President Cleveland shrinking through the years

Carlisle, Pennsylvania—It was called the political storm of the century. It would end with the largest single turnover of power in American history—and one for the ages.

It was fall 1894. People were still feeling the effects of the Panic of 1893, which had shut down most of the economy and plunged the nation into a catastrophic recession, with every segment of the country in a world of pain. Farmers were disgusted with the cost of wheat; laborers were desperate for jobs and higher pay.

President Grover Cleveland, a Democrat in the beginning half of his second nonconsecutive term in office, did not know what to do and did not have any solutions. Just four years earlier, Democrats had gained 86 House seats and a majority. On election night 1894, Republicans gained 130 seats—a whopping 35% of the lower chamber, which totaled 357 seats at that time.

Democrats lost 125 seats outright, with Republicans picking up third-party seats as well. It remains the largest numerical loss for a political party in US history, according to the House historian. The House went from 218-D/124-R to 253-R/93-D. Now that’s a wave!

Could history have a repeat performance for the US this coming November?  Yes, it could…

A super spy descended from the ceiling and stole the Supreme Court's majority opinion that would overturn Roe v Wade and leaked it to the press. Dozens of people across the nation are furious because this will "ruin my weekend murder plans!"

Here are just a few of the terrifying consequences of Roe being overturned:

1) You’ll carry your child to term and have the miraculous, joyful, and beautiful experience of giving birth while your life is enriched and filled with meaning: Who could want that? UUUGGGHHH!

2) All women will be issued Handmaid's Tale outfits and then it will be really hard to find your wife at the mall: Super inconvenient!

Read on for more…

Court packing—the attempt to enlarge the size of the Supreme Court for short-term political purposes—used to be a dirty word in the history of American jurisprudence.

The tradition of a nine-person Supreme Court is now 153 years old. The last attempt to expand it for political gain was President Franklin Roosevelt’s failed effort in 1937. FDR’s gambit was so blatantly political that even his overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress rebuffed him.

Yet now “court packing” is a law school cause célèbre. It is hailed as a supposedly quick fix to reverse the current 5-4 conservative majority.

When my kids were in college and complaining about their workload, I was unsympathetic.  I reminded them that, to pay for college, I lived at home, commuted 30 hours a week, and worked 20 hours a week, as well as working full time during the summer.  I also worked my way through law school.  I took out small loans I was able to pay off within a few years of graduating.  Count me among the people who deeply resents Biden's plan to cancel $1.6 trillion in outstanding student loan debt.  Not only is Biden's plan offensive, but he also has no legal authority and, I believe, no constitutional authority to do so.

There's no question about why Biden is planning to cancel student loan debt:

In terms of the absurdities our cultural elites believe, and have convinced masses of people to believe, there has never been a time like today.

The West has gone through many eras—the so-called Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Age, and the Postmodern. The present era is the Age of the Absurd.

In terms of the absurdities the cultural elites believe, and have convinced masses of people to believe, there has never been a time like today.

Here is a list of the most ridiculous that immediately come to mind.

Tucker Carlson's opening monologue on Monday night was a wake-up call to Americans: the Democrat political class, with help from (or no opposition from) Republicans, seems determined to bring America into a direct conflict with Russia.  He points out that the Democrats' warmongering is so extreme that even Noam Chomsky longs for Trump to be back in the White House.  He recognizes that Trump, whom he dislikes, would keep us off the path of a hot war with Russia.

Tucker rightly traces the Democrats' fulminating hostility toward Putin to the 2016 election.  Hillary and her cohorts created the lie that Putin put Trump in office.  Now, despite having the lie repeatedly disproven, Democrats have come to believe this lie.  They want revenge. They also simply want war.

This account of Zelensky at war is based on interviews with him and nearly a dozen of his aides. His mission, he told me, is to make the free world experience this war the way Ukraine does: as a matter of its own survival.

He seems to be pulling it off. The U.S. and Europe have rushed to his aid, providing more weapons to Ukraine than they have given any other country since World War II. Thousands of journalists have come to Kyiv, filling the inboxes of his staff with interview requests.

My request was not just for a chance to question the President. It was to see the war the way he and his team have experienced it. Over two weeks in April, they allowed me to do that in the presidential compound on Bankova Street, to observe their routines and hang around the offices where they now live and work. Here is what I saw and learned.

In classical, pro-God America, the inspiration for a civilization of freedom and equality came from the unifying assumptions of theistic belief.  The assumptive belief in God and in the universal divine nature of all humans enabled the generation of a predominantly uplifting culture, which in turn was upstream from a generally lawfully and respectfully conducted political process.

That one nation under God has been irrevocably broken into two, irreconcilable American civilizations, one based in life and the other based in death.

Why did the civilization of this one nation under God, the greatest constitutional republic in world history, come to be degraded and broken by the Democrats and the Left?   Here’s how: culture is now downstream from politics.

Al Capone mugshot Aug. 22, 1934

Al Capone was one of the early 20th century’s most infamous gangsters but that wasn’t why he ended up in Alcatraz. Instead, what the feds finally got him on was tax evasion.

