SIGforum.com Main Page The Lounge Joe Biden on the campaign trail: "If you like your health care plan, ..." // biden is out !
Main Page The Lounge Joe Biden on the campaign trail: "If you like your health care plan, ..." // biden is out !Go | New | Find | Notify | Tools | Reply | |
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No Joe, but I’ve known lots of people who have their livelihoods pilfered by their government for less and less returns every year. Nobody I know has to decide which house they’re going to stay in next. Cmon man! "The days are stacked against what we think we are." Jim Harrison | |||
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| Muzzle flash aficionado  |
I don't know that I know anyone who has experienced that. I don't think it's something many people would talk about. flashguy Texan by choice, not accident of birth | |||
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safe & sound |
Hunter is well known for his intimate images. | |||
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FIFY. No need to be specific. Washington is corrupt from the top to the bottom. ----------------------------- Guns are awesome because they shoot solid lead freedom. Every man should have several guns. And several dogs, because a man with a cat is a woman. Kurt Schlichter | |||
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Never been able to get my female companions to pose nekkid for me. I need to up my game.  End of Earth: 2 Miles Upper Peninsula: 4 Miles | |||
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Fire begets Fire |
That’s pretty much grounds for no security clearance - ever… "Pacifism is a shifty doctrine under which a man accepts the benefits of the social group without being willing to pay - and claims a halo for his dishonesty." ~Robert A. Heinlein | |||
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You and me both, Yooper. ____________________________________________________________ Money may not buy happiness...but it will certainly buy a better brand of misery A man should acknowledge his losses just as gracefully as he celebrates his victories Remember, in politics it's not who you know...it's what you know about who you know | |||
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| wishing we were congress |
https://twitter.com/i/status/1504536859808043009 video at link Psaki says China's failure to denounce the Russian invasion of Ukraine "flies in the face of everything China stands for" WTF ? | |||
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Hard to believe 81,000,000 Americans could have been wrong about this Dipstick! | |||
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Tinker Sailor Soldier Pie |
 ~Alan Acta Non Verba NRA Life Member (Patron) God, Family, Guns, Country Men will fight and die to protect women... because women protect everything else. ~Andrew Klavan | |||
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Nothing Hunter was and is involved in can be described as "intimate". His behavior is degenerate and sub human at best. "Fixed fortifications are monuments to mans stupidity" - George S. Patton | |||
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| wishing we were congress |
https://www.breitbart.com/poli...-black-lives-matter/ SCOTUS Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson Inspired by Critical Race Theory, ‘1619 Project’, Black Lives Matter Protest Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who is President Joe Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court seat being vacated by retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, cited Critical Race Theory founder Derrick Bell and the controversial “1619 Project” as inspirations in 2020. During a lecture to the University of Michigan Law School in observance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, unearthed by the Daily Wire, Judge Jackson, who would be confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit the following year, cited Bell’s book, Faces at the Bottom of the Well, and said her parents had it on their coffee table as she was growing up The book argues that other Americans define their identity in relation to black Americans, who are forced to stay at the bottom of society. In one chapter, “The Space Traders,” Bell created a fictional allegory in which the U.S. would agree to sell its black citizens to space aliens in exchange for gold that would help settle the national debt. This isn't just metaphorical. Bell told NPR's Fresh Air he believed whites would make the trade in real life. He argued in the book that the history of slavery was not only "an example of what white America has done," but "a constant reminder of what white American might do." Judge Jackson also cited the fraudulent “1619 Project” of Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times, which won the Pulitzer Prize despite falsely claiming that the United States fought the American Revolution to defend slavery in the South. Though she cited Hannah-Jones to make the observation that black Americans have fought hardest to give life to America’s founding ideals, at no point did Judge Jackson disagree with the author’s thesis that America was founded on slavery. Judge Jackson closed her lecture by citing what she called “favorite civil rights photograph of modern times” — an image of a 2016 protest over the police shooting of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. somebody who thinks like this does not belong on the Supreme Court | |||
