Speaker Johnson is a Mile Wide and an Inch Deep

By Rich Kozlovich

There's been a lot of outrage directed at Speaker Johnson, and rightly so.  Why?  Let's start with a bit of history.  

I save an inordinate number of articles, and in order to save them I create Gazettes.  Here's one I posted on December 6, 2023, and issues were already forming against Johnson, but between December and April, the bottom dropped out.  This is the gazette posted on April 24, 2024, and as you peruse these pieces you see the words, RINO, mole, traitor, betrayer, where he's accused of totally surrendering to the Democrats, and shows he took positions that can hardly be called moderate let alone conservative. 

Then it came budget time, and instead of having a open dialogue with his Republican colleagues, he collaborated behind closed doors with with the biggest RINO of them all, Mitch McConnell, and the two of most radical Democrat leaders there are, Chuck Schumer and that hand puppet for Nancy Pelosi, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries for 87 days creating a 1500 page massively expensive, and massively corrupt, 1.7 trillion dollar CR, that no one could possibly have time to read, violating the 72 hour rule .. a second time...  shoving it down Republicans throats as a do it or else we shut down the government.  That is nothing but a corrupt scam.  A corrupt scam he had to be party of or this couldn't have happened.   According to Rep. Chip Roy they needed Trump, Elon Musk, and Vivek Ramaswamy to come in and cut it down from 1500 pages to 100 pages.  It wasn't Johnson who performed that feat.

Representative Massie, who has been against Johnson from early on says he won't vote for him because, "Mike Johnson Is the Next Paul Ryan", and is still leading the charge against Johnson in spite of Trump's support saying:

“I respect and support President Trump, but his endorsement of Mike Johnson is going to work out about as well as his endorsement of Speaker Paul Ryan. We’ve seen Johnson partner with the democrats to send money to Ukraine, authorize spying on Americans, and blow the budget...."

Then we have Rep. Victoria Spartz, who is really interesting.  She was was  born in Ukraine which was part of the Soviet Union then, and later migrated to America.  Spartz has a clear understanding of corrupt government,  says,  "we need assurances Speaker Johnson won't sell us out to the swamp." And she has reason to worry!

• Mike Johnson: The Mole Who Thinks Fake News CNN Reporter Jake Tapper is "Always Fair"

However, Donald Trump has endorsed Mike Johnson’s bid to stay House speaker.  Given Johnson's history why would he do that?  Well, this whole thing presents a conundrum for Trump.  If there is no Speaker of the House when January 20th roles around he can't be President of the United States, no business can be conducted, and the consequence of that would be Senator Chuck Grassley, as President Pro Tempore of the Senate, becomes President, which has never happened in the nation's history creating unpleasant Constitution issues.  

So, Trump knows he needs to prevent a floor fight for Speaker right now in order to get his nominees for various offices in place as soon as possible because the Democrats will fight each and every one of them tooth and nail.  Will Johnson appreciate Trump's support and change his pattern of "leadership"?  Well, that didn't change Paul Ryan's direction and pattern of "leadership", and I don't think it will change Johnson's except he may be forced to change.  The Republican House is far more conservative than it was under Ryan, and not only will they will be watching, they will openly attack Johnson for his indiscretions. 

Will the Democrats vote for him as Speaker?  Not now, as this creates a vacuum they like, even trying to force the Congress to refuse to certify Trump as President, so a long floor fight for Speaker is great for them showing the Republicans are incapable of governing.  While you may hate Democrat governance, it's clear they know how to do it, and what they stand for, high taxes, massive regulations, big government deep state tyranny, and destruction of the Constitution, which is why they're call the Party of Treason. 

• A Conspiracy to Overthrow the 2024 Elections 

The Republicans are impossible to define.  They're all over the philosophic map, which is why they're called the Stupid Party, as a result the only thing they excel at is snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory. 

1. Kakistocracy: We are Ruled by Charlatans, Knaves, and Fools, Part V
2. Here's my entire

118th Congress Report Card: The Least Productive in Modern History?

A Congress perhaps best forgotten.

By James Fite | Dec 31, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

As the 118th Congress ends, most lawmakers would probably like to erase 2023-2024 from their memories. Over the last two years, they managed to break records and pioneer historic firsts – but not the positive kind folks might later brag about. A look back at the big stories shows not a trend of legislative success, but rather of divisiveness, in-party fighting, and upheaval – especially in the House of Representatives. And compared to previous congresses, the 118th saw an embarrassingly small number of bills signed into law.

Chaos and Strife

From the very beginning, the 118th Congress was plagued by strife as Republican lawmakers fought over who would lead the new GOP majority in the House. It took an impressive 15 roll call votes to elect Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as speaker of the House, holding up the start of congressional work for several days. That’s the longest it has taken since before the Civil War. The longest ever, of course, comes from the 34th Congress, which took 133 rounds of voting over about two months.

And then he didn’t even hold the gavel a full year.

