“In fiscal year 2022 alone, 2.3 million illegal aliens were apprehended by Border Patrol officials”

After Propping Up Biden’s Staged Border Visit, NPR Frames McCarthy’s Trip As A ‘Photo Op’

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD at the Federalist:

FEBRUARY 17, 2023

During the short clip, the podcast host asked NPR International Correspondent Eyder Peralta about Biden’s visit to El Paso, Texas, to which Peralta began his response by utilizing legacy media’s infamous “Republicans pounce!” framing to make it appear as if the ongoing border crisis is nothing but manufactured outrage by the GOP.

“Republicans have been criticizing the president for not visiting the border, and in their eyes, he was ignoring the humanitarian crisis there. So today he went there to tour some facilities and talk to some border agents, and he even took a tour of the border wall,” Peralta said. “The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, didn’t seem very happy about the visit.”

At no point in the clip did Peralta or the podcast host bother to mention that prior to Biden’s arrival, immigration authorities cleared out many of the migrant encampments in the areas the president would be visiting. As The Federalist’s Tristan Justice reported, Customs and Border Protection sources “described a ‘sanitized and orderly’ situation presented to the president, clouding the severity of the crisis.”

[READ: McCarthy Begins To Build Case For Mayorkas Impeachment]

As a result of Biden’s open-border policies, illegal immigration has skyrocketed along the U.S.-Mexico border over the past two years of his presidency. In fiscal year 2022 alone, 2.3 million illegal aliens were apprehended by Border Patrol officials, with 1.7 million captured in 2021. These figures don’t even include the hundreds of thousands of known “gotaways,” whom immigration authorities were not able to apprehend due to a “lack of manpower.”

But rather than focus on how Biden has wildly exacerbated the disaster, leftist “news” organizations such as NPR would rather play political games to score bonus points with their ideological cohorts in Congress. To them, the lives of the overwhelmed Border Patrol agents, Americans living along the border, and the migrants risking their lives trying to come to the U.S. mean nothing.

All that matters is maintaining the Democrat-preferred narrative at all costs.

Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

“but Scandinavians also have the world’s highest suicide rates….so let it be warm again!”

February 18, 2023

Frozen, and Not from Global Warming

By Jeffrey Folks at American Thinker:

It’s been cold for so long, and it’s only early winter.  I have jackets of different thicknesses lying around the house, ready to layer or remove as the temperature outside fluctuates by fifty degrees.  My plants are covered as they struggle to survive the winter that is normally mild in this sub-tropical location.  Something is happening, and it’s not just my imagination.

As I write, I have on three layers of tops along with a thick wool lap-robe covering my legs.  My hands and face are cold despite the gas heat that runs almost continually.  Outside is dark under a new moon and quiet with no one, human or otherwise, on the streets.  The night sounds I usually hear — the hum of distant traffic, the rustle of animals near the house, the occasional vehicle passing the door — are absent.  The only sound I hear is the unsettling cry of a pack of coyotes in the distance, celebrating a kill.  It’s a frozen world, and a taste of what the world would be like year-round if we entered a new Ice Age.

There is silence and a near total lack of activity.  There are no lights on in the houses along the streets.  Everyone is curled up under blankets and comforters, enjoying a long winter’s nap.  When they arise, they should be well rested, but there will be little to do since it is too cold to walk or jog, and all the young plants will have been frozen.  One can sit inside, read as long as one’s eyes and attention last, watch TV, scan the news and markets, and of course eat.  That is hardly a recipe for health and happiness.

Scandinavians are used to it, but Scandinavians also have the world’s highest suicide rates.  Those of us who live in Florida, and who came to Florida to escape it, are not.  We enjoy the warm, balmy days with a south breeze and cumulus clouds rising in the morning.  Even the humidity is welcome, since it comforts the joints and sinuses, wrapping one’s tired body in its huge hands like a newborn.  On warm, humid mornings, we drink our coffee outside and walk and do errands before it gets too hot.  The morning sky is softly pink and orange, promising a new day filled with life-sustaining heat and afternoon rain.  Then there is the strong odor of growing things, and of death and decay as well, and the pungent smell of grasses and herbs and flowers in bloom, but that is all months away.

What I have now is the cold office with the armrests themselves chilling the sleeves of my jacket, cold feet and face, and infinite darkness and silence.  This is what the afterlife must be for those whom God has not redeemed, but it’s not the afterlife that bothers me at this moment — it’s the cold in my feet and legs and back, even with three layers, and the absolute emptiness of the nighttime hours.