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Yeah, obviously a Freudian slip by Joe when he made the comment. | |||
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| Get my pies outta the oven!  |
More like the dementia just making him blurt things out like a 4 year old would. Freudian implies he still has a coherent mind left which I don’t think is the case. | |||
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| wishing we were congress |
I don't understand this. What is biden doing ? https://townhall.com/tipsheet/...ck-on-track-n2604589 Russia’s top state-controlled energy company is set to cash in on a $10 billion contract to build out one of Iran’s most contested nuclear sites as part of concessions granted in the soon-to-be-announced nuclear agreement that will guarantee sanctions on both countries are lifted. Russian and Iranian documents translated for the Washington Free Beacon show that Rosatom, Russia’s leading energy company, has a $10 billion contract with Iran’s atomic energy organization to expand Tehran’s Bushehr nuclear plant. Russia and the Biden administration confirmed on Tuesday that the new nuclear agreement includes carveouts that will waive sanctions on both countries so that Russia can make good on this contract...The removal of these sanctions will provide Moscow’s Rosatom company with a critical source of revenue as American and European sanctions crush Russia’s economy in response to its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine... A State Department spokesman, speaking on background, told the Free Beacon the administration continues "to engage with Russia on a return to full implementation of the JCPOA. As Secretary Blinken said last week, ‘Russia continues to be engaged in those efforts, and it has its own interests in ensuring that Iran is not able to acquire a nuclear weapon.'" It looks like the Biden administration is fixated on giving away massive concessions to Iran's "death to America" regime, and has been engaged in those negotiations through the Russians. Thanks to this arrangement, the Russians are also getting their own lucrative concessions and incentives. We are helping enrich the Russians at a moment in which the Russians are receiving pariah treatment from most of the global community due to their outrageous invasion of Ukraine and related savagery and war crimes. But to help Iran land a sweetheart deal, Biden is offering generous carve-outs from the Ukraine opprobrium. Concessions everywhere in exchange for...essentially nothing President Biden has assured Russian despot Vladimir Putin that Biden’s proposed Iran nuclear deal will immunize Moscow from the sanctions the administration otherwise portrays as crushing Moscow for its barbaric, unprovoked war against Ukraine. So Russia will not only reap desperately needed revenue; it will also continue to develop the nuclear program of jihadist Iran...While Biden has been telling the world how tough he is when it comes to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he has also — through his Iran-friendly envoy, Rob Malley — deputized Putin’s diplomat to intercede and cut the deal Biden is desperate to strike with Iran. And mind you, the president of the United States is doing this in order to make a deal with the world’s leading state sponsor of anti-American terrorism, which does not deign to meet face to face with Biden’s envoy. At the eleventh hour, as the parties were preparing to celebrate the new deal that would line Iran’s pocket with billions of dollars in sanctions relief, Putin trolled Biden by demanding that he guarantee in writing that the Ukraine sanctions Biden has been touting would not interfere in the Russia-Iran commerce that is foundational to Biden’s Iran deal...Now, after a few days’ pause, Biden is giving Russia exactly what it wanted — just in public announcements rather than in writing. | |||
