The top question it raises is whether Zelensky "has something" on Joe Biden, given the revelations of corruption between the Biden family and Ukraine's oligarchs, as seen from the contents of the abandoned Hunter Biden laptops. What does Zelensky indeed have on Biden?
Morris’ investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Joe Biden is unfit to be president. Why didn't anyone stop him?
Despite Democrats performing better than expected in the midterm elections just completed, two thirds of those voters do not want their leader, President Joe Biden, to run for re-election in 2024. Perhaps, by now, like nearly everyone else in the country, they know the real Joe Biden. Just who is he?
President Biden is a man of mediocre intellect who, over almost five decades in national public office, accomplished little to nothing, other than his election to federal offices and becoming rich off the federal teat and various side hustles. He is a thin-skinned, chip-on-the-shoulder, macho swaggerer who, in Tucker Carlson phrase, "kisses up and spits down." He is a prevaricator, plagiarist, teller-of-tall-tales narcissist who has no respect for the truth, only narratives that advance his interests or portray him favorably. If not a racist, he see only through the lens of race and panders, prejudges, or pounces accordingly. Finally, when it comes to young children and women, he just cannot, as my mother use to put it, keep his hands to himself; he may be guilty of much, much worse.
Sadly, as a result of advanced age and cognitive decline, his skills, such as a quick wit, adroit speech, and pleasant countenance, have eroded as his less desirable traits, such as anger, mendacity, and lack of self-control, have worsened. No wonder people are discovering the real Joe Biden.
Senators who served with him always knew. Nonetheless, none said to another, "Joe's a nice enough guy, but he must never be president." We can't let him have access to the nuclear codes, run the largest law enforcement operation in the world, or make life-and-death decisions about sending our Armed Forces into or out of harm's way. All senators, Democrats and Republicans, refused to hold Biden accountable and make him, at least as to any plan he had for the White House, persona non grata.
Nonetheless, there is historic precedent for such nonpartisan and patriotic action.
On August 7, 1974, my once and future boss, U.S. Senator Clifford P. Hansen (R-Wyo.), joined a few of his Republican colleagues, most famously Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) and Senator Hugh Scott (R-Pa.), on a journey to the White House to urge President Richard Nixon to resign. They told him, "not only had he 'lost' the congressional support of his own party and his natural allies among conservative Democrats, [but] also that they would actually convict him at trial and remove him from office." Nixon resigned the next day.
On New Year's Eve in 1974, Justice William O. Douglas, one of the Supreme Court's longest serving jurists, suffered a severe stroke in Hawaii. After months at Walter Reed Hospital, he returned to the Court, but he was nearly incapacitated, yet he hung on into the Court's new term the first Monday in October. On October 17, seven of the eight remaining justices agreed that no case would be decided by a five-four vote with Douglas in the majority. Only Justice Byron White of Colorado disagreed and pressed for Douglas's retirement. A month later, after 36 years on the bench, Justice Douglas did so.
In 1988, President George H.W. Bush nominated former U.S. senator John Tower (R-Texas) as his secretary of defense. Senator Tower, who served from 1961 to 1985, was the first Republican senator to represent Texas since Reconstruction. He chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee, later was chief U.S. negotiator at the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks in Switzerland, and in 1986 chaired the Tower Commission inquiry into the Iran-Contra Affair. All that was not enough to prevent the Senate from rejecting his nomination, given its concerns over his alcoholism and other issues.
Years ago, on a visit from Denver to D.C., I met with an old friend who once served as an attorney to the Senate Judiciary Committee and thus had frequent interactions with Biden. Knowing he was aware of my negative view of the senator, I asked his opinion. "He's always been good to me," he responded. "That's a pretty low bar," I replied. "It's my test," he shrugged. So it must have been for the senators, Democrats and Republican, who knew the real Joe Biden for nearly five decades. Now all Americans are paying a terrible price for their willingness to set such low standards.
Mr. Pendley, a Wyoming attorney, served in the administrations of presidents Reagan and Trump and for 30 years provided pro bono representation, including before the Supreme Court of the United States.
Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.
