Young People Aren’t Nearly Angry Enough About Government Debt thumbnail

Young People Aren’t Nearly Angry Enough About Government Debt

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By Laura Williams

Young people sometimes seem to wake up in the morning in search of something to be outraged about. We are among the wealthiest and most educated humans in history. But we’re increasingly convinced that we’re worse off than our parents were, that the planet is in crisis, and that it’s probably not worth having kids.

I’ll generalize here about my own cohort (people born after 1981 but before 2010), commonly referred to as Millennials and Gen Z, as that shorthand corresponds to survey and demographic data. Millennials and Gen Z have valid economic complaints, and the conditions of our young adulthood perceptibly weakened traditional bridges to economic independence. We graduated with record amounts of student debt after President Obama nationalized that lending. Housing prices doubled during our household formation years due to zoning impediments and chronic underbuilding. Young Americans say economic issues are important to us, and candidates are courting our votes by promising student debt relief and cheaper housing (which they will never be able to deliver).

Young people, in our idealism and our rational ignorance of the actual appropriations process, typically support more government intervention, more spending programs, and more of every other burden that has landed us in such untenable economic circumstances to begin with. Perhaps not coincidentally, young people who’ve spent the most years in the increasingly partisan bubble of higher education are also the most likely to favor expanded government programs as a “solution” to those complaints.

It’s Your Debt, Boomer

What most young people don’t yet understand is that we are sacrificing our young adulthood and our financial security to pay for debts run up by Baby Boomers. Part of every Millennial and Gen-Z paycheck is payable to people the same age as the members of Congress currently milking this system and miring us further in debt.

Our government spends more than it can extract from taxpayers. Social Security, which represents 20 percent of government spending, has run an annual deficit for 15 years. Last year Social Security alone overspent by $22.1 billion. To keep sending out checks to retirees, Social Security goes begging to the Treasury Department, and the Treasury borrows from the public by issuing bonds. Bonds allow investors (who are often also taxpayers) to pay for some retirees’ benefits now, and be paid back later. But investors only volunteer to lend Social Security the money it needs to cover its bills because the (younger) taxpayers will eventually repay the debt — with interest.

In other words, both Social Security and Medicare, along with various smaller federal entitlement programs, together comprising almost half of the federal budget, have been operating for a decade on the principle of “give us the money now, and stick the next generation with the check.” We saddle future generations with debt for present-day consumption.

The second largest item in the budget after Social Security is interest on the national debt — largely on Social Security and other entitlements that have already been spent. These mandatory benefits now consume three quarters of the federal budget: even Congress is not answerable for these programs. We never had the chance for our votes to impact that spending (not that older generations were much better represented) and it’s unclear if we ever will.

Young Americans probably don’t think much about the budget deficit (each year’s overspending) or the national debt (many years’ deficits put together, plus interest) much at all. And why should we? For our entire political memory, the federal government, as well as most of our state governments, have been steadily piling “public” debt upon our individual and collective heads. That’s just how it is. We are the frogs trying to make our way in the watery world as the temperature ticks imperceptibly higher. We have been swimming in debt forever, unaware that we’re being economically boiled alive.

Millennials have somewhat modest non-mortgage debt of around $27,000 (some self-reports say twice that much), including car notes, student loans, and credit cards. But we each owe more than $100,000 as a share of the national debt. And we don’t even know it.

When Millennials finally do have babies (and we are!) that infant born in 2024 will enter the world with a newly minted Social Security Number and $78,089 credit card bill for Granddad’s heart surgery and the interest on a benefit check that was mailed when her parents were in middle school.

Headlines and comments sections love to sneer at “snowflakes” who’ve just hit the “real world,” and can’t figure out how to make ends meet, but the kids are onto something. A full 15 percent of our earnings are confiscated to pay into retirement and healthcare programs that will be insolvent by the time we’re old enough to enjoy them. The Federal Reserve and government debt are eating the economy. The same interest rates that are pushing mortgages out of reach are driving up the cost of interest to maintain the debt going forward. As we learn to save and invest, our dollars are slowly devalued. We’re right to feel trapped.

Sure, if we’re alive and own a smartphone, we’re among the one percent of the wealthiest humans who’ve ever lived. Older generations could argue (persuasively!) that we have no idea what “poverty” is anymore. But with the state of government spending and debt…we are likely to find out.

Despite being richer than Rockefeller, Millennials are right to say that the previous ways of building income security have been pushed out of reach. Our earning years are subsidizing not our own economic coming-of-age, but bank bailouts, wars abroad, and retirement and medical benefits for people who navigated a less-challenging wealth-building landscape.

Redistribution goes both ways. Boomers are expected to pass on tens of trillions in unprecedented wealth to their children (if it isn’t eaten up by medical costs, despite heavy federal subsidies) and older generations’ financial support of the younger has had palpable lifting effects. Half of college costs are paid by families, and the trope of young people moving back home is only possible if mom and dad have the spare room and groceries to make that feasible.

Government “help” during COVID-19 resulted in the worst inflation in 40 years, as the federal government spent $42,000 per citizen on “stimulus” efforts, right around a Millennial’s average salary at that time. An absurd amount of fraud was perpetrated in the stimulus to save an economy from the lockdown that nearly ruined it. Trillions in earmarked goodies were rubber stamped, carelessly added to young people’s growing bill. Government lenders deliberately removed fraud controls, fearing they couldn’t hand out $800 billion in young people’s future wages away fast enough. Important lessons were taught by those programs. The importance of self-sufficiency and the dignity of hard work weren’t top of the list.

Boomer Benefits are Stagnating Hiring, Wages, and Investment for Young People

Even if our workplace engagement suffered under government distortions, Millennials continue to work more hours than other generations and invest in side hustles and self employment at higher rates. Working hard and winning higher wages almost doesn’t matter, though, when our purchasing power is eaten from the other side. Buying power has dropped 20 percent in just five years. Life is $11,400/year more expensive than it was two years ago and deficit spending is the reason why.

We’re having trouble getting hired for what we’re worth, because it costs employers 30 percent more than just our wages to employ us. The federal tax code both requires and incentivizes our employers to transfer a bunch of what we earned directly to insurance companies and those same Boomer-busted federal benefits, via tax-deductible benefits and payroll taxes. And the regulatory compliance costs of ravenous bureaucratic state. The price paid by each employer to keep each employee continues to rise — but Congress says your boss has to give most of the increase to someone other than you.

Federal spending programs that many people consider good government, including Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and health insurance for children (CHIP) aren’t a small amount of the federal budget. Government spends on these programs because people support and demand them, and because cutting those benefits would be a re-election death sentence. That’s why they call cutting Social Security the “third rail of politics.” If you touch those benefits, you die. Congress is held hostage by Baby Boomers who are running up the bill with no sign of slowing down.

Young people generally support Social Security and the public health insurance programs, even though a 2021 poll by Nationwide Financial found 47 percent of Millennials agree with the statement “I will not get a dime of the Social Security benefits I have earned.”

In the same survey, Millennials were the most likely of any generation to believe that Social Security benefits should be enough to live on as a sole income, and guessed the retirement age was 52 (it’s 67 for anyone born after 1959 — and that’s likely to rise). Young people are the most likely to see government guarantees as a valid way to live — even though we seem to understand that those promises aren’t guarantees at all.

Healthcare costs tied to an aging population and wonderful-but-expensive growth in medical technologies and medications will balloon over the next few years, and so will the deficits in Boomer benefit programs. Newly developed obesity drugs alone are expected to add $13.6 billion to Medicare spending. By 2030, every single Baby Boomer will be 65, eligible for publicly funded healthcare.

The first Millennial will be eligible to claim Medicare (assuming the program exists and the qualifying age is still 65, both of which are improbable) in 2046. As it happens, that’s also the year that the Boomer benefits programs (which will then be bloated with Gen Xers) and the interest payments we’re incurring to provide those benefits now, are projected to consume 100 percent of federal tax revenue.

Government spending is being transferred to bureaucrats and then to the beneficiaries of government spending who are, in some sense, your diabetic grandma who needs a Medicare-paid dialysis treatment, but in a much more immediate sense, are the insurance companies, pharma giants, and hospital corporations who wrote the healthcare legislation. Some percentage of every college graduate’s paycheck buys bullets that get fired at nothing and inflating the private investment portfolios of government contractors, with dubious, wasteful outcomes from the prison-industrial complex to the perpetual war machine.

No bank or nation in the world can lend the kind of money the American government needs to borrow to fulfill its obligations to citizens. Someone will have to bite the bullet. Even some of the co-authors of the current disaster are wrestling with the truth.

Forget avocado toast and streaming subscriptions. We’re already sensing it, but we haven’t yet seen it. Young people are not well-informed, and often actively misled, about what’s rotten in this economic system. But we are seeing the consequences on store shelves and mortgage contracts and we can sense disaster is coming. We’re about to get stuck with the bill.

*****

This article was published by AIER, American Institute For Economic Research, and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Biden’s New Rule on Auto Emissions Will Accelerate Death Spiral for Auto Manufacturers thumbnail

Biden’s New Rule on Auto Emissions Will Accelerate Death Spiral for Auto Manufacturers

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By Ronald Stein

For one of the wealthier countries on this planet, America, with 330 million that represents about 4% of the world’s 8 billion on this planet, President Biden is speeding ahead with EV mandates to ditch most new gas cars by 2030.

Biden may not be cognizant that 80 percent of the 8 billion on this planet earning less than $10 a day, which is more than 6 billion on this earth, may never be able to enjoy the materialistic living styles of those in wealthier countries, nor ever own an automobile.

In America, the elites have bought EV’s, and the elites may continue to buy EV’s, BUT we’re quickly running out of elites!

  • The average debt in America is almost $60,000 across credit cards, mortgages, auto loans, and student loans.
  • The common folk need a workhorse vehicle, not just a second car toy that sits in the garage to be used on short ventures!
  • The current EV ownership profiles are reflected in the oligarchic elite that are highly educated, highly compensated, multi-car families, with low mileage requirements for the families second car.
  • Current EV owner profiles are dramatically different from most vehicle owners as they are single-car owners, not as highly educated, nor as highly compensated, and have higher mileage requirements for their workhorse vehicle.

Mandating a change to EV ownership and further austerity onto those that can least afford, the Nation and the other 96% on this planet may face a rebellion from those that need transportation.

Biden seems to be oblivious to the fact that there are more than 1.4 billion vehicles in the world, and almost 300 million trucks in the world, there’s been a mandate movement to have EV’s replace ICE vehicles to reduce emissions from the vehicular transportation sector.

Well, to-date, the mandate to EV’s has been a failure as we’re running short of elites that are buying them, and the auto manufacturers are starting to absorb the financial hits !

The previous worldwide gasoline usage peak was in 2019 before the Pandemic.

  • Today, there are 30 million EVs on the world’s roads that are owned by the elites that can afford them, and are mainly 2nd vehicles parked in the garage, or with low mileage usage, vs the high mileage workhorse vehicles that are internal combustion engines.
  • Today, there are also hundreds of millions of workers that now work virtually since the Pandemic and thus do not “drive” to work as often.

Well, even with those 30 million EV’s and millions of workers not driving as much, gasoline usage continues to rise. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that global gasoline consumption in 2023 blew past the pre-lockdown 2019 peak !

By re-enforcing the mandates to EV’s, Biden is forcing automobile manufacturers into a death spiral, as most of the 8 billion on this planet will never be able to afford an EV !

*****

This article was published by The Heartland Institute and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

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Chris Rufo, Man in the Arena

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By Anastasia Kaliabakos

On March 15, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute honored Chris Rufo, an activist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, with their Conservative Book of the Year Award at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

Rufo finished his first book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, in 2023. In his speech after receiving the award, he said to the gathered crowd, “What I tried to do with this book is to make sure that it was not oriented just towards good prose, solid research, good line of argument, some historical value, but it was actually oriented towards active political life.”

This emphasis on active political life transcends the pages of America’s Cultural Revolution and bleeds into Rufo’s personal life. Rufo gained notoriety in 2020 for his fight against DEI and critical race theory, particularly in school curricula.

Most recently, Rufo collaborated with Chris Brunet, a contributing editor to The American Conservative, to expose Harvard’s former President Claudine Gay for plagiarism. Their joint efforts sparked a nationwide conversation about the detriments of DEI policies at the university level.

