dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

24 Dec, 2023 00:27

German economic adviser proposes tax increase to fund Ukraine

Monika Schnitzer’s call for a “Ukraine surcharge” comes as the government’s approval ratings hit record lows

Berlin should tax citizens’ incomes more in order to strengthen military aid to Ukraine, as support for the conflict ebbs elsewhere in the West, Monika Schnitzer, who chairs the German Council of Economic Experts (GCEE), told the Rheinische Post on Saturday.

A Ukrainian “solidarity surcharge” levied on top of the existing income tax would help meet Kiev’s urgent financial needs, she said, claiming that “special events require special measures.” (The problem with these taxes, they never go away.)

Acknowledging that the measure is not likely to be popular, Schnitzer, who leads the German economic advisory council better known as the ‘five wise men’, insisted that it is nevertheless necessary, arguing that it would be wiser to act now as “at the end of the day, our freedom is also at stake in this war.”

Schnitzer’s suggestion comes just days after Economic Minister and Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck announced Germany would have to assume more responsibility and shell out more money as Western support for Kiev has begun to wilt.

EU leaders failed to agree on a proposed €50 billion ($54 billion) financial aid package for Ukraine earlier this month during the bloc’s annual budget negotiations, and even Kiev’s boosters in Washington have been unable to push further financial support through the Republican-dominated Congress in recent months.

Berlin has already allocated €8 billion in its 2024 budget to fund the Ukrainian military and support refugees, but Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised last week that additional support would be forthcoming, “just as we planned, and, above all, for as long as necessary.”

Germany’s ruling ‘traffic light coalition’ has been polling at record lows, with 70% of Germans polled earlier this week by the Verian opinion research institute agreeing that the government is doing a ‘rather bad’ or ‘very bad’ job, and a similar survey by ARD-DeutschlandTrend earlierthis month finding a whopping 82% of respondents were disappointed with its performance.

While popular dissatisfaction was already running high this summer,support for Scholz and his coalition fell off a cliff last monthafter the Constitutional Court ruled that an effort to repurpose €60 billion in Covid-19 relief funds for climate projects was illegal, forcing the government to freeze most of its new spending commitments.

The expert councilSchnitzer leads called for raising the retirement agein accordance with life expectancy in its annual report to Scholz’s office last month, warning the economy would end the year in recession and growth would remain sluggish into 2024 or furtherif such entitlement reforms were not adopted immediately.

(You know how Bannon, Poso, Bongino and others say the politicians in Congress and in states: “These people really hate you and want you to shut up?“ Obviously Germany and the EU feel the same way about their citizens! This “woman” is justifying taking away the “entitlements” the citizens worked for their whole life, must be reduced so the politicians can spend it on boondoggles of green energy and a foreign country to fulfill an illegal commitment. These politicians have just told thd public, “Vote For The Far Right”, because we will always steal from you and your families.)

(Notice the saintly looking picture she chose)

https://www.rt.com/news/589589-germany-income-taxes-ukraine/

‘O Come Let Us Adore Him’: A Syrian Christmas

Encountering Christ in Aleppo: The Child Jesus reflects new hope for the city and its residents.

The celebration of the Maronites at the Cathedral of St. Elijah includes a special Nativity. (photo: Maronite Cathedral of St. Elijah)

ACI MENA

Travel

December 23, 2023

Despite the harsh conditions in Syria, the Christmas Nativity of St. Elijah Maronite Cathedral in Aleppo remains a source of hope and renewal for steadfast Christians.

The Nativity scene is an important part of Catholic Christmas preparations, as it is in the homes and churches of Syria. Most Christians oversee with care the placement of the Holy Family with the shepherds and Magi under the Christmas tree to remind them of the true meaning of the coming of the Savior, Emmanuel.

This church crèche scene consists of members of the Holy Family, the Three Kings, who visited the Newborn in the grotto, along with the manger, placed at the front of the church. The Child Jesus is placed in the shrine after the biblical recitation by Maronite Archbishop Youssef Tobji of Aleppo.

