capitalist system someone will provide what others want. Last thing this country needs is a bunch of crying whinny woke Democrats dictating to others what they cannot do. Pack sand you marxists, if you don’t like it start your own business.

[em2nought]

So if Brandon gets 81 million votes again, I wonder if we'll all just sheepishly accept it as true this time too?

I could live with Trump picking Kennedy for a running mate, or Tulsi. I kind of dig that two tone hair. LOL

[Rockstar]

In case you don’t remember. Here in the U.S. we were seeing masked uniformed so-called white extremists waving nazi party flags in the news.

Well about that, seems they are liberal soyboys trying to instigate further tensions by mingling with peaceful protestors. Well those peaceful protestors had enough and unmasked a few. One was a college student intending to eventually work for the government.

Needless to say after the event below I haven’t seen this those masked liberal instigating retards in the news.

Watch my brother from another mother come around on the right and knock one out.

[August]

Federal agents posing as nazis I hate even more.

[mapuc]

Copied and translated from a Danish article.

The US is the world's biggest threat, according to an experienced presidential adviser

Richard Haass, who has served under several American presidents, is concerned about the state of the United States.

Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, climate change, international terrorism and global pandemics.

According to American foreign policy expert Richard Haass, who has served under several former presidents, there are enough international threats to deal with.

Yet there is one challenge that keeps him up at night more than any other. And that is the threat from the United States itself.

Do you my American friends agree on this ?

The English version can be read in the American newspaper
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/u...gn-policy.html

You have to sign up before reading it.

Markus

[Rockstar]

[Rockstar]

This is why the world was invaded by weak minded mandate Nazis. They listen to the party boss and of all things social media instead of listening to common sense and their own doctors


Judge Rules Biden Administration Likely Trampled on Free Speech on Social Media
Preliminary injunction orders federal agencies to refrain from pressuring social-media companies on censorship

https://archive.ph/cTZbn

By Jacob Gershman

July 4, 2023 3:37 pm ET

A federal judge ruled that the Biden administration likely trampled on the First Amendment in trying to eliminate what it saw as disinformation on social media, issuing a broad preliminary injunction limiting the federal government from policing online content.

In a 155-page ruling issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana barred White House officials and multiple federal agencies from contacting social-media companies with the purpose of suppressing political views and other speech normally protected from government censorship.

The judge’s injunction came in a lawsuit led by the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana who alleged that the Biden administration fostered a sprawling “federal censorship enterprise.” The federal government, the lawsuit claimed, pressured social-media platforms to scrub away disfavored views about Covid-19 health policies, the origins of the pandemic, the Hunter Biden laptop story, election security and other sensitive topics.

The case is among the most potentially consequential First Amendment battles pending in the courts, testing the limits on government scrutiny of social-media content on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other major platforms.

“[T]he evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario,” wrote Judge Doughty. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

The judge said the plaintiffs “have presented substantial evidence in support of their claims that they were the victims of a far-reaching and widespread censorship campaign.”
A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

Missouri v. Biden, as the case is called, is among dozens of so-called censorship-by-proxy lawsuits challenging account suspensions, content removals and other suppression of social-media posts on First Amendment grounds.

Write to Jacob Gershman at jacob.gershman@wsj.com

[Otto Harkaman]

[Rockstar]

CORRUPTION

The White House That Tracked Down Grannies After Capitol Riot Wants You To Believe Cocaine Caper Has Them Stumped

BY: JORDAN BOYD
JULY 06, 2023
5 MIN READ





https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/06...-them-stumped/

The White House is apparently giving up on finding who is responsible for leaving an illicit drug in the executive mansion last weekend. At least, that’s what Politico reported based on the testimony of an unnamed law enforcement official.

“White House cocaine culprit unlikely to be found: Law enforcement official,” the headline reads.

A snarky subhead noted, “Lines may have been snorted and crossed,” but “it’s possible we won’t know by whom.”

Officials evacuated the White House on Sunday evening after a white powdery substance was reportedly discovered in a “work area” in the West Wing (the location later changed to “near the Situation Room”). Dispatches from the emergency crews at the scene quickly confirmed that the “unknown item” was a bag of cocaine.

“We have a yellow bar stating cocaine hydrochloride,” a D.C. firefighter said in a radio communication at 8:49 p.m. on Sunday.

The White House is supposedly equipped with state-of-the-art security that would make finding the druggie who lost his illegal loot incredibly easy.

White House staff and visitors are required to go through multiple security checkpoints before entering areas like the West Wing. Some of these screening areas are even equipped with dogs that are trained to alert to illegal substances and items. Where metal detectors and cameras may fail, swarms of Secret Service and White House visitor logs are designed to prevail.