McCarthy was ousted after some in his own party called a vote to vacate his speakership. Democrats were only too happy to oblige, and so out with McCarthy and – eventually – in with Mike Johnson (R-LA). But it wasn’t quick. Rep. Patrick McHenry of North Carolina served in the position temporarily so the House could continue its business while working on electing a permanent speaker, a process which took 22 days.

Johnson himself then faced a vote to vacate but was saved when Democrats stepped in to keep him in the role. Now, Johnson goes into a vote on January 3 to determine whether or not he’ll retain the gavel – and it’s unlikely he’ll have many allies across the aisle this time.

The Least Successful Congress in How Long?

Before being ousted from the roll and eventually dropping out of Congress entirely, then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy initiated an impeachment inquiry against President Joe Biden, but even in a GOP-led House, it floundered and failed. Over the remainder of the two sessions, House Republicans went on to launch eight other impeachment attempts, including against Attorney General Merrick Garland, Vice President Kamala Harris, Defense Secretary Llyod Austin, and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. All failed but the second try against Mayorkas, which passed by a single vote, 214-213.

The Senate quickly dismissed the charges.

Amid all this turmoil, very little actual legislating got done. The 118th Congress passed just 209 bills that went on to be signed into public law – and remember, a good number of those are just agreeing to rename some public building! So how does that compare? Not well. The previous 117th, which enjoyed a Democrat majority in the House and an effective majority in the Senate (technically it was a tie, but the tie-breaking VP was also a Democrat). Under this effective trifecta, there were 362 public laws enacted.

But going back a little further, we have the 116th, a government so divided that the Democrat-controlled House successfully impeached President Donald Trump not once, but twice. Still, then House Speaker Nanci Pelosi (D-CA), Trump, and the Republican-led Senate managed to enact 344 public laws.

The 118th, based purely on public laws enacted, has been the least productive Congress this century and beyond – perhaps for the last 100 years or more. One can track the number of public laws enacted by any Congress going back to 1951 on Congress.gov – and all the way back to the beginning in the Congressional Record and the old Annals of Congress. The only two in recent history that came close to having this low a number were the 112th and 113th, which still managed 283 and 296, respectively. The rest in the last thirty years or so passed bills numbering in the 300s and 400s. Before that, Congress seemed to enjoy a decades-long period of prolific bipartisan legislating, with numbers averaging in the 600s to the 800s, going back to the 80th Congress in the late 1940s, even occasionally dipping into the 900s and once breaking 1,000.

The Unknown Unknowns

Of course, to determine whether this abysmal record is actually good or bad for the Americans who pay these lawmakers’ salaries, one must look at the laws that are passed. Every law that makes it through Congress adds to the ever-growing leviathan that is our federal government. Who even knows how many federal laws there are, specifically? The government doesn’t even know. The Library of Congress merely explains that it’s impossible to know. An attempt was made in 1982, but the man in charge of it, Ronald Gainer of the Justice Department, eventually gave up and famously said “you will have died and been resurrected three times” and still not have answered the question.

Do Americans enjoy greater personal liberties under this legislative burden? From that point of view, perhaps the 118th didn’t do so poorly after all – terrible fiscal record aside, of course. Still, history will not remember this Congress well. And it’s likely to haunt the dreams – and re-election efforts – of the lawmakers themselves, especially Republicans. Can the GOP turn it around, though, in 2025 and 2026 with Republican control of both chambers of Congress and the White House – or will the intraparty squabbling in the lower chamber continue to hold them back?

~

Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.

Read More From James Fite Editor-at-Large

The End of Never Trump

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

The Lincoln Project, the crown jewel of the Never Trump movement, raised $67 million meant to swing Republicans toward the Democrats in the 2024 election. Instead, Kamala’s share of the Republican vote dropped from Hillary’s 7% and Biden’s 6% all the way down to 5%.

The Lincoln Project had been co-founded by McCain’s manager who had overseen a campaign where Obama had won 9% of Republican votes. Trump not only performed better (94%) with Republicans than McCain had (90%), but Kamala’s share of the Republican vote was a little over half what it had been under Obama despite spending $67 million on Republicans.

That $67 million was only a part of the money spent by Democrats and leftists on the Never Trump movement even though there was never any reason to think that it was working.

Defending Democracy Together, Bill Kristol’s operation, partnered with the Lincoln Project to become the largest ‘dark money’ spender in 2020 and after blowing through $35 million, had nothing to show in the exit polls except another single digit drop in Republican support for its chosen candidate. Every presidential election cycle that Never Trump has intervened in, Republican support for Democrats has not only failed to go up, but actually went down.

During 2020 and 2024, when Never Trump’s political operation was most active, CNN exit polls showed Trump’s share of the Republican vote rose from 88% in 2016 to 94%. The only thing that Never Trump seemed to accomplish was to unify Republicans around Trump.

Kristol’s Defending Democracy Together Institute and its various projects like The Bulwark and Lyceum Labs have taken in millions of dollars annually with nothing to show for it except gathering up various useless political operatives and staffers like Romney’s former counsel and policy director, a former Dick Armey staffer and Beto O’Rourke’s South Carolina staff director.