The importance of this Nativity scene lies in its the location: The church suffered damage during the Syrian war and its aftermath. In 2015, it was subjected to a terrorist attack that destroyed part of its wooden roof. But in the winter of 2016, after the city of Aleppo was declared safe, the Maronite Diocese of Aleppo celebrated Christmas in this place, which carries a long history of worship and spirituality, after a long interruption and despite the difficult conditions. In this context, the determination and spirit of the people of Aleppo is embodied, as artist Nemat Badawi created a special design; in this rendition, the Child Jesus reflects new hope for the city of Aleppo and its residents.

In the spring of 2017, operations began to remove the rubble, and parts of the roof wood were used to build altars for other churches; small wooden crosses were also made for the faithful. On Sept. 11, 2019, restoration work on the wooden roof began using wood from Italy, turning Farhat Square in Aleppo into a workshop that embodies the hope of reviving this sacred place. On July 20, 2020, St. Elijah Maronite Cathedral was inaugurated, gathering believers and worshipers under its dome once again.

From the heart of darkness, Light is born.

https://www.ncregister.com/features/o-come-let-us-adore-him-a-syrian-christmas

Great News Anons!

The Christmas Poll 2023: More than 9 in 10 U.S. Voters Celebrate the Holiday

December 23, 2023

‘Christmas Spirit Is Alive and Well’, Despite Perceived Spiritual Void Due to Lack of Religious Affiliation and Attendance

BIG DATA POLL finds more than 9 in 10 U.S. registered voters celebrate Christmas and will take part in many festivities and traditions that color the holiday. The survey findings also indicate large majorities of voters still largely celebrate and view Christmas as a religious holiday and reflect on the birth of Jesus Christ, despite whether they attend services and among many who do not declare a religious affiliation.

“Despite talk of the holiday becoming too commercialized, Christmas Spirit is alive and well among U.S. registered voters,” BIG DATA POLL Director Rich Baris, said. “That said, the findings do suggest that there is a spiritual void the church is failing to fill.”

“People haven’t forgotten what Christmas is truly about and we should not mistake a crisis in faith leadership with a crisis of faith, itself.”

Interestingly, only 48.2% say they plan to attend religious services on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, while 46.7% say they will not and another 5.3% had no opinion. When asked how they personally celebrate Christmas, roughly a third (33.2%) say it’s a strongly religious holiday and another 35.2% say it’s somewhat religious. Slightly more than 1 in 4 (27.3%) say it’s not too religious.

Still, more than a supermajority (68.2%) say they reflect on and celebrate the birth of Christ. Further, 56.5% say they they display decorations with a religious meaning, such as a Nativity scene. Only 39.3% do not and 4.1% offered no opinion.

“Significant percentages of ‘nones’ celebrate Christmas as, and consider it to be, a religious holiday,” Director Baris added. “Yet, these voters do not go to church or have a religious affiliation.”

“Simply because someone considers themselves to have no religious affiliation, it doesn’t mean they disbelieve in God.It only suggests a disbelief in the ‘church’.”

Methodology

BIG DATA POLL interviewed 3,011 registered voters nationwide from December 16-18, 2023 via mixed-mode to include 2,772 likely voters screened by self-reported likelihood to vote and vote history. Interviews conducted online are sourced through Lucid (CINT) and phone interviews including P2P SMS and text-to-online are sourced from the Aristotle National Voter File Database. Likely primary voters were further screened for eligibility by registration and intent based on open and closed primary systems by state to include 1,339 Republican primary voters and 1,298 Democratic primary voters. Results were weighted for gender, age, race and ethnicity, education and income, geography and region. The overall sampling error is +/- 1.8% at a 95% confidence interval. The sampling errors for the Republican and Democratic Presidential Nominations are +/- 2.7% and +/- 2.7% at a 95% confidence interval, respectively. It is important to note that sampling errors for subgroups are higher. All BIG DATA POLL publicly conducted surveys are crowdfunded via the Public Polling Project, supplemented if necessary by BIG DATA POLL and are NOT funded by or affiliated with any candidate, campaign, committee, or political entity. Full and interactive crosstabs can be viewed on MarketSight.

https://www.bigdatapoll.com/blog/the-christmas-poll-2023-more-than-9-in-10-us-voters-celebrate-the-holiday/

Michael Shellenberger

@shellenberger

Dec 20 •Read on X

1/3

Trump can't be on the ballot because he attempted insurrection, says Colorado's Supreme Court. But he didn't. Jan 6 was a riot, not an insurrection. Behind the Democrats' turn against democracy is years of planning, including a secret effort to undermine the 2020.

