Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) defended efforts by some in her party to include the State and Local Tax deduction (SALT) during her weekly press conference, breaking her silence on the controversy.
SALT allows taxpayers to deduct their state and local income taxes from their federal tax bill. The program is especially popular for lawmakers representing Democrat-led states with high state income taxes like New York, New Jersey, and California.
SALT has long been a mainstay in the U.S. tax code but was significantly cut by Republicans in 2017.
Under Republicans’ 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act, which the majority-Republican Congress passed through the reconciliation process under President Donald Trump, the SALT deduction remained but was capped at $10,000.
Now that they hold Congress, some Democrats are fighting fiercely to raise this cap or remove it altogether.
In the original draft of their $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, Democrats hoped to reinstate the deduction. But SALT was not included in the compromise budget bill hammered out by President Joe Biden with Senate moderates Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).
Disappointed with this absence, the measure’s proponents have demanded that SALT be reinstated, threatening to not support the bill without the program.
Since the unveiling of the compromise budget, Democratic leadership has been in constant negotiation with various wings of their caucus that were unhappy with one aspect of the compromise or another.
However, Pelosi did not definitively weigh in with her own opinion on the issue until Thursday during her press conference, where she broke her silence and defended the measure.
Republicans and progressives have argued that despite Democrats’ claims that the bill will be paid for by the wealthy, the SALT measure will have the opposite effect. Because higher tax states usually have higher median incomes than other states, the benefits of the SALT deduction, critics say, will go mostly to the wealthy.
A study by the Institute on Tax and Economic Policy seems to vindicate this claim. The study quipped that the program is “not worth its SALT,” finding that the tax deduction would “overwhelmingly benefit wealthy, white households.”
“The vast majority of families would not benefit financially from repeal and most of the tax cuts would flow to families with incomes above $200,000,” the study says.
Asked about these criticisms, Pelosi responded, “As a supporter of that particular measure, I just want to clarify what that’s about.”
“It’s not about tax cuts for wealthy people,” Pelosi insisted, “it’s about services for the American people.”
Education, transportation, and healthcare state-level initiatives funded by state income taxes were “slashed by the Trump administration,” Pelosi said. “We’re just turning that over,” she added.
Pelosi continued, “This isn’t about who gets a tax break, it’s about which states get the revenue they need in order to meet the needs of the people.”
“That is a fight I will continue to make,” she vowed.
Unsatisfied with the response, a reporter pushed on the question, noting that whatever its other benefits, one result of reinstating SALT would be to give the wealthy a tax cut.
Other Democrats Say SALT Too Beneficial to Wealthy
“No, that isn’t the result. That isn’t the result,” Pelosi retorted. “The fact is that the dynamism that is injected into our states—for the people—is what is important here.”
Still, disagreements over SALT, as with so many other programs in the spending bill, continue to divide the Democratic caucus in both chambers.
In one plan introduced by the House Rules Committee, the SALT cap would be raised to $72,500, a more than sevenfold increase from its current level.
But moderate-leaning Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), both from high-tax northeastern states, criticized the plan, arguing with Republicans that it would overwhelmingly affect the rich.
While Sanders admitted that raising the cap to $72,500 is better than making no change at all, he said that the Rules Committee proposal “still is quite regressive.”
The unlikely moderate and progressive duo are instead working on a proposal that would leave the SALT capped at $10,000, but would give an exemption to taxpayers making under approximately $400,000.
According to Menendez, this alternate proposal would exempt around 98 percent of New Jersey constituents from the cap entirely.
And despite Pelosi’s emphatic support for the program, some progressives in the 95-strong progressive caucus agree with Sanders that the budget should not include provisions that would mostly benefit the wealthy, as analysis shows an increased SALT cap would.
Talks over the SALT cap continue, and it is not yet clear what the program will look like in the final draft of the bill.
Because of their razor-thin majority in both chambers, however, Democrats will need the support of all but three members in the House and the support of all 50 members in the Senate to make any changes to the deduction through the larger bill, a difficult task as the issue continues to split the party.
Saule Omarova, nominated by President Joe Biden for the role of one of the top banking regulators, on Nov. 18 tried to portray her recently published proposal to centralize banking as merely an outline of one among many options to consider rather than her own preference.
Her proposal, outlined in an October paper titled “The People’s Ledger,” would have the government take all bank deposits and put them in the Federal Reserve, which would then be able to control who does and doesn’t get a loan (pdf). This would drastically expand government control over finance and exacerbate a number of problems, several experts previously told The Epoch Times.
During her Nov. 18 confirmation hearing for Treasury’s comptroller of the currency, Omarova said her paper was written in the context of “academic debate” around digitizing the dollar “because this seems to be an inevitable solution.”
“The paper seeks to address the implications of that step for the entire financial system,” she said, arguing that it was her job to “expand the boundaries of academic debate and outline potential options for Congress to consider.”
However, ranking member Pat Toomey (R-Penn.) pointed out that that isn’t how she framed her ideas in the paper.
“‘This Article … advocates full migration of demand deposits onto the Fed’s balance sheet,’” he quoted from the paper. “Are you now saying you’re no longer for that?” he asked.
“Senator, what I’m trying to clarify here is the problem this paper was trying to solve,” she replied, making a point that digitization of currency would hurt community banking and give an advantage to the Big Tech and institutional players on Wall Street.
Her paper does mention digitization proposals as well as the idea of allowing people to open Fed accounts without abolishing private banking, Toomey acknowledged. But he stressed that she portrayed the centralization idea as the preferable option in the paper.
“This is what you recommended, and it doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that every one of these thought experiments or academic ideas—every one of them—involved dramatic expansion in the power and control of the central government to allocate resources, to control banking, and a corresponding diminution in the freedom of individual Americans and institutions,” he said.
Omarova also addressed her previous statements, in which she said: “The way we basically get rid of those carbon financers is we starve them of their sources of capital,” and “We want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change.” During the hearing, she said “that was a poor phrasing” and that she was actually talking about “helping workers in this sector to transition to high-paying jobs if we’re looking into the future and the rise of new technologies.”
John Berlau, senior fellow at the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, was skeptical of that explanation.
“For someone who chooses her words very carefully, it’s hard to buy that she misspoke,” he told The Epoch Times, noting that Omarova has a record of advocating for such ideas.
Omarova said her previous jobs at a banking law firm and in the Treasury taught her “the invaluable lessons about how financial sausage is made and how that can lead to devastating financial crises.”
She said she would work “to guarantee a fair and competitive market where small and mid-sized banks that invest in neighbors’ homes and small businesses can thrive, and where every community, regardless of wealth geography or history, has access to safe and affordable financial services.”
She stressed that it was up to Congress to decide whether or not to implement her ideas.
Toomey addressed that argument in his opening statement.
“I suspect Prof. Omarova may claim that as comptroller, she wouldn’t have the power to act on all of her radical views. But the truth is the comptroller is a powerful regulator. It wields enormous powers through bank chartering, regulation, enforcement, and especially through its opaque supervision process. The comptroller is also a member of the FDIC [Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation] Board and the Financial Stability Oversight Council, America’s financial super-regulator,” he said.
He called her ideas “a socialist manifesto for American financial services.”
“These are exactly the kind of socialist ideas that have failed everywhere in the world they’ve been tried,” he said (pdf).
Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) defended Omarova as “one of the most qualified nominees ever for this job.”
In his opening statement, he criticized some Republicans who questioned Omarova’s college thesis on Marxist economics during her studies at Moscow State University (pdf). He pointed out that, though born in the Soviet Union, she “renounced her communist citizenship and became an American.”
Buried in a Senate bill meant to increase U.S. competition with China is a measure that allocates $5 million in taxpayer funds for a “chief diversity officer” at the National Science Foundation.
The provision is part of the United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), a sprawling bill that seeks to increase American manufacturing and shore up the United States’ supply lines to boost competition with China. Republicans object to several portions of the bill, including a passage that awards $5 million annually to the National Science Foundation for a chief diversity officer who would oversee directives such as “establishing a strategic plan for diverse participation” in federal science programs. The official would also collect and report demographic information, such as gender and race, for patent applicants and ensure that any state seeking science-related grants enacts a plan to address “inequity.” States can do that, the bill says, by giving subgrants to close “equity gaps” and boosting enrollment in computer science education coursework for students who face “systemic barriers.”
The diversity officer would be in charge of developing plans to ensure that “traditionally underrepresented populations,” such as native Hawaiians, Alaska natives, and Indians, get access to federal programs. This would also include “historically Black colleges and universities, Tribal colleges or universities, [and] minority-serving institutions,” according to the legislation.
Senior Republican aides who are tracking the legislation said the addition of these measures into a critical national security bill is part of an effort by the Democratic Party’s far-left flank to mainstream their “woke agenda” and progressive priorities centered on race relations.
“This is a thinly veiled attempt to push a radical woke agenda in what the Democrats say is supposed to be a critical national security bill,” said one Republican official, speaking only on background.
A second senior congressional aide said it is “disappointing that Republican lawmakers are helping them” push this agenda by allowing the bill to go to conference, where it can be debated. Republicans, the source said, should unite in opposition to any form of the bill that is used by Democrats to forward far-left priorities, such as the diversity office.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) have been spearheading efforts to see USICA passed and sent to the White House for approval. Democrats attempted on Monday evening to add the legislation as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual defense spending bill, but Senate Republicans blocked this effort due to lingering concerns about the USICA bill. The bill will be taken up by House and Senate leaders in a reconciliation process known as a conference committee, in which the two separate versions of the bill are merged into one bipartisan measure.
The National Science Foundation has long been seen as a bastion for what critics call “woke science.”
The Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology stated in a November report on politicization in scientific funding that the National Science Foundation—which has an annual budget of around $8 billion dollars—routinely employs “highly politicized terms” in its documents.
“As of 2020, 30.4 percent of all grants had one of the following politicized terms: ‘equity,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘inclusion,’ ‘gender,’ ‘marginalize,’ ‘underrepresented,’ or ‘disparity,'” the report stated. “This is up from 2.9 percent in 1990.”
“The results imply that there has been a politicization of scientific funding in the U.S. in recent years and a decrease in the diversity of ideas supported, indicating a possible decline in the quality of research and the potential for decreased trust towards scientific institutions among the general public,” the report concludes.
Ai Weiwei is an artist and human rights activist whose dissident activities against the Chinese Communist Party led to his incarceration and eventual exile from his native country. He’s a figure who knows totalitarianism when he sees it.
When he appeared on Margaret Hoover’s “Firing Line” on PBS for an interview which aired Friday, it wasn’t a surprise that he saw it in the United States. The surprise: It wasn’t from former President Donald Trump, but from wokeness instead.
Host Margaret Hoover — a conservative commentator who was staunchly anti-Trump during the 2020 campaign — thought Ai would actually go for the former president, judging by the fact she read from a part of his autobiography which compared Trump with communist China’s most notoriously totalitarian leader.
“In your book, you were describing the directives of Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution that would be distributed publicly every night,” Hoover said.
“And then you write — this is your quote — ‘They served a function similar to Donald Trump’s late-night tweets while in office. They were the direct communication of a leader’s thoughts to his devoted followers, enhancing the sanctity of his authority.’
“So, do you see Donald Trump as an authoritarian?” she asked.
He didn’t seem to think so.
“If you are authoritarian, you have to have a system supporting you,” Ai said.
“You cannot just be an authoritarian by yourself. But certainly, in the United States, with today’s condition, you can easily have an authoritarian. In many ways, you’re already in the authoritarian state. You just don’t know it.”
“Many things that happen today in the U.S. can be compared to the Cultural Revolution in China … like people trying to be unified in a certain political correctness. That is very dangerous.”
When asked what he thought had gone awry with political correctness, Ai said, “It’s very philosophical. With today’s technology, we know so much more than we really understand.
“The information [has] become jammed. But we don’t really — and really have the knowledge, because you don’t work. You don’t — you don’t have to act on anything. You just think you’re purified by certain ideas that you agree with it. That is posing dangers to society, to an extreme divided society.”
Ai, again, is a man who knows authoritarianism. He was kept in what was known as “residential detention” for 81 days by the Chinese Communist Party in 2011, something that he documented through his art:
Ai Weiwei, the renowned Chinese contemporary artist, “reconstructed” his daily life in detention in series of scene models. He’s being closely watched by 2 Chinese officers in PLA uniform at all times when he was eating, sleeping, taking shower or using toilet.
And he espies this in America? Perhaps not yet — but you can see where the similarities arise.
There’s the stilted jargon of “wokeness” — the “speaking as a [insert group identification here]” statements, the unpleasant souls who seek to educate you in when you should use “person of color” and when “BIPOC” is more apt, the too-frequent use of words like “cisgender” and “gaslighting.”
More importantly, there’s the punishment when you use the wrong language.
Just look at Dave Chappelle stating obvious biological facts or the preposterous Yale Law “trap house” fiasco. If you’re guilty of one of these solecisms, the transgressor is expected to publicly grovel at the feet of society for a chance at rehabilitation — you know, just like people who fall out of line in authoritarian states.
Sometimes, you don’t even need to do anything to have to apologize. All you need is “privilege.” If you’re adjudged to be in possession of any, you’re going to have to wear cultural sack-cloth, like someone from a bourgeois background who wanted to get anywhere in a Marxist regime.
One doesn’t need to be thrown into a Chinese jail for 81 days to recognize all of this as a form of soft authoritarianism. It doesn’t hurt, though.
President Joe Biden’s nominee for comptroller of the currency, a critical federal official charged with overseeing large banks, declared war on the fossil fuel industry: “We want them to go bankrupt,” said Saule Omarova.
Omarova isn’t alone in her desire for financial institutions to discriminate against the energy producers that make their existence possible. Progressive activists and Wall Street financiers are teaming up to promote environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing practices that place political whims on a pedestal—at the expense of our lives and livelihoods.
The Biden administration’s endorsement of this brazen anti-energy movement threatens Americans’ money and future—and could have unsettling ripple effects throughout our economy.
Here’s how it works: Pension funds invest the money of retirees and future retirees. Fund managers should make the smartest investments they can in order to ensure retirees have enough money to live on. But under ESG, they’re not making the smartest investments, they’re making investments that align with their political ideology. If that’s not bad enough, they’ll vote with a small but vocal minority of activist shareholders to adopt resolutions or replace board members—often against the best interests of the majority of shareholders.
Take ExxonMobil, for example. An activist hedge fund called Engine No. 1, which owns just 0.02 percent of Exxon’s shares, forced a takeover and replaced three board members with climate alarmists who will advocate for expensive and ineffective greenhouse gas reduction programs instead of working for the good of Exxon and all its shareholders.
Energy discrimination through ESG investing threatens to withhold capital and discourage investing in companies deemed politically unpalatable by progressives. This, of course, primarily means energy producers—regardless of the fact that America provides fuel for the world using the best pollution control technology available, not to mention fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Discrimination against the businesses powering America has advanced primarily through activists’ public shaming campaigns and big corporations’ virtue-signaling PR angles, but the elite class wants to force American businesses to march in lockstep on climate change. Pushing ESG from the federal level is an arbitrary and indefensible restriction on free speech and a threat to the men and women depending on their investments and pensions for retirement—that’s the vast majority of us.
Activists claim that ESG funds—those branded as having a better social impact, though there are no universal standards that define ESG—perform better financially than traditional investments. However, studies supporting this claim are riddled with methodological errors, and this trend is simply too new to understand long-term effects.
Selecting investments based on political preferences, no matter how seemingly virtuous, goes against decades of investing wisdom. Diversified investments are almost universally agreed to be the strongest investments long-term, which means that limiting investment opportunities for retirement funds and pensions will also limit the return on investment for retirees.
One well-constructed study reveals this by analyzing higher education investments. Professor Daniel R. Fischel finds (pdf) that the cost of complying with energy discrimination campaigns is significant enough to prevent universities from reaching their investment goals. Higher fees, limited diversification, and compliance costs add up—and likely don’t influence the public’s behavior or opinions.
Worse yet, recent legal analysis suggests ESG investing may actually rise to the level of illegal collusion that violates longstanding consumer protection laws. When all the major players are conspiring to follow the same political practices, to the extent that law-abiding businesses can’t access financial services, the free market is no longer truly free.
But do these principles help stop climate change? The answer is categorically no. According to climate data models used globally, even enacting each and every tenet of the Green New Deal wouldn’t produce any meaningful temperature change. Eliminating all fossil fuels and all man-made carbon dioxide emissions would result in less than two-tenths of a degree temperature difference. So even the biggest and loudest campaigns to force divestment from fossil fuels would have a microscopic impact—if any at all.
The only real effect of this energy discrimination movement would be worse poverty, a higher cost of living for everyone, and—ironically—more pollution. That’s because denying capital or investments to American energy companies won’t eliminate our need for fossil fuels, our only significant source of the affordable, reliable energy we need. It will just transfer energy purchases to overseas producers.
It makes little sense, if the environment is really the progressive wing’s top priority, to give power, influence, and money to countries that pollute with abandon and maintain poor human rights records. Instead, we should continue to produce energy here in the United States, taking advantage of our environmentally conscious and efficient energy industry—while also producing energy cheaply and maintaining our national security and international negotiating power.
Biden campaigned on equity and fighting poverty. Unfortunately, his administration’s fixation on climate alarmism and micromanaging investors will create more poverty by making energy—and everything we buy—more expensive.
The Biden administration should reject discrimination of all forms, including energy discrimination.
Speaking to Dana Perino on Fox News, Mike Rowe posited that the reason for the massive number of people who have left their jobs and not looked for replacement jobs is a “topography that ultimately encourages people to not work.”
Perino noted that more than 4.4 million people quit their jobs in September but reports said there were over 10 million job openings. She asked, “Why are all these people quitting their jobs but not taking the other jobs?”
“Look, I mean, the honest answer is the 300-page book I can’t get around to finishing, but in general, I think it’s coming down to the ever-evolving definition of what a good job is, the expectations that most people have when it comes to determining what they want to do with the useful part of their life,” Rowe answered. “Money, incentives, disincentives, uncertainty, it’s all swirling around.”
“And look, it’s really tempting to get on the back porch and scream at the kids to get off the lawn vis-a-vis laziness and all of the other work ethic things that I do love to talk about,” he continued. “But we can’t blame people for acting in their own interests. And if we lay out a topography that ultimately encourages people to not work, then I’m afraid that’s the fault in our stars. We’re not going to do it. And so that’s part of the problem. But ultimately I think it’s a real complex thing.”
“Fundamentally, though, you can’t argue with the numbers. 10.4 million open jobs,” he stated. “That has to mean, among other things, that opportunity is not dead if we can simply get around to making a more persuasive case for the opportunities we have. “
Perino asked, “So if parents or grandparents or young people are watching, this program or ‘How America Works’ on Fox Business, what could they learn maybe start to change that perception of what is a good job?”
“I think so much of the debate always — the way we set the table, is here are the employers and here are the employees and here’s the gap and here’s the problem,” Rowe replied. “The shows I work on all attempt to remind the rest of us how much skin we have in the game. So on ‘How America Works,’ for instance, tonight we look at salt production. We meet the men, a guy named Raul Flores, down in Carlsbad, New Mexico, to get a better understanding of how reliant we are on salt and what it takes to get it out of the ground and on to the roads so interstate commerce can exist. It’s a real simple look at that job. It’s also a very clever recruiting mechanism, because when you look at a show like this, you see people who love their jobs; you see them prospering; you see them moving the needle and contributing in a meaningful way to society.”
“So my thing is to try and get to 300 million other people who are daily unimpressed with the fact that the lights come on when we flick the switch or the poop goes away when we flush the toilet. We have to remember we’re all connected,” he concluded.
As the trial for 18-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse drew to a close, leftists continued their efforts to revise history in favor of their narrative. That included lead prosecutor Thomas Binger, who praised a crowd full of violent rioters on Monday.
During his closing argument, Binger said that the mob in Kenosha, Wisconsin, was composed of “heroes.”
Binger describes the mob in Kenosha that was burning the city as a “crowd full of heroes” who tried to stop an “active shooter” in Kyle Rittenhouse.
Since the riots in the city over the justified police shooting of Jacob Blake took place over a year ago, some people might need a refresher of what happened. Luckily, The Post Millennial editor Andy Ngo posted videos on Twitter showing Binger’s “heroes” committing various acts of arson.
WARNING: The following videos contain vulgar language that some viewers will find offensive.
The trial of accused teen shooter Kyle #Rittenhouse in #Kenosha, Wisc. has brought in a new round of gaslighting mainstream press coverage that obfuscates how violent the BLM-Antifa riots were there. Video by @Julio_Rosas11: pic.twitter.com/zCGGB864td
BLM rioters also threatened to kill people who attempted to protect businesses and promised to “burn your shop down too.”
Armed BLM rioters attacked & threatened to kill the group protecting a gasoline station as fires and violence engulfed #Kenosha, Wisc. in August 2020: pic.twitter.com/hrUUGUzf00
Flashback August 2020 in #Kenosha: “We’ll burn your shop down too”
For days, the city was under siege by rioters who rampaged through the streets destroying property, starting fires & promising violence against the locals. #Rittenhousepic.twitter.com/m41xhcbowt
Sarcasm aside, lies like these are incredibly dangerous. By calling these criminals “heroes,” Binger is trying to demonize Rittenhouse for defending himself against them.
To anyone who has seen videos from the Kenosha riots, Binger’s characterization of the mob is ridiculous. Sadly, not everyone has seen those videos, and those who are ill-informed about the riots may believe Binger’s lies.
In reality, the three men who attacked Kyle Rittenhouse were far from heroes. According to NBC News, Rittenhouse testified that Joseph Rosenbaum chased him after previously telling Rittenhouse and others he would “cut your f—ing hearts out.” Rittenhouse said he killed Rosenbaum in self-defense.
Were the rioters in Kenosha “heroes”?
Rittenhouse testified that Anthony Huber, the second man he killed, was beating him with a skateboard and attempted to take his gun before he shot him. Gauge Grosskreutz, whom Rittenhouse shot and injured but did not kill, allegedly pointed a pistol at Rittenhouse before Rittenhouse shot him.
Binger attempted to argue the men were trying to strip Rittenhouse of his gun to protect others, but he failed to provide convincing evidence to prove that point. Rittenhouse said he did not kill anyone until he felt his life was in danger, and there has been no evidence presented that would prove his claim false.
It is now up to the jury to decide whether or not Rittenhouse acted in self-defense, and they should be allowed to reach their own verdict without the fear of outside influence. But as they deliberate, they should not be swayed by Binger’s blatant misrepresentation of the rioters that night.
General Motors, set to welcome Biden to Michigan factory, has paid Jeff Ricchetti nearly $200K to lobby White House and Congress
After paying the lobbyist brother of a top White House aide nearly $200,000 this year, auto giant General Motors has won an official visit from the president to showcase its new electric vehicle factory.
Jeff Ricchetti, the brother of Biden’s longtime political consigliere Steve Ricchetti, has disclosed $160,000 in payments from General Motors since President Joe Biden took office to lobby the White House and Congress on electric vehicle tax incentives, according to his firm’s lobbying disclosure forms. The investment appears to have paid off—on Wednesday, Biden will attend the grand opening of the company’s new electric vehicle factory as part of his push for Congress to “approve big tax incentives for zero-emission vehicles,” precisely what Ricchetti was paid to push for.
Steve Ricchetti has been one of Biden’s closest advisers for nearly a decade and played a leading role in framing the administration’s infrastructure negotiations. Neither the White House, Jeff Ricchetti, nor General Motors responded to requests for comment on Jeff Ricchetti’s role in arranging the visit.
Ricchetti has cashed in on his family ties to the administration. Ricchetti has already brought in $2.4 million in lobbying fees this year, double his 2020 haul of $1.2 million, according to numbers compiled by OpenSecrets. Ethics experts have criticized the Biden administration for allowing Steve Ricchetti to work on issues his brother is being paid to lobby the administration on.
“Steve Ricchetti ought to completely recuse himself from any part of the legislation that his brother’s firm is lobbying on, and then have the White House not take calls from his brother,” said Richard Painter, a former White House ethics chief and Democratic candidate for office.
The lobbying disclosure forms show General Motors paid Ricchetti’s firm, Ricchetti Incorporated, to lobby on “issues related to tax incentives for electric vehicles and charging stations,” “the availability of semiconductors,” and “climate policy that affect the automobile industry.”
General Motors has received outsized attention from the Biden administration since bringing on Ricchetti. After the company hired Ricchetti in February, the president hosted its CEO for an April summit on semiconductors. One month later, the company met with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo about semiconductors. Ricchetti’s lobbying disclosures show he was paid to lobby the Department of Commerce for General Motors in the weeks prior to those meetings.
Three of Steve Ricchetti’s children work in the Biden administration, prompting Politico to label Biden’s White House “the Ricchetti administration.” Walter Shaub, White House ethics chief during the Obama administration, said the Biden administration’s decision to permit nepotism amounts to a “f— you” to ethics experts.
General Motors said it was “excited to welcome” Biden for the opening of its Factory ZERO in Detroit. The longtime company factory has been repurposed to focus entirely on electric vehicles and will be used as the backdrop for Biden to promote tax incentives for electric vehicles included in his spending plan, according to Reuters.
Biden’s visit to General Motors is his latest trip to companies with close ties to his administration. Biden has also visited electric battery manufacturer Proterra, where his energy secretary Jennifer Granholm was on the board of directors.
It’s not hard to hide things in a 2,135-page document, and that is exactly what the Democrats tried to do in their new spending bill.
It has already been quite a fight for the Biden administration to get Democrats to back the $1.75 trillion bill. There was disagreement over the timing of the bill and its relation to the rest of the president’s Build Back Better plan.
But now the discovery of a provision, tucked on page 1647, may cause even more disagreement over the legislation.
The provision would end the requirement of a Social Security number in order to get child tax credits. This would mean that billions of dollars could be doled out in child tax to credit to just about anyone. Illegal immigrants would be able to claim child tax credits with this new provision.
“No credit shall be allowed under this section to a taxpayer with respect to any qualifying child unless the taxpayer includes the name and taxpayer identification number of such qualifying child,” current law regarding child tax credits stipulates.
Steven Camarota, a researcher with the Center for Immigration Studies, told Fox News he estimates that repealing this requirement could lead to about an extra $2.3 billion in payouts to illegal immigrants for child tax credits.
Camarota also estimated a big payout for all the illegal immigrants who have U.S.-born children.
“[W]e estimated that illegal immigrants would receive $8.2 billion in cash payments from the expanded Child Tax Credit (CTC), which is part of budget reconciliation bill, also referred to as the Build Back Better (BBB) Act,” Camarota wrote for CIS.
This massive spike in payouts is also a result of the new program increasing the child tax credit maximum payment.
Should Congress pass this bill?
“The new program significantly increases the maximum cash payment, which is referred to as a ‘refundable credit,’ from $1,400 per child under the old ACTC to $3,600 for children under six, and $3,000 for children six to 17. The new CTC is only extended for one year in the BBB, after which the maximum for all children would be $2,000,” Camarota wrote.
But even if the CTC payout decreases again next year, the payouts will still be significantly higher if the requirement of a Social Security number is eliminated.
“The elimination of the SSN requirement also allows the more than 600,000 illegal immigrants encountered at the border in family units or as unaccompanied minors and released in FY 2021 to receive cash payments from the new CTC,” Camarota wrote.
These CTC payouts are not be confused, however, with Biden’s previous idea to pay those immigrant families that were separated at the border because they “deserve some kind of compensation.”
This amount of payouts for child tax credits is going to be damaging. Keeping the whole immigration argument out of it, just on the financial side this kind of extra spending is irresponsible.
Biden’s whole bill is already $1.75 trillion, and the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the whole Build Back Better plan could massively increase the deficit.
“CBO estimates that enacting this title would result in a net increase in the deficit totaling $150.7 billion over the 2022-2031 period. That increase in the deficit would result from an increase in direct spending of $151.5 billion and an increase in revenues of $0.8 billion,” the CBO announced Monday.
Despite all this, though, Democrats still seem to be determined to pass this spending bill this week.
“Yes, we intend — that is our plan to pass the bill the week of Nov. 15, as is indicated in our statements that were made at the time of passing the infrastructure bill, and we’re very proud of that,” Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told reporters on Nov. 9, according to the New York Post.
So in the midst of our economy still hobbled and recovering from COVID, and inflation hitting a 30 year high, Democrats want to throw billions more away.
Three corporate CEOs are making a name for themselves – as ‘woke’ enemies of the people.
Ed Bastian of Delta Air Lines, Ryan Marshall of PulteGroup, and AT&T CEO John Stankey are just the latest CEOs to announce they are going SJW.
Delta CEO Bastian stated after a Georgia voting bill was passed, “After having time to now fully understand all that is in the bill, coupled with discussions with leaders and employees in the Black community, it’s evident that the (voting) bill includes provisions that will make it harder for many underrepresented voters, particularly Black voters, to exercise their constitutional right to elect their representatives. That is wrong,” said Bastian.
Bastian is perpetuating the lie that voting integrity is somehow racist. Additionally, according to insiders, Mr. Bastian has made it apparent that he will pursue what he perceives to be “Delta’s values” inside the company.
Will Delta go as far as AT&T?
John Stankey, the CEO of AT&T, told the company’s 230,000 employees in an April 2021 email that white employees should read an article saying that they are racist, to confess their ‘white privilege’ and acknowledge ‘systemic racism,’ and engage with this Marxist struggle session or suffer penalties in their performance reviews.
Stankey coerced his workers to use AT&T’s “anti-racism portal” where they are told “American racism is a uniquely white trait and that black people cannot be racist.”
An AT&T senior employee that blew the whistle to journalist Chris Rufo described the pressure to take the anti-racism training. “If you don’t do it, you’re a racist,” said the whistleblower.
Walmart has launched a similar critical race theory training program that denounces the United States as a “white supremacy system” and teaches white hourly-wage workers that they are guilty of “white supremacy thinking” and “internalized racial superiority.”
Ryan Marshall of PulteGroup has made it mandatory that recurring meetings and announcements of a Diversity and Inclusion Board begin at the company. According to one insider, despite Mr. Marshall’s mandatory Diversity and Inclusion Board, “there doesn’t appear to be any accomplishments of the Diversity Board,” and its “likely just a smokescreen while black employees aren’t actually seen or heard from in any real way that changes this company.” Marshall, like many of these CEOs, may be using these diversity struggle sessions as a way to weed out employees that are not completely subservient liberal yes men and yes women.
One CEO, Marc Lobliner of MTS Nutrition, is standing up to the woke mob. When Disneyland’s Snow White ride was under fire from the left online, because Snow White was “kissed without her consent,” Lobliner tweeted, “CANCEL DISNEY!!!! They’re as woke as anyone. Let them eat themselves.”
Lobliner has been standing tall against the leftist insanity.
“Political views shouldn’t affect how we think of others. But the ‘woke’ cancel those who disagree,” said Lobliner. “Liberals are easy to fool. They just want to be on team woke.”
Lobliner is the creator of the Outright Bar and the Chief Marketing Officer of TigerFitness.com.
When the right supports CEOs that stand up for America and conservative values, the culture war gains supply lines, and becomes a fight that patriots can win.
Christina Karaoli Taylor, Multicultural Competency Trainer, CKT Cultural Strategies: “I challenge you [journalists] to stop thinking in terms of objective journalism. We’ll discuss why that’s not really feasible anymore.”
Ron Treviño, CBS Houston News Anchor: “I don’t really care if people trust us or not, we still have to do our job. Whether they trust us is the least of my concerns — whether they trust me or not.”
Grady Tripp, Tegna Chief Diversity Officer: “At this point, if you’re not listening to a podcast, or looking at a video, or reading any of the information that’s out as far as equality and social justice and race, you don’t care…The other thing is we’re going to be holding stations accountable, right? We’re going to be holding stations accountable because we know it’s important to the organization. KPIs [Key Performance Indicators] are going to change, right? KPIs are going to reflect diversity and inclusion from a representation standpoint.”
Brett Mauser, Former CBS San Antonio Promotions Producer and Whistleblower: “I don’t want to destroy the news. I don’t want anybody to get fired. I want people to change and realize that they are supposed to be objective.”
Mauser: “Teaching journalists at a national level, ‘Don’t be objective.’ To me, that was what journalism always was: to be objective. In my mind, if journalism is not objective, it’s not journalism — it’s propaganda.”
Mauser: “This mindset has been able to grow and infect what was supposed to be the fourth pillar of society. The journalists are supposed to be our watchdogs. They’re the ones that are supposed to be protecting us from tyranny and supposed to be going out there and finding out and giving us the truth.”
Mauser: “I would tell people — my friends, family — you can’t trust the news. ‘You’re being manipulated. Well, how do you know? I work in the news!’”
CBS San Antonio RESPONDS: “A journalist’s job is to present the truth and report the facts, not cater to opinions. Our inclusivity program makes our journalism stronger, particularly for communities that have not been well-served by our industry. We will continue this important work.”
[SAN ANTONIO – Nov. 16, 2021]
Project Veritas released a new video today featuring an interview with CBS San Antonio [KENS 5] whistleblower, Brett Mauser, who exposes his colleagues and outside corporate partners for promoting a political ideology rather than objective journalism in the newsroom.Play
In one instance, Christina Karaoli Taylor, CKT Cultural Strategies’ Multicultural Competency Trainer, was brought in to train CBS San Antonio journalists and defined the expectations.
“Much of what we’re gonna talk about today is going to center around the main code of ethics of journalism. And a couple things — during this workshop and throughout your day, I challenge you to stop thinking in terms of objective journalism. We’ll discuss why that’s not really feasible anymore. But [think] in terms of accuracy, fairness, and transparency — always striving for objectivity is not feasible,” Taylor said.
“That was the one that blew my mind. Teaching journalists at a national level, ‘Don’t be objective.’ To me, that was what journalism always was: to be objective. In my mind, if journalism is not objective, it’s not journalism — it’s propaganda,” Mauser said.
Ron Treviño, who serves as one of CBS Houston’s [KHOU] most experienced and main news anchors, was recorded admitting that he is indifferent about conveying trust to the public through his reporting.
“I don’t really care if people trust us or not, we still have to do our job. Whether they trust us is the least of my concerns — whether they trust me or not,” Treviño said.
“To me that seems like — that’s part of the job. That you need trust to be able to do your job. Your job is to inform. If you can’t trust who you’re getting the news from — you’re not doing your job,” Mauser said in response to watching Treviño’s statement.
On another occasion, Tegna’s Chief Diversity Officer, Grady Tripp, can be seen describing how employees should be evaluated more heavily on their adherence to a political ideology rather than their skillset in journalism. Tegna is the parent company of CBS San Antonio and CBS Houston, along with 62 other news stations across the country.
“At this point, if you’re not listening to a podcast, or looking at a video, or reading any of the information that’s out as far as equality and social justice and race, you don’t care…The other thing is we’re going to be holding stations accountable, right? We’re going to be holding stations accountable because we know it’s important to the organization. KPIs [Key Performance Indicators] are going to change, right? KPIs are going to reflect diversity and inclusion from a representation standpoint,” Tripp said.
“It’s about the narrative. It’s about pushing an agenda,” Mauser said to Project Veritas founder and CEO James O’Keefe in response to watching Tripp. “It feels almost threatening, doesn’t it?”
Mauser expressed concern for the state of journalism in the United States after witnessing these behaviors at CBS San Antonio on a regular basis.
“This mindset has been able to grow and infect what was supposed to be the fourth pillar of society. The journalists are supposed to be our watchdogs. They’re the ones that are supposed to be protecting us from tyranny and supposed to be going out there and finding out and giving us the truth,” he said.
“I would tell people — my friends, family — you can’t trust the news. ‘You’re being manipulated. Well, how do you know? I work in the news!’”
Mauser explained to O’Keefe why he decided to come forward to Project Veritas.
“I don’t want to destroy the news. I don’t want anybody to get fired. I want people to change and realize that they are supposed to be objective. They are being told by another company and by their parent company to ‘not be objective’ — to be divisive. I just want them [CBS San Antonio] to admit they have a problem.”
In response, CBS San Antonio made the following statement when asked for comment:
“These assertions by a former employee are a severe misunderstanding of what valuing inclusivity, diversity and equity in a newsroom means. This lack of understanding is exactly why we’re doing this training. A non-news employee secretly taped inclusivity training where our journalists were given tools and information and shared perspectives on how we can better serve all our audience. A journalist’s job is to present the truth and report the facts, not cater to opinions. Our inclusivity program makes our journalism stronger, particularly for communities that have not been well-served by our industry. We will continue this important work.”