Against a bag of cocaine, however, Politico’s inside man suggests all of these measures are moot.

“Even if there were surveillance cameras, unless you were waving it around, it may not have been caught,” the anonymous official told Politico. “It’s a bit of a thoroughfare. People walk by there all the time.”

Unless the cocaine came from a member of the first family, such as Hunter Biden, who potentially resides in the White House and gets a free pass to walk in and out of the mansion’s many doors without scrutiny, finding the cocaine culprit should be an open and shut case for the “Excellence through talent, technology, and diversity” within the Secret Service. Yet, the Biden administration repeatedly showcases a lack of interest in discovering and sharing who dropped the bag and why.

“So, what’s preventing a visitor from bringing in anthrax or something that’s not magnetic into the White House?” one reporter queried at Wednesday’s press briefing.

It’s a question worth asking. If the cocaine caper truly was a security breach that law enforcement officials couldn’t catch at security checkpoints or on cameras, the White House cannot, in good conscience, claim that the first family is safe in the executive mansion.

Instead of addressing reporters’ concerns, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre emphasized that the president and his family — including his son, who has a long history with the illicit drug — were not at the White House during the incident. She, along with several White House leakers, also repeated the idea that the drugs were discovered in a “heavily traveled area” where “many … West Wing visitors come through.”

“We have confidence that the Secret Service will get to the bottom of this,” Jean-Pierre said.

Americans who know anything about the Biden family’s Secret Service team should not find that statement reassuring, considering the cush agency’s track record of going to great lengths to clean up Hunter’s missing gun mess in 2018.

Security failures in important government buildings, including the White House, have certainly occurred in the past. When protestors walked into the Capitol on January 6 — one of the most notable breaches in recent history — the Biden regime partnered with banks, cell phone companies, and Big Tech to track down, question, and arrest people near and in the federal building.

Months after the afternoon chaos, people like Georgia grandma Linda Menk, who merely attended the Trump rally near the White House on Jan. 6, received house visits from the FBI who demanded to question her about her stint in D.C.

To this day, with encouragement from the president himself, Biden’s Department of Justice is working to find and charge Americans for their presence in the Capitol in 2021. But when it comes to finding the crackhead who left his cargo somewhere in the president’s residence, the White House clearly couldn’t be less interested in pursuing an investigation.

The administration dead-set on “bringing transparency” back to the nation is hiding something.

Whether the cocaine belongs to someone with a history of doing crack like Hunter — who would be in direct violation of his sweetheart plea deal if the drug bag was connected to him — a staffer, or even a White House guest, Americans deserve to know why the Biden administration suddenly doesn’t care about security breaches.

Jordan Boyd is a staff writer at The Federalist and co-producer of The Federalist Radio Hour. Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @jordanboydtx.

Back in the day we used to seize peoples property if we found illegal narcotics in their home.

[Skybird]

"Evaluating the Success of the War on Poverty Since 1963 Using an Absolute Full-Income Poverty Measure"

I post this article because the study it is based on is behind a paywall (LINK). The article is from the NZZ and that often has regional limitation and cannot be posted as a Google website translator link.

How far has the U.S. come in the fight against poverty? Much further than officially reported, say researchers.

The official poverty rate in the U.S. has shown little progress for 50 years. Now, a group of researchers says the war on poverty proclaimed by U.S. President Lyndon Johnson in 1963 has been won. How can this be?

It's not fair if you change the rules of the game in the middle of the game and make the goal smaller so that scoring becomes more difficult. Or when you already have the finish line in sight on a run - and then it is moved back another kilometer. And yet this is exactly what happens year after year in the fight against poverty. Once upon a time, a threshold was defined below which someone is considered poor. But over time, when the majority of the population is better off, the threshold is set higher and higher.

The problem is that you never know exactly where you stand in the fight against poverty, whether all the measures that the state has taken over the years have achieved anything or not.

This is exemplified in the USA. In his 1963 State of the Union address, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson declared a "war on poverty. At that time, the poverty threshold was defined by first determining an extremely frugal food plan and then tripling the expenditures for it, because a poor household spent about one third of its resources on food. This arrived at a poverty threshold for an individual of just under $10,000 per year (at 2019 prices).
Official figures exaggerate the problem

A team led by renowned Cornell University researcher Richard Burkhauser now wanted to know how far the U.S. has come in fighting poverty since Johnson's "declaration of war." To do this, the economists took Lyndon Johnson's 1963 poverty threshold and adjusted it each year for inflation. But they also took into account that the U.S. has introduced new social programs in the meantime. Poor families receive wage subsidies, for example, or there is rudimentary health insurance for the poor in the form of Medicaid. Food cards or school lunches have also been expanded.

