LEAVWORLD: GRAFFITI POLITTI

   2022 is just about over, so there are the inevitable compilations of what has happened in the last year. I'm still wondering about what was said at the end of last year. I've been reviewing the "Year in Review" articles from 2021, and very few of them say what a bad year it was. Most of them say things like "Biden is facing challenges," instead of his policies are total failures, which is common knowledge, now. I find this interesting, because it points toward  a bigger point. The leftist media has covered up for Biden's leftward policies for so long, they have no choice but to continue.     There have been some exceptions, notably on inflation. At the end of 2021, there were many people warning about it, myself included. Not to inflate my own importance, I can cite Larry Summers, who was Secretary of the Treasury under Pres. Obama. I only noticed that the chair set we bought at the beginning of the year was double the price by the end of 2021. It was...

     Some brief comments about current events. There is so much going on, I can't just focus on one story, and I've been slacking off on my weekly posts. We'll look at the Southern border crisis, the coming investigation of Pres. Biden, GOP opposition to Ukraine war funding, and GOP support for the omnibus disaster. I'm a moderate Republican, conservative on many issues, and liberal on others. I try to keep that separate from my analysis of what's happening, but I appreciate your feedback about my columns.    First, and maybe easiest to analyze, is the real crisis of illegal immigration on the Southern border, which has been exported to localities around the nation. I've been following this issue for decades, and the numbers don't lie. What is happening now at the Southern border is beyond anything that has occurred in the past. The partisan line from the right is that the Biden administration wants to flood the nation with immigrants, and then make them cit...

     The American public is politically divided somewhat evenly, according to the outcomes of the last several elections, and most polls. There's been a pattern, actually, where a new executive comes into office with a congressional majority, and loses one or both houses in the midterms, but still gets reelected. By the end of their second term, the nation is sick of them, and their party, and the process is repeated. This cycle has been in effect since the '90's, with a few aberrations, until the Trump presidency.    Pres. Trump broke much more than the political cycle of the last 30 years. He blew up both the Republican and Democratic parties, and exposed the extent that the US intelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies were illegally interfering in national elections. There is no doubt that Democrats think that James Comey's public reopening of the Clinton email investigation cost her the election in 2016. Likewise, Republicans think that the FBI's "cove...

     A few comments on current events:     There are a bunch of anti-semitic controversies being reported on, lately. A NY Nets basketball player named Kyrie Irving shared a link to an Amazon.com post of an "antisemitic documentary". He says that he was not promoting the documentary by tweeting a link to it, which falls flat in the face of social media reality. If you share something controversial, if you don't openly condemn it, you are promoting it. (Full disclosure: over my almost 20 years blogging, I have posted content that I disagree with, and not proclaimed my opposition.) He eventually was forced to apologize, after being suspended from the team for several games. That's how public life works, but I have a question: Is nobody questioning why Amazon is selling this "antisemitic" documentary? It's still up there .    Of course, Kanye West had to "one up" the story. Before  defending Irving , he had gone on his own crazy antisemitic r...

     I have to admit being surprised by the results of the 2022 midterm elections. The partisan in me was disappointed, but the analyst in me was intrigued. In some ways, it resembled what happened in 2020, when the GOP lost the White House and Senate, but gained seats in the House. While the presidency wasn't on the ballot this year, the similarities in the Senate are uncanny, with Georgia's one Senate race going into a runoff, as both did in 2020. There is a lot to unpack and analyze, and I've waited until the final results are in, except for the Georgia runoff, before posting this. On Nov. 21st, there were still some localities that are still counting ballots, amazingly, but none of them made a big difference in the national outcome. By Nov. 29th, it looks as if the GOP has a 220 to 213 advantage over Dems , with 2 seats still undecided, but leaning Republican.    At this point, the GOP has won control of the House of Representatives, by a slim margin.  ...

