Posts Tagged ‘Nursultan Nazarbayev’

Kazakhstan, Hunter Biden And…A Bio Weapons Lab?

Monday, January 10th, 2022

What are my qualifications to write about Kazakhstan? Well, before the situation there boiled over last week:

  1. I knew it was an ex-Soviet republic, so…
  2. I knew it existed before Borat.
  3. I can find it on a map.
  4. I knew it was a majority Muslim nation, which made the Soviet Afghan War Very Unpopular there.

So it’s a one-eyed, squinty, myopic man in the land of the blind sort of thing, but there’s a a whole lot of Kazakh news breaking, so let’s tuck in.

ZeroHedge has additional information on its importance to Russia, some of which I knew and some of which I didn’t.

Mass protests and anti-government violence have left dozens dead. Russia is deploying 3,000 paratroopers after Kazakh security forces were overrun. The largest city, Almaty, looks like a warzone. To appreciate why Russia is willing to deploy troops to Kazakhstan, it’s critical to understand the depth of Russia’s vital national interests inside the country. This isn’t just any former Soviet republic. It’s almost as important to Russia as Belarus or Ukraine.

First, Russia and Kazakhstan have the largest continuous land border on planet earth. If Kazakhstan destabilizes, a significant fraction of the country’s 19 million residents could become refugees streaming across the border. Russia is not willing to let that happen.

Second, roughly one-quarter of the population of Kazakhstan is ethnic Russians. Kazakh nationalists are overwhelmingly Muslims, who resent the Orthodox-Christian Russian minority. Russia believes that civil war would entail a non-trivial risk of anti-Russian ethnic cleansing.

Third, the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan was the heart of the Soviet space program. Russia still uses it as its primary space-launch facility. The Vostochny Cosmodrome in Russia’s Far East will lessen that dependence, but it still isn’t complete.

Fourth, Russia conducts its Anti-Ballistic Missile testing at the Sary-Shagan test site within Kazakhstan. This is where ongoing development of the S-550 ABM system is occurring, one of the foundations of Russia’s national security.

Fifth, Russia’s nuclear fuel cycle is intimately linked to Kazakhstan. Russian-backed Uranium mining operations are active in the country. Uranium from Kazakhstan is enriched in Novouralsk, Russia and then returned to Kazakhstan for use in Chinese nuclear-fuel assemblies.

Collectively, these security interests make Kazakhstan a region that Russia is willing to stabilize with force. The 3,000 troops it has already committed are not the maximum it is willing to deploy. If necessary, these will only be the first wave of RU forces in the country.

3,000 troops for a country roughly three times as large as Afghanistan is not going to pacify a country if the country doesn’t want to be pacified.

All that provides a thorny geopolitical problem for Kazakhstan’s neighbors (including China, where it borders Xinjiang, and for which it it would provide the ideal base for any Uigher insurgency), but isn’t why I’m writing about it. No, what caught my attention is The Hunter Biden connection:

Among the boldest and eye-brow raising political moves by embattled Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev within the past days that grabbed international headlines was his ordering the arrest of Kazakhstan’s powerful former intelligence chief, Karim Massimov, on the charge of high treason.

Indicating that amid widespread fuel price unrest which quickly became aimed squarely at toppling Tokayav’s rule there’s a simultaneous power struggle within the government, Massimov had headed the National Security Committee (KNB) up until his Thursday sudden removal and detention. Massimov had served as the prior longtime strongman ruler Nursultan Nazarbayev’s prime minister and has long been considered his “right hand man”.

Nazarbayev was essentially “president for life,” an Ex-Communist Party leader who transitioned to ruling the country after the breakup of the Soviet Union until resigning during a wave of protests in 2019.

Shortly after, a photo has resurfaced, currently subject of widespread speculation which shows Joe Biden and Hunter Biden posing with the now detained Kazakh security chief Karim Massimov, along with well-connected oligarch Kenes Rakishev.

With Hunter, it always seems to be oligarchs all the way down. I can only assume they have the best cocaine and teenage prostitutes.

Further an email and communications have surfaced, previously subject of extensive reporting in The Daily Mail, and related to prior extensive commentary and questions concerning Hunter’s ‘laptop from hell’ – that appears to confirm that Hunter Biden and Massimov were “close friends”. Reporting at the time indicated that “when Biden was vice president, Hunter worked as a go-between between for Rakishev from 2012 until 2014. And further the emails were from “anti-corruption campaigners” in Kazakhstan showing that Hunter made contact with Rakishev. And more: “Per the report, Hunter successfully got a $1million investment from Rakishev to a politically-connected filmmaker.”