About Project Veritas
James O’Keefe established Project Veritas in 2010 as a non-profit journalism enterprise to continue his undercover reporting work. Today, Project Veritas investigates and exposes corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions to achieve a more ethical and transparent society and to engage in litigation to: protect, defend and expand human and civil rights secured by law, specifically First Amendment rights including promoting the free exchange of ideas in a digital world; combat and defeat censorship of any ideology; promote truthful reporting; and defend freedom of speech and association issues including the right to anonymity. O’Keefe serves as the CEO and Chairman of the Board so that he can continue to lead and teach his fellow journalists, as well as protect and nurture the Project Veritas culture.
Project Veritas is a registered 501(c)3 organization. Project Veritas does not advocate specific resolutions to the issues raised through its investigations.
The Biden administration conveyed its intention Monday to pause new oil and gas drilling for twenty years within a ten-mile radius of the Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, which already prohibits oil and gas drilling within its borders, drawing objections from the 24th Navajo Nation Council, which represents allottees of oil and gas leasing within the perimeter and which favors a five-mile protective radius instead.
Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, which is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site and an International Dark Sky Park, contains structures inhabited by the ancient Puebloan peoples from roughly 850 to 1250 AD.
The administration’s announcement comes after Congress approved a one-year ban on oil and gas leasing within a ten-mile perimeter of the park as part of the 2021 spending bill passed in December 2020.
According to a press release from the Department of the Interior, the proposed move “would not affect existing valid leases or rights and would not apply to minerals owned by private, State, or Tribal entities.”
Yet the Navajo Nation Resources and Development Committee Chair Rickie Nez, representing the Navajo communities of T’iistsoh Sikaad, Nenahnezad, Upper Fruitland, Tsé Daa K’aan, Newcomb, and San Juan, expressed concern about the pause’s impact on Navajo allotment owners who may wish to open their land to oil and gas development.
“We must ensure the livelihood of Navajo allotted land owners in the greater Chaco Canyon area are maintained. The Navajo Nation through a resolution has provided a compromise to also protect this sacred area from mineral development. The Biden Administration has to work with us to find a solution that meets our needs and that is this 5-mile buffer zone,” Nez said in a press release from the Navajo Council.
“Tribal nations do better when they make their own decisions,” Biden said before mentioning the proposal for the ten-mile buffer zone as part of his remarks to the White House Tribal Nations Summit.
In Interior’s press release, Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland said the proposal was “a great example of how Tribally-led conservation can advance the nation’s goal of addressing climate change.”
Navajo Council Speaker Seth Damon, representing the communities of Bááhaalí, Chichiltah, Manuelito, Red Rock, Rock Springs, and Tséyatoh, had a different perspective.
“The Biden Administration bypassed previous requests to Congress for field hearings and for leaders to hear directly from our Navajo families affected in the Chaco Canyon region,” said Damon as part of the Navajo Council press release.
“It is important that the federal government consider and work with our Navajo allottees to further advance development. The Administration must respect our tribal sovereignty and what the government to government relationship entails,” he added.
His concerns were echoed by Mark Freeland, a Navajo council delegate representing the communities of Becenti, Lake Valley, Náhodishgish, Standing Rock, Whiterock, Huerfano, Nageezi, and Crownpoint.
“The Interior Department unilaterally made this withdrawal proposal without proper tribal consultation, now directly affecting our families on the Navajo Nation,” said Freeland in the press release.
By contrast, the All Pueblo Council of Governors (APCG), composed of the leaders of New Mexico and Texas’s twenty Pueblo nations, voiced its strong support for the Biden administration’s move, which it argued would protect vital artifacts and heritage from the ancient Pueblo and other tribes.
“On behalf of the 20 Pueblo Governors, we are overjoyed by the actions of President Biden and grateful to Secretary [Deb] Haaland for honoring the responsibility of each Pueblo Leader to protect Pueblo culture. Today’s announcement is the result of continuous prayers and the commitment to steward mother earth, our Sacred Trust,” said Wilfred Herrera, Jr., chairman of the APCG and former governor of the Laguna Pueblo nation, as part of an APCG press release.
Interior Secretary Haaland, the first top executive branch official of Native American ancestry since Charles Curtis served as vice president to Herbert Hoover, also belongs to the Laguna Pueblo nation.
A spokesperson for the APCG stated it did not have sufficient time to answer more detailed questions from The Epoch Times about the move, including the Navajo Nation’s concerns with it.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R.-Az.) and other Republican congressmen also objected to the move.
“Today’s latest land grab by the Biden administration will strip hundreds of Navajo Allottees of their rights to their lands by imposing an unscientific and overreaching buffer around Chaco Canyon. We heard from these allottees directly and urged the DOI to listen and reject this reckless policy. This action is another attack on America’s energy independence by the Biden administration. They are determined to shut down federal lands to all energy development while begging foreign countries for more oil. Americans reject this America Last policy,” Gosar said.
“Clearly President Biden prefers relying on our foreign adversaries for essential energy rather than domestic producers,” said Rep. Bruce Westerman (R.-Ark.)
The disagreement over lands near Chaco Canyon is one skirmish among many in the long-running conflict between Democrats and Republicans over the future of fossil fuels.
In April 2020, as COVID-19 lockdowns throttled the nation’s economy, Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.) responded to a tweet about oil prices going negative by tweeting that “you absolutely love to see it.”
Ocasio-Cortez later deleted her tweet.
At an October meeting of the House Committee on Natural Resources, Ranking Member Westerman challenged Democrats on the committee to speak up if they did not ultimately seek to end domestic oil and gas production altogether.
Another January 6th Commission member is compromised by the CCP
Rep. Elaine Luria – a member of the Congressional January 6th Commission – has six-figure investments in a Chinese Communist Party-linked tech firm flagged by the U.S. State Department for aiding the regime’s military and espionage capabilities, The National Pulse can reveal.
The Virginia Congresswoman‘s most recent financial disclosure reveals an investment worth $250,000 to $500,000 in Alibaba, a Chinese e-commerce giant whose executives include powerful members of the Chinese Communist Party.
LURIA DISCLOSURE.
Alibaba has also been involved in the “research, production, and repair of weapons and equipment for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)” and has a “deep record of cooperation and collaboration” with China’s “state security bureaucracy,” former Assistant Secretary for International Security and Nonproliferation Christopher Ford revealed.
The State Department has also flagged the company as a “tool” of the Chinese Communist Party, aiding in its build-up of “technology-facilitated surveillance and social control.”
Significantly, the modern “China Model” is built upon a foundation of technology-facilitated surveillance and social control. These techniques for ruling China have been – and continue to be – in critical ways developed, built, and maintained on behalf of the Party-State by technology firms such as Huawei, Tencent, ZTE, Alibaba, and Baidu. As these companies export their products and services to the rest of the world, the security and human rights problems associated with this “China Model” are progressively exported with them.
Companies including Alibaba “have no meaningful ability to tell the Chinese Communist Party “no” if officials decide to ask for their assistance – e.g., in the form of access to foreign technologies, access to foreign networks, useful information about foreign commercial counterparties, insight into patterns of foreign commerce, or specific information about the profiles, activity, or locations of foreign users of Chinese-hosted or -facilitated social media, computer or smartphone applications, or telecommunications,” the report adds.
Yesterday, The National Pulse revealed how Rep. Adam Schiff, another Jan 6th commission member met with a Chinese Communist Party official previously responsible for spearheading the regime’s foreign influence operations on a visit to Washington, D.C. sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Foundation.
Furthermore, the Chairman of the Commission, Bennie Thompson, has a history of backing extremist guerilla warfare groups in America. Read more here.
There is, understandably, bi-partisan concern about the decision. It allows foreign nationals to fund signature collecting, qualify measures and financially support campaigns to amend or create statutory law. (And in some states, even amend its Constitution.) Imagine foreign nationals in China, Russia, or even Iran legally funding multiple ballot measures in battleground States in 2022 or 2024. And why? For their own financial gain and political agenda.
I’ve spent my career running ballot measures in almost every state and several abroad. As someone who sees a lot of them – Indian and non-Indian gaming, tax increases, energy, healthcare reform, and more – an equally concerning threat is the impact on voter turnout.
Anything that motivates turnout – even at the margins of an already historically active electorate – can have a massive impact on election results. It is a statistical fact that ballot initiatives and referenda, particularly controversial measures, can increase voter turnout by five to 10 percent.
That’s what happened in Arizona last year.
In 2020, Arizona’s proposition 207 to legalize the recreational use of marijuana drove more voter participation than Joe Biden and Donald Trump, as you see in the chart below.
A closer look shows that Arizona flipped in favor of Biden on the coattails of recreational marijuana. If Prop. 207 was a “Presidential candidate” in Arizona it would have won by over 200,000 votes. The post-election analysis shows proposition 207 drove hundreds of thousands of young, Democratic voters who also cast votes for Joe Biden.
Another concerning aspect is money – ballot measure committees can accept an unlimited amount.
Individuals, committees, associations and businesses are allowed to contribute as much as they want to support or oppose a ballot measure, as long as it’s disclosed on the campaign contribution/expenditure report, which most states require.
Thankfully, given the FEC ruling only applies to federal issues on individual state’s ballots, the states retain some authority and autonomy to help backstop the FEC’s decisions and mitigate the potential for Election Day manipulation by foreign actors.
Each state sets its own rules for ballot measures. That includes the process for qualifying a measure, the number of signatures required, what can and cannot be a subject on the ballot, the level of financing disclosures or transparency and more.
States must take a thoughtful look at this new FEC policy and how it might impact wider results on Election Day, particularly in Presidential election years.
In all their various forms, ballot measures are an essential part of the direct democracy process. History has shown that direct democracy – although not perfect – has resulted in dramatic social and economic changes that legislative bodies didn’t have the courage to do themselves. But it is reserved for state and local citizens and not foreign nationals.
The budget reconciliation package pushed by Democrats creates a new expanded child tax credit (CTC) that would pay illegal immigrants some $10.5 billion next year. All immigrants with children are eligible, regardless of how they got here and whether their children are U.S.-born. This includes the roughly 600,000 unaccompanied minors and persons in family units stopped at the border in FY2021 and released into the country pending a hearing. Cash welfare to illegal immigrants is not just costly; it also encourages more illegal immigration.
Although it is referred to as a “refundable credit,” the new CTC, like the old additional child tax credit (ACTC) it replaces, pays cash to low-income families who do not pay any federal income tax. The new program significantly increases the maximum cash payment from $1,400 per child to $3,600 for children under 6, and to $3,000 for children ages 6 to 17. After 2022, the maximum payment would be $2,000 per child, but advocates hope the much larger payments will be extended.
In an analysis conducted in October, my colleague Karen Zeigler and I estimated that illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children would receive $8.2 billion from the new CTC. However, we had assumed that the new program, like the old ACTC, would require children claimed as dependents to have Social Security numbers (SSNs). But reconciliation (page 1452, line 14) would permanently repeal this requirement.
Illegal immigrants are able to receive benefits on behalf of their U.S.-born children, who are American citizens. In the case of the old ACTC, they simply acquired an individual taxpayer identification number, which is not hard, and then claimed their payment. In practice, only illegal immigrants with U.S.-born children could receive payments under the old system, since as American citizens those U.S.-born children receive SSNs. The permanent elimination of the SSN requirement means that even illegal immigrants whose children are also illegally in the country can receive the new expanded credit.
If the reconciliation bill is passed, we now estimate illegal immigrants whose children are also illegally in the country will receive $2.3 billion from the new CTC, for a total of $10.5 billion in cash payments to illegal immigrant parents. This includes illegal migrants here in 2020 and those stopped and then released into the country in 2021. These payments are not related to the huge cash settlements the administration is planning to pay illegal immigrant families separated at the border during the Trump administration.
Receipt of payments under the new CTC would be all the easier because reconciliation also eliminates the work requirement of the old ACTC for next year. In the past, some illegal immigrants who worked off the books sometimes had trouble demonstrating employment income. Dropping the work requirement makes it even simpler for them to receive payments.
These payments represent an enormous inducement to illegal immigration. We estimate that 78 percent of illegal immigrants with children have income low enough to receive cash payments averaging $5,300 per family, or about $2,600 per child next year. To place these numbers in perspective, the median income in the current top illegal immigrant-sending countries of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador is $3,000 to $4,000 a year. The cash payment we are offering to virtually anyone who arrives with a child, whether they work in the United States or not, is roughly equal to—or in some cases exceed—what migrants could earn in their home countries in one year.
In addition to creating large costs for taxpayers and encouraging illegal immigration, the elimination of the SSN requirement would seem to be an invitation to fraud, as tax filers now simply need to provide a name and date of birth for a child. The only other requirement is that they check a box on their returns indicating they lived in the United States for half a year, though there is no enforcement mechanism for this provision. Partly in response to a 2011 report from the Inspector General for Tax Administration showing that illegal immigrants made extensive use of tax credits, Congress included provisions in both the 2015 PATH Act and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act designed to restrict illegal immigrant receipt of such programs. This included the requirement that the qualifying child have an SSN. The budget reconciliation effectively undoes those changes.
To be sure, most illegal immigrants who come to America do in fact work. But the welfare benefits we give to them certainly incentivizes even more illegal immigration. The list of things we have failed to do to enforce our immigration laws is so long that it can’t even be summarized here. But if we want to understand why a record 1.7 million people were apprehended at the border in FY 2021, we need to look no further than the large cash payments the House plans to give illegal immigrants.
Mitch Landrieu will oversee $1.2 trillion in infrastructure spending
President Joe Biden’s pick to oversee $1.2 trillion in infrastructure spending is a top adviser to a trade organization that seeks Chinese investment in American infrastructure.
Mitch Landrieu serves as strategic adviser to the United States China Heartland Association, which supports cultural and business exchange between China and 20 states in the American heartland. The association frequently partners with Chinese Communist Party front groups that operate abroad.
Landrieu’s position with the Heartland Association could raise eyebrows given the organization’s promotion of Chinese investment in domestic infrastructure projects. American officials have expressed concern that the Chinese government and state-linked companies use infrastructure investments in foreign countries to influence policy abroad. Heartland Association chairman Bob Holden, the former Democratic governor of Missouri, this year urged Chinese investment in U.S. infrastructure, saying it presents a “win-win” for both sides.
Landrieu is an unpaid adviser to the Heartland Association, according to Executive Director Min Fan. Fan said that the association’s advisers—a list that includes Export-Import Bank nominee Reta Jo Lewis—”are all Governor Holden’s friends who agreed to be consulted when we need their advice.” Fan told the Washington Free Beacon that she is not aware of Landrieu’s providing any advice to the Heartland Association.
Biden on Sunday appointed Landrieu, the former Democratic mayor of New Orleans, to serve as infrastructure coordinator, a position in which he will supervise spending on roads, bridges, ports, and other infrastructure across the country. The White House says Landrieu’s work on rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina makes him qualified for the post.
The Heartland Association has worked closely with two Chinese Communist Party organizations, the China-United States Exchange Foundation and the Chinese People’s Association for Relations with Foreign Countries. An executive with the China-United States Exchange Foundation serves on the Heartland Association’s board of directors.
CIA director William Burns testified this year that in his previous role as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he severed ties with the Exchange Foundation because of its efforts to influence American policymakers. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo last year cancelled a diplomatic event sponsored by the Chinese People’s Association for Relations with Foreign Countries, saying the group sought to “malignly influence” state and local leaders to advance China’s foreign policy goals.
While the Heartland Association does not disclose its financial backers, the group has touted partnerships with Chinese automotive glass maker Fuyao Group and solar panel maker Wanxiang New America.
Event will feature Chinese military contractors behind hypersonic missile test
A scion of the Bush family is lending his influence and family name to boost a Chinese government contractor blacklisted by the U.S. government for its links to the Chinese military.
Neil Bush, the son of President George H.W. Bush, is a cosponsor of the International Symposium on the Peaceful Use of Space Technology that begins Nov. 18 in Beijing. Three co-chairmen of the forum are executives with the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), a state-controlled contractor that builds China’s military and space equipment. A subsidiary of CASC reportedly developed a hypersonic missile that the Chinese military tested in August. American officials called the nuclear-capable missile a “national security crisis” because of its ability to evade detection.
Bush’s sponsorship of the space symposium adds a veneer of respectability to the event amid growing concerns about China’s increasingly aggressive military and space activities. The Trump and Biden administrations have prohibited American companies from doing business with CASC because of its position in the Chinese military-industrial apparatus. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which tracks China’s military activities, rates CASC a “very high risk” to foreign nations’ security because of its links to China’s military and intelligence services.
Bush has extensive business ties in China and has worked closely with some of the country’s propaganda organizations. He chairs the George H.W. Bush Foundation for U.S.-China Relations, which is cosponsoring the space symposium. The Bush Foundation received $5 million in funding in 2019 from the China-United States Exchange Foundation, a leading think tank in the Communist Party’s propaganda network. Bush’s business partner, the Chinese real estate investor Wang Tianyi, is executive chairman of the space symposium.
“Bush is basically a power broker. He’s an access point for the Chinese to leverage,” said Brandon Weichert, a space security analyst and author of the book Winning Space.
Weichert said the space symposium follows “the classic Chinese model” of using academic and business forums to recruit experts and investors in the West.
“One of their big missions is to get Western talent and investment to come to China to do cutting-edge research and development,” Weichert told the Washington Free Beacon.
A spokeswoman for the Bush-China Foundation said they are not concerned by CASC’s links to the Chinese military, saying that the symposium will focus on the development of space technology for use in the health care industry.
“We are not concerned because it is not relevant to the content of this particular conference, which is unrelated to China’s military and is instead focused on global space technological advancements and rules-setting,” said Leslie Reagan, the communications director for the Bush-China Foundation.
Reagan said that Bush does not have a financial interest in the space symposium and that neither he nor the foundation are paid to take part in the event.
Bush is also linked to China-focused think tanks with ties to business leaders and the Biden administration. In 2019, Bush served as an honorary vice chairman of the annual gala for the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, a think tank that facilitates dialogue between American and Chinese leaders. High-level Biden officials—including CIA director William Burns, National Security Council official Kurt Campbell, Ambassador Nicholas Burns, climate envoy John Kerry, and State Department deputy secretary Wendy Sherman—served as vice chairs for the gala alongside Bush.
American policymakers disagree about whether the United States should collaborate with China on space exploration, with critics expressing concern that China would steal technology from their American counterparts. Some in President Joe Biden’s orbit have urged cooperation between the United States and China on space research, including NASA administrator Bill Nelson.
“We should collaborate, no doubt about it,” Bush said about the space symposium in a recent interview with the Center for China and Globalization, a Communist Party-linked think tank.
There is some indication that the organizers of the space symposium concealed the CASC officials’ links to the organization. An itinerary for the symposium lists the officials’ affiliations with various international space organizations. But a review conducted by the Free Beacon shows the officials—Wu Yansheng, Yuan Jie, and Yang Baohua—serve as chairman, president, and vice president of CASC, respectively.
The China Academy of Aerospace Aerodynamics, a CASC subsidiary, reportedly launched a hypersonic missile in August, the Financial Timesreported. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the test “very concerning” and said it shows China is “expanding rapidly in space, in cyber and then in the traditional domains of land, sea and air.” The Chinese missile, which surpasses American technology, cannot be detected by radar. It has raised concerns in some circles that China is developing war plans, or may use its military might to invade Taiwan.
“We do not have at present either the capability to reliably track that attack or to put up a reliable defense against a Chinese hypersonic attack,” Weichert, the space security expert, told the Free Beacon.
In addition to his business interests in China, Bush has been one of Beijing’s biggest defenders against allegations of human rights abuses. Chinese state-controlled media have used some of his remarks in their propaganda efforts, such as his criticism in 2019 of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests. Bush dismissed protesters’ complaints about a Communist Party-backed national security law and questioned whether the U.S. government was propping up pro-democracy demonstrations. The Chinese government has since used the law to arrest dissenters and shut down news organizations that criticize it.
An organizer for the event did not respond to questions.
President Joe Biden’s latest some $2 trillion social spending plan will add trillions to the national debt, make inflation worse, and hurt traditional energy businesses. These were the contentions of a group of Heritage Foundation policy scholars.
During a press briefing on Nov. 12, they reviewed the president’s Build Back Better policies.
The original Build Back Better proposal called for $4 trillion in spending. Some progressives said it was not big enough. But opposition from Senator Manchin (D-W.Va.) required the proposal’s price tag come down.
Heritage Foundation experts lambasted both the recently passed $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and the latest $1.75+ trillion social and environmental spending proposal. The latter is pending in Congress.
“The White House’s newly released framework,” the Heritage Foundation said in a statement, “returns to a tried-and-true way to obscure the true cost of the legislation: the budget gimmick. Progressives claim the bill is a compromise when in reality, it is a profoundly radical document that would massively expand federal power, promote a variety of left-wing causes, kneecap the economic recovery, and waste a tremendous amount of taxpayer money.”
The White House Press Office didn’t respond to requests for comment.
At the same time, a high Biden administration was recently predicting the latest package would pass Congress, which might take up the issue next week. Still, Heritage Foundation officials said it would be toxic.
Katie Tubb, an energy analyst, warned that spending billions of dollars proposed for alternative energy companies would repeat the mistakes of the Obama administration, which spent billions of taxpayer dollars on loan guarantees for the Solyndra solar energy company. The company later defaulted.
“I’m not sure why we are expecting this to be any different this time around,” she said.
Tubb contended much of the economic growth over the last few years has come from traditional energy sources. This Biden plan, she added, would punish those industries.
“Why is that important? Because Americans get 80 percent of their energy from traditional sources such as coal, oil, and natural gas,” she said.
Tubb argued, “these are legal industries in the United States that contribute to the wellbeing of the United States, yet you wouldn’t know this by the way this administration talks.”
Tubb warns Build Back Better policies conflict with most of the president’s constituents “because, as you increase energy prices, you increase the cost of almost every product and service.”
She also said Build Back Better would hurt right to work states, states in which workers can’t be required to join unions.
This Biden’s original social spending proposal included $555 billion for environmental programs and $400 billion to pay for universal pre-school and cap child care costs at seven percent of income for most families and $200 billion to expand the child tax credit for families that earn up to $150,000 from $2,000 to $3,000 per child or $3,600 for those under age 6.
Several Heritage Foundation officials also complained that the five infrastructure/stimulus plans that have been passed since the outbreak of COVID last year are too much. And while one or two of these packages may have been justified, they are now excessive, they said. They are adding too much to the debt and will hurt efforts of some private sector firms to recover, especially in the energy sector, they noted.
David Ditch, a Heritage Foundation federal budget policy analyst, said the latest Biden plan is part of a number of spending plans since the start of the pandemic that have “already added $5 trillion to the national debt.”
It would also be the “greatest expansion” of government welfare programs in history, according to Robert Rector, a Heritage Foundation analyst.
“The deficit spending has consequences because we have massive structural consequences that will keep growing,” Ditch contended.
“There’s also no way to escape the fact that Build Back Better would increase deficits in the first five years. It’s really important to understand that every important economic headwind we face now would be worsened by Build Back Better,” according to Ditch.
Rachel Greszler, another Heritage Foundation analyst, said most of the Biden child care programs discourage the use of religious, or faith-based, child-care programs.
“To qualify, they would have to take most of the faith out of their programs. None of them are going to do that because the reason they set them up was to be in line with their faith.”
She also said the proposal will primarily benefit urban “high income families” at the “expense of more rural low-income areas.”
Still, a Biden administration official on Nov. 11 said the $2 trillion proposal is in good shape. Vice President Kamala Harris, in a speech in France, predicted the package “is poised to pass soon.”
“Just before I traveled here,” Harris added, “our Congress passed a landmark piece of legislation to make a historic investment in our nation’s infrastructure. Another bill that will support our nation’s working families and help us meet our climate commitment is poised to pass soon.”
High oil prices are a symptom of economic and monetary imbalances, not a consequence of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) decisions.
Throughout history, we have seen how OPEC cuts have done little to elevate prices when diversification and technology added to rising efficiency. Likewise, OPEC output increases don’t necessarily mean lower prices, let alone reasonable ones. OPEC helps but doesn’t solve price issues, even if they would probably like to.
The problem in the oil market has been created by years of massive capital misallocation and underinvestment in energy—the result of extremely loose monetary policies directed by governments that have penalized capital expenditure on fossil fuels for ideological reasons.
Misguided activism and political nudging in the middle of monetary injections have created bottlenecks and underinvestment that hinder both security of supply and a technically feasible competitive energy transition.
Massive injections of liquidity have caused a double side effect: rising malinvestment in non-productive activities and, now, a large inflow of capital into so-called “value” areas—more money directed to relatively scarce assets. Energy has gone from a consensus underweight stock rating to a large overweight, exacerbating the price increase. The marginal barrel of oil has risen almost 60 percent in a year, despite supply rising in tandem with demand.
According to JP Morgan, the required capital expenditure in energy required to meet demand is $600 billion for the period 2021–2030. This “cumulative missing capex” is part of the problem.
The other important problem is artificial demand created by chains of stimulus plans. As I explained in this column, adding enormous energy-intensive infrastructure plans to a re-opening economy where some supply bottlenecks have been worsened generates the same effect on energy prices as a huge speculative bubble.
Political intervention has also created an important impact on the price of a marginal barrel of oil. Threatening to ban domestic development of energy resources in the United States or announcing the prohibition of fossil fuel investment in some European summits makes the net present value of the long-term marginal barrel higher, not lower. Why? Because those threats aren’t made with sound technical analysis and robust supply and demand estimates, but with political agendas. Any serious engineer that understands the importance of security and supply and technology development understands that a successful energy transition to a greener economy requires solid and realistic targets and policies that avoid an energy crisis. Those have been forgotten.
OPEC is benefitting from high oil prices, but not as much as one would think. The OPEC Reference Basket average is $68.33 per barrel year-to-date, a large 68.4 percent increase over the same period last year, but still massively below the elevated levels prior to the 2008 financial crisis. Furthermore, OPEC and non-OPEC supply has risen in tandem with demand. Global oil supply in October increased by 1.74 million barrels per day to average 97.56 million barrels per day compared with the previous month. The U.S. liquids production growth forecast for 2021 has been revised up by 19,000 barrels per day and expected to be 17.57 million barrels per day in 2021. Imagine where oil and gas prices would be if the political threats to ban or severely penalize domestic production had been enforced.
Let’s not forget that OPEC has also revised down the estimates of global oil demand to 96.4 million barrels a day in 2021. Supply remains ample, and the U.S. administration should see that Russia and the United States are expected to be the main drivers of next year’s supply growth. Without Russia and the United States, production prices would soar no matter what OPEC partners or Saudi Arabia alone do.
We’re suffering the combination of misguided energy policies, excessive money creation, and ill-timed giant construction plans. OPEC and its partner Russia may alleviate this, but not change it dramatically. Furthermore, as time passes and underinvestment becomes more severe, OPEC’s ability to curb prices weakens. We can’t forget that OPEC and Russia account for less than half of the total world supply. They matter, but putting two more million barrels a day of supply into the market doesn’t solve the long-term price problem.
Energy prices will decline with more technology, investment, and diversification, not empty political threats.
For most Americans, the first 10 months of the Biden administration have been a disaster. A new report suggests Vice President Kamala Harris is one of those Americans who is suffering through the administration’s incompetence.
West Wing aides are growing increasingly frustrated with “entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus” from Harris and her staff, CNN reported Sunday. The outlet interviewed almost three dozen current and former staffers for Harris, administration officials, donors, advisers and Democratic Party operatives, and they reportedly painted a discouraging picture.
“Harris is struggling with a rocky relationship with some parts of the White House, while long-time supporters feel abandoned and see no coherent public sense of what she’s done or been trying to do as vice president,” CNN reported.
At the same time, the outlet said Harris’ supporters are equally frustrated with White House officials who they feel are not putting Harris in a position to succeed.
“Kamala Harris is a leader but is not being put in positions to lead,” a top donor to President Joe Biden said. “That doesn’t make sense. We need to be thinking long term, and we need to be doing what’s best for the party.
“You should be putting her in positions to succeed, as opposed to putting weights on her,” he said, speaking indirectly to Biden. “If you did give her the ability to step up and help her lead, it would strengthen you and strengthen the party.”
However, when the president has given Harris a chance to lead, she has largely failed to do so.
He tapped Harris to lead the response to the border crisis in March, The Associated Press reported. Since then, Harris has visited the border just one time, and it was far from the areas where illegal immigration is at its highest.
Border agents are still facing huge numbers of illegal border crossings, some of which are committed by convicted criminals.
Do you think Harris will run for president in 2024?
But according to a former aide to Harris, her sinking approval rating is not due to her own failures, but rather systemic racism within the Biden administration.
“It’s hard to miss the specific energy that the White House brings to defend a white man, knowing that Kamala Harris has spent almost a year taking a lot of the hits that the West Wing didn’t want to take themselves,” the aide said.
These comments show just how dysfunctional the relationship between Biden and Harris is. Members of Biden’s own party are turning on him and accusing him of racism because of the incompetence of his administration and particularly his vice president.
Obviously, none of this is helpful optically to an administration that is already floundering. For that reason, multiple White House staffers attempted to cover for Harris after the damming report.
“For anyone who needs to hear it. @VP is not only a vital partner to @POTUS but a bold leader who has taken on key, important challenges facing the country — from voting rights to addressing root causes of migration to expanding broadband,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki tweeted Sunday night.
For anyone who needs to hear it. @VP is not only a vital partner to @POTUS but a bold leader who has taken on key, important challenges facing the country—from voting rights to addressing root causes of migration to expanding broadband.
White House chief of staff Ronald Klain also joined in on the action by retweeting a sycophantic celebration of Harris from Mayor Robert Garcia of Long Beach, California.
“Our @VP Kamala Harris just finished a highly successful trip where she strengthened diplomatic relationships,” the tweet said. “She takes on the most complex assignments because she’s capable and smart. She’s a great leader who also happens to be funny and kind. And that’s the tweet.”
Our @VP Kamala Harris just finished a highly successful trip where she strengthened diplomatic relationships. She takes on the most complex assignments because she’s capable and smart. She’s a great leader who also happens to be funny and kind. And that’s the tweet.
Scramble as they might, those within the walls of the White House cannot hide their dysfunction forever. Americans are growing increasingly tired of Biden, Harris and the entire administration just 10 months into it, and tensions are rising between its own members.
Remember all of the CNN and MSNBC talking heads coming up with unique and funny ways to take away former President Donald Trump’s phone when he would tweet something problematic?
The good news is that they can reprise all of those jokes again. The bad news, for them, is that they’ll have to use them against an administration they generally support — and in a high-stakes matter where that tweet could end with one of the new administration’s most divisive policies getting nixed.
In a Friday ruling from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans that stayed President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate, Biden Chief of Staff Ron Klain’s retweet of an MSNBC host was used as evidence that the administration used a rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as a “work around.”
The three-judge panel found “the Mandate’s true purpose is not to enhance workplace safety, but instead to ramp up vaccine uptake by any means necessary,” as per the ruling penned by Circuit Judge Kurt Engelhardt.
The ruling declared the mandate was “the rare government pronouncement that is both overinclusive (applying to employers and employees in virtually all industries and workplaces in America, with little attempt to account for the obvious differences between the risks facing, say, a security guard on a lonely night shift, and a meatpacker working shoulder to shoulder in a cramped warehouse) and underinclusive (purporting to save employees with 99 or more coworkers from a ‘grave danger’ in the workplace, while making no attempt to shield employees with 98 or fewer coworkers from the very same threat.
“The Mandate’s stated impetus — a purported ’emergency’ that the entire globe has now endured for nearly two years, and which OSHA itself spent nearly two months responding to — is unavailing as well. And its promulgation grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority,” the court concluded.
Part of the court’s reasoning had to do with one of Klain’s retweets, this one from MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle.
“OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations,” she tweeted Sept. 9. Klain retweeted it later that day, according to the Fifth Circuit’s ruling.
OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.
This, the court said, was some proof the Biden administration knew they lacked the authority for a vaccine mandate.
“After the President voiced his displeasure with the country’s vaccination rate in September, the Administration pored over the U.S. Code in search of authority, or a ‘work-around,’ for imposing a national vaccine mandate,” the court stated.
“The vehicle it landed on was an OSHA [emergency temporary standard]. The statute empowering OSHA allows OSHA to bypass typical notice-and-comment proceedings for six months by providing ‘for an emergency temporary standard to take immediate effect upon publication in the Federal Register’ if it ‘determines (A) that employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards, and (B) that such emergency standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger.’”
The citation for the “work around,” of course, was Klain’s retweet.
It isn’t the only reason the 5th Circuit issued a thoroughgoing destruction of the ruling, as an editorial from the board of The Wall Street Journal noted.
“The court’s opinion takes apart the OSHA mandate every which way — on constitutional, statutory and procedural grounds,” the editorial, published Sunday, stated.
“The Constitution gives states, not the federal government, the police powers to regulate individual behavior to protect public health and safety. The Administration tried to circumvent this limitation on federal power by conscripting private employers via an OSHA ’emergency temporary standard.’”
However, Klain’s retweet provides an important glimpse into what the White House was thinking when it implemented the widely hated mandate — and it could end up helping destroy it as the case continues in the courts.
As GOP Texas Sen. Ted Cruz noted at the time, the retweet was “Foolish” and said it meant the “Biden admin knows it’s likely illegal (like the eviction moratorium) but they don’t care.”
Important.
Foolish RT from WH chief of staff. He said the quiet part out loud.
Biden admin knows it’s likely illegal (like the eviction moratorium) but they don’t care. https://t.co/AlfmYtuvhp
But like the eviction moratorium that was struck down by the Supreme Court in August, the administration hoped it would stand up for long enough that it would scare people into getting the vaccine. The problem is that if you say that part out loud, it can induce a court to notice just how flawed the mandate is.
This isn’t the only time Klain has had Twitter issues, either. Last month, the chief of staff retweeted a Harvard economist who called inflation and supply-chain issues “high class problems,” adding a millennial-ish “This,” along with two fingers pointing down, to the tweet:
Mind you, he’s far from the only problematic member of the Biden administration. Vice President Kamala Harris has been handed several major issues as tests of her seaworthiness, and on all of them she’s ended up sinking. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin oversaw the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Department of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has made a bungle of the border crisis.
All of these things loom much bigger than a retweet by the chief of staff, but it speaks to a culture of general incompetence in the administration. Funny how, during the last administration, CNN and MSNBC would have seized upon this — just like they would joke about how the president’s phone should be taken away. They seem strangely silent on it this time.
You can trot out the Klain jokes all you want, media. After all, this is twice now he’s said the silent part out loud on social media — and one of those times, it may have affected a court ruling. Strange how the Don Lemons and Joe Scarboroughs of the world don’t want to recycle their own material.
Many people scratched their heads when Joe Biden picked Harris as his running mate. The media claimed it was because she was an amazing politician. It had nothing to do with her race or gender. But since entering office, the woman has not had a stellar record.
She has a worse approval than Biden. That’s probably because she has done nothing with the jobs given to her. But recently she managed to drain even more water out of the shallow end. Just see what she asked NASA… about trees.
From The Right Scoop/ Twitter:
Kamala Harris interrupts a NASA presentation to ask if NASA “can measure trees” as part of “environmental justice.” pic.twitter.com/POoArDzaGc
Kamala Harris is a very special vice president don’t you think? Special. And she asked a very special question, interrupting a NASA presentation to do it, on the issue of tree justice.
That’s right, she wanted to know if NASA can use satellites to “track” how many trees there are on a neighborhood by neighborhood level, with those neighborhoods being apportioned by race, for the sake of environmental justice.
I think it’s safe to say that “social justice” has gone too far. No longer able to find real sources of racism in America, Kamala Harris is now asking about how racist a neighborhood is—based on its trees. Harris asked NASA if they could track tree density, per neighborhood, as some form of “environmental justice.”
Because, as we all know, racists love cutting down trees in majority-black neighborhoods.
What is Harris thinking? Does she really expect us to believe that a lack of trees in a neighborhood indicates its racial makeup? Or does she have a hunch and wants NASA to prove it? But we shouldn’t be all too surprised for her to think this way.
The left casts everything in the mold of race. She is assuming that, if there are lots of trees in a neighborhood, it’s because it is made of up rich people who planted them. And, as all social justice warriors know, rich equals white. So, if there are too many trees in a neighborhood… racism!
