AwesomeCapital

Friday, January 3, 2025

Ukraine ambassador says brooch given to Jill Biden cost ‘less than $1’ after WH estimated $14K

Embattled Ukrainian Ambassador Oksana Markarova said a brooch she gave Jill Biden actually cost “less than 1 dollar” after the White House said it was worth more than $14,000 on disclosure forms.

Markarova, whom top congressional Republicans want to be fired over an event they believed was designed to boost Democrats in swing-state Pennsylvania, gave the first lady the forget-me-not-flower brooch on the same day that the Bidens hosted her at the 2023 State of the Union address.

“Non-acceptance would cause embarrassment to donor and U.S. Government,” an annotation on the gift registry says.

But the ambassador posted to X that there was confusion about the cost, which seemed to be based on the price of a similar item fetched.”This meaningful but very inexpensive brooch is made of remains of Russian missiles, decorated by flowers made of titanium dioxide and bronze, by genius Ukrainian artist Stanislav Drokin from daily attacked Kharkiv,” she tweeted Friday.

00:00

04:43

“The value of materials is less than 1 dollar. The meaning of this brooch which turns Russian aggression and our Ukrainian pain into resilience and creation, has no limits. And so does our gratitude to American people supporting us 3 difficult years for Kharkiv, Ukraine and world.”

Markarova added that the item was “donated… to the Embassy to be presented as a gift.”

The present was, at least per the official estimate, one of the most expensive gifts given to the first couple in a listing published Thursday in the Federal Register — though it was topped by a diamond gifted to Jill Biden by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, worth an estimated $20,000.

US ethics policies require diplomatic gift recipients to relinquish the items unless they purchase them for market value.

The brooch will be “Retained for Official Use in the East Wing,” the disclosure document says.

The first lady’s office did not immediately offer comment to The Post.

Congress has appropriated $183 billion to support Kyiv since the February 2022 Russian invasion.

Those funds include $26.8 billion in direct budget support for the Ukrainian government.

Markarova’s position as ambassador became tenuous in September when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited a Scranton, Pa., ammunition plant at the height of the election campaign between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) demanded that Zelensky “immediately fire” Markarova for organizing the trip featuring Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro.

“The facility was in a politically contested battleground state, was led by a top political surrogate for Kamala Harris, and failed to include a single Republican because — on purpose — no Republicans were invited,” Johnson said at the time.

“The tour was clearly a partisan campaign designed to help Democrats and is clearly election interference. This shortsighted and intentionally political move has caused Republicans to lose trust in Ambassador Markarova’s ability to fairly and effectively serve as a diplomat in this country.”

https://nypost.com/2025/01/03/us-news/ukrainian-ambassador-oksana-markarova-gave-jill-biden-14k-brooch-as-us-gave-billions-to-kyivs-government/

Biden’s Boondoggles Boggle The Mind

As President Joe Biden counts down the days he has left in office, he’s busy trying to burnish his legacy. What he should be doing is apologizing for unleashing waste and fraud of epic proportions.

Politico, to its credit, this week reported on where the $1.6 trillion that Biden approved in spending ($1.1 trillion) and tax breaks ($500 billion-plus) for “clean energy” and infrastructure investments went.

The good news is that most of it hasn’t been spent. The bad news is that the rest appears to have vanished without a trace.

Politico found that more than half of the $1.1 trillion in new spending hasn’t even been “obligated,” which is the first step in dispensing the cash. In May, it reported that only $125 billion of that $1.1 trillion had actually “gone out the door.”

In other words, all of Biden’s bragging about his unprecedented “investments” in clean energy and infrastructure programs was bogus.

That’s good news, because there is a chance that President Donald Trump will cancel unspent funds, or at the very least grind these programs to a halt. None of that will be easy, given that lawmakers on both sides of the aisle like nothing more than spending other people’s money.

But the real scandal isn’t what hasn’t been spent under Biden, it’s what has been spent.

As Politico reports: “A $42 billion expansion of broadband internet service has yet to connect a single household.” And “a $7.5 billion effort to install electric vehicle chargers from coast to coast has so far yielded just 47 stations in 15 states.”

That’s 47 charging stations out of the 5,000 that were supposed to be built with that $7.5 billion, to say nothing of the 500,000 Biden said he’d get built by 2030.

Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey asks the right question: “That money went somewhere over the last couple of years. Where did it go, and how much is left?”

That’s just the tip of the spending mystery.

It’s not clear what the rest of the money produced, either. How many jobs has the $551 billion in tax breaks for clean energy and semiconductor manufacturing produced? Who knows. Intel got almost $9 billion in CHIPS money and then laid off 15% of its workforce.

Biden also handed out $27 billion as part of the “Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund.” What has that money accomplished? As far as we can determine, nothing more than promises so far.

Has the $7 billion to install solar panels in low-income communities resulted in one panel being installed? What about the $14 billion “clean investment fund” or the $6 billion in “clean communities accelerator” money? Where have those billions ended up? The biggest recipient of that “investment fund” cash, Climate United Next, has so far announced just two programs that add up to $280 million.

Morrissey goes on to say: “The new Congress had better start asking those questions and getting answers under oath, because there’s a fair chance that this administration used it as back-door subsidies for political allies and donors.”

He’s no doubt right. Taxpayers are owed a full – and honest – accounting of where that $1.6 trillion went and what it produced, if anything.

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/01/03/biden-boondoggles-boggle-the-mind/

Who's Qualified to Serve?

Ever since news of President-elect Trump’s more unorthodox appointments was leaked, debates have raged over whether his nominees are “qualified” for the roles for which they’ve been selected.

When President Trump chose Pete Hegseth to serve as Secretary of Defense, protests immediately began that he is nothing more than a “Fox News Host” who should be dismissed as unserious. Matt Gaetz had to forego his nomination for Attorney General not just because of his controversial past but because he lacks experience directly practicing law.

When it comes to Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Kash Patel, and the rest, our august senators will surely provide their judicious advice and consent—setting aside all personal grievances and factional concerns. (I know, I know…but c’mon, give them a chance.)

The whole debate, though, rests on faulty premises. Before asking whether Trump’s picks are “serious” or “qualified,” we should consider that our governing class may have a warped view of what counts as “qualified” and what “serious” means.

This is not to say all credentials are useless markers. Recently, Peter Thiel—who has offered cash to smart individuals to drop out of college—commented on the relatively elite university credentials of President Trump and J.D. Vance compared to Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and even Gavin Newsom. When asked to square the paradox, he said, “I can believe they’re corrupt and rotten, and find it amazing that the Democrats no longer believe in them.” He explained, rightly, that anyone who can pass through so-called elite institutions and organizations while maintaining or even strengthening their right-wing convictions should be celebrated.

By far the greater part of those who spend their careers in Washington, D.C.—those who move through the concatenation of universities and government agencies sometimes referred to as “The Blob”—are affected by assumptions they may not realize. They may profess all sorts of populist or democratic ideals in speeches and writings, but when it comes time to select personnel, they revert to unconscious notions of credibility that are not just useless but detrimental.

The common retort to Hegseth’s doubters has been that he went to Princeton and Harvard. This is tactically wise and a mark in his favor, as it softens the hearts of his elite naysayers. But a more honest retort would be that it would be far better if he had never been influenced by this wrong-headed thinking at all. His best qualities are not those shared by fellow travelers in elite circles, but those learned through years of rubbing shoulders with and getting feedback from the American people. His roles as an operator in the wars in the Middle East and a counter-elite television host who heard from all sorts of ordinary Americans are his qualifications, not his drawbacks. These experiences prepared him for truly democratic service far better than any liberal conditioning would have.

C.S. Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man about the corrupting influence of unconscious training: “It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which, ten years hence—its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious—will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.”

It is not a theory, but an assumption that a president elected on a populist mandate should choose elite-credentialed personnel to run his government. It is a controversy whether or not the president should select individuals who are best in-line with the agenda he ran on or select for the preferences of the party in D.C. But it is not recognized as a controversy: it is stated as a point of fact.

That deserves to be reconsidered, and we should all be grateful that our once and future president is forcing this conversation.