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by sdy: I don't understand this. What is biden doing ? https://townhall.com/tipsheet/...ck-on-track-n2604589 Here is an interesting answer to your question. Team Biden Runs the Syria Playbook on Ukraine The administration’s horror over Putin’s war is not merely performative, but functional—in the service of realigning with Iran https://www.tabletmag.com/sect...ria-playbook-ukraine The Biden administration has spent the last two weeks publicly censuring and sanctioning Russia over its brutal invasion of Ukraine. Yet even as it engaged in evermore shrill public denunciations of the undoubted evils of Vladimir Putin, it was simultaneously working hand-in-glove with the Russian dictator to finalize a new agreement with Iran over its nuclear program. So how do we make sense of the administration’s public campaign to isolate Putin at the same time as it partners with the vilest man on the planet to cut a deal with a Russian client state? The key to understanding this seemingly erratic set of zigs and zags is the recognition that Team Biden is following the template that former President Barack Obama created in Syria a decade ago. Let’s call it the “Syria playbook.” To understand the Syria playbook, and its connection to Ukraine, we need to look back to Obama’s second term, and its all-consuming policy priority, the Iran deal—which remains no less urgent in 2022 than it was in 2013. Back then, Syria itself did not matter much to Obama, who mused about how one might weigh deaths in that country against deaths in the Congo—implying that if the latter was not a pressing U.S. national interest, neither was the former. Rather, Syria’s significance for Obama lay only in the risk that images of hundreds of thousands of people being tortured and murdered might interfere with his defining foreign policy initiative: reaching a deal that would realign the United States away from Israel and Saudi Arabia and toward Iran, his new choice for regional hegemon. Meanwhile, Syria did matter greatly to Iran, Obama’s sought-after ally. Along with Ukraine, Syria also mattered very much to Russia, then as now a key partner in the nuclear negotiations with Iran. Syria mattered to Russia because it mattered to Iran; because the Russians saw the Assad family as a historical ally; and because Putin looked forward to restoring, enlarging, and entrenching the Soviet-era naval presence that would allow Russia to project power in the eastern Mediterranean. It was in Syria that the Obama-Biden team honed the cynical duplicity we’re witnessing today. At the heart of Obama’s maneuvering in and around Syria was the practice of strategic messaging, which allowed Obama to hold both ends of the stick while speaking out of both sides of his mouth—or rather, letting cynical or clueless members of his administration strike seemingly contradictory poses, each of which allowed him to advance toward his goal. He could be simultaneously moralizing and a cold realist—whatever it took not to be distracted from his main objective of a deal with Iran. Achieving that goal in turn meant cooperation with Russia, a principal backer of the Assad regime. The Obama administration alumni now in charge of the Biden administration currently pose as staunch defenders of NATO and the trans-Atlantic alliance against Russia’s barbaric aggression in Ukraine. But in 2012 and 2013, it was NATO’s other members who pressed Obama to join, and lead, the European and regional states opposed to Assad’s butchery in Syria. Instead, Obama fended them off by turning to Russia, and using its veto power-by-proxy at the United Nations and other international forums in which the administration claimed to place stock. Anyone who wants something in Syria, the Obama administration told U.S. allies, should go talk to Putin. In August 2012, Obama made the blunder that he has since repeatedly said he regrets most of all out of every decision he made as president, when he boxed himself in by laying down a red line against Assad’s use of chemical weapons—a line Assad would cross repeatedly, all the way to a major chemical attack in August of 2013. Again, Obama turned to Russia to bail him out of a commitment he had no intention of keeping, as the rest of his presidency demonstrated quite clearly. At the time, Obama was on the verge of clinching the interim agreement with Iran, known as the Joint Plan of Action, which was signed in November 2013. There was no chance he would jeopardize that breakthrough by targeting Iran’s client in Damascus. He had now signaled that, for all the moralizing rhetorical barrages against Russia’s support for the brutal Assad, Putin remained his principal partner in the Syrian arena. That Putin fully understood Russia’s importance in Obama’s Iran calculus could be seen by the fact that the Russian dictator immediately pressed his advantage by seeking compensation in Ukraine. In early 2014, he took the first small bite of the sovereign nation, invading and annexing Crimea. The United States’ reaction was rich in rhetorical condemnation and otherwise pointedly feeble. Aside from a profound historical critique from then-Secretary of State John Kerry about how “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th-century fashion,” which must have sounded like a compliment in Moscow, the administration leveled some sanctions against individual Russians, froze the assets of a handful of Russian government officials in the United States, and canceled their visas—in other words, the kind of response that makes for palatable headlines, but has precisely zero effect on the calculations of Vladimir Putin. Putin would continue ingesting additional amuse-bouches extracted from eastern Ukraine in return for his services in Syria well into 2015. But