Has this woman ever gone to Brooklyn? There are lots of trees in the city—especially in the many parks managed by both the city and private communities. There are so many trees, despite the fact that the area is very racially diverse.
She should also visit cities outside the liberal bubble, where white, black, and other races get along very well. And guess what—plenty of trees!
Maybe there is a lack of trees in some areas because urban density meant they needed to be cut down. It had nothing to do with race, just the need to build more homes and buildings?
But nobody tell Harris that—she won’t understand!
Key Takeaways:
Kamala Harris asked if NASA could track trees for “environmental justice.”
The leftist seemed to think trees indicated the racial profile of a community.
Harris tried to tie the number of trees to racism, it seems.
The other day, I received the following email from Lisa Murkowski, currently Republican senator from Alaska:
“Fellow Conservative,
“Today I announced my campaign for re-election to continue representing the great state of Alaska. You’ve been there from the beginning, Fellow Conservative, and I wanted you to hear the news directly from me.
“As a born and raised Alaskan, serving my state has been the honor of a lifetime. This privilege is only possible because of fantastic supporters like you!
“This will be my toughest fight yet and it is critical that we get this campaign off to a strong start. That’s where you come in, Fellow Conservative.”
Fellow Conservative? (How many questions marks can I put after that without seeming illiterate?) Murkowski is about as conservative as Nancy Pelosi on one of her middling days. I was going to write AOC, but that would have been unfair—a tad anyway.
In 2013 the National Journal ranked Murkowski the 56th most liberal and 44th most conservative member of the Senate and it has only gotten worse since.
More recently, among many more liberal-friendly acts, the Alaska senator waffled forever on the Kavanaugh nomination, even after the most despicable smears, and then, of all things, voted to convict Donald Trump during that fiesta of the most overt leftwing partisan hackery, the second impeachment trial.
At the moment, three other candidates, all decidedly more conservative than Murkowski, have declared against her in the primary with two more, one of them being Sarah Palin, having expressed interest.
But… lest we the great unwashed forget where Lisa really stands… “Fellow Conservative” [caps. hers] appears not just the quoted three times, but five times in the brief solicitation email I received, which closes in the following manner (resist the gag reflex, please):
“I can’t thank you enough, Fellow Conservative. This will be a long and difficult road but with you by my side I know we will prevail.”
If you click on that email, it takes you directly to the familiar WinRed site that almost all conservative causes and politicians use for donations. By law the site is required to pass the money on to the individual candidate’s campaign within ten days.
You could call what Murkowski is doing attempted robbery through misrepresentation, but the larger, and more important question, is how this was allowed to happen.
According to the Washington Post, the following transpired when Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.)—chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee—appeared on “Meet the Press” Nov. 7:
“Scott reaffirmed his support for Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), defying the attacks that Trump has levied against both. Trump has endorsed Murkowski’s primary challenger, Kelly Tshibaka, saying in June that Tshibaka is ‘MAGA all the way.’”
When asked if the NRSC would back Murkowski financially, Scott said “Absolutely.”
What kind of game is the Florida senator playing here? Arguments exist pro and con McConnell, who has done some things well, notably judicial nominations, but Murkowski?
Nothing is discernible for her and, as noted above, several good Republicans are running against her in the primary. Moreover, Alaska is a reliable GOP state. Trump won it comfortably in 2020.
I can only speculate what’s behind Scott’s support, but it couldn’t be more obvious that he is betraying, disdaining, alienating, ignoring—choose the word you wish—the Republican rank-and-file, who are finished with Murkowski. Ask virtually anyone. (It’s worth remembering Murkowski initially became senator through being appointed by her father, then state governor.)
This is a foolish thing to do on many levels, so the conclusion must be there is money involved for someone (or some candidate or candidates). Otherwise it makes little sense unless it’s part of a covert plot by so-called “moderate” (read: RINO) Republicans to subvert Trump. Possibly both are involved.
That this was done at a moment of maximum Republican enthusiasm after the victory in Virginia and the near-victory in Democrat stronghold New Jersey makes it all the more disturbing.
Many people wonder why Republicans lose when they are able to outdraw the Democrats on the ground, and not just at Trump rallies, in large numbers.
Perhaps it is that some of them, the leadership in particular, secretly want to lose—or to win only when their candidates are part of the Deep State/Uniparty.
That would appear to apply to Scott who should be removed from his position forthwith.
As for Murkowski, she’s probably toast anyway. The NRSC is wasting their… excuse me, your… money. I would advise you not to give them any. Pick your candidates individually and carefully.
The California Congressman has been a leading proponent of the Russiagate hoax, the impeachment hoax, and now the January 6th hoax. All after he met with a leading Chinese propagandist.
Rep. Adam Schiff met with a Chinese Communist Party official previously responsible for spearheading the regime’s foreign influence operations on a visit to Washington, D.C. sponsored by the China-United States Exchange Foundation, The National Pulse can reveal.
The foundation, known as ‘CUSEF’ for short, has been flagged by the U.S. government for seeking to “influence foreign governments to take actions or adopt positions supportive of Beijing’s preferred policies.”
A key promoter of the Trump-Russia collusion hoax and leading member of the unconstitutional January 6th committee, Rep. Schiff met with officials from the documentedChinese Communist Party-linked foreign influence group in October 2009.
Schiff recently turned his attention to former Trump campaign chief Steve Bannon, a known “China hawk,” raising questions as to whether or not the Congressman for California’s 28th Congressional district is working to neutralize critics of the Chinese Communist Party.
The China-United States Exchange Foundation’s (CUSEF) website reveals it “sponsored the visit” of Chinese Communist Party official Xu Kuangdi to the U.S., including a stop in Washington, D.C.
The former Mayor of Shanghai, Xu also served as the Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the “highest-ranking entity overseeing” China’s controversial “United Front Work Department.”
Beyond Xu’s leadership role within the United Front, his trip sponsor CUSEF functions as one of several United Front groups weaponized by the Chinese Communist Party to target American elites.
CUSEF’s website highlights Rep. Schiff as one of Xu’s key meetings during his visit to Washington, D.C.:
In Washington D.C., Professor Xu met with Congressman Adam Schiff (D-CA), Congressman David Wu (D-OR) and representatives of think tanks.
The National Pulse has previously revealed how CUSEF has obtained “favorable coverage” from American journalists and former Congressmen, by offering free trips to China according to Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) filings. The trips function as part of CUSEF’s broader effort to “effectively disseminate positive messages to the media, key influencers and opinion leaders, and the general public” regarding the Chinese Communist Party.
The judge presiding over the Kyle Rittenhouse trial has reportedly received a host of angry emails due to his audacious failure to treat the accused murderer with the same outraged bias as the establishment media.
That’s right — this guy has angered liberals by being an impartial judge.
Imagine that.
It’s bad enough that the media — not to mention President Joe Biden — has painted Rittenhouse as a white supremacist because he was forced to shoot three men amid violent riots that broke out following a police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year.
That’s a ridiculous accusation to begin with, one that would render every small business owner who tried to prevent anyone from burning down his property in the summer of 2020 a seething racist.
What’s even more ridiculous is attacking Judge Bruce Schroeder for sticking to the basic principles of the American justice system and ensuring that Rittenhouse gets a fair trial.
Yet, according to the U.K. Daily Mail, Schroeder has been the target of death threats and vile accusations.
“I didn’t know that under your black robes of justice you wear a white robe of the klan. There is no way a fair trial can be heard under your supervision. Better yet, resign,” one of the messages reviewed by the Mail read.
Do you think Kyle Rittenhouse will be acquitted?
One email, which the British tabloid deemed too offensive to print in its entirety, allegedly expressed the hope that Schroeder’s children “become victims to the most heinous homicide known to man.”
“Enjoy your term, judge, it’s going to be your LAST,” another email read. “If I ever meet you in person, I fully intend to spit directly into your face, regardless the cost. You’re disgusting.”
The Daily Mail reported that Schroeder has mentioned the “thousands of communications” he’s received in court.
“I wouldn’t want to be those people,” he said this week, according to the outlet.
Schroeder has enraged the left throughout the high-profile trial, presumably for not ordering Rittenhouse to be tarred and feathered by a mob of social justice warriors the moment he stepped foot in his courtroom.
The judge’s first offense was establishing that the men shot by Rittenhouse could not be referred to as “victims” during the proceedings as, of course, whether or not Rittenhouse victimized anyone was exactly what the trial was supposed to determine.
According to an attorney who has worked in Schroeder’s courtrooms for 20 years, this is his common practice. Schroeder happens to be very sympathetic to defendants — which, were the defendant anyone other than a young white man who fired an AR-15 in self-defense during an anti-police riot, most leftists would certainly find admirable.
Another Schroeder offense came when his phone rang in the courtroom. Lo and behold, his ringtone was Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA.” Twitter leftists busted out their tinfoil hats quicker than you could say “MAGA” and pointed out that the patriotic anthem had been played at many a rally for former President Donald Trump.
Naturally, as far as they were concerned, this meant that the judge was not only a Trump fan but also sympathetic to Rittenhouse and probably a member of the KKK. There was no other explanation for why Schroeder would have selected the 1984 hit for his ringtone; it certainly wasn’t because he simply likes the song and his country.
Schroeder sent his critics over the edge last week, however, when, while discussing a lunchtime food delivery, he said he hoped his Asian food wasn’t stuck on “one of those boats in Long Beach Harbor,” a lighthearted reference to the supply chain crisis. Never mind that Schroeder used the most politically correct term possible for food from, well, Asia — to Twitter’s blue checkmarks, this was an insensitive racial comment.
The vitriol aimed at Schroeder is, of course, just an extension of the incoherent rage leveled at Rittenhouse, who has been turned into an effigy of everything the left hates simply for using a firearm to protect himself from violent rioters.
It’s not Rittenhouse or Schroeder leftists hate the most. It’s the idea that Rittenhouse should get a fair trial. It’s a justice system that does not take into account a person’s place on the intersectional totem pole when determining whether he has committed a crime.
That is the bigger issue at play here, and it’s the reason we must all pray that Rittenhouse does get a fair shake — and that more cities don’t burn as a result of the verdict.
Because if you think leftists hate this kid and the judge presiding over his trial now, just wait and see what they think if Rittenhouse is found innocent.
The action against James O’Keefe has prompted concern about the Biden administration’s commitment to the First Amendment.
The Biden administration’s effort to establish itself as a committed champion of press freedom is facing new doubts because of the Justice Department’s aggressive legal tactics against a conservative provocateur known for his hidden-camera video stings.
A predawn FBI raid last weekend against Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and similar raids on some of his associates are prompting alarm from some First Amendment advocates, who contend that prosecutors appear to have run roughshod over Justice Department media policies and a federal law protecting journalists.
Adding to the drama surrounding the brewing court showdown: It stems from a politically sensitive investigation into the alleged theft of the diary of President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley.
That document made it into the hands of O’Keefe’s organization, Project Veritas, which never published anything on the subject and eventually turned the document over to police.
An ensuing federal investigation resulted in the FBI raid on O’Keefe’s home in Westchester County, N.Y., at 6 a.m. last Saturday to seize his cell phones pursuant to a court order. O’Keefe says he stood handcuffed in his underwear in a hallway as almost a dozen agents — one carrying a battering ram — searched for the phones.
The politically fraught episode is shaping up as an early test of the vows from Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland to show greater respect for the media and to back away from the confrontational, often hostile approach favored by former President Donald Trump and his administration.
“This is just beyond belief,” said University of Minnesota law professor Jane Kirtley, a former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “I’m not a big fan of Project Veritas, but this is just over the top. I hope they get a serious reprimand from the court because I think this is just wrong.”
O’Keefe’s lawyers complained to a federal judge this week that the raid unfairly denied him the legal protections afforded to journalists.
“The Department of Justice’s use of a search warrant to seize a reporter’s notes and work product violates decades of established Supreme Court precedent,” O’Keefe lawyer Paul Calli wrote to prosecutors.
O’Keefe’s lawyers are demanding that the court appoint a special master to supervise the review of the information on his phones, which they contend contains sensitive details about confidential sources, as well as privileged communication with Project Veritas’ attorneys.
Such a process is uncommon, but has been used in recent years to sift through information seized in federal investigations into two of Trump’s personal attorneys, Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani.
On Thursday, Manhattan-based U.S. District Court Judge Analisa Torres issued a one-page order giving prosecutors one day to confirm they have “paused [their] extraction and review of the contents” of O’Keefe’s cell phones. Torres — an appointee of President Barack Obama — has not yet ruled on O’Keefe’s request for a special master, who is typically a retired judge.
Project Veritas was facing a jury trial in Washington next month in the suit brought by Democracy Partners, a Democratic consulting firm it infiltrated, but on Thursday, a judge postponed the trial due to the raids and the unfolding legal fight over them.
At the center of the gathering legal storm is a pivotal question: Is O’Keefe a journalist in the eyes of the law?
O’Keefe’s attorneys insist that despite his evident political bent and his unorthodox — sometimes deceptive — tactics, he qualifies as a journalist under a federal statute and Justice Department regulations aimed at sharply restricting the use of search warrants and similar steps against members of the media.
Prosecutors insist they’ve complied with those requirements, but have thus far been cagey about whether or not they’re treating O’Keefe as a member of the press.
“The Government hereby confirms that it has complied with all applicable regulations and policies regarding potential members of the news media in the course of this investigation, including with respect to the search warrant at issue,” prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan wrote Monday in a letter to O’Keefe’s lawyers obtained by POLITICO.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month, Garland was asked who qualifies as a journalist under Justice Department policies. “It’s very difficult to make that kind of definition,” he said.
O’Keefe is certainly not a typical journalist. Indeed, several of his outfit’s major hidden-camera exposés have been directed at employees of major news organizations such as CNN and NPR, seeking to paint them as left-wing activists. (At least one such attempt was foiled in 2017 when Washington Post reporters suspected they were being set up and effectively turned the tables on O’Keefe’s operatives.)
While many of O’Keefe’s tactics are unsavory, they are far from unknown in the mainstream press. Hidden-camera stings and undercover reporting have fallen out of fashion at most traditional news organizations, but they were once a staple of network television news magazines.
In the 1970s, the Chicago Sun-Times bought a rundown bar and rigged it out with hidden cameras, successfully capturing city inspectors demanding bribes. NBC’s popular and controversial series, “To Catch a Predator,” revolves around hidden-camera stings.
O’Keefe’s rather overt political agenda is also in line with a long American tradition of advocacy journalism. And many conservatives view mainstream news outlets as pervasively liberal in their worldview even as most claim to be neutral in their reporting.
Some of O’Keefe’s practices do seem highly unusual. A poorly redacted pleading filed in the civil suit Project Veritas was set to face trial on next month indicates that O’Keefe encouraged a colleague to tell potential donors they could provide “input” on the timing of release of Project Veritas’ work, raising the specter that O’Keefe was essentially operating under the direct control of political benefactors.
“Real news organizations — whether Fox News, the New York Times or any other recognized media outlet — do not go to their donors, or advertisers, and ask for their ‘input’ on when stories should be run,” attorneys for Democracy Partners said in the court filing.
Kirtley, the Minnesota law professor, warned against denying legal protections to Project Veritas based on its political outlook or its tactics. She also noted that Trump repeatedly accused mainstream media outlets of both unethical practices and of having a political ax to grind.
“Trump’s been saying that about the New York Times for seven years,” she said. “It’s very dangerous to try to categorize people doing journalistic-type work, even if they’re not doing it the way I would do it or the way the mainstream media would do it or the way ethical journalists would do it,” Kirtley said.
Another First Amendment advocate, Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, also said the raids on Project Veritas were worrying.
“I don’t personally like Project Veritas at all, but imagine this was a liberal org under Trump. Not a good precedent,” he wrote on Twitter.
However, legal experts cautioned that even if Project Veritas and O’Keefe qualify as journalists under the law or Justice Department policy, that did not give them license to violate the law.
“If they’ve got evidence that [Project Veritas] has broken the law, then we’re in a completely different world here,” Kirtley said.
Precisely how the Biden daughter’s diary came into the organization’s possession is unclear, but there have been no public indications thus far that — if the diary was stolen — the conservative group planned the theft or helped carry it out.
Court papers provided to the Project Veritas founder when his phones were seized last weekend indicate that his devices were taken as part of an investigation that prosecutors are conducting into potential conspiracy to traffic stolen goods across state lines, as well as accessory-after-the-fact and misprision of a felony.
Precisely what the government told U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Cave to get the warrant used to seize O’Keefe’s phones is unclear and remains under seal.
But the bare-bones outline of the investigation contained in the warrant has fueled the concerns of First Amendment advocates because the Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that media outlets cannot be held liable for publishing information that may have been obtained illegally, as long as they themselves obtained the material legally.
Project Veritas’ lawyer, Calli, acknowledged in an interview on Fox News’ “Hannity” last week that O’Keefe’s group “agreed to pay money for the right to publish” the purported Biden diary. Calli said lawyers for the sources assured Project Veritas that the diary had been obtained lawfully, but the group’s only information on how it was obtained came from the sources.
Calli told the court in a letter earlier this week that the sources told Project Veritas they obtained the diary after Ashley Biden abandoned it at a home in Delray Beach, Fla.
Lawyers tracking the case say the publicly available facts suggest two possibilities: the Justice Department deemed O’Keefe did not qualify as a journalist under DOJ guidelines and federal law known as the Privacy Protection Act, or concluded that he was a member of the media, but that Project Veritas’ personnel may still have committed a crime.
Some language in the warrant suggests prosecutors are examining whether a bidding process for the diary violated laws against fencing stolen items.
However, Calli insists that even if the FBI suspects O’Keefe or others of crimes, Justice Department policy required prosecutors to negotiate for Project Veritas’ materials rather than seizing them.
“The principles that informed this guidance are no less applicable where the news-gathering activities focus on the President’s daughter,” Calli wrote in the motion seeking a special master.
Emails obtained by POLITICO show prosecutors declined to tell Calli whether the Project Veritas searches were approved by a Justice Department committee that oversees investigations impacting the news media.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan declined to comment on the office’s handling of the inquiry. A Justice Department spokesperson also declined comment.
Over the past six months, Biden and Garland have introduced extraordinarily protective policies toward the press, protections so robust that some national security professionals have raised concerns. However, the fight with Project Veritas raises questions about how broadly the new administration intends to apply those robust protections.
“This is really a test in this administration of whether they’re going to put their money where their mouth is,” Kirtley said. “If they’re trying to be seen as great champions of press freedom, this is a pretty bad way to start.”
Remember former President Barack Obama’s famous pledge in his push to pass the Affordable Care Act: “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan”?
He said variations of it dozens of times over the course of 2009 and 2010 while pitching Obamacare to the American public.
In 2013, after provisions of the law were implemented and millions of people saw their health care plans go away, PolitiFact named the promise the “Lie of the Year.”
President Joe Biden appears to have taken a page from his old boss’ playbook as he attempts to sell the “Build Back Better” proposal, which would launch several new open-ended entitlement programs.
His consistent talking point has been that those making under $400,000 a year will not see their taxes go up. The White House has the pledge right on its website along with the pronouncement that the wealthy will finally pay their “fair share” under the plan.
In Scranton, Pennsylvania, last month, Biden said, “I guarantee you that no one making under $400,000 a year will see one single penny in tax go up. Not one.”
Biden: “The cost of the Build Back Better bill in terms of adding to the deficit is zero, zero, zero. Because we’re going to pay for it all.” pic.twitter.com/sRqBLeD6sA
In fact, he described his plan as “a tax cut for working-class people.”
Do you think Build Back Better would strengthen the economy?
Well, an analysis by the left-leaning Tax Policy Center found that “roughly 20 percent to 30 percent of middle-income households would pay more in taxes in 2022” under Build Back Better.
The group estimated that the tax increase for low- and middle-income Americans would not be substantial — $100 or less per year. Those making $200,000 to $500,000 would pay an additional $230 per year.
That, of course, is an increase of more than a penny and certainly isn’t a tax cut.
But here’s the kicker, after all Biden’s pontificating about the rich paying their “fair share”: Build Back Better — again, according to the liberal Tax Policy Center — actually lowers the tax burden on many of the wealthiest Americans.
You ask, “How can this be? Democrats are all about socking it to the rich.”
It all comes down to a provision in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act passed under former President Donald Trump that set a $10,000 cap on deductions that wage earners can take for state and local taxes when calculating their federal income tax payment. They’re known as SALT deductions.
Wealthy people in blue states with high income taxes like New Jersey, California and New York saw their tax bills go up when the new SALT cap went into effect after 2017.
“Wait,” you say, “I thought the Trump tax cuts were a giveaway to the rich.” That was a false talking point propagated by Biden, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Build Back Better benefits many high-income earners by taking the SALT deduction cap up to $80,000.
“The higher SALT cap would boost after-tax incomes by 1.2 percent for those making between about $370,000 and $870,000 (the 95th to 99th percentile),” according to the Tax Policy Center.
So Biden is lying. Build Back Better would raise taxes on many making less than $400,000 while easing the tax burden on the well-to-do, primarily in blue states.
But there’s another important aspect of the legislation that would hit Americans’ wallets across the board: a tax hike on corporations, reportedly from 21 percent to 26.5 percent.
The White House has claimed that the tax increase will not result in companies raising the prices for their wares.
Then-President Ronald Reagan explained in 1981 why this is not true.
“Some say, ‘Shift the tax burden to business and industry,’ but business doesn’t pay taxes,” he said.
“Oh, don’t get the wrong idea. Business is being taxed, so much so that we’re being priced out of the world market. But business must pass its costs of operations — and that includes taxes — on to the customer in the price of the product. Only people pay taxes, all the taxes,” Reagan continued.
“Government just uses business in a kind of sneaky way to help collect the taxes. They’re hidden in the price; we aren’t aware of how much tax we actually pay.”
Don’t be fooled. Build Back Better would result in a tax increase for many hard-working Americans while giving a break to Biden’s favored wealthy elite.
President Joe Biden’s administration on Friday announced it is raising Medicare premiums, a move it blamed in part on the cost of drugs.
The Medicare Part B standard monthly premium will rise by nearly $22 to $170.10 next year, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said.
“The increase in the Part B premium for 2022 is continued evidence that rising drug costs threaten the affordability and sustainability of the Medicare program,” Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, administrator of the agency, said in a statement.
“The Biden-Harris Administration is working to make drug prices more affordable and equitable for all Americans, and to advance drug pricing reform through competition, innovation, and transparency,” she added.
The move also stemmed from the limiting of the monthly premium increase this year in the Continuing Appropriations Act and from “spending trends driven by COVID-19,” the agency said. “It also reflects the need to maintain a contingency reserve for unanticipated increases in health care spending, particularly certain drug costs.”
One drug in particular was a major factor. Officials said the uncertainty surrounding the potential use of the Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm by people covered by Medicare meant they needed to store away a higher level of reserves. The agency in July began analyzing whether Medicare would cover the drug but has not yet finished the analysis.
Aduhelm, Biogen’s approved drug for early Alzheimer’s disease, is seen at Butler Hospital, one of the clinical research sites in Providence, R.I., on June 16, 2021. (Jessica Rinaldi/Pool via Reuters)
In addition to the monthly premium, the annual deductible will rise from $203 to $233. Also, Medicare Part A inpatient deductibles will jump $72 to $1,556 next year, and Medicare part A daily coinsurance and skilled nursing facility coinsurance will both increase at least $9.
Officials pointed out that many Americans covered by Medicare will see a net increase in Social Security benefits. The Social Security Administration announced last month that recipients will get a 5.9 percent increase in benefits.
However, the 14.5 percent jump in Medicare premiums—the highest since 2016—will eat up the entire adjustment for Social Security recipients with the lowest benefits, according to Senior Citizens League, a nonpartisan seniors group.
“Social Security recipients with higher benefits should be able to cover the $21.60 per month increase, but they may not wind up with as much left over as they were counting on,” Mary Johnson, a policy analyst for the group, said in a statement.
Further, inflation is causing the cost of all variety of goods to rise, including core spending priorities like groceries.
Medicare is a federal health insurance program for Americans 65 or older. Americans can start receiving Social Security as early as age 62, though they receive more if they wait until full retirement age.
As House Democrats continue trying to muster enough votes to pass President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio), a member of the House Financial Services Committee, said that the massive social spending bill—along with other Democrat-led policies—represent a “potentially fatal overdose of government” that could stifle free enterprise and push inflation higher.
Davidson, who serves co-chairman of the Congressional Sound Money Caucus, told NTD News in an interview that the Biden administration’s big-ticket spending proposals risk exacerbating inflation, which is running at a near 31-year high.
“The only debate on Capitol Hill is how much more gas to throw on the fire,” Davidson said.
“It gets bigger, and that’s the Democrats’ agenda—they want to throw more on with Build Back Better,” he said, adding that “it’s going to dump a lot of extra spending into the economy and it has a big impact” on inflation.
“Whether you’re talking about the American Rescue Plan, the infrastructure bill or Build Back Better—all part of this Bernie Sanders’ agenda,” Davidson said, alluding to the Vermont senator’s various left-leaning or far-left policy positions, including proposing to cut the wealth of billionaires by half over 15 years and initially putting forward a $6 trillion budget proposal that he said was “probably too little.”
“It is hostile to the American way of life and free enterprise. We’re confronting a potentially fatal overdose of government. We need more freedom and less government—and we need to embrace sound money,” Davidson said.
President Joe Biden has argued that his Build Back Better plan will ease inflationary pressures, including on the labor cost side by getting more Americans back into the workforce by reducing child and elder care costs. And more directly, his plan would lower costs for families by providing more affordable health coverage and prescription drugs, he said.
In a similar vein, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told CNBC in late October that the Build Back Better agenda would have an anti-inflationary impact by smoothing some supply-side dislocations and footing the bill for some costs facing American families.
“It will boost the economy’s potential to grow, the economy’s supply potential, which tends to push inflation down, not up,” she told the outlet.
“For many American families experiencing inflation, seeing the prices of gas and other things that they buy rise, what this package will do is lower some of the most important costs, what they pay for health care, for child care. It’s anti-inflationary in that sense as well,” Yellen added.
Yellen also said she continues to see inflation as a temporary supply-side-driven phenomenon that will normalize next year.
Davidson challenged the “transitory” inflation framing, noting that the Fed’s balance sheet has ballooned from around $4 trillion in the months prior to the outbreak of the pandemic to over $8 trillion.
“When you create that much cash into the economy, of course it shows up,” he said, adding that, initially, people were “happy” to see their financial assets grow in value, “but then you start seeing it in retail prices, and that’s what we’re seeing today.”
Group wants the justices to review the case alongside a similar challenge to Harvard
An advocacy group pushing the Supreme Court to overturn Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies on Thursday filed a petition that charges the University of North Carolina with anti-Asian bias.
The advocacy group, Students for Fair Admissions, asked the justices to fast-track a case against UNC that is still being processed in lower courts. The group is petitioning the Court to review the case alongside its landmark challenge to Harvard’s admissions practices, which it asked the justices to take up in February.
“If the Supreme Court decides, as it should, to reconsider racial preferences in college admissions, it should consider that question in the context of both a private school and a public school,” Students for Fair Admissions president Edward Blum said. “And it should resolve that question under both Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution.”
The request is a reminder that the Supreme Court is facing a wave of affirmative action cases. Separate attacks on affirmative action are unfolding across the country and will reach the justices in due course, even if the Court refuses to hear the Harvard and UNC disputes. For example, a challenge to race-conscious admissions policies at the University of Texas is pending before the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Both matters ask the Supreme Court to overturn a foundational affirmative action decision, Grutter v. Bollinger, and forbid consideration of race in college admissions. In Grutter, the Supreme Court said colleges may consider race as one factor among many on a case-by-case basis. Grutter involved an unsuccessful attack on affirmative action policies at the University of Michigan Law School.
Although it is a private institution, Harvard is subject to federal anti-discrimination laws because it accepts federal dollars each year. UNC, on the other hand, is a public school, so the plaintiffs can attack its program on statutory and constitutional grounds.
“This case and Harvard should be heard together,” Thursday’s petition reads. “The first question presented in both cases is the same: whether this Court should overrule Grutter and hold that institutions of higher education cannot use race as a factor in admissions. This Court can resolve that momentous question in either case. But if it decides to revisit Grutter, its analysis would be more complete if it considered both a private university (Harvard) and a public university (UNC) and both the Constitution (UNC) and Title VI (Harvard and UNC).”
UNC awards racial preferences to African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans, but not to Asians. The university considers the first three groups underrepresented on campus as compared with North Carolina’s population. In contrast, Asians account for about 12 percent of UNC’s student body and 3 percent of the state population.
Students for Fair Admissions on the same day in 2014 filed lawsuits that accused Harvard and UNC of unlawful race discrimination. The UNC case lagged through the court system behind the Harvard dispute. A federal trial court ruled for Harvard in 2019, and a federal appeals court did the same a year later. In contrast, it took almost seven years for the UNC case to reach trial. U.S. District Judge Loretta Biggs in Winston-Salem, N.C., ruled for the university on Oct. 18.
Grutter, decided in 2003, predicted that affirmative action would end 25 years in the future. In contrast, Biggs said race-conscious admissions are a permanent “institutional obligation to be broadly and equitably administered.”
“While no student can or should be admitted to this university, or any other, based solely on race, because race is so interwoven in every aspect of the lived experience of minority students, to ignore it, reduce its importance and measure it only by statistical models as [Students for Fair Admissions] has done, misses important context,” Biggs wrote.
Hearing the Harvard and UNC cases together would be consistent with Grutter. The justices decided to hear Grutter after a federal appeals court upheld Michigan Law School’s affirmative action policies. A separate legal challenge to Michigan’s undergraduate admissions criteria was not as far along, but the Court heard that lawsuit alongside Grutter to consider affirmative action at multiple levels of higher education.
The Court often fast-tracks closely linked cases. For example, the justices in October expedited review of two separate legal challenges to Texas’s abortion law, one from clinics in the state and another from the Biden administration.
The case is Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina.
Labor Dept says inflation at highest point in 30 years
President Joe Biden in July dismissed concerns over inflation, saying it’s “highly unlikely” there will be “long-term inflation.” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm echoed Biden’s claim this month, telling CNN that there is a “transitory nature to the inflation problem.”
While the White House downplays the threat of rising consumer prices, the Labor Department on Wednesday said the annual inflation rate has hit its highest point in 30 years, and economic observers warn there could be no end in sight for the country’s inflation surge.
The Washington Post on Friday corrected two articles and altered a dozen others in an attempt to respond to discrepancies that had emerged between its reporting and what was known about the dossier compiled by ex-British spy Christopher Steele.
The Post, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, had long insisted that Sergei Millian, a Belrusian-American businessman, was one of Steele’s sources. But its stories, which relied on two sources it did not name publicly, were increasingly undermined as time went on, most recently a grand jury indictment against Igor Danchenko, who has been described as Steele’s “primary sub-source.”
Danchenko is accused of falsely telling FBI agents on four separate occasions that he spoke with Millian over the phone. But authorities discovered he had never spoken to Millian.
The indictment and “further reporting” drove the Post to correct two pieces—one originally published in 2017 and another in 2019, the Post said in editor’s notes appended to the stories.
A dozen others were altered to remove all references to Millian.
Sally Buzbee, the paper’s executive editor, said in a story published by the paper the indictment and other information “created doubts” about Millian’s alleged links to the dossier.
“We feel we are taking the most transparent approach possible,” Buzbee said.
Millian told The Epoch Times in a Twitter message that the correction was “long overdue.”
“Truth finally prevailed,” he said.
Jeffrey McCall, professor of communication at DePauw University, told The Epoch Times that “it’s very unusual to see a news organization step forward so plainly to correct reporting that was done, in this case, a couple of years ago.”
“This is a remarkable development,” he said.
While the corrections were a positive development, the Post should also publish the names of the sources that were relied upon and explain why they were shielded from public view in the first place, he added.
A spokeswoman for the paper declined to comment beyond the editor’s note.
Instead of naming the sources, the Post continued to cite them. In one note, the paper said one of the sources believes the new information, including the indictment, “puts in grave doubt” the claim Millian was a source for Steele. The other was said to have declined to comment.
Igor Danchenko is seen at a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., on Nov. 10, 2021. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Rosalind Helderman and Tom Hamburger, the co-authors of both corrected stories, did not respond to requests for comment. Each shared a Post story about the corrections on their Twitter feeds.
Helderman, though, has not deleted posts on Twitter about Millian, including a Feb. 7, 2019, missive that called him “a key source for the Steele dossier.”
Media experts say the best practice is to update readers on every channel when corrections are issued.
Reporting on the dossier by the Post and a slew of other outlets, including The New York Times, has been increasingly undermined.
Steele was revealed to have been paid by Fusion GPS, a firm that was itself hired by Hillary Clinton—the Democratic presidential candidate facing off against then-candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 election—and the Democratic National Committee. His sources have been revealed as a cast of characters with links to the Clinton network, including Michael Sussman, a Clinton campaign lawyer.
Sussman was charged last month with lying to the FBI about a claim that there were secret communications between the Trump Organization and a Russia Bank. Steele has said he received the information from Sussman, and ultimately included it in his series of unsubstantiated reports. The allegation was reported by multiple news outlets, many of which later corrected their stories.
Another source was Charles Dolan, according to special counsel John Durham. Dolan is a long-time Democrat Party operative. Dolan’s role was not previously known before.
Democrats have been hell-bent on getting Biden’s massive reconciliation bill passed. This “build back better” spending bill is little more than a socialist takeover of our country. Biden plans on putting millions of Americans on welfare, while hammering businesses and working Americans with new financial burdens.
Yet, Biden and Pelosi have claimed this bill will cost “zero.” We’ve already seen how the bill contains hidden tax hikes (unless you’re a rich Democrat). Now, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is calling out Pelosi over her hidden “gimmicks.”
From Fox Business:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce accused the authors of the Democrat-backed reconciliation bill of using “gimmicks to cover up well over $1 trillion in spending,” and called on Congress to identify the bill’s actual “real-world impact.”
The business group published a letter it sent to politicians in D.C. on Wednesday demanding that they consider the cost of the legislation, its inflationary impact and how the policies will impact future workforce participation.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce blasted Democrats for trying to hide the true cost of Biden’s massive spending bill. They revealed that the bill contains a sunset provision that will expire over time, which masks just how much this bill is going to cost. While saying it is only $1.75 trillion, this gimmick hides at least $1 trillion in spending.
The chamber warned lawmakers not to support a bill that will hurt our economy. They said this spending package will have an “inflationary impact” on our country and could hurt “future workforce participation.” This should sound alarm bells for every American.
Biden’s previous spending bill, passed earlier in the year, triggered massive inflation. That “stimulus” is largely to blame for our rising costs, worker shortage, and other economic problems. Democrats and RINOs just passed an infrastructure bill that could cause more damage. If the reconciliation bill is passed, it will only get worse.
Democrats don’t seem to be listening, though. Pelosi has been bullying her own party to get this bill rushed through the House. She doesn’t even want lawmakers to wait for the CBO’s assessment, which is sure to echo the chamber’s concern.
Key Takeaways:
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce accused Democrats of hiding the true cost of Biden’s spending bill.
The chamber warned that “gimmicks” are hiding over $1 trillion in additional spending.
They warned that this bill would hurt the U.S. economy for years to come.
Nick Perry – Joe Biden’s nominee for Ambassador to Jamaica – participated in a lawmaker’s delegation to China aimed at “building friendship” with Chinese Communist Party officials and establishing business ties.
Perry, who’s served as a member of the New York State Assembly for three decades, joined an Asian American Business Development Center’s (AABDC) “Trade Mission to China” in September 2006. Previous trip participant and New York State Senator Malcolm Smith explained the purpose behind the trip as “provid[ing] us with a foundation to build friendship and an ongoing dialogue with Chinese government officials and business leaders” in an AABDC document chronicling Perry’s delegation.
Among the projects AABDC highlighted as one of its successes – in addition to Perry’s China trade mission – was assisting with the outsourcing of American jobs, noting it was helping “an American manufacturer [that] is seeking Chinese factories for order fulfillment.”
A summary of Perry’s trip reveals the China visit aimed to “enhance understanding of the Chinese government’s role in the country’s economic development and growth”:
The delegates’ first-hand experience of China gave them an enhanced understanding of the Chinese government’s role in the country’s economic development and growth. This, in turn, has provided these New York State legislators with a greater ability to effectively address their own constituents’ interests and concerns regarding doing business with China.