According to a 2020 article in The New York Post written when the photo first began gaining attention among Western pundits, “The snap, first published by a Kazakhstani anti-corruption website in 2019, follows last week’s bombshell Post exposés detailing Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings and a report claiming Rakishev paid the Biden scion as a go-between to broker US investments.” Concerning his relationship with Kazakh oligarchs and power-brokers, the NYPost story had detailed further:

…Hunter Biden’s alleged work with Rakishev, claiming he dined regularly with the Kazakh businessman and attempted to facilitate investment for his cash in New York, Washington, DC, and a Nevada mining company.

But Rakishev, who enjoys close ties to Kazakhstan’s kleptocratic former president, reportedly ran into trouble when Western business partners realized that the opaque origins of his reported $300 million fortune could become a “liability,” the Mail reported.

This brings up a slew of questions, starting with: What is the nature of the ties between the Biden family and Kazakhstan’s kleptocratic former president and his circle of oligarchs and powerful security officials?

That’s a darn good question.

But today’s Kazakhstan revelations took a strange turn, when the government claimed that a U.S.-funded bio-weapons lab hadn’t been seized by protestors.

Wait. A what???

Officials in Kazakhstan have denied that a controversial ‘military biological laboratory’ was seized in the recent unrest, which has so far claimed 160 lives since starting on January 2.

It is not clear if the 164 deaths refer only to civilians or if law enforcement deaths are included, but the number – provided by the health ministry to state news channel Khabar-24 – are a significant rise from previous tallies.

Kazakh authorities said earlier on Sunday that 16 police or national guard members had been killed.

Russian media highlighted claims that the US-funded facility near Almaty was compromised, resulting in a possible leak of dangerous pathogens.

The airport, mayor’s office and secret services buildings fell briefly into the hands of rioters during a wave of protests backed by shadowy armed cells.

The secret bio-laboratory funded by the US defence department – which has links to Russian and Chinese scientists – was also compromised in the disturbances, according to social media claims that it was seized.

‘This is not true. The facility is being guarded,’ said the health ministry which is responsible for the Central Reference Laboratory, in Almaty.

Official Russian news agency TASS had highlighted alleged social media reports that it was taken over by ‘unidentified people’ and ‘specialists in chemical protection suits were working near the lab so a leak of dangerous pathogens could have occurred’.

The laboratory’s existence has been controversial and in 2020 the country formally denied that it was being used to make biological weapons.

At the time, the Kazakh government stated: ‘No biological weapons development is underway in Kazakhstan – and no research is conducted against any other states.’

It was built in 2017 and is used for the study of outbreaks of particularly dangerous infections.

Dangerous pathogens are stored here, it is reported.

2017 date aside, there was already an ex-Soviet pathogens facility in the general vicinity (Almaty = Alma-Ata), so my suspicion is that it’s a more modern facility for an existing lab team.

Maybe it’s not a bio-weapons lab. Maybe it’s just studying pathogens to better fight them.

Just like the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

So: It’s totally a bioweapons lab.

Both the United States and Kazakhstan are signatories to the Biological Weapons Convention, which outlaws “the development, production and stockpiling of chemical and bacteriological (biological) weapons.”

Is the CDC actually funding/working with a biological lab in Kazakhstan?

No.

It’s helping/funding 17 labs in Kazakhstan.

CDC strengthens clinical and laboratory capacity to minimize biosecurity threats in the Central Asia region through collaboration with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency and its Cooperative Biological Engagement. CDC works with public health laboratories across Kazakhstan to build a robust and sustainable network of quality management systems, standard operating procedures, training requirements, disease surveillance and testing capacity, and necessary legal and regulatory framework. CDC and the Kazakhstan MOH also partner with hospitals to improve surveillance and testing of especially dangerous pathogens and antimicrobial drug-resistant pathogens.
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CDC assisted all 17 regional laboratories within the National Center for Expertise in Kazakhstan to achieve ISO 15189 standard certification for laboratory quality management.

That’s all from Infowars. Oh wait, did I say Infowars? I meant the CDC’s own website.

Maybe we owe Alex Jones an apology.

This is breaking story that sprawls out in dozens of directions, but I think Dr. Fauci has even more ‘splainin’ to do…

BidenWatch for October 19, 2020

Monday, October 19th, 2020

Hunter Biden revelations continue to explode, Kazakhstan joins China and Ukraine in the Biden Payola Sweepstakes, inside Biden’s Malarkey Factory, and the revolving door between social media giants and Team Biden. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

Just two more BidenWatchs until election day!

