A woman's story of how a surgeon handled her braids during a head surgery has gone viral, not just for the thoughtful actions of the doctor, but for what it shows about the importance of representation in medicine. India Marshall posted her heartwarming story on Twitter:"So y'all know how I said I woke up from surgery w/more braids in my head than I came in w/and I thought it was the black nurses? I found out today at my post op appt that the surgeon (he's black) did it," she wrote. "He said he has 3 little girls & they have wash day... I almost cried." — (@) "While removing my staples he said, 'Your braids look better than mine, I hope I didn't do too bad,' and I was like excuse me??? YOU did my hair???..." she continued. "You could tell he was so proud to tell me too lol." — (@) "He also said he used staples to close my incisions instead of stitches to avoid cutting my hair when removing stitches," she added. — (@) Marshall explained that she'd had a rare condition of bone growths in her forehead region and the surgery to have them removed meant three incisions behind her hairline. "The surgeon parted and braided my hair to create clean incisions without shaving," she wrote. On her way home from surgery.India Marshall"Thinking about this black man braiding my hair to prepare to cut my head open is hilarious and endearing at the same time," she added. "Also the fact that he's that active in helping his wife with their girls, I love it. Moral of the story: find black doctors."People loved the story—the consideration of the surgeon, the image of him doing his own daughters' hair, and the difference it makes to have a doctor who has personal experience with a patient's culture. — (@) As one person pointed out, "THIS is among the millions upon millions of reasons why we need diversity in medicine. There is a level of care that only people who have walked in your shoes... even just a little bit... can provide.""This is why the world needs more Black & Brown folks at every level," wrote another person. "Reminds me of Peruvian Indigenous women who showed scientists how they do a specific weave unique to them that taught the medical AI how to stitch skin so that the patient has a quicker recovery time." [The person clarified in a later tweet it was Bolivian, not Peruvian Indigenous women.] — (@) "This experience was meaningful to me because this simple gesture showed I was being cared for by a surgeon that saw me," Marshall told Upworthy. "He saw me as a black woman that would appreciate extra precaution taken with her hair. Not only did he understand this as a black man, but he had the ability and took the time to braid my hair himself." India MarshallMarshall added that since she's the oldest of four girls herself, it was extra special to hear that he did the same for his own daughters. This is why diversity in medicine, as well as other fields, matters. It isn't just about equal opportunity or making a nod to inclusive values. Representation can make a direct, marked difference in people's experiences, and the value of being seen and having a need understood—without having to explicitly explain it—is priceless. This article originally appeared on 6.30.20

Carlos Díaz Ballesta dressed up like Queen front man Freddie Mercury and put on a show for his neighbors from his balcony in Spain. He threw on Mercury's iconic jeans, undershirt, and mustache and lip-synced to Queen's 1984 song, "I Want to Break Free."In the video, Ballesta dances with a vacuum cleaner, an homage to the song's video. In the "I Want to Break Free" video, members of Queen dressed in drag as characters from the British soap opera "Coronation Street." Freddie Mercury balcony (auténtico autor del baile)- OFICIAL ?? (del auténtico autor del baile) youtu.be While the video was a hit across the world it was a dud in America where no one knew what the band was lampooning."All around the world people laughed and they got the joke and they sort of understood it," Queen guitarist Brian May told NPR Radio. "I remember being on the promo tour in the Midwest of America and peoples' faces turning ashen and they would say, 'No, we can't play this. We can't possibly play this. You know, it looks homosexual'." - YouTube www.youtube.com This article originally appeared on 5.8.20

