And With That Development, the GOP Should Fire the Dem Senate Parliamentarian

 

President Trump’s reconciliation package is on life support. Almost every major portion of the bill has undergone more surgeries than a transgender person at this point, and it’s due to the Democrat Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough. She has applied the Byrd rule, which prevents ‘extraneous’ provisions from being logrolled during this process. These provisions now require a 60-vote threshold instead of a simple majority.  

The portion that reins in rogue federal judges was sliced off, and now welfare reforms tweaks got the hatchet treatment as well. Making the Trump tax cuts permanent was also a casualty of this Democrat leech, along with immigration enforcement measures. In short, this unelected Democrat is trying to usurp the will of the people, who voted for Trump and these legislators to enact these three key legislative goals. 

And speaking of transgender surgeries, this woman took a tomahawk to the tweaks we want for Medicaid. As PBS Newshour’s Lisa DeJardins noted, the ban on transgender care in Medicaid is out, along with these portions: 

It Doesn’t Matter If Iran Can Build a Bomb. It Matters If America Has the Guts to Bomb It, Again.

 

We’re now in the aftermath of the Saturday night, June 21st American strike to take out the three enrichment plants that were necessary for Iran’s acquisition of a bomb. And we’ve had now four or five days of reaction to it. And it’s kind of been mixed. And I’d like to review, very quickly, the validity of the criticisms of the strike and what the strike was really about.

There’s a lot of people on the American Left, in the media—there was a leak from the Pentagon as well—saying that this strike really didn’t achieve its aim of destroying, entirely, these three enrichment facilities. But of course, we don’t know that. We wouldn’t trust the Iranians, who say that it didn’t harm them. Of course, they’re gonna say that.

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency that watches this says that it was very successful. I agree with it. The military says it was very successful. And the point being is it doesn’t really matter to what degree—it’s 90% destroyed, 80% destroyed, 100% destroyed—it’s been severely damaged. And it doesn’t really matter for this reason: Iran will have to rebuild them.

There’s been all sorts of rebuilding costs out there in the public domain: $100 billion, $200 billion, $400 billion, $500 billion, to go down 500 feet, 300 feet, 200 feet in a new mountain cavern. And remember, they would be reacting to a B-2 strike. And they would look at the damage and they said, “We’d have to go even lower, which means we’re gonna have to spend more money.”

But here’s the interesting equation. Add the money that Iran, still subject to oil embargoes, with an economy that its gross domestic product has collapsed by 45% over the last two or three years, is going to come up with a wherewithal and make that argument to the people: “Hey, everybody, you’re going to miss now not just one paycheck, but two paychecks every three months because we have to rebuild the nuclear facilities that were completely demolished. And we have to spend more money.”

The Iranian in the street would say: “And then what? They’re gonna be destroyed again. How can you stop them? You have no air defenses. The Russians don’t want to give us air defenses. The Chinese will not give us air defenses. Why would they want to give us air defenses? They go up in smoke. They only humiliate their own equipment. It’s you—you, the military; you, the theocracy—that’s the problem.”

And so, if you boil that down, ask yourself, in a cost-to-benefit analysis, is it more—is it cheaper for Iran to go back and start from scratch and build these mountainous subterranean facilities or is it cheaper for the United States to send another seven or 10 or 12 B-2 bombers and send them into airspace for about 35 minutes and take them out? That’s what they can do.

But there is a caveat. There is a warning here. There’s only one limit on our ability to take out the next generation, should it appear, of uranium enrichment. And that problem is not in Iran. It’s not in Hezbollah. It’s not with Hamas. It’s with Washington and Tel Aviv.

Will the United States government have the courage and have the competency and understand the geostrategic complications and implications and dangers of Iran having another bomb? And what I mean by that is, if you have another Obama administration or if you have another Biden administration, will they act when they see another uranium facility being developed? Will you have another Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel?

So, what am I getting at? The only worry that we all have in the West is that Iran, at some future date, will look at the political composition in Washington and Tel Aviv and say, “We’ve seen this bunch before. So, pedal to the metal. Let’s hurry up and enrich because they will not stop it.”

But even then it will take a huge investment, a huge investment that has to be sold to a population that has been deprived of trillions of dollars of internal development, that has been diverted to Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis, the Assads that are all up in smoke, and then they will have to hear an argument to re-arm all of those people for terrorist deterrence, and then rebuild everything for nuclear deterrence, and hope there’s somebody not like Netanyahu and President Donald Trump in Washington.

And for now, those are pretty good odds that the strike is successful and will be in the near future.

Unhinged Rhetoric Reveals Left’s Desperation

 

After the June 21st, Saturday night bombing of the nuclear facilities in Iran, the Left has kind of gone crazy.

