Featured Articles

A Switch in Time?

A Switch in Time?

by | Jan 16, 2025 |

When she was a member of the House of Representatives, Tulsi Gabbard was a fierce defender of personal privacy rights protected by the Fourth Amendment. She consistently opposed permitting federal agents to spy on Americans without search warrants, and she consistently voted against the reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Last week, Gabbard, now about to be nominated as Director of National Intelligence -- the head of all known American spying...

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Accepting the Truth About Ukrainian Casualties is the Only Real Path to Peace

Accepting the Truth About Ukrainian Casualties is the Only Real Path to Peace

by | Jan 16, 2025 |

They say “all wars must end.” Yet how does this actually happen? First, all parties must agree — to go down that path together. Next, they must enter into formal negotiation, which almost always means horse trading, compromise, and accommodation. Finally, and most important, all belligerents must want the war to end. Russia almost certainly wants this. Its minimum territorial objectives are within reach. Moreover, the destruction of Ukrainian military potential — equipment,...

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Getting Russia Wrong: A Quarter Century of Putin

Getting Russia Wrong: A Quarter Century of Putin

by | Jan 16, 2025 |

It started out rather differently than we now sometimes imagine it. When Vladimir Putin took over the Russian presidency from Boris Yeltsin 25 years ago, on New Year’s Eve 1999, he was seen as a man with whom Washington could do business.  President Bill Clinton lauded Putin’s accession to the presidency as a “democratic transfer of executive power,” which it certainly was not. Clinton administration officials hailed Putin as “one of [Russia’s] leading reformers” who, according to the New...

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Russia’s Defeat of Ukraine’s Army Limits Trump’s Options for a Negotiated Settlement

Russia’s Defeat of Ukraine’s Army Limits Trump’s Options for a Negotiated Settlement

by | Jan 15, 2025 |

Russian war correspondent, Marat Khairullin, has posted a terrific summary about the current status of Russian and Ukrainian forces on the battlefield. He writes: Victory is already in sight. Ukraine has lost the war. This is not even an axiom, but a ready, settled foundation on which the walls of the future building are being poured right now. What is happening on the ground is nothing more than the convulsions of the regime. No one is interested in Ukropia and the Ukies as such – Trump...

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Animal Farm Politics: The Deep State Wins Again

Animal Farm Politics: The Deep State Wins Again

by | Jan 15, 2025 |

It cost the American taxpayer $24 million to find out what we knew all along: politics is corrupt. After four years of being subjected to special prosecutor Jack Smith’s dogged investigation into alleged election interference by Donald Trump, the Justice Department has concluded that Trump would have been convicted of breaking the law if only he hadn’t gotten re-elected. In other words, the Deep State wins again. The revelation here is not that Trump broke the law but...

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The State of Western Warcraft

The State of Western Warcraft

by | Jan 15, 2025 |

In early 2023, the head of the US European Command and Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, General Christopher Cavoli, remarked, "precision can beat mass."1 This is true; precision can beat mass. But some countries now have the capability to render Western precision much less precise, both by “hard kill” (kinetic) and by “soft kill” (electronic). More to the point, these countries now possess both precision and mass, whereas the West is left to rely on a degraded version...

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Trump, Iran and the Obama Strategic Blueprint

Trump, Iran and the Obama Strategic Blueprint

by | Jan 14, 2025 |

Like a smashed antique clock – with its elaborate cogs, ratchet wheels and innards splayed out from the casing – so the mechanics of the Middle East lie similarly exposed and broken. All the region is in play – Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt and Iran. The original Obama strategic blueprint for containing and balancing the potentially violent energies of West Asia was subsequently handed to Team Biden at the end of the Obama term – and it still clearly bore the Obama imprimatur right up...

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Sanctions – Trump’s Only Old/New Iran Policies

Sanctions – Trump’s Only Old/New Iran Policies

by | Jan 14, 2025 |

I had missed this Friday news item on Iran: Trump's Ukraine envoy says world must reinstate 'maximum pressure' on Iran PARIS, Jan 11 (Reuters) - The world must return to a policy of 'maximum pressure' against Iran to turn it into a more democratic country, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's incoming Ukraine envoy Keith Kellogg told an Iranian opposition event in Paris on Saturday. Trump has vowed to return to the policy he pursued in his previous term that sought to wreck Iran's economy to...

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The Moral Depravity of US Sanctions and Embargoes

The Moral Depravity of US Sanctions and Embargoes

by | Jan 13, 2025 |

In the December 29, 2024, issue of the conservative Wall Street Journal, the paper’s longtime columnist Mary Anastasia O’Grady, who also serves on the Journal’s editorial board, wrote an article harshly criticizing the dictatorships in Cuba and Venezuela. Quoting a State Department statement issued in January 2021, she points out that the Cuban communist regime is a murderous supporter of terrorism that lets the Cuban people “go hungry, homeless, and without medicine.” O’Grady also...