Tackling such prevalent issues was at the center of Rufo’s book as well: “What’s critical race theory?” he asked the audience. “It’s an academic discipline that has captured elite institutions with public funding, even though in many cases, the public never voted for these ideas to be installed. It’s not just in California, New York, it’s actually you know, almost everywhere.”

He went on, asking, “The point being is that these ideas proliferated and propagated through institutions, and the real question is how?… The worst answer is to say, well, they’re bad or stupid at what they’re doing and it doesn’t work. The better question is, so how do they do it? What can you learn from it? And then, how can you adjust your own politics to respond effectively?”

Daniel McCarthy, editor of Modern Age and contributing editor of The American Conservative, asked Rufo his opinion on a sense of complacency in America that has allowed DEI initiatives and critical race theory to take such a strong hold: “Some complacency or some weakness on the part of that stronger and more virtuous America opened the door to the insanity that we’ve seen the last 20 plus years. I’m curious, what do you think has created this sense of complacency, or this obliviousness, among so many conservative people towards the threat that they’re facing from a very radical revolutionary level?”

Rufo explained that, in his opinion, baby-boomers and libertarians were to blame for the current state of conservatism in America, concluding that it is important to understand and be educated about the history of the ideologies ripping through today’s society in order to restore a recognizable American order. 

Nevertheless, even in the midst of this significant culture war, Rufo maintained that conservatives should hold the high ground and never mimic the often violent and aggressive fighting strategies of the left.

“And, and I think, look, the right shouting and getting in people’s faces is always a loser for us,” he said. “The left can burn down a city and the media will cover for them. If there’s one bad person in a crowd at a conservative rally or something, it tars everybody. We have to avoid that.”

*****

This article was published by The American Conservative and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot Manhattan Institute

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Weekend Read: A Tale of Two Lies – Part II: The Two-State Solution thumbnail

Weekend Read: A Tale of Two Lies – Part II: The Two-State Solution

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By Marvin A. Treiger

Editors’ Note: We suggest also reading Part 1 of A Tale of Two Lies – Jewish Settler Colonialism published two weeks ago in The Prickly Pear. The author’s accurate history of the state of Israel and the well documented distortions presented to the world since 1948 are particularly relevant to the existential threat Israel is currently faced with since October 7th. Note the excellent conclusion of Part II concerning the House Freedom Caucus Resolution. Its substance deals directly with the Tale of Two Lies and hopefully will be a path forward for America’s critical support of Israel within one year.

The UN Partition of 1947 was established on the principle that both the Arabs and Jews had legitimate claims to the land. It was the first significant effort to resolve the growing conflict between the combined Arab states, the local Arab population and the growing and prosperous Jewish community within the region of the former British Mandate.

The Partition must be understood as the first two state solution. The Jewish population was ecstatic for one reason and one reason only. It meant sovereignty. The truncated borders, shrunken again and again by international commissions, meant the area was barely defensible and a great part of it was the Negev desert.

It was a miracle that it happened at all. Major credit must go to President Harry Truman. He pressed for its nationhood and recognized Israel eleven minutes after Independence was declared on May 14, 1948.

Truman turned out to be the most prominent “Christian Zionist” of his day. He would soon be followed by others including a massive, evangelical movement of Christian Zionists,,in which John Hagee of Texas, and many others friendly to the new Jewish state played a part. This included, not surprisingly nearly the whole of the influential Jewish community.

America had been founded by Puritans and other Christians seeking freedom from religious persecution in the New World,  Their faith often included a strain of Judeophilia or philosemitism. This was in sharp contrast to the more prevalent antisemitism in Europe.

Our founding Documents acknowledged this, as President Washington underscored when he said may all “…sit in safety under the same fig tree..” in his letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Rhode Island in 1790. The Judeo-Christian foundation of the values of the Republic were reflected during the period leading up to the Civil War when more than half of all recorded Christian sermons were based upon the Old Testament.

Destiny, or Providence as some might say, placed Truman, the right man in the right place at the right moment as a Jewish state was reborn once again going back from the time of the occupation of the “promised land” to the First and Second Temples and from a series of unsuccessful revolts against Rome, they always sought a state of their own in the region.

The First Two-State Solution

The day following the UN declaration, the five Arab armies of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Trans-Jordan and Lebanon declared war on Israel. Sovereignty in any form for the Jews was considered by the Arabs to be a grievous injustice. It was an impermissible insult and assault on Islam.

The Arab Higher Committee issued a statement that “All of Palestine must be Arab”. Jamal al Husseini vowed that “the blood will flow like rivers in the Middle East.” And indeed it did and continues to this day.

The Nakba – the Emotional Lie

This brief summary of the failure of the first two state solution in modern times would not be complete without a discussion of the Nakba, or “Catastrophe”. The Nakba refers to the alleged “ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the region” – that is, from the Jewish territory. 

Despite the UN partition deliberately establishing Israel in a Jewish majority area, Arabs claimed the opposite was true. Despite Israeli efforts to dissuade Arabs from leaving their zone, the Arab Higher Committee spread information that the Jews would commit genocide upon those Arabs who remained and urged them to leave. The “taquiyya,” also know as the “prudential,” or “Noble Lie” is permitted towards infidels in Islam. Shamelessly, this falsehood was visited upon their own Arab brethren.

The fellaheen were promised their homes would be returned to them upon the inevitable Arab victory.Many Muslim Arabs remained and though the Arab armies war failed, Muslim Arabs today constitute 21% of the Israeli citizenry.

Deir Yassin

Military clashes were picking up during the period prior to partition. One of these was an attack by Israeli militias on Deir Yassin, an Arab village on the road between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It was located on high ground and considered to be a strategic location. It must be said that, during any war, atrocities happen and those committing them have a vested interest in denying them as do those who embellish them. The fighting there was indeed fierce.

This event remains a rallying cry for Jihadis to this very day. It is often fused with the larger narrative of Nakba because of its emotional potency. Emotions are used to effectively seal ideological positions which otherwise may retain an abstract quality.

There is no shortage of accounts of the “Deir Yassin” incident since it played an important part in the 1948 war. The most credible “worst” account published at the time by the Arab Higher Committee held that 254 arabs had been massacred out of a town 750 people. The numbers have since been embellished.

Let us assume for the moment that the initial account is true. And, let’s remember that the event follows 2 1/2 decades of pogroms mobilized by the Grand Mufti and others during the British Mandate. The total number of murdered innocent Jews would have exceeded those of the Muslim Arabs in this battle.

Searching the Internet, I could not find accounts of the ‘massacre’ that were properly documented from the Arab side. I did uncover what appears to be a thoroughly researched and documented account of the accusation from an Israeli scholar who interviewed villagers and soldiers, collected documents, testimonials and compared them. Here is the summary of the book on the subject:

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/deir-yassin-the-end-of-a-myth/

Eliezer Tauber, the author, concludes that there was no massacre at all. None. Zip. Many of the accounts of Jews and Arabs present in the village at the time match in fine details and provide a consistent  account of a very ordinary, if hard-fought military battle, in which the Israelis prevailed.

The local Arabs that fled with the soon to be defeated armies were granted no home in nearby Arab countries. They were confined for the most part to displaced persons camps administered by the UN in one form or another. They abided there as second class citizens rather than being absorbed into the nations where they dwelled.

The Arabs did not want them and refused to absorb them as citizens. Instead, they suffered as pawns in the intransigent effort to eliminate Israel. This is the origin for the so-called Right of Return. In my view, this rejection of their own people was the true Nakba, the true Catastrophe. 

Politically, this event is used by the radical left here and in Europe to paint the Zionist project as fascistic. Though false in every respect, the charge does serve the purpose of giving fence-sitters a chance to adopt the view of ‘a plague on both your houses,’ and fuels the rage of the committed Jihadis.

In dramatic contrast to Arab refusal to integrate displaced Arabs in the aftermath of Israel’s victory in its War of Independence, 140,000 Holocaust survivors migrated to Israel. In addition, the perpetual persecutions and periodic pogroms that characterized Jewish life in countries like Yemen and Aden, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, had reached an intolerable state after Israel’s victory. Between 1949 and 1952, some 650,000 more Jews migrated to the newly independent state from those countries.

The contrast couldn’t be starker. Arab nations refused to accept Palestinians while Israel welcomed a suffering people. After WW II, mass population transfers in the millions settled disputes all over the globe. In the middle east no such humanitarian outcomes were permitted.

The One-State Solution Period

The Muslim Arabs nations never had anything else in mind for the region than a ‘one-state solution’. This arose during a period when the newly minted Arab nationalism fused with the ancient ideal of the islamic Ummah. This view emerged from various local developments such as Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.

Muslim absolutism has never been universal to the faith but was and remains strongest within the Arab world. Nevertheless, distant Muslim nations were prepared to support their Arab brethren at the UN and other forums. The singular goal was to isolate and eventually eliminate the Jewish state. The battle raged diplomatically for twenty years.

The Six Days War

The ‘Six Days War’ or what is known as ‘War of 1967’ changed the face of the Middle East. During October of 1967, Nasser increased tensions by mobilizing tens of thousands of troops in the Sinai. He also deployed air force squadrons to the region.

Reconnaissance flights over Israel’s Dimona Nuclear Reactor  by the Egyptiian was the last straw and the compelling signal that Israel better act first. Israel quickly prevailed once more against a foe that believed itself to be far stronger.

The territory added to Israel following its decisive victory included the whole of the Sinai, Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) to the Jordan River, the Golan Heights and most of Jerusalem. These new borders made defense much easier.

The Yom Kippur War of 1973

Yom Kipper is the holiest day on the Jewish Calendar. It is the day during which every believing Jew makes accounts with his Creator. It is a day of fasting and prayer. Israel had slipped into a degree of complacency due to overconfidence and arrogance. On October 5, in the early morning hours three million Jews  were awakened with the shock of the sounds of war and the warning blasts of sirens.

Egyptian and Syrian armies, tank battalions and air-forces launched a strategic surprise attack on two fronts and successfully crossed into the Sinai in the south and onto the Golan Heights in the northeast. The outlook was grim for Israel but they quickly scrambled in part because everyone was available and not at work due to the holiday.

Israel rallied mightily in the face of brave and determined Arab fighters. The Israeli Air force had at 46-1 victory ratio in dogfights which exceed the 9-1 ration in the 1967 War. The IDF lost 106 planes due to anti-aircraft fire. The Golan heights were recovered in fierce tank warfare and Israel was soon positioned to march on the Syrian capital and even on Cairo.

At this juncture, the superpowers jumped in forcing a truce. Yet, despite the military victory, the mood of the Israelis was newly fearful with much grieving as they recognized anew they were facing an existential threat that would not go away.

The Egyptians counter-intuitively were buoyant, and felt their pride has been restored after the outright 1967 defeat. Their armed forces fought more gallantly and were able to hold their heads up high despite the reality of mediocre performance and heavy losses.

Ironically, this newly felt Egyptian pride paradoxically opened a path to peace with Israel. In Egypt it was believed that they were equals with Israel. In 1978, the Camp David Accords were signed in Washington DC by Sadat and Begin and were presided over by President Jimmy Carter. The peace agreement has lasted to this day.

Oslo Accords of 1993

The issue of s two state solution once again took center stage.with the Oslo Accords. This effort continued through several U.S. Administrations always ending in failure. This history deserves its own summary which I will summarize in Part 3 and relates directly to Biden’s plans.

The Biden Administration is currently calling for a Palestinian state with sovereignty. Recently, Biden’s people  met with several parties without including Israel which will render the call stillborn. Nevertheless, the battle over who will rule in Gaza is beginning to unfold.

House Freedom Caucus Resolution

Trump, in contrast, was the first President not to offer a two-state solution. Instead he launched the Abraham Accords, ratified Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and acknowledged Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel.

On March 4, 2024, under the chairmanship of Bob Good of Virginia, the House Freedom Caucus put forth a resolution asserting three principles:

(1) Condemning all calls for a ceasefire. (Israel must decide its own fate.)

(2) Opposing a two-state solution as no recipe for peace.

(3) Ending funding for UNRWA. (Many UNRWA operatives have joint membership in Hamas and funnel monies and goods to Hamas).