Official poverty rate hides progress

The result is impressive: The fight against poverty, as Johnson had proclaimed, has practically been won. By the time the Corona pandemic broke out, the percentage of the population below the poverty line had fallen from nearly 20 percent in 1963 to just 1.6 percent. Focusing on the poverty rate for blacks, it even dropped from 51 to 2.9 percent.



The officially reported poverty rate in the USA is quite different: Here, the starting point was also the original level of the threshold in Johnson's time. But the official measure does not take into account Medicaid, school lunch or meal vouchers, or the wage subsidies (Earned Income Tax Credit) that have been added in the meantime. It thus gives an incomplete picture of the resources available to a poor household.

In addition, the poverty threshold has been raised continuously over time, making it more difficult to jump over - the target band has thus been moved several times. As a result, the official poverty rate has made less progress over time; at last count, it was only just above 10 percent.

One criticism of Burkhauser's poverty measure is obvious: $10,000 won't get a person far in the U.S. today. When it comes to participation in society, many experts therefore rely on a poverty threshold that is based on the median income and grows with it.

In this case, however, poverty will never disappear, as an extreme example illustrates. If everyone suddenly has twice as much income, the poverty rate will remain the same if the threshold is set at half the median income, for example. In this case, the median income divides the population into two halves: One has more income than the median, the other less.

This has happened grosso modo in the United States. At the time, the 1963 poverty threshold was a good half of the median income. But the median income for one person, adjusted for inflation, has more than doubled since 1963, from $18,000 to $49,000. All have improved over time, but the distribution in the bottom half has not changed as much: As a result, relative poverty has declined comparatively little, from 19.5 to 15.3 percent.

Six in ten Americans escape poverty

The progress of the poor relative to the middle class has thus been modest, while the United States has virtually shaken off absolute poverty. However, President Johnson also cautioned in his speech that the fight against poverty is not just about helping the poor. Rather, they should also stand on their own two feet as much as possible.

Here, the study shows that (also) in the U.S., dependence on government transfers has increased. In 1967, 4.7 percent of working-age people had received more than half of their income from the government; in 2019, 11 percent did. Among blacks, that dependence climbed as high as 11 percent to 20 percent, and among their children, from 18 percent to 28 percent.


However, this is not an inevitable development. In the 1990s, this dependency temporarily declined sharply. At that time - i.e., during the presidency of Democrat Bill Clinton - the welfare system was reorganized in such a way that taking up a job was a prerequisite for receiving certain subsidies. This reform also fell on fertile ground because the economy, and thus the labor market, was in full swing at the time.

To be sure, not everything in the U.S. is at its best, as anyone who has visited a major city knows. But to deny the progress is to encourage an attitude that everything is getting worse - which is not true. In fact, if you take today's official threshold and look at how many Americans had lower incomes in 1963, you would have had to classify as many as 70 percent of Americans as poor back then. So by today's modern standards, six out of ten Americans have been able to lift themselves out of poverty since 1963.

https://www.nzz.ch/wirtschaft/die-us...nen-ld.1746354

[August]

Good article.

DeSantis’ Problem Isn’t Trump, It’s That Dems Rigged The Last Election

John Daniel Davidson
Visit on Twitter @johnddavidson

You might have noticed a media narrative taking shape the last few days about how Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign has “stalled.” A Politico Playbook item over the weekend described it as a “failure to launch,” noting that polling for DeSantis peaked in January at 40.5 percent and has since settled in the low 20s amid a barrage of attacks from former President Donald Trump.

Playbook also cited other news outlets recently casting doubt on the DeSantis operation, from fundraising struggles to lack of endorsements to difficulties distinguishing himself from Trump on policy. DeSantis super PAC official Steve Cortes added fuel to the narrative fire in an interview Sunday night, bemoaning the polls and admitting, “clearly Donald Trump is the runaway frontrunner.”

One could of course object that it’s only July, that polls don’t mean much this far out from the primaries, and that corporate media want nothing more than to push a DeSantis-is-stalled narrative whether it’s true or not, because they hate and fear him just as they hate and fear Trump.

But maybe there’s something else going on here. If enthusiasm for DeSantis seems lacking, maybe it has little or nothing to do with DeSantis or his campaign. Perhaps what we’re seeing is less about him and still less about 2024 or the upcoming GOP primary scrum, and more about what happened in 2020. Put bluntly, maybe what we’re seeing now is an early sign that what Democrats, Big Tech, and corporate media did in 2020 was inject poison into our political system, and the 2024 election cycle is going to show us just how deadly that poison is.