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Cutting Slovakia’s Gas Supplies May Well Backfire on Zelensky

Cutting Slovakia’s Gas Supplies May Well Backfire on Zelensky

by | Jan 13, 2025 |

On 1 January, Ukraine ceased to allow the transit of Russia gas to Europe. This ended almost uninterrupted supply of Russian piped gas to Europe, through sovereign Ukraine, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some in the west have celebrated this as victory over Russia. More likely, it will backfire on Ukraine’s NATO and European aspirations. I have always considered the sale, purchase and supply of gas or any other commodity as an entirely commercial matter. In that regard, even...

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2025 New Year’s Resolutions, Part Two

2025 New Year’s Resolutions, Part Two

by | Jan 13, 2025 |

Even though we are two weeks into 2025, I want to suggest some more New Year’s resolutions. The Federal Reserve should resolve to stop enabling excessive federal spending by purchasing Treasury bonds, thus monetizing the federal debt. The Federal Reserve’s monetization of federal debt enables the federal government to amass trillions in debt while running a global empire abroad and a welfare state at home. The American people feel the effects of the Fed’s debt monetization in the form of the...

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Can Trump Save America From Itself?

Can Trump Save America From Itself?

by | Jan 11, 2025 |

Russian FM Lavrov last week dismissed Team Trump’s floated peace proposals for Ukraine as unsatisfactory. Essentially, the Russian view is that the calls for a frozen conflict precisely miss the point: From the Russian perspective, such ideas – frozen conflicts, ceasefires, and peacekeepers – do not begin to qualify as the type of treaty-based, “Big Picture” deal the Russians have been advocating since 2021. Without a sustainable, permanent end to conflict, the Russians will prefer to rely on...

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Defining the Deep State

Defining the Deep State

by | Jan 11, 2025 |

The phrase, Deep State, is now a staple of political vocabulary, but people who have not worked in the Washington bureaucracies, especially those tied to national security and intelligence, may not appreciate the meaning. I will try to define it for you. What I offer below is an attempt to define a complex, dynamic system in simple terms. I ask your forgiveness in advance if I have overlooked some key variables. I place the birth of the Deep State in the early 1990s, during the...

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Killing the Constitution at Gitmo

Killing the Constitution at Gitmo

by | Jan 10, 2025 |

When British kings wanted to dispose of troublesome enemies -- real or imagined -- they often had them or their colleagues arrested on pretextual charges and then brutally tortured until confessions were extracted. The confessions were then read aloud during so-called trials; and, of course, the defendant was convicted of whatever crime was the subject of the confession. All this was done in order to satisfy the political, and in many cases the personal, desires of the monarch by creating the...

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House Passes Bill To Sanction Cooperation With The ICC Following Netanyahu Arrest Warrant

House Passes Bill To Sanction Cooperation With The ICC Following Netanyahu Arrest Warrant

by | Jan 10, 2025 |

When newly re-elected Speaker Of The House Mike Johnson was first elected to the chair in 2023, his first act of business was to advance a bill providing an additional $14.3 billion in aid to Israel to fund its war in Gaza. This came after the House Of Representatives entered into a period of stasis following the historic success of the Motion To Vacate filed against Kevin McCarthy that would depose him as Speaker Of The House and replace him with Johnson. Despite the backlog of work Congress...

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Sen. Fetterman Claims He is Puzzled Why Americans Protest His Support of Israel’s Decimation of Gaza

Sen. Fetterman Claims He is Puzzled Why Americans Protest His Support of Israel’s Decimation of Gaza

by | Jan 9, 2025 |

In a Wednesday Twitter post, United States Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) expressed his confusion why “[z]ero dopes have shown up at my home or office, or blocked a road to chant and protest over an actual genocide in Sudan.” Proceeding, he questioned why “South Africa engaged the ICJ over Gaza, but not for an actual genocide on their own continent” — in Sudan. “ICJ” in Fetterman’s tweet refers to the International Court of Justice that ruled in January of last year that the Israel government may...

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Peace & Prosperity Blog

Downsized DOGE

Downsized DOGE

by | Jan 11, 2025

Elon Musk stirred up much hope among many small government advocates when he spoke on stage at Donald Trump’s October 27 presidential campaign rally at Madison Square Garden in...

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Polio Poppycock

Polio Poppycock

by | Jan 1, 2025

“Polio.” That is a common go-to word for trying to silence people expressing any concern about any vaccine. The emotion-centered tactic relies on people having great fear of...

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