Cold seeps through even the warmest jacket I own, admittedly not the warmest available, but one I’d always thought would be too warm.  The small wool carpet beneath my desk is designed to keep my feet warm, but it doesn’t.  The “room temperature” bottled water is cool on my tongue, and the metal surface of the computer is like frozen iron.  The only real warmth comes from the thick wool sweater that I use as a lap robe.  For some reason, that rustic, hand-knit sweater that I bought in Varna, woven from the wool of sheep that probably lived nearby, captures the warmth of my legs and holds it.

I slept well at first under my three thick covers, and when I awoke just after three, my lower body was toasty.  I was tempted to stay in bed but got up in the cold, a few minutes before I could get settled with my thick jacket, lap robe, and water bottle and work amid the intense early-morning silence.  The sleep was deep and refreshing, and I feel more or less restored.  I massage my left hand for warmth and blood flow.  Somewhere out there, even at this insane hour, there are others, probably with their own jackets and lap robes, working or at least emailing or surfing the net or watching TV.  I feel better knowing that.  “Men work together, whether they work together or apart.”

In the quiet and peace, I lapse into a meditative state, unable to write or even think.  Slow heartbeat and intense calm, breathing maybe seven times a minute.  It’s a luxury to sit calmly and let the time pass, knowing somehow that in this manner, the time is not lost, as it would be watching news or sports or surfing the net.  Those distractions are silenced like the normal traffic sounds or animals in the night.  In the absence of thought and speech, there is a restful fullness, more rich and rewarding than any conscious activity.  Without intending to, I’ve stumbled on these minutes of freedom.

Now my office chair is completely comfortable.  There is no need to attend to the body, no itching or squirming or shifting about.  I feel not so much “light” as “absent.”  Every part of my body is grounded, my hands folded softly in my lap and my back straight and free of pain.  Above all, the breathing is slow and relaxed.  Everything is being attended to, and there is no need to worry.  There is nowhere better to be and nothing more important to do.

But meditation cannot last forever.  After twenty minutes, I return to thought, and with it sensations of the cold and a bit of hunger, which I quell with a sip of water.  Time to return to that waste of time that we call work.  

I suppose it is healthy to fast and to rest completely, but not for months on end.  Not for those who are retired and who wish to live outside in the Florida warmth and sunshine.  Nothing so sweet as sitting outside on a warm evening with a sky full of stars and a mild breeze blowing from the south or the west.  An outside table with friends, with their laughter and smiles and slow, calm breathing, happy in the night’s warm pleasure.

But now those pleasures have been suspended.  So far, 2022–23 has been one of the coldest winters in Florida’s history.  Highly paid climate scientists insist that is the result of “global warming.”  Yeah, right.

Let it be warm again, with those lovely mornings when I sit outside the grocery waiting for my wife to finish her shopping and watch the pink sunrise coloring the tall morning clouds, and inhale a deep and satisfying breath knowing that all around me life continues, multiplies, and reproduces, and that this warmth is as it should be.  The warm and fruitful earth that we enjoy, at least for while.

Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books and articles on American culture, most recently Heartland of the Imagination (2011).

“More worrisome would be if many children decided that going to school is a waste!”

FEBRUARY 18, 2023 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

AMERICA’S LOST GENERATION

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board comments on the hundreds of thousands of kids who seem to have disappeared, following the covid school shutdowns:

An analysis released recently by Stanford University, in collaboration with the Associated Press, finds that K-12 public-school enrollment declined by 1.2 million in the first two years of the pandemic. About two-thirds of the decline can be explained by increasing private-school enrollment, home-schooling, or population changes at the national and local level.

That’s great. The fewer kids in public schools, the better. But the numbers don’t add up:

Home-schooling and private-school data aren’t available for all states. But in the 21 states (plus Washington, D.C.) for which all school enrollment and population data are available, the study finds that 240,133 students who left public schools can’t be accounted for. In California, public-school enrollment fell 270,928, but more than half can’t be explained by these other factors.

There might be some illegal home schooling going on in some states. But the more likely explanation is that kids have simply dropped out:

More worrisome would be if many children decided that going to school is a waste, perhaps because they weren’t learning much. If many stopped going to school altogether, then the pandemic learning loss may be even greater than has been reported and may never be made up.

We know that when schools went remote, a large percentage of students–probably something like 30 percent, nationwide–simply didn’t participate. They didn’t log on, didn’t complete assignments, didn’t take tests. It is plausible that, having gone for a year and half without school, hundreds of thousands decided there was no need to resume their “studies.” The Journal’s editors conclude:

More evidence that school closures were an historic and tragic policy blunder.

“This second instance is even worse. It comes from Center Point Energy, which supplies natural gas to the Twin Cities”.