The Caucus is also calling for a stand-alone bill. There would be more support for Israel if funding for Ukraine or for a phony border bill were not fused into one Bill as it is now. A stand-alone Bill is likely to carry the House and the Senate. The Freedom Caucus, mindful of trillions in debt, seeks a cut in IRS spending and a defunding of UNRWA. to finance their call for Israeli military aid.

Politicians must consider the national interest. The Freedom Caucus knows who our real friends and allies are and how crucial the alliance with Israel is and has been to maintain our influence in this crucial region of the world. They know these two democracies stand together against a region of dictatorships.

Yet the Caucus represents a deeper emotional and spiritual commitment to Israel going back to our Founding. Christian Zionism, remains a part of our national ethos and motivates a majority of the Caucus. They may not wear it on their sleeves but it is in their hearts.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

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Biden’s New Zero Agenda Spells Trouble Down On The Farm And Supermarket

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By Bonner Cohen

Feeling the heat from farmers dumping manure in front of government buildings across the Continent, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is pumping the brakes on a pillar of the European Union’s Net-Zero climate policy and withdrawing an EU-wide bill that would force farmers to reduce the use of chemical pesticides by 50% by 2030.

With elections to the European Parliament in Brussels set for later this year, backing away from one of Net-Zero’s most radical measures is an act of political realism. Europe is being rocked by soaring energy and food prices, much of it brought on by the political class’s obsession with lowering greenhouse gas emissions from all sources, including agriculture. With peasants running amok, the “climate crisis” will just have to wait.

Blissfully oblivious to what’s happening across the pond, the Biden administration is doubling down on its own version of Net-Zero emissions, and the American public may be in for some nasty surprises. And a new report by the Columbus, Ohio-based Buckeye Institute shows just how nasty those surprises will be. The report “Net-Zero Climate-Control Policies Will Fail the Farm”, was authored by Trevor W. Lewis and M. Ankith Reddy.

The problems start with provisions in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and Biden administration regulations favoring EVs over traditionally-powered vehicles in the agricultural sector, the report says.

Forced Transition to EVs

“First, EVs are significantly less reliable and more expensive to purchase repair, power, and maintain than combustion engine vehicles, making them impractical and ill-suited to working farms. Farm equipment must be durable and capable of operating in all weather conditions,” the Buckeye report points out. “Tractors and farm equipment must operate in off-road environments on poorly paved roads under constant risk of collisions that can permanently damage an electric vehicle’s sensitive parts, rendering it useless.”

“EV batteries drain faster in extreme cold and heat, and EVs lose range in the rain due to lower resistance between the car and the road and power diversion to the windshield wipers and headlights…Replacing an electric vehicle battery typically costs from $5,000 – $15,000, and general EV repairs require more labor and cost 25% more than standard vehicles,” the report adds.

“These reliability and financial concerns make EVs unattractive as farm equipment and make running a successful farm more expensive, but Biden administration rules will all but force farmers to buy or subsidize them anyway,” Lewis and Reddy note.

Reliance on Intermittent Energy

“Second, a nationwide transition to electric energy depends entirely on intermittent, unreliable zero-emission sources of electric power, namely wind and solar. Wind and solar do not produce power consistently throughout the day, and the variation in renewable power makes it harder for operators to schedule power demand, which makes energy prices volatile and ultimately more expensive,” the report says.

Easing the strains intermittent power puts on an already shaky electric grid requires bringing more natural gas power plants online, lest the country face more blackouts and brownouts. But in July 2023, the report notes, the White House Council on Environmental Quality increased the bureaucratic red tape on the approval of new natural gas projects.

“The Biden administration’s efforts to force farmers to adopt electric equipment ill-suited to farming and to replace natural gas generators with unreliable renewable energy sources is a recipe for unsustainable farming. Unfortunately, Washington’s central planners seem oblivious to that stubborn fact and remain committed to making Europe’s mistakes,” Buckeye points out.

Tracking Emissions from Farm to Table

American farmers also find themselves in the bull’s eye of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) reporting requirements proposed by the Biden White House. In March 2022, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) proposed a mandatory ESG disclosure rule that would apply to every publicly traded company. “The rule would mandate costly ESG emissions reporting for a firm’s entire supply chain, requiring large publicly traded food processing companies, grocery stores, and restaurant groups to track and report emissions from farm to table,” the report explains. “Large companies looking to reduce their overall emissions would stop purchasing food from farms with high emission rates, once again applying financial costs and pressures to the American farmer.”

“With its heavy use of artificial fertilizers and fossil fuels, livestock methane emissions, weed and bug sprays, and genetically modified crops, agriculture has been targeted by ESG fiduciaries,” Lewis and Reddy note. And now, farmer Brown is being targeted by the Biden SEC.

The EU calls one of its Net-Zero agriculture programs “Farm to Fork.” But Europe’s farmers are in open revolt, and the powers that be in Brussels have taken notice. And the SEC’s power grab may also be in for some rough sledding. The Biden plan faces a stiff court challenge, with plaintiffs arguing that the SEC – under the “major questions doctrine” adopted by the current Supreme Court – lacks congressional authority to regulate an industry’s, including agriculture, entire supply chain.

*****

This article was published by CFACT, Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

How Did American Capitalism Mutate Into American Corporatism? thumbnail

How Did American Capitalism Mutate Into American Corporatism?

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By Jeffrey Tucker

In the 1990s and for years into our century, it was common to ridicule the government for being technologically backwards. We were all gaining access to fabulous things, including webs, apps, search tools, and social media. But governments at all levels were stuck in the past using IBM mainframes and large floppy disks. We had a great time poking fun at them.

I recall the days of thinking government would never catch up to the glories and might of the market itself. I wrote several books on it, full of techno-optimism.

The new tech sector had a libertarian ethos about it. They didn’t care about the government and its bureaucrats. They didn’t have lobbyists in Washington. They were the new technologies of freedom and didn’t care much about the old analogue world of command and control. They would usher in a new age of people power.

Here we sit a quarter-century later with documented evidence that the opposite happened. The private sector collects the data that the government buys and uses as a tool of control. What is shared and how many people see it is a matter of algorithms agreed upon by a combination of government agencies, university centers, various nonprofits, and the companies themselves. The whole thing has become an oppressive blob.

Every major company that once stayed far away from Washington now owns a similar giant palace in or around D.C., and they collect tens of billions in government revenue. Government has now become a major customer, if not the main customer, of the services provided by the large social media and tech companies. They are advertisers but also massive purchasers of the main product too.

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the biggest winners of government contracts, according to a report from Tussel. Amazon hosts the data of the National Security Agency with a $10 billion contract, and gets hundreds of millions from other governments. We do not know how much Google has received from the US government, but it is surely a substantial share of the $694 billion the federal government hands out in contracts.

Microsoft also has a large share of government contracts. In 2023, the US Department of Defense awarded the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle. The contract is worth up to $9 billion and provides the Department of Defense with cloud services. It’s just the beginning. The Pentagon is looking for a successor plan that will be bigger.

Actually, we don’t even know the full extent of this but it is gargantuan. Yes, these companies provide the regular consumer services but a main and even decisive customer is government itself. As a result, the old laughing stock line about backwards tech at government agencies is no more. Today government is a main purchaser of tech services and is a top driver of the AI boom too.

It’s one of the best-kept secrets in American public life, hardly talked about at all by mainstream media. Most people still think of tech companies as free-enterprise rebels. It’s not true.

The same situation of course exists for pharmaceutical companies. This relationship dates even further back in time and is even tighter to the point that there is no real distinction between the interests of the FDA/CDC and large pharmaceutical companies. They are one and the same.

In this framework, we might also tag the agricultural sector, which is dominated by cartels that have driven out family farms. It’s a government plan and massive subsidies that determine what is produced and in what quantity. It’s not because of consumers that your Coke is filled with a scary product called “high fructose corn syrup,” why your candy bar and danish have the same, and why there is corn in your gas tank. This is entirely the product of government agencies and budgets.

In free enterprise, the old rule is that the customer is always right. That’s a wonderful system sometimes called consumer sovereignty. Its advent in history, dating perhaps from the 16th century, represented a tremendous advance over the old guild system of feudalism and certainly a major step over ancient despotisms. It’s been the rallying cry of market-based economics ever since.

What happens, however, when government itself becomes a main and even dominant customer? The ethos of private enterprise is thereby changed. No longer primarily interested in serving the general public, enterprise turns its attention to serving its powerful masters in the halls of the state, gradually weaving close relationships and forming a ruling class that becomes a conspiracy against the public.

This used to go by the name “crony capitalism” which perhaps describes some of the problems on a small scale. This is another level of reality that needs an entirely different name. That name is corporatism, a coinage from the 1930s and a synonym for fascism back before that became a curse word due to wartime alliances. Corporatism is a specific thing, not capitalism and not socialism but a system of private property ownership with cartelized industry that primarily serves the state.

The old binaries of the public and private sector – widely assumed by every main ideological system –have become so blurred that they no longer make much sense. And yet we are ideologically and philosophically unprepared to deal with this new world with anything like intellectual insight. Not only that, it can be extremely difficult even to tell the good guys from the bad guys in the news stream. We hardly know anymore for whom to cheer or boo in the great struggles of our time.

That’s how mixed up everything has become. We’ve clearly traveled a long way from the 1990s!

Some might observe that this has been a problem far back in time. Starting with the Spanish-American War, we’ve seen a merger of public and private as involving the munitions industry.

This is true. Many Gilded Age fortunes were wholly legitimate and market-based enterprises but others were gathered from the nascent military-industrial complex that began to mature in the Great War and involved a vast range of industries from industry to transportation to communications.

Of course in 1913, we saw the advent of a particularly egregious public-private partnership with the Federal Reserve, in which private banks merged into a unified front and agreed to service US government debt obligations in exchange for bailout guarantees. This monetary corporatism continues to vex us to this day, as does the military industrial complex.

How is it different from the past? It’s different in degree and reach. The corporatist machine now manages the main products and services in our civilian life including the entire way we get information, how we work, how we bank, how we contact friends, and how we buy. It is the manager of the whole of our lives in every respect, and has become the driving force of product innovation and design. It has become a tool for surveillance in the most intimate aspects of our lives, including financial information and inclusive of listening devices we’ve willingly installed in our own homes.

In other words, this is no longer just about private companies providing the bullets and bombs for both sides in a foreign war and obtaining the rebuilding contracts after. The military-industrial complex has come home, expanded to everything, and invaded every aspect of our lives. 

It has become a main curator and censor of our news and social media presence and postings. It is in a position to say which companies and products succeed and which ones fail. It can kill apps in a flash if the well-placed person does not like what it is doing. It can order other apps to add or subtract to a blacklist based on political opinions. It can tell even the smallest company to comply or face death by lawfare. It can seize on any individual and make him a public enemy based entirely on an opinion or action that runs contrary to regime priorities.

In short, this corporatism – in all its iterations including the regulatory state and the patent war chest that maintains and enforces monopoly – is the core source of all the current despotism. 

It obtained its first full trial run with the lockdowns of 2020, when tech companies and media joined in the ear-splitting propaganda campaigns to shelter in place, cancel holidays, and not visit grandma in the hospital and nursing home. It cheered as millions of small businesses were destroyed and big-box stores thrived as distributors of approved products, while vast swaths of the workforce were called nonessential and put on welfare.

This was the corporatist state at work, with a large corporate sector wholly acquiescent to regime priority and a government fully dedicated to rewarding its industrial partners in every sector that went along with the political priority at the moment. The trigger for the construction of the vast machinery that rules our lives was far back in time and always begins the same way: with a seemingly inauspicious government contract.

How well I recall those days in the 1990s when public schools first started to buy computers from Microsoft. Did alarm bells go off? Not for me. I had a typical attitude of any pro-business libertarian: whatever business wants to do, it should do. Surely it is up to the enterprise to sell to all willing buyers, even if that includes governments. In any case, how in the world would one prevent this? Government contracting with private business has been the norm from time immemorial. No harm done.

And yet it turns out that vast harm was done. This was just the beginning of what became one of the world’s largest industries, far more powerful and decisive over industrial organization than old-fashioned producer-to-consumer markets. Adam Smith’s “butcher, baker, and brewery” have been crowded out by the very business conspiracies against which he gravely warned. These gigantic for-profit and public trading corporations became the operational foundation of the surveillance-driven corporatist complex.