The top question it raises is whether Zelensky "has something" on Joe Biden, given the revelations of corruption between the Biden family and Ukraine's oligarchs, as seen from the contents of the abandoned Hunter Biden laptops. What does Zelensky indeed have on Biden?
Zelensky demands $55 billion more from American public to fund his bureaucrats
Seems it's pretty easy for Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to shake out more cash from the Uncle Sam money tree, what with Joe Biden in the White House ready to accommodate.
So he's gone bold now, calling on Uncle Sugar to provide him with another $55 billion, on top of the $90 billion already earmarked for Ukraine by Congress, $13 billion of which he's already gotten for budget needs. High as that is, it's even more outrageous than it looks, which we will get to in a minute.
First, Tucker Carlson's observations:
Conservative Treehouse has more here.
Here's some of the original reportage from Reuters last month:
WASHINGTON, Oct 12 (Reuters) — Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Wednesday appealed to international donors to increase their financial support, saying more money was needed to rebuild schools and homes destroyed by months of Russian bombardment.
Zelenskiy, speaking by video link to finance ministers at the World Bank and International Monetary Fund annual meetings in Washington, said Ukraine needed about $55 billion — $38 billion to cover next year's estimated budget deficit, and another $17 billion to start to rebuild critical infrastructure, including schools, housing and energy facilities.
"The more assistance Ukraine gets now, the sooner we'll come to an end to the Russian war, and the sooner and more reliably we will guarantee that such a cruel war will not spread into other countries," Zelenskiy said.
Well, no, Vlodko. That's not how these things work. Extended wars create entire consultant classes of special interests, intent on keeping the war fires burning, the budgets expanding, and the salaries rising. More money, longer war. Or, to paraphrase Thomas Sowell, you can have all the Ukraine war you'd like to pay for. (In the original, he said "poverty," in criticism of huge expanding government poverty programs.) Just ask what happened in Afghanistan and Vietnam.
Ukraine may have a sympathetic cause, given that it was invaded, but it's also a nation that didn't prepare for its own defense. It's had plenty of money, but it's one of the most corrupt places on Earth, according to Transparency International and other watchdogs of corruption and waste. In 2021, Transparency found that Zambia, Algeria, and the Philippines were less corrupt places. The corruption is so bad that Ukraine is a poorer nation than most of its Western neighbors, such as economically flourishing Poland and Hungary.
Is anyone asking where this money is going? Back when the last big tranche of federal cash was dispatched by the Senate to Ukraine, Sen. Rand Paul called for an auditing amendment to watch where that money was going. His amendment was turned down by a Democrat-led Senate, and Zelensky, whose nation is not a NATO ally, got what he wanted.
Well, he's spent that, and now he wants us to fill the budget hole in his government operations to the tune of $55 billion, some $38 billion for government operations and $17 billion for reconstruction of the country, showing that constructing roads and bridges is no match in terms of cost for government salaries and pensions. He asks this as if the place were still operating normally, as if the country were incapable of cutting the size of its government, freeing its citizens of all its oppressive regulations, and growing its economy on its own without the gigantic government apparatus of pre-war times. It could be argued that Ukraine spent so much on government bureaucrats and bureaucrat pensions that it didn't have much left for its national defense.
Here are some of the problems with that one.
Why does Zelensky want $38 billion for government operations when, according to the Reuters report, the IMF, which does demand conditions for aid, says it needs $3 billion per month, which would be $36 billion, not $38 billion? That needs a little explaining right there.
Second, what do these bureaucrats do that creates this $38 billion in "value" to justify the expense? Why can't they just be laid off as useless fixtures during a hot war and be done with it?
On the matter of pensions, note that pensions in Ukraine are a big cost indeed, given that so many young people have fled the country even in the pre-war era. It's expected that about a quarter of the population is going to be on government pensions by 2024, according to Wikipedia. Maybe they can try to bring some of the young people back by freeing their economy for entrepreneurship so they can get a tax base?