When you see someone jump out of their car at a red light to talk with another motorist, usually it's bad news. Most of the time, it's the moment when road rage gets personal.But 26-year-old Celina Romera caught video of probably one of the most adorable red-light interactions between motorists on December 15 in Tampa, Florida.In the video, an unidentified man pops out of his car at a stoplight with a darling puppy in his hand. In the other car, a big German Shepherd pops his head out and the two dogs exchange kisses."I JUST WITNESSED THE PUREST THING EVER," Romera wrote on Facebook.After the light changes, the man with the puppy gently walks back to the car. In the video Romera can be heard saying, "It's okay, man. Take your time."One could imagine that the dogs were barking at each other before the video began.Then, the owner of the puppy thought it was okay for the two dogs to meet. The American Kennel Club says that barking between dogs is a pretty crude way to communicate.However, it is part of a host of messages that dogs send to one another.The job of a dog's owner is to determine if the dogs are ready to share a sniff or of one is fearful. "The combination of barking, body language, and approach-avoidance behavior gives away the fearful dog's motivation, even to us relatively uneducated body-language readers," the Club says on its blog.The original video Romera posted has been shared over 120,000 times.The heartwarming video is a reminder that nothing can bring two strangers and millions of Facebook viewers together quite like dogs. This article originally appeared on 12.16.19

One of the great joys of having a pet is seeing how they develop and learn over their lifetimes. Sometimes, the things they pick up from us are surprising because they're completely unintentional. Reddit user TheRoseByAnotherName asked the online forum "What's the best thing you've accidentally trained a pet to do, like a behavior that is specifically from interaction with you and couldn't just be a quirk or learned themselves?" and the answers were surprising and funny. Here are 13 of the best.1. Crafty kitten"When my old cat was a kitten he would get in your face when you were eating and try to steal stuff off your plate/fork/mouth. Squirt bottle came into play and after a few days he realized if he stood by the xbox we would not squirt him and he could plan an attack," dj_narwahl white and gray cat Photo by Mikhail Vasilyev on Unsplash 2. The bed of solace"I had three brothers growing up who loved to torment my mainecoon. I made the rule they couldn't touch him on my bed. They would chase him through the house and he would make a huge flying leap onto my bed (1 bedroom for four kids) and then whip around and just glare daggers at them, knowing he was safe. I swear it only took him a week to figure it out!" — [Account deleted] white and black cat on white textile Photo by Polly Alexandra on Unsplash 3. Pavlovian X-Box"The noise of the Xbox turning off. When the dog hears that 'boo boo bing' noise he goes fucking apeshit thinking he's getting taken on a walk. To be fair. He usually is," — belsnickel2224. "Go upstairs!""My wife and I lived in a condo and whenever one of us went upstairs we announced it. Like "I'm going upstairs." Then go. So one day my wife is trying to snack on something and our dog was bothering her and she got fed up and scoldingly said 'Go upstairs!' Up the stairs he went! Where he sat and stared at her as if nobody ever feeds him and one little bite would mean the world," —The_Superfist a dog is sitting on the stairs of a house Photo by Natalie Kinnear on Unsplash 5. Bird blessing"I had a budgie who was impossible to train, but he chirped twice after anyone in the house sneezed. It was his form of 'Bless You,'" — A_Big_Pizza_Pie green bird on brown tree branch Photo by Johannes Giez on Unsplash 6. Husky Pants"A little bit of preface....I hate pants, I'm more of a skirt or dress type of person. My energetic Sheepherder Husky mix knows if I have pants on it means I'm taking her for a hike. Now whenever I'm seen in pants she freaks out, jumping up and down and running to the front door," — HiraeathAtRockBottom a dog running in the snow Photo by Ivan Rudoy on Unsplash 7. The dog 'n the hat"My dog is a retriever so she likes to hold things when I get home, not too uncommon. I started giving her my hat and after a while she started jumping up to get it. Now I have to kneel down so she can gently pluck it off my head. Adorable. Unfortunately she loves all hats now. So, this poor kid (2.5-3years old) was at a barbecue at my house and decided she wanted to run around with her baseball cap on. Cue my dog running after her, bowling her over, and stealing her hat to bring to me. I was mortified," — Fishes_Suspicous dog running on show Photo by Marcus Löfvenberg on Unsplash 8. "What did you do?""I used to scold my dogs my saying 'What did you do?' in a stern, disappointed voice. Then we were watching TV, and a male voice said 'What did you do?' and they both just sat there looking like they were in trouble," Uffda019. Good boy toots"My dog farts when he wants attention. Every time he would fart, my gf and I would laugh and tell him he's a good boy. Now he'll come up to me, sit, wag his tail, and let a few toots out. Not sure if it's his short fur or just his anatomy, but they're almost always audible," — BonkeyKongCountry. black pug in black and white Photo by Priscilla Du Preez ?? on Unsplash 10. Bad kitty"When my childhood cat would bite us or my parents, my mum would put her outside as punishment. When she felt like going outside, she'd come and bite