We are nowhere near coming to terms with the implications of this. It goes way beyond and fully transcends the old debates between capitalism and socialism. Indeed that is not what this is about. The focus on that might be theoretically interesting but it has little or no relevance to the current reality in which public and private have fully merged and intruded into every aspect of our lives, and with fully predictable results: economic decline for the many and riches for the few.

This is also why neither the left nor the right, nor Democrats or Republicans, nor capitalists or socialists, seem to be speaking clearly to the moment in which we live. The dominating force on both the national and global scene today is techno-corporatism that intrudes itself into our food, our medicine, our media, our information flows, our homes, and all the way down to the hundreds of surveillance tools that we carry around in our pockets.

I truly wish these companies were genuinely private, but they are not. They are de facto state actors. More precisely, they all work hand-in-glove and which is the hand and which is the glove is no longer clear. 

Coming to terms with this intellectually is the major challenge of our times. Dealing with it juridically and politically seems like a much more daunting task, to say the least. The problem is complicated by the drive to purge serious dissent at all levels of society. How did American capitalism become American corporatism? A little at a time and then all at once.

*****

This article was published by the Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

‘Economic Disaster’: Biden’s Budget Dreams Would Add Even More Fuel To Sky-High Inflation, Experts Say thumbnail

‘Economic Disaster’: Biden’s Budget Dreams Would Add Even More Fuel To Sky-High Inflation, Experts Say

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By Will Kessler

President Joe Biden recently released his budget proposal for fiscal year 2025, which, if approved, could add even more fuel to sky-high inflation, according to federal government budget experts who spoke to the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The president’s proposal lays out a slew of new targeted spending measures and tax increases that, in total, would add at least $14.8 trillion to the already massive national debt by the end of Biden’s presumptive second term. Many provisions in the budget would contribute to inflationary runaway deficit spending while not addressing the real problems causing unaffordability and rising prices, experts told the DCNF. (RELATED: Iconic Discount Merchandise Brand To Shutter Around 1,000 Stores As Harsh Economic Factors Weigh On Sales)

“Between the new anti-growth taxes and large deficits, you get a reduction in the real supply of goods and services and more financial assets floating around — more dollars chasing fewer goods and services — lots of inflation going forward, and the Fed will likely respond by waffling between printing money like crazy to cover some of the deficits — jacking up inflation even higher — and tightening the money supply, sending interest rates to the moon and only slightly bringing down inflation,” Richard Stern, director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget at the Heritage Foundation, told the DCNF.

Inflation currently sits at a rate of 3.2% year-over-year as of February and has risen 18.5% since Biden first came to office in January 2021. Biden has made huge stimulus packages part of his economic agenda, passing the American Rescue Plan in March 2021, which approved $1.9 trillion in new spending, and the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, which authorized another $750 billion.

“Biden’s budget is anticipating that the debt will go from $260k per household to $370k per household,” Stern told the DCNF. “That will continue to send interest rates way higher … which both pushes housing out of reach for most people but also will starve business growth.”

In response to high inflation, the Federal Reserve has set its federal funds rate to a range of 5.25% and 5.50%, putting pressure on interest rates across the economy as credit becomes more costly. Home prices are particularly exposed to credit cost increases as mortgage rates track closely with the price of Treasury bills, which are valued based on future inflation and interest rate expectations.

“The deficit will drive inflation higher because it means that the government will produce more financial assets (bonds) with no corresponding increase in real productive capacity,” Stern told the DCNF.

The budget calls for $258 billion to be approved for use in building or preserving two million housing units, specifically targeting lower- and middle-income households. The real limiting factor to housing availability in terms of units is local regulations, like those in California, that have stalled construction, meaning more federal funding would not solve the issue but instead add fuel to inflation.

“It’s very hard to build an apartment building because of all the government zoning and regulatory rules,” Chris Edwards, the Kilts Family Chair in Fiscal Studies at the Cato Institute, told the DCNF. “It’s not the federal government’s job to try to solve it with subsidies…it’s really a waste of federal taxpayer money because it’s something that state and local governments should be solving by themselves through deregulation.”

A Biden administration official told the DCNF that the budget would decrease the national deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade through increasing taxes and cutting wasteful spending, parroting language in the proposal. Edwards points out that the calculations used for the budget employ tricks that make it appear as if the deficit is declining over time, such as projecting nondefense discretionary spending to the same level each year despite GDP and inflation rising over time, instead of what typically occurs when spending tracks with these gains, resulting in $2.5 trillion more in deficit spending by 2034.

“He uses phony accounting and his budget in various ways to pretend that he reduces the deficit compared to baseline,” Edwards told the DCNF. “It’s extraordinary that the government has run up $3 trillion in debt, and a president proposes a budget to add another $17 trillion in debt over the next decade. It’s extraordinarily irresponsible.”

The U.S. national debt has already ballooned to nearly $34.5 trillion under Biden, up from around $27.8 trillion when he first took office in January 2021, according to the Treasury Department. In just February, the national debt increased by $296 billion, more than the total amount the government took in during the month at $271 billion.

“Additionally, his tax plans would make our tax system one of the least competitive for luring investment here and will pass right through the wealthy and big corps and end up being felt as lower wages, higher consumer prices, fewer startups — so a more concentrated market with less growth and opportunity,” Stern told the DCNF.

The plan also calls for increasing taxes on those with incomes over $400,000 a year and certain business owners to fund Medicare, while also raising taxes on “the highest-income Americans” to pay for Social Security. Biden also wants to raise tax rates for large corporations, partially removing tax cuts given during the Trump administration, and end “tax breaks” in a number of different areas, such as capital gains and executive compensation.

Gross domestic product (GDP) has come in above trend in the last two quarters, increasing 4.9% in the third quarter and 3.2% in the fourth quarter of 2023, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Despite the economic gains, the federal government’s debt grew more than $800 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023, more than twice GDP growth.

“His budget is, in my opinion, a wholly unserious recipe for long-term economic disaster,” Stern told the DCNF.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Caller News Foundation and is reproduced by permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Noble Dreaming thumbnail

Noble Dreaming

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By Juliana Geran Pilon

In “Time for Two States,” Rachel Lu observes that after the shocking events of October 7, “the sequence of events was somewhat predictable. Israel retaliated. It was clear they would win.” Well, maybe not win, exactly. But definitely, “Israel’s war with Hamas is reaching its final stages.” If only it were. According to the Wall Street Journal, “Israelis have made only partial progress in finding and destroying Hamas’s vast tunnel network [i.e., 350 miles of tunnels under an area 30 miles by 8 miles].” It is exceptionally treacherous. No one can reliably anticipate the potential damage, reports the Journal.

Still, Ms. Lu’s optimism is undaunted. She concludes that “however the end game plays out, the IDF should soon have its victory.” I sincerely pray that she may be right. One must hope that Hamas’s Gaza leader, Yahya Sinwar, is wrong to believe that it is Hamas who is actually winning despite the major losses it has clearly suffered. After all, all it has to do, says Sinwar, is “declare a historic victory by outlasting Israel’s firepower and claim the leadership of the Palestinian national cause.”

It is in that context that one must evaluate Ms. Lu’s view that “there is no reasonable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem that does not involve two sovereign states.” Fair enough. But the question is: when and in what circumstances? Definitely not now, argues Israeli historian Gadi Taub. In a powerful article published February 12, 2024, in Tablet Magazine, Taub writes that “compelling as it is as a debating strategy, or a form of self-therapy, [the two-state formula] is no solution at all … a noble dream … but just that—a dream.” A lifelong liberal, he had shared that dream with many other Israelis until October 7, which was the nation’s wake-up call, a living nightmare for all but a negligible number of the mislabeled “woke.”

Palestinian self-rule is undoubtedly preferable to most alternatives. But as the former head of the East Jerusalem mission of the Quartet (consisting of the US, EU, UK, and Russia) Envoy Robert Danin told reporters on March 1, 2024:

[Palestinians] don’t want the Israelis there, but they don’t want the Palestinian Authority either; the PA doesn’t care about Gaza. They don’t want Hamas either. They want to have a voice for themselves.

Will that voice be allowed to be heard? For unless and until it does, any two-state solution is predicated on premises that are at best dubious and at worst delusional.

Recent surveys indicate that a majority of Palestinians support Hamas and approve of the October 7 massacres. These include the populations under the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) jurisdiction, which they detest as corrupt and weak. Hence, the Biden administration’s plan to put the PA in charge of Gaza is utterly unrealistic, argues Taub. “There is no such thing as a ‘revitalized’ Palestinian Authority, because there is no one who wants to ‘revitalize’ it in such a way as to make it conform to Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s sales pitch.” Under the circumstances, Israelis “believe that turning Judea and Samaria into another Hamastan to satisfy those who see the massacre as an inspiration and its perpetrators as role models would be suicidal. Who in their right mind would inflict the ensuing bloodshed on their partners, children, friends, and parents?” For Ms. Lu, therefore, to argue that the only way to peace “probably will not be possible without a good-faith commitment on Israel’s part to work towards a two-state solution,” must be seen in the proper context.

Israel is currently fighting not only for its own survival but also for ours.

Since the 1917 Balfour Declaration proclaimed that the British government “view with favor the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in their homeland,” the Jews have hoped that their two-thousand-year-old exile would finally end. They sought to live alongside their neighbors as best they could. Yet in all that time, writes Taub, “there never was a Palestinian leadership ready to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish nation-state. That is a constant fact of life in the conflict.” Israel never denied the Palestinians a right to govern themselves. By contrast, “the Arab side has rejected any and all partition plans starting with the Peel Commission in 1937, the United Nations partition resolution of 1947, and all the way through the various American mediation plans and Israeli offers, and those offered by Israeli leaders.” Israel’s “land-for-peace” strategy, whereby it relinquished territory it had acquired after pushing back Arab military attacks in exchange for accepting its right to exist, was an utter failure.

Ms. Lu concludes her article by reminding her readers that “we should bear in mind that citizenship, and the basic rights and freedoms that go with it, really aren’t the kind of thing that a person should have to earn.” A commendable ideal, without a doubt. One shouldn’t have to earn rights that America’s founders, invoking the key commandment of Genesis, declared self-evident. But since when have basic rights and freedoms not been earned at the steep price of its defenders’ lives? Since when has freedom, that most fragile of human blessings, not had to be earned again and again?

Palestinians have yet to be given a chance to enjoy those rights by those who use them as cannon fodder, expropriate their food and medicine, and reduce them to misery. Fellow Muslims on Iran’s payroll have shown them far less empathy than do Jewish medical personnel who save Palestinian lives in Israeli hospitals, and soldiers who seek to keep Palestinian civilian casualties at a minimum while fighting to free innocent Jewish hostages, including women, little children, and grandparents, who are severely maltreated in captivity.

Basic rights and freedoms must never be taken for granted. When lost, recovering them is hardly guaranteed. Americans would do well to remember that, because whether we realize it or not, we too are in the line of fire. Iran’s leadership considers Israel merely the Little Satan; Big Satan is none other than America. The growing alliance of this barbaric Islamist regime with Russia, China, and North Korea, all of which deny their own populations the most basic rights, does not bode well. Israel is currently fighting not only for its own survival but also for ours.

*****

This article was published by Law & Liberty, and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

New Book Admits Fani Willis’ Get-Trump Investigation Began With Illegal Recording thumbnail

New Book Admits Fani Willis’ Get-Trump Investigation Began With Illegal Recording

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By Mollie Hemingway

With Fani Willis repeatedly saying the entire investigation into Republicans was the result of an illegally recorded phone call, defendants might pursue legal recourse.

Democrat Fani Willis’ legal troubles extend beyond recent revelations that she deceptively hired her otherwise under-qualified, secret, married lover to run the political prosecution of former President Donald Trump and other Republicans in Georgia. A new book from Mike Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman admits that a widely misunderstood phone call, on which Willis’ political prosecution rests, was illegally recorded. That means the entire prosecution could crumble with defendants having a new avenue to challenge Democrat lawfare.

