Resident Joe Biden is losing support from some of his biggest backers.
Bill Kristol, who founded and edited the neoconservative magazine The Weekly Standard, became a fierce critic of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign and led the NeverTrump movement.
In 2018, Kristol co-founded The Bulwark, whose coverage is largely centered around criticism of Trump.
Two years later, he endorsed Biden in the Democratic primary, calling it a “simple choice,” and in the general election.
On Wednesday, however, Kristol argued that Biden should announce he won’t run for re-election.
He said on Twitter that a retirement announcement by Biden would bolster the Democrats’ chances in the 2022 midterm elections and lead to a Democratic victory in the 2024 presidential race.
Straightforward from here:
1. Biden announces not running again.
2. 2022 focus turns to R extremism, Ds do well in Nov.
3. Inflation subsides, Ukraine defeats Russia, Biden is successful 1-term president.
4. Younger moderate D defeats Trump or Trumpist in ’24.
As the president’s popularity drops further and further amid historic inflation and other crises, even liberals are increasingly giving him the cold shoulder.
A recent New York Times/Siena College poll indicated that 64 percent of Democratic voters want someone else than the incumbent as their nominee for president in 2024.
Biden snapped at a reporter who asked him about the poll at a White House event Tuesday.
“Read the polls, jack! You guys are all the same,” he said.
“What’s your message to Democrats who don’t want you to run again?”
At the now-defunct Weekly Standard, the neoconservative ideologue became a crucial proponent of President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The invasion has since become regarded as one of the worst foreign policy disasters in U.S. history.
Kristol reinvented himself by aligning with progressive Democrats as a Trump critic after the 2016 GOP primary, establishing himself as a mainstay on liberal cable channels such as CNN and MSNBC.
So Biden uses climate change lies to kill US oil industry- thus raising prices through roof- and then has our country buy oil from our enemies at a hyper-inflated cost. I’m sure the Russia-Ukraine war was part of the plan. Enemy #1 of the state, just like Barack Hussein Obama [US Patriot]
OPEC expects to increase oil output in 2023 by nearly 1 million barrels per day due to rising global demand.
“In 2023, expectations for healthy global economic growth amidst improvements in geopolitical developments, combined with expected improvements in the containment of COVID-19 in China, are expected to boost consumption of oil,” the organization said in its monthly report released on July 12.
Year over year, world oil demand is anticipated to rise by 2.7 million barrels per day (bpd), and overall demand is projected to reach 103 million bpd, OPEC said in its report.
Non-OPEC supply is expected to increase by 1.76 million bpd in 2023, with OPEC having to chip in an additional 940,000 barrels daily. In total, OPEC production is expected to be at 30.1 million barrels per day in 2023, up from 29.2 million barrels in 2022.
For 2022, total global oil demand is estimated to increase by 3.36 million bpd, with OPEC having to release an extra 1.1 million barrels of oil each day.
In the first quarter of 2022, OPEC was supposed to release 28.63 million bpd but could only produce 28.36 million bpd, a shortfall of 270,000 barrels. Things improved in the second quarter after OPEC produced 610,000 bpd more than expected.
In June, OPEC oil output rose by 234,000 bpd, driven by production increases in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Iran, and Angola.
With regard to the United States, OPEC expects total oil output to rise by 700,000 bpd in 2023, a slower growth when compared to the 880,000 bdp increase estimated for 2022.
Increasing Oil Output
Resident Joe Biden is scheduled to meet with Persian Gulf leaders in Saudi Arabia this week to discuss raising oil output to ease gasoline prices. White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan stated on July 11 that OPEC members have the capacity to boost oil production.
However, some experts do not agree with such a view.
“I think that a surge in Saudi production seems unlikely. I expect some anodyne statements from Saudi Arabia about helping to balance the global oil market, meet global demand, support economic growth and stability among the import countries,” Ben Cahill, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told Reuters.
On the sidelines of the G–7 summit in June, French President Emmanuel Macron was heard telling Biden about a call he had with UAE leader Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan regarding the difficulty in raising output, according to Reuters.