  • If you haven’t been following last week’s Hunter Biden revelations, click here and here.
  • Latest Hunter Biden revelations: Crooked dealings with Kazakhstan:

    Hunter Biden is facing fresh questions over business dealing in yet another nation — Kazakhstan.

    Between 2012 and 2014 — when his father Joe Biden served as Vice President — Hunter Biden worked as a go-between to Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakh oligarch with close ties to the country’s longtime kleptocratic leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, The Daily Mail reported.

    The British tabloid said they obtained emails from “anti-corruption campaigners” in Kazakhstan showing Hunter making contact with Rakishev and attempting to facilitate investment for his cash in New York, Washington DC and a Nevada mining company.

    Through his connections, emails show Hunter Biden successfully engineered a $1 million investment from Rakishev to filmmaker Alexandra Forbes Kerry — the daughter of ex-Sen. and former Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, the report said.

    Hunter Biden also traveled to the country’s capital of Astana for business talks.

    Rakishev, however, repeatedly ran into problems finding western business partners due to the murky origins of his wealth. The respected International Finance Corp. pulled out a planned deal with him over “liabilities” stemming from his connections to the country’s rulers.

    As in other nations like Ukraine and China where Hunter plied his trade, Joe Biden may not have been far behind. The Mail published a photo they obtained from the “Kazakhstani Initiative on Asset Recovery” showing Hunter Biden with his beaming father alongside Rakishev.

  • Has another Hunter Biden laptop been seized in Ukraine? “A Ukrainian lawmaker has claimed a second laptop belonging to Hunter Biden’s business contacts in the country has been seized by law enforcement there. Andrii Derkach posted to Facebook on Friday to say there is a ‘second laptop’ involving evidence of corruption and connected to the Bidens.” As with all foreign sources, some caution is probably in order.
  • “Has the FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop material for ten months?”

    A whistleblower says that many months ago, he provided the FBI contents of a laptop computer once used by Hunter Biden.

    That’s according to a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray sent today by Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.). The letter states that an unnamed whistleblower contacted Sen. Johnson’s committee on September 24, a day after the committee released its investigation into alleged Biden conflicts of interest.

    The whistleblower reported he had turned over the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop December 9, 2019 in response to a grand jury subpoena issued by the FBI from the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. Delaware is the Bidens’ home state.

    In the letter today, Sen. Johnson says that he and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked the FBI about facts alleged by the whistleblower but the FBI stonewalled. That despite the fact that Johnson says several of their questions were not related to confidential information regarding “the possible existence of an ongoing grand jury investigation.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • More from Rudy Giuliani on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Including the fact that Biden’s lawyer tried to get the laptop back after the story broke. Plus: “It’s got him [Hunter Biden] there with crack pipes, it’s got him there doing an imitation of Anthony Weiner about 50 times.” Also:

    He went on to say that there would be more communications that would describe how Joe Biden was being compensated.

    “In fact, he was getting a large portion of this money,” Giuliani said, adding that the information would explain how Joe Biden, who has never made that much money as a politician, “has two or three luxurious homes.”

    “Because he didn’t pay for anything, Hunter did,” he explained.

    “This is a long term bribery scheme that started low level in Delaware with his brother James—selling his office,” Giuliani told Crowder.

    “When they got to the big time, they shook down Iraq for … I think about 500 million, Ukraine for about 20 [million], China—I don’t know—30, 40 million?” he said.

    Giuliani added that he almost forgot Russia. “The 3.5 million from the mayor’s wife,” who he noted is a good friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “That woman is a close ally of Putin,” Giuliani said, pointing out the irony of the president being accused of colluding with Russia, when “Biden actually got paid by Russia!”

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • “Hunter Biden demanded Chinese billionaire pay $10 million for ‘introductions alone,’ emails show.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Here’s a New York Times piece that attempts to debunk the Hunter Biden story by taking every Team Biden pronouncement at face value, but which nonetheless provides an awful lot of damning context for his China dealings:

    The $1.5 billion figure to which Mr. Trump referred on Thursday appears to be the amount of money that a Shanghai-based private-equity company, BHR Equity Investment Fund Management Co., aimed to raise in 2014. The company, which says its biggest shareholder is the state-controlled Bank of China, pools money and invests in companies, many of which are also state owned.