This Never Trump political cruft was funded by leftist billionaires like Persian eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and foundations, including $500,000 from the liberal Hewlett Foundation (Lyceum’s director Daniel Stid conveniently also ran Hewlett’s Democracy Program).

The Hewlett Foundation along with Soros, the Rockefeller Foundation, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker’s family foundation, and assorted liberal foundations, also funds the Niskanen Center, a pre-Trump hub for liberal Republicans and libertarians which responded to Trump’s win by insightfully blaming it on the lack of public school integration. And it only got worse from there.

The Bulwark, the Substack magazine of Kristol’s movement, funded by Omidyar, is largely indistinguishable from Slate or MSNBC, and has nothing to offer to anyone who isn’t already obsessed with hating Trump, analyzing his connections to Vladimir Putin and fuming at the media including ABC News, the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal (WSJ Isn’t a Serious Publication Anymore. Just another Fox News!) for not being sufficiently anti-Trump.

The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last responded to Trump’s victory by urging that “Democrats should not try to save America from itself” and proposed that Democrats should not fight deportations of illegal aliens because Latinos voted for Trump. “Democrats should spend exactly zero political capital stopping any Trump deportation efforts,” he broadcast. “It is madness to spend capital trying to help people who are no longer a major part of your electoral coalition.”

While professional Never Trumpers shot further down the radicalization rabbit hole, Bret Stephens at the New York Times headlined his column, “Done With Never Trump” dismissing the “heavy moralizing and incessant doomsaying that typified so much of the Never Trump movement”, conceding that the Russiagate “collusion allegations were a smear” and that “Trump’s Russia policy — whether it was his opposition to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline or his covert aid to Ukraine — was much tougher” than Obama’s or Biden’s had been or would be.

Stephens wrote about the hypocrisy of Trump’s critics asking “why were the same people who demanded investigations into every corner of the Trump family’s business dealings so incurious about the Biden family’s dealings, like the curiously high prices for Hunter’s paintings?” and argued that ” as much as we fear Trump could wreck some of our institutions, whether it’s higher education or the F.B.I., many of those institutions are already broken and may need to be reconceived or replaced.”

The reactions from The Bulwark and Stephens typify the two poles of Never Trumperism.

Serious adults like Stephens proved capable of reevaluating their positions in the face of a landslide election and a major shift in public sentiment while professional Never Trumpers doubled down on trying to out-MSNBC the actual MSNBC in the fanatical fashion of past defectors from the conservative movement like Media Matters guru David Brock.

But they’re imitating a model that may be dead. MSNBC’s ratings are struggling and from the Washington Post to the Los Angeles Times, the media’s Trump-baiters are rethinking their offerings. The liberal base is tired of rants about Trump and has been tuning out. And after three election cycles of failure, the big liberal foundations may grow weary of funding the vanity projects of Never Trumpers which have never been anything other than a social club for political operatives who had found a way to use the rise of Trump to make money from his enemies.

‘Never Trump: The Revolt of the Conservative Elites’, a book funded in part by the movement, warned that Never Trump’s “funding has come from left-of-center sources including Democracy Fund Voice, an initiative solely sponsored by tech entrepreneur Pierre Omidyar, and the Hewlett Foundation.” Will the money keep on coming especially with Trump in his final term in office?

Never Trump built its movement around opposing one man who has won his last election. What are they going to do for a next act? Rebrand around opposing the next GOP candidate?

When the money dries up, the campaign consultants who were the real force behind Never Trumperism will move on and the handful of intellectuals who lent their name to this facade will have to do likewise. And that may end up happening even sooner than anyone expects.

The Lincoln Project, like the rest of the Never Trump movement, proved to be a political dead end, but enormously profitable for those connected with it. Its operatives failed to elect Kamala, but by diverting millions in Democrat funds, they may have helped to reelect Trump.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

 

Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left tells the untold story of the Left's 200-Year War against America And readers love it.

From The Director Of Net Zero Watch

December 29, 2024/ Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

Net Zero Watch is an affiliate of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the UK’s leading climate-skeptic think tank. (Another affiliate of the Global Warming Policy Foundation is the American Friends of the GWPF, the organization of which I am the President and a board member.). The specialty of Net Zero Watch is poking holes in the UK’s insane pursuit of Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions. The Director of NZW is Andrew Montford.

A few days ago (December 23), Montford issued a brief end of year statement that gives a good summary of where we are now in the climate wars. I thought that I should feature the statement here on Manhattan Contrarian. Here is the statement in full, with a few key lines highlighted by myself:

As another year draws to a close we can look back with some satisfaction on the changes in the political and economic landscape over the last twelve months.

We are not nearing the end of the climate emergency madness, but I think it’s fair to say we are at the beginning of the end – it is now clear that Net Zero is doomed, that the western world will return to rational energy policies, and that we will be completely vindicated.

There is a long road still to travel, and we shouldn’t expect the entrenched climate cult to suddenly collapse. Instead, we would expect the Net Zero timescales to be extended – see the story about the Canadian government below – and then, over the years, the targets themselves to be watered down, and then ignored, if not cancelled entirely.

