The Patriot Post® · Thursday: Below the Fold
Government & Politics
Trump is TIME’s Person of the Year: He was the obvious choice, and everyone knew it. Donald Trump was named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year yesterday, the second time he’s been so honored. “I think I like it better this time, actually,” he said this morning before ringing the bell to open the New York Stock Exchange. “We did a good job. We had a great first term despite a lot of turmoil caused unnecessarily. But the media has tamed down a little bit. They’re liking us much better now, I think.” Indeed, Trump didn’t sound like a president poised to once again do battle with the same “fake news” media that savaged him throughout his first term. These honeymoons don’t last, though, unless your name is Barack Obama. Nevertheless, Trump still had kind words for the newsweekly, which last featured him in a well-balanced campaign-season piece seven months ago. “I do want to thank Time magazine,” he said, calling it “an honor” and thanking “the whole group at Time,” whom he called “really very professional people.” It’ll be interesting to remember this spirit of goodwill and revisit it in around 18 months.
Biden’s big clemency: Joe Biden made history today, as the White House announced that he has commuted the sentences of some 1,500 individuals and pardoned 39 others who were convicted of nonviolent crimes. This total represents the biggest single-day act of clemency by any American president in modern history. The commutations apply to individuals who were released from prison and placed under home confinement during the COVID pandemic. Biden defended his decision, stating, “America was built on the promise of possibility and second chances.” After pardoning his son Hunter, which he had pledged earlier this year he would not do, speculation has run rampant that Biden will preemptively issue pardons for individuals who have not been charged with any crimes over concerns that Donald Trump may target them for political payback. Yet, thus far, Biden has taken no such action. Meanwhile, Trump has hinted at issuing pardons to J6 individuals on day one of his presidency.
Defense bill passes House: When the opposition party controls both the Senate and the White House, it’s a badge of honor to be named the do-nothingest of do-nothing Congresses. Yet the GOP-led House did its job yesterday when it passed an $895 billion bill that authorizes a 1% increase in defense spending for this fiscal year and includes a double-digit pay raise for about half of our nation’s enlisted service personnel. That raise might seem exorbitant — until one considers that many military families rely on government food banks and often live in woefully substandard housing. So far, so good, then, right? Well, as the Associated Press reports, it wasn’t all seashells and balloons: “The bill is traditionally strongly bipartisan, but some Democratic lawmakers opposed the inclusion of a ban on transgender medical treatments for children of military members if such treatment could result in sterilization. The bill passed the House by a vote of 281-140 and will next move to the Senate, where lawmakers had sought a bigger boost in defense spending than the current measure allows.”
Xi invited to Trump inauguration: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. That’s what seems to be at play here as Donald Trump has surprisingly invited Chinese President Xi Jinping to his inauguration on January 20. Trump spokesman Karoline Leavitt explained that the president-elect was “creating an open dialogue with leaders of countries that are not just our allies but our adversaries and our competitors too.” Beijing has yet to announce whether Xi has accepted the invitation, but if he does attend, it will mark the first time in American history that a foreign leader has attended the inauguration of a U.S. president.
Out with the old for House Dems: More than a month has passed since the American people repudiated the Democrat Party and its awful policies, and the recriminations are continuing apace. Hakeem Jeffries is still safely ensconced in his position as House minority leader, but as The Daily Caller reports, “The knives have come out at the committee level, with a slew of Democratic representatives launching bids against more senior panel members for top committee posts.” For example, 61-year-old Jamie Raskin ran 77-year-old ranking member Jerry Nadler out of his chair on the House Judiciary Committee. Elsewhere, 74-year-old Gerry Connolly, the heir apparent to fill the now-vacant leadership chair of Raskin on the House Oversight Committee, is being challenged by 35-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Apparently, it wasn’t the rotten policies of the soft-on-crime, open-borders, pro-taxpayer-funded-sex-change-operations-for-illegal-aliens Democrats that caused the American people to so resoundingly reject them at the ballot box last month. No, it was their septuagenarian committee chairs.