us," — SusieQ134 view of white cat Photo by Chen Yi Wen on Unsplash 11. Medical support dog"I am chronically ill and have an autoimmune disease that causes my blood pressure to crash while upright and Pass out frequently. Certain exercises are important to stop from passing out frequently so I hike daily with my dog. After passing out a bunch on hikes (and at home), My dog somehow has learned to warn me by standing close to my hand and staring at me on our hikes when my blood pressure is getting low and my heart rate is increasing to tell me to sit/lay down before I pass out. It's become super helpful!" — FrogyFrogFrog123 a black dog wearing a yellow bandana standing in front of an airplane Photo by Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash 12. Blinky bunny"My rabbit, Poe, will only exit his cage when given the go ahead (a nod), and as soon as he does, he binkies twice then sits in my lap. Every. Single. Time," — TerribleEyeSight rabbit on polka-dot fabric Photo by Lucy M on Unsplash 13. Spelling pooch"My old dog (RIP) learnt to spell certain words which we didn't want to say in front of her. She would go mental if we spelt out "W-A-L-K", "L-E-A-D" or "O-U-T". I miss her," — SilentSamamamanderThis article originally appeared on 8.16.19

Godless, secular, anti-Christian sentiment is reaching a fever pitch, and it is completely incompatible with the foundations of Western civilization. Evidence of this phenomenon is readily available across the globe, but ultra-liberal France offers a particularly alarming illustration. Just last week, the historic Church of the Immaculate Conception in Saint-Omer, in Northern France, was set ablaze and nearly burned to the ground. The fire raged for three hours and consumed the roof and bell tower, before being extinguished by about 120 firefighters. The fire, of course, was no accident. The arsonist responsible has been identified as Joël Vigoureux, a left-wing, anti-Christian extremist with a lengthy record of crimes; he has been convicted at least eight times for setting fire to churches, although he is suspected of having burned down nearly twice as many. In 2019, he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment for burning down a church. The day after he was released, he burned down another church. To those of us who regularly peruse European headlines, it seems as though a church is burned to the ground in France about every week or two. It turns out that this perception is very nearly the truth. In 2021, the Observatoire du patrimoine religieux (Observatory of Religious Heritage) in Paris warned that Christian churches and monuments were being destroyed at a rate of approximately one every two weeks. Edouard de Lamaze, president of the Observatoire du patrimoine religieux, observed that while there are still more Christian (and specifically Catholic) sites of worship in France than Muslim, a new Mosque is built in France every 15 days, while one Christian church is destroyed, demolished, or burned down at roughly the same rate. This anti-Catholic violence is spreading quickly across Europe: an Irish military chaplain was stabbed last month in Galway, where “Mohammed” just became the most popular birth name; a 1,000-year-old Catholic church in Germany was burned down last year, with the arsonist targeting the historic high altar; a machete-wielding Islamist in Spain slaughtered a sacristan and wounded a priest as he attacked multiple churches last year. While the drastic increase in crimes against Catholics in Europe may be largely attributed to the unmitigated influx of Muslim immigration, the root of anti-Catholic violence has a different source in America. According to CatholicVote, just shy of 450 Catholic churches have been targeted for vandalism, desecration, and arson in the U.S. since May of 2020. Over 280 of those incidents have occurred just since the U.S. Supreme Court’s draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade was leaked in the first half of 2022. Islam, imported by godless liberal secularists, may be the chief motivating factor behind attacks on churches in Europe, but abortion is the religion of the anti-Catholics in America. The Catholic Church has, of course, long stood against abortion, unequivocally declaring the slaughter of the unborn a grave moral evil. The Catholic Church has led the charge against abortion in the U.S. It was Catholic priests and bishops who first railed against slaying the unborn in the New World, it was Catholic bishops who organized the first nationwide campaigns against abortion, even before Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, and it was Catholic Supreme Court justices who decided in 2022 to do the right thing and overturn the disastrous precedent that had allowed for the butchering of over 63 million unborn American children. It is then only reasonable, at least according to the sort of reason that reigns in Hell, for those who worship at the altar