Find Me the Votes: A Hard-Charging Georgia Prosecutor, a Rogue President, and the Plot to Steal an American Election is a fawning political biography of Willis. For context on the bias of the authors, Isikoff was an original Russia-collusion hoaxer, and his articles to that end were used to secure warrants for the FBI to spy on innocent Republican presidential campaign advisers such as Carter Page.

For years, the media and other Democrats have held up Willis as a brilliant and credible prosecutor of Republicans. The new book suffers from poor timing, with Willis and her lover accused of perjury, subornation of perjury, bribery, and kickbacks related to the prosecution. Willis could be removed from the prosecution as early as this week.

Willis’ Radical Roots

Nevertheless, the book shares interesting details about Willis’ father, John C. Floyd, and his radical past. Described as a “onetime radical activist” who considered the police to be the “enemy” and an “occupying army,” Floyd founded the Black Panther Political Party of Los Angeles and said of it, “Our political philosophy is black nationalism.” He took former Communist Party vice presidential nominee Angela Davis as a lover and lived with her prior to her being placed on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for purchasing the gun used to murder a Marin County, California judge.

Willis, who was raised by her father, worked for Beverly Hills attorney Howard Schmuckler before he was disbarred and also before he was imprisoned for running a fraudulent mortgage rescue company. She worked for another lawyer in Atlanta who was disbarred for tipping off a drug dealer to an impending DEA raid. At that firm, she represented a crack dealer who “turned out to be the male stripper at her bachelorette party” and worked with Keisha Lance Bottoms, a former Atlanta mayor and now a top domestic policy adviser to President Joe Biden.

Isikoff provides these details to help readers “understand how Willis became the kind of law-and-order DA who would unflinchingly take on Donald Trump.”

Willis ran on pledges to restore professionalism and sexual ethics to the Fulton County district attorney’s office and to begin to deal with a backlog of 11,000 unindicted homicides, assaults, shootings, and other crimes. Instead, the night before her official first day, word leaked of a recent phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The phone call had been dishonestly portrayed by Trump opponents, and Willis hoped that Raffensperger had been in Fulton County for the call, so she could prosecute Trump based on that false understanding of the call.

When she showed up for her first day of work, according to the book, “‘I just remember sitting down and looking at the TV and thinking’ maybe he was in Fulton County, she recalled. Her county.”

A Political Activist in Georgia’s Election Office

However, the person who recorded the phone call wasn’t in Fulton County or even in Georgia. That’s a problem. Jordan Fuchs, a political activist who serves as Raffensperger’s chief of staff, was in Florida, where it is illegal to record a call without all parties to the call consenting to the recording. She neither asked for nor received consent to record.

Fuchs was one of the main sources for Isikoff and Klaidman’s book, they admit in their acknowledgments. While they reward her with effusive praise throughout, she comes off very poorly. For example, she offers a frankly unhinged conspiracy theory that President Trump was planning to lose the 2020 election as early as May of 2020 and was therefore floating a plan with Washington Post reporters to win the election in Georgia through the legislature. She describes how she “invented a new policy” to block public view of an election audit. She indicates such little knowledge of election laws and processes that she seems to think Georgia requires voters to use Social Security numbers to vote.

Fuchs is instead described as a “street-smart deputy” of Raffensperger who is obsessed with personal slights, political payback, and her hatred of Trump, his supporters, and his team. Her previous dabbling in the occult is contextualized, along with her shocking lack of knowledge of election law and processes — which brings us to the illegally taped phone call.

Illegal Phone Call Recording

“Unlike many of her fellow Republican consultants with whom she had worked, Fuchs had a friendly working relationship with members of the Fourth Estate,” Isikoff and Klaidman write before describing Fuchs’ regular leaks to The Washington Post, which conservatives despise for its left-wing propaganda, hoaxes such as the Russia-collusion lie, and smears of conservatives such as Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Fuchs first gave The Washington Post fabricated quotes they later had to retract about a phone call President Trump had with someone in the elections office. Though Fuchs was not busted for her lie until March 2021, months after the fabricated quotes were used to impeach President Trump, the authors of the book say the embarrassment of being found out taught her the importance of recording phone calls such as the early January 2021 phone call that forms the basis of Willis’ investigation. They do not explain how this lesson worked in terms of the space-time continuum.

In any case, Fuchs recorded a phone call between Trump, Raffensperger, and their associates. Fuchs ended the call by saying they should get off the phone and work to “preserve the relationship” between the two offices. Instead, she immediately leaked the phone call to The Washington Post, which published it hours later.

Covering up the Crime

This is where the authors of the book admit that the very recording of the call was a crime:

Fuchs has never talked publicly about her taping of the phone call; she learned, after the fact, that Florida where she was at the time is one of fifteen states that requires two-party consent for the taping of phone calls. A lawyer for Raffensperger’s office asked the January 6 committee not to call her as a witness for reasons the committee’s lawyers assumed were due to her potential legal exposure. The committee agreed. But when she was called before a Fulton County special grand jury convened by Fani Willis, she was granted immunity and confirmed the taping, according to three sources with direct knowledge of her testimony.

Republicans had long suspected Fuchs was the source of the audiotaped call and, further, that she had illegally recorded it in Florida. Fuchs had noted in a Facebook post that she was in Florida visiting family around the time of the call. The book describes the close working relationship and “secret collaboration” of the Liz Cheney-led Jan. 6 committee and Fani Willis’ prosecutorial team. Fuchs should have been a major part of the televised show trial Cheney put on, further convincing Republicans that Fuchs had illegally taped the call and Cheney was helping cover that up. (Incidentally, the book portrays Cheney as the real leader of the Jan. 6 committee, that she viewed it as a “platform for her to resuscitate her political career” and would “provide a springboard for a Cheney presidential run.”)

The authors go on to say Fuchs would attempt to escape prosecution for the call if a Florida official brought charges by claiming she taped and immediately leaked the call to The Washington Post for “law enforcement purposes.” The authors somewhat hilariously describe this claim as an “effective defense.”

Fruit of the Poisonous Tree

The problem for Fani Willis’ political prosecution is that the book convincingly shows the entire prosecution rests on a piece of evidence that everyone now knows was illegally obtained — never mind that the evidence has also been completely misinterpreted.

“And Fuchs did what was arguably the single gutsiest and most consequential act of the entire post-election battle,” the authors write. “Without telling Raffensperger or Meadows, she taped the call.”

“It was all the evidence Fani Willis needed to get started,” they write of the leaked recording, adding, “The recording was the single piece of damning evidence that had launched the investigation.”

With this evidence provided in the hagiography of Willis, those persecuted by her political prosecution could argue the entire investigation is corrupted by the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine.

“Fruit of the poisonous trees is a doctrine that extends the exclusionary rule to make evidence inadmissible in court if it was derived from evidence that was illegally obtained,” according to Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute. “As the metaphor suggests, if the evidential ‘tree’ is tainted, so is its ‘fruit.’ The doctrine was established in 1920 by the decision in Silverthorne Lumber Co. v. United States, and the phrase ‘fruit of the poisonous tree’ was coined by Justice Frankfurter in his 1939 opinion in Nardone v. United States. The rule typically bars even testimonial evidence resulting from excludable evidence, such as a confession.”

With Fani Willis repeatedly saying the entire investigation into Republicans was the result of a phone call that was illegally recorded, defendants might pursue legal recourse. It’s the latest challenge for Willis, even if the political ally judge reviewing whether she can continue prosecuting Georgia Republicans rules in her favor.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Media Research Center Finds Google Engaged In Election Interference

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By Neland Nobel

New research from the Media Research Center has found that tech giant Google is decidedly biased in its reporting and has engaged in election interference for years.

Election interference can occur directly or in this case indirectly, by denying or twisting information for voters thereby making it difficult to make an informed choice.

This has become all the more problematic in that tech giants receive huge contracts from the Federal Government. These companies become sensitive to the needs of clients, that is to say, the government. Crony capitalism has created almost an equivalent to state owned media.  In a sense, it may be more sinister because the appearance is that of a free market.

They also benefit by regulatory and anti-trust treatment.

The mainstream media has  engaged in biased selection of stories for years, and is now generally recognized as unreliable.  Only about a third of Americans believe mainstream broadcast and print media can be trusted to provide objective information and balanced opinions.  Mainstream media even ranks below Congress in terms of public esteem. It appears digital media giants may not be far behind in this decline in public confidence.

While such bias has long been suspected as it concerns digital media, this is one of the first full blown reports on the subject.  Below is from the Executive Summary from Media Research Center.

MRC researchers have found 41 times where Google interfered in elections over the last 16 years, and its impact has surged dramatically, making it evermore harmful to democracy. In every case, Google harmed the candidates–regardless of party–who threatened its left-wing candidate of choice.

From the mouths of Google executives, the tech giant let slip what was never meant to be made public: That Google uses its “great strength and resources and reach” to advance its leftist values.

Google’s outsized influence on information technology, the body politic and American elections became evident in 2008. After failing to prevent then-candidate for president Donald Trump from being inaugurated following the 2016 election, Google has since made clear to any discerning observer that it has been — and will continue — interfering in America’s elections. The most recent example was recorded after Google artificial intelligence Gemini (formerly Bard) refused to answer questions damaging to Biden.

MRC Free Speech America research shows that throughout a 16-year period (from 2008 through February 2024), carefully crafted studies and numerous reports have consistently demonstrated the tech behemoth’s election meddling.

Media Research also believes such meddling has tangibly shifted votes and therefore, affected election outcomes.  The study found that they estimate the number of votes “shifted” from 2.6 million in 2016 to at least 6 million in 2020, an increase of 140 percent during just that four year period. If true, this easily made the difference in closely contested elections.

Readers are encouraged to read the full report and draw their own conclusions.  Click here for access to the complete report.

Standard political theory sees a free press as a bulwark against governmental abuse.  However, when the Fourth Estate gets huge revenue from government, and when the Fourth Estate hires scores of former police and intelligence officials as employees, the supposed benefit of a “free press” is substantially diminished.

When government contracts are a substantial source of profits, do the social media companies serve the truth and the interests of the public, are do they serve their paymasters?

Conservatives and Libertarian, who generally are all for free enterprise, and also generally against antitrust laws, are philosophically challenged by the union of private companies with the government in a “semi fascist corporate state”.

Free market advocates typically say that a true monopoly cannot exist without government support.  We agree. What is the threshold in sources of profit to where “government support” of a tech company is achieved?

That said, the first step has been taken to establish the financial ties between social media companies and the government, and then active interference of these companies in our “democratic” process. Then Conservative and Libertarians have to grapple with Google, which clearly operates as a monopoly.

We at The Prickly Pear, have experienced first hand Google’s total capture of YouTube.  If we select a video that they do not approve of, it can’t be run.  Word Press, a universally used program for electronic publishing, only is compatible with YouTube.  If there is no choice, and no alternative for the public user of dominant programs, is that not a working definition of monopoly power?

Not surprisingly, Democrats who benefit from this cozy relationship, are the first to declare any suggestion our electoral system is rigged is a “threat to democracy.”  Their general contempt for large corporations suddenly disappears. For them it seems, it is best to destroy “democracy” in order to save it.

Meanwhile Conservatives and Libertarians tie themselves in knots over economic theory while the Left runs over everything they hold dear.

We are not suggesting this is an easy question to answer.  These companies are nominally privately held and we don’t want to turn the government loose on every corporation with dominant market share. Government agencies engage in election interference and corporations beholding to the government do the same things.  How does one draw distinctions and formulate laws and policies?.  If Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech is a guiding constitutional principle, what do we do when the suppression of our rights is farmed out to a private company?

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Supreme Court Allows Texas To Enforce New Border Law

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By Bethany Blankley

Texas law enforcement can begin charging illegal border crossers with a state crime after the U.S. Supreme Court issued a procedural ruling Tuesday.

The court issued two rulings in less than 24 hours this week, ultimately allowing Texas’ border bill, SB 4, to go into effect. The opinion sends the case back to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to hear arguments on the merits. 

On Monday, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued a third extended stay on the initial stay he ordered on March 4 to prevent the law from going into effect on March 5 until the court could rule on the matter. 