FEBRUARY 17, 2023 BY JOHN HINDERAKER at Power Line:

DO YOUR PART: REDUCE YOUR STANDARD OF LIVING!

A regulated utility exists to benefit its customers (ratepayers) and ultimately is responsible to state government. It has always been understood that the purpose of a utility is to meet the needs of its customers for electricity, natural gas or water. Its fiduciary duty is to do so as economically and reliably as possible.

But that has changed, as utilities, aided and abetted by state governments, are printing billions of dollars in profits through the wind and solar scam. Utilities understand that wind and solar are ridiculously expensive–that is the point, from their perspective–and that intermittent energy sources can never provide reliable energy. So the burden is now shifting. Instead of utilities being required to provide adequate energy, customers are called on to reduce their energy consumption. Which is to say, reduce their standard of living.

Two cases in point popped up on my family’s chat line today. Xcel Energy, which serves most of Minnesota, declared today an “Energy Action Day.”

This is because the utility could see that it might not be able to meet its customers’ needs for electricity–in other words, there could be blackouts. One might think that an “Energy Action Day” means Xcel will take action to maximize output of electricity. But no: the utility’s failure is taken as a given, and the “Action” consists of customers reducing their standard of living.

We are going to see more and more of this, as increasing reliance on wind and solar devastates our electric grid. At some point, we become a third world country, with electricity available only intermittently. Just as the wind blows, and the Sun shines, only intermittently.

This second instance is even worse. It comes from Center Point Energy, which supplies natural gas to the Twin Cities. This appeared on social media, Next Door or something of the sort. I deleted the user’s name. I wondered whether this could be real, but one of my daughters says she has gotten a similar letter:

So the gas company compares neighbors’ bills, and tries to shame some into using less gas. This particular neighbor responded quite eloquently. But the situation is weird: you might think that any company would applaud those who use the most of its product, not try to embarrass them. But we are not living in a sane world when it comes to energy.

What I want to know is, how long are the American people going to stand for this?

What Can Today’s Biden Explain?

February 18, 2023

Biden Can’t Explain Away the Chaos on the Border

By Justin O. Smith at American Thinker:

It doesn’t matter that many illegal aliens are good and decent people when they are breaking U.S. law and jumping in front of millions of others, who are attempting to come to America legally. So many thousands more are committing well documented rapes, assaults, robberies, and murders by the thousand each year, at a rate that has grown exponentially with the Biden regime’s immediate reversal of President Trump’s effective border policy.  And to hear Joe Biden tout his actions on the border during the recent State of the Union address was sickening, dishonest, and evil to the core, as he attempted to convince the American people that an extremely out-of-control and serious problem doesn’t exist on the southern border, a problem of his making that continues to be facilitated by Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Speaking to the L.A. Times in June of 2017 about her husband’s murder, which occurred thirty miles from the border in southeast Arizona in 2010, Sue Krentz stated, “It wasn’t a U.S. resident who shot him.  You show me which U.S. resident it was.  Give me their name and address. … There’s not a house for seven miles.”

In his book Far Beyond the Border Fence, George Alan Kelly makes the following observation:

Stopping construction of the Border Wall was just a ploy taken by Washington politicians trying to buy the votes of Hispanics living legally and illegally in the U.S.

Kelly also just happens to be a seventy-three year old rancher from Kino Springs, Arizona, a mile and a half from the Mexican border, who shot and killed Gabriel Cuen-Butimea, an illegal alien with a long history of deportations from the U.S.  Kelly asserts that he took fire, which more than likely prompted him to return fire.  Cuen-Butimea’s body was found a little over 100 yards away from Kelly’s house, and if one of the two rifles confiscated by the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Department prove to have been the illegal alien’s, there isn’t a jury in Arizona that will convict Kelly in good conscience, especially with Arizona law providing for lethal action to protect one’s life and home.

Rather than charge Kelly with murder, arrest him, and hold him on a million dollar bond, authorities should have shaken his hand and let him get on with his life and back to his elderly wife, who is now left to fend for herself on a dangerous section of border. 

Make no mistake: many of these people trying to make it to America are already illegal aliens by the fact that they entered Mexico illegally, too, and they’re often dangerous criminals or terrorists.  And if they truly are asylum-seekers fleeing political or religious persecution or a sex-slave situation, international law and treaties agreed upon by the U.S. and most nations of the United Nations demand that they seek asylum in the first nation they enter where the threat no longer exists.

Some have taken exception to my referencing illegal aliens as “illegal aliens” before they ever cross the Rio Grande, but if they are Other-Than-Mexican in Mexico without proper papers and authorization, they are illegals.  If they cross the U.S. southern border without going through an official port of entry and without a valid passport or visa, they are illegal aliens, pure and simple.