I’ve mentioned in earlier videos their inconsistency, where they now want to invoke the War Powers Act and resolution that Congress must approve these interventions. Of course, they never did that during either the Clinton or Obama administrations who bombed regularly and frequently, and much more frequently than President Donald Trump, without any worry about getting a resolution.

But it opens a larger issue up and that is, the Left knows that they are not polling well. They know that the party’s base is controlling their narrative, and they know that that narrative supports issues from transgenderism to an open border, to lax enforcement of criminal statutes, to something like Kabul abroad that has no public support.

And they’re angry. And this anger is coming from the base of the party. And the base of the party are the green radicals, the Green New Deal people. They’re the diversity, equity, inclusion, black caucus people. They’re the trans people. They’re the Antifa people. And it’s manifesting itself in a way we’ve never really seen before.

Just to give you a few examples:

Ilhan Omar, the controversial representative from Minnesota, sounded off the other day. And she said that the United States is basically worse than Somalia—where she came from, I guess as a preteen or 12 or 13 years old—and it’s worse than the dictatorship in Somalia.

If she really believes that, of course, the question is begged to be asked, why did you come here? Why don’t you go back? Why are a million people a year, under the Biden administration, committing illegality—breaking the law—to get in here? Why don’t a million people go back to Mexico? Or why don’t we all go back to our countries of origin? It made no sense.

Then we had “The View” with Whoopi Goldberg. And she weighed in and said that black people today—remember, this is a multimillionaire person who’s making millions of dollars for sitting there and sounding off like this—black people have it worse than people who have it in Iran today.

And if you look at the average black income of women, it is approaching normality and it’s parity with their white counterparts. In some cases, of the white working class, it’s higher.

I don’t know what she’s talking about. It’s completely absurd. Why would anybody say that? Why would you say that when black people are doing better than ever and have more of a combined gross national product than, probably, black people in the entire world put together? Why would she say something like that?

Then we had Jasmine Crockett, the controversial Texas representative. She went off on the last election and said that half of the people that voted for Trump were mentally ill—half the country that voted for Trump. She was basically going down a racist rant.

Then she said that people only voted against former Vice President Kamala Harris not because of her word salads, not because of her incompetence, not because she couldn’t give interviews, not because she had to completely flip from her former left-wing positions, at least for 90 days, but because they voted for an old white man.

Can you imagine somebody on the Right saying the only reason people voted for Kamala Harris is they just wanted to vote for a middle-aged black woman? That would end their career.

And then, of course, we had Mr. Padilla, Alex Padilla, he’s our senator. And as I mentioned earlier, he crashed a press conference by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary. He barged in and he was screaming and yelling and he had no identification. He wanted to do something like, I guess, he wanted to top Sen. Cory Booker’s Spartacus, 25-hour filibuster to nowhere.

But he was arrested because people didn’t know who he was. I think he was angrier that he’s a senator and nobody, even in a state, knows that he’s a senator from California.

But then, he started sounding off and said, “Well, I’m not against deporting criminals.” And I just said, “Full stop, you are. Because you were one of the sponsors of sanctuary cities in your prior manifestation as a California official. And the whole purpose of a sanctuary city is not to turn over criminals to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. So, you have no credibility.”

And finally, we end with California Gov. Gavin Newsom. He had a little flirtation with moderation. He had a podcast—I guess it’s defunct now, but he tried to bring on people like Charlie Kirk, sound reasonable, say that he agreed with Donald Trump that biological men shouldn’t compete in women’s sports.

And then somebody tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Gavin, your party is crazy. They’re left-wing lunatics. You would never be nominated. You’re polling 4%. How are you going to get the nomination? So, the correct position, Gavin, is to sound crazy like they are. And crazier, even, than Sens. Bernie [Sanders] or Elizabeth Warren, ‘the squad,’ or Crockett. And then you can move back and do the podcast, once you’re nominated.”

So, as a result, Gavin Newsom is doing his little body movement. He’s challenging Trump to come out here, mano a mano. He said that Vice President JD Vance is a liar, he wants to debate him.

And during the riots, he did a French Laundry 2.0. He was up in Napa, where he seems to feel most comfortable, doing a wine tasting while people were, I don’t know, destroying federal property, attacking the police, setting cars on fire, looting. And after, he said that this didn’t exist and that Donald Trump had overreacted and prompted this by nationalizing the California Guard.

So, he’s completely melded down. This is beside the point that he doesn’t address, at all, our high taxes, the lack of available water, our electricity rates, the most expensive gas in the United States, the disaster in Pacific Palisades and the inability to re-burn, what caused it, etc., etc., etc.