There is a great deal still to do to make this happen. The UK government, and Ed Miliband in particular, appear set on economic suicide, and civil society will need to make it clear to the Labour party that their pursuit of this end will lead to their political annihilation. Limiting the damage done along the way will be a huge task, and a very difficult one, given the size of Mr Starmer’s majority. But we must try, for the sake of everyone who lives on these islands.

And we must also start to turn our thoughts to how we put the UK’s energy sector back onto a rational footing – how we reverse out from the dark and dangerous cul-de-sac into which successive governments have driven us. Escaping all the political, diplomatic, legal and economic entanglements will be no simple task, and we will need all the help we can get.

So finally let me publicly thank everyone who financially supports our efforts. We remain on a tight budget, and we are therefore enormously grateful.

Wishing you all a very merry Christmas, and a prosperous New Year.

Andrew

I second Andrew’s sentiments, and of course also wish to see rational energy policy for the U.S. as well. We have every reason to think we are going to get that, or at least something close to it, with the incoming Trump administration.

Incredibly, the GWPF is moving toward “complete vindication” of its position with an annual budget of under $500,000. This compares to the annual budgets of the big enviro climate cult organizations in the range of hundred of millions of dollars each. (Examples: EDF $255 million for 2023; NRDC $244 million for 2023; Sierra Club $168 million for 2022; and there are dozens more, not to mention the government’s infinite checkbook.). Like the Kamala Harris campaign, they can blow through hundreds of millions of dollars in mere months, but their message of constant scare-mongering has gradually worn out.

For more from NZW, go here. For more from the GWPF, go here.

The Reality of Jimmy Carter

It's time to see substance over shadow

By Rich Kozlovich

Over the next few days we're going to be inundated with media clabber telling us what a wonderful humanitarian Jimmy Carter was.  Well, I'm not going to rejoice at his passing as is the wont of leftists when a conservative passes, but I'm not going to mourn it either, and I think a little clarity should prevail starting with Andrea Widburg's article with her saying:

Ultimately, Carter was a guy who lived a life of personal rectitude (he had the same wife for almost 80 years, went to church, etc.), but he left the United States and the world in much worse shape than they were when he found them

Leftist parents, whose draft dodging children fled to Canada, whined how sorry they were and wanted to come home now that all was safe.  So Carter pardoned them. He gave away the Panama Canal, and now we're seeing the consequences of that.  He passed the Community Reinvestment Act that caused the housing bubble that thirty years later crashed the economy to the tune of trillions of lost dollars. 

He created the Department of Education, another proven Carter disaster, and an expensive one at that.  His policies, like Biden's, caused inflation, economic malaise, and the energy crisis.  Most don't remember the energy crisis, but we faced long lines at gas stations all over the country.   But it was very real then, and it went on daily, and Carter's energy policies was the cause, and among the left, none of that's changed.

He abandoned the Shah of Iran allowing insane Islamists to take over, so they promptly took over the U.S. Embassy creating a hostage crisis that lasted 444 days.  After cutting the defense budget dramatically Carter oversaw a rescue mission that was a complete failure.   When Reagan was elected the Mullah's decided Reagan wasn't a wimp like Carter and ended that Carter driven fiasco.

Nonetheless, as a result of Carter's abandonment of the Shah of Iran, that nation became the nucleus for all the terror movements that's killed untold thousands ever since, and it's believed, and I believe it also, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan because they knew Carter was weak and stupid. 

He's credited with the Camp David Accords, and rightly so, but that one credible action doesn't give him a pass on the rest of his life.  Not to mention he was then, and until he died, a blatant antisemite, who never saw a leftist tyrant he couldn't love, a corrupt election that elected Democrats he didn't praise, and was convinced Trump was unfit to be President, with his great last wish to live long enough to vote for Kamala Harris.   A cap on his life of failure.

Bill Clinton awarded Carter and his wife Rosalyn the Presidential Medal of Freedom saying:

“Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter have done more good things for more people in more places than any other couple on the face of the Earth,”

That was a lie!  The greatest man to have lived in the 20th, and 21st centuries was Norman Borlaug, who saved a billion people from starvation with his 'green revolution' of high yield crops, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides, and Carter would have been against that.  It's time to see substance over shadow.   Inflation, gas lines, incredibly stupid foreign and domestic policy to the tenth power creating failures that materialized disastrously for decades juxtapositioning how much long term damage an extremist administration like his could do.   Until the Biden became president Carter had the dubious honor of being the dumbest man to ever occupy the White House, a standard no one thought would ever be broken, until now.   

Here's why I could never be a politician.  I won't his celebrate his passing, but I won't mourn it either. 