As I observed in 2013:

Under Article 32 of the Mexican Constitution, a person cannot immigrate Amnesty by any Other Name – American Thinker to Mexico without first demonstrating a particular skill or potential usefulness; Article 34 requires immigrants to have the means to support themselves; applicants for legal immigrant status are screened for mental illness and prior criminal acts as outlined by Article 37. And, entering Mexico illegally is a felony punishable by 5 years in prison and a 5,000 peso fine; more importantly, only citizens of their republic can take part in the politics of the country, according to Article 133.

Why aren’t these “asylum-seekers” seeking asylum in Mexico?  It’s because they aren’t asylum-seekers.  They are simply looking for the economic opportunities afforded people in the U.S. and all the free stuff they can collect.  And even then, we have seen them reject American charity as not being good enough, as they trashed $500-a-night rooms in the Watson Hotel in Hell’s Kitchen and threw away perfectly good food and supplies they had been provided by various NGOs and the federal government, after being told they were being moved to a regular, perfectly good shelter facility.

Ranchers and many average citizens all along the border are worried and often frightened by the massive groups that seemingly appear from nowhere on their properties, and although many pass by without incident, far too many stop and do great harm to Americans like Krentz and Kelly, or they glide out of the border areas to create chaos and carry out their deadly mayhem in the interior of America.  The proof is found in a well documented exponential increase in drug cartel activity throughout the country. 

Suggesting that only Congress could solve the problem by passing “comprehensive immigration reform” and providing a pathway to citizenship for DREAMers, Biden was essentially calling for Congress to come together to pass another amnesty for some 40 million illegal aliens currently residing in America.  He also called for more equipment to be used to help the Border Patrol secure the border, although he full well knows that his policy has been a massive program and mission to facilitate more illegal immigration and flood the country with millions of illegal aliens, as seen through Mayorkas’s orders to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Border Patrol. 

Nearly six million illegal aliens have entered the U.S. under Biden’s watch, and it is ludicrous for him or anyone in his regime to state that they have the border situation “under control” when they so obviously don’t, and millions of more illegals are already on the way.  These Democrats aren’t pursuing or advocating some minor difference on governance regarding immigration policy.  They are maliciously abandoning all legal restrictions on immigration and actively refusing to enforce standing U.S. immigration law, in a manner that can only be called treasonous at the least, Machiavellian and evil to its core. 

One need not be surprised when the country starts witnessing many more illegals shot along the border, or in the interior in the commission of a crime, as tensions rise across the country and Americans do what the federal government refuses, defending their own lives and property, in the same manner as George Alan Kelly did.

None of this would be happening if Joe Biden would actually enforce existing U.S. immigration laws and fully, completely, and properly secure the border, through the wall and any manpower necessary to get the job done right.  This mess is his doing, it’s intentional, and he and other Democrats may soon reap what they have sown.

Do You Remember Miss Brodie?

FEBRUARY 17, 2023 BY SCOTT JOHNSON at Power Line:

THE PRIME IDIOCY OF MR. DON LEMON

Muriel Spark’s classic novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was published in full by the New Yorker in October 1961 and subsequently in hardcover. The novel remains in print and was successfully adapted for the stage and screen by Jay Presson Allen.

If you ever saw the film, you won’t have forgotten Maggie Smith’s incredible portrayal of the title character. Smith took home the Oscar for best leading actress with that performance. She brought Miss Brodie’s manifold complications to life.

Miss Brodie is a teacher of girls at the Marcia Blaine School in Edinburgh and she is in her self-declared “prime.” The 1969 film is available in its entirety on YouTube. Below is the trailer.

“One’s prime is elusive,” Miss Brodie explains in Spark’s novel. “You little girls, when you grow up, must be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur. You must then live it to the full.”

I love this: “I have long wanted to know the Greek language, and this scheme will also serve to impress your knowledge on your own minds. John Stuart Mill used to rise at dawn to learn Greek at the age of five, and what John Stuart Mill could do as an infant at dawn, I too can do on a Saturday afternoon in my prime.”

And this: “Mona Lisa in her prime smiled in steady composure even though she had just come from the dentist and her lower jaw was swollen.”

Yesterday Don Lemon instructed CNN viewers that GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley “is not in her prime” at age 51, apparently because she is beyond her childbearing years. Don Lemon is an idiot. He doesn’t understand what he is talking about. He never had a prime. He may nevertheless have unintentionally contributed to the good life by calling Muriel Spark’s Miss Brodie to the mind of those of us who may admittedly be past our prime.

G.F. Haendel’s MESSIAH

Haendel’s Messiah first entered into public in Dublin in 1741!