The UAE leader told Macron that his country was at “maximum” oil production capacity and that the Saudis are also struggling.
The Jewish Democratic Council of America tries to rewrite history on Wittes’s opposition to the historic Abraham Accords
Resident Joe Biden is headed to the Middle East this week for the first time as president, in part to advance the historic peace agreements the Trump administration helped secure between Israel and many of its neighbors.
It’s bad timing for one of his nominees, Dr. Tamara Cofman Wittes, who spent the Trump years as a Twitter warrior trashing the Abraham Accords and —well, now it’s awkward.
We assume that’s why, according to our Alana Goodman, the Jewish Democratic Council of America is rushing in to shore up Wittes’s street cred with a letter to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from “leaders in foreign policy, national security, and the Jewish community” attesting to her stellar support for the Abraham Accords: “As Dr. Wittes said during her hearing,” Jewish Democratic Council CEO Halie Soifer writes in the letter, “the Abraham Accords ‘offer a foundation for regional cooperation between Arab states and Israel, on shared issues like energy, water, and health.’”
It would be hard to come up with a sleazier, more dishonest, more lawyerly case for Wittes’s nomination.
Wittes may have regurgitated platitudes at her confirmation hearing intended to assure lawmakers of her support for the Abraham Accords that are now Biden administration policy, but one has to think she was more honest when she wasn’t gunning for votes. That’s when she slammed the peace agreements as a “new Naksa”—that is, a setback or catastrophe—for the Palestinian people, called the normalization agreements between the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Israel a step “in the wrong direction,” and took to her podcast to mock their significance: “For your average Israeli, what is most exciting about this is that instead of having to fly to Istanbul to get to Southeast Asia, they can fly through Abu Dhabi and Dubai, it is much faster,” she sneered.
Consider those remarks in light of the rest of the letter, which describes Wittes as an “open-minded and principled” woman who “always finds time to listen to alternative views and give them full consideration.”
Mmmhmm.
Wittes’s post-hoc explanation for her tweets—that she “was skeptical that other Arab states would join” the Abraham Accords—makes no sense and is plainly refuted by the record. Bias and ignorance are the best case explanation for her position then. At least as plausible is that Wittes had in mind Qatari opposition to the Abraham Accords: The repressive Gulf monarchy was at the time funding her perch at the Brookings Institution, and Wittes had no compunction about lavishing praise on her benefactors.
That a supposed Middle East expert was upstaged and discredited by the political novices in the Trump administration is embarrassing but not disqualifying. Her dishonesty during her Senate testimony should be.
An Arkansas law that bars state contractors from engaging in Israel boycotts was upheld Wednesday by a U.S. appeals court, dealing a major setback to supporters of the anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Arkansas’s anti-BDS law—which bars state contractors from waging economic warfare on Israel—”does not violate the First Amendment,” the court concluded, rejecting arguments from activists that banning state contractors from engaging in Israel boycotts violates their free speech rights.
BDS supporters across America have tried to frame the debate as a free speech issue. The Arkansas decision sets a precedent that these arguments are bunk because economic boycotts are not speech and provides legal standing to other states that have also passed anti-BDS measures into law. Israel’s enemies will now have a much harder time fighting against this type of state legislation.
The Arkansas law, like many others across the nation, prohibits any entity that contracts with the state from engaging in Israel boycotts. The state was first sued over the law in 2017 by the Arkansas Times, which claimed the statute is unconstitutional and violates the First Amendment by restricting protected speech.
“The district court dismissed the suit, holding that economic boycotts do not implicate the First Amendment because they are neither speech nor expressive conduct,” according to the ruling. The appeals court affirmed the district court’s finding.
Pro-Israel organizations and legal advocates who worked to ensure the anti-BDS law was upheld praised the court’s decision.
“Progressive groups have used bogus constitutional arguments as prerexts to protect the discriminatory treatment of primarily Jewish groups. Embarrassed to publicly defend BDS itself, they have claimed to oppose such laws out of legal scruple. Today that pretext has been removed, and Congress can move forward with confidence to pass federal anti-BDS legislation,” said Professor Eugene Kontorovich, who has helped draft many state anti-BDS laws and participated in the 8th Circuit litigation.