    Hunter Biden has been a member of the board of BHR since it was formed in late 2013. In October 2017, after his father had left the vice presidency, he bought 10 percent of the firm, investing the equivalent of $420,000.

    But his lawyer, George Mesires, said on Thursday that he has never been paid for his role on the board, and has not profited financially since he began as a part-owner.

    “He has not been compensated for being on the board of directors, nor has he received any return on his investment to date,” Mr. Mesires said. Although BHR has been involved in a number of business deals, he said, “there have been no distributions to the shareholders since Hunter has been an equity owner.”

    Translation: “Sure, he’s part owner of a company with several Communist Chinese officials, but you have top trust us when we say he hasn’t made any money off the deal!”

    With his latest attacks on the Bidens, Mr. Trump is “desperately clutching for conspiracy theories that have been debunked and dismissed by independent, credible news organizations,” Kate Bedingfield, Mr. Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said in a statement.

    Still, the fact that Chinese state-owned firms were interested in linking arms with Hunter Biden while his father was vice president fits a long pattern of companies owned by or closely tied to foreign governments courting the families of high-ranking American officials. In 2002, for example, when George W. Bush was president, his brother Neil won a $400,000 consulting contract to advise a Chinese semiconductor company co-founded by the son of the man who was then China’s president.

    “Almost any senior name that I start researching, I run into practices like this. It is extraordinarily widespread,” Sarah Chayes, the author of the book “Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security,” said in an interview on National Public Radio on Thursday. “How did we all convince ourselves that this isn’t corrupt?”

    Asked if there was any conflict of interest, Mr. Mesires, said: “Hunter has been repeatedly clear on this point. Hunter has not and does not discuss his business interests with his father.”

    A spokesman for the Biden campaign also said that the former vice president never discussed the China venture with his son.

    The only known connection between the elder Mr. Biden and BHR came in early December 2013 in Beijing. Mr. Biden, who had traveled to China on official business as vice president, met and shook hands with his son’s business associate, Jonathan Li, in the lobby of the hotel where the American delegation was staying, according to an account in The New Yorker. The magazine said Hunter Biden had arranged the encounter with Mr. Li, who was headed for a post as BHR’s chief executive.

    Hunter Biden went along to Beijing, too, because his young daughter had been invited and needed to be chaperoned, according to Mr. Mesires. He said that his client and Mr. Li met for coffee on the trip but that it was only a social chat. “He conducted no business there,” the lawyer said.

    Several days after the trip, BHR won a business license from the Chinese government. Mr. Mesires said that the registration paperwork had already been submitted and that the timing of the approval was purely coincidental. Hunter Biden was not involved in the firm’s registration, and its approval “was not related in any way, shape or form to Hunter’s visit,” he said.

    To raise funds, BHR teamed up with some of China’s leading state-owned financial companies, including its biggest indirect shareholder, Bank of China, as well as China Development Bank and the country’s social security fund, according BHR’s website. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2014 that the firm was seeking to raise $1.5 billion.

    That figure was then cited by Peter Schweizer, a conservative author, in a 2018 book detailing the China business ties of some prominent American political families. Mr. Schweizer was also the author of the 2015 book “Clinton Cash.”

    Until October 2017, well after his father had stepped down from the vice presidency, Hunter Biden had no equity stake in BHR, Mr. Mesires said. He said Mr. Biden bought a stake in the firm in the name of a company named Skaneateles L.L.C. for the equivalent of about $420,000. That gave him about 10 percent of the company’s registered capital of 30 million renminbi, China’s currency. Skaneateles is the New York hometown of Hunter Biden’s mother, who died in 1972.

    BHR has invested in a number of state-owned Chinese companies, including a subsidiary of the oil refiner Sinopec and China General Nuclear Power Group. The business focus of some of them is at odds with American policy.

    For example, the company invested in Face++, a division of the Chinese company Megvii, which specializes in facial recognition technology that is promoted for use by China’s police, according to a report by Human Rights Watch. BHR also invested alongside AVIC, a major state-owned aerospace and defense company that builds fighter jets for the Chinese military.

    “Nothing to see here, folks! But that Ukrainian phonecall was an impeachable offense!”

  • “5 Ways Hunter Biden’s Business Deals Empowered China at America’s Expense:

    1. Military technology

    “In 2015, Hunter Biden’s Bohai Harvest joined forces with Chinese military contractor AVIC to buy American parts manufacturer Henniges,” Schweizer explains in the documentary. Henniges produces dual-use technology, which can be used for commercial and military purposes. The deal required Obama administration approval, and the Obama administration did approve it.

