Bipartisanship

Joe Lieberman wants some, particularly regarding any nuclear weapons agreement with Iran.

The only way to assure that [bipartisan unity] is for President Biden to submit an agreement with Iran to the Senate as a treaty, needing 67 votes to be ratified. That would require support from members of both political parties. It would bring Washington, for a moment, back to bipartisanship in foreign policy.

And

Achieving an agreement with Iran that could get 67 votes in the Senate wouldn’t be easy, but it is worth the effort. It would restore the longtime bipartisan consensus in Washington about Iran….

What is it that Lieberman wants here–bipartisanship, which is a worthy step to a lasting worthy agreement?

Or a permissive path for Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, which it then will use to destroy Israel, to sell to terrorists for attacks on Europe and the US, and to use itself around the world?b

An agreement that facilitates Iran getting nuclear weapons is not a worthy one.

Some Results of Illegal Immigration

Here are some of those, just crossing our unprotected southern border.

  • 17,300 migrants illegally crossing our southern border, with prior convictions of other crimes, arrested. Up from 9,447 in fiscal 2020.
    • assault
    • battery
    • domestic violence
    • burglary
    • robbery
    • larceny
    • theft
    • fraud
    • DUI
    • homicide
    • manslaughter
    • illegal drug possession and trafficking
    • illegal reentry
    • illegal weapons possession and transport
    • sex offenses
  • additional 8,979 migrants arrested with outstanding arrest warrants against them from other law enforcement agencies
  • 27% of arrestees were repeat offenders previously caught in the same fiscal year

Sheriff Joe Martinez, of Val Verde County, Texas:

What’s scary…we don’t know where they [the got-aways] are going. How many were from terrorist groups from special interest countries?
That’s the unknown.

Indeed. But the Biden-Harris administration cares not a fig about any of this.

Nor is it just this flood of illegal aliens who also are seriously violent criminals.

Outgoing DEA El Paso Division Chief Kyle Williamson:

It’s the worst it’s ever been. There’s no good news here. And the amount of methamphetamine and fentanyl coming in right now is unprecedented.

From the DEA’s March National Drug Threat Assessment:

The violence, intimidation, theft, and financial crimes carried out by [Mexican] TCOs [Transnational Cartel Organizations], criminal groups, and violent gangs pose a significant threat to our nation. The criminal activities of these organizations operating in the United States extend well beyond drug trafficking and have a profoundly negative impact on the safety and security of US citizens. Their involvement in alien smuggling, firearms trafficking, and public corruption, coupled with the high levels of violence that result from these criminal endeavors, poses serious homeland security threats and public safety concerns.

The Biden-Harris administration cares not a fig about any of this, either.

Aside: Just the News refers to these as “migrants.” They are not. They are illegal aliens. Full stop. It’s sad that JtN has allowed itself to get so infected with political correctness.

The Cost of Aiding and Abetting

$590 million dollars. That’s the cost of aiding and abetting ransomware criminals in the first half of this year. That’s what so-called victims of ransomware attacks paid to their putative attackers to reward them for their crimes. Moreover,

The average cost of reported ransomware payments per month in the US in 2021 was $102.3 million. If the current trend continues, the number of SARs filed in 2021 “are projected to have a higher ransomware-related transaction value than SARs filed in the previous 10 years combined,” the Treasury projects.

(The average cost and the total cost differ by about 4%, but the point remains valid.)

Andrew Lipow, Lipow Oil Associates LLC CEO, is busy ducking responsibility—and he’s sadly typical:

The anonymity of a digital currency has allowed ransomware attacks to flourish. If you can’t follow the money today, regulators need to either ban the digital currencies or implement regulations that enable the identification of people and accounts involved in these transactions—just like they would do for a real bank.

Sure. Because criminals engaged in ransomware attacks can be counted on to obey currency laws. What a copout.

Aside from that, whether digital currencies need to be regulated is wholly irrelevant. What’s required is for businessmen to stop paying the ransom, stop rewarding criminals for their crimes, stop actively aiding and abetting criminals. They’re only making their companies willing repeat targets.

Beyond that, this is more than just money out of these companies’ coffers. It’s money out of other companies’ coffers, too, those that are downstream in the supply chain from the company that decides it’s fine to reward the criminals. They have to pay the higher prices the “victim” companies charge to cover their payoffs ransom payments.

It’s also money out of the coffers of other, otherwise unrelated, companies as they must bear the added security costs accruing from having also been made targets by those putative victims so amply rewarding the crimes and the criminals engaged in them.

It’s money out of us consumers’ pockets, too, in the form of increased prices we have to pay as those company executives just treat the “ransom” payments as a cost center, a cost of doing business.

Facebook Employees and Virtue-Signaling

Here are a couple of examples, from a batch of leaked Facebook internal emails.

Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer asked employees to “hang in there” as the company figured out its response. “We have been ‘hanging in there’ for years,” one person replied. “We must demand more action from our leaders. At this point, faith alone is not sufficient.” [Emphasis added]

And

“All due respect, but haven’t we had enough time to figure out how to manage discourse without enabling violence?” another staffer responded. “We’ve been fueling this fire for a long time and we shouldn’t be surprised it’s now out of control.”

And

“I’m tired of platitudes; I want action items,” another staffer wrote.

And

[Y]et another staffer wrote[,] “History will not judge us kindly.”

And yet, none of these Precious Ones, along with so many of their cronies, cared enough about these failures and their claimed inability to do anything about them to resign rather than continue to go along with them.

All of these Precious Ones, along with so many of their cronies, plainly care more about their paychecks than they do about their integrity or their morality.

As the New York Post put it in a related piece summarizing The Atlantic article,

Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with growth has overridden ethical concerns and allowed hate speech and incitements to violence to spread unchecked….

That’s Facebook, from top to bottom, for all the…whining: management’s demand for growth above ethics and employees’ demand for paychecks above ethics.

Smuggling Illegal Aliens

It isn’t only Mexican cartels doing it. The Biden-Harris administration is nakedly trafficking in children. And by openly trafficking children on the last leg of the traffick, the Biden-Harris administration is complicit in the cartels’ traffick from the kids’ origin to our border.

Planeloads of underage migrants are being flown secretly into suburban New York in an effort by President Biden’s administration to quietly resettle them across the region, The Post has learned.
The charter flights originate in Texas, where the ongoing border crisis has overwhelmed local immigration officials, and have been underway since at least August, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Last week, The Post saw two planes land at the Westchester County Airport, where most of the passengers who got off appeared to be children and teens, with a small portion appearing to be men in their 20s.
Westchester County cops stood by as the passengers—whose flights arrived at 10:49 pm Wednesday and 9:52 pm Friday—got off and piled into buses.

In the dark of night.

And

A Post analysis of online flight-tracking data suggests that around 2,000 migrants nabbed after sneaking into the US from Mexico have arrived at the airport outside White Plains on 21 flights since August 8.

Similar trafficking is being done by Biden-Harris into Florida, also.

This is utterly despicable. It’s bad enough that the Biden-Harris administration has chosen to do nothing serious about the cartels’ trafficking children (and other humans) into the US, but for this administration then to actively participate by extending the trafficking into the interior of our nation is beyond the moral pale.

And it is trafficking. Were the Biden-Harris administration’s motives on the up and up, they would be publicizing transfers and explaining why, instead of doing this trafficking under cover of darkness and as quietly and publicity-free as possible.

Worse (if it’s possible to be worse), the only ones objecting are Republicans. The Progressive-Democratic Syndicate Party is silent on the matter, and Biden, through his Press Secretary Jen Psaki, actually insists that this trafficking is quite OK.