Here are some other problems cited in Wikipedia's entry, emphasis mine:
Pension expenditures in 2017 amounted to 284 billion UAH. representing approximately one-third of total spending. The government covered 141 billion UAH of pension spending while the rest was funded by Single Social Contribution.[12]
Capital residents received the highest average pension in 2017, 2408.02 UAH, while the lowest was in Sumy Oblast, 1560.95 UAH.
Nearly half of retirees (5.6 million) received the minimal pension.
Pensions of public servants, judges, prosecutors, and educators received multiples of the average. According to the State Statistic Service, payments over 10,000 UAH (312 EUR) were received by only 15.5 thousand pensioners.
Six million workers pay Single Social Contribution from which 12 million pensions are funded, which means that each contributor supports two retirees.
So these bureaucrats whom Zelensky expects Uncle Sam to bankroll make many times as much in terms of average pensions paid out compared to ordinary Ukrainians. Seems they can't be asked to make any wartime sacrifices, and with Joe Biden in the saddle ready to sign off on another tranche of free money to them, why would they? They can continue to live high on the hog compared to other Ukrainians, with many reports out there of them buying second and third properties for themselves in other countries. Can't interrupt that, now, can we? Zelensky himself is believed to be worth upwards of $20 million, according to Forbes. What's his wartime contribution?
Note also from the Wikipedia report that the latest they retire is at age 65. Over here in the states, they just raised that age to 70. Ukraine, which is the land of long-lived people who drink their yoghurt, can't raise their full retirement age to 70, too, so they can pay out less?
It's conditions like these that make that $55-billion demand to fund Ukraine's government seem so skeevy. It raises obvious questions about why there isn't an auditor for these gargantuan amounts, as well as a free-market policeman demanding reforms as conditionality, the way the IMF does, and why the IMF amounts and the contributions from Europe are so small, while the demands on the U.S. are so big. The top question it raises is whether Zelensky "has something" on Joe Biden, given the revelations of corruption between the Biden family and Ukraine's oligarchs, as seen from the contents of the abandoned Hunter Biden laptops. What does Zelensky indeed have on Biden?
But sure enough, Zelensky feels comfortable enough to get away with making these extraordinary demands, which seem to propel Ukraine into a fantasyland of permanent war and raining money. "Show leadership," he implored the U.S. by means of flattery. What he really meant was "show money."
Image: Screen shot from Fox News video via YouTube.
Comer: If Dems Think We’re Lying about Hunter, They Can Just Turn over Bank Records Instead of Establishing a War Room
On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Rep. James Comer (R-KY) said that if Democrats want to embarrass Republicans for their statements about Hunter Biden, they don’t need a war room, the Bidens can just release suspicious activity reports on the Biden family and prove them wrong if they really believe Republicans are wrong.
Comer said, “[I]f the Democrats want to embarrass Republicans on the Oversight Committee for making allegations that aren’t true about the Biden family, then all they have to do is prove that what we say is not true, turn those bank records over, those suspicious activity reports. This is the most damning thing with respect to what this White House has done to block congressional investigations and to protect Hunter Biden and the entire Biden family from all of their influence-pedaling overseas. They have changed the rules to where Congress can’t have access to those suspicious activity reports. That shouldn’t be something that we have to subpoena. We will if we have to. But, at the end of the day, Maxine Waters, once Joe Biden changed that rule, put language in legislation to give Congress that authority back. I think that’s something the Financial Services Committee can do early on to try to get Congress to have the ability to access those suspicious activity reports.”
In 2018 and 2020, Breitbart Senior Contributor and Government Accountability Institute President Peter Schweizer published Secret Empires and Profiles in Corruption. Each book hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list and exposed how Hunter Biden and Joe Biden flew aboard Air Force Two in 2013 to China before Hunter’s firm inked a $1.5 billion deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China less than two weeks after the trip. Schweizer’s work also uncovered the Biden family’s other vast and lucrative foreign deals and cronyism. Breitbart Political Editor Emma-Jo Morris’ investigative work at the New York Post on the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” also captured international headlines when she, along with Miranda Devine, revealed that Joe Biden was intimately involved in Hunter’s businesses, appearing to even have a 10 percent stake in a company the scion formed with officials at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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