Sunday, December 31, 2023

Ending the year is total chaos, beginning a new year in total chaos - can you imagine how it will end?

 

Mexico gives Biden el dedo medio

By Silvio Canto, Jr. www.americanthinker.com

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/12/mexico_gives_biden_emel_dedo_medioem.html

 In English, it's the middle finger   

 In Spanish, it is "el dedo medio." 

 It means the same thing in both languages. 

 It sure looks to me that Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador just gave the U.S. delegation the finger.

 To be fair, you can not blame Lopez-Obrador for being angry with Joe Biden. 

 Not long ago, AMLO, as they know him south of the border, negotiated a pretty good deal with the Trump administration, i.e., "Remain in Mexico."  It worked well because it discouraged migrant caravans.  Why would you pay something to bring you to the U.S.-Mexico border if you can't get into the U.S.?  The objective is to get into the U.S., not spend time in Mexico waiting for a judge to review your case.

 So what do we do now?   

 First, let's recognize that President Lopez-Obrador leaves office in 11 months.  Most Mexican presidents leave office and disappear totally.  I believe that AMLO has other plans.  He wants to be an international leader of the Third World, and speaking for migrants is a big part of his plan.

 Second, AMLO is a leftist, as his love of communist regimes worldwide demonstrates.   

 This is from The Dallas Morning News editorial:

 López Obrador has become a defender of rogue and repressive regimes that have squandered their economies and triggered mass exoduses. These countries need aid but also policies leading to better governance, as we have outlined in our series The Unraveling of Latin America.

 Mexico has deported a record number of migrants this year but now says it needs more funding. Last weekend, Mexican officials did nothing to contain a caravan of an estimated 6,000 migrants, a sign they could do more if they wanted to.

 Right now, a containment policy to control these migrant flows is needed at the southern Mexican border, and López Obrador, who criticized the U.S. for using barbed wire and physical obstacles to contain migrants, should offer cooperation instead of criticism. His quid pro quo proposal does not look like a common strategy, and the U.S. must be ready to pressure him to be a better partner.

 That will require President Biden to engage directly. Right now, he’s on vacation. That’s a mistake when a crisis is at hand.

 Yes, our president is on vacation.  Worse than that, AMLO is not afraid of him.   He knows that nothing will happen.   There won't be any U.S. taxes on remittances, or economic sanctions, or designations of Mexico's cartels as terrorist organizations.  

 Trump got AMLO to work with him.  Biden can't.   As my late Cuban mother used to say "Colorín, Colorado, este cuento se ha acabado," loosely translated to: The story is over and don't expect any changes.

 

Saturday, December 30, 2023

Do you actually think Mexico will help with the migrant crisis? AMLO gets $55 billion in remittances annually. Why shoot yourself in the foot!

 

Biden rolls over like a lapdog for Mexico's el presidente

By Monica Showalter www.americanthinker.com

With elections on and Joe Biden hovering at around a 40% public approval rating, everyone can see that Joe Biden's starting to get desperate over his polls.

Vying for issue number one among voters is an out-of-control open border with illegal immigration now hitting record highs as hundreds of thousands pour in. Cities are going bankrupt with the onslaught. Border Patrol agents are shutting down legitimate trade to "process" migrants. Hospitals are flooded with diseased and injured migrants, and schools are overwhelmed with indigent pupils speaking more than a hundred languages.

Instead of change his policies to match what's written in law, Biden has sent his men down to Mexico to try to talk Mexico's anti-U.S. president, Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador, into taking care of his migrant problem for him. AMLO, of course, is actually helping the migrants get in, which is a situation requiring assertiveness but there was none of that from Joe, just the image of a pleading lapdog.

According to the New York Post:

The White House sent Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Wednesday to meet with Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, hoping to obtain his assistance in slowing the wave of migrants crossing through his country on their way to ours.

The resulting “Joint Communique” from that parley reveals Mexico City has no interest in assisting an administration that won’t secure US borders.

The trip itself, scheduled during a holiday week when little gets done in either capital, reeked of desperation, and nothing in that communiqué dispels the stench.