Alito first stayed a Fifth Circuit ruling that was issued for two consolidated lawsuits filed by the Department of Justice and El Paso County and nonprofit organizations, respectively. The two lawsuits were filed after Gov. Greg Abbott signed SB 4 into law, which makes illegal entry into Texas from a foreign nation a state crime.

In February, U.S. District Judge David Ezra ruled against the law. On March 5, the Fifth Circuit overturned Exra’s ruling and the consolidated cases were appealed to the Supreme Court. The high court was asked to block the law from going into effect as the Fifth Circuit heard the case on the merits. 

The Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, denied that request Tuesday, allowing the law to go into effect. 

In response to the ruling, Gov. Greg Abbott said, “In a 6-3 decision SCOTUS allows Texas to begin enforcing SB4 that allows the arrest of illegal immigrants. We still have to have hearings in the 5th circuit federal court of appeals. But this is clearly a positive development.”

The ruling states, “the applications to vacate presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court are denied. The orders heretofore entered by Justice Alito are vacated.” 

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, wrote a five-page ruling for the majority. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ketanji Jackson, wrote a 10-page dissent. Justice Elena Kagan wrote a two-page dissent. 

The ruling centers around the legality of issuing an administrative stay and does not address the case’s merits, punting the case back to the Fifth Circuit. 

If the Fifth Circuit had issued a stay pending appeal, Barrett wrote, the Supreme Court would have applied a four-factor test to rule on the case. But because it exercised its docket management authority to issue a temporary administrative stay and deferred the stay motion to a merits panel, she said, the court “has not yet rendered a decision on whether a stay pending appeal is warranted. That puts this case in a very unusual procedural posture.”

She then went on to describe the process of administrative stays and the hesitation to rule on a case due to procedural reasons. 

“So far as I know, this court has never reviewed the decision of a Court of Appeals to enter – or not enter – an administrative stay,” she said. “I would not get into the business. When entered, an administrative stay is supposed to be short-lived prelude to the main event: a ruling on the motion for a stay pending appeal. I think it unwise to invite emergency litigation in this court about whether a court of appeals abused its discretion at this preliminary step – for example, by misjudging whether an administrative stay is the best way to minimize harm while the court deliberates.”

Sotomayor and Jackson said the decision “invites further chaos and crisis in immigration enforcement,” and the Fifth Circuit issued its ruling “with no reasoned analysis.”

“Texas can now immediately enforce its own law imposing criminal liability on thousands of noncitizens and requiring their removal to Mexico,” they lamented. As a result, the Supreme Court gave “a green light to a law that will upend the longstanding federal-state balance of power and sow chaos, when the only court to consider the law concluded that it is likely unconstitutional.”

While they debated aspects of administrative stays and attacked the merits of Texas’ law, they also attacked the Fifth Circuit. They said, “Texas’s novel scheme requires careful and reasoned consideration in the courts. The District Court gave S. B. 4 careful consideration and found that it was likely unconstitutional. The Fifth Circuit has not yet weighed in, but nevertheless issued a one-sentence administrative order that is maximally disruptive to foreign relations, national security, the federal-state balance of power, and the lives of noncitizens. The Court should not permit this state of affairs.”

Justice Kagan said she didn’t think the Fifth Circuit’s use of an administrative stay versus a stay pending appeal “should matter. … But a court’s unreasoned decision to impose one for more than a month, rather than answer the stay pending appeal issue before it, should not spell the difference between respecting and revoking long-settled immigration law.”

When signing SB 4 into law, Abbott said President Joe Biden’s “deliberate inaction has left Texas to fend for itself,” pointing to Article 1 Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution, which empowers states “to take action to defend themselves and that is exactly what Texas is doing.”

The law stipulates that repeat offenders who illegally reenter Texas can face a prison sentence of up to 20 years. It also gives law enforcement officials the authority to return illegal foreign nationals to a port of entry and/or arrest them for unlawful entry.

*****

This article was published by The Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Sex Politics thumbnail

Sex Politics

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By E.J. Hare

With the sudden re-emergence of Christine Blasey Ford, who tried to derail Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court with baseless accusations of sexual assault, the Democrats are clearly wasting no time in trying to get more white women back into their fold. They are looking to make the extremely nuanced case to white women, a pivotal demographic in this year’s election, as in every recent election, that Trump and his friends are all rapists.

White women—married ones especially—have confounded Democrats and the liberal press in their stubborn refusal to vote consistently “in their own interest.” Following Trump’s victory in 2016, early reports that 52 percent of white women had voted for the Orange Beast infuriated Democratic pollsters and reporters, who have spilled ink debunking the figure, derived from some exit polls. It’s true that white women didn’t actually vote for Trump by such a broad margin, but he did win a plurality of the segment—enough, in other words, to help him win. According to Pew, white women gave Donald Trump 53 percent of their votes in his losing effort in 2020.

As much as Democrats signal publicly that black women are the “backbone” of their party (as described by former DNC chair Tom Perez) and the most important demographic in their coalition of the fringes, they know that white women—39 percent of the electorate—are critical to their success in 2024. Consequently, their messaging is tailored to white women above all others.

In the 2022 midterm elections, outcry against the Dobbs ruling built the margin among white women that delivered the Senate to Democrats and mitigated what looked to be an impending disaster in the House. But while Donald Trump appointed the justices who make up the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, he rarely speaks with any passion about the issue. Republicans chose not to defend Dobbs as a state’s rights issue that did not limit access to abortion for women in deep blue states. Blue cities’ ongoing struggles with crime, decaying quality of life, and progressive prosecutors working hard to keep criminals out of jail are not yet a major concern for suburbanites beyond the reach of urban progressive ideologues.

Even apart from abortion, an issue that white, college-educated women remain more passionate about than any other group—while continuing to personally choose to abort their own babies less than they have in the past, and far less frequently than black women—the Democrats’ emphasis on racial equity and trans ideology is tailored to the sort of suburban women who signal their allegiance to liberal orthodoxy by planting “In This House” signs on their front lawns.

Media observers and liberal Democrats have latched onto another issue of import: education. But on this front they may have miscalculated, elevating teachers’ unions over white women, the demographic whose votes they desire above all in 2024. The Left savagely went after the “Karens” of Moms for Liberty, a grassroots organization with over 100,000 members who hail from almost every state. The group was formed in 2021 in opposition to public school Covid policies, as well the institutionalization of trans advocacy as part of the curriculum. Moms for Liberty is part of the larger “parents rights movement” which the Guardian described as “housewife populism,” and is bitterly opposed by the teachers’ unions that are a core constituency of the Democratic Party. Democratic elected officials and activists have condemned Moms for Liberty as a white supremacist hate group, and they clearly feel affronted that women may oppose key parts of the larger progressive agenda.

Like in the two previous presidential elections, Democrats are also highlighting former President Donald Trump’s proclivity for personal insults directed at women like Rosie O’Donnell and E. Jean Carroll, which does not help him with the mature, married women (who tend to vote for the GOP) he must persuade to support him if he is to have any chance for re-election. These women are uncomfortable with the chaos that often surrounds Trump, and he rarely projects the calm and reliability that most appeals to them.

Former Massachusetts GOP chair Jennifer Nassour recently argued in the New York Post that Trump’s harsh, personalized insults and tendency to bully turns off many women, pointing to a Quinnipiac poll that found women overall support Biden over Trump by a 58-36 margin.

Though vice presidential nominees are rarely if ever decisive factors in an election, Trump may benefit substantially from choosing a mature, thoughtful woman to temper his impetuous abrasiveness. Pro-Trump New York Congresswoman Nicole Maliotakis and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem could fit the bill.

If Trump can soften his perception among women—unlikely as that may be—or temper his image with a female running mate, he may be able to bring home the married, white female voters who were essential to his 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton. Democrats will seek to emphasize Trump’s insensitivity and squeeze every vote out of the Dobbs decision while avoiding scolding women for not supporting them in the past, as when Madeline Albright said in the midst of Hillary’s unsuccessful campaign that there is a “special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” The mature, white American women who make up the country’s largest voting demographic will undoubtedly be pivotal in choosing our next president.

*****

This article was published by The American Mind and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

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Hamas’s New Friend In The White House

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By Mark Wallace

The 20th century and early 21st century are remarkable for the large number of terrorist organizations arising during these years.  They include not only those most recently in the news — Hamas and Hezbollah — but also the Baader-Meinhof Gang (Germany), the Japanese Red Army, the Weathermen (U.S.), the Red Brigades (Italy), Black September (Arab), Timothy McVeigh and others.  What they all have in common is a willingness to extinguish human life to achieve some purported political objective.  Typically, terrorists don’t much care if they happen to kill babies and toddlers.  For example, Timothy McVeigh described the death of infants and children in a child care center in the Oklahoma City federal building that he destroyed as “collateral damage.”

But all terrorist groups are not created equal.  Some are clearly far more barbaric and savage than others.  Although the more mellow terrorists feel themselves to be free to murder children and infants along with adults, even they appear to be reluctant to intentionally target children.  For example, there is no recorded instance of the Baader-Meinhof Gang or the Red Brigades bombing a kindergarten class.

During the last six months, the terrorist organization Hamas has proven itself to be the most savage, barbaric, ruthless and evil terrorist organization the world has yet seen.  Hamas’s totally unprovoked October 7 attack on Israel included not just the rape and murder of civilians, but also putting innocent young babies into ovens and burning them alive — all for the crime of being Jewish. 

After Black September murdered Israeli Olympic athletes in 1972, the State of Israel hunted down and killed each and every participant in that atrocity.  This action was completely justified.  After Hamas murdered thousands of Israelis on October 7, 2023, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu made it an objective of the State of Israel to ideally eliminate but in any event greatly degrade Hamas’s ability and capacity to subject Israel’s population to further atrocities.  This action is also completely justified.

Hamas is currently holding United States of America citizens as hostages.  One would think that this fact, along with the incredible savagery and brutality of the October 7 attack, would have led the Biden Administration to encourage Prime Minister Netanyahu to do everything in his power to rid the world of Hamas.  Clearly, Hamas’s members and adherents are miscreants who have no place in this world or the next.  A world without Hamas would be a far better world.

Incredibly — and most unfortunately — President Biden has completely lost whatever moral compass he may originally ever have had and appears to have chosen up sides in favor of Hamas.  Through Senator Chuck Schumer (with whom Biden has said he agrees), Netanyahu has been called an impediment to peace.   It has been suggested that Israel hold a new election so that this “impediment to peace” can be removed from office and replaced with a more Hamas-friendly politician.  Get rid of the guy who is winning the war for Israel and ridding the world of the most savage and brutal terrorists it has ever known and replace him with someone willing to disregard the October 7 barbarity and make peace with those committed to Israel’s destruction (“from the river to the sea”).

Imagine that. Imagine if in 1940 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had called for the British people to oust Winston Churchill and replace him with a new prime minister more friendly to Hitler.

The conservative media has alleged that Biden is siding with Hamas in order to curry favor with Arab-Americans in the must-win states of Michigan and Minnesota.  And what happens if the American hostages end up dead in all this?  Biden probably would call it “collateral damage.”  As Lenin said, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

One can imagine Hamas operatives sitting in their tunnels and rubbing their hands with glee upon hearing that the Biden Administration is now urging Israel to jettison Netanyahu, Hamas’s most formidable enemy.  One can also hope that the good people of Israel will have the common sense of retaining in office the great Israeli patriot who is leading them to victory over some of the worst people ever to inhabit this planet.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Arizona News: March 20, 2024

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By The Editors

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Dragging Trump Into Court While Biden Campaigns Is Election Interference, Regardless Of Verdict thumbnail

Dragging Trump Into Court While Biden Campaigns Is Election Interference, Regardless Of Verdict

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By Brianna Lyman

Even if Trump succeeds everywhere in court, Democrats’ lawfare is costing him time and money in a busy campaign season.

Former President Donald Trump spent Thursday sitting in a Florida courtroom while his opponent, President Joe Biden, hit the campaign trail — a reminder that Democrats’ 2024 campaign strategy of “get Trump” lawfare is dangerous election interference regardless of the outcomes of particular prosecutions.

Biden spoke to voters in Michigan and Wisconsin this week and is slated to visit North Carolina soon as he tries to patch potential holes in the “blue wall.” Meanwhile, Trump appeared in court to defend himself from special prosecutor Jack Smith’s relentless campaign to jail the former president.