Parker Briden is Founder of The Buckhorn Group and a former Chief of Staff to Governor Tate Reeves of Mississippi.

https://americanmind.org/salvo/whos-qualified-to-serve/

Hope for the Western World in Crisis

by Ayaan Hirsi Ali

This year, throughout the Western world, hard-working people made their voices heard and put their trust in the Right. New political parties were forged: in the UK, the Right-wing Reform Party won 4 million votes and gained 100,000 members; in the Netherlands, Geert Wilders helped to form an historically Right-wing government; and Italy, Sweden, Austria, Finland, the Czech Republic, and Germany have all seen the popularity of patriotic conservative parties rise, especially among the young. Trump once again defied expectations – you would think people knew to expect the unexpected! – and won the popular vote by a healthy margin. Critics of gender ideology, shunned for years, have seen their work pay off: puberty blockers are now banned in the UK and governors in the USA are working to ban federal funding for transgender surgeries and continuing their advocacy for children’s safety apace.

People who have been betrayed or forgotten are rallying against the discursive strictures of woke-inflected neoliberal regimes. They are also sending a message to weak so-called “conservative” parties whose policies are indistinguishable from the quasi-socialist, anti-patriotic Left. Make no mistake: the Western world is in the midst of several concurrent crises. But, thanks to the democratic mandates issued by the people in 2024, there is hope.

The critical issue underpinning this turn to the Right is immigration, an issue hitherto thrust into people’s public and private lives while simultaneously kept strictly outside of the realm of acceptable discussion and debate. Mass movement from the Islamic world into Europe has forced people with sanitized liberal views, inherited from media and education, to confront the problems of cultural incompatibility. In the States, Biden’s disastrous border policy has similarly become impossible to ignore. The fact that a new debate is shedding light onto the fault-lines of the American Right – H1-B visas for Indian nationals to work in the USA – is, at the risk of sounding trite, something to celebrate. The Overton Window has now widened to the extent that remigration is an unavoidable talking point for governments, no longer relegated to anonymous corners of the Internet.

While it is easy for any faction to be divided, as the Left has been for the last decade, we should pause and be grateful that this conversation is happening at the heart of the American government and in the biggest, freest public forum there is: Musk’s X. Thanks to the continuing vibe shift, we are now well-positioned to openly make the sensible case for scrupulous immigration policy and provide a robust critique of the pipe-dream of automatic cultural integration of migrants from the developing world. We can stand up for those who have been left behind in their own countries; we can lead the charge against managed decline and the “culture of mediocrity”, in the words of Vivek Ramaswamy, that entices States and businesses to outsource labor in the first place.

In 2025, we have the momentum and mandate to civilly and openly challenge the platitudes of civic nationalism which have motivated States to escalate immigration and enforce cultural relativism to deal with the fallout. Debate is not meant to drag on infinitely, but to test hypotheses and to increase the knowledge of the community. The telos of such a discursive process should be unity – as much of it as possible – on matters of existential importance. I hope that 2025 is the year that we resist contrarian factionalism and instead unite the Right around a combination of hard data and pragmatism. I am confident that governments like that of the UK, for instance, will soon no longer be able to keep data on crime and demographics hidden from view, thanks to the brave advocacy of newly-elected champions like Reform MP Rupert Lowe. But for this to happen, conservative voters and representatives cannot lose momentum.

Conservatives: you are emboldened. Now that anyone with anti-woke instincts can be confident that they side with the majority, we must continue to resist the loud minority which still inhabits mainstream bureaucratic, journalistic, and academic institutions.

There is also hope, amidst the chaos, for the future of Israel and for peace in the Middle East. Following Netanyahu’s failures leading up to Hamas’ genocidal attack on October 7th, he has followed up on his pledge to seek to destroy Hamas and to tackle the existential threat of the Iranian regime. As we go into the new year, Hezbollah and the Houthis – Iran’s major proxies – are in tatters. Thanks to Israel’s show of strength, there is cause for cautious optimism: the dismantling of Iran’s nuclear regime and the rekindling of the Abraham Accords may be on the horizon. While there is still serious work to be done towards dismantling the ideological stranglehold of Hamas on Gaza (and on the Western Left!) Israel stands firm. And while we cannot rule out the risk that Bashar Al-Assad’s fallen regime will precipitate the return of jihadist rule in Syria, I have hope that this year might be better than the last in the Middle East.

https://www.restorationbulletin.com/p/a-new-year-message

Search This Blog

Friday, January 3, 2025

Ukraine ambassador says brooch given to Jill Biden cost ‘less than $1’ after WH estimated $14K

Biden’s Boondoggles Boggle The Mind

Who's Qualified to Serve?

Hope for the Western World in Crisis