Here's the main section of the declaration that came of it:

The two countries reaffirmed their existing commitments on fostering an orderly, humane, and regular migration. This includes reinforcing our partnership to address the root causes of migration, such as poverty, inequality, and violence, and for the two countries’ initiative for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. Ongoing cooperation also includes enhanced efforts to disrupt human smuggling, trafficking, and criminal networks, and continuing the work to promote legal instead of irregular migration pathways. Also, both delegations agreed on the importance of maintaining and facilitating the vital bilateral trade at our shared border.

President López Obrador highlighted the commitment of President Biden to pursue regular, orderly, and secure migration. He stressed the need to continue the diplomatic and political engagement with all countries in the region, as well as investing in ambitious development programs throughout the entire hemisphere of the Americas. Both delegations underlined the efforts that the Biden administration is pursuing through development assistance and humanitarian aid, as well as advancing new private investments in the region.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/ssl-intgr-net/tags/7_74_19.gifWhich is garbage, pretty much regurgitated palaver about 'root causes' from Biden's border czar, Kamala Harris and her vaunted migration report, which mean nothing. We notice that she wasn't invited to this all-important meeting for Biden. She was just there in spirit.

More specifically, it's about money, and dropping sanctions for AMLO's crummy little socialist friends running the Nicaraguan, Cuban, and Venezuelan dictatorships. AMLO saw his opportunity with Biden, recognizing how desperate he was for Mexico to stop the migrants, and decided that now was the time to get the U.S. to drop sanctions on those countries, which is what they want, and get their hands into the money pots of the big greedy gringo capitalists with so-called "investments."

The Post points out that AMLO gets $55 billion in untaxed remittance cash each year, mostly from the U.S. and its illegal migrants, and he'd like to have more of that coming. That goes doubly so for the regimes of Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela, which don't have much of any cash coming in except migrant remittances. Nicaragua, for one, reported record remittances this week from its illegal migrants.

It's telling that Mexico dropped the words "democratic decline" as one of its root causes of illegal migration in the official statement, apparently on its own, in the Spanish version of the document. Someone noticed, and then Joe Biden rolled again, dropping those words from the U.S. version of the statement in English as if following Mexico instead of sticking to the agreed-upon statement.

The Hill described that embarrassing rollover here.

The Mexican version, identical save for the phrase “democratic decline,” caused an uproar among the country’s opposition, which has raised red flags over López Obrador’s institutional reforms.

López Obrador has derided institutions such as the country’s independent electoral authority as “neoliberal,” “conservative” and too costly for the country, pushing reforms and budget cuts to weaken them.

To Mexico’s opposition, López Obrador’s actions are the very definition of “democratic decline.”

Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal, the top foreign policy adviser to opposition presidential candidate Xóchitl Gálvez, accused Mexico’s government on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, of “shaving off” the term after the White House published its initial version.

But the White House reissued the English language version of the statement hours later, this time without “democratic decline.”

We might note that democratic decline is present here, too, in the migrant-receiving country, but that's not what this is about.

It's about political cover for AMLO and his dictator-y acts, and AMLO's pals, in socialist hellholes such as Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. They're all happy the heat's off on their increasingly oppressive dictatorships and the migrants are flowing outward.

Joe was happy to roll for them there.

Worse still, there was talk of amnesty for illegals in the document, an interesting switch for AMLO who historically has opposed illegal immigration of Mexicans to the states, viewing them as traitors to the motherland.

Now he likes that illegal immigration, which, as the Post notes, has brought him billions in remittances to play around with though the banking system. Who needs poor Mexicans to support when gringo will do it for him and the money is rolling back to him instead of the protests? Who needs potential rioters who otherwise would stand up against his own bad economic policies if they have to live in their own homeland? Migration is always a cash cow for Mexican governments and for more reasons than one.

What's bad here is that amnesty -- for DACA kids and longtime illegal migrants -- will encourage more illegal immigration, not less. After that, AMLO will stand there with his hand out again, knowing that Feckless Joe will come to him, ready to roll over again.

What an ugly disaster this meeting was, and what counterproductive things -- none good for Americans -- went on there. 

Back when President Trump was in office, the U.S. was able to stand tall and hit Mexico with the right incentives to get it to change its behavior on illegal migrants and the border, shutting down the border and warning AMLO that there would be no trade until he played ball. AMLO was able to read Trump clearly and decided it wasn't worth his while to end trade with one of his top trading partners.