To do so, Perry’s delegation “met with Chinese government officials” in “every city [they] visited,” including events such as private dinners hosted by the National People’s Congress. During the trip, Perry, his fellow delegation members, and AABDC executives also “presented a gift” to the Chinese Communist Party Secretary of the Haining Municipality.
Perry provided a testimonial upon returning from the trip, praising the Chinese Communist Party’s development of China:
The economic development of China is remarkable. What stood out for me in all three cities was that even though they are ancient urban areas, I never had the sense that I was in an old city; everywhere, new construction and building is happening!
KINNEY COUNTY, Texas—Charging an illegal immigrant with a misdemeanor such as criminal trespass sounds simple enough.
But throw 1,008 cases at a small county with a jail that has 14 spaces and a court system that usually handles six or seven cases per month—using Microsoft Word—and the wheels start to fall off.
On June 10, when Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed state troopers to start arresting illegal aliens—on charges including trespass, criminal mischief, and evading on foot—officials in Kinney County jumped on the idea.
County Sheriff Brad Coe was keen to stick illegal immigrants with any charges he could to deter them from coming to his county.
“We’re going to try to hold these people accountable,” Coe said. He also wanted to get them in the system because the illegal aliens captured in Kinney County have evaded Border Patrol, so they’re unknown.
Since January, ranchers and local law enforcement had seen an unprecedented increase in the number of illegal aliens traversing the county, and they’d given up on expecting federal solutions. Local ranchers, tired of cut fences and property damage, signed affidavits allowing the sheriff and the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to press charges on their behalf.
Although Abbott announced the Operation Lone Star border security initiative in June, it took almost two months to secure enough jail space and for the DPS to work out the process. The state set up a temporary 100-bed detention center in neighboring Val Verde County and cleared out the 1,000-bed Briscoe Unit in Dilley.
Meanwhile, in July, almost 10,000 illegal aliens evaded Border Patrol in the Del Rio Sector, according to preliminary Customs and Border Protection numbers.
By August, DPS was ready to start the initiative in Val Verde and Kinney counties. In Kinney, DPS assigned a small team to work the brush near the U.S.–Mexico border in areas of high foot traffic. The officers quickly started arresting an average of 25 illegal aliens per day from private ranches, often at night.
At the sheriff’s office, state troopers and local jail staff took about two hours to complete the paperwork and magistrate seven Mexicans who were arrested late on Aug. 7. They’d been walking for two days before being caught on a ranch.
Texas State Troopers complete paperwork after arresting illegal immigrants for criminal trespass on a local ranch, at the Kinney County Sheriff’s Office in Brackettville, Texas, on Aug. 8, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Two said they had already tried crossing a month ago but got caught by Border Patrol and expelled. Another man, who said he was aiming to get to New York, said this was his third time trying to get through. He said his cousin intended to pay the $4,000 smuggling fee upon his delivery to New York.
Several said they’ll probably try again, while others weren’t as enthusiastic. They all said a “travel agent” on the Mexican side of the border directed them on where to cross, gave directions of where to walk, and had planned to coordinate a vehicle pick-up for them.
At first, Kinney County Justice of the Peace Narce Villarreal came down to the sheriff’s office in the middle of the night to magistrate the groups before DPS transported them the 30 miles to the Val Verde facility. But the hours became untenable and the sheriff’s office parking lot was overwhelmed with detainees, so the whole process was moved to Val Verde.
From Val Verde, the illegal aliens would eventually be transported 126 miles to the Briscoe Unit in Dilley while they waited for their court hearing. Subsequently, some were then transported another 200 miles to the Segovia jail facility in Edinburgh.
Illegal immigrants wait to be magistrated on trespassing charges in Kinney County outside the Sheriff’s Office in Brackettville, Texas, on Aug. 6, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
The Prosecution
Meanwhile, Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith was scrambling to take up the flood of new cases. He had started the job in January and was building the backend process on the fly. He had to go to the county commissioners to request a software system that would streamline the paperwork on the cases—Word documents had become too unwieldy under the volume. He contacted two other county attorneys to double-check that his complaints were solid.
Smith said he’s filed around 900 charges for criminal trespass since August, with more pending, and has had to rely heavily on Mason District Attorney Tonya Ahlschwede, who is part of Texas’s border prosecution unit, to keep up.
Former chief of the Del Rio Border Patrol Sector Austin Skero, who retired at the end of July, also joined the unit as an investigator.
After a misdemeanor arrest, Smith examines the evidence in the case file from the sheriff’s office or DPS. If it’s determined that trespass occurred, he’ll file a complaint against the individual for trespassing, which is a Class B misdemeanor. The charge is elevated if the individual has a deadly weapon, is found more than 100 feet past the property line on agricultural land, or if the alleged crime took place during a disaster (the county has been in a perpetual state of disaster since April).
Once charged, the suspect will make a plea, and if he pleads guilty, he’ll most likely get time served and be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
It’s not a hefty penalty, but “we’re hoping they avoid our county,” Smith said.
The maximum punishment for a Class B misdemeanor in Texas is 180 days in jail and a $2,000 fine, whereas a Class A is one year in jail and a $4,000 fine.
Recent trail camera photos of illegal aliens provided by ranchers in Kinney County, Texas. (Courtesy of ranchers)
As the cases have piled up, it has become a race against time for Smith.
“If they don’t make bail, they’re in jail the whole time until trial,” he said. From the time of the arrest, he has 30 days to file a Class A misdemeanor complaint against a detained individual before the habeas corpus statute requires a personal recognizance (PR) bond to be set and the individual released.
In some cases, Smith received the arrest files from DPS on day 29, or even beyond day 30. In other cases, the complaints were filed within the 30 days, but the inmate had bonded out of jail and was nowhere to be found.
Logistics and lack of manpower were the bottlenecks, he said.
“Because what the state did, when they planned on this process, they got the jails set up, they got defense attorneys funded, but not one prosecutor was there to get the prosecution set up for this,” he said.
“So we’re playing catch up, trying to get the resources at the same time to do everything—versus the defense had everything set up from the very beginning.”
On Oct. 14, Abbott announced $36.4 million in grant funding toward border prosecutions and 12 border counties, including more than $3.1 million in grant money to Kinney County, as part of Operation Lone Star.
But the money doesn’t just appear in the county bank account. It’s grant money that requires an application process, and the county must carry the costs in the meantime.
Smith has already spent more than his annual office supplies budget (about $1,200) on file folders for the trespass cases.
Court Proceedings
The first of Kinney County’s cases came up on the court docket during the last week of October. They were conducted over video conference with retired judges coming in to fill the gaps.
On Oct. 26, Judge Vivian Torres sat on the virtual bench. The cases proceeded slowly, with frequent pauses for the translator to ensure the defendant understood the goings-on.
Defense lawyer Sylvia Delgado had arranged a plea deal for several defendants that reduced their charge from a Class A to a Class B misdemeanor and a sentence of “time served,” with court costs being waived.
The defendants pleaded guilty, and the judge agreed to the plea deal terms, which included a 72-day sentence, which had been served.
Delgado said she’s been assigned about 190 cases so far by the Lubbock Public Defenders’ Office and has been focusing on getting the first ones out of jail because they’d been detained so long.
She said she meets her clients via Zoom video conference. “And I tell them specifically: ‘You have not been forgotten. I’m your attorney, I’m going to work to get you out,’” Delgado told The Epoch Times on Oct. 28.
Delgado said she lets them know that she’ll attempt to get them released on a no-fee PR bond, try to get charges reduced, and, if they want to plead guilty, ask for time served.
“And then, unfortunately, when I go back to see them before docket, a lot of them are gone,” she said. Of her 18 clients for the Nov. 2 court docket, she has only been able to follow up with the six who are still in jail.
“I met with Joselito, and Joselito had told me, ‘Well, Ms. Delgado, I just want to plead guilty and get sent back to Mexico. I just want to go back to Mexico.’
“So I was looking for Joselito. And he’s nowhere to be found.”
She was told by the other inmates that Joselito was transferred to ICE, while others had returned to Mexico after bonding out.
Defense lawyer Sylvia Delgado (bottom-right) speaks during an arraignment hearing for an illegal alien charged with criminal trespass in Kinney County, on Oct. 28, 2021. (Screenshot/The Epoch Times)
Other defense attorneys have also said they had no idea where their clients were after they bonded out.
The region’s district attorney, Suzanne West, told The Epoch Times that she believes inmates who bond out are released to ICE.
ICE didn’t confirm that it was taking custody of the inmates, or what happened next. A spokesperson said the agency is following the enforcement priorities set out by the Biden administration.
“In Texas and elsewhere, ICE conducts an individualized determination in each case to assess whether arrest and removal is warranted. This determination includes an assessment of aggravating and mitigating factors, as well as a determination of whether the person is removable under the law,” ICE spokesperson Monica Yoas stated in an email to The Epoch Times.
“ICE fully respects the civil rights and liberties of all people when conducting this assessment.”
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which operates the Briscoe and Segovia jails, said that as of Oct. 29, the Briscoe unit held 654 illegal alien inmates, with 536 from Kinney County, 105 from Val Verde, 10 from Zavala, and three from Frio County. In Segovia, all 291 illegal alien inmates are from Kinney County.
Delgado said she has asked for an investigator to help on the ground to find the missing people and has meanwhile obtained a continuance in court for their hearing dates.
“If they’re truly lost, like we don’t ever hear from them again, we don’t know what happened. If I can’t really find out, then they’re probably just going to keep getting reset,” she said.
“So I suppose a warrant may issue, but we’re not there yet. We’re just not there in that system yet.”
Most of the defendants on the next several dockets, totaling about 60 cases, had their cases dismissed because defense lawyers argued that the complaints were deficient as they lacked the landowner’s name.
Smith later said he was disappointed that the name of the ranch wasn’t sufficient for the court, as he was hoping to avoid naming the landowner in public records. The landowner’s name is usually included in the arrest file, which the lawyer can access.
“A lot of ranchers are concerned about cartel retribution, possibly, if their name comes up in complaint after complaint after complaint” he said.
“So we can still refile it and prosecute once we correct that information. But you know, they’re not going to show up.”
Smith’s office scrambled to amend the 900 complaints already filed to include the landowner name and the GPS location of the alleged offense.
A total of 52 illegal immigrants from Mexico and Honduras wait to be booked for criminal trespass after being arrested by Texas State Troopers on local ranches, at the Kinney County Sheriffs Office in Brackettville, Texas, on Aug. 8, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Defense lawyers appeared to change tack on the Nov. 2 docket and entered “not guilty” pleas for all their clients who were still present.
The judge subsequently ordered the release of each defendant on a no-fee PR bond and set a pre-trial hearing for Nov. 18.
Ahlschwede, from the border prosecution unit, told the court on Nov. 2 that several illegal aliens who had been released from jail after paying a cash bond have since been arrested again for criminal trespass in Kinney County.
Smith said one man was released after paying a $4,000 cash bond. “Then we re-arrested him 10 days ago. And despite it being a multiple offense, they gave a $500 bond. Well, we filed the motion to revoke [the bond] once we got the case file—which was 10 days after it occurred,” Smith said.
The man had been released three days prior to receiving the motion.
“By the time we got the file, he was already gone. Who knows where he’s at now,” Smith said.
Coe said his office has been juggling a steady stream of people coming in to pay cash bonds with wads of crisp $100 bills.
“Some of them are $5,000. Where are they getting the money?” he said. At one point, he had more than half a million dollars in cash sitting in his vault.
“I’d bet there’s a 99 percent chance that they don’t show up [to court],” Coe said of the released illegal alien defendants.
“They’ll probably end up in places like Michigan, Missouri, West Virginia, Washington—we’ll never see them again. So are we doing this all in vain? I mean, it’s doable. It’s very, very new. It’s just getting the mechanism rolling.”
Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe sets up a pop-up vehicle checkpoint near Brackettville, Texas, on Aug. 16, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)
Impact
Coe said he hoped the convictions might be a roadblock for illegal aliens if they ever tried to file for some type of assistance or become U.S. citizens.
“That’d be a check mark against them. Some type of consequence has to be there,” he said.
However, in reality, having a trespass conviction on record will act more like a speedbump, according to former immigration judge Andrew Arthur, who is now a resident fellow in law and policy for the Center for Immigration Studies.
“Generally, this isn’t going to have any effect on them from an immigration standpoint, but again, sleeping in a room with 30 guys for six months really does have a way of concentrating one’s attention,” Arthur told The Epoch Times on Oct. 27.
Even if the Texas legislature passes a bill that would enhance punishment to a third-degree felony for illegal alien trespassers, the impact on future immigration status would be negligible, Arthur said.
“But again, anything that impedes people’s ability to enter the United States, anything that’s going to require them to be detained pretrial, or imprisoned post-trial, is going to be a deterrent,” he said.
“Now, how strong a deterrent effect that is remains to be seen.”
Arthur said the deterrent effect was worth the taxpayer dollars spent on the trespass prosecutions.
“The problem is that Texas is doing the job that the federal government should be doing.”
Volume
The majority of Border Patrol apprehensions along the southwest border occur in Texas. Of the more than 1.6 million illegal alien apprehensions in fiscal year 2021, Border Patrol apprehended almost 958,000, or 58 percent, crossing into Texas.
Customs and Border Protection doesn’t publish the number of illegal aliens that Border Patrol agents have detected but who subsequently evade apprehension, but the internal numbers have sat at around 50,000 per month this year, according to an inside source. It’s impossible to estimate the number of those who aren’t detected at all.
Within the Operation Lone Star border effort, the DPS had made 7,744 criminal arrests as of Oct. 14, including 1,300 for criminal trespass and 6,339 on felony charges. State troopers had been involved in 822 vehicle pursuits, mostly chasing smugglers who were transporting illegal aliens.
Kinney County has charged significantly more illegal aliens with trespass than Val Verde County so far, which started the initiative at the same time. Other counties, such as Frio and Zavala started prosecuting more recently, while Uvalde and Brooks counties are considering getting started but are strapped with the same lack of resources that Kinney County has experienced.
Smith said the volume of prosecutions coming from Kinney County were a result of the county officials caring about the issue.
“They want to do something more about it than just close your eyes and not watch what’s happening to your county,” he said.
Smith said he’s been accused by a defense lawyer of being racist for prosecuting illegal aliens.
“The criminal complaints make no mention of immigration status or hinge on race. If you come down to Kinney County and trespass on private property, we’ll arrest you too,” he said in a statement on Oct. 26.
Delgado, the defense lawyer, said she hadn’t seen any malfeasance, despite the scramble to pull everything together.
“It’s a big ship and it’s making a large turn in a small canal. And so we are all working really hard to get things moving. And I believe it is starting to unclog,” she said.
Smith predicted that the system will be much more robust within a couple of months.
“What we’re working on right now is tweaking the language of the complaints, researching everything, making sure there’s nothing else they [the defense] can pick at,” he said.
“Now, will this Operation Lone Star continue for the next three years? Probably so. Unless the federal government decides to actually follow the laws passed by Congress—which at the moment they’re not doing.
“The only realistic solution to this crisis will require deploying all of the Texas military on the border and actually prevent the illegal entries from occurring. Right now, it’s like trying to build a dam after the flood gates have already been opened.”
Creating more government jobs is an expense (AKA subsidy), not a benefit. Do less with more. [US Patriot]
WASHINGTON—The U.S. infrastructure bill President Joe Biden is expected to sign soon will boost investments in the U.S. Department of Energy by the most since its founding in 1977 and create about 1,000 jobs in the agency, officials said on Wednesday.
The bipartisan bill contains more than $62 billion in incentives for emerging and traditional technologies for the department.
Biden and his fellow Democrats in Congress are also seeking to pass a bigger reconciliation bill that has even more incentives for the energy transition, but which has been delayed by disagreements within the party.
“Over the coming days, weeks, months, we are going to have to step up,” Tarak Shah, the DOE chief of staff told reporters about the programs included in the bipartisan bill.
“We anticipate somewhere around 1,000 new folks coming on board to help us spend this money efficiently and effectively for the American people.” The DOE has about 13,000 federal employees and tens of thousands more at its 17 national labs.
For the development of new technologies, the bipartisan bill includes more than $7 billion in incentives for producing, sourcing, and recycling minerals and materials for batteries to store renewable power.
It also has $21.5 billion for clean energy demonstration plants for development of hydrogen gas, sucking carbon emissions out of the air and from industrial plants, and for advanced nuclear power plants.
Hydrogen can be used in fuel cell vehicles, mixed with natural gas, or in making synthetic fuels for ships, but costs about four times as much to generate from wind and solar power as from fossil fuels.
On helping the existing U.S. energy system function better, the bill also has $11 billion in grants for states, tribes and utilities to enhance the resilience of the electric grid from extreme weather and cyber attacks.
And it creates a $6 billion nuclear power credit program at the department to save existing reactors, some of which have been struggling to compete with plants that burn plentiful natural gas and with falling costs for renewable power.
The nuclear power credit program will be one of the fastest programs to develop, with a deadline of 180 days to start running. Reactor owners will have to submit applications showing that their plants are under economic duress before receiving any subsidies.
An official said nuclear power was essential for meeting Biden’s climate goals, including decarbonizing the electric grid by 2035.
Former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon is warning that he thinks “things are spinning out of control” for Joe Biden.
During an interview with Joe Hoft, Bannon warned that he has no idea if Biden is even in charge or who is calling the shots behind the scenes at the White House.
“If you look at really the policies of what President Trump stands for, two-thirds of the nation I think agrees with us and it’s time we start acting like we control the country. We do control this country,” Bannon began.
“People are responding and we’re winning and we’re going to win,” Bannon added.
When discussing Joe Biden, he argued: “He’s just so inappropriate on so many things…Not only is it radical, not only is it reckless, but it’s also gross incompetence.”
Bannon went on to slam Biden on rising inflation and the threat of China.
“It’s the cruelest tax on the elderly and the cruelest tax on the working class. I’m not sure anyone is running this country, I think it’s spinning out of control,” Bannon said.
“Their [Democrats and RINOs] radical plans, they tried to destroy this country. This thing with China is a disgrace,” he said.
“I think that’s a clearer and present danger. These advances in robotics, the advances in artificial intelligence, the advanced chip design, and the merger of those along with biotechnology and CRISPR, that is a real challenge to us. It’s technology that’s out of control and quite frankly gonna spin out of control, out of our grasp within, I think the next five or ten years,” he added.
Last month, Bannon warned
Bannon is warning Americans that they can use “psychological warfare” to their advantage to cut through the information noise from the elites.
During an episode on his War Room podcast, Bannon warned about what’s coming and how Americans need to be prepared.
“The first tenet of psychological warfare is to break you to become compliant to make sure all your actions and the human agency will be futile.”
He went on to warn about what’s to come.
Bannon continued with his warning of psychological warfare, saying, ” With information, you can be armed to take action in a world gone awry and that you will never succumb to psychological warfare which is to break your resistance which is to make you complicit.”
Last week, Bannon warned that The Economist has issued a new issue of their newsletter with the headline: “The Shortage Economy.”
Bannon called it a “tip sheet” for the elites and warns that America should take it seriously. He suggests that if even mainstream sources like the Economist are predicting doom, then it’s time for the American people to prepare and get ready.
“The revered Economist, what is their headline? The Shortage Economy. America needs to prepare… Get ready for the bleakest, darkest Christmas in living memory… This is far beyond stagflation,” Bannon said.
“We’re entering into another faze. It’s all the converging forces. Remember, elections have consequences, illegal elections have catastrophic consequences,” he added.
”This is why we’re in dangerous territory right now. Biden’s fiscal and monetary stimulus is the most reckless thing in American history. And you know who’s going to pay for that, the workers… I’m gonna tell you, This Christmas, it’s going to hit and it’s going to hit like nobody’s business. And nobody else in all media is going to tell you this,” he added.
Bannon is also the subject of the Democrats’ political witch hunt.
Unable or unwilling, so far, to go for Trump himself and issue him a subpoena they have trained their focus on Bannon, the host of the hugely popular “War Room” podcast.
It could be because Bannon hosts the popular show and they fear him as much as they fear Trump, or it could be that they believe they have a real case.
If you haven’t downloaded the War Room podcast, you’re missing out on critical information you can’t get anywhere else (and it’s FREE)!
Let’s get the groundbreaking podcast to 100 million downloads to show mainstream media and the left how strong this movement is!
The defense team for Kyle Rittenhouse has rested its case and his mom is furious with President Joe Biden for the way, she said, he has portrayed her son.
Last year, during the presidential election campaign, Biden attacked Donald Trump for not disavowing “white supremacists” as he tweeted a video featuring a photo of the teenage Rittenhouse.
“There’s no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night,” he said.
There’s no other way to put it: the President of the United States refused to disavow white supremacists on the debate stage last night. pic.twitter.com/Q3VZTW1vUV
“When I saw that I was shocked, I was angry. President Biden don’t [sic] know my son whatsoever, and he’s not a White supremacist. He’s not a racist. And [Biden] did that for the votes. And I was so angry for a while at him and what he did to my son, he defamed him,” Wendy Rittenhouse said in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday, Fox News reported.
Rittenhouse was charged with two counts of homicide for shooting Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, with an AR-15. The third person Rittenhouse shot, Gaige Grosskreutz, survived and testified Monday.
Rittenhouse was also charged with possessing a weapon by a person under 18, and multiple counts of reckless endangerment.
At trial, the prosecution tried to convey that the defendant went to the riots and had a gun with him because he intended to use it. The defendant pleaded not guilty to all charges and testified that he fired his weapon, all eight times, in self-defense.
“I see this man trying to kick my son in the face …. When I look at the video with that guy pointing a gun to my son’s head, I thought: he was going to die,” she said of the video of the shooting.
She said that her son “has a lot of healing to do” and experiences “nightmares.”
But she did have nice things to say about the judge in the case.
“The judge is very fair. The people that I talked to that lived in Kenosha all their lives. They told me that Judge Schroeder is a very fair judge and he doesn’t allow no nonsense [sic] in his courtroom,” she said.
The judge has been hammering the prosecution this week.
Sparks flew during the eighth day of Kyle Rittenhouse’s trial in Kenosha, Wis., after Judge Bruce Schroeder yelled at one of the prosecutors.
According to reports, the heated exchange between Schroeder and Assistant District Attorney Thomas Binger came following his cross-examination of the teen who had earlier broken down on the stand, leading Schroeder to call for recess.
“The first rift between Binger and Kenosha County Circuit Judge Bruce Schroeder broke out after the district attorney pressed Rittenhouse if he was telling his account of August 25, 2020—when he fatally shot two men and wounded a third—for the first time,” Newsweek reported.
After he instructed the jury to go to the library, the judge ripped Binger, saying that he had committed a “grave constitutional violation” after discussing Rittenhouse’s right to remain silent.
“You’re right on the borderline. You may be over. But it better stop,” the judge warned.
The judge ordered the jury to leave his chambers for a second time during cross-examination after the prosecutor asked the teen about an Aug. 10 incident that had been excluded under a pre-trial order.
“Why would you think that made it okay for you to bring this matter before the jury?” Schroeder hollered at Binger.
“I was astonished when you began his examination by commenting on the defendant’s post-arrest silence. That’s basic law. It’s been basic law in this country for 40 years, 50 years. I have no idea why you would do something like that,” he added. “I don’t know what you’re up to.”
Binger replied that he was attempting to impeach Rittenhouse during his line of questioning, but that didn’t go over at all with Schroeder.
“Don’t get brazen with me!” Schroeder yelled at Binger. “You know very well that an attorney can’t go into these types of areas when the judge has already ruled, without asking outside the presence of the jury to do so. So don’t give me that!”
The judge went on to say that he did not want to have another issue with the prosecutor.
Twitter, Facebook deemed defendant guilty immediately after Wisconsin shooting
And if Kyle was black and the rioters were KKK…? [US Patriot]
Social media platforms rendered a verdict on Kyle Rittenhouse long before he went to trial, suppressing claims that he was innocent and blocking users from searching for details of the case.
Immediately after the anti-police riots that thrust Rittenhouse into the national spotlight, social media companies began to block users who expressed support for the Illinois teen. Twitter suspended the accounts of users who called Rittenhouse innocent, including the defendant’s own lawyer. Facebook said it “designated this shooting as a mass murder and … removed the shooter’s accounts from Facebook and Instagram.” The platform also blocked searches for “Kyle Rittenhouse.”
Social media platforms often intervene to suppress posts expressing a particular stance on controversial issues. Both platforms censored news stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the month before the 2020 election. Facebook blocked a Gold Star mother’s criticism of President Joe Biden and suppressed a song that criticized the president. Twitter and Facebook also suspended users who oppose vaccine mandates.
The fundraising platform GoFundMe also removed a page set up to support Rittenhouse, which the company said violated its ban on fundraisers involving “the legal defense of alleged crimes associated with hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorism, or intolerance.” GoFundMe supported fundraising for the family of one of Rittenhouse’s assailants, Anthony Huber. The site regularly hosts fundraisers for individuals associated with Black Lives Matter.
When smaller platforms began raising funds for Rittenhouse, hackers breached the donation lists. News outlets doxxed paramedics and police officers who gave small donations to Rittenhouse’s defense.
Twitter is still banning or suspending users for supporting Rittenhouse, even as the trial proceeds. Facebook searches for Rittenhouse’s name turn up no results. Neither platform responded to requests for comment.
Rittenhouse faces six charges, including two counts of homicide, after shooting three men who attacked him during last August’s anti-police riots in Kenosha, Wis. His murder trial began on Nov. 1. His defense hopes that videos that show rioters assaulting Rittenhouse will bolster his self-defense claim.
A Swiss billionaire is bankrolling a leading dark money group lobbying for the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan and green energy jobs initiatives, according to corporation and lobbying records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Climate Power, one of the main groups pushing for the White House’s climate agenda, has billed itself as a traditional advocacy organization, with an advisory board featuring John Podesta, Stacey Abrams, and former senator Harry Reid. But the group doesn’t actually exist independently—it is owned and operates as a front group under the Fund for a Better Future, a Democratic dark money organization that has received the majority of its funding from Swiss health care mogul Hansjorg Wyss’s foundation since 2016, according to corporation records.
Wyss has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the Fund for a Better Future and other progressive dark money groups and has been the subject of controversy since his opaque web of donations was detailed by the New York Times last spring. The connection between the Wyss-funded Fund for a Better Future and Climate Power has not been reported until now.
The link raises questions about foreign influence on the climate debate and the prominence of dark money groups in the Biden administration’s public advocacy campaign for the Build Back Better legislation. While foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing to federal campaigns, lawmakers and watchdogs have raised concerns about foreign donations to nonprofit political advocacy organizations—so-called dark money groups—which could be used as a legal loophole to influence elections.
Americans for Public Trust, a conservative watchdog group, filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission in May, calling for an investigation into whether some of Wyss’s donations amount to “campaign contributions from a foreign national, running afoul of federal law.”
The group told the Free Beacon that Wyss’s contributions to groups leading the climate legislation lobbying add to concerns about his political funding.
“Hansjörg Wyss has been indirectly funding American politics for years, so the news that his foreign money is tied up in this latest dark money campaign to pass President Biden’s legislative agenda comes as no surprise,” Americans for Public Trust executive director Caitlin Sutherland told the Free Beacon. “Americans for Public Trust has previously filed an FEC complaint against Mr. Wyss calling for an investigation into his political spending, and we look forward to the commission taking action.”
Wyss, a Swiss citizen born in Bern who has declined to clarify his citizenship status in the United States, has become one of the most prolific donors to progressive advocacy groups in recent years. His foundations, the Berger Action Fund and the Wyss Foundation, have poured over $200 million into organizations supporting Democratic policies since 2016, the New York Timesreported in May.
Since last summer, Climate Power has emerged as one of the most active lobbying arms of the Democratic Party’s climate agenda. The group rolled out a $10 million ad blitz in June, aimed at pushing lawmakers to support the Biden administration’s American Jobs Plan and Build Back Better legislation.
Climate Power also hired a lobbying firm, Pioneer Public Affairs, last February to press lawmakers in the House and Senate on “climate provisions of the American Rescue Plan (H.R.1319) and the American Jobs Plan,” according to lobbying disclosure records.
Climate Power is not an independent entity, according to records reviewed by the Free Beacon. The group operates under the ownership of the Fund for a Better Future, according to business records filed in Sacramento, where the fund is based.
The Fund for a Better Future received $44,468,000 from Wyss’s foundations between 2017 and 2020, according to the latest available financial disclosure records. Wyss’s contributions to the Fund for a Better Future make up “the majority of its funding” during this time, the Times reported in May.
Between 2017 and 2018, Wyss’s financial support accounted for 80 percent of the Fund for a Better Future’s total receipts, according to financial disclosure records.
According to Climate Power’s website, the group was founded “by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, League of Conservation Voters, and Sierra Club” and “integrates hard-hitting research, polling, state and national earned media, digital and paid media to influence the national conversation, embolden leaders to take immediate, bold climate action, and expose climate deniers and their oil and gas lobby allies.”
Climate Power launched another front group in August called the “Great American Build” to promote the Biden administration’s Build Back Better agenda. The Great American Build’s website describes it as a “public awareness campaign launched by Climate Power, League of Conservation Voters and their allies to build the momentum necessary to create millions of good clean energy jobs and give our economy the boost it needs.”
Climate Power did not respond to a request for comment. The Wyss Foundation did not respond to a request for comment.
President Joe Biden’s appeasement is getting its usual payback.
An Iranian-backed militant group the Biden administration removed from a designated list of foreign terrorist organizations right after assuming power has stormed the shuttered U.S. Embassy in Yemen, making hostages of Yemenis who worked at the facility, The Washington Free Beacon reported Thursday.
And making fools, once again, of the Biden administration and its foreign policy.
BREAKING: Iran-Backed Militants Storm US Embassy in Yemen, Seize Hostages and Equipment — State Dept tells me it is ‘concerned about the breach of the compound,’ demands release of hostages & equipment https://t.co/vA8sQc35mt
According to the Free Beacon, the Houthi rebels, who’ve been fighting a proxy war on Iran’s behalf against the government on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, took over the compound in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa on Wednesday, leaving it to Biden’s beleaguered State Department to try to negotiate for the release of the employees.
“The United States has been unceasing in its diplomatic efforts to secure their release,” a State Department spokesman said, according to the Free Beacon. “The majority of the detained have been released, but the Houthis continue to detain additional Yemeni employees of the embassy.”
To be clear, the embassy has been closed since 2015, when the Obama administration and the State Department under then-Secretary of State John Kerry decided the situation amid the violence was untenable, as Fox News reported at the time. No Americans are among the Yemeni hostages.
Still, Yemen has remained a simmering cauldron on the world stage, breaking into the news periodically with reports of yet more Houthi savagery, the involvement of the Iranian government in that savagery, or the Democratic congressional effort to end U.S. support for the government fighting to defeat that savagery. (For nearly half a century, or roughly the entirety of Joe Biden’s political career, his party has been on exactly the wrong side when it came to fighting Islamic fascism. That’s probably not a coincidence.)
But there’s no way to safely ignore the role of Iran in the unrest.
Is the possibility of war greater with Joe Biden in the White House than it was with Donald Trump as president?
The world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism, where “Death to America” is practically the national motto, just proved once again that it has zero respect for a Biden administration that has projected nothing but weakness on the international stage since coming to power.
To Americans of a certain age, this all might sound familiar: Abroad, chaos with Iran playing a starring role, the storming of a U.S. embassy; at home, a weak Democrat in the White House and raging inflation, among other problems.
Welcome to the 1970s — an abysmal decade that isn’t looking any better with time.
As a National Review article pointed out, the raid on the embassy comes 10 months after the Biden administration, hoping to curry favor with the Iranian mullahs, overturned a decision made in the final days of the Trump administration to designate the Houthis as a terrorist organization.
At the time, according to ABC News, Biden Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the decision was “a recognition of the dire humanitarian situation in Yemen.”
It was also, according to the Free Beacon, “seen as a goodwill gesture” toward the murderous mullahs of Tehran, in hopes of restarting talks on the Iran nuclear deal.
Well, it’s a good bet that Yemen’s “dire humanitarian situation” is no better now than it was back in February. And it’s an obvious conclusion that the “goodwill gesture” toward Tehran has paid off in the usual way such gestures do when dealing with the Islamist dictatorship: more aggression, more provocation, more terrorism.
In short, it’s an utter failure – one more humiliation for the United States to add to the Biden humiliation in Afghanistan, and one more sign that the Biden White House can’t truly be trusted by anyone except the country’s bitterest enemies — and then, only to do exactly the wrong thing.
In Yemen, even now, Yemeni nationals are in the hands of the Islamist terrorist group that, among other things, has staged missile attacks against Saudi Arabia, a country that, whatever its obvious faults, is a U.S. ally in the region.
And it’s one more example of how far the United States’ image has fallen since President Donald Trump left the White House.
Where Trump walked away from the Obama-era nuclear deal because it amounted to a blank check for the mullahs to obtain a nuclear weapon in the future, Team Biden is abasing itself and the country to try to get Iran back to the table.
Where Trump met Iranian provocation and intransigence with strength (see Soleimani, Qassim: Death of), his successor has established a record of weakness that gives confidence to the country’s enemies and anxiety to its friends.
And most importantly, where the Trump administration fostered peace or the potential for peace between Israel and its Arab foes in the region through a series of deals, Biden brings chaos and the potential for ever more war, with the deaths of innocents that inevitably come with it.
It’s appeasement that’s getting its usual payback.
Unfortunately, the country is likely to see a lot more of it in the next three years.
The Google-owned giant is going to hide “dislikes” to shield the Biden regime from criticism.
YouTube has removed its famous “dislike” button and counter following unprecedented levels of downvotes on President Biden’s White House channel videos. The removal of the feature was mooted in March. This week, it was announced that YouTube will be removing it.
When the Google-owned video streaming giant first announced the testing of new features surrounding the counter, an organization called 81m.org extrapolated data to determine the approval ratings of Biden’s channel. The site further noted that YouTube was manipulating dislikes to shield the early Biden administration from criticism.
When originally investigated by The National Pulse, it was found that within 6-12 hours of posting a video, YouTube began deleting dislikes from Biden’s videos. The firm continued to delete likes at regular intervals from that time onwards.
Twitter users were quick to note that the number of dislikes were removed. YouTube claimed, without evidence, that these dislikes were classified as “spam”.
Analysis by Zoe Phin found that the dislike counts were organic in nature, but the number of dislikes would reduce between the 6-12 hour mark after posting.
Analysis of other popular and mid-sized YouTubers revealed no manipulation in dislike counts.
Even with the dislike manipulation, The National Pulse found that all of Biden’s videos dislike count far outranked the likes. In one video “President Biden Reviews the Readiness of Military Troops in a Pass in Review” had twelve thousand (12,000) dislikes at the time of writing. The same video had only eighteen hundred (1,800) likes.
Almost a year later, the video only has forty-two hundred likes (4,200) and twenty thousand (20,000) dislikes. The inauguration video had only fifty-three thousand (5,300) likes to twenty-three thousand dislikes (23,000). The same video now has seventeen thousand likes (17,000) and one hundred and ten thousand dislikes (110,000).
A statement posted to YouTube’s Official Blog reads: “the dislike count will be private across YouTube, but the dislike button will remain.”
The platform stated the reasons for the removal were focused on “promoting respectful interactions between viewers and creators.” The statement went on to say that YouTube wants to reduce “dislike attacks – where people work to drive up the number of dislikes on a creator’s videos.” YouTube concludes by noting that this is just one of the steps being taken to reduce harassment on the platform.
Creators will still be able to view the dislike count in their YouTube Studio. The change started being rolled out on November 10th.
The Democrat who has battled to keep the Biden administration and far-out liberals from spending their way off an inflationary cliff can count on a Republican to back him in the next election.
Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone, a Republican and a billionaire, said Wednesday on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that he will raise funds for Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
For weeks, Manchin has rejected multiple elements of the spending plan proposed by the Bidenistas in Congress, saying last week, “I for one won’t support a multitrillion-dollar bill without greater clarity about why Congress chooses to ignore the serious effects of inflation,” according to WDJT-TV.
“I don’t see leadership any place in this country. Thank god for Joe Manchin. The guy gots guts and courage … I’m going to have one of the biggest fundraisers I’ve ever had for him. He’s special,” says Ken Langone on @Sen_JoeManchin. pic.twitter.com/HUkZHdI41a
“Thank God for Joe Manchin. The guy’s got guts and courage.”
Although Langone has never supported Manchin before, he will now. Manchin is up for re-election in 2024.