the main dish would be served to him later that year. As Obama drew closer to finalizing his deal with Iran, he was faced with a problem: His prospective Iranian ally and future candidate for Middle Eastern hegemony simply couldn’t get things under control in Syria. Assad and the Iranians were being bled badly, and were in danger of actually losing the war. But first things first: In June 2015, Obama officially got his deal with Iran. Now it was time to protect what Obama called Iran’s “equity” in Syria. The following month, the commander of the Iranian forces, the late Qassem Soleimani, went to Moscow for help. At some point in 2015, an Assad go-between and Obama’s regional point man, Robert Malley (who is currently in charge of the Biden administration’s talks with Iran in Vienna), informed the White House that the Russians were preparing to intervene directly in Syria. And in September 2015, shortly after the Iran deal was done, the Russian military went into Syria. Putin was now the protector of the equity Obama promised the Iranians. Moreover, in addition to safeguarding its base on the Black Sea, Russia was gifted with a long-sought strategic asset: a base on the Mediterranean, directly on NATO’s southern flank, and on the border with Israel. Team Obama sought to cover its acquiescence to—indeed, its satisfaction with—Russia’s intervention by initially presenting it as a stupid decision on Putin’s part, which Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted would result in a quagmire for Russia. But that was just more “strategic messaging.” In no time, the Obama administration was coordinating with the Russians as they bombed opposition-held areas to dust in order to help Assad crush his enemies and win his war. Simultaneously, in one of the more grotesque examples of the Syria playbook, Samantha Power performed arabesques of moral outrage at the U.N., “shaming” the Russians for doing exactly what Obama had contracted with them to do, in support of the Iran deal. Obama’s realignment policy took a hit in the Trump years, during which the United States withdrew from the Iran deal and facilitated the transition of the much-admired Soleimani back to the spirit world. But once Team Obama was back in power in the form of the Biden administration, Iran was back at the front of the line. Not coincidentally, so was Ukraine—the currency in which Iran’s Russian protector liked to be paid. The Biden administration came into office with immediate gifts to both Iran and Russia. It removed sanctions on Iranian clients and stopped enforcing sanctions on Iranian oil exports. It also waived sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. Putin’s dependence on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure was Kyiv’s insurance policy against a further invasion. Russia needed that infrastructure to move gas to Europe, and Moscow couldn’t risk it being damaged or sabotaged. The purpose of Nord Stream 2 was to give Russia an alternative route, one that kept the same amount of gas flowing to Europe but eliminated its dependence on Ukraine. Once the pipeline was physically completed, Putin concluded that it was a fait accompli that the Europeans would eventually activate it, now that Biden had given it the green light. As the talks with Iran entered their final stage, Putin began his preparations to move on Ukraine. No more amuse-bouches. Now it was time to Syrianize Ukraine—to consume it whole, as Russia’s main course at the Iran deal banquet. Underneath all the anti-Putin rhetoric, and even the slew of sanctions that followed the Russian dictator’s invasion (which have increased only somewhat in severity as the fighting has dragged on), the posture of the Biden administration toward the Russian military operation has remained more or less the same—sanctions, sure, but nothing that puts friendly countries in an awkward spot, let alone starts World War III by giving the Ukrainians too many weapons, a policy that recalls Obama’s posture toward Moscow in Syria. Putin is a thug, yes. But it takes a thug to ruthlessly pound ISIS and keep the Israeli Air Force grounded. Looking back at the Syria playbook tells us that the denunciations of and half-measures to combat Putin’s aggression, combined with the solicitation of Russian aid and guarantees for Iran, is par for the course for the Obama-Biden realignment dance. And once the cynical two-step of this dance is seen for what it is, the moves are easy to spot. Even as the administration was slapping sanctions on Russia, it was simultaneously setting up a sanctions evasion haven for Putin in Iran, as it prepared to lift sanctions on Russia’s Iranian client. How does that work? The Russians are the guarantors of the Iran deal. Moscow would receive Iran’s excess enriched uranium and exchange it for natural uranium. Per the deal, it would also be involved in nuclear and scientific cooperation projects with the Iranians. Naturally, the administration said it was “weighing” sanctions on Rosatom, Russia’s nuclear power supplier and uranium producer. Only it knows it