    AVIC, a company notorious for stealing U.S. military technology, bought 51 percent of Henniges while Bohai Harvest bought the other 49 percent.

    2. Military surveillance tech used on the Uyghurs

    “Hunter’s firm, Bohai Harvest, also invested in military surveillance technology that the Chinese government would use to monitor and control the population in their own country,” Schweizer says.

    The company, FACE++, developed technology the Chinese Communist Party used to identify potential terrorists, which helped result in the detention of over 1 million Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

    Plus helping China obtain nuclear secrets.

  • More on the Ukraine emails.
  • If you’re wondering what photos of Hunter Biden Twitter is trying to censor, here’s the NSFW one of him snorting cocaine off a woman’s ass. Some have asserted that the lady in question is underage, but that’s not in evidence from the pic.
  • Interestingly, nothing comes up when using “Hunter Biden cocaine ass” as the Twitter image search terms, but do come up if you remove “ass.” So: The usual twitter incompetence extends to their censorship as well…
  • Testy:

  • You know that Team Biden is none too pleased with the New York Post daring to report on the laptop scandal.
  • More of that all-in-the-family Biden corruption: “Biden’s son-in-law advises campaign on pandemic while investing in Covid-19 startups.” That’s Howard Krein for those of you playing along on the home game…
  • China and Iran want you to vote for Biden:

    It’s no secret the totalitarian governments of China and Iran favor Joe Biden in the presidential election.

    The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would like nothing more than to go back to the status quo ante, the pre-Trump world when American politicians convinced themselves (or pretended to) China would turn democratic if we gave them favorable trade terms and shut up about their monstrous repressive policies, including the hundreds of thousands—or is it millions—languishing in “reeducation” camps while the rest of their population becomes subject to the pervasive Orwellian surveillance of the “social credit“ system.

    Then there’s the little matter of the as yet still mysterious provenance of the novel coronavirus, appropriately called the CCP virus hereabouts, that has wreaked such havoc across the globe. When we will know the truth about what really happened in the Wuhan virology lab? Would a Biden administration even want to know?

    And, yes, as most of us realize, there’s considerably more, but it was all okay in the view of Democrats like Biden and Sen. Dianne Feinstein—she of the Chinese chauffeur who, mirabile dictu, was suddenly exposed as a spy after twenty years of service to her—as long as there was money to be made.

    And there was, a lot, as Hunter Biden, not to mention Feinstein’s husband and Michael Bloomberg, can attest.

    Hunter’s father had to revise his initial praise of China, pooh-poohing the idea they might be an enemy, when things started to get a little obvious and handlers whispered in his ear this was not exactly the road to the White House.

    So it’s hard to feel reassured about how Joe would behave toward the communist regime once in office. There’s a great deal more reason, actual evidence of deals, to believe the Chinese have “special leverage” with Biden than there ever was that the Russians had something on Trump.

    And politicians like Biden and Feinstein are far from alone in their fealty to Beijing. They have plenty of support among American progressives. As is well known, many of our universities, from Harvard on down, have been bribed with huge sums by the CCP to regard them favorably, even have had spies on the faculty, with Confucius Institutes, essentially communist propaganda arms, installed on many campuses.

    Would a President Biden fight this network of corruption that actually justifies and teaches totalitarianism to our youth? Does he even think or know about it?

    We know Trump would because he already has. He does it.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • You know that whole “Biden Landslide” narrative the media is trying to sell? You shouldn’t be buying.

    Early voting data in battleground states shows Trump outpacing national polls giving Biden an edge

    The Republican Party is keeping pace in mail-in and early voting in three key swing states despite polls showing early voting should clearly favor Joe Biden.

    Data out of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio indicates that registered Republicans are returning ballots at about the same rate as registered Democrats in the battleground states.

    In Michigan as of Wednesday, just over 1 million ballots have been returned, 40% from registered Democrats, with the same from registered Republicans. In Wisconsin, 40% of the 711,855 returned ballots have been from Democrats, while 38% have come from Republicans. The GOP actually leads in Ohio, with 45% of 475,259 early ballot returns coming from Republicans, compared to 43% from registered Democrats. The preliminary data matches up with the requests by party affiliation for mail-in ballots.

    The data contradicts national polls showing Biden supporters overwhelmingly plan to vote by mail or early in person. According to a Pew Research poll released Friday, 55% of voters who plan to cast their ballot in person before Election Day support Biden, compared to 40% who support President Trump.