of abortion to see the Catholic Church as their chief enemy. In the end, it is not, for abortion acolytes, a matter of defending women’s rights, of fighting for bodily autonomy, nor even entirely of enjoying consequence-free sex. The latter, consequence-free sex, is the hollow promise made to them by their new god, Moloch. But just as the adorers of Moloch in ancient times could not bear to be told by faithful prophets that they are, in fact, hurling their own children into hungry flames and that that’s a bad thing, so today the followers of Moloch — known by new, sterilized names, be it “abortion” or “reproductive rights” or, most diabolical of all, “reproductive freedom” — cannot abide to share a society with any who would see their child sacrifice as anything less than noble, liberating, and worshipful. Indeed, the Catholic Church does see child sacrifice through abortion as a form of worship, but it is the worship of self, the worship of demons, the worship of Hell. Those who choose to slay their own children — not, as in the days of old, on altars or before great golden idols, but in quiet little operating rooms in quiet little office buildings — see the Catholic Church as an existential threat to their own chosen religion and their way of life (or, rather, of death) and, thus, attack the Church. Or at least what they perceive the Church to be. Although cathedrals and chapels are important, and even crucial, to the Church, and attacks against them are, indeed, against the Church herself, they are not the essence of the Church, just as abortion mills and gay bars are not the essence of the leftist zeitgeist. These two spiritual realities — the one noble and the gateway to life everlasting, the other corrupted and a doorway to unending misery — are waging war in our nation and our world even now. One will inevitably be defeated. The only question is whether we will live our lives in such a way as to further the noble or the corrupt. READ MORE: Trump Waffles on Florida’s Abortion Amendment Disgracefully, a Catholic Cardinal Fronts for Abortion The post What Attacks on Catholic Churches Reveal About Society appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Ezra Pound was an extraordinary and original poet who was emulated by T. S. Eliot and a hero of modernists of all sorts. Yet for all his genius — or perhaps because of it — he fell under the spell of Mussolini and then Hitler. He scourged the Jews just as the speed of their disenfranchisement was accelerating and the outlines of their apocalyptic danger were starting to become clear. From his home in Italy, he broadcast on behalf of the Axis and continued to do so even after Pearl Harbor. (READ MORE: Six Hostages Murdered. Put Heat on Hamas, Not Netanyahu.) He wrote: “Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d’Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.” Ah, a modernist’s saint. All that was lacking was for Pound to start a modern order in honor of his saint, perhaps the Brothers of Zyklon B. Oswald Mosley was a brilliant and well-placed Briton who distinguished himself on the battlefields of World War I. He won a seat in Parliament as a Tory, switched from the Conservative Party to Labour, and, as an undersecretary in the government, proposed a plan to deal with the skyrocketing unemployment of the Great Depression. It was a bold vision that FDR would embrace only a few years later in his New Deal. When it was rejected, Mosley resigned and started his own British fascist party. He dressed in uniform and, in many ways, emulated the Nazis to a T. Intelligence had it that he was to be installed as ruler of Britain on its surrender to Germany, and so he was interned for a few years until the tide of war turned decisively in the Allies’ favor and Churchill figured he could do no serious harm. Mosley wrote: A Jewish financier, stock-exchange speculator, or bucket-shop keeper may amass a large fortune and leave it to his son. That son’s interest in the country may not extend beyond a night club and a liberal supply of champagne. Yet under the present system, such an owner of hereditary wealth is treated as altogether admirable. Hitler thought Mosley too fawning an imitator, but said nothing to his face. He was an honored guest at Mosley’s second marriage, held secretly in Joseph Goebbels’s Berlin home in 1936. Martin Heidegger was a deep and subtle philosopher, one of the most challenging of the 20th Century. