Ransom

That’s what President Joe Biden (D) paid for five Americans kidnapped by Iran—$6 billion worth of ransom. Here’s Biden’s disingenuous (at best) claim:

Today [18 Sep 2023], five innocent Americans who were imprisoned in Iran are finally coming home…after enduring years of agony, uncertainty, and suffering[.]

Translation: Today, the United States government aided and abetted a criminal entity in the pursuance of its crimes by rewarding Iran for its crime of kidnapping.

Paying this ransom has just put a price tag on all Americans traveling overseas, and especially in the Middle East. Worse, that price has gone sky high: Biden has set the reserve price at $1.2 billion per American.

Biden’s dishonest rationalization, through a carefully anonymous senior administration official, for paying the Iranian ransom:

The alternative is these Americans never come home.

Never mind that lots of prior administrations—not just the immediately prior Trump administration—had brought kidnapped Americans home from a variety of criminal enterprises, not only Iran, without paying any ransom.

That’s not all. In addition to upping the incentive for kidnapping and raising the ransom requirement, Biden has personally funded further Iranian terrorist and terrorist-supporting activities for Iran, to the tune of $6 billion that Iran didn’t have last Sunday.

Cowardice in DoE

Recall that Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm tried a cross-country trip in her electric vehicle convoy and that, along the way on a hot and humid Georgia day, a staffer driving a gasoline-powered vehicle blocked off an EV charging station so that when the rest of Granholm’s group arrived, one of the EVs in her convoy would have a place to recharge. Police were called over the behavior by a separate EV driver who needed a charge and had a small baby in the car.

Last Tuesday, Granholm was called to testify before the House Science and Technology Committee about that incident among other items. Responding to Congressman Scott Franklin’s (R, FL) question about the incident, Granholm said,

Let me just say, I have a fantastic young staff, just fantastic. It was poor judgment on the part of the team.

Fair enough, openly acknowledging the error like that.

But when pressed by Franklin,

Granholm also sidestepped blame during the back-and-forth with Franklin on Thursday, saying that it was not her that was “saving the spot.”

But whose error, again? Isn’t she the one in charge? Wasn’t her fantastic young staffer only acting within the department culture and associated imperatives that she has consciously developed during her tenure?

This is the arrogance of Government above all, and the MFWIC of DoE above all of that. Not her fault; she’s the one in charge, she’s not one of the worker bees who, you know, actually do things.

Talking about the Weather

That’s what Hunter Biden, Devon Archer—both Burisma board of directors members at the time—then-Vice President Joe Biden, and Marc Holtzman discussed in the Vice President’s Naval Observatory residence. Or maybe not.

Holtzman wanted to advocate for former Kazakh Prime Minister Karim Massimov—today imprisoned in his country on treason charges—to become the next United Nations Secretary General.

The quid pro quo:

Hunter Biden and Archer hoped Holtzman—then the top official at Kazakhstan’s largest bank—could help deliver an energy deal for their Burisma client in Ukraine with Kazakhstan. Joe Biden was in a position to influence both.

The quid pro for the quid pro quo:

The other reasons for Massimov were Burisma Eurasia, because he was the Prime Minister, and Burisma was trying to expand its businesses, so I [Archer] leveraged the relationship to introduce him to the company….

This is the level of corruption that the President Joe Biden (D) syndicate is engaged in. That corruption and the legacy press’ collusion in it continue today. Biden’s White House Counsel, through his spokesman,

sent a memo Tuesday, titled, “It’s Time For The Media To Do More To Scrutinize House Republicans’ Demonstrably False Claims That They’re Basing Impeachment Stunt On”….

This is Biden’s diktat to the legacy press regarding the “news coverage” they’re required to do.

House Republican leaders should be held accountable…

And

As you begin to cover the House GOP’s impeachment push more intensely….

The Biden instruction to the legacy media can be read here.

First He Disrespects our 9/11 Fallen

He didn’t deign appear at the 9/11 site on 11 September of this year—he lay over in Alaska on his way back from Vietnam instead of pressing on to New York. Then he lies about being at the site the day after the attack.

Ground Zero in New York—I remember standing there the next day and looking at the building. I felt like I was looking through the gates of hell. It looked so devastating. Because of the way you—from where you could stand.

Just the News pointed out Biden’s lie—he was in DC for a Senate session—and Biden himself presaged his lie in his 2007 book Promises to Keep in which he wrote that he:

arrived in Washington on Sept. 11 after a plane hit the Pentagon and that he saw the smoke from that crash….

The New York Post exposed more of Biden’s lie:

the 80-year-old president also claimed he saw the fireball caused by the plane that struck the Pentagon in northern Virginia from Washington’s Union Station, when his own book says he merely saw “a brown haze of smoke.”

As bad as Biden’s lying is, he insults our intelligence with the blatancy of his lies: he really thinks we’re that grindingly stupid enough that we believe him.

How About Some Reparations?

The lede says it.

No human remains have been found from excavations at a Canadian Indian residential school two years after allegations were made that more than 200 Indigenous children were buried at the site. In the aftermath of the claims, Canada experienced a rash of burning and vandalizing of dozens of Catholic churches.

This has occurred two years after

the British Columbia First Nation Band Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced that a radar survey had found “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.

As a result of that false claim, a dozen Catholic churches were razed through arson, and dozens more were vandalized. The Canadian government paid $320 million CAD ($234,320,672 USD) to Indigenous communities and an additional $40 billion CAD to those who were allegedly abused at the schools.

Minegoziibe Anishinabe Chief Derek Nepinak insists that these excavations’ results take nothing away from the difficult truths experienced by our families who attended the residential school in Pine Creek.

That’s as may be, but the smear of mass graves of 215 children is separate from that. Maybe it’s time to reclaim those $360 million CAD that were paid out on false accusations and to begin holding to account those responsible for the smear.