    For a few weeks now, there has been a massive divide between what the polls say and what you can see happening on the ground. Every poll shows Biden leading, yet public support for Trump remains huge and enthusiastic.

    One other thing that’s not showing up in the polls and that’s favoring Trump is voter registration.

  • Borepatch wonders how many fraudulent votes Biden will need to win.

    Breaking it down, we see the following minimum fraudulent ballots needed:

    Michigan +5%
    Pennsylvania: + 5%
    Wisconsin: +6%

    So I went and looked at what the percentages translated into in terms of actual ballots cast. Here’s what’s needed:

    Michigan: 113, 442
    Pennsylvania: 146,322
    Wisconsin: 82,952
    Total: 342,716

    Note that this is net new fraud, on top of whatever was done in 2016. And this is the best case scenario – there’s no margin of error at all for Team Biden here, and so it really needs to be 500,000.

    Plus that many again to keep Trump from flipping Blue states.

  • Hillary Auditions for SecDef in 5000-Word Pro-Biden Article Which Admits Massive Defense Jobs Cuts Plan.”
  • Biden was gassed an hour into his softball-tossing Town Hall. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Why a Biden Presidency will end the U.S. oil boom:

    To talk about a Biden-Harris administration let’s first talk about the Obama-Eric Holder/Loretta Lynch administration.

    Back in 2015 and 2016, when Holder and Lynch were President Obama’s Attorney Generals, my frack company was beset with an IRS audit, an International Fuel Tax (“IFTA”) audit and a Department of Labor investigation. Not to be excluded, I was also personally audited by the IRS. Fortunately, me and my company cleared the IRS audits without penalty (other than paying our accountant). The Department of Labor audit got us for something less than $250, based on some arcane back of the book calculation on arbitrarily given bonuses. But the IFTA audit did some damage with a $40,000 paperwork related fine even though all our taxes were paid at the pump. All three agencies and all four audits were federal, and all came at roughly the same time. When I asked the Department of Labor attorney how she even found our little basement office, she kept mum.

    There was no point in her answering – we both knew why she was there.

    Her 18,000-employee strong department, like the IRS and IFTA, had been weaponized to undermine the oil and gas industry. AGs Holder and Lynch, likely with President Obama’s blessing, were picking and choosing and me and my industry got picked.

    Snip.

    Now, we have Vice President Biden saying he supports fracking when he swings through natural gas rich Pennsylvania, but we all know that is just politicking. His previous anti-fracking statements, all of them inconveniently caught on imperishable video tape, suggest some double speak here.

    So where does Joe Biden truthfully stand on fracking?

    That depends on who he’s talking to. In the old days they called it “waffling” and it was a disqualifier. Not so any longer. If there is any sort of pushback, the 2020 method is to simply just deny that you have multiple positions on the same subject. When no one pushes back, why not?

    They call Joe a fair-minded moderate, a congenial and thoughtful friend to both sides of an argument. I’m sorry, I just don’t see it. A moderate doesn’t choose a San Francisco prosecutor with an anti-fossil fuel record as a running mate. A moderate also wouldn’t choose socialist New York Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez to co-chair his climate task force.

    During the recent Harris-Pence debate, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez Tweeted “Fracking is bad, actually”. So, I guess we at least know where she stands, a breath of fresh air given the chicanery of the Biden-Harris oil and gas platform. Now rumors of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as a Biden administration Attorney General are being reported. True or not, it knocks the wind out of the rest of that moderate argument. Remember, Governor Cuomo was the guy who ordered his own state regulators to study the health and safety of fracking. When their study qualified fracking as environmentally safe, Mr. Cuomo outlawed it anyways. So much for open minded moderation, Mr. Biden. These aren’t “across the aisle” sorts of people that Biden’s handlers would want you to believe are open minded to US Energy Policy. Moderates simply don’t choose vehemently anti oil and gas lightning rods as successors, advisors and top cops.

    In a recent Rasmussen Reports poll, 59% of respondents didn’t think Joe Biden would serve-out a full four-year term due to health-related issues. That would leave us with Senator Harris as president. And where exactly would that leave us? I would argue, uncertain at best. When President Trump won the 2016 presidential election, the oil and gas industry immediately turned on after a punishing two-year downturn. Oil and gas prices didn’t rise as a result of his victory, but business confidence did. Operators teed up new drills and completions and service companies like mine were immediately called back to work. We finally had an administration that was supportive of extraction rather than vaguely duplicitous about it. Four years later, having a new Commander and Chief who is well known as anti-fracking isn’t going to do much for industry confidence. Investment will dwindle, jobs will be lost and the environment will suffer. Natural gas power plants are the reason for the considerable drop in CO2 emissions in US air over the last decade. Fueling these plants is the gas from fractured horizontal shale. Stop fracking and natural gas stops flowing—right away.