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party, stopped accepting Jewish students, and remained a Nazi Party member until the party was outlawed by the victorious Allies at the war’s end. He wrote: History teaches us that nomads did not become what they are because of the bleakness of the desert and the steppes, but that they have even left numerous wastelands behind them that had been fertile and cultivated land when they arrived, and that men rooted in the soil have been able to create for themselves a native land, even in the wilderness…the nature of our German space would surely be apparent to a Slavic people in a different manner than to us; to a Semitic nomad, it may never be apparent. Heidegger lent the considerable prestige of his name to the Nazi narrative of the super race ridding itself of inferior kinds, especially of the worst and most parasitic — the Semite. Nazism Reborn: It Doesn’t Take Much to Set a Trend Given these men and many more who peppered American and British upper classes and reputable universities, it is no surprise that intelligent people can go Nazi. The fascist glorification of the will as well as its rejection of the Biblical tradition’s emphasis on the need to accept the limitations imposed by our physical mortality (as well as the human proclivity to narcissism) appeals to fantasists and narcissists across time. They can imagine themselves utterly unlimited, and when the limitations imposed by Nature and Mature’s God inevitably manifest, they know whom to blame. During World War II and its unprecedented horrors, it became much more difficult to take this route. Four-hundred thousand American dead, the obscenity of the Holocaust and other related Nazi atrocities, and its alliance with the even bloodier Japanese militarists — all of this made it hard for anyone to go in that direction without becoming a pariah. (READ MORE by Shmuel Klatzkin: The Face of Evil Is Masquerading as ‘Joy’) But it doesn’t take a lot in our ahistorical age to set a new trend. Think of how long it took to mainstream antisemitism once the Democrats decided that Arab Americans could become a new client identity group. Instead of being banished to the fringes, now antisemitic haters like Rashida Tlaib and Jamaal Bowman with their fellow Squad members were lionized by the leftist press and shielded by the Democratic leadership from any meaningful consequences for their hateful transgressions. Influencers online regularly ballyhoo their imagined genius and blame their failures on Zionists. And now, this reborn embrace of Nazism’s central tenet is everywhere that our kids are. It’s being taught and reinforced in our great universities. But, dear fellow conservative, don’t pat yourself on the back just yet. You have been valiant in combating this new strain of Jew-hatred that has burst like a boil on the left, spewing its noxious contents all over our politics and our children’s minds. Job well done! Even Suburb People Have Fallen to the Nazi Mystique But now, the ridiculously talented Tucker Carlson, one of the most listened-to voices on the new populist right, has given credibility to a new rightist hatemonger who is striving to rehabilitate Hitler — as if all we learned in World War II and its aftermath had suddenly been thrown down the memory hole and had never existed. Tucker had a guest on his show, Darryl Cooper, whom he hyped as “the best and most honest popular historian working in the United States today.” Oh yeah. And what does this best and most honest scholar have to say? As reported by someone who has earned her stripes in the war for press freedom, Bari Weiss: Cooper argued that the Nazi death camps, where more than six million Jews were systematically murdered, were the result of the Germans taking too many “prisoners of war.” (Nazi Germany “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war. . . and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead.”) Yes, indeed, millions of people “ended up dead.” Cooper shows his Jew-hating bona fides in this tweet from last year: God sent the Romans to destroy the leprous temple and put an end to the Israelite religion for all time. Romans are an appropriate emphasis. Rome destroyed the Jewish state but found it could not destroy Jewish independence. Bidden by Jeremiah to seek the welfare of any sovereignty in which they lived, the Jews were nonetheless free as a people due to their choice to stay loyal to God in whose image all humans are made, and who forged their nation and its law. Even under the worst tyranny, they lived in inner freedom. The tale of freedom in the ensuing centuries has been between the imperial, top-down law in the Roman–Justinian model, in which only the ruler is seen as godlike, and the ground-up model of a law that sees infinite value in each individual and so enshrines liberty as its core value — for only free people can truly serve God. (READ MORE: Jews, Muslims, and the Fate of Europe) Imperialists don’t care whether it is leftist or rightist thought that gets them where they wish to go. The law will ultimately be theirs to shape as they please, with no one to gainsay them. As the Sun King was reported to say, “L’Etat, c’est moi!” And these people almost always hate Jews. Hitler, Stalin, Maduro, Erdogan, Communists, Nazis, and Islamists — their hatred of freedom and of Jews are all of one piece. Tucker has stood up for us with courage and tenacity. He has paid a price and has soldiered on. But even superb people have fallen to the Nazi mystique in the past. Embracing men like Cooper will befoul him. Don’t mistake the hatred for history. Read another valiant warrior and a far superior historian on Nazism and World War II, Victor Davis Hanson, in his superb article that Bari Weiss published together with her own piece in the Free Press. To praise Hitler, after all we know, is no better than extolling Russian communism after the publishing of The Gulag Archipelago. The post Tucker Carlson Gives Credibility to a Hatemonger appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