Manchin and Sinema help block Dems from shaping Trump-era majority in labor agency (Daily Wire)
Fetterman becomes the first Dem lawmaker to join Trump’s Truth Social (Hot Air)
Government funneled unprecedented amount of money to criminal gangs through COVID relief (Daily Caller)
Food stamps accepted at thousands of liquor and tobacco stores, contributing to healthcare fiasco (Daily Wire)
Schadenfreude
- CNN gets eaten by Food Network: These are depressing times over at CNN, a leftist propaganda network masquerading as news. Viewership there has been hemorrhaging for many years now, and yet it still hasn’t hit rock bottom. (Or make that the bottom of the oven.) Last week, the Food Network attracted more viewers than CNN, whose primetime lineup averaged a paltry 367,000 people. Also besting CNN was HGTV, among others. In other words, more people would rather watch wannabe chefs butcher their culinary creations or contractors remodel grossly overpriced homes than suffer through pundits gaslighting the world around them. Whatever changes CNN pledged to implement have evidently fallen flat with the average Joe.
Security
Blinken defends Afghan exits as not that bad: On Wednesday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he testified that the U.S. military’s disastrous exit from Afghanistan in 2021 wasn’t that bad. Blinken claimed that “our alliances, our partnerships, are stronger today than they have been in a generation.” He expressed regret “that we did not do more and could not do more to protect” the 13 U.S. troops who were killed by a suicide bomber at the Kabul airport, even apologizing to the families of the deceased who were in attendance. Republican House members welcomed Blinken’s apology but found his claims about the exit absurd. Michael McCaul (R-TX) called the “catastrophic” exit “the beginning of a failed foreign policy that lit the world on fire." Warren Davidson (R-OH) said Blinken’s sympathy is "appalling” because he has “never acknowledged the failures or owned the consequences.” Blinken only continued to offer the false excuse that the Biden administration was following through on the deal that Donald Trump had negotiated with the Taliban, adding, “There was no consensus view that the government, the Afghan forces, were going to collapse.”
Pentagon denies New Jersey drones are coming from Iran or any other “foreign entity or adversary” (NY Post) | Satire: Drones revealed to be Iranian after closer inspection (Babylon Bee)
Culture
Warren lectures about a murder: It would seem to go without saying: Yes, your health insurance premiums are too high, but that doesn’t mean you send a message by assassinating one of the industry’s CEOs. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren doesn’t seem to have this fundamental human decency within her. Get a load of her equivocation: “What happens when you turn this into the ‘billionaires run it all’ is they get the opportunity to squeeze every last penny. And look, we’ll say it over and over: Violence is never the answer. This guy gets a trial who’s allegedly killed the CEO of UnitedHealth[care]. But you can only push people so far, and then they start to take matters into their own hands.” Sure, Warren did denounce this act of premeditated murder, but she couldn’t leave it at that. She couldn’t resist expressing her deep-seated hostility to American business. “It wasn’t a slip of the tongue,” reports The Washington Times. “Warren made similar comments in an interview posted the same day by the Huffington Post, calling the shooting a ‘warning.’” Warren weakly walked that one back: “I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder.”
UK bans puberty blockers: Even the leftist-controlled United Kingdom is reasonable enough to know that giving puberty blockers to children is a bad idea. The UK’s Department of Health and Social Care has issued an indefinite ban on giving puberty blockers to minors under the age of 18 who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Health Secretary Wes Streeting explained the need to “act with caution” and “follow the expert advice” in determining how to care for this “vulnerable group of young people.” The Cass Review found no evidence that administering puberty blockers to children helped them and indeed found just the opposite was the case. Referencing that review, Streeting noted, “Children’s healthcare must always be evidence-led. The independent expert Commission on Human Medicines found that the current prescribing and care pathway for gender dysphoria and incongruence presents an unacceptable safety risk for children and young people.” It would be great if a similar nationwide ban were to be implemented in the U.S. Doing so would save a lot of children from the gender-mutilation cult.
Google trashed for holiday shopping ad featuring man dressed like a woman (Daily Wire)
Satire: Caitlin Clark explains that white privilege feels weirdly like getting beat up by giant black lesbians (Babylon Bee)
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