“The court’s conclusion should put to bed any arguments put forth by bigots who won’t simply settle for demonizing and boycotting Israel but want the state to aid and abet that appalling endeavor,” added Sandra Parker, an attorney and chair of the Christians United for Israel (CUFI) action fund.
BDS activists across the nation have begun using the courts to try to shoot down state laws that bar Israel boycotts. Legal challenges in Georgia, Arizona, Kansas, and Texas have been working their way through the court system.
In a stirring and spot-on campaign email, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis declares war on the Far Left calling it a “Radical Vigilante Woke Mob.”
While I’ve seen my share of them over the years and sent out a few myself, campaign fundraising emails are notorious for appealing to the hard-core base of both parties.
So, most of them are taken with a grain of salt by political observers.
However, the email I just received from the DeSantis re-election campaign really hit home. It accurately defined and summarized the aggressive domestic threat posed by the extreme Left to our nation’s very core:
Our country is currently facing a great threat. A new enemy has emerged from the shadows that seeks to destroy and intimidate their way to a transformed state, and country, that you and I would hardly recognize.
This enemy is the radical vigilante woke mob that will steamroll anything and anyone in their way. Their blatant attacks on the American way of life are clear and intensifying: stifling dissent, public shaming, rampant violence, and a perverted version of history.
A group that will, literally, tear down monuments and buildings but — perhaps in an even more sinister way — tear down the American spirit itself. They go after the family unit, parental rights, traditional moral values, the church, and fact-based education.
Over the past few years, we’ve watched horrified as this group has attempted to brainwash our children into thinking we live in an evil, racist, irredeemable country.
We listened to them deny science and data to exert political theater all the while trampling over personal liberties enshrined in the Constitution.
We saw them take to the streets for an entire summer like outlaws burning, looting, and destroying everything in sight while being told they were “mostly peaceful” and “passionate.”
DeSantis omitted the LGBTQ brainwashing of our young children and the collusion of major woke companies like Disney in doing so, but he has been at the forefront of battling both these evils in Florida.
The DeSantis campaign continues, noting something that impacted me directly on the huge social media platform LinkedIn: “We watched Big Tech moguls in Silicon Valley be the arbiters of truth – deciding who gets to speak and who gets silenced through the digital public square.”
And of course, the last piece of the massive leftist effort: “We listened to the legacy media muffle legitimately verifiable news stories that didn’t align with their preferred narrative, only to watch the truth trickle out months later at a more politically expedient time.”
Referring to himself as the “Governor of the Free State of Florida,” DeSantis then goes on to make his pitch for how he will fight this grave threat to America, at least in Florida, with “faith, with reason, and with freedom.”
And of course, he asks for our financial support.
In my view, this email accurately and effectively summarizes the threat we face from the extreme Left in America today. DeSantis is on the front lines of this battle in Florida, but he also seems to be preparing to take the fight nationally as well.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.
Qatar quashes free speech. Tamara Cofman Wittes praised it as a “global gathering place for dialogue.”
Resident Joe Biden’s nominee for a top role at the U.S. Agency for International Development has a long history of praising Qatar, the oppressive Gulf state with a shoddy human rights record that includes restrictions on free expression and the criminalization of same-sex sexual conduct.
Tamara Cofman Wittes is slated to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday, where the panel will consider her nomination to be an assistant administrator of USAID. If confirmed, she would be responsible for distributing billions of American aid dollars throughout the Middle East.
As a Middle East policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, where she worked first from 2003 to 2009 and then from 2012 until earlier this month, Wittes lavished praise on Qatar, a repressive nation that discriminates against gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals. Wittes described Qatar’s capital city Doha as a “global gathering place for dialogue” and amplified Qatari leaders’ claims that they support human rights and oppose “extremists who exploit religion to incite violence.”