So, you add it all up and every once in a while you see James Carville and he’s trying to remark on how crazy they are but in the mode of his criticism, he’s crazy because he says things that are even crazier.

So, whatever Donald Trump has done to them—and maybe that will be his lasting legacy—he had the ability to expose what used to be Democrats as absolutely unhinged and nihilistic. And I don’t think anybody wants any part of them.

How the Transgender Movement Turned the Left Against Women

 

One is that President Donald Trump had issued an executive order suggesting or maybe threatening K-12 sports programs—and indeed, college and higher education as well—that if they allowed biological men to compete in women’s sports, then he was going to consider cutting off federal funds for that.

But at the same time he did it, the number of transgendered women—that is biological men who have transitioned to supposedly women—has increased and soared in women’s sports.

So, here on the West Coast, a trans athlete dominated the state high school track and field competitions, winning three or four main events. The same thing happened in Oregon. The same thing had happened in Washington. The same thing is happening in Minneapolis with girls baseball in the finals.

The point is it’s usually a phenomenon in blue states and in particular, blue cities. And Donald Trump’s executive orders are going the way of sanctuary cities. People are just ignoring them because they feel that he wouldn’t dare cut off federal funds because it would shut down the whole school.

But let’s get some background on this whole transgendered sports phenomenon. And maybe there’s five or six things we should keep in mind.

No. 1: We know a lot about gender dysphoria. There’s a long history of sex research about people whose psychological or hormonal makeup does not match their physical characteristics. But here’s the key: They’re very rare.

Until the transgendered—I don’t know what we would call it—phenomenon in the last 10 years, we accepted classical epidemiological studies that showed there were about five people who suffered from genuine transgendered phenomenon per 100,000 people: 0.005%. If you do the math, in a country of about 340 million people, we’re talking maybe 20,000, maybe 0.005%, or five per 100,000, maybe 10.

But you see the Pew poll and other polling ask students on campus, they ask the general public and they say there may be 20 million people. But there has been no history of that once the science of epidemiology started, which suggests it might be more of a trendy phenomenon than actual biological or scientific matter.

The second thing to remember is this is not new.

As a classicist, I can tell you that there are documented fables, myths, poems, histories about people who feel they were in the wrong bodies. The most famous is Catullus Poem 63, about a young man who performs transsexual surgery on himself in a fit of mania in honor of the god—the sexually ambivalent god—Cybele and castrates himself and is very unhappy when he wakes up out of the frenzy.

We have this novelist Petronius’ “Satyricon,” where a lot of men are cross-dressers—which is a different phenomenon—but transvestism. And we have—I think there’s a fable in “Phaedrus” about men who change into women. And we got to remember the god Hermaphroditus that comes from Hermes and Aphrodite—the combination of a male and female god. And there’s many fables about that.

So, it’s an ancient phenomenon.

Here’s another thing to remember. Does anybody know—and I’m asking a genuine question—does anybody know of a female athlete who decided that she was in the wrong body and she transitioned to maleness, manliness, and she won a major event? I know of none.

So, when we talk about transgendered sports, we’re talking about one phenomenon. We’re talking about men.

And if anybody—let me ask a corollary question as I pause here. Does anybody know a famous, well-known, but especially spectacular male athlete that transitioned? I don’t. It’s usually men that were not very successful, at least in the elite of their division or their field, who transition to feminism. And then they become very, very successful.

And this is very important because we are told that once you transition, you are a genuine new sex. That your prior muscular skeleton frame doesn’t really matter, given your hormonal treatment. But it does. Because when we’re talking about transgenderism in sports, we’re not talking about women who become men. And because they don’t succeed in that sport, that reminds us that they’re not fully men. Or if they were, they could just declare their new gender and compete competitively.

And by the same token, 100% of what the controversy is about are men who have bigger frames, more muscles who transition and dominate women’s sports in a way they did not dominate male sports. In other words, they’re taking.

Final thoughts: It has so many political ramifications. One is the party of the left, the Democratic Party, has embraced this 20-80 political issue—20% to 30% tops support this, of the American people. And yet, they’re going down the road of a very unpopular development and supporting transgendered women who are decimating and destroying female sports.

The second thing is it’s counterintuitive. The Left was supposed to be for gender parity. And that meant—that was defined by giving money and attention and resources to women so that their sports would be equivalent to male sports. And now we’re kind of reactionary. We flipped it upside down, where males go around the back, take over women’s sports, and essentially, destroy it. And yet that is popular among many on the left.