Years Of Planning Behind Democrats’ Turn Against Democracy

War on Trump shows that the most dangerous people are often those who consider themselves incapable of evil

by @ZaidJilani & @galexybrane

Donna Brazile (left), John Podesta (center), and Rosa Brooks (right) led a 2020 scenario-planning exercise, the “Transition Integrity Project,” aimed at undermining the election.

The Colorado Supreme Court has ruled that former president Donald J. Trump cannot be on the 2024 primary ballot in the state. The Court found that Trump engaged in an insurrection and is therefore disqualified from running for president. The Colorado Supreme Court’s decision was based on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which was originally intended to keep Confederate officials from holding office.

Yet Trump has never been criminally convicted of participating in an insurrection. Even special counsel Jack Smith, who is leading the Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation into Trump, chose not to indict Trump under the federal statute that criminalizes inciting an insurrection or rebellion, even though this charge was part of the referral from the January 6 committee. Smith could not build the legal case to include the charge, likely because of the First Amendment issues that would come with it.

The Colorado Supreme Court skirted both due process and First Amendment concerns and chose to equate Trump’s political speech with sedition in the American Civil War that killed over 600,000 people.

It’s true that Trump has at times adopted extreme and inflammatory rhetoric, including most recently saying that illegal immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country.

But one need not agree with anything Trump says to recognize that in a democratic society, voters still have a right to see him on the ballot. Over one million people voted for Trump in Colorado in 2020. What will those people think when they see that judges are essentially trying to take away their right to vote for the candidate of their choice? Will they really see themselves as included in our democracy, or will they continue to lose faith in the American political system? The answer is obvious.

Democrats’ argument that Trump poses a unique threat to democracy has little basis in reality. Trump’s election denial and machinations were not qualitatively different from the actions of many Democrats. As for the January 6 riot, it was largely the result of security failures, including leaders’ alleged refusal to call in the National Guard.

The court decision comes on the heels of years of panicked warning from Democrats and their allies that it’s Trump who seeks to end American democracy and establish a dictatorship.

In a lengthy essay for The Washington Post that quickly went viral last month, Robert Kagan argued that the United States is a “few short steps, and a matter of months, away from the possibility of dictatorship” led by none other than Donald Trump.

The problem with this prediction is that we already know how Trump responds to all of these things: he was president between 2017 and 2021. When, for instance, the judiciary ruled against Trump – as it did many times during his presidency – he was more likely to send a Tweet than troops.…

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1737541142902972760.html

>>20125312

2/3

For instance, when a federal judge temporarily paused Trump’s travel ban targeting visitors from a range of countries in February 2017, Trump took to Twitter to lament, “The opinion of this so-called judge, which essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country, is ridiculous and will be overturned.”

At the time, Trump took heat for singling out a judge for condemnation. “The President’s attack on Judge James Robart, a Bush appointee who passed with 99 votes, shows a disdain for an independent judiciary that doesn’t always bend to his wishes and a continued lack of respect for the Constitution,” intoned Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

But while Trump’s frequent verbal attacks on the judiciary may have been seen as impolitic by his critics, they ultimately didn’t amount to much — certainly not anything like an actual attack. Trump, throughout his presidency, ultimately preserved the separation of powers, and you could even argue that having an adversarial relationship between different branches of government and different parts of political society protects democracy rather than subverts it.

For instance, Kagan warns that “in a regime where the ruler has declared the news media to be ‘enemies of the state,’ the press will find itself under significant and constant pressure. Media owners will discover that a hostile and unbridled president can make their lives unpleasant in all sorts of ways.”

But if the media’s lives were unpleasant thanks to Trump, it’s hard to detect that in their pocketbooks. Newspaper subscriptions soared under the first Trump presidency, and reporters who went out of their way to antagonize the president became instant celebrities with generous book deals.

Even when Trump did take a rare tangible step against press freedom, it didn’t amount to much. When the Trump White House temporarily suspended the press pass of a reporter who engaged in a lengthy verbal dispute with an administration staffer, the courts ruled that the reporter’s due process rights were violated. Whatever names Trump called the press, there is little evidence that he used his powers as president to suppress their critical coverage of his White House.