• The Sainting of Jimmy Carter by “Christianity Today” Is a Farce - I was going to stay silent about the passing of Jimmy Carter, but reading the Christianity Today article was too much. I wish the best for Carter’s grieving family, and Carter should be lauded for his humanitarian efforts, his efforts to bring about peace in the Middle East, and for what I take was his sincere (if liberal) faith. But CT’s exercise in hagiography further destroys its reputation as a serious publication for evangelical Christians. A partial rundown:.........
• Jimmy Carter: His image vs. the reality I experienced covering his 1976 campaign  - The contrast that I observed between the meme that dominated the mainstream media and the Carter I witnessed closely on the campaign trail was night and day. In personal appearances including press conferences, Carter was often surly, angry, and short-tempered. This is often the case with national politicians, Minnesota Democrat Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey, who ran unsuccessfully for the presidency multiple times, being another example that I witnessed close up. But with Carter it was different, because his whole public image in 1976 rested on his supposedly down-to-earth geniality and simpering mien. “I will never lie to you,” was one of the main themes of his 1976 campaign. ............
  
• The Carter Era is Over, And not just because he's dead., December 30, 2024 by Daniel Greenfield, 16 Comments -The Carter era is over not just because its eponymous figure kicked the last of a long line of buckets to reunite with the Ayatollah Khomeini and Fidel Castro on the world’s worst reunion tour in the world’s worst place, but because the era itself best epitomized by his legacy has come to an end.....
• Ask the Venezuelans how great an ex-president Jimmy Carter was December 30, 2024 by Monica Showalter Carter did much to legitimize the dictatorship in Venezuela as one that conducts free and fair elections. ....Amselem described in his long tweet-story how Carter paid a visit to Indonesia in 2004 and in his speech to the locals, launched into a series of verbal broadsides against U.S. foreign policy from the grounds of the U.S. embassy as the diplomats stared at each other, utterly stupefied.......
• Are the drones President Carter’s legacy? December 31, 2024 by Noel S. Williams Perhaps the message Carter cast into the cosmos has indeed been intercepted.....
• Scott Jennings Hits Jimmy Carter Over 'Borderline' Treasonous Legacy (Video) 
•  Jimmy Carter Was Never a Good Man.  And Carter and Biden have a lot in common. Outgoing President Joe Biden urged incoming President Donald Trump to learn “decency” from permanently outgoing former president President Jimmy Carter. Biden once set his sights high by trying to compare himself to FDR and JFK, now has to settle for being the second Carter. On his way out the door, the media continues to insist that Biden is a good man. And that Carter, despite presiding over one of the worst administrations in history, was a good man. Biden and Carter had many things in common, record unpopularity, crooked brothers, and empowering Islamic terrorists, but decency was never one of them.  Joe Biden was not a good man. Neither was Jimmy Carter.......
• As Media Fawns Over Jimmy Carter's Legacy, We Can See Their Rehabilitation Plans for Biden's Failed Presidency - After former President Jimmy Carter died on Sunday, hagiographies quickly appeared. Nobody wants to speak ill of the dead, especially if they’re Democrat, so this was to be expected.  However, what was truly astonishing in their tone was that Carter’s disastrous four-year term in the White House, from 1977 to 1981, included a bunch of stuff that just kinda, you know, happened to him. It wasn’t his fault, seriously!.............
• Carter appears to be as decent to others as Biden is honest and empathetic - The media and others spend a lot of time rewriting history and misleading the public. Jimmy Carter was a terrible president, but the media said what a genuinely nice person he was otherwise. Yet, here we see a story about how he treated people when the cameras weren’t on, and he reportedly wasn’t the “decent” man the media wants to portray him as.  Secret Service Says Carter Wasn’t ‘Decent’....such portrayals as a ‘total fairy tale’ perpetuated by the media. He also drew a parallel to Biden himself, noting reports that Biden allowed his German Shepherds to attack Secret Service agents. ‘What kind of decent person is that?’...... Carter would stage photo opportunities to appear relatable but allegedly behaved quite differently once the cameras were off.......‘He would actually tell Secret Service agents he did not want them to say hello to him on the way to the Oval Office because it was too much bother to say hello back.........One agent who drove Carter for five months and served on his detail for three and a half years said Carter never spoke to him, considering such interactions beneath him...

Cartoon Roundup: Joe Biden's December

By Rich Kozlovich 

 

This was Biden's December, and it wasn't a happy December, at least if your sane.  As you view these cartoons think about this, Biden actually claims he could've beaten Trump, and I have no doubt he believes it, which further enhances the idea he really has lost his mind.  While the pattern of Joe's life has been one of lies and massive self deception, I think he believes his lies are facts, and then he's shocked when no one believes him.   Scott Jennings, who is an anomaly at CNN, says Biden's leaving in disgrace. Imagine that.

 

 

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Monica Showalter says,  Joe Biden heads out on a low note, more despised than ever, and the media isn't covering for him now.   While they've taken some shots at Ole Joe, that's not universal.   The Pravda media is so full of nitwits, dimwits, halfwits, and dipsticks, there's always someone lying for Ole Joe.

 

George Bush would spend the weekend at his home in Texas and the Pravda Media screamed like insane banshees that he was unfit to be President for not attending to the nation's affairs. 

 

Joe Biden spent most of his four years on vacation, and they never noticed.   But no matter how much they keep covering for Ole Joe, with his corrupt history, he's the gift that just keeps on giving.  