In Joe Biden’s case, although the facts are a bit different because the problem isn’t one of tax evasion but one of mysteriously reported taxable income, it does appear that we may finally be getting proof that Joe was deeply involved in Hunter’s overseas dealings and may have been doing influence peddling from the White House.

The message could be coming to Joe to resign now before he get’s Al Caponed.  Then again, he may up that way anyhow.

Over the last 16 tortuous months of the Biden presidency, it’s become clear that the Democrats are running on empty.

They are not even trying to reset their electorally poisonous policies.

But while they might not be any good at governing, when it comes to seizing power by foul means or fair, they are world-class.  Which brings us to how the stole the 2020 election from President Trump.

The most compelling evidence to date has emerged in “2000 Mules,” the upcoming documentary by conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza, who draws on research by election integrity group True The Vote to expose suspicious ballot harvesting.

With no actual accomplishments to point to, having ruined everything that was running so well for the American people, Democrats are turning to what has become their most effective electoral tool in recent years: Fraud.

They did a magnificent job of perpetrating a total fraud on the country in the 2020 Presidential election. We all know what they did and what they got away with. The big question is what have the Republicans done to ensure that this degree of election-stealing fraud doesn’t happen again?

Unfortunately, it seems Republicans have done essentially nothing truly significant to stop Democrat vote fraud. All  the really major drivers of Democrat vote fraud still appear to be in place. Here they are:

America these last 14 months resembles a dystopia. It is becoming partly the world of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, partly the poet Homer’s land of the Lotus-Eaters.

Nothing seems to be working. And no one in control seems to care.

What explains an America that suddenly no longer works?  Here are three reasons.

Nance told Reid that he joined the International Legion of Territorial Defense in Ukraine.

"The more I saw of the war going on, the more I thought, I'm done talking. 

It's time to take action here. So, about a month ago, I joined the international legion here in Ukraine, and I am here to help this country fight, you know, what essentially is a war of extermination." 

A little over a decade ago, two researchers at Wharton published a paper showing that, despite women’s increasing work and educational opportunities, their self-reported happiness was in steady decline. Back in 1970, women were on average happier than men; they are now less happy than men.

Broadly, since 1970, everyone has gotten more miserable. But the decline in women’s overall happiness has outpaced men’s, and the happiness curve inverted sometime in the early 1990s. The paper also documents increasing anxiety and neuroticism, as well as decreasing social cohesion among women.

The researchers couldn’t come up with a good explanation for their observations. So here’s mine:

Maybe women don’t want to fill traditionally male roles. Is it conceivable (or is it inconceivable) that women have traditionally lived a certain way and derived happiness from certain things not because they were weak and forced into it by men, but because that is what they actually preferred?

Russia’s impending doom is a driving force to invading Ukraine.

For centuries, Russia’s rulers have thought Russia’s border regions are indefensible. There are few geographic barriers to block potential invasion, forcing the Russians with their dwindling numbers to attempt to defend massive stretches of territory.

What barriers the Russians do have now — Crimea and the Caucasus come to mind — are only because of the sort of strategic adventurism that Putin is now threatening to Ukraine as a whole.

There is a method to the madness. To paraphrase Catherine the Great, Russia can expand, or Russia can die.  Today, that means Russia is going to die.

[Michael Beckley is a Professor of political science at Tufts University. He is gaining international recognition for his insightfulness and meticulous research on global power politics. Here he presents a short synopsis of China’s serious shortcomings]

“FREEDOM MUST BE ARMED BETTER THAN TYRANNY” --Volodymyr Zelensky

For those of us born after World War II, this is the most consequential war of our lifetime. Upon its outcome rests the future of European stability and prosperity.

The Russian military—revealed as inept at tactics, unimaginative in operational design, obtuse in strategy, and incompetent at basic logistics and maintenance—can do only two things well: vomit out massive amounts of firepower and brutalize civilians.

Putin and his senior advisers, as stewards of a military that cannot adequately care for its wounded and that abandons its dead, don’t care about the human price they are paying.  And so Putin will order offensives that, if confronted by a well-resourced Ukrainian foe, can effectively destroy his own army.

The challenge for the West is to ensure that this is its fate.

Last Thursday (4/07), the NATO foreign ministers met in an emergency session about Russia’s increasingly horrific and atrocity-filled invasion of Ukraine. However, unlike most NATO meetings, this one was substantive. The main issue on the table was weaponry. Quantity, quality, and purpose were all concerns. To date, the weaponry supplied to Ukraine has been defensive.

No more.  Game-changing weapons began to flow to Ukraine immediately after the meeting.

Further, the attendees were not only NATO nations; there were also observers present: the European Union, Sweden, Finland, Georgia, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and Ukraine. If Putin was afraid of being surrounded before, he should take a quick look at his map now.

A very insightful statement came from Ukraine Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba: “I think the deal that Ukraine is offering is fair. You give us weapons, we sacrifice our lives, and the war is contained in Ukraine.”