Recall that 2020 was unlike any election in American history. One need not declare that it was “stolen” to admit that it was obviously rigged. After all, the people and institutions that rigged it have freely admitted what they did. They suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, censored what Americans could say on social media, introduced unprecedented changes to our voting system under the pretext of pandemic precautions, and poured hundreds of millions of dollars into putatively nonpartisan local election offices through Mark Zuckerberg-connected nonprofits for the sole purpose of turning out Democrat voters in swing states.

Nothing like that has ever happened in American history. And it was all done for the singular purpose of ensuring that Trump would not serve a second term. What’s more, all of that came after four years of the permanent regime in Washington discarding every political norm, bending every rule, and breaking more than a few laws in a failed effort to oust Trump from office during his first term.

Now, maybe you think that’s all nonsense, or just water under the bridge. What’s done is done, we can’t go back, and even if the 2020 election wasn’t on the level we all just need to move on and go about the 2024 primary season like it’s business as usual. There’ll be debates and a deluge of political ads and campaign shenanigans. There’ll be a chaotic, rambunctious primary full of zingers and debate moderator tomfoolery, and at the end of it Republicans will have their nominee and we can all get on with the general election.

Sorry, but that’s not going to happen. It won’t happen because Trump supporters are understandably not willing to forget 2020 and just trundle along through 2024 like none of it happened. Plenty of them will always believe, not without reason, that 2020 was stolen outright. Many millions more believe, with even more reason, that it was rigged unfairly against Trump and that the same forces are at work now to rig it against whomever the GOP nominee turns out to be.

Does that mean Trump is somehow entitled to the nomination, or even to another term in the White House? Not necessarily. To the extent that 2020 was stolen, it wasn’t strictly speaking stolen from Trump but from the American people, the voters who cast their ballots for Trump in good faith, trusting that our elections were free and fair.

Now that their faith has proved misplaced, do you think they’re going to line up for a GOP primary and consider each candidate on his or her merits, giving them all a fair hearing? Of course not. As far as they’re concerned, they were robbed of their votes in the last election by a corrupt cabal of powerful elites who are still in control.

Indeed, we know more today about the astounding level of corruption and election-rigging in 2020 than we did at the time. None of the problems have been fixed, and no reparations have been made. You can’t expect these voters to simply move on and act like 2024 is going to be a free and fair election, and accept whatever result the machine coughs up.

To win over GOP primary voters who supported Trump in the past two cycles, these candidates have to speak to the injustice that was done in 2020, they have to admit what happened, name who did it, and affirm that we cannot have a self-governing republic if that’s how our elections are going to be.
And therein lies the problem for a candidate like DeSantis — to say nothing of such winsome and meritorious gunners like Vivek Ramaswamy or Tim Scott. How can you decry what they did to Trump in one breath and in the next proclaim that you’re the best person to redress those grievances? That Trump should stand aside and let you, Nikki Haley, restore faith in American elections and put Democrats in their place.

Maybe it can be done, maybe they can come up with a rationale for their candidacies that will appeal to Trump supporters. It certainly would be a neat trick.

But if you’re trying to explain why an otherwise popular figure like DeSantis isn’t gaining traction among GOP primary voters, the answer has less to do with Trump and more to do with what Democrats did in 2020. No one should expect Trump voters to forgive and forget. Democrats and their accomplices might have thought they were getting rid of Trump once and for all, and maybe they will get rid of him in the end. But right now, it looks like they sowed the wind.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/11...last-election/

[em2nought]

Originally Posted by August

Good article.



https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/11...last-election/

YEP

[Rockstar]

OUCH . He didn’t do very good job defending himself.

FBI Director Testifies at Oversight Hearing.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?529135...9135&playEvent

JULY 12, 2023

FBI Director Christopher Wray defended the agency against Republican accusations of weaponization and politicization during an oversight hearing before the House Judiciary Committee. Director Wray told lawmakers where there have been issues, he’s taken immediate action to correct them. The director, appointed under the Trump administration, faced questions from lawmakers for nearly five hours. At times, exchanges turned heated on topics ranging from the Hunter Biden investigation to the internal Richmond, Virginia office memo targeting Catholics, and the warrantless searches of digital data.

—————


https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-...-conference-8/

Q – So the entire genesis of that G7 conversation was tied to your predecessor, who is about to launch another campaign. So how do you reassure them, if that is the reason for their questioning, that the former President will not return or that his political movement, which is still very strong, will not —

BIDEN:: Oh, yeah? (Laughs.)

Q — once again take power in the United States?

BIDEN: Well, we just have to demonstrate that he will not take power by — if we — if he does run. I’m making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next President again.

[Rockstar]

[em2nought]

Originally Posted by Rockstar

Fight on!

Dedicated to you man!