The Pravda media will never stop covering for Joe, and the alternative media will never stop legitimately vilifying Joe, his crime family, and his criminal administration because time and truth are on the same side, and Biden will go down in history as the worst most corrupt President in American history leading the most corrupt, criminal, inept, and incompetent administration in living memory.

From the Back Forty: Flyover Folks Can Relate to Vivek Ramaswamy

Is that meritocracy on the horizon? 

By Sarah Cowgill | Dec 29, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

Editor’s Note: From the Back Forty is Liberty Nation’s longest-running and most popular weekly column. 

Much like Hillary Clinton when she bounced off the glass ceiling, a couple of leftist lawyers found themselves unable to accept defeat and are now conspiring to tank Trump’s election certification and install Kamala in his place. If that isn’t the kiss of death, then there’s the endangered speaker drama in the House to add a petty bone of contention in getting the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed come January 6. And even if they weren’t paying attention before, flyover folks have certainly noticed Vivek Ramaswamy after this past week’s rant and will forever pronounce his name correctly.

No One Wants a Do-Over

If the January 6 protests were not enough to yank a knot in the tail of troublemakers, we may have a problem. Attorneys Evan A. Davis and David M. Schulte wrote an impassioned article that claims the following should happen: “The unlikelihood of congressional Republicans doing anything that might elect Harris as president is obvious. But Democrats need to take a stand against Electoral College votes for a person disqualified by the Constitution from holding office unless and until this disability is removed.”

One retired pastor in Central Indiana, Ron Hicks, couldn’t believe what he’d read: “Sure formula for a bloodbath or worse. Sadly the self-declared party of tolerance showing their tolerance is limited only to those who agree with them.”

Politico chased this wily rabbit down the hole, and its Democratic sources say they won’t object to certification. “I think you’re going to have a pretty sort of normal transfer, and I think we will respect the wishes of the American people … in contrast to what happened January 6, 2021,” Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) told the outlet.

Rob Grazioso Sr. of Arizona also offered his opinion: “The deceptive administration and constituents are at the cliff’s edge due to their own crookedness and still throwing rocks. The more rocks they throw, the weaker the ledge gets.”

But Olmo Freddie in Michigan had some helpful advice: “Those liberal lawyers need to do it Pro-Bono. Kamala owes at least 20 million.”

Back to the Endangered Speaker’s List

The heartland is tired of the squabbling over Speaker Mike Johnson. How many times, they ask, will the GOP eat their young? “It’s getting ridiculous,” said Randall Stine of Judyville, Indiana. “It’s like déjà vu every time someone gets their skirt blown up.”

“Mike Johnson’s disastrous handling of the continuing resolution unquestionably left his future speakership imperiled, with several members rethinking whether they can back him in January. Much will depend on if Donald Trump’s support for the Speaker remains firm,” one House Republican told the Daily Caller – with anonymity, of course.

Another tattling GOP House member claimed no one can trust the guy. “There’s nothing Mike Johnson can do between now and the Speaker’s race to regain the trust of Republicans in Congress. He’s as lame of a duck as Joe Biden.” Ouch.

 

Mike White is one frustrated Alabaman. He commented: “What the Heck is wrong with this party?! Cannot work together and seemingly get anything done without drama! Dems don’t have this issue. Don’t like her, and I doubt they all did. But look how much support and how long they supported Nancy. It’s called teamwork.”

And in Statesboro, Georgia, Bruce Moody had a thought. “He didn’t get what Trump and Musk wanted out of the bills that passed. But there is no mention of the Republicans who sided with the Democrats. Let’s all be fair.”

In Sioux City, Nebraska, Arnold Krabbenhoft pondered politely: “I hope the Republicans don’t waste our opportunity of getting Trump’s agenda going because of petty bickering. Let’s get a speaker elected early on so Congress can get down to business.”

Vivek Ramaswamy Makes a Connection

Heartlanders love hard work. And it would appear Vivek Ramaswamy is now the poster boy for getting the country back on track from mediocrity to meritocracy. In a social media post, Ramaswamy called out the shiftless and lazy. The rant read, in part:

“‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy, excellence over mediocrity, nerdiness over conformity, and hard work over laziness. That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence.”

He also demanded fewer devices in the hands of students and the random millennials who can’t get out of the basement.

It’s News, Captain – But Different!

Mina Dlrv of Las Milpas, Texas, was on board right away: “I agree! My biggest regret was to get my kids in 2013 as high school kids a smartphone. Just 4 yrs ago, I got my first smartphone. I am not impressed. Only use it for the map, calls, and texts.”

Mike Estle from Independence, Missouri, chimed in: “Too much allowing our past to define us. Just teach kids to improve every day. Too much, I’m OK, You’re OK. Too much Dumb and Dumber. Too much Bart Simpson. Never settle for mediocrity.”

And Michigan’s own Michael Dack summed it up nicely: “The political right believes in meritocracy, the political left in anti-quality.”

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Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.

Believers Flee Progressive Religion – And Many Find Orthodoxy Instead

As more churches “get with the times,” more Christians are getting out.  