    Should a Biden presidency prevail in the upcoming elections, my own experience tells me that our oil and gas industry will be facing regulatory headwinds that will far exceed the blow back I personally faced during President Obama’s time in office.

  • “Biden Tries To Gloss Over His Long History of Supporting the Drug War and Draconian Criminal Penalties.”

    First, Biden did not merely “support” the 1994 law; he wrote the damned thing, which he has proudly called “the 1994 Biden Crime Bill.” Second, as much as Biden might like to disavow the law’s penalty enhancements now that public opinion on criminal justice has shifted, he was proud of them at the time. Third, the 1994 crime bill is just one piece of legislation in Biden’s long history of supporting mindlessly punitive responses to drugs and crime.

    Biden is trying to gloss over a major theme of his political career. “Every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress—every minor crime bill—has had the name of the Democratic senator from Delaware, Joe Biden,” he bragged in 1993. Now he wants us to believe his agenda was limited to domestic violence, community policing, and gun control.

    “Things have changed drastically” since 1994, Biden said last night, noting that “the Black Caucus voted” for the crime bill, and “every black mayor supported it.” In other words, now that black politicians and Democrats generally have rejected the idea that criminal penalties can never be too severe, Biden has shifted with the winds of opinion. But as Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) noted during a Democratic presidential debate last year, that does not mean we should forget Biden’s leading role in the disastrous war on drugs and the draconian criminal justice policies that put more and more people in cages for longer and longer periods of time.

    “The crime bill itself did not have mandatory sentences except for two things,” Biden said. He mentioned the law’s “three strikes and you’re out” provision, which required a life sentence for anyone convicted of a violent crime after committing two other felonies, one of which can be a drug offense. He said he “voted against” that provision, which is not exactly true. While he did express concern that the provision was not focused narrowly enough on serious violent crimes, he voted for it as part of the broader bill.

    In any case, Biden did not just go along with the crime bill’s punitive provisions; he crowed about them. Like a crass car salesman hawking a new model with more of everything, he touted “70 additional enhancements of penalties” and “60 new death penalties—brand new—60.” He denounced as “poppycock” the notion, which would later be defensively deployed by Bill Clinton and Biden himself, that “somehow the Republicans tried to make the crime bill tougher.” Biden bragged that he had conferred with “the cops” instead of some namby-pamby “liberal confab” while writing the bill.

    As for “what the states did locally,” the law was designed to increase incarceration. It provided $10 billion in subsidies for state prison construction, contingent on passage of “truth in sentencing” laws that limited or abolished parole. “What I was against was giving states more money for prison systems,” Biden said last night. But that is simply not true. As FactCheck.org noted last year, “Biden did support $6 billion in funding for state prison construction, but not the $10 billion that was part of the final bill.”

    For all that people bitch about, that crime bill, incarcerating repeat offenders, and the “broken window policing” embracing by many big cities did help bring crime rates down. But the drug war incarcerated millions of users without putting a dent in the drug trade.

  • Indeed, President Donald Trump has a far more compelling pitch to Black Americans than Biden:

    Trump first lamented the horrific treatment of George Floyd, calling it “a terrible thing to watch.” He noted Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-S.C.) proposal, the JUSTICE Act. “He came up with a bill that should have been approved. It was great,” the president noted. “And the Democrats just wouldn’t go for it.”

    Indeed, Senate Democrats pre-emptively blasted the bill before Republicans had finished drafting it. Minutes after Scott, a black Republican senator, revealed the bill, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called it a “token” effort. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) went so far as accusing Republicans of “trying to get away with murder, the murder of George Floyd,” because the JUSTICE Act’s provisions against chokeholds did not go far enough, in her view.

    Trump went on to repeat his rather grandiose claim, “I have done more for the African American community than any president. With the exception of Abraham Lincoln.”

    Yet the president mentioned specific accomplishments. “Criminal justice reform, prison reform, historically Black colleges and universities — I got them funded. They were on a year-to-year basis. … I got them 10-year funding and financing, and more than they even asked for,” Trump explained.