All of the actions taken by NATO countries indicate they have agreed to Mr. Kuleba’s deal.

AMERICA IS OUR COUNTRY NOT THEIRS

Title 42 is the last remaining tool the federal government has to control record-high levels of illegal immigration.  Every other policy the Trump administration implemented to secure the border has been rescinded or neutered by Biden, and on May 23, Title 42 will be gone too.

What’s coming, in other words, is a border surge of historic and almost unimaginable proportions, and it is happening as a direct result of Biden’s policy choices. The crisis about to unfold is 100 percent avoidable, and 100 percent Biden’s fault.

If Abbott were serious about securing the border, he wouldn’t announce a plan to transport migrants to Washington but a plan to take them back to Mexico -- immediamente.  Here’s how he can.

Winston Churchill famously called Russia "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." A more accurate description of the current Russian Federation is a forgery wrapped in a deception inside a lie.

Numerous analysts have focused on Moscow’s campaign of disinformation to undermine the West, but they have barely noticed that the most important subject of disinformation is Russia itself. Moscow has a long record of deceiving Westerners and depicting its empire as invincible.

In a previous imperial incarnation, Soviet communism and socialist internationalism were supposed to ensure salvation for all humanity. Until, that is, they were exposed as a fraud. Today’s Russia has created an image of great power status, economic strength, and military power that is rapidly unraveling in Ukraine. This is revealing that the Russian state structure itself stands on rotting foundations.

The last 14 months have offered one of the rare occasions in recent American history when the hard Left has operated all the levers of federal government. The presidency, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the permanent bureaucratic state are all in progressive hands.

And the result is a disaster that is uniting Americans in their revulsion of elitists whose crazy ideas are tearing apart the fabric of the country.

In pursuit of its nihilist utopian omelet, the Left cares little about the millions of middle-class Americans it must break to make it.

The result is an unmitigated disaster that not only has tarred the Democrat Party, corrupted once-revered agencies, and alienated half the country from our cultural institutions, but now endangers the very health and security of the United States.

In fact, it left me with an admittedly wild theory about how Obama may intend to fix things: Obama’s aiming to get back into the Oval Office.  Here’s how he can do it, without violating the 22nd Amendment. There are three steps to return Obama to the presidency:

Mitt Romney is thoroughly damaged by Trump derangement.  This has been evident for a long time over the last four years, but his vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson is a bridge too far.

For a man of the Mormon faith to accept a judge who is perennially partial to purveyors of child pornography is incomprehensible.  How does a man with five sons and twenty-four grandchildren suffer from the same Woke blind spot as Judge Jackson?

Romney's purported religious faith must be fake; if it were real and true, he would be unable to vote to confirm Jackson.

America has had enough of the disastrous leftist policies of the Biden Administration. We must return to America First policies.

After American voters clean Biden’s Democrat henchmen out of the United States House of Representatives in November’s elections, they will want to see action on the part of incoming Republicans.

It isn’t enough for Republicans to remind voters that Democrats have lost their soul as a party. Republicans must have an affirmative, positive platform that can be implemented. The plan must enact real policy changes while rolling back Biden’s harmful initiatives.

We need an America First Plan, a new contract with America. Our America First Plan must contain three sections: a brief assertion of positive policy initiatives—with legislation ready to go, a plan of how to achieve the objectives, and a list of the oversight actions that Republicans will take when we control committees.

The spectacle of America’s cultural elite uniting to defend the propriety of child porn in school libraries, insisting that a gender ideology they had not even heard about until seven years ago must be taught to seven-year-olds, and a presidential administration publicly celebrating the breast amputation, genital mutilation, and sterilization of autistic children, should be utterly appalling to anyone with a shred of human decency.

This all has led some on the Right to finally try to do what the Left always does: coin a novel political epithet.

You’ve heard the catch-all dismissal insult of young know-nothings of any advocacy of normality by older people – “OK, Boomer”?  Well, how about we turn some tables with a catch-all dismissal of what the Left is trying to do with our children – “OK, Groomer”?

Regime Change in Moscow: 70% Agree Putin Must Go

President Biden closed his speech in Warsaw March 26 with a ringing denunciation of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power,” he said, setting off a firestorm of criticism from around the world.

Well, it’s simply off the wall to say that calling for regime change in Russia is inappropriate. Putin has not merely called for regime change in Ukraine, he has launched a full-scale invasion and repeatedly sent squads of assassins to murder Ukraine’s elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

Putin has stated that he wants to restore the Russian and Soviet empires; and if he thinks he can get away with it, he’ll likely continue in that project. He therefore cannot be appeased. Each successful aggression leads to yet a more offensive one.

If he succeeds in conquering Ukraine, he will go for more, because his position will be stronger and the West — with Ukraine’s forces neutralized — will be weaker, and because he will have seen, once again, that the West is unwilling to fight.

So Biden spoke the truth: For the sake of world peace, Putin cannot be allowed to remain in power.