     This is the final post in my series on the 2022 midterm elections, and before I make my closing arguments, I'd like to share links to each post, so that they can all be accessed through this post. Part 1: The Biden Record, and the Democrats Who Supported It: A Series on Graffiti Politti Part 2: COVID and Educational Policy Failures Part 3: Garland's DoJ and FBI Seek Domestic Threats, While Ignoring Crime and the Crisis on the Southern Border Part 4: How Biden Blew Up the Economy With Inflation Part 5: Foreign Policy Failures, Empowering America's Enemies, and Being Owned by Foreign Powers Part 6: The Corruption of the Biden Family, and the Democrat and Media Cover-Up       When I started this series, the political landscape was a bit different, with Democrats having a surge from their year-long drubbing in the polls. The raid on Mar a Lago put Pres. Trump back in the media spotlight, and the SCOTUS ruling on abortion was still affecting the GOP p...

     Over the last six weeks, I've bee documenting the problems that Pres. Biden and his congressional allies have caused for America, and for themselves, politically. This week, I'd like to focus on my home state of New York. I, as well as thousands of others, have moved to Florida in the past two years. All of us had different reasons, but they pretty much fall into one of a few categories. Cost of living, taxes, excessive regulations, and crime. Three of these are generally long-standing issues in NYS, and have contributed to people and businesses leaving for greener pastures for some time. However, until about two years ago, crime was not a factor in this larger equation, because it was lower than the national average. What has changed, and why?    The simple answer is that the Democratic Party now has a supermajority in the NYS Legislature, and the party has been commandeered by the far left, ever since AOC ousted Joseph Crowley in the congressional primary...

     Wh ile it's no surprise that the left wing media has "soft-pedaled" Democrat corruption for decades, the coverage of the Biden family is second only to the Clintons, in the brazenness and continued denial of clearly unethical, if not criminal activity. In this post we are going to explore how many ways Pres. Biden's family have cashed in on his political position, as well as how his family members have gotten away with crimes that would put "regular" people in jail, consistently and repeatedly.     Let's start with the least offender, his niece Caroline. She pled guilty to $110,000 credit card theft in NYC, in 2013. From the article: " Caroline Biden admitted Friday to grand larceny and petty larceny, with an agreement to get two years' probation if she repays the money, does 10 days of community service and avoids re-arrest for a year." Caroline continued to break the law, again skating away from serious penalties for a DUI incident...

      One area of policy that doesn't usually factor into electoral politics is foreign policy, unless the US is actively involved in a conflict. The only active conflict that the US was involved in when Pres. Biden took office was in Afghanistan. We had been engaged there for 20 years, and there hadn't been a US casualty in around two years, at that point. His predecessor had been laying out a withdrawl plan for his whole term, but it had conditions that hadn't been met, when he left office.    Nonetheless, Pres. Biden accelerated the withdrawl timeline, paving the way for one of the worst foreign policy disasters since the withdrawl from Vietnam. A bombing at the gate of the last American base killed 13 Marines, and a retaliatory drone strike killed an aid worker, and a bunch of children. In the face of all of this, Pres. Biden proudly proclaimed that this was some kind of success, even comparing it to the English evacuation at Dunkirk, bizzarely.   ...

   The US economy is in chaos. This is not "spin," or "opinion," but a fact. Some people aren't feeling it as hard as others, because they were well-off before the inflation started. Unfortunately, the worst is yet to come, and it will affect those "well-off" people, to a greater degree than it does currently, as the recession sets in. It also will present a crisis for government, as the interest rates for the chronic borrowing that sustains all of their largesse double, triple, or even quadruple. How did we get here, after what was shaping up as a robust recovery from the pandemic response inspired recession?    When Pres. Biden was elected, almost every policy that had been in place was reversed. We've looked at the disatrous results of this on the southern border , but what's happened to our economy has impacted many more Americans. It started out on day one, when Biden killed the KeystoneXL pipeline, followed by freezing new federal leases ...