By James Fite Dec 29, 2024 @ Liberty Nation News, Tags: Articles, Opinion, Politics

Religion has been losing ground in American society for years, and there are many reasons for the decline. But one modern trend is driving believers away from their church homes – and right into the ancient arms of Eastern Orthodoxy.

As churches “get with the times” and change their long-held, scriptural beliefs in favor of fitting in with what secular society says is right, more Christians are becoming disenfranchised with their ever-more progressive religion. Eastern Orthodox Christianity, however, is happy to welcome them home.

Religion and Politics – The March of “Progress”

Christian values were long considered to be conservative in America – and those values have always been a point of contention (dare we say, contempt?) for the more secular left, especially so-called progressives. From a scriptural point of view, men are men, women are women, and marriage is between one man and one woman. Furthermore, 1 Timothy chapter three and Titus chapter one lay out the requirements to be a church leader or elder – think priest, pastor, or deacon – and, surprise, those requirements don’t fit into the progressive worldview.

Today, numerous churches have abandoned these principles. Many Anglican, Lutheran, Episcopal, Methodist, and Presbyterian churches, among others, now allow women to be ordained as full members of the clergy. The United Methodist Church, for example, began ordaining women in 1956, and today, there are close to 12,000 clergywomen.

Many now also allow gay marriage and openly gay clergy despite clear biblical prohibitions against it. In 1972, the United Church of Christ was the first to ordain openly gay pastors. It was also the first to call for full inclusion of transgender clergy – and it certainly wasn’t the last. Even the Vatican has allowed priests to bless same-sex unions. Many of these churches have also jumped on the bandwagon to apologize for their “racist roots.”

This incremental bowing to “progress,” as inevitable as it may have been, has gone so far that even belief in God is now optional. For more than eight decades, the United Church of Canada, our northern neighbors’ largest Protestant denomination, has allowed openly gay men and women to lead ministries. In 2013, however, it was revealed that Gretta Vosper, the woman who has led Toronto’s West Hill United Church since 1997, is an atheist.

“I do not believe in a theistic, supernatural being called God,” Vosper told The Guardian in 2016, as the church was reviewing her beliefs to see if she was fit to lead. “I don’t believe in what I think 99.9% of the world thinks when you use that word.” She considers God just a metaphor for goodness and a life lived with compassion and justice. After the review, Vosper was initially deemed unfit and almost defrocked – but then, in 2018, she and the church reached an agreement that allowed her to remain a minister even without belief in or sermons about God. “This doesn’t alter in any way the belief of The United Church of Canada in God,” the church announced afterward, confusing many.

The Modern Exodus and a Boom for Orthodoxy

Back in March, Pew Research revealed that eight out of every ten Americans they polled said religion is losing influence in public life. As the report points out, 80% is the highest it has ever been in their surveys.

 

There are numerous reasons for this decline. Many Americans don’t attend church or consider themselves to be very religious because their parents – regardless of their own personal beliefs – didn’t prioritize faith and church attendance. When children aren’t taken to church or shown much consideration for God by their parents, they’re far less likely to prioritize belief in their own lives. And this apathy for religion grows with each generation.

Then there’s politics and progressive ideology. Much of the modern exodus is due to churches not changing their policies – or, at least, not doing so fast enough to suit increasingly socially liberal Americans who see scripture as misogynistic, homophobic, racist, or just outdated and bigoted in general. But many others are leaving their churches – if not Christianity entirely – because they feel their faith eroded by these changes.

Has God changed his mind? Was the church wrong to begin with? If the answer to either of these questions is “yes,” then how reliable are Christianity and the Bible? If it’s the modern progressive churches that have it wrong, what good are they to a true believer? For many, there seem to be no good answers – and so, church membership declines.

But that’s not the end of the story. While progressive religion drives Americans away – especially young men – a recent survey of Orthodox churches around the nation published by the Orthodox Studies Institute shows a 78% increase in converts compared to pre-pandemic levels in 2019. While men and women have historically converted in more or less equal numbers, the report shows that far more men have joined since 2020.

“The last four to five years have been a massive uptick,” Father Josiah Trenham of Saint Andrew’s Orthodox Church in Riverside, CA, told the New York Post. “It’s showing no sign of tapering off. If anything, it’s increasing still … It’s happening massively in untold numbers all over the country.”

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Why is this happening? “The feminization of non-Orthodox forms of Christianity in America has been in high gear for decades,” Father Trenham explained. “Men are much less comfortable [in those settings], and they have voted with their feet, which is why they’re minorities in these forms of worship. Our worship forms are very traditional and very masculine.”

It’s this very reliance on tradition – largely unchanged over the centuries – that draws many believers to Orthodoxy. One convert interviewed by the Post, Bailey Mullins, explained that he had noticed many denominations getting “co-opted by politics.” “I wanted to be somewhere that was stable and that wasn’t going to change,” he said. “It felt very ancient, and that was not something I’d experienced elsewhere.”

“Everything’s changing. Protestant churches are changing. The Catholic Church is changing. The culture is changing. The government is changing,” lamented Mullins. “People want something that is historic and not going to change. They want something that’s stable and sound and is not built on sand.”