And then there’s a final political corollary. We were also told by some radical feminists—especially as it applies to women in combat units—that women could do anything that men could do. A small percentage can, physically. But the vast majority—in terms of muscularity, size, frame, endurance, lung capacity—cannot.

So it kind of, in a weird way, also affects that issue that women cannot really compete with men on the battlefield—at least in tasks that require physicality and muscularity.

Let’s just end the discussion with a brief summation.

Transgenderism is an old phenomenon. It was very, very rare, a very small percentage of the population. Sometime around 2005 to 2015, it exploded as a civil rights issue. And the numbers have been vastly inflated. It’s been trendy among young people on campus. But it has almost destroyed female sports in a way that’s ironic, tragically ironic, because the Left once was a protector and the champion of female sports and now it’s de facto, it’s destroyer.

Israel Dismantles Iran’s Defenses, but Will It Be Enough?

 

We are at a historic time in the Middle East. Never in our lifetimes have we been closer to a complete revolutionary fervor that gives promise of normalcy for the Middle East. And never have we been in more danger of seeing the entire region blow up.

What am I referring to? The war right now between Iran and Israel.

It is surreal. If we had this conversation five years ago and I said to you, the Iranian nation—that is huge compared to Israel, 10 times the population—the Iranian nation has lost all control of the Houthi terrorists and they are themselves neutered. Their surrogates in the West Bank, Gaza are neutered. They’re gone, Hamas as a fighting force. The formidable, the terrifying Hezbollah cadres, they’re inert.

There is no more Syria—the Assad dynasty, the pro-Iranian Syria—it’s in chaos. But whatever the chaos is, it seems to be anti-Iranian. There is no Shia Crescent, starting with Tehran, all the way to the Mediterranean. Lebanon is free of Iranian influence. So is Syria. Gaza, de facto, will be.

There is no Russian presence. It’s not a patron. It is not a protector. It’s not a power in the Middle East. It’s tied down in Ukraine.

And Iran itself, the formidable powerhouse of the Middle East that evoked terror all over, has no defenses.

And now we’ve seen five days of war, in which the Israelis have systematically dismantled all of the Iranian missile defenses. They have air defenses. They have dismantled the terrorist hierarchy. They have dismantled the people who are responsible for the nuclear program.

We’re down to a single critical issue. They have suffered casualties. The Iranians have sent over 400 ballistic missiles and drones into Israel. And 90% are stopped but that 10% gets through.

But here’s the crux. All of this chaos and all of this war will be for naught if Iran’s theocracy emerges intact from this war and its nuclear infrastructure can either be quickly rebuilt or there are elements of it that have been missed and maybe there is enough fissile material—if not already, soon—to make another bomb.

So, here we are at the critical point.

Should Israel continue, does it have the ability to nullify the entire nuclear program, which was the object of this war? Or must it rely on the bunker-buster devices, bombs of the United States?

And if the United States should try to go into these key nuclear facilities and blow them up—with the ordinance and the aircraft that it has, which Israel lacks—will it be fighting an optional Middle East war? Of which the MAGA doctrine says: No more forever wars. No more intervention in the Middle East. No more ground troops.

Or can President Donald Trump say: “I’m not an isolationist. I’m a Jacksonian. You should have known that when I took out Qasem Soleimani in my first term, when I took out Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, when I took out the Wagner Group. I don’t like to intervene. But when people threaten the United States and our deterrence as a matter of conjecture, I want to ensure that they understand the repercussions.”

And so, is there a fight between the isolationists and the Jacksonians or is it just a minor group of people on the right who don’t want any action at all?

And we don’t know the answer yet. But if this war should end with the Iranian regime intact and the elements of its nuclear program recoverable, then, in some ways, it will be all for naught. And people will make the necessary adjustments in the Middle East. And it won’t be necessarily, well, Iran is still very weak. They’ve lost all their terrorist surrogates. They have no air defenses. They’ve lost their media. They’ve lost their commanding—it will be more like, my gosh, Iran survived everything that Israel and, by association, the United States threw at it. It’s indestructible.

And so, we’re at a critical cusp. It’s, do you risk more danger by taking out and eliminating the nuclear threat for good and, by association, humiliate the theocracy to the point it can be overthrown, or do you play it safe and have negotiations and allow the regime and the remnants to survive?

I don’t like forever wars. I don’t like preemptive wars. I do not like the United States intervening anywhere in that godforsaken area. But if the war ends with the regime intact and a recoverable nuclear program, it won’t just be back to square one, it will be a disaster.

So, we’ll see what happens. And hold on, everybody. I think we’re going to see things that we haven’t seen in a lifetime in the Middle East. And it could turn out very bad, but it could also turn out to be quite revolutionary and remake the map of the entire region.