Will the Democrats still end up spending too much money?
“He’s a Democrat, I’m a Republican; I’m going to have one of the biggest fundraisers I’ve ever had for him,” Langone said. “He’s special. He’s precious. He’s a great American.”
But Langone was far more somber as he turned to a subject that vexes him and Manchin – inflation.
“Let me give you a warning — this inflation is a lot worse than people think. It is not transitory. The little people … they’re going to suffer,” Langone said.
Inflation rose 6.2 percent in the 12 months that ended in October, the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced Wednesday.
That’s the biggest monthly increase in 30 years, according to CBS News.
Fuel oil prices are up nearly 60 percent, gas is up about 50 percent, and average food costs are up over 5 percent. Beef is up about 20 percent, and pork is up approximately 14.
US crushed by an inflation crisis, energy crisis, supply chain crisis, employment crisis, border crisis (to name a few). In response, Dems planning to vote for a bill that spends trillions, taxes energy, offshores supply chains, pays people not to work & abolishes migration caps.
Inflation is now at 6.2%, which represents a huge tax increase on the working class. Joe Biden is a much worse version of Jimmy Carter & the idea that the government spending trillions more is going to make inflation lower, which is what they are arguing, is absolute insanity.
Manchin said the report shows that the Biden party line of inflation being just a tiny passing cloud is way off.
By all accounts, the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not “transitory” and is instead getting worse. From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and DC can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day.
“By all accounts, the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not ‘transitory’ and is instead getting worse,” Manchin said on Twitter. “From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and DC can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day.”
Forbes has reported that Langone has donated over $2.4 million to Republican causes since 2019.
Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton ripped President Joe Biden’s remark that labeled Kyle Rittenhouse a “white supremacist” in a Twitter post last year without considering the evidence.
Cotton shared the comments during a “Fox & Friends” interview Thursday morning.
“I want to focus on what Joe Biden said last year, which is calling this young man a white supremacist based on a few seconds of video,” Cotton said.
“As I often say, when there’s a shooting like this, you shouldn’t jump to conclusions based on some video circulating on social media. You should allow all the facts to be collected and make a reasoned judgment,” he added.
Cotton also commented that Biden’s critical response has become the “go-to” move of Democrats.
“When Joe Biden called Kyle Rittenhouse a white supremacist last year, it really was just the go-to move of the Democrats,” Cotton said.
“They do this all the time when they’re losing an argument on the merits,” the senator argued.
Cotton then applied the attitude by Democrats to the left’s response to school board issues where parents are viewed as enemies for protesting policies like closures or critical race theory.
Should Rittenhouse be found not guilty?
“They don’t like parents going to school boards to protest what their kids are learning or school closures, so those parents are called racists,” he said.
“They don’t like that Virginians elected Republicans last week, they condemn Virginia voters as racist,” Cotton added.
The senator argued Democrats even apply the same approach to the Constitution when it fits their agenda.
“They don’t like the United States Constitution or the norms and the customs of the United States Senate, so they call it racist,” Cotton said.
Cotton noted the name-calling is a losing approach and said it’s “not a sign” of a strong party.
“They are constantly losing arguments with the American people, and then they just revert to name-calling towards their opponents. It’s not a sign of a party that is strong or healthy,” he said.
Last night was a clear indication that the American people are disappointed, dissatisfied, and disgusted with the modern Democratic Party. pic.twitter.com/Y5cmVg4Gw7
The other night I had a brief but remarkable dream. I was speaking out against a proud propaganda artist regarding a poster he intended to give out to his fellows. He was peddling the sort of agitprop that one would expect to find in our fallen world and I wasn’t having any of it.
Now normally I would remain silent on such matters in the waking world, but in the dream I was boldly speaking out against the worldly misinformation.
I was ruminating on this dream for the greater portion of the morning, and while being careful not to read too much into it, I started thumbing my woolen knots in order to calm my spirit and try to discern which prayerful meditation may have inspired these feelings of mutebreak within me. Then it hit me, these words from my newly discovered patron that I chanced upon in an icon:
“Brothers: it is later than you think. Hasten, therefore, to do the work of God.” – Fr. Seraphim Rose
What explicit conviction these words bring to the humbled heart! Too careful I have been in the past few years of wavering unbelief to speak out against anything. -Lord have mercy-
Despite an entire lifetime spent in the shade of the shadow of the cross, I could not make declarations outside of echo chambers for fear of being wrong, cancelled or sounding a neophyte. -Lord have mercy-
The wanderings through culture secular and sanctified, all to sound well-read and enlightened, and yet I was fooled by a prelest-like false peace. -Lord have mercy-
No more. And so here we are, how can I begin to describe the wellspring from which words become intelligible and articulated again. This much I can relate: it is not for me to boast.
Those familiar with the epic animated film “The Prince of Egypt” 1998, will remember a particular scene that can make a man cry. From the Burning Bush, the LORD answers a shying Moses thusly:
“…Who has made man’s mouth? Or who makes the mute, the deaf, the seeing, or the blind? Have not I, the Lord? 12 Now therefore, go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you shall say.” Exodus 4:11-12 NKJV
Moses has been thought to have had a stutter or some other sort of speech impediment, more reason to have been reluctant than I. Yet by heeding the voice of God he went on to become one of the most important figures of the faith, remembered and venerated for generations after.
What is the point of saying all of this at all? Why speak up now, after years of suppression in a feigned humility? In my zigzagging back towards the light, I have remembered what is truly essential to be spoken and shared, more so than any political opinion, any scientific declaration, any sign or wisdom or identity or nationality: “We preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness” 1 Cor 1:23 NKJV.
This, the entire reason behind the repetitions ’round my rope (Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Have mercy on me, a sinner), the one thing so worth saying that it has reignited the logos within me.
This supreme truth, from which all other conversations and creations may follow, and by which I would have a solid foundation to begin again using my talents, is the essence of what is at all worth saying, or gabbing.
In this little dark age we have all been living through, let all of us who have been called and gifted with the ability to speak, write or sing, do so.
May we use our God-given talents to build for the Kingdom of God by participating in the re-creation of our fallen world remade in the image of His Son Jesus Christ.
I pray that this short post becomes a sort of rallying cry for all of the “little-c” creators out there and I can assure you that there will be much more to come on this subject. That thrilling adventure of the escape from stagnation and silence and towards a pursuance of beauty & truth, or, a craving of the cup.
In Florida, every county has a supervisor of elections.
These supervisors have their own professional organization, the Florida Supervisors of Elections. Until 2019, their name was the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections, which made their purpose far clearer. But then two years ago they changed it to the current name, “Florida Supervisors of Elections,” which hides their real purpose and makes them look like an official government body. Their website looks almost exactly like an official government website. It includes links for registering to vote. It has a calendar of election dates. It has a whole battery of links to other state election websites. It has a profile photo for the current chief of the organization, whom you might come away thinking is the holder of an official statewide post.
But of course, the Florida Supervisors of Elections organization is not a government body. It’s just a professional group representing all the county supervisors.
That might be all right if it were just a boring organization nobody had to pay attention to. But the Florida supervisors are not that. They’re staking out political territory. Last month, they released a statement, claiming that concern about fraud in the 2020 election is undermining, quote, “the integrity of our democracy.”
This group presents itself as a body for organizing and training 67 different election supervisors. If they’re then putting out statements assuring everyone that our elections are perfect, and we should ignore the obvious problems with mail voting and everything else, what exactly is the group teaching its members?
It gets weirder, though. Last June, all 67 of Florida’s election supervisors attended a conference organized by this group. Who sponsored that conference? What would be the absolute most ridiculous group that could sponsor a gathering of election supervisors? We’ll wait a few seconds for you to think on that.
Okay, ready? That’s right. It’s Dominion Voting Systems. They sponsored the Florida Election Supervisors. And by the way, it wasn’t just the supervisors there. Florida Secretary of State Laurel Lee addressed the conference.
So this conference has dozens of elected officials at it, being addressed by the appointed chief overseer of Florida’s elections. And get this: It wasn’t open to the public. You could buy a ticket to go, but they sold out, and the proceedings weren’t broadcast online.
Now, you start to see an additional purpose for this organization to exist. Florida has one of the broadest sunshine laws in the country. Pretty much all government and legal documents are accessible to the public. Political proceedings have to be public too. But through this “non-profit”, dozens of elected officials and the secretary of state are meeting up to discuss governmental matters, but because it’s not “official” it’s not subject to the sunshine law and the public doesn’t have to have access.
It’s all shady, and Governor Ron DeSantis is letting his own chosen secretary of state participate in this.
Laura Loomer has been tracking this story, and just 6 days ago she published a video showing her interaction with that Dominion Voting Systems employee.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), a moderate who has broken with his party over a slew of issues, took to Twitter on Wednesday to warn that unprecedented inflation is not “transitory” as his party insists, but is only “getting worse.”
Currently, inflation of the U.S. dollar is at its highest level since 1990. According to the Labor Department’s Consumer Price Index (CPI), inflation jumped by 0.9 percent in October alone, more than doubling September’s 0.4 percent increase.
The CPI showed a 30 percent increase in the price of energy in October. The price of gasoline itself increased by a staggering 49.6 percent in October.
These increased prices have been partly driven by an intentional effort by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to decrease their oil production. At the same time, the United States has cut its own oil production significantly since President Joe Biden, who promised to “transition away” from fossil fuels during the 2020 presidential campaign.
The cost of food also increased by 5.3 percent during the month of October, riding on the back of unprecedented supply chain issues.
Since Biden took office, many Democratic leaders, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Democratic caucus chair and co-chairs Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), have insisted that this unprecedented inflation is the result of the nation’s efforts to bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The inflation, these leaders have insisted, is “transitory.” Sen. Joe Manchin, who has raised the alarm on inflation for months, does not agree with this assessment.
On Twitter, Manchin wrote: “By all accounts, the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not ‘transitory’ and is instead getting worse. From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and DC can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day.”
The “inflation tax,” long a talking point for conservative and libertarian elements of the Republican Party, has been embraced by Manchin, who has demanded that his party limit its spending in order to combat continued inflation of the money supply.
In March 2020, soon after the beginning of the global pandemic, Congress authorized $2.2 trillion in spending to respond to the virus, which included direct payments to qualifying American families. President Donald Trump signed that bill into law not long after.
Later the same year, after months of wrangling, Congress passed an additional $900 billion in spending to modify and extend the earlier legislation, which Trump also signed into law.
Around a year after its original CCP virus relief package Congress, now controlled by Democrats, used the reconciliation process to pass a further $1.9 trillion bill called the American Rescue Plan on a party-line vote. The bill was quickly signed into law by Biden.
Recently, Democrats also passed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill with some Republican support, though many in the GOP opposed the bill.
At the same time, Democrats tried to push through a $1.75 trillion budget bill even though the legislation had not been scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO); They failed in this effort after moderates demanded a CBO score as a precondition to vote for the bill, but Democrats still hope to pass the legislation in the near future.
The U.S. government has already added $6.2 trillion in new obligations with these bills, which will shoot to $7.95 trillion if the Democrats’ budget reconciliation bill is passed.
Manchin Has Tied Effects of Inflation to His Support of Budget Bill
In the wake of this unprecedented spending, Manchin has staked out a position against much of his party, emphasizing fiscal responsibility and warning of the effects that Democrats’ unprecedented spending will have on inflation.
“I will not support a bill that is this consequential without thoroughly understanding the impact it will have on our national debt, our economy, and most importantly all of our American people,” said Manchin at a Nov. 1 press conference. “We must allow time for complete transparency and analysis on the impact of changes to our tax code, energy, and climate policies to ensure that our country is well-positioned to remain the superpower of the world.”
At the same conference, Manchin accused his party of hiding the price of the bill.
The “so-called $1.75 trillion” reconciliation bill, said Manchin, is full of “shell games” and “budget gimmicks that make the real cost of the [bill] estimated to be nearly twice that amount.” He continued, “This is a recipe for economic crisis. None of us should ever misrepresent to the American people what the real cost of legislation is.”
“To be clear, I will not support the reconciliation bill without knowing how the bill will impact our debt and our economy and our country,” the West Virginia Democrat vowed.
Manchin also repeated a demand first put forward in a Sept. 2 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal. To win his vote, he said on both occasions, his party must give him “greater clarity about why Congress chooses to ignore the serious effects inflation and debt have on existing government programs.”
While Manchin staking out a position against his party is nothing new, he is now one of the only Democrats who have broken from the party line over inflation.
Manchin has tied his support for the Democrats’ budget bill, in part, to the effects of inflation. His latest split with the party over inflation could bode poorly for Democrats as they attempt to win Manchin’s vote for the budget bill after months of delays.
After the Labor Department report came out, Biden said that fighting inflation would now be a “top priority” for the administration, but getting inflation under control is sure to take some time—time that will be in short supply for congressional Democrats as they frantically try to pass their budget before the 2022 midterm election season.
Jonathan Mantz – Hillary Clinton’s former Finance Director who’s “raised nearly half a billion dollars over his career for Democratic campaigns” – is now a lobbyist for the American Chamber of Commerce in South China, which seeks to craft policies favorable to American companies doing business in China and routinely partners with the Chinese Communist Party to do so.
Jonathan Mantz, a Principal at BGR Group, “leads the firm’s Democratic outreach efforts,” according to his professional bio and serves as a member of the Finance Committee of the Democratic Governors Association.
“Over the past three decades, Jonathan has held senior positions to elect Democrats to the White House, Senate, House of Representatives and governorships. A leading political strategist, he has raised nearly half a billion dollars over his career for Democratic campaigns,” the summary adds, including positions such as the National Finance Director for then-Senator Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Presidential campaign.
Mantz has also served as the Finance Director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) under Nancy Pelosi.
Following his long stint in Democratic politics, Mantz is now lobbying on behalf of the American Chamber of Commerce in South China. Lobbying registration documents reveal Mantz is lobbying the National Security Council (NSC) and providing “strategic counsel on bilateral issues.”
The chamber counts its primary objective as “promot[ing] the development of trade, commerce, and investment between the United States and the People’s Republic of China” and includes over 2,000 corporations as members. “Through engaging in dialogue with our more than 2,300 members, we formulate policy objectives that represent the immediate interests of the Chamber as a whole, and then pursue them at the local, regional and national levels in the United States and the People’s Republic of China,” asserts the group.
To do so, however, the group routinely partners with the Chinese Communist Party on events and conferences.
The upcoming China (Shanxi)–U.S. Symposium on Investments is sponsored by the American Chamber of Commerce in South China in partnership with Chinese Communist Party officials from Shanxi province. The group has also organized events in support of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which the U.S. State Department has warned that Beijing “to expand foreign markets for Chinese companies and as a means of drawing nations, particularly their political and economic elites, into Beijing’s geopolitical orbit.”
“Supported by Guangdong Provincial Party Committee and People’s Government of Guangdong Province, it is built as an important high-end platform for business and trade exchange and cooperation, corresponding to the Belt and Road Initiative,” notes the chamber’s event summary.
The American Chamber of Commerce in South China has also sponsored events connecting its members with Chinese Communist Party and military-linked companies such as BGI Genomics, Huawei spin-off Honor, and DJI Drones.
“The delegation will focus on healthcare, manufacturing, and technology industries and offers exclusive opportunities for our members to meet with government officials from the Commerce Bureau of Shenzhen Municipality, Shenzhen Municipal Health Commission, [and] the Drug Administration of Shenzhen Municipality,” notes a description of a recent chamber delegation to Shanghai.
Import ban could agitate Beijing as U.S. pushes for climate deal
Climate czar John Kerry is lobbying House lawmakers to oppose legislation that would ban the import of all Chinese-made goods that are produced using Uyghur slave labor, a move aimed at buying goodwill with Beijing as the United States seeks a new climate deal, according to congressional sources and foreign policy insiders familiar with the matter.
Kerry and a faction of State Department officials oppose legislation meant to curtail Chinese imports made using slave labor, sources said, due to concerns that the restrictive measures will agitate Beijing. The legislation, known as the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, in July passed the Senate by voice vote but is stalled in the House. It would target China’s construction of solar panels and other equipment the United States needs to migrate the country to green energy sources.
The Biden administration’s internal strife over China points to a tug-of-war between the White House, which supports this type of measure, and the State Department, which is pushing a softer China policy in the hopes of securing a climate deal with Beijing—an effort that Kerry is spearheading in his role as presidential envoy for climate change. Kerry has been under fire in recent weeks for owning stakes in an investment group that funds companies that are linked to forced labor and have been blacklisted for human rights abuses, as the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Reports issued during the past several weeks indicate that Kerry, who operates out of the State Department, is the principal opponent of increased sanctions on China and its use of Uyghur slave labor. During remarks Wednesday at the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow, Kerry told reporters that the United States and China have made progress on reducing carbon emissions, which is fueling speculation that any action on Uyghur slave labor will take a backseat to these ongoing negotiations.
Kerry was reported to have engaged in a “forceful debate with other administration officials on the matter before his most recent China trip,” according to the Associated Press, a claim that jibes with information provided by congressional and foreign policy community sources to the Free Beacon. One veteran foreign policy hand told the Free Beacon that there “is a lot of chatter about” Kerry’s opposition to the legislation swirling “in the China policy circle.”
The State Department did not respond to a request for comment.
Michael Sobolik, a fellow in Indo-Pacific studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, told the Free Beacon he sees evidence of an “ongoing turf war within the Biden administration over China policy—specifically, how will the president square his climate goals with his insistence that human rights is at the center of his foreign policy?”
China is forcing the Biden administration “to choose between those priorities,” Sobolik said. “If the bill remains stuck, it’s a safe bet that Biden’s rhetoric about human rights in China is just that—rhetoric.”
Renewed attention has been cast on the issue in the days since Democrats stripped language from the hotly contested House budget reconciliation bill that would have leveled restrictions on China’s surveillance and internment of Uyghurs, a move that generated outrage in the human rights community.
One senior GOP congressional aide tracking the matter said it is becoming clear that Kerry’s push for a climate deal is eclipsing the Biden administration’s human rights agenda, which has expressly included Uyghur rights issues.
“It’s not surprising that the Biden administration, especially Secretary Kerry, is actively pushing back against any efforts in Congress to stop Uyghur Muslim slave labor in China. Kerry will do whatever he can to get a climate deal with China, even allowing federal science funding for Uyghur Muslim slave labor and those involved in constructing the Uyghur forced labor camps,” said the source, who was not authorized to speak on record. “The Democrats should never again mention the word human rights.”
National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan was also reported to be siding with Kerry on the issue, but the White House National Security Council rejected this claim when contacted by the Free Beacon.
“This is false,” an NSC spokesman told the Free Beacon when asked if Sullivan was part of the faction opposing the slave labor legislation. “We share Congress’s concern about forced Labor in Xinjiang and in fact the Biden administration has taken concrete measures on our own, including but not limited to visa restrictions, financial sanctions, export controls, import restrictions, the release of a business advisory, and rallying the G7 to commit to take action to ensure all global supply chains are free from the use of forced labor, including from Xinjiang.”
Republican lawmakers say that Kerry’s lobbying on the issue is wholly inappropriate given Kerry’s holdings in an investment group that funds companies linked to Uyghur slave labor. Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) and Rep. Chris Smith (R., N.J.) wrote to President Joe Biden earlier this week to express their concerns about the matter.
“There isn’t a good explanation for why President Biden has not fired John Kerry, who appears to be profiting from slave labor,” Rubio told the Free Beacon. “But it does help explain why Kerry and others in the Biden administration continue to undermine my commonsense, bipartisan, and bicameral Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.”
Sen. Ben Sasse (R., Neb.), another chief backer of efforts to penalize China, told the Free Beacon, “John Kerry wants all of us to have a moral backbone as weak as a soufflé. Let’s be clear what he’s asking for: He’s so desperate for a paper-thin Chi-Comm climate pledge he can parade around Paris that he wants us to deny a genocide. It’s pathetic.”
Congressional Democrats are also divided on efforts to penalize the CCP’s use of Uyghur slave labor. Republican foreign policy leaders in the House told the Free Beacon that Democratic leaders refuse to explain why they stripped language from the budget reconciliation bill that would have penalized Beijing’s use of slave labor.
“Democrats still haven’t explained why they’re taking steps to enable and protect the Chinese Communist Party’s use of Uighur slave labor in the reconciliation bill,” Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, told the Free Beacon. “I sure hope it doesn’t have anything to do with John Kerry’s desperate attempts to reach a climate deal with China. Anyone who says they care about the worst human rights violation of our lifetime but supports this bill is a hypocrite.”
Rep. Greg Steube (R., Fla.), a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said Democrats “cruelly decided to remove” measures aimed at ensuring U.S. taxpayer dollars do not fund entities engaged in using Uyghur slave labor. “Democrats decry racial injustice in America but actively support slavery in China,” Steube said.
If you have any doubt that the radical left is alive and well in the Biden administration, this should wipe it out once and for all.
Saule Omarova, the administration’s dubious pick for comptroller of the currency, is a radical by pretty much anyone’s definition. Up for a job that would put her in charge of regulating the country’s largest banks, she published a paper earlier this year with a proposal to “end banking as we know it,” as the New York Post reported.
And, as a video now circulating online shows, she’s on record desiring the destruction of the nation’s fossil fuel industries.
Scared yet?
Documents show Saule Omarova was a committed communist & planned a career as a Prof. of Scientific Communism. She hid her Karl Marx thesis and conveniently omits that she was planning to be a Professor of Marxism.
Whatever you think about climate change, it’s clear that political forces on the left are leveraging the idea in their bid for globalization. The COVID-19 pandemic is real, and the left politicized it in a sweeping power grab. They have no shame.
Speaking in March at a “Social Wealth Seminar” sponsored by the Jain Family Institute, according to The Daily Wire, Omarova made her feelings about the fossil fuel industries clear.
“We want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change,” Omarova said.
Biden nominee Saule Omarova saying the quiet part out loud. On the oil, coal and gas industries:
Born and raised in the former Soviet Union, Omarova graduated from Moscow State University in 1989, as noted in an October column by Forbes magazine editor in chief Steve Forbes.
“Amazingly, she still has nice things to say about the defunct U.S.S.R., where Western-style liberties were non-existent and countless millions died from man-made famines, arbitrary executions and, of course, in the notorious Gulag Archipelago,” Forbes wrote
Forbes also noted that Omarova, “advocates that consumer banking be taken over by the Federal Reserve and wants the government to direct where loans are made.”
Is Biden trying to ruin America?
In fact, her appearance at the Jain Family Institute seminar was to advocate the idea of a “National Investment Authority” — a top-down control of the economy that would basically implement the communist ideal of the state having the ultimate power over what, in a capitalist system, are free-market decisions.
For the record, as the Washington Examiner noted, Omarova denies having communist or Marxist sympathies (she told the Financial Times she’s an easy target for critics because she’s “an immigrant, a woman, minority”). But the names that are used aren’t nearly as important as the ideas.
And when it comes to the kind of government Omarova’s ideas conjure up, you get the picture: It’s leftist. It’s radical. And it’s a horror show.
If you have any doubt Biden is on board with Omarova’s thinking about fossil fuels, the White House has confirmed the administration is now studying the impact of shutting down the Embridge Line 5 pipeline. The pipeline brings 540,000 barrels of oil a day — about 23 million gallons — into the United States through Michigan’s Straits of Mackinac, according to Breitbart.
If you haven’t noticed, gas prices are already sky-high. After his opening-day decision to shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, why on earth would Biden consider shutting down another pipeline under the current conditions? To make fuel prices go even higher?
Is he trying to destroy what the radical left sees as deplorable middle America?
Put the coal, gas, and oil, industries out of business, nationalize the banks, and what comes next? Hand over the rest of our hard-won American freedoms to would-be globalist overlords?
Jack Gist is an award-winning writer who has published essays, poetry and fiction in Catholic World Report, First Things, The Imaginative Conservative, New Oxford Review and others.
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The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a nonpartisan organization with an emphasis on federal finances, has said that Democrats’ budget reconciliation, which Democrats have marketed as a $1.75 trillion bill, will actually cost around $2.4 trillion.
The $1.75 trillion bill was unveiled by the White House after months of negotiations with a handful of moderates who refused to vote for the original, more expansive $3.5 trillion budget proposal.
But according to CRFB, this new $1.75 trillion figure is far too conservative.
CRFB, which describes itself as “a nonpartisan, non-profit organization committed to educating the public on issues with significant fiscal policy impact,” has an impressive history. The group was founded by Reps. Robert Giaimo (D-Conn.) and Henry Bellmon (R-Okla.) after both left Congress in 1981.
The group has researched legislation for decades, and has not shied away from criticizing proposals from both parties.
In 2017, when Republicans used the reconciliation process to pass the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, CRFB warned that the legislation would increase the federal deficit and the national debt. “Tax cuts don’t pay for themselves,” they wrote in a blog post.
Now, CRFB has turned its attention to Democrats’ Build Back Better budget bill. According to new analysis by the group, the bill will actually initiate $2.4 billion in new spending.
By far the most expensive item in the bill will be universal pre-K and childcare programs, coming in at $390 billion. In addition, Democrats’ proposed family leave program, which has been controversial with some moderates, would cost $195 billion.
Climate provisions in the bill will set the nation back by over half a trillion dollars, costing $555 billion in total.
For many Democrats, climate policy has been an essential element of the bill, and supporters of the legislation, like President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) have emphasized when discussing the bill that it is “the largest investment to fight climate change in U.S. history.”
Biden has put forward a lofty goal for the bill to achieve: a 50 percent reduction in U.S. emissions by the year 2030.
To meet this goal, the bill would devote most of its climate funding to incentivizing non-fossil fuel energy.
For example, utility companies will be eligible to receive kickbacks for transferring from fossil fuels to solar and other non-carbon emitting sources. Other plans in the bill would incentivize electric cars and charging stations in an effort to further reduce emissions.
Comparatively little in the bill will go toward health care provisions, which were significantly weakened in the pared down compromise budget.
$150 billion will go to funding home-based care, which Democrats have said will help people who are currently caring for a disabled or elderly relative to reenter the work force.
The bill would also extend Affordable Care Act premium tax credits, which allow some families to deduct the cost of their health insurance premium—but not all health insurance premiums are eligible for these deductions; According to CRFB, these extended tax credits will cost $125 billion.
The bill also appropriates $30 billion in spending on Medicare hearing benefits. Initially, progressives hoped for comprehensive hearing, vision, and dental benefits, but these did not make it into the compromise budget.
Another $30 billion will go to growing the healthcare workforce. Currently, hospitals and other healthcare facilities around the country are experiencing severe shortages of healthcare workers as nurses and doctors quit their jobs in order to avoid Biden’s vaccine mandates. These funds will go to try to regrow that workforce.
Looking at these and other expenditures, CRFB estimates that the bill will actually cost $2.4 trillion, $650 billion more than its top line price.
But CRFB also warns that “the legislation relies heavily on arbitrary expirations to keep reported costs down.”
In short, this means that the bill sets some programs to end in a few years, apparently lowering the price of the legislation. However, Democrats could easily re-authorize the programs later in another reconciliation bill. “Making all provisions permanent,” writes CRFB, “would cost $2 trillion to $2.5 trillion over a decade.”
At the same time, CRFB’s analysis shows that revenue schemes in the bill will not cover the full price of the bill. Rather, they will offset the price by $2.2 trillion, increasing the federal deficit by around $200 billion.
The Congressional Budget Office has yet to release their own analysis of the bill, which several moderates have indicated is necessary to gain their support for the legislation.
If the CBO’s analysis aligns with CRBF’s, some moderates—especially Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) in the Senate—may refuse to vote for the bill, forcing Democrats back to the drawing board after months of delays.
Civil liberties advocates oppose President Joe Biden’s proposed rescission of a Trump-era broadening of a regulatory exemption protecting religious employers against being forced to hire individuals who don’t share the organization’s faith views or practices.
In a proposed rule posted Nov. 9 on the Federal Register for official public comment, the Department of Labor’s (DOL) Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) said it had proposed in 2019 a revision that is now viewed as going too far in broadening the definition of “religious freedom” in hiring by federal contractors and subcontractors.
The 2019 proposal was amended in 2020 and became law in January 2021 just before then-President Donald Trump left office. Now, according to OFCCP under Biden, the previous broadening required that religious freedom “must be construed in favor of the broadest protection of religious exercise ‘permitted by the U.S. Constitution and law.’”
Prior to the Trump revision, federal officials usually recognized the right of religious organizations to hire individuals who shared a particular group’s faith principles and practices.
But when the Supreme Court expanded the definition of “sex” in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include homosexual and transgender individuals, a conflict was created with the Constitution’s guarantees of equal protection and religious freedom in hiring practices.
The Trump rule was intended to make clear that an individual could not be fired because of a religious-based objection to being required to participate in actions or pronouncements favoring homosexual or transgender practices.. In addition, an employer could legally decline to hire an individual whose sexual practices or claimed gender conflicted with a clearly stated religious belief.
Atheist groups are lauding Biden’s action, with American Atheists Vice President for Legal and Policy Alison Gill saying in a statement that her group applauds “the Biden administration for restoring workers’ freedom of religion. The government should never fund businesses that justify discrimination based on religious beliefs. And American taxpayers should never be forced to be complicit in discrimination.”
But public interest law firms specializing in litigation on behalf of the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom of practice and assembly said the Biden administration’s attempt to repeal the Trump-era regulation indicates an anti-religion prejudice.
“Religious liberty means that the government cannot force religious organizations and businesses to abandon their religious identity in order to partner with the government. The pattern of hostility toward religion that we’re seeing from the Biden administration is disturbing,” said Jeremy Dys, special counsel for litigation and communications for the Plano, Texas-based First Liberty Institute.
Mat Staver, founder and chairman of the Orlando, Florida-based Liberty Counsel told The Epoch Times he is not surprised by the Biden proposal. “This has been Biden’s practice all along, including when he was part of the Obamacare campaign. He’s anti-religious freedom and anti-Christian,” he said.
Both First Liberty Institute and Liberty Counsel are representing hundreds of employees of the U.S. military and the federal civilian workforce, as well as corporations, health care organizations and private businesses in seeking to force the Biden administration to recognize religious exemptions to the president’s recent orders requiring workers to receive the vaccination against the CCP Virus.
Biden’s OFCCP proposal creates an unusual situation in which a change in presidential administrations leads in less than one year to a single agency completely reversing itself on an important major policy issue.
The OFCCP’s rescission notice explained that “the 2020 rule’s departures from Title VII principles and case law are likely to increase rather than decrease confusion about the application of the Executive Order 11246 religious exemption.
“Furthermore, to the extent the 2020 rule reflects the previous administration’s policy judgments regarding deviating from Title VII case law and principles, the present administration has evaluated the range of permissible policy options and determined that a return to its traditional approach of applying Title VII case law and principles will promote clarity and consistency in the application of the exemption.”
The same agency just 11 months ago described the Trump policy now being revised by Biden as being to “ensure that OFCCP respects religious employers’ free exercise rights, protects workers from prohibited discrimination, and defends the values of a pluralistic society … This rule is intended to correct any misperception that religious organizations are disfavored in government contracting by setting forth appropriate protections for their autonomy to hire employees who will further their religious missions, thereby providing clarity that may expand the eligible pool of federal contractors and subcontractors.”
An estimated one-quarter of all employers in the United States receive federal contracts or are sub-contractors on such agreements between the government and private businesses.
Comments on the Biden proposal are open until Dec. 9, 2021, and may submitted at http://www.regulations.gov.
Former Trump administration State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus clearly made House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff uncomfortable when she pressed him on Tuesday about his promotion of the debunked Steele dossier.
Last week, special counsel John Durham charged Igor Danchenko with five counts of lying to the FBI.
Danchenko is a Russian national who worked at the liberal Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., and is believed to be a primary source of information contained in the infamous anti-Trump dossier compiled by former British intelligence agent Michael Steele.
That document was paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee and was used to help launch the Russia probe in search of ties between the 2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign and Russia.
Ortagus, who was a guest-hosting ABC’s “The View” on Tuesday, questioned Schiff about his promotion of the Steele dossier and the false narrative underlying it.
“You’ve been really prolific over the past few years being the head of the Intel Committee. You defended, promoted, you even read into the Congressional Record the Steele dossier,” Ortagus said.
“And we know last week the main source of the dossier was indicted by the FBI for lying about most of the key claims in that dossier. Do you have any reflections on your role in promoting this to the American people?” she asked.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=UWSdiJJ8pPU
Schiff first responded in a reasonable fashion, saying any who lied to the FBI should be prosecuted.
Do you think Schiff knowingly misled the American people regarding Trump-Russia collusion?
He then defended his conduct.
“We couldn’t have known, for example, people were lying to Christopher Steele. So it was proper to investigate them,” Schiff said.
The congressman added that one benefit of the investigation was learning that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort had given polling data to Russian intelligence.
Schiff was playing pretty fast and loose with the facts.
According to The Associated Press, Manafort gave polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian and Ukrainian political consultant, who allegedly passed it along to Russian intelligence.
“But Mueller’s team said it couldn’t ‘reliably determine’ Manafort’s purpose in sharing it, nor assess what Kilimnik may have done with it,” the AP reported.
That sort of exaggeration by Schiff was typical throughout the Russia probe.
Ortagus reminded Schiff that Manafort was removed from the campaign in the summer of 2016 when questions arose regarding his past lobbying work for pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs.
Further, it should be noted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team, though filled with Democratic investigators, “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated” with Russia, according to the Justice Department’s Mueller report.
Ortagus then brought the conversation back to Schiff’s role in promoting the whole collusion false narrative and the dossier.
“You may have helped spread Russian disinformation yourself for years by promoting this. I think that’s what Republicans and what people who entrusted you as the Intel Committee chair are so confused about your culpability in all of this,” Ortagus said.
“Well, I completely disagree with your premise,” Schiff responded. “It’s one thing to say allegations should be investigated, and they were. It’s another to say that we should have foreseen in advance that some people were lying to Christopher Steele, which is impossible of course to do.”
The Californian sells himself short. He was constantly out in front of the cameras claiming he was privy to intelligence that he could not share with the public validating the collusion charge.
For example in March 2017, NBC “Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd asked Schiff if there was anything beyond circumstantial evidence suggesting the Trump campaign’s connection to Russia.
“I can tell you that the case is more than that and I can’t go into the particulars, but there is more than circumstantial evidence now,” Schiff said.
Further questioned whether he had seen direct evidence, the representative responded, “I don’t want to get into specifics but I will say that there is evidence that is not circumstantial and is very much worthy of an investigation.”
.@RepAdamSchiff on Trump/Russia connection: “There is more than circumstantial evidence now…and is very much worthy of investigation.” pic.twitter.com/qvw7drsqQX
Despite making claims like that for many months, Schiff never came forward with such evidence, even after Mueller issued his report.
On Tuesday’s showing of “The View,” the Democrat pivoted away from discussing the dossier to raising the issue of the 2019 House Democratic impeachment of Trump and the Capitol incursion to prove investigating him was justified.
You’ll recall it was during the impeachment hearing that Schiff famously made up his own fanciful version of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to build his case that the American leader conducted a shakedown to secure an investigation into Joe and Hunter Biden’s shady dealings in Ukraine.
This performance was even after Zelensky himself said he felt no pressure from Trump’s call and his country launched no investigation into the Bidens.
Schiff told Ortagus, “None of that is undercut. None of that serious misconduct is in any way diminished by the fact that people lied to Christopher Steele.”
“No. I think just your credibility is,” Ortagus shot back.
Schiff then opted for the verbal attack of a schoolboy, saying, “I think the credibility of your question is in doubt.”
Having boasted about so much with so little pushback from the media, it was refreshing to see his feet actually held to the fire for once.
Cortez Rice is the reported nephew of George Floyd, whose May 2020 death while in police custody triggered a summer of rioting, looting and mayhem. And he has a message for the Kyle Rittenhouse trial jury.
In a chilling video that was clearly designed to intimidate, Rice told members of the jury they’re being watched and that he fully expects a guilty verdict. In a menacing tone of voice, he says, “I ain’t even gonna name the people that I know that’s up in the Kenosha [Wisconsin] trial. But it’s cameras in there. It’s definitely cameras up in there. There’s definitely people taking pictures of the juries and everything like that.”
“We know what’s going on, so we need the same results, man. We need the same results,” he said, referencing the guilty verdicts delivered by the jurors in the Derek Chauvin murder trial in April.