Meanwhile, his predecessor, Barack Obama, vigorously pursued whistleblowers with the full force of the federal government. As CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out, the Obama administration “used the Espionage Act to go after whistleblowers who leaked to journalists . . . more than all previous administrations combined.”

One report from the Shorenstein Center at Harvard estimated that 80% of the media coverage during Trump’s first 100 days had a negative tone. That’s hardly a sign that the media was cowed by the presence of Trump in the White House, Tweets and all.

This adversarial relationship between the press and the president is good for democracy, not bad. When the media serve as handmaidens for those in power, we get less scrutiny of policies that we later come to regret – such as excessive COVID-19 policies like school shutdowns and the Iraq war….

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1737541142902972760.html

>>20125321

3/3

One sign that the Republican Party would be moving in an autocratic direction would be if they stopped respecting electoral results and clung to power despite losing elections.

It is true that Trump refused to concede his own defeat, and his rhetoric helped contribute to political chaos around the election and the January 6th riot. Much of the Republican Party, too, has been reticent to admit that Trump lost that election.

But being sore losers about an election isn’t equivalent to being tyrants. Following the 2000 election, many Democrats, too, felt that Bush was unfairly made the president. Gallup polling from after that election found that “just 15% said he won fair and square.”

And, as noted above, some Democrats have similarly refused to admit defeat. While both Republicans and Democrats have a handful of gubernatorial candidates who refused to concede – Stacey Abrams in 2018 for the Democrats and Kari Lake for the Republicans in 2022 – for the most part, the parties have been proceeding as normal after defeat.

But Democrats and their allies were quick to predict that the 2022 election would produce a repeat of Trump’s refusal to concede in 2020. The Post surveyed a range of Republican candidates in battleground states about whether they’d respect the results of their election. When most of those candidates failed to respond to the paper’s questions, the Post ran the alarming headline: “Republicans in key battleground races refuse to say they will accept results.”

Yet after the election came and went, every candidate except for Lake had accepted the results of their election. It turned out that it was less that the Republican Party had stopped accepting elections and more that they didn’t want to talk to the Post.

As NBC News wrote in an article shortly after the midterm election: “From Maine to Michigan, Senate to state legislature, Republican to Democrat, most high-profile candidates who fell short in the 2022 midterm elections are offering quick concessions and gracious congratulations to their opponents.”

That was a far cry from what was predicted by California Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell, who warned in a Tweet in January 2022 that “every politician says this is the most important election of our lifetime. It may be. But it could also be the last one.”

During an appearance with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Swalwell expanded on what he meant in the Tweet. “I’m worried that if Republicans win in the midterm elections that voting as we know it in this country will be gone…if they are able to win the House, the damage they could do to permanently make it difficult to vote and to alter the way that we participate in the democratic process may be irreversible,” he said.

But Republicans did win control of the U.S. House in the 2022 election. And yet nobody thinks there won’t be another election – campaigns across the country are preparing to spend billions on it.Yet now we’re being told that maybe the next election will be the end of democracy as we know it. Why is that?

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1737541142902972760.html

Mark Paoletta: RFK Jr.'s Favorite SCOTUS Justice Tells Us Everything We Need to Know, Earl Warren was his favorite. And Eisenhower said “picking Earl Warren was the biggest damn mistake I made”

When RFKjr told Charlie what SC he like, so Jr was depending on no one knowing what Earl Warren did and tried to do!He was the modern day activist judge

4:55

https://rumble.com/embed/v407pvz/?pub=4

>>20125347

The Left Continues Their Targeted Attack on Justice Thomas: Mark Paoletta Debunks Their Lies

11:21

https://rumble.com/embed/v407pt2/?pub=4

RFK Jr. Slams the Colorado Supreme Court's Ruling and Predicts it Will Actually Help Trump

This was the only answer he got right!

6:39

https://rumble.com/embed/v400gmz/?pub=4

>>20125431

This guy shifts his opinions all the time. Typical leftist, there’s no black ir white, its how I feel and what my party wants that day

How We Know We're Living Through a Synthetic Political Simulation: This is What's Coming Next

5:17

https://rumble.com/embed/v400gj3/?pub=4

Will Scharf Explains How Left-Wing Dark Money is Being Used to Dismantle the Trump Campaign