Now it's different. For AMLO, it's time to shake concessions out of the feckless gringos. He knows Joe Biden won't change his policies, so now he calls the shots. What a satisfying thing is it for him to see Joe Biden rolling over for him again and again, pleading for for one last belly rub from the Mexicans.

 

Friday, December 29, 2023

If you thought 2023 was a difficult year - just wait and try to live the best you can in 2024! Good Luck!

 


The Lessons of 2023

December 27, 2023 amac.us

Ben Shapiro, 39, is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” and co-founder of Daily Wire+. He is a three-time New York Times bestselling author; his latest book is “The Authoritarian Moment: How The Left Weaponized America’s Institutions Against Dissent.”

2023 was a rather bad year.

Not as bad as 2024 is likely to be, or as 2020 was.

But bad.

Nonetheless, we ought to learn from the bad as well as the good. So, in a spirit of reflection, I offer a few lessons we ought to remember from this crummy year.

Lesson No. 1: Lots of people do not think like we do. And failure to recognize the truth of this lesson leads to failures of imagination that in turn lead to suffering and death.

When Hamas slaughters infants in their cribs, rapes women in front of their husbands and takes them captive back to Gaza, and tortures and murders civilians, that isn’t because of some outsized grievance. It’s because they do not have the same values as Westerners. Pretending that members of Hamas are simply freedom-loving people who seek material prosperity, quiet family lives and tolerance for those who think differently isn’t just wrong; it’s catastrophically wrong. It’s also leading foolish Westerners to believe that appeasement of Hamas sympathizers will somehow alleviate Hamas’ evil terrorist behaviors, or that current deaths of civilians in the Gaza Strip is the result of Israeli indiscrimination rather than Hamas’ stated war objective of maximizing civilian casualties for the international media.

That’s a lie. And it’s a dangerous lie. It’s the same lie that led to 20 years of terror buildup in the Gaza Strip, funded and then ignored by the West. It’s the same lie that has led to thousands of deaths, both Israeli and Palestinian. It’s the same lie that led the West to import millions of radical Muslims into its heart, endangering both the social fabric and the future of the West itself.

Which brings us to lesson No. 2: The next generation is in serious moral peril. As a recent Harvard-Harris poll showed, 79% of young Americans (18-24) agree that white people are oppressors and people of color are the oppressed; a similarly frightening two-thirds of young people believed that Jews are part of the oppressor class and “should be treated as oppressors.” This bodes ill for the future of republicanism: If Americans can quickly be classified as oppressor or oppressed not based on behavior but based on group identity, we will revert to the tribalism that destroys nations entirely.

Lesson No. 3 of 2023: Weakness breeds aggression. From Afghanistan to Crimea, weakness in the face of America’s enemies breeds aggression. Russia moved on Ukraine not predominantly because it feared NATO’s dominance, but because it sensed Western weakness; right now, the Iranian government is flipping the activation switch on all of its proxy terror groups in the Middle East because of perceived Western cowardice; should the West fail to confront the Houthis in the Red Sea, undoubtedly China will see the West’s unwillingness to expend even minor military resources to retain open trade lanes, and will threaten Taiwan. The same is true with regard to America’s southern border: an open border breeds waves of illegal immigration, which is precisely what we have been seeing. Conversely, strength means facing hard realities and making sacrifices in order to confront them.

Lesson No. 4 from 2023: what goes around comes around. Always.

This has been true for quite a while when it comes to American politics: voiding the judicial filibuster means the other party will cram through nominees on a party line vote; militarizing the executive order will allow the other party’s president to do the same. Today, Democrats seem excited to weaponize the Department of Justice in order to target former President Donald Trump, the leading candidate to face off against President Joe Biden. What are the chances that precedent will be utilized by Democrats’ opponents in the future? Refusal to acknowledge this reality means an endless cycle of escalating reprisal that ends only with actual conflict.

One final lesson: incompetence has consequences.

We live in the richest and most powerful country in human history. That truth obscures the effects of incompetence at every level. But not for long. Eventually, the people tire of the incompetence of their leaders – and when they tire of the incompetence of leaders from all sides, they seek radical change to the systems themselves. Often, such changes are more perilous than the incompetence they seek to rectify. Which means that perhaps intermediate institutions – say, political parties – ought to flex their muscle in order to press forward competent people rather than caving to the whims of the moment.

So long, 2023.

Here’s to a better 2024.