An inconvenient truth: there are dictatorships freer and more efficient than many democracies. More than reflecting well on dictatorships, this speaks poorly of democracies. In the ’60s, in a wonderful interview with Esquire, William F. Buckley made this clear when he stated that the idea that everyone is qualified to vote is “one of the great self-delusions of democracy!” However, this wasn’t a defense of a government formed by a well-versed elite; it was quite the opposite. It was at this point in the conversation, in this context, that Buckley famously said: “I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.” “Under a certain circumstance dictatorship is best,” he continued, “I’m interested in human freedom, and the kind of government that maximizes it. I think I could have had more freedom under Franco, for instance, than I would have had under the Spanish Republic.” It’s amusing to read this comment from Buckley in 1961, because today in Spain, in my country, it’s quite common to hear intellectuals and artists — not necessarily right-wingers — express the feeling that they were freer under Franco than they are now. And, in many ways, they were. That gives you an idea of just how far government intrusion into individual freedoms has advanced over the last half-century of democracy. Of course, this isn’t exclusive to Spain. The United States is also in the midst of a rollback of freedoms. Government is always inefficient. Sometimes, when there’s an idiot in charge — and don’t think I’m referring to Joe Biden — it’s not only inefficient, but also ineffective and harmful. Government oversight is an indispensable requirement for democratic health. Most politicians don’t want oversight, and they couldn’t care less about democratic health, just like most of us men prefer not to know our cholesterol levels, because that would force us to take action, and not the kind we enjoy. Better to stay blissfully ignorant than … save one’s life. Better to wade through government corruption than … save the nation. In 1982, Ronald Reagan made one of his many great decisions: the creation of the Grace Commission, a private-sector investigation of government inefficiency aimed, in the president’s words, at “draining the swamp.” Draining what? Was he drunk? I don’t think so. When malaria ravaged the United States and Europe during the past century, draining swamps was a way to combat the disease by eliminating the mosquitoes that transmitted it. So, the metaphorical order to “drain the swamp” really meant: fight the government mosquitoes that cause the disease, eliminate inefficiency and waste in government, and show no mercy — shoot down every atom of incompetence. Now Trump has announced his intention, at the suggestion of Elon Musk, to create his own efficiency commission if he reaches office. It will also be made up of private-sector figures, with the primary goal of tackling inflation and eradicating anything that contributes to government inefficiency. The truth is that the Grace Commission, led by businessman and Reagan’s friend Peter Grace, wasn’t quite a success story. In 1984, the Grace Commission presented its report to the government, with about 2,478 recommendations that would supposedly save $424 billion of “waste” over three years. Reagan’s report later claimed that Congress agreed with 1,600 of the recommendations, though there was hesitation over Grace’s savings calculations and the actual budget savings. Reagan’s idea failed because, even though politicians agreed with many measures, most were never implemented — another lovely metaphor for the vicious inefficiency of government and its ripple effects, including the idiotic bureaucracy of Congress. Then you’ll ask me why I sometimes think a good dictatorship is better than a bad democracy. Let’s continue: Trump and Musk now have a golden opportunity to turn this failure around. The idea is brilliant, and, regardless of idiotic prejudices, it brings public administration closer to the type of private-sector talent that would never enter politics or manage public funds. This is the kind of people who simply make money and do things well in their companies. The mere fact that they might spend some of their time trying to make the government more efficient is wonderful news for all sensible people. If, as in Grace’s case, the commission members are competent individuals regardless of their political leanings, even better. The task of executing the recommendations to slim down the government, make it more efficient, reduce inflation, and clean up the economy will ultimately lie in Trump’s hands, this time for real. If he succeeds, Reagan’s spirit will smile proudly, wherever he is. Translated by Joel Dalmau.  