George Floyd’s nephew, Cortez Rice, makes a claim that he knows people taking photos of jurors during the Kyle Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His goal is to dox jurors if they do not convict. pic.twitter.com/uwLuV2ftfV
Rice’s relation to Floyd is a bit hazy, as severaloutlets have reported Rice is Floyd’s nephew, while others have said Rice’s relationship with Floyd was as close as a family bond would be, though the two were just friends.
Cortez Rice was not blood related to George Floyd but has continuously referred to himself as Floyd’s nephew, although they were merely friends.
Rice, a self-professed civil rights activist & advocate for the people, admins a private group on Facebook called “United We Walk”.
Kyle Rittenhouse, 18, has pleaded not guilty to seven charges which include “first-degree intentional homicide, first-degree reckless homicide and first-degree attempted intentional homicide,” according to CNN. He shot two individuals fatally and wounded a third during the Kenosha riots last August.
Do you think Cortez Rice should be prosecuted for intimidating a jury?
His lawyers are making the case that Rittenhouse fired the shots in self-defense. His case was bolstered last week by aerial footage taken by the FBI which supports Rittenhouse’s version of events. He received a second boost on Monday when the survivor of the men he shot told the court he had pointed a gun at Rittenhouse before Rittenhouse fired his own gun, according to Reuters.
Judge Bruce Schroeder, who is presiding over the case, told the court Tuesday it had been reported to him that, the same morning, an individual was found video-recording the jury. Schroeder said, “The officers approached the person and required [them] to delete the video.”
If it happens again, he said, the officers have been instructed to take the phone and bring it to the court.
Evidently, Rice feels his “status” as Floyd’s “nephew” gives him some leverage over those who might dox or otherwise harm the jurors should they return an unsatisfactory verdict.
Because the jurors are not sequestered, it’s very possible that at least some will hear Rice’s messages.
One Twitter user informed his followers that, although Rice deleted his message from his Facebook page, an hour-long stream of the original can be viewed on YouTube.
Cortez Rice deleted the stream off his facebook, probably because he was admitting to crime (not that it’s likely it will be prosecuted given his connection to Saint Floyd)
WARNING: The following video contains graphic content and language.
I suppose there are many ways to influence a jury. One could choose the thuggish approach that Rice did.
Or one might try a more brazen approach as California Rep. Maxine Waters, a Democrat, tried the weekend before the verdict was reached in the Derek Chauvin trial. She showed up at a riot and essentially told the crowd a manslaughter verdict was unacceptable. If the jury didn’t find Chauvin guilty of murder, they needed to turn up the heat.
Maxine Waters is marching in Brooklyn Center tonight and told people to take to the streets if Chauvin is acquitted pic.twitter.com/RemfvCCLAn
For his part, President Joe Biden said he hoped the jury would make the “right” decision.
Republicans were outraged by Waters and Biden for their efforts to “weigh-in” on the case. Democrats, of course, were fine with it.
Unfortunately, this behavior is impossible to stop and difficult to prosecute. And it clearly marginalizes our system of justice which promises citizens a fair trial.
Hopefully, the city of Kenosha will provide members of the Rittenhouse jury with security for a period of time should they reach an “unpopular verdict.”
NLRB members David Prouty and Gwynne Wilcox served as counsel for SEIU
Two of the nation’s top labor arbiters will not recuse themselves from a case involving their former employer, a chief Democratic Party ally.
David Prouty and Gwynne Wilcox serve on the five-member National Labor Relations Board, an independent federal agency that dictates labor laws. Board chairman Lauren McFerran announced Friday that the pair will not recuse themselves from a lawsuit filed by the Service Employees International Union, their former employer and the nation’s second-largest union. The SEIU is challenging a Trump-era “joint employment” rule, which holds that franchises are distinct from parent companies.
Prouty directly opposed the Trump rule at the SEIU, and Wilcox worked with groups that fought the changes. Their failure to recuse themselves from the case could lead to a favorable ruling for their former employer. Unions largely oppose the rule, which makes it harder for parent companies to be held liable for violations committed by franchisees. The SEIU and other labor groups are pushing for a broader definition of “joint employers,” which would make it easier for them to sue large corporations when franchisees violate labor laws.
The NLRB has a history of asking for recusals in joint employer cases. The board vacated a 2017 decision on the issue after it ruled that Trump-appointee William Emanuel had a conflict of interest. Emanuel had no connections to the parties in the lawsuit, but the NLRB inspector noted that his former law firm represented a group in a case the 2017 decision overturned.
Sen. Mike Braun (R., Ind.) told the Washington Free Beacon that the NLRB is inconsistent in asking for recusals.
“The swamp is back to their usual hypocrisy, and the National Labor Relations Board’s double standard on what constitutes a conflict of interest is an obvious case of politics winning over ethics,” Braun said.
In a letter to Republican lawmakers, McFerran said an ethics officer ruled Prouty and Wilcox would not violate any rules or regulations by ruling on the case. The NLRB declined to comment.
Glenn Taubman, a staff attorney at the National Right to Work Foundation, said unions want to reclassify major companies as joint employers to boost their organizing efforts. At the moment, unions have to organize each franchise individually. But under an expanded rule, they could unionize an entire company and all its franchises at once.
“This is to grease the path to maximal unionization,” Taubman told the Free Beacon. “It has the smell of a collusive lawsuit.”
Prouty, who replaced Emanuel on the board, served as general counsel for SEIU Local 32BJ from 2017 until his appointment in June. Prouty signed on to the union’s 2019 letter in opposition to the Trump-era joint employer rule at the center of the case he will review.
Wilcox served as associate general counsel of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East. One of her clients as a labor lawyer was “Fight for $15,” an SEIU-affiliated group that has filed its own lawsuits in opposition to Trump-era joint employer laws.
Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), a ranking member on the House Committee on Education and Labor, said McFerran’s letter dodges clear ethical questions on how the NLRB will handle the case.
“Prouty and Wilcox’s prior affiliation with the SEIU excludes them from being impartial arbiters, and we will be following up on the NLRB’s completely inadequate response to our concerns,” Foxx told the Free Beacon.
The SEIU and its PAC spent $13 million in total to elect Democrats in 2020, including $8 million to help elect President Joe Biden. Patrick Semmens, vice president of the National Right to Work Foundation, said the NLRB under Biden has become increasingly partisan in favor of top Democratic Party donors.
“Wilcox and Prouty were appointed to the NLRB by President Biden specifically to help expand the coercive powers of Biden’s big labor political allies,” Semmens told the Free Beacon. “What this episode shows is that Wilcox and Prouty can’t even be bothered with the appearance of impartiality as they push the agenda of their former union colleagues.”
Internal documents show Meredith Whittaker was reprimanded for insubordination
The Biden administration’s choice to advise the Federal Trade Commission on artificial intelligence was pushed out of her position at Google for being too political and insubordinate, according to internal documents reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Meredith Whittaker announced Friday that she is joining the FTC as a “Senior Advisor on AI,” a position that reports directly to chairwoman Lina Khan. The former Google employee made headlines in 2019 for organizing walkouts in opposition to the company’s partnership with the U.S. military. Internal reviews obtained by the Free Beacon show that Whittaker was repeatedly warned to focus on her job responsibilities and left Google in July 2019 after she was asked to take a more limited role following several critical performance reviews in the first quarter of that year.
Under President Joe Biden, the FTC has embraced the far-left positions Whittaker espouses. Khan has argued that Amazon, Google, and others may be monopolies even if they don’t raise prices for consumers. FTC commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter has said that antitrust enforcement “can’t be value-neutral” and that the FTC has a mandate to tackle “structural and systemic racism.” Carl Szabo, vice president of tech industry group NetChoice, told the Free Beacon that Khan, Whittaker, and Slaughter share “an obsession with using antitrust to shape progressive policy.”
Although Whittaker has presented herself as an expert in artificial intelligence ethics, some former colleagues have accused her of inflating her credentials, noting that she has no formal training in the field and has done no peer-reviewed research. One manager described her impact inside Google as “nonexistent in the AI bias space, if not negative” and said that “there is not a lot of value” in the work she touted.
Under Whittaker, Google’s AI Now Institute received funding from liberal donors, including the Ford and Omidyar Foundations. In her performance review, Whittaker highlighted her work on the institute as her major contribution at Google, prompting a manager to comment, “This isn’t her job at Google.” Whittaker made her priorities clear in a 2019 blog post that announced her departure from Google, in which she noted her commitment to “organizing for an accountable tech industry.”
Whittaker has a history of controversial statements. In 2019, she called Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James an “outspoken bigot” after Google named James to its artificial intelligence advisory board. Whittaker in her attacks on James said the idea of viewpoint diversity is a rhetorical tool of the alt-right. She has called the gender gap in the artificial intelligence industry “an emergency” and called on Google to fire an employee who suggested that innate sex differences might contribute to the gap. Whittaker has also attacked white women who voted for former president Donald Trump and called out women in “positions of patriarchal power.”
Whittaker’s appointment will likely open another front in the battle over the FTC’s role. Republicans in Congress who think tech companies are a threat are divided over whether to trust the FTC with more power. Republican senators Josh Hawley (Mo.), Chuck Grassley (Iowa), and Tom Cotton (Ark.) have all cosponsored bills that would give the FTC more power to go after tech companies. Other lawmakers, including Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah), have slammed the Biden FTC for political “abuses.”
Whittaker did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In Saule Omarova’s world, America only really needs one bank—the Federal Reserve. Omarova, President Joe Biden’s nominee to be one of the top banking regulators, has proposed such drastic expansion of government control over finance that it’s leaving some experts scratching their heads over whether the administration is serious about her nomination.
A descendant of Kazakh intellectuals who were persecuted by the Soviet regime, Omarova saw firsthand the effects of a tyrannical state. However, that doesn’t appear to have tempered her vision of expanding the power of the state in America.
It would be best, she outlined in a series of articles and papers, to virtually abolish private banking. Every American would have a bank account set up at the Fed and authorities would be free to inflate the currency by issuing interest on the deposits or even crediting the accounts directly. To counter inflation, the Fed could also slash interest rates or even, if all else fails, take away people’s money as needed, she proposed in a recent paper (pdf).
Saule Omarova during a September 2018 hearing by the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. (Courtesy Senate Committee)
However, she didn’t stop there. The Fed would build a stock portfolio mirroring the broader market and short stocks it perceives as inflated in value or “go long” on those it sees as undervalued. The government also would be given special voting rights as though it were a major shareholder in every publicly traded company, directly influencing the appointment and firing of executives.
According to several experts, the implications of the first proposal alone—the centralization of banking—are so enormous they would effectively enable the government to run the economy with near-unlimited discretion.
Omarova didn’t respond to emailed questions and a request for an interview.
Who Lends to Whom?
“If you have all of the deposits in the government bank, then all of the loans, or at least a very high percentage of the loans, are going to be there as well,” said Alex Pollock, former head of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago and financial research executive at the Treasury who is currently a senior fellow at the classical liberal Mises Institute.
Controlling credit means the Fed—and de facto the federal government—would have a say in most major individual economic decisions, such as what factory or office tower gets built, who gets to build or buy a home, and even who gets to go to college or buy a car.
“If you’re politically correct, well, then you can get a loan; if you’re not, you can’t,” Pollock told The Epoch Times about the implications.
Omarova argued the government wouldn’t necessarily make such detailed decisions, but would lend money to “qualifying lending institutions” (QLI) at “affordably priced” interest rates and those QLIs would then relend it to individual customers and pocket the difference in interest. Their pecuniary interest would thus lead them to lend only to financially sound projects.
Then what would stop a QLI from borrowing from the Fed excessively? Omarova would require them to pledge collateral for the money borrowed. Only “quality” collateral would pass, such as government bonds and various high-rated debt securities. Issuing “quality” loans would thus enable a QLI to borrow more from the Fed to make more loans, etc. As such, QLIs would be strongly incentivized to only make loans and investments that could pass as collateral with the Fed.
Omarova acknowledges how major “the impact of the Fed’s collateral eligibility policies on the economy-wide credit allocation” would be.
Government officials setting such criteria would thus pull many a string of the economy at large.
“She wants government to control the allocation of capital in the economy, which is a recipe for politicizing everything,” said David Burton, financial regulation expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Pollock concurred: “It would become purely political.”
Omarova seemed to affirm the influence of political priorities. The Fed would be “explicitly preferencing certain categories of assets” such as “loans to small and medium-size non-financial enterprises and minority-owned businesses, student loans, credit supporting development in underserved communities” and others, she wrote.
Meanwhile, the central bank would reject some assets such as “private equity bridge loans, highly engineered asset-backed securities,” etc., and even ban QLIs from using Fed money for certain loans, such as “loans fueling secondary-market financial speculation, leveraged buyouts (‘LBOs’), massive stock buybacks” etc., she wrote.
Who would have the power to approve QLIs? The federal comptroller of the currency at the Treasury Department—exactly the role Omarova was nominated for.
While her focus is mainly on suppressing what she sees as maladies of the financial market, the Biden administration has made clear it wants financial regulators to target a much broader set of priorities, including steering capital toward companies it sees as furthering the climate-change agenda and away from those that don’t.
In Omarova’s proposal, the Fed wouldn’t have to bother financing political priorities through private parties. It would create a National Investment Authority (NIA) to funnel money from the Fed into “publicly beneficial infrastructure projects.” The NIA would set up investment funds to finance projects such as “nationwide clean energy networks and high-speed railroads, regional air and water cleaning and preservation programs, systems of ongoing adult education and technical training, networks of mixed public-private ‘startup’ finance funds, and so on,” she wrote.
While she noted that such projects don’t necessarily “generate easily privately ‘capturable’ revenues,” private parties putting money into such funds would still reap “rewards,” she wrote. Where would the rewards come from? The Fed would come up with them through “advanced financial engineering,” she argued.
The Fed wouldn’t need private investors, she wrote. They would be invited only so they have something “productive” to do with their money and also to incorporate “price signals” into the NIA’s investment decisions.
It isn’t clear what such price signals would be worth when the investors would be limited to options predetermined by the NIA, Pollock noted.
In fact, it isn’t clear how the Fed would determine what is or isn’t productive in a system in which credit flows are largely determined by the government. The ordinarily robust private credit to serve as a frame of reference would be largely absent and so the Fed would have to fall back on its own judgment.
“Nobody, especially a government bureaucracy, can know enough to do this,” Pollock commented in an email. “It is a totally naïve and, in fact, silly idea.”
At times, Omarova contrasted “productive” investment with speculative investment, which she called “misallocation of capital.”
But speculation “can be destabilizing or stabilizing,” Pollock said. Suppressing it by government mandate doesn’t necessarily heal the monetary woes. In fact, the current practice of the Fed buying up securities seen as safe, like government bonds and mortgage-backed securities, depresses yields on such instruments and pushes investors toward riskier assets, he said.
Omarova argued that something like the NIA has worked before, giving the example of the New Deal-era Reconstruction Finance Corp. (RFC). She didn’t mention the demise of the agency in 1953 after a litany of corruption and scandals.
“According to a Senate investigation of 1951, securing an RFC loan through the Democratic National Committee had become a common practice,” Clark Nardinelli noted in a paper for the Heritage Foundation in 1983.
It’s not clear how Omarova would control corruption within the system she envisions.
Pollock estimated that such an all-powerful Fed “would go on inflating the money supply by lending to the government itself (monetizing government debt) and to politically favored entities of all sorts.”
‘Faith and Credit’
Omarova portrays her vision as the “democratization” of banking. In her view, the Fed functions as a “franchisor,” issuing franchises in the form of charters to its member banks. The Fed is, in turn, controlled by the federal government, which is run by politicians, who are elected by the public.
“The Fed acts on behalf of the sovereign public as the ultimate creator of a unique collective good: the monetized full faith and credit of the United States,” she summarized.
According to Pollock and several other economists, there are a number of problems with this view.
First off, the “faith and credit of the United States” simply means the ability of the federal government to capture a portion of the productivity of the American people in the form of taxes. If Americans aren’t sufficiently productive or if the government loses its ability to sufficiently tax, the “faith and credit” disappears too.
To portray this asset as a “collective good” is problematic because not everyone is contributing to it equally. People run the gamut from extraordinarily productive to utterly unproductive.
Moreover, in practice, the Fed only partly operates as a government-run franchisor. It is also controlled by the member banks who follow their own interests. After the 2008 crash, the Fed extended over $29 trillion in mostly short-term loans to various financial institutions (many of them foreign), in what critics called a bailout of the big banks. At the same time, the bailout also served a political purpose for the government as it, at least on its face, served to save the jobs and savings of millions of voters.
Omarova cited Fed’s interventions in the market to conclude that such measures are the normal and necessary job of a “modern central bank.” As such, the bank could intervene even more and do so more efficiently if it controls the financial industry outright.
The problem is, many experts argue that the Fed’s interventions simply delay the inevitable market correction the economy will eventually have to undergo. The more it’s delayed, the worse it will be. The Fed simply kicks the can down the frosty road of finance, watching it snowball.
“In my view, the Federal Reserve already intervenes too much. Making it the monopoly deposit taker and dominant lender would certainly create an inefficient federal bureaucracy,” Pollock said. “Just look how well student loans have turned out.”
Omarova’s ideas about redistributing the “monetized full faith and credit of the United States” raise the question of how much faith and credit the country has left.
Current federal debt stands at over $28 trillion and nearly 130 percent of the GDP. With consumer prices up nearly 7 percent up over the past two years, there’s a worry that excessive money printing could trigger runaway inflation.
There seems to be an air of suspense regarding the U.S. monetary system, which de facto undergirds financial markets worldwide. Increased spending on durable goods, jewelry, guns, and ammunition as well as the growing popularity of “prepping” hint at the level public anxiety toward the American economy as a whole.
If that should deter the government from further pushing its intervention in the economy, it may actually do the opposite.
If a financial crisis were to hit, the government could usher in Omarova’s proposals as a supposed solution, positioning itself as the savior, according to Mark Thornton, economist at the Mises Institute.
“It sure seems like they know how much the Fed has really messed up the structure of the economy and financial system and they are getting ready for high price inflation, bank runs and failures, and a stock market crash,” he said.
“They always want to manage the message that they solve problems, rather than cause them, and in this case, it is clear that they have brought about these problems with a decade-plus of ultra-low interest rate policy.”
Tools to counter inflation make up a significant part of Omarova’s proposals, particularly her idea of “draining liquidity” directly from people’s bank accounts.
This method, however, isn’t exactly new, Pollock said. It’s been the hallmark of socialist regimes.
One good example, he noted, is the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia’s “Monetary Reform” in 1953.
After World War II, the economy of the Eastern European country was weak and as the Soviet-backed regime gradually took over, it redirected massive investments toward the military and heavy industry. That exacerbated a shortage of consumer goods—people had nowhere to spend the money they managed to save up during and after the war.
Despite strict cash withdrawal limits and rationing, consumer goods prices went through the roof, especially in the open market, where one needed to go after running out of rations. A bag of rice was about 13 times more expensive in the controlled market and nearly 100 times more in the open market in 1952 than before the war. The regime then decided to curb inflation by draining liquidity.
On May 30, 1953, the regime announced that the old currency would expire the next day and would be exchanged for a new currency. The exchange rate was drastically “progressive.” Small cash amounts of old currency and small deposits were exchanged at a rate of 5 “old” for 1 “new.” Large deposits had a rate of 30-to-1 and larger cash amounts 50-to-1.
In effect, the populace was stripped of its savings. The move pushed back inflation, but decimated people’s trust in the monetary system. It also created massive opportunities for corruption. Communist officials were known to get better exchange rates than commoners. Some knew about the move in advance and could prepare accordingly. Rumors about the incoming “reform” were quashed by the authorities as malicious misinformation. Those who were most trusting and loyal to the regime thus ended up being hurt the most.
Omarova would alleviate people’s worries about the government suddenly taking money from their accounts by keeping physical cash in circulation and also giving “as much advance warning as possible” before any draining commences, she wrote.
In that case, it seems, people could simply withdraw their money the day before the “draining” and deposit it back the day after. Omarova didn’t explain how the Fed would prevent that from happening.
Many such questions appear to be left unanswered, often explicitly left to be figured out in “the implementation phase.”
It’s true that her vision would make the banking sector much simpler. Pollock says it’s “dubious,” however, whether that would lead to greater efficiency.
“Once the government takes control of everything, it generally doesn’t get more efficient.”
How much longer can this go on? As we head into the second year of the President Joe Biden “administration,” with the country in a shambles and heading no place good but full speed ahead, it’s time for all real Americans to take stock of our situation and formulate an emergency plan, with no time to spare.
Back in March, I wrote in these pages: “Biden’s Presidency Seems Ready to End.” In fact, Biden’s sham presidency never really began and whatever there was to it is now long over.
But then Brandon—excuse me! Biden!—isn’t really the president, simply the President in Name Only. Sure, he dutifully signs whatever executive order—increasingly authoritarian and blatantly unconstitutional—is put under his nose, which, at least until the next election, has the force of law until a federal court says otherwise. Even should a court block its implementation, as happened over the weekend with the illegal vaccine mandate being imposed on private industries by the Nixon-era excrescence of OSHA, the White House’s advice is to ignore it.
Biden also makes pro forma appearances on the international stage, including a mysteriously long audience with the former Cardinal Bergoglio (who’s every bit as much a pope as Biden is a president) that instantly gave rise to embarrassing rumors. And from time to time he even makes the short walk from West Wing to the Old Executive Office Building in order to stage something for the cameras in a studio-set version of the Oval Office.
But everybody in Washington knows the puppet presidency has no agency of its own, but is instead controlled from Kalorama by Barack Obama and his minions, including Ron Klain, who now serves as Biden’s chief of staff.
Meanwhile, the country he ostensibly leads is going to hell. We’ve gone from energy independence to passing the gasoline begging bowl, even as the forces behind Biden are busy choking off the domestic energy industry. Perhaps you’ve noticed the effects of this malicious policy at the gas pump.
Our long-neglected infrastructure, which is properly defined as roads, bridges, and buildings, remains a national disgrace, and the recent passage of a pork-laden $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill—with turncoat Republican help—not only won’t help a bit but will be paid for with imaginary money.
Overseas, right in Biden’s vaunted “foreign policy” wheelhouse, the Chinese are testing advanced missiles and expanding their fleet of aircraft carriers while what’s left of our Defense Department celebrates awarding four stars to a man in a skirt and hailing him as a “historic” female admiral.
A Navy sub’s trio of commanders was recently cashiered when the USS Connecticut struck an underseas mountain its crack officer corps somehow didn’t notice, while in San Diego the amphibious assault ship, Bonhomme Richard, was destroyed by an arsonist and a crew too incompetent to put out the blaze.
Oh yes, and the Marines recently got their tails kicked by the British in a desert-warfare exercise at their base at Twenty-Nine Palms in southern California. (The woke Marine Corps, of course, denies it.)
But the void in the White House is really the least of our problems, most of which we have brought upon ourselves. You get what you vote for and the American people, in rejecting Donald Trump, have voted for anarchy. As former New York City mayor Ed Koch said after being defeated for re-election in 1989, “the people have spoken, and they must be punished.”
Punishment is coming from every angle, principally from the criminal organization masquerading as a political party known as the Democrats. We now know that the vindictive but cunning loser Hillary Clinton set in motion the entire “Russian collusion”—in part with the collaboration of the Russophile leftist think tank, the Brookings Institution, and in part through the medium of a British spy channeling deliberate Soviet-style disinformation.
From the jump, it was obvious that the “Steele dossier” was a farrago of standard ex-KGB dirty tricks—in Russia and in Eastern Europe I’d seen this movie a dozen times—and I said so publicly at the time, practically from the day Buzzfeed published the “dossier.”
The American media deliberately weaponized this disinformation—which they knew at the time was false—against the lawfully elected president of the United States and crippled his presidency over it. And then they awarded themselves Pulitzer Prizes for their “reporting” of something that never happened.
Par for the course for the American version of Pravda. If you don’t think the New York Times hasn’t been in love with its Russian socialist confreres—and often actually been in bed with the KGB, its forebears, and its descendants—for the bulk of the 20th century, you need to wake up. Until the power of the Times is broken, the American Republic-as-founded will never have a moment’s peace.
But the weaponization didn’t and doesn’t stop there. “Former” members of the intelligence community now lie brazenly and openly on some of the “news channels,” such as CNN: the spooks are out of the shadows and in your living room.
The FBI is now investigating the alleged theft of Joe Biden’s daughter’s diary—a document that if genuine offers even more repellent insights into this stunningly dysfunctional family. How this is a federal matter is beyond me, unless the FBI has now become the Biden family’s private police force with a mandate to suppress bad news about the family. And if you don’t believe me, ask Hunter Biden.
Americans, quite properly, sense there’s something “off” about Biden and his crew, which is why his approval ratings continue to crater. But as long as the radical Left holds the media high ground, it’s hard for most people not obsessed by politics to grasp just how malignant these people are. For decades, they’ve made no bones about their desire to replace the United States of the founding with something “progressive.”
They’ve overtly collaborated with the Soviets, infiltrated the civil-rights movement, absorbed the legacy media, corrupted the lawmakers, overpowered academe, seized hold of the education of our children and now, in their moment of triumph, are forcing us to live in a fantasy world of their own psycho-sexual device, while their pet shrinks tell us that we’re the crazy bigots, via the media.
President Joe Biden’s administration is sending notices to tens of thousands of illegal immigrants who were released into the U.S. interior without being given a date to appear in court, the government confirmed to The Epoch Times.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) “is mailing charging documents to place noncitizens in removal proceedings who have been paroled or released under prosecutorial discretion by Customs and Border Protection,” an ICE spokesman told The Epoch Times in an email.
The illegal immigrants, numbering about 78,000, will receive packets of documents, including documents directing them to report to the ICE office closest to where they’re living, and that they will be processed for possible deportation.
Agents will log biometric information, take photographs, and inform them of future check-in requirements and court dates.
“Action will be taken against those that do not appear consistent with the law and department priorities. By mailing out these charging documents, ICE is initiating removal proceedings in a timely way,” the spokesperson stated.
Chad Wolf, former head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), said the move showed the Biden administration had been dysfunctional in its handling of immigration enforcement.
“Since this admin could not effectively manage the border, DHS must now expend considerable resources to track down illegal immigrants,” he wrote on Twitter.
The U.S. immigration system, already burdened by a backlog of more than 1.4 million cases, has seen unprecedented illegal border crossings since Biden entered office in January.
The previous fiscal year record of illegal immigrant apprehensions was broken in September, and a new yearly record is all but certain to be set.
Normally, when illegal immigrants are apprehended by Border Patrol and they wish to claim credible fear of returning to their home country, or the first step in the asylum process, an asylum officer will conduct a credible fear screening.
Illegal immigrants who pass the screening are released into the U.S. interior and given one year to formally apply for asylum—which a significant number fail to do.
Under the crushing volume of illegal entries this year, however, the Biden administration has released hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants without official documents, giving them a notice to report to a local ICE office within 60 days.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, wrote on Twitter that it would be interesting to see how many of the notices to appear are returned to the government, not to mention how many illegal immigrants actually show up in court.
Those who don’t comply with the notices face deportation, but can appeal. However, with a bogged down court system, she said, deportation is unlikely to happen quickly, if at all.
Amy Fischer, advocacy director at Amnesty International USA, told CBS, which first reported the mass mailings, that she was concerned immigrants may not receive the notices from Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
“We know that when people are entering, they give CBP an address and it’s typically an address of where they know somebody in the United States. But that doesn’t mean that it is where they will reside,” she said. “We also know that CBP has a long history of writing down inaccurate information.”
ICE has declined to say how many people were given the lower-level notices to report, and a Freedom of Information Act request for the data hasn’t yet been returned.
“Obviously, the better practice would be to have individuals be noticed to appear as opposed to noticed to report,” Chris Magnus, Biden’s nominee to head CBP, told a Senate panel last month.
Magnus, who said he wasn’t sure about the legal basis for issuing notices to report, blamed a dearth of asylum officers and immigration judges, and a “broken” immigration system on the change in policy.
Magnus also refused to say the situation at the border constitutes a crisis, a move that drew scorn from Republican lawmakers.
What’s the worst thing a government can do when there’s high inflation and supply shortages? Multiply spending on energy- and material-intensive areas. This is exactly what the U.S. infrastructure plan is doing and—even worse—what other developed nations have decided to copy.
If you thought there were problems of supply and difficulties in accessing goods and services in the middle of a strong recovery, imagine what will happen once central banks and governments turn up the printing machine to maximum to spend on white elephants.
There’s no such thing as “multi-cause inflation.” What President Joe Biden calls “speculation” is simply more money going to the same number of goods. So-called “supply chain disruptions” is more money going to the same services, and “cost-push inflation” is nothing other than more money created to bloat government spending and “infrastructure” plans going to the same number of goods. As one of my followers explains, “More credit issued for GDP related purposes chasing the same amount of goods and services.”
More money printed to bloat government spending chasing the same goods and services: Monetary inflation.
Who benefits from this massive spending plan? The biggest beneficiaries are Asian economies, according to Bloomberg Economics. Vietnam, Indonesia, and South Korea would get a boost of up to 1 percent of GDP, with India, Japan, and China gaining between 0.4 percent and 0.8 percent of GDP.
However, an additional—and quick—$1 trillion spending boost in energy-intensive and material-consuming industries is likely to also create important challenges in terms of inflation and supply shortages.
The key parts producers in the world are likely to see more orders but much higher energy prices and transport costs.
The reader will likely argue that infrastructure spending is good and needed. However, the problem of demand-side policies is that they create a bottleneck and inflationary pressures in the worst moment possible.
Even if the plan is implemented in eight years, it’s likely to put further pressure on prices of essential goods and services instead of putting more effort on reducing the burdens on improving the technology and supply chains through competition and investment.
The problem of demand-side policies is that they create a bullwhip effect that’s likely to reduce the potential for jobs. Why? Because firms that are already facing rising energy bills are unlikely to be able to hire personnel as they would have in a normal recovery.
The first effect of such an energy-intensive plan is damage to service sector costs and citizens’ expenses. Pushing a massive spending bill financed with printed money just when the United Nations Food Price Index reaches a new all-time high and oil, gas, copper, and aluminum are at five-year highs is a big problem for small and medium enterprises and families. You may have a job, but costs are going to be very steep.
The entire plan reads “more oil, gas, copper, and aluminum demand”: $110 billion in new spending for roads and bridges, $73 billion to upgrade power infrastructure, $66 billion for rail, $65 billion for broadband infrastructure, and $39 billion for transit.
Is this infrastructure needed? Maybe. But it would have been a better idea to present the plan with a stronger emphasis on allowing the private sector to pace it according to the reality of supply and demand, and less as a spend-for-spending’s-sake way to boost nominal GDP without understanding the risk to the services sector, which is 67 percent of the U.S. economy.
The services sector is going to be hurt badly from the rise in inflation as well as the shortages. The U.S. consumer might find that job creation is much smaller than the government expects, because it has always been so with these plans, and that the inflation tax will be much steeper for all.
U.S. citizens may think that the government is paying for this plan, but they’re wrong. Consumers and taxpayers will suffer the rise in cost of living added to the higher taxes.
Human smugglers transported more than 100 illegal immigrants by ferry into Roma, Texas, Monday night in an incident captured in exclusive video showing coordination with National Guard members.
The video, posted by Breitbart Texas on Tuesday, revealed numerous migrants crossing from Miguel Aleman, Tamaulipas, into Roma after being smuggled into the U.S.
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Smugglers Coordinate with National Guard to Ferry Migrants into South Texas https://t.co/haxhw48DIx
“The smugglers openly communicate with the soldiers and Border Patrol agents, coordinating where to beach the raft so children can easily climb the riverbank,” Breitbart Texas reported.
The report comes just days after the Biden administration’s Department of Homeland Security issued a memorandum on Oct. 29 announcing its plans to end the Trump-era “Remain in Mexico” policy, officially called the Migrant Protection Protocols.
“After carefully considering the arguments, evidence, and perspectives presented by those who support re-implementation of MPP, those who support terminating the program, and those who have argued for continuing MPP in a modified form, I have determined that MPP should be terminated,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas wrote.
“In reaching this conclusion, I recognize that MPP likely contributed to reduced migratory flows. But it did so by imposing substantial and unjustifiable human costs on the individuals who were exposed to harm while waiting in Mexico,” Mayorkas added.
The Biden administration also soon re-implemented the Obama-era “catch and release” policy.
Former President Donald Trump released a statement in June blasting the Biden administration’s efforts to end his “Remain in Mexico” policy.
“Remain in Mexico, also known as MPP (Migrant Protection Protocols), was not only a historic foreign policy triumph but one of the most successful border security programs anyone has ever put into effect anywhere,” Trump said.
“Along with our Central America Safe Third agreements, asylum reforms, and expedited removal procedures we drove border numbers to record lows and we ENDED the horrendous practice known as Catch-and-Release,” he said.
“No American President had ever done more to defend the border and safeguard the whole immigration system.”
We can say this about the Chandler Unified School District in Chandler, Arizona: They didn’t need Attorney General Merrick Garland to start spying on parents and coordinating their arrest.
According to the Daily Caller, emails uncovered by a parents group revealed that CUSD’s director of school safety, Tanya Smith, was in contact with Chandler police Sgt. Greg Howarth in April and May as parents were protesting against mask mandates in schools.
The situation was complicated by a long battle in the district over critical race theory. After a series of 2019 reports spotlighted a controversial teacher training program called “Deep Equity” being used across the country, including in Chandler, parents began to revolt. The pandemic no doubt exacerbated existing problems.
So Tanya Smith did what any director of school safety would do: She exchanged emails with police, asking them to provide information on parents groups as the mask mandate battle intensified.
In a May 4 email, Smith notified police of a May 12 board meeting dealing with mask mandates. She said she was scouring social media to see who would attend and asked law enforcement, “If you hear anything specific, can you please let us know.”
“Hours later, Howarth said that he had access to the websites of concerned parent groups and would ‘be monitoring all of them’ and updating the district,” the Daily Caller reported.
“In a separate email, Smith told Howarth that CUSD governing board member Jason Olive was in conversations with a school board member in a separate district who had access to a parent Facebook group. Olive’s inside source claimed that CUSD’s governing board meeting would be the next ‘target’ of parent activists who wanted to end mandatory masking.”
The police department not only complied with Smith’s request but set up an intelligence task force.
On May 27, Howarth emailed police Lt. Jason Sieczkowski about three parents groups — a progressive group police apparently had no issue with and two groups labeled “disruptors.”
One of the “disruptors” was called Patriot Party of Arizona. The group has less than 1,000 followers on Twitter, and it’s unclear how it is related to the Patriot Party movement that The Wall Street Journal reported last month was being suppressed by Facebook.
Do you support mask mandates?
What is clear, however, is that the group was considered a threat by Chandler police in part because of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
“Howarth’s ‘intel’ included links to the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center’s ‘hate watch’ page. The intelligence was focused more on the fringe political group and its leader than on actual parent groups that were protesting the mask mandates,” the Daily Caller reported.
“Other links included in the ‘intel’ report were to articles that dubbed passionate parents … disruptive for speaking out against their school board. The examples of ‘disruptive’ protests included three examples of parents refusing to wear their masks.”
Howarth said CUSD should “cut the mic” on parents speaking at meetings without a mask.
“If someone doesn’t comply and you want them removed from the property let us know,” Howarth said. “If they fail to leave let us know that you want them trespassed and we can do that.”
District parent Jennifer Alvey called the coordination with police and threats of arrest “egregious.”
“At worst, these emails would seem to indicate that [the Chandler Police Department] suggested to CUSD officials that they be anticipating and selectively looking for any opportunity to silence, trespass, [or] remove the anti-mask meeting participants, using CPD as the willing muscle to help CUSD remove we parents for non-legally enforceable issues,” Alvey said.
“[This] is pretty egregious for we community members to contemplate.”
And yet this is where we are.
Let’s not forget that while CUSD was enforcing mask mandates in schools, it was also canceling prom and severely limiting invitations for graduation until it was revealed that the district superintendent’s retirement party would go on as scheduled.
Now we know the school district was likely involved in a campaign of suborned surveillance against its civilian opponents. This is the blueprint for what Attorney General Merrick Garland wanted.
Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley blasted a new report that revealed a provision in the Democrats’ budget reconciliation bill would allow illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes to remain in the U.S., calling the legislation “insane.”
The proposed bill would reportedly give undocumented residents who have committed crimes, including manslaughter and domestic violence, the ability to remain in the country rather than be deported.