After the hearing on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon denied one of Trump’s motions to dismiss the Biden Justice Department’s classified documents case against him. Cannon argued in a two-page ruling it would be premature to decide now whether the Espionage Act’s applicability to a former president is unconstitutionally vague, as Trump’s team argues. (Cannon has not yet ruled on another motion to dismiss, which argues Trump had “unreviewable discretion” to designate documents as personal under the Presidential Records Act.)

But in doing so, Cannon gave Trump’s team the opportunity to raise the issues during the trial.

“Although the Motion raises various arguments warranting serious consideration, the Court ultimately determines … that resolution of the overall question presented depends too greatly on contested instructional questions about still-fluctuating definitions of statutory terms/phrases as charged, along with at least some disputed factual issues,” Cannon wrote. She opted “to deny the Motion without prejudice, to be raised as appropriate in connection with jury-instruction briefing and/or other appropriate motions.”

Some leftists, including former U.S. attorney and MSNBC contributor Joyce Vance, fretted Friday that the decision could end up bolstering Trump’s chances of having his case tossed entirely should Cannon side with Trump at trial — something she called a “nightmare scenario.”

Vance explained to Salon that if Cannon had ruled in Trump’s favor, special counsel Jack Smith could have then appealed her ruling.

“But that’s not the case if, after today’s ruling in the government’s favor, she permits Trump to resurrect the motion at trial. She could grant the motion to dismiss the case then,” at which point the Biden DOJ likely “can’t appeal,” Vance said. “That’s because once a jury has been empaneled, double jeopardy ‘attaches’ and prevents the government from retrying the defendant on the same charges if he’s acquitted.”

Cannon did express skepticism at Trump’s argument that the Espionage Act is “unconstitutionally vague,” telling the defense at the hearing “I’m not seeing how any of that gets you to the dismissal of the indictment,” according to Courthouse News. Still, her decision leaves the door open for Trump’s team to argue the unconstitutionality of the Espionage Act later down the road.

But even if Trump succeeds everywhere in court, Democrats’ lawfare is achieving its goal of costing him time and money in a busy campaign season. And it’s being led by the Justice Department of Trump’s main opponent.

Smith, of course, was appointed by Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, who has weaponized the Justice Department against political enemies before. Furthermore, Jay Bratt, a prosecutor on Smith’s team, had a meeting in the White House with then-deputy chief of staff for the White House counsel’s office Carolina Saba and FBI agent Danielle Ray in March of 2023, according to the New York Post, which cited visitor logs. Trump was indicted by Smith weeks later for what the DOJ claimed was improper retention of classified document at Mar-a-Lago.

Bratt had two prior meetings at the White House in 2021 around the same time Trump was working with the National Archives to return requested records, according to The Post.

Fox News legal analyst Jonathan Turley said the meeting “raises obvious concerns about visits to the White House after [Bratt] began his work with the special counsel.” Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said there was “no legitimate purpose for a line [DOJ] guy to be meeting with the White House except if it’s coordinated by the highest levels,” according to The Post.

As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist 78, an individual can only unjustly lose his liberty at the hands of the judicial system if the judicial system is in cahoots with the executive or legislative branch.

The courts will not endanger “the general liberty of the people … so long as the Judiciary remains truly distinct from both the Legislature and the Executive,” Hamilton wrote. “Liberty can have nothing to fear from the Judiciary alone, but would have every thing to fear from its union with either of the other departments.”

By weaponizing the justice system against Trump, who is beating Biden slightly in most polls, Jack Smith and the rest of the “get Trump” gang are attempting to achieve just that.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Kari Lake and Mark Finchem Take Lawsuit To Ban Voting Machines To The US Supreme Court With New Allegations Of Illegal Machine Certification thumbnail

Kari Lake and Mark Finchem Take Lawsuit To Ban Voting Machines To The US Supreme Court With New Allegations Of Illegal Machine Certification

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By Jordan Conradson

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Kari Lake and Mark Finchem appealed their lawsuit to ban the use of electronic voting machines to the United States Supreme Court on Thursday

This comes after the 2022 election, where 60% of the voting machines were reportedly programmed to fail on election day, causing mass voter disenfranchisement and up to four-hour-long lines for Republican in-person voters.

The filing includes “new allegations,” some of which were previously mentioned in Kari Lake’s lawsuit to overturn the stolen election, including:

  • First, Maricopa did not conduct the required L&A testing, on which the district court relied to find the risk of election interference speculative.
  • Second, Maricopa did not use certified software, on which the district court relied to find the risk of election interference speculative.
  • Third, Maricopa used software that made all passwords needed to control Maricopa elections available to anyone with physical or remote access, which supports petitioners’ allegations and evidence that past elections were manipulated.
  • Fourth, altering election software without the Arizona Secretary of State’s approval is criminal act under Arizona law, A.R.S. §§16-449(A), 16- 452(C), 16-1009, 16-1004(B), 16-1010, thereby evaporating presumptions in their favor under Arizona law. See note 5, infra (Arizona’s “bursting bubble” theory of nonstatutory presumptions).
  • Fifth, Maricopa’s officials misrepresented their compliance with Arizona election law (e.g., L&A testing, certified software), which negates any presumptions in their favor under Arizona law. See note 5, infra (Arizona’s “bursting bubble” theory of nonstatutory presumptions).
  • Sixth, Maricopa officials abdicated control over the complex election systems to embedded private Dominion employees who lack any presumption of regularity under Arizona law. See note 4, infra.

The Gateway Pundit previously reported on these claims and video evidence that Maricopa County conducted secret reprogramming of the machines on October 14 through 18 after the Secretary of State’s October 11 Logic and Accuracy testing without notifying the Secretary of State for required additional testing…..

*****

Continue reading this story at Gateway Pundit.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

1365 2048 Jordan Conradson 2024-03-17 05:56:25Kari Lake and Mark Finchem Take Lawsuit To Ban Voting Machines To The US Supreme Court With New Allegations Of Illegal Machine Certification

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Not A Good Look For Liz Cheney: Now It Looks Like Her Star J6 Witness Was Lying thumbnail

Not A Good Look For Liz Cheney: Now It Looks Like Her Star J6 Witness Was Lying

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By Chris Donaldson

New details have emerged on the Nancy Pelosi-Liz Cheney sham J6 committee and it now looks like one of their star witnesses may have been less than truthful.

Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on the day of the so-called “insurrection” electrified the media with her lurid tale that then-President Donald J. Trump nearly choked a Secret Service agent while trying to grab the wheel of “The Beast” the armored presidential limo.

In her star turn before the Democrat-stacked panel, the ex-staffer claimed that Trump demanded “I’m the F**ing president! Take me up to the Capitol now,” and “reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel” and “used his free hand to lunge” at the driver’s “clavicles.”

Now her story is being called into question according to devastating new testimony from the limo’s driver who disputed Hutchinson’s account in testimony to House Republicans, further shredding the credibility of the disgraced former Wyoming congresswoman and the now-defunct Soviet-style tribunal.

In a report released by the House Administration Committee’s oversight subcommittee which reviewed “heavily redacted” transcribed interviews from White House employees, found that their accounts “did not corroborate Hutchinson’s.”

“None of the White House Employees corroborated Hutchinson’s sensational story about President Trump lunging for the steering wheel of the Beast,” the report said.

“None of the White House Employees corroborated Hutchinson’s sensational story about President Trump lunging for the steering wheel of the Beast,” the report said.

“I did not see him reach,” the Secret Service employee who was driving the limo told the panel. “He never grabbed the steering wheel. I didn’t see him, you know, lunge to try to get into the front seat at all. You know, what stood out was the irritation in his voice, more than his physical presence.”

The transcript was never publicly released by the committee.

It’s not a good look for Cheney after it was reported that she had buried evidence that would have potentially exonerated Trump who had asked for 10,000 National Guard troops to help provide security on the day when all hell broke loose at the U.S. Capitol.

Not only was Hutchinson’s account dubious, but Cheney sprung her appearance to the rest of the committee as a last-minute surprise….

*****

Continue reading at American News Wire.

Image Credit: YouTube Screenshot

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

NATO’s ‘Welfare’ States: Treating the U.S. As ‘Room Service’ thumbnail

NATO’s ‘Welfare’ States: Treating the U.S. As ‘Room Service’

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By Peter Hoekstra

Last month, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg conceded what former US President Donald Trump has been warning about for nearly a decade: America’s allies are not paying their fair share — as they had agreed — for national defense. After four years in which Trump held our NATO allies accountable for funding their share of NATO’s collective defense, US President Joe Biden has once again allowed many of them to pass significant burdens of NATO spending on to American taxpayers – threatening the security of the NATO alliance in the process.

The very nature of alliances is that they are a two-way street. Americans should rightly expect to realize benefits from U.S. participation in NATO, just as the citizens of other NATO nations can expect to benefit from their country’s relationship with the United States.

Indeed, that was the original idea behind the North Atlantic Treaty Organization when it was founded in 1949. In the wake of WWII, 12 nations agreed to band together to guard against the threat of the Soviet Union, a number that has now grown to 32 with the recent addition of Sweden.

The NATO alliance today, however, more closely resembles an international welfare program than a true alliance, with most countries failing to meet their defense commitments and instead relying on the generosity of the United States.

As the eminent journalist Amir Taheri put it: “others… treat the US as a ‘room service’ reachable by pressing a button…”

In 2014, every NATO member agreed to allocate just 2% of their nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) to defense spending. This minimum baseline target is crucial to ensuring military readiness in the face of growing threats from hostile nations such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran.

A decade later, 19 out of 32 NATO member nations have failed to meet this goal. Moreover, most of those countries that have reached the 2% target, such as Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Greece, are smaller nations with smaller GDPs.

The United States, meanwhile, accounts for a staggering 70% of all NATO defense spending — even though the combined GDP of the other 31 member nations is roughly equal to that of the United States. Germany, by far the richest NATO member behind the United States, allocates just 1.57% of its GDP to defense spending.

The combined population of these 31 NATO member states, at more than 620 million, also now dwarfs that of the United States, at 333 million. In other words, each American citizen is now effectively responsible for funding the national defense of two people in another NATO nation.

The situation in Europe today is far different than at the founding of NATO, when many nations were still relying on the Marshall Plan funding to be rebuilt. Our NATO allies have highly advanced economies and immensely capable citizens. American taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize their national defense.

If NATO is to function as an effective deterrent to military aggression from Russia and other adversaries, there seriously needs to be a new commitment by every NATO member state to invest in a strong national defense. Yet, the failure of our European allies to meet their spending commitments means they are woefully unprepared from a military standpoint to defend their countries – thus endangering the United States as well as themselves by threatening to draw America into war unnecessarily because of European weakness.

President Trump wisely recognized this threat and accordingly made holding our NATO allies accountable a top priority of his foreign policy. Under his leadership, NATO member countries increased their defense spending by $350 billion.

President Biden has failed to continue the momentum Trump created. After our NATO allies’ defense spending increased 4.6% in 2020, it dropped to only a 2% increase by 2022.

As U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands, in a meeting with Dutch business professionals, I would be asked about the emphasis the Trump administration was putting on the 2% number. People would remark that the Dutch had other priorities, such as healthcare, infrastructure and education. They said they considered the military threat to Europe as miniscule.

Other Dutch citizens asked at various times if Russia would really roll across the borders of Europe with tanks. They had a hard time believing that the Netherlands could ever be in danger. They seemed convinced Trump, and Americans in general, were being unreasonable, distraught and completely out of touch with the security situation in Europe.

A couple of years later, the world discovered the truth. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in fact appears extremely willing to roll his tanks into battle in Europe. After Trump was ridiculed by our NATO allies for demanding European countries do more to protect themselves, unfortunately history has proven him correct.

The United States and the world need an American president who is committed to ensuring our NATO allies share the burden of deterring conflict and attacks upon members of the alliance.

The magnificent Netherlands American Cemetery and Memorial in Margraten, in the Netherlands, is the final resting place for 8,288 American servicemen and where another 1,722, whose names are engraved on the Tablets of the Missing, are remembered.

The Dutch have a unique relationship with the cemetery. Every American grave since 1945 has been adopted by a Dutch family. It is a beautiful recognition of the personal sacrifices made for the sake of freedom and liberty – but also a stark reminder of the horrific cost of war and of the failure to deter it.