    The president also mentioned opportunity zones, his program to help black entrepreneurs. He claimed that President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Biden “never even tried” to do criminal justice reform. While Obama did suggest reform measures, he did not get them passed through Congress and signed into law, as Trump did.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Biden admission: “We stopped showing up at the Polish American Club and instead started hanging out with really smart people instead.”
  • Hey, remember when The New Yorker did a profile of Hunter Biden…and focused on his art? Good times, good times…
  • “Joe Biden is not a good person.” “He’s a man with a short temper and a history of lying.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Inside Biden’s Malarkey Factory:

    Joe Biden’s campaign has quietly built a multimillion-dollar operation over the past two months that’s largely designed to combat misinformation online, aiming to rebut President Trump while bracing for any information warfare that could take place in the aftermath of the election.

    The effort, internally called the “Malarkey Factory,” consists of dozens of people around the country monitoring what information is gaining traction digitally, whether it’s resonating with swing voters and, if so, how to fight back. The three most salient attacks the Malarkey Factory has confronted so far are claims that Biden is a socialist, that he is “creepy” and that he is “sleepy” or senile.

    In preparation for misinformation spreading as voters head to the polls, especially a stretch around Election Day when Facebook will not let campaigns buy new ads, the campaign has partnered with dozens of Facebook pages associated with liberal individuals or groups that have large followings. The campaign has also enlisted 5,000 surrogates with big social media platforms who can pump out campaign messages.

    The Malarkey Factory has already been at work. When Trump began attacking Biden as a socialist, for example, the Biden campaign saw that it was affecting Hispanic voters in Florida. So it developed counter-messaging that showed a different image of Biden, with him speaking of his love for America and being endorsed by former president Barack Obama, and the campaign blasted the messaging to Latinos in the state.

    Hunter’s name appears once, China and Ukraine not at all. One wonders if Post writer Matt Viser is himself an employee, given how fervently the piece regurgitates Biden campaign talking points…

  • “Anna Makanju, Facebook’s Public Policy Manager for Global Elections, was Joe Biden’s senior policy adviser…on Ukraine.”

    Here are some of the other areas of concern, especially when we consider the role she plays at Facebook should be filled by someone who is politically unbiased:

    • Senior Policy Advisor to Ambassador Samantha Power
    • Director for Russia at the National Security Council
    • Chief of Staff for the Office of European and NATO Policy
    • Professor at Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University
    • Field organizer for Obama for America in Wisconsin
    • Worked for the President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
    • Distinguished Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship recipient

    Caveat: I’m not familiar with noqreport.com, but there seems to be some supporting information out there.

  • More social media honchos walking through the revolving door to team Biden: Twitter public policy director Carlos Monje is joining Biden’s “transition team.” 1. Why does Twitter even have a “public policy director? (Don’t answer that: Obviously to help Democrats.) 2. Seems like he’s counting his chickens before they’re hatched, doesn’t it?
  • In case you hadn’t noticed yet, the Biden-Harris tax plan is to hike your taxes until your eyeballs bleed.

    Most households would face a tax increase under the Biden-Harris tax plan. In fact, as the chart shows, unless your household income is less than $45,600, there is more than a 90 percent chance that the Biden-Harris plan, if enacted, will raise your taxes. In the exact middle of the household income distribution, over 95 percent of households can expect a tax increase if the Biden-Harris plan becomes law. Overall, 82.6 percent of American households can expect a tax increase.

  • But you won’t just be taking home less money thanks to taxes, you’ll be taking home less money period. “A new study on Biden’s tax, health-care, energy and regulation proposals predicts $6,500 less in median household income by 2030.”
  • Evidently Joe Biden has seen his own shadow and will not be showing his face until Thursday:

    Does that sound like a hale, healthy man on his way to a landslide victory to you?

  • “Biden Endorses Transgender Activism for 8-Year-Old Children.”
  • Boom:

  • Slow Joe is even having problems reading a Teleprompter:

  • “WATCH: Joe Biden Attacks ‘Systemic Racism’; Forgets Name of ‘Proud Boys.'” He’s fighting against, you know, the thing…
  • How Biden is spending his ad money.
  • I think this very short flowchart is worth highlighting:

  • Supposedly Kamala Harris has tested positive for the Wuhan coronavirus, and so won’t be traveling anymore. Which is a lot more palatable to the press than saying she’s come down with the Dontwannatalkaboutmyrunningmatesobviouscorruptionproblemsvirus.
  • You’ll need to turn up your audio for this one:

  • Feel the enthusiasm:

  • Any day now…

  • “Trump Attempts To Catch Hunter Biden In Trap Labeled ‘Free Crack.'”
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