Stable and sound – while those words may have once described most churches across Christendom, they’re nowhere to be found in progressive religion today.

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Liberty Nation does not endorse candidates, campaigns, or legislation, and this presentation is no endorsement.

Read More From James Fite Editor-at-Large 

Cultural Magic

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

Myths were once rare and exclusive things. The stories told around fires made up the soul of a culture. From the printing press to the internet, technology helped change all that. The oral became written and the written became all too easy to duplicate. Stories ceased to be communal and became personal. A written scroll was a painstaking effort, too precious to be hoarded, while a book could be one of a million copies. Everyone could have their own stories.

When communal stories became personal stories: some things were gained and others were lost. Religious stories (there is a reason that the Bible remains the quintessential bestseller), national myths and cultural lore gave way to stories of personal empowerment. The story of the group became that of the individual and ‘individualism’, absent after the fall of Greece and Rome, was reborn, first in tales and then the power shift from the collective to the individual.

Western individualism would not have existed without the underpinning of individual narratives and they would not have come into being without a printing press and books that people could read privately, instead of in groups, that increasingly came to center around the individual, not as a prototype, a set of principles or a racial hero, but as the fulfillment of individual drives.

The ‘cultural magic’ of the lore became democratized. It no longer existed only to amplify the agendas of the group, but to actualize the individual. Protagonists no longer needed to be moral or if immoral, a cautionary tale, it was enough that they satisfied someone’s desires. They could be foolish, selfish and immoral, commit adultery, lie, cheat and steal, without facing a reckoning.

The old culture wars had been between different cultures. The ascension of the Greek world led to a round of cultural wars over how much of the new Greek culture to absorb and how much of it to resist. But the new cultural wars were taking place within a culture over cultural morality. These culture wars continued for half a millennium and while there was a good deal of back and forth, they were largely marked by the slow relentless dismantling of cultural morality.

By the 19th century, culture had become an obsession that affected everything and defined society. The rate of change was accelerating and culture moved as fast as technology did. In the 20th century, culture fused with technology so that the medium became the message. Since the medium was change, the culture became about change and society had to keep changing.

With the advent of the counterculture, culture ceased to become fashion and became revelation. Not since the old Italians had treated their Renaissance sculptors, painters and tinkerers as saints had any generation become as convinced that their entertainers were really prophets, not just of beauty or ideas, but of a coming new age that would transform all of mankind.

Religion declined and culture decisively took its place. Culture offered no certainty, but in a world that seemed to be coming apart, neither did religion. While religion stifled hedonism, culture praised the liberating powers of individual impulses to bring joy and change the world. The counterculture soured into drug abuse, violence and cynicism, but the religious revivals that followed in its wake failed to shift the fundamental balance of cultural power away from it.

Cultural magic relentlessly predicted change and since change came, culture was right. The new world might not be better, but it was retroactively inevitable and so cultural magic ruled. The culture was the right side of history and if it seemed awful, that was because we were awful.

Conservatives grappled with the culture before surrendering to it. The culture wars are no longer about the role that culture should play, but what messaging the culture should be invested with. Having forgotten that the medium is the message, they believe that the message can be altered by becoming the counterculture and thus co-opting the culture the way the radicals once did.

But when the medium is change, the only cultural message that can be centered is radical change. To become a counterculture is to embody radical change and then to be changed by it.

Technology democratized culture but then collectivized it again as individual printing presses gave way to publishing monopolies and web sites to social media monopolies. Technological disruptions initially individualize only to then collectivize. Cultural change broke up old traditions through individualism and then collectivized to impose new cultural regimes.

Change created cultural magic. The rapid rate of technological and social change made culture appear disruptive and therefore prophetic. To the youth of each generation, culture appeared to be a harbinger of a new world, only to fall apart leaving behind nostalgia for its lost optimism. Each future became retrofuturistic and each utopia turned into a dystopia to be torn down again.

Our culture has become collectivist and disposable, alienating and ubiquitous, trying and failing to fill the role of religion and national mythos all the while setting out to demolish them. And social media’s mission of enlisting users into making culture has only made teenagers as depressed and dysfunctional as the ‘creators’ at the top of the cultural food chain.

Depression rates correlate with cultural saturation. The more people engage with a narcissistic feedback culture, the more unhappy they become. Like addicts, they turn to culture for validation, meaning and purpose, only to come away drained and depressed.

Cultural magic breaks up the family and replaces it with dissatisfaction, it replaces actual cultures with intellectual properties and religion with AI generated fictions on an extended payment plan. The only future it offers is the dysfunctional one that it makes out of people.

A healthy culture maintains a balance between individual drives and social values, between change and tradition, and does not confuse narratives with truth. It knows that we need to believe in more than whatever we invent ourselves. While we need to change, we also need to have touchstones that allow us to control how we change and what that change is to achieve.

Culture is magic when it conveys to us not only what we need to change, but also what to keep. Radical change destroys what exists now with the promise of making something better down the road, but the only thing that follows in the wake of its destruction is dependency on the destroyers. We have learned what it is to destroy, now we need to learn what to hold on to.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

 

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