“Immigration provisions in the legislation shield all illegal immigrants who have been in the country for at least 10 years from deportation unless they have been convicted of a ‘crime involving moral turpitude’ (CIMT), a vague legal category of crimes that involves ‘intent,’ ‘vicious motive,’ or ‘culpable mental state,’” the report said.
“An analysis of the provision by Senate Republicans determined it would shield illegal immigrants with a variety of criminal backgrounds,” it added.
The news comes just days after reports that the Biden administration is considering legal settlements of up to $450,000 per person who were separated by family members after illegally crossing the border during the Trump administration.
President Joe Biden said the report was “garbage” after the news was initially released.
For the millionth time, Joe Biden appears completely unaware of what his administration is doing – in this case, paying illegal immigrants https://t.co/KtCQR1SLQn
The White House then appeared to change its view following the president’s comment, claiming during a media briefing last week that Biden is “perfectly comfortable” with paying $450,000 to illegal immigrants.
So now the White House line is that Biden “perfectly comfortable” with paying illegal immigrants $450,000 https://t.co/SJCo8kFfk8
Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton released a statement condemning the report.
“It would be unthinkable to pay damages to a burglar who broke into your home for the ‘psychological trauma’ they endured during the crime. And yet the Biden administration wants to reward migrants who illegally entered our country with up to $450,000 each for just that reason,” Cotton said in the statement.
It’s unthinkable to pay a burglar who broke into your home for the ‘psychological trauma’ they endured during the crime. Yet the Biden admin wants to reward migrants who illegally entered our country with up to $450,000 each for just that reason. Insanity. https://t.co/XNTFs9KkLo
“The Biden administration’s promises of citizenship and entitlement programs have already caused the worst border crisis in history — a huge cash reward will make it even worse. This is the height of insanity,” he added.
The concern regarding criminal illegal immigrants has also grown as the border crisis has spiked under Biden’s leadership.
A reported 70,000-plus illegal immigrants were released into the country between Aug. 6 and mid-October on parole, a status allowing temporary legal status and the ability to obtain a work permit.
Sometimes you have to wonder whose team President Joe Biden is playing on.
Nearly every decision he has made since taking office in January has been to weaken the United States.
What’s shaping up to be the latest example is the Biden administration considering shutting down a vital pipeline that transports 540,000 barrels of oil per day into the U.S. from western Canada.
White House deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed the reports are true, saying the Army Corps of Engineers is doing an environmental impact study on the Line 5 pipeline that runs through Michigan.
Biden spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre acknowledges the Biden administration is “studying” shutting down the Line 5 Pipeline.
If Biden shuts down Line 5, Millions of Americans could face higher energy bills this winter. pic.twitter.com/7ZJoDIBd0S
Of course, this brilliant move comes after Biden canceled the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office, which was slated to transport over 800,000 barrels of oil a day from Canada to refineries in Texas.
Oh, and he halted oil exploration on federal lands just as the U.S. had reached energy independence during the Trump years, and he closed down drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska too.
The United States is producing nearly 2 million barrels of oil a day less under Biden than it was at its peak under former President Donald Trump, during whose administration the nation became a net energy exporter for the first time in nearly 70 years.
Predictably, with less supply and rising demand, gas prices have risen by an average of over $1.30 per gallon nationwide.
A year ago we were energy independent, a net exporter, and a gallon of gas was 2 bucks and change. After less than a year of a war on fuel producers here and giveaways to Russia, all those gains are reversed. The surprise is how quickly everything changed. https://t.co/JD3dF4mBjg
Perhaps, one could argue that Biden and his team have calculated if they make it painful enough at the pump, they will speed along the day when the U.S. transitions completely away from fossil fuels to wind and solar and, who knows, unicorn travel.
Well, that sounds nice, but it’s contradicted by the fact that imports of Russian and Saudi Arabian oil are up. So we’re burning oil, just less of our own.
The EIA reported that the U.S. imported 24.6 million barrels in August from Russia on top of over 26 million in May. That’s nearly 5 million more barrels per month than the highest number ever recorded under Trump.
During the previous administration, the amount imported consistently ranged between 11 million and 16 million barrels per month.
Under Biden, the total has been over 20 million barrels every month, with the exception of February.
In August, Bloomberg reported that Russia had become America’s No. 2 foreign oil supplier, edging out Mexico.
Because the Biden admin would rather import more Russian and Saudi oil than Canadian…brilliant. https://t.co/Rzbfr9cR6A
Meanwhile, oil imports from Canada have stayed roughly the same between Biden’s and Trump’s presidencies.
So why are we favoring Russia over Canada?
That wasn’t the only pro-Russia move Biden has made.
In May, the president announced no sanctions would be imposed to block the completion of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, as Trump had threatened to do. The pipeline will transport natural gas from Russia into Western Europe.
To summarize, Biden — citing climate change concerns — shut down the Keystone XL pipeline, killing American jobs, and greenlit Nord Stream 2, which benefits Russia economically and gives Russian President Vladimir Putin a leverage point over NATO allies like Germany.
And now the administration is considering shutting down another U.S.-Canada pipeline, which is almost certain to drive up prices even more.
Again, whose team is Biden on?
For all the hooting and hollering by the Democrats about Trump and “Russia, Russia, Russia,” it sure feels like Biden’s the one Putin has in his back pocket.
It’s the laugh heard ’round America — and the world.
Last week, Jennifer Granholm, President Joe Biden’s energy secretary, was appearing on Bloomberg TV when she was asked this question: “What is the Granholm plan to increase oil production in America?”
Granholm immediately began laughing. “That is hilarious,” she responded. “Would that I had the magic wand on this.”
“As you know, of course, oil is a global market. It is controlled by a cartel. That cartel is called OPEC, and they made a decision yesterday that they were not going to increase beyond what they were already planning.”
Laughing at Americans paying more for gas?
Biden and the Democrats are out-of-touch with how their failed policies hurt working families.pic.twitter.com/9lbi2Nzx5I
There are several problems to this answer, but the biggest one is the prelude to it: the laugh.
For Granholm, what she was dismissing is Americans who are paying a lot more at the pump — and stand to see further price increases. According to CNN, Bank of America projected last week that by June 2022, the price of crude oil would rise by 45 percent.
Do you think there will be a food shortage?
It’s not just the pump or the prices on store shelves, however. Lest we forget, carbon energy affects a number of other areas, too — including agriculture, where experts are predicting an energy shortfall will mean a deadly food shortage in the near future.
“I want to say this loud and clear right now, that we risk a very low crop in the next harvest,” said Svein Tore Holsether, the CEO and president of Norwegian-based fertilizer giant Yara International, according to a Fortune article published Thursday.
“I’m afraid we’re going to have a food crisis.”
Fertilizer prices, he said, had roughly tripled during the summer and fall, in part due to natural gas prices in Europe increasing at about the same rate.
Yara produces ammonia, which is one of the ingredients of artificial fertilizer. To this, they either utilize hydropower or natural gas.
“To produce a ton of ammonia last summer was $110,” Holsether said. “And now it’s $1,000. So it’s just incredible.”
While Yara has donated $25 million of fertilizer to vulnerable farmers, he said, they can’t just give the product away — and since September, it’s been reducing its production of ammonia by 40 percent.
While food prices have also gone up, meaning some farmers can afford to pay for more expensive fertilizer, smaller farmers could end up taking a hit. What’s more, Holsether predicted a food crisis could unfold similar to the computer chip crisis we’re currently experiencing — a delayed reaction to the effects of the COVID-19 shutdowns.
“That’s all linked to factories being shut down in March, April and May of last year, and we’re reaping the consequences of that now,” he said.
“But if we get the equivalent to the food system … not having food is not annoying, that’s a matter of life or death.”
Beyond food shortages is food families can no longer afford. That’s what made Granholm’s answer so infuriating; the administration she works for views carbon energy production and security as a minimal priority. (See how they canceled the permits on the Keystone XL pipeline and paused federal oil leases, for instance.)
This isn’t just about the price at the pump — and it doesn’t just affect Americans, particularly given agricultural exports.
Laugh now, Secretary Granholm. When families in America and abroad are starving or can’t afford basic foodstuffs, thanks in part to your administration’s reliance on OPEC for carbon-based energy, you can imagine how that cackle will look in 2022 political advertisements.
On Oct. 26, TikTok executive Michael Beckerman was asked by members of U.S. Congress if the app shares data with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Although Beckerman said no, there is reason to think otherwise.
With all this talk of Instagram, it’s easy to forget that other problematic apps exist. In fact, according to a comprehensive survey carried out by analysts at Piper Sandler, Instagram isn’t even that popular among U.S. teens.
Aptly titled “Taking Stock With Teens,” the 91-page report outlines the responses of 10,000 American teenagers. Just 22 percent of respondents listed Instagram as their app of choice; interestingly, 30 percent named TikTok as their favorite app.
The popularity of TikTok is particularly revealing—and, more importantly, particularly worrying. Launched in its current form three years ago, the social media app now has 1 billion active monthly users worldwide; rather incredibly, it has been downloaded in the United States more than 200 million times. Why should we be worried? After all, it’s just a harmless app, right?
Wrong.
As tensions between the United States and Chinacontinue to rise, the CCP has upped its cyberespionage game. Contrary to popular belief, TikTok is not a wholly unserious app designed to spread joy around the world. Created by ByteDance, a company with close ties to the CCP, TikTok should be viewed with a great degree of suspicion. As the Wall Street Journal reported back in June, the CCP now expects tech companies, including ByteDance, to share all its data with Party members.
At the very same time the CCP demanded access to data, TikTok introduced a new biometric policy solely catered to its U.S.-based users. The app now takes two key pieces of biometric data—“faceprints” and “voiceprints”—from every single U.S.-based user. The former involves the collection of digitally recorded representation of a person’s face; the latter involves recording different aspects of a user’s voice, including resonance, reverberation, intonation, rhythm, and pacing.
With at least 100 million users in the United States, that’s a lot of personal information. Also, why would TikTok, a company with headquarters in Beijing, require this sort of information from U.S.-based users? More importantly, why is this policy aimed solely at U.S.-based users? This is a question Congress needed to ask Beckerman. It didn’t.
The logo of Chinese video app TikTok is seen on the side of the company’s new office space at the C3 campus in Culver City, in the westside of Los Angeles, Calif., on Aug. 11, 2020. (Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images)
Could the CCP Be Weaponizing TikTok?
According to former employees, the answer appears to be yes. By providing users with algorithmically tailored videos, TikTok can easily be used to disseminate disinformation.
According to Kara Frederick, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, this makes the app the perfect vehicle for spreading pro-CCP propaganda. Young Americans spend an inordinate amount of time on TikTok. In fact, American app users now spend more time on TikTok than they do on YouTube.
Instead of asking if the CCP would ever use TikTok to influence young, impressionable Americans, a better question to ask is this: why wouldn’t it use the app to influence Americans? After all, it already uses Twitter to spread harmful propaganda.
As the nature of warfare changes, with boots on the ground being replaced by cyberhacks and killware, the threats we face also change.
TikTok is now the fastest growing app in the world; it provides a window into the lives of millions of Americans. The CCP already uses similar apps to spy on its own citizens, according to a recent report by Cure53, a German cybersecurity firm. We must wake up to the realities now facing us: If something can be weaponized, it will be weaponized. The United States and China are currently engaged in a new cold war; with the latter busy spreading disinformation about the former. The U.S. government should be on full alert.
Which brings us back to the potential threat posed by TikTok. Congress is responsible for making laws that influence the daily lives of 330 million Americans; rather alarmingly, it doesn’t appear to understand the threat posed by social media apps. Furthermore, the Biden administration doesn’t seem to care. In June, at the very same time as the aforementioned WSJ story was published, President Joe Biden chose to revoke and replace executive orders banning TikTok.
Now, China, a country known for extensive cyberespionage operations, is free to use the app to further divide a country that has never been more divided. Charles de Gaulle, the former president of France, once called silence “the ultimate weapon of power.” Today, however, social media is the ultimate weapon. The Chinese Communist Party knows this. Sadly, the U.S. government doesn’t. Such ignorance could prove to be very costly.
Focus on ‘genetically engineered,’ not on ‘accidental leak’
Let me just come out and say it: COVID-19 was engineered by China in cooperation with the democrats, deep state, elites of the world, etc. to oust Trump and take over and destroy the USA [US Patriot].
The recently declassified U.S. intelligence community report on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 muddies the water.
There had been months of open-source reporting from scientists around the world speculating that the likely origins of the virus was the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), not the so-called zoonotic disease theory (for example, a naturally-occurring virus jumped from an animal—supposedly a bat in a Wuhan “wet market”—to a human) that has been widely propagated by the state-run Chinese media, the highly politicized World Health Organization, and medical trade journals like The Lancet, and Western media anxious to divert attention from China.
Even a U.S. government agency, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, had concluded in a classified report in May 2020 “that the hypothesis claiming the virus leaked from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is plausible and deserves further investigation.”
But on Oct. 29, an article in The Wall Street Journal quoted from a declassified intelligence report that made this incredible claim: “Researchers at a Wuhan, China, laboratory were probably unaware of the existence of the virus that causes Covid-19 before the pandemic began in late 2019, and if it leaked from the lab, it was likely the result of an accident not connected to deliberate genetic engineering.” Incredible, as in not believable at all!
Here is one item that was conveniently dropped down the memory hole in compiling that “intelligence report” and the Oct. 29 WSJ story that torpedoes the contention that the zoonotic theory is still possible. Back in June on its own pages, The WSJ reported that the CGG-CGG amino acid sequence found in the virus is manmade and can only have been inserted through gain-of-function research, as the CGG-CGG sequence is not found in nature.
How did the U.S. intelligence community sidestep that inconvenient truth in concluding that “U.S. government analysts cannot determine whether the global pandemic emerged when the virus passed to humans from an animal, or from a laboratory accident”? Did the 18 intelligence agencies that reviewed the final report neglect to review that study because the story reporting it was behind a paywall and not readily accessible?
A second item conveniently forgotten was the study completed by British professor Angus Dalgleish and Norwegian scientist Dr. Birger Sorensen in May 2021, which claimed “that Chinese scientists created COVID-19 in a Wuhan lab.” The two scientists also claimed to have first-hand evidence of Chinese “retro-engineering” in hand for over a year, but were ignored by the scientific community and others. Another stake in the heart of the zoonotic theory!
Workers place barriers outside the closed Huanan Seafood wholesale market during a visit by members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team, investigating the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China’s central Hubei Province on Jan. 31, 2021. (Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images)
The final inconvenient truth is from The Oxford Student, which provided this final stake in the heart of the zoonotic theory: “Research by Oxford’s Wildlife Conservation Fellow, Professor David Macdonald, has shown that neither bats nor pangolins were sold at Wuhan’s wet markets between May 2017 and November 2019.”
To summarize:
The Oct. 29 WSJ article quoted a U.S. intel community report that claimed the following: a) that researchers at the WIV were “probably unaware” of the virus before “patient zero” contracted it, and b) the virus was not “connected to deliberate genetic engineering.”
The virus contains a CGG-CGG sequence not found in nature, ergo it was genetically engineered.
Evidence of Chinese virus “retro-engineering” has been suppressed for well over a year.
There were no bats or pangolins sold in the Wuhan wet markets between May 2017 and November 2019.
Conclusion: The zoonotic theory is a farce and complete misdirection.
Secondary conclusion: Open-source research-derived evidence trumps classified obfuscation by the U.S. intelligence community.
No facts have ever been presented by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that “patient zero” was anywhere other than in Wuhan city, Hubei Province. In fact, all clinical evidence gathered to date points directly to Wuhan as ground zero for the outbreak. The only question is whether the outbreak was mendacious and accidental, or mendacious and purposeful, because the CCP lies have persisted regardless of which is correct. Regardless of which is true, the virus was human-engineered through gain-of-function research.
The U.S. intel community cannot conclude which alternative is correct, either, and apparently want us to believe a theory that the lab researchers who handled virus-contaminated material were simply unaware of the potential dangers, and blithely went about their jobs in a biosafety level 4 laboratory without taking appropriate personal precautions. Who truly believes that fantasy?
Focusing on “accidental release” rather than the virus origin itself is a poor attempt to exonerate the CCP. Even though that U.S. intel community report concluded that almost certainly the virus originated in Wuhan, never mind pressing the CCP for accountability for that bio-engineered virus that is still destroying the world economy and the lives of many innocents around the world. If the virus had not been bio-engineered in the first place, whether it was “leaked” purposely or accidentally would be irrelevant because the ensuing damage would not have occurred.
The state-run Chinese media tell us everything we need to know about the true origins of the virus. They know perfectly well that the virus was engineered, with the WIV being its last port of call before it was released into the human population. Denial and blame-shifting, including by Xi Jinping and his wolf warrior diplomats, mask that reality as they seek to avoid the financial pain that is coming when world consensus develops that restitution from the Chinese regime for the damages inflicted by the CCP virus is warranted and lawful.
Police officers wearing masks walk as the CCTV Building (left, back), the headquarters for the Chinese regime’s mouthpiece broadcaster, is seen in Beijing on May 19, 2020. (Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images)
And denial and blame-shifting about the virus origins has continued unabated in Chinese state-run media from early 2020 to the present day. Here are a few recent headlines:
“Objective, scientific, responsible attitude should be adopted for COVID-19 origins tracing: Chinese FM [Foreign Ministry]”—People’s Daily
“China slams ‘declassified assessment on COVID-19 origins’ released by U.S.”—Xinhua
“Stop scapegoating China! Chinese FM rejects US intelligence-led origins-tracing report”—Global Times
Conclusion
When all is said and done, and when all the CCP propaganda and denials are deconstructed, the facts remain—the communist Chinese regime and its media mouthpieces know that the human-engineered SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Biosafety Level 4 laboratory. And the CCP knows that the world will soon be knocking on its door, demanding restitution. Hence its continuing complete denials in the face of all evidence to the contrary, even when a U.S. intelligence community report provides them with a little bit of shade.
A Detroit suburb with a history as a Polish enclave is making history of a different kind.
After elections on Tuesday, Hamtramck, Michigan, is set to become what is likely the first municipality in the country where every elected governing official is of the Muslim faith, according to the Detroit Free Press.
On Tuesday, Hamtramck voters elected three Muslims to its City Council to join the three Muslims already serving. Voters also elected Amer Ghalib, 42, a Muslim, as mayor, the Free Press reported.
The council will now have three members of Yemeni descent, two whose roots are in Bangladesh and one who is of Eastern European heritage who converted to Islam.
Councilman Mohammed Hassan said the council will govern for all.
“Religion is not inside the (City Hall) building,” Hassan said. “It’s outside in the mosque and temple and the church. Not in City Hall.”
Hassan added that “nothing will change in council, we remain the same.”
“We respect all the religions,” Hassan said. “Inside the City Hall, we are responsible for the residents … we do our responsibility by the book.”
Amanda Jaczkowski, who was elected last week, said the city’s government will serve all the people.
Do you see this happening in other jurisdictions in the U.S.?
“We will all take an oath … to protect the Constitution of the United States, and that includes the concept of separation of church and state. I believe strongly in that separation, and although I will bring the Islamic values of honesty and integrity to the table, the policies that I promote and affirm will be what is best for all people of Hamtramck,” she said.
Mayor Karen Majewski, who lost her bid for a fifth term, said she will work with the new leadership of the city.
“I’ve always cautioned people to not think about Islam as a monolith,” Majewski said.
“Remember that people come from different traditions within a shared religion. Individuals are different, too. They come with different experiences, different interpretations of their faith and different priorities. I would always caution people against creating a monolith in their minds about any religion,” she said.
Majewski and Ghalib have differed over LGBTQ issues: She supports flying the LGBTQ flag outside City Hall. He does not
Ghalib has said he is not opposed to any group based on the tenets of his faith.
“People think because of my background and my religious beliefs that I will be anti-LGBT or something, but we are in America,” he said.
“This is how democracy works, right?” Ghalib said. “You have to think about your constituents and what they would say. You don’t want to lose some people’s support.”
Adam Albarmaki, an immigrant from Yemen elected last week, said there will be no favoritism.
“I owe it to the people of Hamtramck, and my loyalty to them will remain intact,” he said. “Make no mistake, I do not represent the interest of a certain group over another. I will work diligently to ensure that the best interest of Hamtramckans is attained.”
You don’t have to be a fan of James O’Keefe’s style of journalism to be worried about how the government is reacting to it.
The FBI and Manhattan federal prosecutors are investigating the case of Ashley Biden’s diary: The president’s daughter says it was stolen in a burglary last year; an obscure right-wing Web site wound up publishing what it said are pages from it about 10 days before the election.
O’Keefe says someone shopped the diary to his Project Veritas, claiming Biden had left it somewhere. His outfit didn’t use it (in part because it couldn’t verify it), and he says he informed law enforcement of the whole thing.
But he has some ties to the outfit that did publish, which seems to be why the feds raided the homes of several current or former Veritas employees — before dawn, in O’Keefe’s own case.
He’s also outraged that the feds urged him not to go public with the subpoenas, but someone dropped a dime to The New York Times, which started calling for comment an hour after the first raids Thursday morning.
Journalists can’t be prosecuted for publishing stolen material unless they were part of the theft. And the theft in question hardly seems to rise to a federal crime.
And shield laws normally mean law enforcement can’t make reporters reveal a thing about their sources, even if they didn’t publish anything.
Journalists regularly publish material that has been leaked or even taken — consider the Times running President Trump’s tax returns. Unless the feds know something about Veritas sanctioning the burglary, the diary does not warrant pre-dawn raids. It has all the marks of a political vendetta.
That’s not at all a good look for a Biden Justice Department already in ill repute for intimidating parents who just ask questions at school-board meetings.
Requirements as common in STEM as in social science
Nearly a fifth of university jobs require diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements that press applicants to express and expound upon their commitment to diversity, according to a new study from the American Enterprise Institute.
The study, from the Educational Freedom Institute’s James D. Paul and the American Enterprise Institute’s Robert Maranto, is the first to empirically estimate the prevalence of diversity statements in higher education, which they say may narrow the research questions that academics feel comfortable addressing.
Using a representative sample of 999 job postings, the study found that 19 percent require a diversity statement; that the statements are significantly more common at elite schools than non-elite ones; and that jobs in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—are just as likely as jobs in the social sciences to require a diversity statement from applicants.
DEI statements have grown more routine in recent years, especially on the West Coast. Between 2018 and 2019, most schools in the University of California system mandated DEI statements for all faculty applicants, with a system-wide task force recommending that the requirements be standardized across UC schools. Such requirements soon made their way east: In 2020, a job posting at the University of Denver asked applicants “how you plan to integrate DEI into your role as a faculty member, including new or existing initiatives you would like to be involved with.”
The last finding surprised Paul, the director of research at the Educational Freedom Institute, who told the Washington Free Beacon it was a testament to the sway of DEI ideology in academia. He and Maranto had hypothesized that the more empirical a field, the less likely it would be to use “soft” criteria when evaluating applicants. But when they actually ran the data, that hypothesis collapsed.
“The most surprising finding of the paper is that these requirements are not just limited to the softer humanities,” Paul said. “I would have expected these statements to be less common in math and engineering, but they’re not.”
This swift march has not gone unopposed. City Journal‘s Heather Mac Donald has blasted DEI requirements as an assault on meritocracy, quipping that Einstein’s groundbreaking research had nothing to do with diversity, equity, or inclusion. Paul agreed, saying it was “concerning” that DEI has begun to “take precedence over merit.” The study notes that at the University of California, Berkeley, more than 76 percent of applicants to a life sciences post were eliminated on the basis of their DEI statements.
Others, like Maranto’s American Enterprise Institute colleague Max Eden, see the requirements as ideological litmus tests, loyalty oaths to a “woke” worldview in which equity matters more than education and free thought.
“Universities are conditioning employment on fealty to an ideology that is inherently hostile to the university’s traditional mission,” Eden said. “If colleges started asking prospective faculty about their patriotism or commitment to American ideals, you can bet there would be a mass outcry about academic freedom.”
Greg Lukianoff, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), echoed Eden’s concern.
“The idea that someone looked at the current crop of professors and said, ‘There’s just not enough political homogeneity’ is remarkable to me,” Lukianoff told the Free Beacon. “I fear that higher education has become a conformity engine.”
That conformity, Paul and Maranto note, “may also result in a narrowing of research questions, with negative consequences for intellectual pursuits.”
The study, which reviewed postings on three popular online job boards, suggests that DEI litmus tests are not aberrational. They are now common at both public and private universities—especially the elite ones, which the study found were 18 percent more likely than non-elite schools to require diversity statements. The authors defined an “elite school” as any college or university in the top 100 of the 2020 U.S. News & World Report rankings.
Paul speculated that the market power of such schools lets them be extra ideological. If elite universities get more job applicants, he reasoned, they may “be able to prioritize this ideology without sacrificing anything in quality. They’re in a position to pick and choose, so why not choose someone who toes the line?”
The study emphasizes that the 19 percent statistic is likely a low-ball estimate. For one thing, Paul and Maranto only used the terms “diverse” or “diversity” to identify jobs that require DEI statements; postings that eschewed that language in favor of “equity” or “antiracism” weren’t counted under their coding scheme.
For another, the study only looked at job postings, not job applications. If some applications required diversity statements that weren’t advertised in public postings, Paul and Maranto’s results could be a significant undercount.
“I strongly suspect that if we went through the steps of applying for positions there’d be more jobs with DEI statements,” Paul said. “Our estimate is conservative.”
Komi German, a research fellow at FIRE, argued that the proliferation of DEI statements could ultimately backfire, constraining not just ideological but racial diversity.
“Hiring committees may actually emphasize the political and ideological components of DEI statements to make them more palatable to politically progressive white scholars,” German said. “After all, being white won’t count against them if they can pledge strongly enough their allegiance to DEI.”
Although six House Democrats from the progressive wing of the party voted against passage of the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi passed the bill late Friday night with the help of 13 Republicans. Hidden inside the 2,300 pages of this complete boondoggle of a bill are numerous dangerous provisions that would have our founders rolling in their graves.
Shortly before the vote, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana warned colleagues about several of the most egregious initiatives contained in this legislation.
Scalise, holding up a copy of the unwieldy bill that lawmakers had only received the night before, reminded his colleagues of Biden’s promise that passage of his agenda would not cost Americans earning under $400,000 one dime.
“He breaks the promise right here,” Scalise said. “In the bill, a tax, according to the American Gas Association, will increase household electricity rates by 30 percent. And by the way, that’s low-income families that pay that tax the hardest.”
Democrats had originally put amnesty for illegal immigrants into their larger Build Back Better bill. Because there is no Republican support in the Senate for this legislation, they hoped to pass it through the process of reconciliation.
However, in September, Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth McDonough ruled that amnesty could not be included in a reconciliation bill because it has nothing to do with either spending or revenue. So they added it to the infrastructure bill instead.
Scalise told colleagues: “Millions of additional people will get amnesty in this bill. And it comes at a time where President Biden is negotiating — initially he said he wasn’t — and then the White House had to go back up and say the Justice Department is negotiating half a million dollar checks to people who came across our border illegally and then they’re going to give amnesty to millions more people. Estimates are seven million more people.”
“Can you imagine the flood that will come over when they hear that you can get a half a million dollars a person if President Biden gets his way?” he adds.
Scalise was referring to reports that the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are in talks to give $450,000 per person to immigrants who were separated from family members at the border during the Trump Administration. Questioned about these payments by Fox News’ Peter Doocy last week, Biden said the story wasn’t true. He was later “corrected” by White House officials who confirmed that negotiations are ongoing.
Do you believe inflation will rise next year from current levels?
Next, he addressed the addition of 87,000 IRS agents. “They call this infrastructure. They call this equity. Whatever they want to call it, it’s an army of IRS agents that are going to comb through your bank account. … Why? Because they’ve got to generate hundreds of billions of dollars to spend on more inflation-inducing spending. …”
“According to this Penn-Wharton account [a budget model], you’re going to have over $4 trillion of spending with $1.5 trillion of new taxes. By the way, that’s $2.5 trillion of additional debt. The President says there’s no cost – no cost, just … $2.5 trillion of debt.”
“These IRS agents are going to have to account for over $200 billion to find money from your checking accounts,” he said. “That’s what they’re trying to do at dark of night.”
“No wonder they don’t want a CBO score [on this bill], no wonder they want to do this by dark of night. This is going to induce more inflation that’s hurting families all across America,” Scalise said.
In this bill Dems are trying to ram through: – Mass amnesty – 87,000 new IRS agents – Insane leftist mandates – Giveaways to union bosses – Natural gas tax that’ll raise energy costs
Scalise listed two additional items in his Twitter post that time would not allow him to cover in his floor speech. The first was giveaways to union bosses.
According to the Labor Department, “Davis-Bacon Act and Related Act contractors and subcontractors must pay their laborers and mechanics employed under the contract no less than the locally prevailing wages and fringe benefits for corresponding work on similar projects in the area.” Locally prevailing wages are set by the Labor Department.
A White House fact sheet states that “the overwhelming majority of the funds in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will be subject to Davis-Bacon requirements. … These requirements will protect wages for millions of workers, grow the economy, and support good-paying, union jobs.” (Emphasis mine.)
Stand for America has warned that tying federally funded infrastructure projects to the Davis-Bacon Act will make these projects substantially more expensive and will put unions at a distinct advantage to win these coveted government construction projects. They explain that “it’s mainly unionized companies that pay prevailing wage salaries, so they’re more likely to be chosen for federally-funded construction projects.”
According to their report, “Under Davis-Bacon, the government jacks up required wages. Studies show that prevailing wages can drive the costs of projects 20% higher than market cost. As of just a few years ago, carpenters’ prevailing wages in Nassau-Suffolk, New York, were 30% above market. Electricians and plumbers’ prevailing wages were 45.5% and 58.7% above market, respectively.”
The organization also discusses the union giveaways included in the Build Back Better bill, which they said are even worse.
The final grievance on Scalise’s list was “insane left mandates.” The bill contains an abundance of insane left mandates, so I’m not exactly sure which ones he had in mind.
I imagine he was referring to the legislation’s aggressive climate-change measures. Yahoo’s senior climate editor — yes, they have a climate editor — calls the spending in this bill alone “the largest climate change investment in U.S. history.”
For example, it includes $150 billion for clean energy advancement. This is a mere drop in the bucket when one considers Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s mind-boggling estimate of $100 to $150 trillion over the next 30 years to reach “net-zero” emissions. She delivered this stunning figure in her remarks to COP26 attendees last week. ZeroHedge had the story.
No need to worry, though. Yellen has assured us that this represents the “greatest economic opportunity” of our lives.
Scalise is right. None of these items are good for America. All are intended to move the country closer to becoming a socialist state.
The passage of the reconciliation bill would bring us to the brink. Let’s hope Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia who has thus far withheld his tie-breaking support, either blocks it, which may be too much to hope for, or at least takes the most dangerous provisions out of the final bill.
This administration represents the greatest national security threat America faces today.
He sat down with The Epoch Times at the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, shortly before delivering his speech at the event, “Mass Immigration vs. Modern Society.”
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Epoch Times: I’ve written a few times about the environmental impact of immigration, and particularly illegal immigration. I’ve focused on carbon emissions in their home countries versus the United States. You’d expect this to not be controversial, but this is something it seems to me you can’t discuss without being immediately accused of xenophobia or bigotry. What do you think that’s about—because I get the sense that’s changed over the past few decades.
Mark Krikorian: Immigrants come specifically to increase their carbon footprint. And I don’t mean [anybody’s] saying, ‘Boy, I’m gonna increase my carbon footprint.’ What they’re doing is they want to come and have a decent house, and maybe be able to own a car and have a more prosperous life, which translates inevitably into increasing their carbon footprint.
If you’re a peasant farmer in Honduras, you’re not having much of an impact on the environment. If you’re living in a modern society, even as a lower-middle-class working stiff, you’re having a hugely greater impact on the environment.
That was not controversial in the past, when the population issue was mainly a matter of domestic fertility—in other words, when most population growth was driven by Americans having kids, then it was okay to be concerned about population growth on the Left, because that was, in a sense, a way of being anti-American.
The Epoch Times: If you look at the response to countries that have adopted pro-natalist policies, I think that’s a very consistent theme.
Say what you will about the Club of Rome and some other groups, but at least there was more consistency there on immigration—but that seems to have fallen by the wayside.
Mr. Krikorian: I think the reason there was that consistency—it’s not so much because the people making those arguments hated America or hated the West, necessarily—although I think probably a lot of them did—it’s that they weren’t forced to confront the contradictions in their own worldview.
In other words, that non-whites are inherently superior to whites—morally, objectively superior—which is kind of a starting point for much of the Left. [As] an inversion of an older, pro-white racism, this is anti-white racism.
That was there even in the older sixties and seventies-era discussions of populations. But the conflict between that worldview and concern about population wasn’t really in their face when they [were] talking about at least American population issues, because we still had relatively robust population growth, most of which was driven by domestic fertility. It’s when immigration became the driver of population growth that you could no longer talk about population growth as a problem.
Personally, I’m not a population or environment alarmist, but if you’re worried about carbon emissions, one of the things you have to be worried about is large-scale immigration. How can you not? And yet, people aren’t.
That’s the companion sentiment to giving China a pass as a country for building coal plants and all the rest of it, is because you can’t really criticize China, because they’re a non-Western country.
Even though the economies of the West have become much less harmful to the environment, you still have to focus on that, because focusing on China as the biggest driver of further problems for the environment is somehow racist, just as talking about the Wuhan virus is racist, even though that’s obviously where that came from.
They’re different versions of the kind of pathological self-hatred of the elites in the West. And one of the ways that shows up is this attenuation—really, disappearance—of concern about immigration driving increased carbon emissions.
The Epoch Times: You can see this same sort of strange reaction even in the context of how the Left responds to Christian immigrants from the Middle East versus Muslim immigrants from the Middle East.
Mr. Krikorian: It’s the same idea—pathological self-hatred. Christians from the Middle East are still seen as somehow more like us, and therefore bad, even though they’re the ones getting the [expletive] end of the stick in the Middle East.
Mass immigration and de facto open borders are a non-negotiable value for the Left now. So, if you’re an environmental group, open borders has to trump environmentalism. If you’re a labor union, open borders has to trump the interests of workers.
The Epoch Times: Are there any other clear-cut environmental hazards or threats to ecosystems that are related to mass immigration?
Mr. Krikorian: The big [issue] is the carbon emissions and, generally speaking, water use and all the rest of it. The other is the on-the-ground, immediate impact that illegal flows in a fragile ecosystem like the Southwest have. It devastates the flora. You’ve got smugglers knocking over saguaro cactuses that took two hundred years to grow. You don’t just plant a new saguaro cactus, you know what I mean?
That kind of devastation could be avoided, the Left would say, by just opening the borders so nobody has to do that, and they could all come through ports of entry. But in the real world, there are going to be limits, and there are going to be people who want to skirt those limits, and they’re going to try to do it in environmentally destructive ways.
The mass illegal flows of people are much more damaging [to the Southwest] than they would be anywhere else.
The Epoch Times: One thing I often think about is, beyond what’s happening just across our borders, when you have massive numbers of people traveling, often on foot, across thousands of miles, you’d expect that to have an impact.
Mr. Krikorian: Especially where there are bottlenecks.
The Darién jungle of eastern Panama—it’s called the Darién gap, because there’s a gap in the road system. You could drive from Anchorage, Alaska, almost to Tierra del Fuego, expect for the Darién gap, where there’s no roads.
The Epoch Times: It’s lawless.
Mr. Krikorian: Completely lawless. And people are pouring through there, laying waste to the environment there. So it’s a similar phenomenon.
The leader of one of the Indian groups, the chief who lives down there, is screaming bloody murder because people are just overrunning their turf. It damages their way of life and ability to earn a living.
The Epoch Times: I’m also wondering about your remarks today: “Mass Immigration vs. Modern Society.” What do you mean by that?
Mr. Krikorian: What I mean by that is that’s sort of my unified field theory for immigration restriction. Everybody comes to immigration from a different angle. Some people are worried about security issues. Other people are worried about workforce or environment or government services or assimilation. My point is they’re all the same thing. They’re all ways that mass immigration is incompatible with the goals and the characteristics of a modern society.
We’re in a post-industrial, knowledge-based economy, and yet we’re importing a 19th century workforce. We’re importing poor people into a welfare state that never existed in the past. We have an elite that doesn’t believe in assimilation, and yet we’re importing a million-plus people a year who have to be assimilated. And we have different environmental and quality of life values than we did in the past, and yet we’re importing people who are undermining those objectives of environmental stewardship.