READ MORE: The Real Reason Democrats Fear Losing in November Military Raids in the West Bank Help Thwart Terrorists The post The Second Coming of Ronald Reagan appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden has said he will not pardon his son Hunter, who pleaded guilty to nine felony and misdemeanor tax charges Thursday in Los Angeles. I hope Biden relents on his no-pardon pledge before the younger Biden spends a night behind bars. My guess is that’s the president’s plan — to flip and pardon his son after the Nov. 5 election. (RELATED: The Real Reason Democrats Fear Losing in November) I don’t think it would be a good precedent to imprison a president’s son. In this age of perennial political payback, one punishment inflicted on one side ultimately spawns a reciprocal act of reprisal. And it only gets worse. Look at impeachment. The I-word was a nightmare for Bill Clinton in 1998. Trump was impeached twice as president — and still, he won his party’s nomination this year. If Hunter Biden goes to prison, know that family members of Republican politicians will be considered fair game. Democrats, too. In June, a Delaware jury convicted the president’s son on three felony gun counts. Sentencing for those crimes is scheduled for Nov. 13. Hunter Is Not a Great Guy, But He’s Hardly a Menace It’s important to note that Hunter has been clean for five years. He no longer is the danger to society he was when he was driving intoxicated, sometimes armed, leaving trails of cocaine and unpaid bills in his wake. He was a menace to society; now he’s just an embarrassment. I’m no fan of Hunter Biden. I think he is a complete fraud who sold access to his then-vice president father rather than accept the sort of top 2 percent salary he could have made as a Georgetown and Yale law graduate. (READ MORE: The Manchurian by Way of Minnesota Candidate) Consider the statement Hunter Biden released Thursday: “I will not subject my family to more pain, more invasions of privacy and needless embarrassment. For all I have put them through over the years, I can spare them this, and so I have decided to plead guilty,” the son wrote in a publicly released letter. The president’s son also offered he was done with prosecutors who “were focused not on justice but on dehumanizing me for my actions during my addiction.” For all his moaning, he’s pleading guilty because he is guilty on the tax charges — just as he was guilty on the gun charges for which he was convicted in June. Problem: As Special Counsel David Weiss observed, in 2020 the president’s son had regained his sobriety and was paid more than $1.2 million — and he still did not pay off his tax liabilities. He was just greedy. I should note that 2020 was the year his father was running for president, so you would have thought he’d be on his best behavior. But then, as POTUS was fond of saying, “My son did nothing wrong.” In the end, Hunter Biden faces a life sentence being Hunter Biden. And his father won’t be president much longer. Now that I’ve got that out of my system, I return to the pardon idea. While the 46th president is at it, he might want to consider a pardon for Donald Trump’s criminal charges — election interference and willful retention of classified documents. (READ MORE: Five Quick Things: Easy Predictions For 2024) Republicans often gripe about “law-fare” — and rightly so. So maybe Trump should make the first move by promising to pardon Hunter Biden if his father fails to do so. Not that anyone expects that to happen. Contact Review-Journal Washington columnist Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com. Follow @debrajsaunders on X. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM The post Hunter Biden Pleads Guilty. The President Should Pardon Him. appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

from State Of The Nation: Iran & Hezbollah Has Seriously Punished Israel For Spate Of Recent Assassinations—Why crickets in Tel Aviv? SOTN Editor’s Note: You certainly won’t see the following report in the CIA’s Mockingbird Media, or even in the Alt Media, so censored is this highly classified  info. TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/ You very rarely see it or […]

by Sean Carney, Activist Post: A technology for modifying our planet Geoengineering has a propensity to cause confusion and division, as well as misunderstanding. If you are familiar with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and their political position on the environment, you might already know that geoengineering programs are hastily being rolled out by […]