won’t sanction Rosatom, because the Iran deal is more important. “We would of course not sanction Russian participation in nuclear projects that are part of resuming full implementation of the JCPOA,” a State Department official soon clarified. Rosatom reportedly has a $10 billion contract to expand Tehran’s Bushehr nuclear plant. This is to say nothing about the prospects of selling arms to the Iranians once the Biden administration decides to revoke, or just not enforce, a Trump-era executive order that blocked arms sales to Tehran. Obama’s 2015 deal allowed arms sales after October 2020, and locked it into a Security Council resolution. The Trump administration invoked a snapback mechanism to reverse the U.N. resolution, and locked that in with the executive order. As part of what it calls a “rapid return to mutual compliance” with the deal, the Biden administration will want to permit such sales as quickly as possible. As Iran’s main arms supplier, the Russians will be allowed—even required—to sell arms to Iran, in order to fulfill the terms of the deal. And so it goes. Moscow, already familiar with the Syria playbook and no doubt fed up with having to play the administration’s sanctions games while its soldiers are dying in Ukraine, decided to make a point of exposing the administration’s double-game publicly for all to see. At the 11th hour, as the Biden team got ready to announce the conclusion of the deal with Iran, the Russians threw a wrench in the works. They demanded the United States announce written guarantees that its sanctions on Russia will not impede “our right to free and full trade, economic and investment cooperation and military-technical cooperation with the Islamic Republic.” In a line that deserves a place in the annals of Soviet humor, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov added, “We need guarantees that these sanctions won’t affect the regime of trade-economic and investment ties embedded in the [nuclear deal].” Ridiculous, right? But it only took a few days before the Russians declared they were satisfied with the written guarantees they received from the Biden administration. That is to say, they’ve made their point, and everyone understood it. As was the case in Syria, all the moral outrage about the horrors of Russia bombing civilian neighborhoods is just the lead in to the Iran deal. The American horror at Putin’s aggression, in other words, is not merely performative, but functional—all the more so after the instrumentalization of Vladimir Putin in domestic American politics since 2016. For the Biden administration, unlike for Obama, there are necessarily two Putins. There’s Vladimir Putin, the realist head of state. He’s a stone-cold killer, to be sure, but he gets the job done in rough spots like Syria, where he helped keep America out of another Middle Eastern war while holding in check the U.S. allies and their domestic neocon lobbyists who wanted to drag us into that conflict and spoil the Iran deal. He’s a thug, yes. But it takes a thug to ruthlessly pound Islamist terrorists like ISIS and keep the Israeli Air Force grounded. Then there’s “Putin,” the devious monster who hacked our elections to install a puppet in the White House in an all-out assault on American democracy that even some Republicans deplore. Clearly, no compromise is possible with that kind of hell spawn. But if Putin was instrumental in neutralizing pesky U.S. allies of old with his entry into Syria while Obama conducted the real business with Iran, “Putin” is equally useful toward the same end: browbeating U.S. allies put in danger by the Iran realignment into keeping their mouths shut while the 2.0 deal is sealed. Sure enough, the administration has weaponized moral outrage over “Putin” in a messaging campaign against the Gulf Arab states and Israel. How can these countries be real U.S. allies when they don’t denounce “Putin”? While it’s perhaps unsurprising that the Gulf Arab states side with the authoritarian “Putin,” underscoring their incompatibility with American values, how can Israel call itself a democracy while it enables “Putin”? Like “the Palestinians” and “settlements,” “Putin” is a cudgel masquerading as a principled American stand on values that is meant to keep a downgraded Israel preoccupied and on the defensive as the administration gives nuclear weapons capacity to its enemy. If, with its faux outrage over “Putin,” the Obama-Biden crew manages to trip the Israelis into crossing a line with the actual Vladimir Putin, whom Obama helped install on Israel’s northern border, thereby complicating Israel’s ability to operate against Iran, then all the better. That is to say, the administration’s moral outrage really isn’t about Ukraine at all. It’s another tool in the service of its deal with Iran. Which is the common thread between the timing of Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine, and the U.S. reaction to it. It’s all pegged to the realignment. That’s the lesson of the Syria playbook. _________________________ "Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it." Mark Twain | |||
