Ukraine Update
 
Do you think we're living under failed leadership?  According to the polls, most Americans believe we are.  But just consider the frontpage of today's Washington Post.
 
The lead story is headlined: "Putin Sends Troops To Eastern Ukraine."  The subtitle reads:  "White House Wrestles With What Counts As An 'Invasion.'"
 
If you like comedy, you can watch the Comedy Channel on cable.  But if you're Vladimir Putin, you can just watch this White House.  Biden caused a panic in the White House recently when he seemingly gave Putin the greenlight for "a minor incursion" into Ukraine.
 
I have been in a lot of White House meetings.  But I can't imagine what White House meetings are like now! 
 
Yesterday, Putin recognized two separatist regions of eastern Ukraine as independent states, and ordered Russian troops and tanks across the border into those regions. 
 
Just to remind you, there are estimates that Russia has massed 1,200 tanks along the border of Ukraine.  This is a fully mechanized force.  To repel this invasion, we would have to deploy tanks to Ukraine, and so would NATO.  But I don't see that happening.
 
Even though Russian troops have entered these Ukrainian provinces, I can see why Biden might be confused about whether it is an "invasion."  He doesn't believe that what he is allowing at the southern border is an invasion either.
 
 
 
What A Difference
 
The events of the past weekend should put to rest the left's absurd claim that Donald Trump was "Putin's puppet."  Let me remind you again how Obama/Biden and Biden/Harris have handled Putin's Russia compared to how Trump/Pence handled Russia.
 
Under Obama/Biden, Putin seized the Crimean Peninsula, and supported the renegade Ukrainian provinces.  He did this after then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's infamous "reset" of our relationship with Russia. 
 
There was a lot of huffing and puffing from Barack Obama and Joe Biden.  But nothing significant happened, and Russia still controls Crimea.
 
Donald Trump and Mike Pence came into office and they hammered Putin over and over again.  They sanctioned the Nord Stream pipeline from Russia to Germany, and they made America energy independent. 
 
Trump went further.  He even threatened to sanction European countries that purchased Russian energy.  That severely undercut Russia's economy. 
 
He pushed our European allies to boost their defense spending so that NATO could more effectively confront Russia.  When Russian forces attacked U.S. troops in Syria, Trump obliterated them.  Trump sent lethal weapons to Ukraine that Obama and Biden refused to send.
 
And when we caught Russia repeatedly violating treaties, Trump canceled them (here and here) rather than tolerate Russia's cheating.
 
But when Biden took office, he reversed the sanctions on Putin's Nord Stream 2 pipeline.  He canceled our Keystone pipeline, and waged war on the American energy industry.  Lo and behold, Russia is on the move again.
 
Two years ago, during the Democrat primary campaign, Joe Biden tweeted, "Vladimir Putin doesn't want me to be president. . .  If you're wondering why -- it's because I'm the only person in this field who's ever gone toe-to-toe with him."
 
That sounds like Russian disinformation to me.  Biden never stood up to Putin, and Putin knows how weak Biden really is.  And while Joe Biden is trying to talk tough now, Putin and his allies in Beijing and Tehran are laughing as Biden keeps making concessions to communist China and Iran.
 
 
 
More Weakness
 
Joe Biden's weakness was displayed for the whole world to see during the humiliating retreat from Afghanistan.  Not only were 13 of our heroes brutally murdered, we left behind many American citizens and an untold number of Afghan allies. 
 
Many of the people who got to the Kabul airport were totally unvetted, and simply managed to push their way to the front of the line.
 
Now we're learning that dozens of those "refugees" are in fact serious security risks, and many of them have disappeared inside our borders.  That's called "homeland insecurity."
 
In related news, the Biden Administration is planning to gut a major Trump initiative to root out and prosecute scientists who lied about their connections to communist China.  Biden has already rolled back certain aspects of this initiative aimed at forcing greater transparency on our university campuses.  But that's not enough.
 
Many universities have complained that so many scientists under investigation are Chinese, and the government's efforts to expose Chinese spies are supposedly adding to racism on campus.  
 
It's because of this left-wing nonsense that the TSA spends so much time patting down grandmothers from Duluth!
 
Campus elites who are offended that the FBI appears to be "profiling" don't understand that this is how communist China operates!  It exploits Chinese students and researchers who are here on student or work visas.  It even threatens American citizens who still have family members in China. 
 
Let me remind you about the recent comments of FBI Director Christopher Wray.  He told NBC News that he was "blown away" by the scale of communist China's espionage efforts, adding that the Bureau is opening up a new case against possible communist Chinese spies every 12 hours. 
 
Wray said, "There is no country that presents a broader, more severe threat to our innovation, our ideas and our economic security than China."  And he warned that China's efforts are becoming "more brazen [and] more damaging than ever before."
 
But Joe Biden is getting ready to scrap this critical national security effort.
 
 
 
CDC Secrecy
 
There have been many sources of frustration throughout the coronavirus pandemic.  A big one has been the Centers for Disease Control itself.  The CDC is considered the "gold standard" of medical research in this country.  But throughout much of the pandemic, the CDC failed to produce even the most basic information.
 
Countries all over the world, especially Israel, were releasing important studies that gave us more information about the virus.  But the Centers for Disease Control, that has received tens of billions of dollars, has been sitting on mountains of data.
 
This isn't necessarily new news.  Respected doctors and researchers like Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University have been complaining about the CDC's lack of transparency for many months.  But few would listen to them.
 
Now the New York Times is reporting that the CDC "has published only a tiny fraction of the data it has collected."  The excuse, according to a CDC spokeswoman, is the bureaucracy's "fear that the information might be misinterpreted."  But as some experts correctly noted, there is a greater danger of misinterpretation when there are "data vacuums." 
 
More importantly, we're not peasants and we're not children.  We're taxpayers and citizens.  Our hard-earned tax dollars pay for every study conducted by the CDC and its army of public health bureaucrats!
 
In recent decades, the CDC's budget has expanded exponentially.  But it's abundantly clear that the taxpayer's return on investment has not expanded nearly as much as the agency's bloated bureaucracy. 
 
When conservatives take back the House and the Senate, they must make fundamental reform of the CDC a top priority.
 
 
 
The DC Freedom Convoy
 
A "Freedom Convoy" of truckers is reportedly heading to Washington, D.C.  So far, nearly 38,000 people have signed up to join the convoy to protest during Joe Biden's State of the Union address next week, and local officials are panicking. 
 
This regime clearly has the same totalitarian instincts as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.  In fact, Nancy Pelosi's fence is going back up around the Capitol Building and the National Guard is already being called out. 
 
 
 
Truth Social
 
Donald Trump's social media platform, Truth Social, went live yesterday.  Demand for the pro-freedom platform was so overwhelming, that the Truth Social app became the Apple Store's most popular download.  Unfortunately, the huge demand also crashed the site.  The site's full launch is officially scheduled for March 31st.