The strengthening of the NATO alliance by insisting on burden-sharing by all the member states was a hallmark policy of Trump’s first term, and it most probably will be again if voters return him to the White House this November. All of America’s leaders also need to embrace the reality that if our allies are unwilling to do more to keep the world safe and secure, we may need to reassess the relationship we have with them, and cease being “room service.” Alliances are only alliances when the costs and benefits run both ways. Anything less, especially from the richest countries in Europe, is not only disrespectful, but an unacceptable breach of contract.

*****

This article was published by The Gatestone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

What to Make of the Confusing and (Mostly) Incorrect Federal Court Ruling on Arizona’s Proof of Citizenship Election Law thumbnail

What to Make of the Confusing and (Mostly) Incorrect Federal Court Ruling on Arizona’s Proof of Citizenship Election Law

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By Arizona Free Enterprise Club

It is no secret that an overwhelming number of Americans believe that only U.S. citizens should be allowed to vote in our elections. It arguably is and ought to be the first and primary qualification to vote. But what good is that requirement if it isn’t verified? In other words, without proof of citizenship, we are relying on a simple stroke of a pen or pencil on a registration form, checking a small box attesting to citizenship.

That’s why in 2004 Arizona voters approved a measure to require proof of citizenship before registering to vote. But, in the 20 years since, that requirement has been whittled away and now there are tens of thousands of people voting in Arizona elections (often referred to as “Federal only” voters) without ever having provided evidence of their citizenship.

In response to this explosion of ‘Federal Only’ voters, the Arizona legislature passed two landmark bills, HB2492 and HB2243, to require proof of citizenship and regular, enhanced voter roll maintenance to ensure only eligible individuals are registering and voting in our elections.

What happened next shouldn’t surprise anyone that has watched the left fight every reasonable voter integrity measure around the country. As soon as both bills were signed into law, a dozen liberal organizations and the Biden Justice Department sued in federal court, claiming that the measures were unconstitutional, illegal, and (of course) racist.

The case was given to Bill Clinton appointed judge Susan Bolton, and after a year of litigation, she issued a confusing, disjointed two-part ruling that is destined for appeal. And while a few positives can be gleaned from the decision, the bad and ugly from the liberal opinion far outweighed the good.

The Bad

Bolton had already ruled against many of the provisions last September, including, most importantly, blocking Arizona from rejecting state voter registration forms not accompanied with proof of citizenship (even though the U.S. Supreme Court clearly stated that we could) and from preventing “Federal Only Voters” from voting in presidential elections and by mail.

In this new ruling, Bolton also ruled that the requirement that a registrant include their place of birth on their voter registration form (currently optional), which would have helped verify the citizenship status of voters, violates the materiality provision of the Civil Rights Act. In other words, although the U.S. Supreme Court just a decade ago said we are free to design our own form and request the information we determine is necessary, Bolton decided for us, preventing us from collecting critical information from registrants to verify citizenship status.

Residency might be second only to citizenship as a qualification to vote: you have to be a citizen, and you must live here to vote in our elections. Pretty basic. But Bolton also decided that requiring registrants using the state form to prove their residency violates the National Voter Registration Act, requiring them to be registered as Federal Only Voters.

The Ugly

After the liberal group plaintiffs tried to go on a fishing expedition last year, serving the Club with subpoenas to access years of our communications, Bolton spent six pages determining whether the laws were passed with discriminatory intent. Three of those pages were spent on the Club’s involvement in getting these bills passed, where she described us as a “conservative lobbying group” (without identifying the nonprofit plaintiffs likewise as “liberal lobbying groups”). Even worse, she wrote that our previous articles amounted to racial animosity. Her evidence? In some of them we argued the bills would help stop “illegals” from voting. And, according to Bolton, the word “illegals” is a “code word” that “may demonstrate discriminatory intent.”

Her evidence for that? The testimony of one individual, former state senator Martín Quezada, whose nomination by Hobbs to head the Registrar of Contractors was rejected by the Arizona Senate last year. That was enough for a federal judge, in a federal court order, to allege our advocacy for the security of elections was fueled, at least in part, with coded racist language.

This claim is even more absurd now given that just last week President Biden (whose DOJ is a lead plaintiff against these bills) used the “coded word” “illegals” during his State of the Union address to Congress. Would Judge Bolton say that President Biden was using “coded” racist language too?

The Good

Even though Bolton thinks our advocacy was rooted in racism, it wasn’t enough to find that the legislature acted with discriminatory intent, because we didn’t, and they didn’t. And that alone is a huge win as this case moves to an appeal, because it was the bulk of the argument from the “liberal lobbying” group plaintiffs.

Additionally, many of the voter list maintenance provisions were upheld, meaning Arizona counties will be checking the voter rolls against several databases regularly and removing those not eligible to vote in our elections. Individuals who obtain a driver’s license in another state, those who attest on a jury questionnaire that they are not a U.S. citizen or are not a resident, SAVE (the federal immigration database), and more, will begin to clean up our voter list.

Finally, before the case moved to trial, the RNC intervened, as did Senate President Warren Petersen and House Speaker Ben Toma on behalf of the legislature, allowing for an appeal all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary to uphold these commonsense laws before the 2024 election. And we will stand with them as it does.

*****

This article was published by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club and is reproduced with permission.

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

Military Recruitment Crisis: What If It *Is* The Product? thumbnail

Military Recruitment Crisis: What If It *Is* The Product?

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By Rebecca Burgess

Any phenomenon manifesting in a large, complex, multipart institution whose dynamics are downwind of society at large is bound to have not just one cause, but many. Current institutional case in point: the U.S. Armed Forces and the military recruitment crisis.

For the two-plus years that the military’s branches (outside of the U.S. Marines) have faced a significant (Navy) to severe (Army) shortage of incoming recruits, analysts have invoked many now familiar arguments for the causes why: economic considerations (low unemployment); societal considerations (Covid; fitness unfitness/obesity epidemic); public misperceptions (“broken veteran” narrative; civil-military divide related to the All-Volunteer Force); historical considerations (twenty continuous years of the Global War on Terror; disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan; overreliance on the military family pipeline); culture war considerations (“wokeness”; overhyped accusations of “right-wing extremism” among those who’ve served; over-recruitment from the South/West “smile”); and finally, generational considerations (not meeting the digitally native Gen Z where it’s at).

While an over-generalization, these “reasons why” can be more or less classified as marketing problems, and the Pentagon seems to be treating them as such. But what if there are more tangible, and more fundamental reasons, for the crisis tied to the “product” itself—the military as it functions today—and to the less fundamental but no less consequential institutional barriers to join that it inflicts on itself?

In terms of barriers, some keen-eyed observers have begun drawing attention to the military’s recent medical records modernization effort, the Military Health System Genesis (MHS Genesis), which went into effect in March 2022. MHS Genesis is an automated and integrated medical information system that is meant to enable a thorough medical screening of applicants and boost efficiency with the same. While a fantastic concept for those already in the military and those transitioning into the VA health care system (no more having to keep track of physical paper records!), it’s proving a nightmare for potential recruits. Simply put, it requires a person’s full prescription medication history, as National Review’s Luther Ray Abel recently explained. “If someone has had painkillers prescribed by a doctor working at a hospital, more than likely they got surgery. We then need all the documents explaining why a prescription was made.” Moms everywhere know what this means—endless calls and visits with doctors’ offices to try to track down a growing list of paperwork explanations for care prescribed and received, and further documentation of why. The delay this is creating in terms of time has been profound.

But the military “doesn’t like a medicated recruit unless he’s a Motrin devotee,” and can pretty much use any prescription (whether actually used or not) as grounds for rejecting the recruit. This hits especially the high-performing, athletic recruits particularly hard—if they’ve participated in competitive sports, they’re likely to have been injured at some or several point(s). And it also hits today’s youth hard with what is increasingly just another aspect of their life—a mental health diagnosis of ADHA or something similar. A 2022 survey found that 42% of Gen Z have a mental health diagnosis; a 2023 report claims that 60% have a “medically diagnosed anxiety condition.” The military has not adjusted to this fact or determined new standards to differentiate between, say, chronic severe depression and psychotic behavior versus middle school ADHD. And, as Abel notes—“White kids are treated for mental health at twice the rate of others, and boys (9.8 percent) were medicated more often than girls (7 percent).” Not surprisingly, the Army is experiencing a sharp decline in white recruits.

Another institutional barrier that’s worth revisiting: Currently, single parents with a dependent under 18 years old cannot join the Army, for instance. They have to have given up guardianship of any children prior to the duration of at least the first enlistment (two to six years) to be eligible to join. But with 119,186 single parents serving in the U.S. military in 2021, it seems clear that the military has figured out how to work with this population. Furthermore, considering that only around 10% of the Armed Forces are currently even classified as combat arms, especially outside a time of war it seems like there are thousands of military jobs that a single parent with a dependent could qualify for that would not undercut the effectiveness or efficiency of the institution as a whole. And considering that there are roughly 11 million single-parent households currently in the United States, now seems a rational time to reassess this policy barrier.

But then there’s the matter of the military “product” itself. While the American public is increasingly unfamiliar with who and what its military is and does and how, breaking stories about the military’s inability to house service members in safe, sanitary, non-mold-infested barracks and homes can only further already-imbibed prejudices about the military being a last-resort option for desperate individuals at the bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder. Or how about its inability to feed a whole installation-worth of junior enlisted for several months? This summer, one of the Army’s largest bases, Fort Cavazos (formerly Hood), Texas, could barely operate two out of a total of ten major dining options, and did not advertise to soldiers which would be open and when. Conditions at this summer’s ROTC Cadet Summer Training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, might possibly have been even worse, with cadets having to eat sometimes even expired MREs when dining services were suspended. Fort Knox is supposed to be the nation’s “Gold Standard Army Installation.”

This isn’t even to touch on problems of scandal among officers and of morale within each of the military’s service branches. The Navy—or Coast Guard, for that matter—can’t seem to shake itself free from scandals involving its officers, whether with defense contractors (“Fat Leonard” scandal) or otherwise. The Army followed its familiar pattern of behavior when it recently opted merely to slap the wrist of a male lieutenant colonel rather than severely discipline him, for having hid a video recording device in a teen-centric clothing store dressing room in California. Just last year more than a handful of Special Operators at Fort Liberty (Bragg) found themselves under questioning in relation to drug trafficking and even possible sex trafficking of underage girls. In 2022, the Air Force Academy had to expel 22 cadets and put on probation 210 more for cheating and plagiarism. Accounts of “toxic leadership” and the need for reform within the senior officer ranks have been proliferating for close to a decade now. And who among us willingly rushes to join a toxic workplace culture?

None of this presents a novel or unprecedented situation for the U.S. military. It has been here before—most recently, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as the Armed Forces struggled and learned its way through the transition from being a conscript military to the All-Volunteer Force. The military emerged stronger and better—and more attractive to a diverse cadre of potential recruits—after undergoing that baptism by fire. But it only did so by its senior leaders being honest with themselves about the true sources of its problems, having the courage to swim upstream against entrenched modes of thinking and behavior, and knowing when and how to adapt to new circumstances. It fixed its product even while it was working on its marketing. Our military can do the same again, today.

*****

This article was published by The Independent Women’s Forum and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

TAKE ACTION

The Prickly Pear’s TAKE ACTION focus this year is to help achieve a winning 2024 national and state November 5th election with the removal of the Biden/Obama leftist executive branch disaster, win one U.S. Senate seat, maintain and win strong majorities in all Arizona state offices on the ballot and to insure that unrestricted abortion is not constitutionally embedded in our laws and culture.

Please click the TAKE ACTION link to learn to do’s and don’ts for voting in 2024. Our state and national elections are at great risk from the very aggressive and radical leftist Democrat operatives with documented rigging, mail-in voter fraud and illegals voting across the country (yes, with illegals voting across the country) in the last several election cycles.

Read Part 1 and Part 2 of The Prickly Pear essays entitled How NOT to Vote in the November 5, 2024 Election in Arizona to be well informed of the above issues and to vote in a way to ensure the most likely chance your vote will be counted and counted as you intend.

Please click the following link to learn more.

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