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| wishing we were congress |
thanks wcb. quite a read . will take a few times to fully understand. obama was even worse than I thought and this is indeed another obama administration | |||
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More money to the 'Big Guy' maybe? Or just a continuation of the hatred this administration has for anything that is good for Americans? Regardless, they are the primary enemy of this country and its future. With all due respect, this administration and president has eclipsed the Barry O administration when it comes to the damage inflicted on this country in the shortest timeframe possible. ----------------------------- Guns are awesome because they shoot solid lead freedom. Every man should have several guns. And several dogs, because a man with a cat is a woman. Kurt Schlichter | |||
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We've spent the last 40 years living in the shadow of jimmy carters failures. Afghanistan, Iran and the 1 china policy. We're seeing biden lay the groundwork for the next 40 years. ____________________________________________________ The butcher with the sharpest knife has the warmest heart. | |||
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| wishing we were congress |
https://www.breitbart.com/poli...ity-as-top-priority/ HHS Sec. Xavier Becerra Promotes Critical Race Theory-Based ‘Health Equity’ as Top Priority Health and Human Services (HHS) Sec. Xavier Becerra on Friday identified “health equity” as the department’s top priority under his leadership. “Health equity has to be part of everything we do,” Becerra said, during an address marking his first year in office. “You will see health equity pervades everything we do.” For the left, “equity” means rationing and redistributing resources based on perceived oppression, privilege, and social status — typically based on race or gender identity. Becerra’s commitment to the ideology marks an important milestone for a movement that has been proliferating among medical schools and professionals. As Breitbart News reported, the radical group “White Coats for Black Lives” has infiltrated American medical schools, forcing the “equity” ideology into many aspects of medical decision-making, ethics, and hiring practices. This group believes that “the dominant medical practice in the United States has been built on the dehumanization and exploitation of Black people” and therefore advocates “‘prioritizing’ black patients over other patients and ‘unlearning toxic medical knowledge and relearning medical care that centers the needs of Black people and communities.'” Furthermore, the organization maintains that “whiteness is an invented political tool created through violence in the service of establishing domination,” “whiteness has been historically used as a violent means for stealing lives,” and “racism, capitalism, and white supremacy are interdependent systems which lead to the particular dehumanization, exploitation, and murder of Black people.” Similarly, the American Medical Association (AMA) issued a 54-page manifesto called “Advancing Health Equity” which teaches medical professionals how to agitate toward critical race theory-centric policies and practices. “Yet a rich tradition of work in health equity and related fields, including critical race theory (defined in the glossary), gender studies, disability studies, as well as scholarship from social medicine, gives us a foundation for an alternative narrative,” it says, citing a Guide to Counter-Narrating the Attacks on Critical Race Theory, “one that challenges the status quo, one that moves health care towards justice.” Instead of focusing on a patient’s individual needs, the AMA contends that “inequities cannot be understood or adequately addressed if we focus only on individuals, their behavior or their biology.” Rather, political considerations are paramount to healthcare. “This effort involves confronting the mounting evidence of the health effects of structural racism, while grappling with understanding intersecting, complex, and deeply entrenched ‘systems of power and oppression,’ including white supremacy … classism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism and sexism,” the guide says. A chart in the guide suggests replacing some commonly used words with other “equity-focused alternative[s],” such as replacing the word “fairness” with the phrase “Social Justice,” replacing the word “minority” with “historically marginalized or minoritized or BIPOC,” and using “oppressed” in place of “disadvantaged.” It is yet unclear how Becerra’s determination to focus on “health equity” will affect how Americans receive healthcare. | |||
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SIGforum.com Main Page The Lounge Joe Biden on the campaign trail: "If you like your health care plan, ..." // biden is out !
Main Page The Lounge Joe Biden on the campaign trail: "If you like your health care plan, ..." // biden is out !© SIGforum 2024