The immigrants aren’t the problem, because the immigrants really aren’t particularly different from anyone a hundred or two hundred or three hundred years ago. What’s different is us. Modern society is different in kind from anything that’s existed in the past. We are running a 19th century immigration policy in a 21st century country, and it doesn’t work.
Immigration is just a federal government program that we can upsize or downsize or change any time we want. It’s just like farm subsidies or small business loans or something else.
The Epoch Times: And yet we spent the last few years discovering that despite what the federal program may be, individual cities can apparently declare themselves sanctuaries and operate independently.
Mr. Krikorian: There is that. They can’t formally amnesty anybody, but by not cooperating with ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], ironically, what they’re really doing is protecting criminals, because the only people that ICE picks up from non-sanctuary cities are people who were arrested for local crimes.
Editor’s note: in its Fiscal Year 2020 report on enforcement and removal operations, ICE reported that 68 percent of its administrative arrests were of convicted criminals, while 22 percent were of people with pending criminal charges and 10 percent were of other immigration violators.
A Chinese state-run oil and gas company linked to the son of the President of the United States, Hunter Biden, hit record levels of natural gas production amidst the Biden White House’s assault on American energy independence.
Sinopec, also known as China Petroleum & Chemical Corporation, is a Chinese Communist regime-controlled oil and gas enterprise. Its “fully-owned subsidiary” Sinopec Marketing Company enjoyed nearly $1 billion in investment from Hunter Biden’s private equity firm BHR Partners.
Finalized in March 2015, the investments from the controversial investment fund led to BHR Partners amassing a nearly 30 percent stake in Sinopec.
Hunter reportedly still owns a 10 percent stake in BHR Partners, whose LinkedIn profile highlights its Sinopec investment, revealing it was involved “in the pilot state-owned enterprise reform deal involving the segregation and capitalization of Sinopec Group’s non-oil business into Sinopec Marketing Corporation.”
A press release from the energy company – “Sinopec Puts Largest Gas Storage Cluster in North China into Operation” – details its record-breaking, new natural gas storage facility. Its current storage size of 10.03 billion cubic meters is expected to increase by an additional 1.116 billion cubic meters following the completion of additional gas storage facilities.
SINOPEC’S NEW GAS STORAGE FACILITY.
“Sinopec continues to accelerate the construction of gas storage facilities and improve gas storage and peak shaving capabilities in China. The Company is stepping up to complete key projects including the Zhongyuan gas storage cluster and Huangchang gas storage facility in Hubei Province and more after completing the gas storage facilities including Yong 21 in Shandong Province, Wei 11 in Zhongyuan Oilfield region, Guxi in Jilin Province and Qingxi in Sichuan Province, steadily expanding the scale of natural gas storage and effectively improving the storage capacity and gas peak shaving capability to guarantee the supply of natural gas,” the company explains.
The new project follows Sinopec’s Fuling Shale Gas Field hitting a country-wide record for production quantity amidst the Biden White House canceling the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline.
The day of reckoning over the Western world’s self-destructive indulgence of the excesses of the environmental movement must now be almost at hand.
An important part of the Bidenization of America has been the frivolous discarding of America’s status as an energy self-sufficient nation after 75 years of oil imports.
As if completely deaf to the many and urgent warnings of the cost of shutting down the XL pipeline from Canada and groveling to the environmental agitators by rolling back offshore exploration and fracking, President Joe Biden and other administration spokespeople have, apparently unselfconsciously, lowered themselves to beseeching the Russians and Iranians, countries with whom the United States notoriously possesses no reservoir of goodwill, to join with the rest of OPEC in increasing oil production.
This initiative is of a piece with Secretary of State Blinken’s scolding of the Taliban regime the White House and the Pentagon helped usher into office in Afghanistan, for insufficient “diversity” in the selection of the new regime’s cabinet ministers, with John Kerry’s degrading petition of China for greater respect for the conjured dangers of climate change, and with the chairman of the joint chiefs, General Millie, volunteering from the Ruritanian vastness of his hyper-beribbonned tunic that the recent testing of Chinese and Russian hypersonic nuclear-capable missiles was “a Sputnik moment.”
Where were Millie and his colleagues, prior to their masterly performance in Afghanistan, and former Defense Secretary Mattis, when President Trump provided the Defense Department the funds to do everything it needed to assure American military superiority?
All of these reflections indicate the other-worldly preoccupations of this administration. This is the mentality that admits thousands of likely COVID carriers illegally across the southern border into the United States every day while failing to discourage Democratic civic administrations in New York and elsewhere from laying off policemen and firefighters, most of whom have a COVID immunity from having previously contracted that illness and recovered from it, for declining to be double vaccinated.
Apart from being unjust and probably illegal and absurdly inconsistent, this is a policy that inevitably accelerates the skyrocketing rates of urban violent crime in most American cities.
Self-Inflicted Wounds
But it is the saga of self-inflicted economic wounds in appeasement of climate change hysteria that most vividly illustrates the lethal toxicity of Bidenization. The spectacle of the president of the United States going cap-in-hand to the Kremlin and the ayatollahs is more demeaning than the indignities of the helicopters leaving the embassy compound in Saigon in 1975 and the seizure of the embassy hostages in Tehran in 1979.
And as the rites and antics of Bidenism accumulate, the major oil companies of the world have effectively ceased exploration, graciously introducing the eco-fairyland in Washington to the implications of supply and demand. That is, the supply of oil will decline as the demand increases and the price to ungrateful Americans increases.
If Biden imagines that the Kremlin and the ayatollahs or even our esteemed allies in Saudi Arabia (who cut the price of oil in the late Obama years in order to put a rod on the backs of the ayatollahs and in doing so saved Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia from Putin’s efforts to revive the Soviet Union), are going to palliate the violence eco-Bidenism has done to scores of millions of American households by raising gasoline and home fuel prices for the American public, he is more cognitively beset than is generally reckoned. (Ironically, the United States in the last twenty years, including the Trump term, had a brilliant record in reducing carbon emissions.)
Writing on Nov. 1, I expect the elections in Virginia on Nov. 2 will provide a sobering lesson in electoral arithmetic. This will be followed by the draconian comeuppance that the whole country is reserving for the Bidenists next year and especially in 2024. But we will have to endure these upcoming years with Job-like patience as the executive branch leads America into ever greater unnecessary energy expenses and evermore absurd “sustainable” energy boondoggles.
Referendum?
But there is a ray of hope that arises in mother England and in the contemporary plebiscitary spirit. It is not widely realized what an important geopolitical development Britain’s vote to depart the European Union five years ago was. And it is possible that a sequel is in the making.
The European Union was the successor to Cold War associations of European states that essentially strengthened the West in the Cold War by deepening the bonds that held Western Europe together and enabled it to resist the threats and blandishments of the Soviet bloc.
But after the Cold War ended satisfactorily, it became the pursuit of “an ever closer Europe” that would steadily aggregate into one confederal superstate that would enable Europe to reenter the world as a great power and, accordingly, a rival to the United States, rather than the meeting place of America’s principal allies.
For Great Britain, one of the worlds five or six most important countries and one of its very most distinguished nationalities, to secede from such a combination of states and resume the status that enabled it to be the principal ally of the United States in both world wars and in the Cold War, though it was not presented in this way to the British voters, was an act that reinforced America’s geopolitical position.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who led the campaign to depart Europe while maintaining cordial trade and political relations with it, all in the framework of the Western Alliance, is, inexplicably, a climate change enthusiast who in his more animated moments stops only slightly short of Biden’s parroted bunk about the “existential threat” of climate change.
But the British public, like the French “yellow jackets” who rioted and demonstrated for an entire angry year about gasoline and home heating fuel price increases due to additional taxation to combat climate change, have real reservations about Boris’s current hobby-horse.
As this is an issue on which it will be difficult to impose party discipline, as public resentment over the cost of reducing carbon emissions with higher taxes and prices becomes clearer, some are already foreseeing a British referendum on this issue, a “Climate Chexit.”
Historically, Britain is rivaled only by the United States and France as the most politically influential and widely emulated country in the world, and a British referendum on the cost of combating climate change, whatever its result, would generate substantial pressure for a similar consultation of public opinion in the United States.
Congressional and parliamentary democracies tend not to like referendums. The history of both systems favors the election of legislators to work out the precise wording of legislation and even in France the history of referendums prior to the current Fifth Republic was of rubber-stamps of questionable accuracy of the most self-serving initiatives of the emperors Napoleon I and Napoleon III.
The United States has no history of such nation-wide plebiscites but any reasonably worded question about the desirability of proceeding with the Biden administration’s $550 billion carbon suppression program triumphantly unveiled in Glasgow this week will almost certainly produce an unambiguous vote for rejection.
Since the faddists dominate the political class and the national political media, it would be a magnificent act of self-liberation for the United States to consult itself, and puncture the giant hot-air balloon of faddish and generally mindless environmentalism.
President Joe Biden’s administration is withholding information about Afghanistan, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko said during a speech on Friday.
As an example, Sopko said, the Department of Defense (DoD) withheld information on the performance of Afghan security forces, including unit strength, training deficiencies, and casualty data, or, “in essence, nearly all the information you needed to know to determine whether the Afghan security forces were a real fighting force or a house of cards waiting to fall.”
“In light of recent events, it is not surprising that the Afghan government, and likely some in DoD, wanted to keep that information under lock and key,” he added.
Sopko said he was forced to relegate the information into classified appendices of a recent report his office released detailing flaws in the United States’ 20-year war in Afghanistan.
“This information almost certainly would have benefited Congress and the public in assessing whether progress was being made in Afghanistan and, more importantly, whether we should have ended our efforts there earlier,” he said.
“DoD is well aware of the Special Investigator for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s recent report. Its assertions that DoD deliberately withheld information on the Afghan Security Forces lacks context as the department took significant effort to ensure that the availability of data on Afghan forces was treated similarly to how DOD would manage such data on U.S. forces,” Major. Rob Lodewick, a Pentagon spokesman, told The Epoch Times in an email.
The Pentagon maintains that the Afghan government wanted to classify the data and that it recommended against it but “abided by the decision of the original classification authority.” Overall, the department says it has cooperated with SIGAR since the office was created by Congress.
The State Department, meanwhile, wrote to Sopko shortly after U.S.-backed Afghan forces were routed by the Taliban terrorist group as the U.S. moved to fully withdraw from the country.
“Shortly after the fall of Kabul, the State Department wrote to me and other oversight agencies requesting to ‘temporarily suspend access’ to all ‘audit, inspection, and financial audit … reports’ on our website because the Department was afraid that information included in those reports could put Afghan allies at risk,” Sopko said.
While the watchdog believes Afghans at risk should be protected, the State Department was never able to describe any specific threats nor could they explain how removing the reports “could possibly protect anyone since many were years old and already extensively disseminated worldwide.”
Sopko complied reluctantly with the request but became more puzzled when the agency reached out asking for redacting roughly 2,400 items in the reports, including the name of former Afghan President Ashraf Ghani. A review found all but four requests “without merit.”
“In my opinion, the full picture of what happened in August—and all the warning signs that could have predicted the outcome—will only be revealed if the information that the Departments of Defense and State have already restricted from public release is made available,” said Sopko.
The speech was delivered to a conference in Arlington, Virginia.
A State Department spokesperson said in an email that the agency has worked to address challenges SIGAR identified in its report and recognizes the importance of the watchdog’s work.
“Due to safety and security concerns regarding our ongoing evacuation efforts, we requested some reports be temporarily removed to redact identifying information from public records and protect the identities of Afghans and Afghan partner organizations. SIGAR has the authority to restore the reports when it deems appropriate,” the spokesperson said.
“To protect the identities of Afghans and Afghan implementing partner organizations, the Department of State has worked to remove identifying information from multiple public records. The identifying information are the only details intended to be shielded. Because of the volume of information, some entities temporarily removed reports or full datasets,” they added.
Elon Musk issued a warning on Thursday against Democrats’ billionaire tax proposal that levies unrealized capital gains, saying that eventually the government will run out of ultra-wealthy individuals, following which, they will target the majority middle class.
“US national debt is ~$28,900 billion or ~$229k per taxpayer. Even taxing all ‘billionaires’ at 100% would only make a small dent in that number, so obviously the rest must come from the general public. This is basic math. Spending is the real problem. https://usdebtclock.org” @elonmusk tweeted on Oct. 28.
Chiefly authored by Sen. Ron Wyden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, the radical 23.8 percent tax rate for long-term capital gains on tradable assets would be targeted at those making a billion dollars or more in annual income or $100 million or more for three consecutive years. This puts around 700 Americans in the bracket whose wealth is mostly concentrated in stocks.You May Also Like
Existing laws prevent the government from taxing “unrealized” gains or unsold stocks. The new law changes that to include unsold stocks and adds them into the individual’s income that is subject to taxation. The recently proposed changes by the Democrats are mostly to fund their $2 trillion “Build Back Better” campaign.
The billionaire tax proposal is facing stiff opposition from many Democrats as well, including House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal of Massachusetts and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin.
“I don’t like it. I don’t like the connotation that we’re targeting different people,” Manchin told reporters. He also praised American billionaires’ contribution to society through investments, job creation, and philanthropy.
The other critical issue facing the proposal is the legality of whether the Constitution gives Congress the right to tax wealth. It is likely there will be legal challenges if the controversial plan is passed. Opponents can argue that unrealized gains cannot be counted as income, and thus, must not be taxed.
According to Musk, “this tax only covers ~10% of the $3.5 trillion spending bill. Where will the other 90% come from? The answer is you.” Musk, with a net worth of almost $284 billion, had recently dethroned Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as the richest man on the planet.
A recent surge in Tesla’s (TSLA) stock price following the mass purchase by Hertz of 100,000 cars made the company part of the trillion-dollar club. Musk owns more than 20 percent of Tesla shares.
As a response to a supportive tweet, Musk said he is better suited at allocating capital than Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, “Who is best at capital allocation — government or entrepreneurs — is indeed what it comes down to. The tricksters will conflate capital allocation with consumption.”
Does the Biden administration want to foment a civil war, a mass taxpayer rebellion, or are they simply crazy?
Those were the thoughts that flew through my head like the swallows to Capistrano the minute I read the Oct. 28 report in the Wall Street Journal under the headline “U.S. in Talks to Pay Hundreds of Millions to Families Separated at Border.” Needless to say, it is currently their most read article.
“WASHINGTON—The Biden administration is in talks to offer immigrant families that were separated during the Trump administration around $450,000 a person in compensation, according to people familiar with the matter, as several agencies work to resolve lawsuits filed on behalf of parents and children who say the government subjected them to lasting psychological trauma.
“The U.S. Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services are considering payments that could amount to close to $1 million a family, though the final numbers could shift, the people familiar with the matter said.”
$450,000 a person? This when millions of actual taxpaying American citizens are suffering, barely able to make ends meet during the pandemic, and inflation is on a record pace. Not even Anthony Fauci, allegedly the highest paid government official, makes that much, at least in salary.
Psychological trauma? How about causing psychological trauma to a whole country at once? Never in my life have I heard anything so insane.
And I thought nothing could top the Afghanistan debacle.
For once, well twice—the first time was during the Kavanaugh hearings—I found myself in complete agreement with Lindsey Graham who tweeted
I just about fell out of my chair when I read this.
For the sake of our country, I hope this reporting is in error.
To put it mildly. Rep. Doug Lamborn pointed out $450,00 was more than the 9/11 victim’s fund—and this new proposal is for people who entered our country completely illegally.
Can you imagine how many more are now making a beeline for our open border after hearing about this incredible largesse.
If you want to get some laughs, or maybe vengeance, take a look at the comments section on the Daily Mail’s coverage of the story that ranges from “I’m a Democrat and this is the dumbest thing I ever heard” to Sen. Tom Cotton tweeting, “It’s unthinkable to pay a burglar who broke into your home for the ‘psychological trauma’ they endured during the crime.”
Well, maybe that’s not funny. In fact, the whole thing isn’t very funny, when you think about it. Biden is actually president of the United States, the supposed leader of the free world. And we’re theoretically stuck with him until 2024.
And now this strange, befuddled individual is in Glasgow pretending to understand climate science. Good luck to those of us who want to have heated homes this winter.
The only one who should be pleased by all this is James Buchanan, previously thought of as the worst president of all time for his role in preserving slavery, who must be sitting up in his grave, smiling in relief.
Of course, what appeared in the WSJ might be some kind of “trial balloon” number meant to be negotiated down to a still ridiculous $300,000 per person/ $600,000 a family, figures that still dwarf the $1200 or so given to our own people at the height of the pandemic.
(That reporters allow themselves to be used for this game by authorities would be no surprise since it is consistent with the behavior of the entire mainstream media in recent years, acting as a slavish adjunct of government. Hence, the phrase “people familiar with the matter,” as used here, has become something of a modern cliché.)
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)—a once-honorable (decades ago) organization that at one time actually worked for Americans’ civil liberties but now works to undermine them at every turn—is apparently one of the main sponsors of this proposal.
They should consider changing their name to the American Republic Destruction Union (ARDU) with the slogan “Ben Franklin was right. We can’t keep it!”
Of final note, the New York Times does not have this astounding story on its front page this morning. Has shame finally set in? Or is it just the old game of hiding the bad news?
Whatever it is, this is bad news indeed for Biden and the Democrats as well. They’ve not just jumped the shark, as they used to say in show biz. They’ve jumped a thousand of them. This is not going to sit well with most decent Americans. And we shouldn’t let them forget.
It’s open enrollment season for Medicare. Local TV stations and cable networks are flooded with ads for various insurance supplements. They promise “free” dental care, free transportation to doctors, free drugs, free dentures, and lots of other free stuff. Paid spokespersons speak of “benefits” and “entitlements.” They say subscribers could receive as much as $100 a month back into their Social Security checks. Even the phone number to call to sign up is “absolutely free.” Read the small print and you’ll find that some of the plans vary by region, some by ZIP code. Sometimes there’s a nominal cost, so it’s not actually “free.” Call a “licensed” insurance agent for more details. Licensed by whom? Probably the companies selling the plans.
Some of the ads pay aging celebrities like quarterback Joe Namath, basketball legend Earvin “Magic” Johnson, and comedian Jimmie Walker to pitch their products.
Notice the use of certain words and how they also are used by politicians to dupe people into believing they are not getting what they “deserve” because “the rich”—those predatory, stingy, and greedy people—are not paying their “fair share” in taxes.
Selective language has long been used by snake oil salesmen and politicians to flim-flam the public. That is why propaganda messages from dictators are effective. President Biden’s falling approval numbers suggest a dwindling number of people believe his claim that taxing billionaires will pay for the trillions he wants to spend. Even the word “infrastructure” is manipulative because only a small percentage of the proposed spending is targeted to repair roads, bridges, and airports. The rest will be spent on other things unrelated to infrastructure and drive us deeper into debt, along with a separate social spending bill to expand “entitlements” that will addict more people to government.
People not only have to read between the lines to find the truth, but also explore different sources of information. If you read only, say, The Washington Post and The New York Times and watch CNN and MSNBC, you will likely believe what comes from their worldview—government is good and here to help you, at least when Democrats are in control. If you read other publications, say, The Washington Times and The Wall Street Journal, watch Fox News and listen to conservative talk radio, you will learn things you didn’t know by consuming only left-of-center media. The media also have the power to ignore certain subjects that would give consumers a more balanced information diet.
The problem is that too many people read and tune into only those sources that reinforce what they already believe. That, too, is a type of propaganda.
In a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, Daniel C. Oliverio of Buffalo, N.Y., deconstructs the “fair share” lingo with his personal story: “As a self-employed professional in a law partnership, I am one of those high-wage earners. I pay over 45 percent of my income in taxes to New York and the U.S. Treasury. That’s not counting real-estate tax, both sides of Social Security and Medicare taxes, sales tax and lost deductions. I have no trust fund and can’t rely on interest and dividends alone.” Here’s the key part which flies in the face of the envy and entitlement crowd: “I have worked and saved my whole life … I have paid my bills and aggressively funded a retirement. To hear ad nauseam the lie that I am getting away with something at tax time … is frustrating. Now President Biden wants even more on the false premise that people like me aren’t paying enough. Half isn’t enough?”
Once we celebrated and encouraged success. Now we subsidize mediocrity and failure. We are then surprised we are getting more of the latter and less of the former. Do your homework. Don’t be manipulated by the language used by politicians and TV ads promising free stuff.
Democrats used to be the party of working people. Now, they sneer at people who work hard.
Democrats pushing to pass the Build Back Better bill want a single parent with two kids to be able to take home well over $31,000 in cash and noncash federal benefits a year, tax-free, without having to work. The handouts are even higher in states that offer generous benefits. So why get a job?
Nonworking adults are already eligible for food stamps, housing vouchers, and health care. Now, Democrats want to send them monthly checks if they have kids—up to $300 per kid. The checks, nicknamed “Biden Bucks,” originated earlier this year to help tide over families who lost their jobs because of COVID. President Joe Biden’s team wants to convert them into a permanent entitlement. House Republicans mock it as “cash-for-kids.”
Everyone wants to help kids, but Republicans and one lone Democratic senator, Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), oppose handing out cash to able-bodied parents without requiring them to work or train for a job. Democrats and their media allies bash that as cruelty. Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman attacks work requirements as a “time tax and ritual humiliation” on poor people. Really? The rest of us have to work, and there’s nothing humiliating about it.
The political battle over “Biden Bucks” is key to where we as a nation are headed.
In 1996, President Bill Clinton and a bipartisan majority in Congress passed welfare reform, eliminating cash welfare without work or job preparation. It worked. Child poverty dropped from 13 percent to less than 4 percent, and teen pregnancies and welfare dependence plummeted. Democrats want to undo these reforms.
Biden himself supported the work requirement then, but he says he’s adamantly against it now. So much for his blue-collar cred.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman admits eliminating the work requirement “represents a philosophical break with the past few decades” and “the obsessive fear that poor people might take advantage of government aid by choosing not to work.”
A fear borne out by social science and common sense.
University of Chicago economists calculate that the monthly cash payments will encourage 1.5 million parents to quit working. Perhaps they’ll spend the next year on the couch, making more babies to up their income from Uncle Sam.
This week’s headlines are about Democrats trimming the Build Back Better bill to reduce the price tag and win the votes of holdouts Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). All 50 Democratic senators need to be on board to pass the bill. But don’t be misled by proposals to sunset the monthly checks after one year, or five, instead of making them permanent. That reduces the official cost. But once created, entitlements are almost never allowed to sunset. Their funding will be renewed in succeeding years.
America will fast become starkly divided between the hardworking people who foot the bills and the millions on welfare, cheering on politicians to increase the dole. The burden on working people will become intolerable.
The New York Times has been featuring opinion columns deriding Americans’ work ethic. In “8 Hours a Day, Five Days a Week Is Not Working for Us,” Bryce Covert argues that a “reduction in work doesn’t have to mean a reduction in anyone’s living standards.” That’s la-la-land economics.
When fewer people work, fewer goods are produced, and they cost more. Inflation.
Americans are shell-shocked already by rising food and fuel prices. They’re recalculating how much they can afford and how it will impact their life plans. Yet the Biden team is telling them they have to support able-bodied adults who don’t want to work. The reaction should be pure rage.
President Joe Biden and his administration have attacked American energy independence since he took office in January, and one former Keystone XL Pipeline contractor had a few choice words for the president about the consequences.
In an interview on “Fox & Friends First” Tuesday, laid-off pipeline worker Lynn Allen explained his thoughts on the nation’s gas prices, which are the highest on average since 2014 at $3.38 per gallon as of Monday, according to the American Automobile Association.
“I’m not surprised at all,” Allen said, “because everything that Biden’s touched or done — it’s a failure.”
“It ain’t nothing but a total failure. We went from America first to America last.”
He then praised former President Donald Trump for his approach to the energy sector.
“Trump had it going on,” he said. “The thing about it is that we’ve got all these high prices of oil and gas, we’ve got drilling rigs stacked, we’ve got roustabout crews ready to go, we’ve got pipeline contractors with all of their equipment is stacked in the yards. And I can tell you right now, we can put America to work next week if we needed to.”
While Biden is not solely responsible for the current gas prices, his energy policies have not helped mitigate the situation.
His team has done little more than pressure the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to ramp up oil production — which has the majority of its oil reserves in the Middle East — and has been largely unsuccessful.
Should the Keystone pipeline project resume?
During a CNN town hall on Thursday, Biden came across as defeated on the issue of gas prices, and said there is not much action he can take to see prices fall before 2022.
“I don’t see anything that’s going to happen in the meantime that’s going to significantly reduce gas prices,” Biden said.
“A lot of Middle Eastern folks want to talk to me.”
“I’m not sure I’m going to talk to them,” he continued, “but the point is, it’s about gas production.”
President Biden says he expects gas prices will stay high until 2022.
If Biden wanted to be proactive about the issue — which is hurting the average American’s wallet severely — he would admit he made a mistake by halting federal oil and gas leases and canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline.
Of course, he won’t admit he was wrong. Far-left environmentalists take priority over middle and lower class Americans, even though everyone would benefit from American-produced oil and gas.
The Lynn Allens of the United States need to keep speaking up against the injustice happening in the energy industry and throughout the country at large, as Americans cannot afford to carry this financial burden any longer.
Frustrated over Republicans stonewalling their efforts to raise the debt ceiling, Democrats in the House have introduced two measures that would abolish the debt ceiling or significantly reform it by placing it largely out of Congress’s jurisdiction.
The legislation, which was introduced by Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), contains two separate approaches to the debt ceiling.
Option A: Abolish the Debt Ceiling Altogether
The first of the two brief bills contains only two lines. The first is “A bill to repeal the debt ceiling,” and the second declares any standing law relating to the debt ceiling repealed.
For much of U.S. history, no such thing as a debt limit existed, but it slowly came about as a congressional assertion of authority over the president.
Before 1917, Congress could approve individual loans or individual methods to be used by the Treasury, but often lending and spending were left to the president’s discretion.
After the nation became involved in World War I, Congress issued its first blanket debt limit with the Second Liberty Bond Act, which limited the debts that the Treasury could incur to $15 billion. Given the president’s large financial discretion, the bill was intended to limit how much then-President Woodrow Wilson could borrow to finance the war.
Aside from a few scattered bills approved by Congress to cap the aggregate debt limit that the president could borrow, the president continued to exercise largely unilateral control of state finances until the 1970s.
In the 1970s, the revelations surrounding the Watergate scandal led Congress to look deeper into the states’ finances, culminating in a reassertion of authority with the Budget Act of 1974.
The bill introduced annual itemized budgets passed by Congress, the budget reconciliation process, and limited the public debt to amounts approved by Congress. Since then, Congress has had unilateral authority to set borrowing limits on the president and the Treasury.
With the legislation, federal spending and revenues became a legislative prerogative rather than an executive one. Since then, the original oversight purpose of the bill has become obfuscated by largely party-line splits over raising the debt ceiling.
Members of both parties have often used the debt ceiling as a mechanism to play political hardball. In 2006, Democrats in the Senate—including then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) and now-Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—almost unanimously voted against raising the debt ceiling. Republicans have used the same move since then, most notably in 2011 and 2013 under President Barack Obama.
Despite this history of hardball, the move does give Congress the ability to extract concessions from the president, or to make a symbolic gesture of protest against the current administration. Democrats’ 2006 rebellion came as just such a protest vote. During Obama’s tenure, Republicans were able to use the mechanism to obtain a concession from Obama to cut spending.
Now, Boyle’s bill would abolish the debt ceiling altogether, leaving no limits on how much debt the United States can incur. If the measure were approved, neither the president nor Congress could place limits on the maximum acceptable national debt without repealing Boyle’s bill.
Some Democrats are supportive of the bill’s goal.
Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.) told his colleagues on the House floor that the debt ceiling should be eliminated altogether. Reps. James Clyburn (D-S.C.), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), David Trone (D-Md.), Dwight Evans (D-Pa.), Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.), and Earl Blumenhauer (D-Ore.) signed on as co-sponsors of the bill. Despite expressing support for the bill, Yarmuth hasn’t signed on as a co-sponsor.
Option B: Give Treasury Secretary Power to Raise Debt Limit
The second option would once again restore the power to raise the debt limit to the executive branch. The option is put forward in Boyle’s second proposal, called “The Debt Ceiling Reform Act.”
If approved, the public debt would “be treated as being equal to such greater dollar amount as the Secretary of the Treasury may periodically determine.” In brief, the bill would allow the Secretary of the Treasury—currently Biden-appointed Janet Yellen—to unilaterally raise or lower the debt ceiling.
As an appointee of the president, that would return the power to the executive branch and give the president significant influence over the debt limit.
Due to its constitutional power over federal spending, revenues, and debt, Boyle’s bill would allow Congress to keep some influence over the debt limit.
The bill says that the decision of the Treasury secretary to raise or lower the debt ceiling can be overridden by a “subsequently enacted” law. This would give Congress the ability to maintain oversight, but actually executing such oversight would be difficult.
Currently, Congress can use parliamentary maneuvers to approve legislation to raise the debt ceiling along a party-line vote. In 2006, Republicans raised the debt ceiling along party lines; Schumer has indicated that Democrats plan to do the same to raise the current debt ceiling.
But bills to override the Treasury secretary’s debt ceiling decision wouldn’t be able to use the same maneuvers in the Senate, where 60 votes are required to begin debate on a bill before it can be passed by a simple majority. Historically, members of the Senate have voted to raise the debt ceiling when the president is a member of their party, while efforts not to raise the debt ceiling have arisen from the opposition party.
Members of the president’s party are likely to continue to be hesitant to override the decision of his Treasury appointee, and to deny the 60 votes needed for any legislative efforts to do so. Without a supermajority of resistance to the decision in the upper chamber, overriding the Treasury secretary’s decision will be a challenge.
This proposal also has shown to be more popular among the Democratic caucus than the first.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has indicated that she supports Boyle’s second proposal, telling a reporter, “I think it has merit.”
The second bill also has significantly more co-sponsors, with a total of 16: Reps. Coleman, Espaillat, Evans, and Blumenhauer joined Boyle as co-sponsors again; Reps. John Yarmuth, Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), Susan Wild (D-Pa.), Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), Mike Levin (D-Calif.), Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), Marilyn Strickland (D-Wash.), Danny Davis (D-Ill.), Bill Foster (D-Ill.), Nikema Williams (D-Ga.), and Donald Beyer (D-Va.) also signed onto the bill.
Democrats have insisted that reforms of the debt ceiling are necessary to avert crises in the future.
Boyle’s proposals represent the first effort at cementing his party’s demands into law, but will likely face resistance in the Senate, where Republicans have unanimously refused to raise the debt limit, if Pelosi passes either in a House vote.
Both bills are currently tied up in the House Ways and Means Committee.
On Friday, President Joe Biden announced his plans to redesignate nearly two million acres of land as national monuments. Despite attempts by many to paint the move as a positive development, it is another clear example of overreach by the federal government.
According to a Thursday news release from the Department of the Interior, Biden plans to “restore protections” to the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments in Utah.
Former President Barack Obama designated Bears Ears National Monument in 2016 after pressure from tribal nations, the department said. The monument originally spanned 1.35 million acres, all of which were under the supervision of the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service.
Grand Staircase-Escalante was established as a national monument in 1996 by former President Bill Clinton. After three adjustments from Congress, the monument came to encompass 1.87 million acres.
In 2017, former President Donald Trump announced the significant reduction of both monuments. Bears Ears National Monument was reduced to 228,000 acres, and Grand Staircase-Escalante was cut nearly in half to about 1 million acres.
At the time, NPR reported that many Native Americans were upset by Trump’s decision.
“The Navajo Nation has made repeated requests to meet with President Trump on this issue,” Navajo Nation president Russell Begaye said in a statement. “The Bears Ears Monument is of critical importance, not only to the Navajo Nation but to many tribes in the region.”
However, Trump made clear that the move was not meant to strip land from Native Americans, but rather to put decisions about the land back in the hands of the people who live there.
“No one values the splendor of Utah more than you do … and no one knows better how to use it,” Trump told a crowd in Utah during the announcement of the reduction.
Trump did not make the decision on his own, either. He had the support of Utah Sens. Orrin Hatch and Mike Lee, according to NPR.
By reducing the amount of land controlled by the federal government, Trump gave the people of Utah — including Native Americans — control over land that was rightfully theirs.
Nonetheless, Biden felt the need to undo Trump’s work and bring the land back under federal control. Predictably, the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition praised the move.
“By taking this action, President Biden will be recognizing the deep and enduring ancestral and cultural connections that Tribes have to this landscape and taking a step toward honoring his commitment to Indigenous People by acknowledging their original place in this country that is now our shared home,” the group said in a statement.
“The Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition looks forward to the President’s continued leadership in ensuring that a new model of collaborative management between the Tribes, state and federal land agencies is immediately put into action and that a comprehensive Land Management Plan can be developed for the greater Bears Ears landscape.”
The problem with that statement is that the federal government should not have a say in those conversations. Instead, Native Americans should be working directly with the state of Utah to develop plans for the land.
This is not the first time during the Biden administration that bureaucrats have signaled their lust for more land and power. Last month, the Interior Department announced plans to relocate the headquarters of the Bureau of Land Management to Washington, D.C.
Trump had previously moved BLM headquarters from D.C. to Grand Junction, Colorado. Its relocation back to Washington hints at its increased ties to the political elite under the Biden administration.
“There’s no doubt that the BLM should have a leadership presence in Washington, D.C. — like all the other land management agencies — to ensure that it has access to the policy-, budget-, and decision-making levers to best carry out its mission,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.
Contrary to leftist belief, not everything needs to be federalized.
Instead of letting the state of Utah consult with Native American organizations and other groups with a vested interest to determine the best use of its land, Biden has once again turned to federal government expansion as the solution.
If recent actions are any indication, the Biden administration does not plan to stop its land-grabbing any time soon.
Haitian immigrants being deported back to the Caribbean nation bit Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on a flight bound for Port-au-Prince from Laughlin Air Force Base in Texas, according to the Washington Examiner.
The Monday incident saw two Haitian immigrants leave their seats as the aircraft taxied to the runway and attack ICE agents by biting them, forcing takeoff to be delayed, the report said.
Federal assault charges will be brought against the two Haitian attackers, the Examiner reported.
“[The Haitians] all realized they were going back to Haiti and lost it,” a senior federal law enforcement officer told the newspaper.
Last month, Haiti was hit by a powerful earthquake resulting in thousands of deaths.
The devastating temblor came just weeks after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.
A second deportation flight was reported canceled by the U.S. government because Haitian migrants on board were “being disruptive and not complying” while the plane was on the tarmac, the Examiner reported.
Meanwhile, in another incident, three ICE officers were injured during a Tuesday assault at the Port-au-Prince airport when a group from a plane carrying single adult men stormed another recently arriving flight carrying deported families, according to NBC News.
The three ICE agents suffered non-life-threatening injuries, the report said.
CNBC video from the scene showed the chaotic incident at Haiti’s main airport, with returnees reacting angrily to spending large sums of money on arduous journeys attempting to reach the United States after learning the Biden administration had stopped deporting Haitians. https://www.youtube.com/embed/cgmu0ZGbjSc?feature=oembed
“On Tuesday, Sept. 21, some adult migrants caused two separate disruptions on the tarmac after deplaning in Port-au-Prince, Haiti,” a Department of Homeland Security representative said in a statement, according to NBC News.
“Haitian crowd control officers responded to both incidents and resolved the situations. ICE fully respects the rights of all people to peacefully express their opinions, while continuing to perform its immigration enforcement mission consistent with our priorities, federal law and agency policy.”
Some 10,000 migrants, mainly Haitians, have set up an impromptu camp under a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, after wading across the Rio Grande separating Mexico and the United States.
NEW: This is what it looks like under the international bridge in Del Rio this morning. Latest numbers as of 6 AM.
6,722 migrants 4,742 family units 1,489 single adult men 418 single adult females 73 family “groups”
300+ pregnant women here as of yesterday. @FoxNews
Border agents have begun expelling planeloads of mostly Haitian migrants from the sprawling makeshift camp.
Optics for the Biden administration worsened on Monday after viral footage from the U.S.-Mexico border showed officers on horseback trying to push Haitians back across the border.
“We are increasing the frequency and number of the repatriation flights each day,” he said. “And we’re hoping that what we are doing now serves as a deterrent because it backs up the words that we have spoken since the very outset: that irregular migration is not the way to enter the United States. It will not work.”