The Brookings Institution was at the time raking in millions from Qatar—its “Doha Center,” renamed after the organization came under scrutiny for the partnership, had a controversial 14-year run. Wittes’s confirmation hearing comes as the Brookings Institution faces renewed scrutiny over its foreign financial ties. The think tank’s president, retired general John Allen, resigned on Sunday amid news that he is under federal investigation for his alleged role in illegally lobbying for Qatar.
While the Brookings Institution took money from several foreign governments over the past decade, Qatar appears to be its most significant foreign donor, pouring at least $22 million into the think tank between 2013 and 2021, according to congressional financial disclosures and the organization’s annual donor reports.
Wittes’s record, laid out in her writing and prolific tweets that are now shielded from public view, also includes criticism of U.S.-brokered deals normalizing relations between Israel and Arab governments and of Israel’s pushback on activists calling for an economic boycott of the Jewish State. It may be an obstacle as she looks to win Republican support ahead of her confirmation hearing. It is unclear, for example, how Republican lawmakers will respond to her amplification of a tweet suggesting that Trump supporters should be subject to the same process of “denazification” that sought to rid Germany and Austria of Nazi ideology after World War II.
Congressional Republicans voiced concern about her criticism of the Abraham Accords, an agreement that normalized ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, among others.
“Wittes was one of the most bitter opponents of the Abraham Accords. She trashed everyone involved, including and especially Israel,” a senior Republican congressional aide told the Washington Free Beacon.
Wittes quoted articles decrying the deal as misogynistic, a “new Naksa”—referring to the Palestinian word for “setback”—and as a “triumph for authoritarianism.”
“If I were an Arab leader weighing ties with Israel, I would have 2 things in mind,” Wittes wrote on Twitter in September 2020. “1) A promise from [Trump adviser Jared] Kushner now isn’t worth much. Why not wait until after Nov elections? 2) Bibi’s backtracked on his commitments to UAE; his promises aren’t worth much either. Let’s wait & see.”
Wittes argued that the several Gulf states taking steps toward normalization with Israel were engaged in a “betrayal of Palestinian interests” and the agreement would make it more difficult to extract Israeli concessions in return for a peace deal with the Palestinians.
“This is not Middle East peace. It’s certainly not Middle East peace when there are horrific civil wars going on in the region,” Wittes said of the accords. “That’s where I think it’s been oversold.”
She went so far as to blame Gulf states that joined the Abraham Accords with Israel for the May 2021 war between Hamas and Israel.
“The risk now is that Arab states that normalised with Israel bought this mess and now have to live with it,” she told the Independent.
Notwithstanding her extensive writing and tweeting on the subject, Wittes told the Washington Free Beacon days before her confirmation hearing that she supports the Abraham Accords.
“I have never expressed ‘strong opposition to the Abraham Accords,’” Wittes said. “I support the Accords and the profound transformation they have wrought.”
“When the Accords were announced in September 2020, I told the New York Times that ‘Abu Dhabi and Jerusalem each had their own good reasons for finding a way to open the door to formal relations,’” Wittes said.
She also noted that her last column for the Brookings Institution said that the Accords “strengthened the pro-American coalition in the region and created opportunities for Arab states and Israel to pursue mutually advantageous security, economic, and social projects.”
The Abraham Accords also happened to draw opposition from Qatar, whose funding for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood has put it at odds with both the Jewish state and the United Arab Emirates.
Wittes also highlighted claims that the Qatari government — which has been accused of widespread human rights violations, including jailing protesters and maintaining abusive workplace conditions for migrant workers – supports human rights and tolerance.
“Qatar deputy PM says Islam, like West, embraces human rights because they’re to benefit of all, esp non-Muslim minorities in Muslim World,” Wittes wrote in 2013.
“Doha’s become global gathering place for dialogue!” she wrote in one 2012 post, adding that Brookings “has partnered w/ Qatar many years.”
The Brookings Institution said Qatar’s donations in 2020 and 2021 were the final payments from a prior fundraising pledge. “Qatar will not be listed as a financial supporter in the 2022 annual report,” a Brookings Institution spokeswoman told the Free Beacon.
