The Dismissal of Kari Lake’s Election Lawsuit Shows Voter Disenfranchisement No Longer Matters thumbnail

The Dismissal of Kari Lake’s Election Lawsuit Shows Voter Disenfranchisement No Longer Matters

/in , , , /by

By Rachel Alexander

The trial court judge in Kari Lake’s election lawsuit predictably threw out her case on Saturday, putting on a sham trial that on the surface looked fair to the general public that doesn’t know any better, but to legal minds was a travesty of justice. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson only gave her two days for a trial and issued his ruling immediately afterwards, even though he could have taken several days, and it was one of the biggest, most important cases in the country. Legal experts believe his decision was ghostwritten, they suspect top left-wing attorneys like Marc Elias emailed him what to say.

The standard should have been whether voters were disenfranchised, not all the additional hoops Thompson added. If inner city blacks had been disenfranchised, Thompson would not have added all those extra requirements, he would have made the law fit. Robert Gouveia, a rare attorney who isn’t afraid to speak up and who describes himself as watching prosecutors, judges and politicians, said the standard should have been whether there was voter suppression.

Instead, Thompson said Lake had to show an extremely vague, high bar in order to prevail, that an election official intentionally caused the printer changes in order to change the results of the election, and that it did affect the outcome. He explained away many of the disturbing election anomalies as accidents or mere coincidences. He ignored the vast majority of them; in a show of arrogance, his opinion was less than eight pages long.

Thompson completely ignored all the voters who saw the long lines and gave up trying to vote, as if they didn’t count. Considering probably well over half of the voting locations in Maricopa County were affected, not to mention they were almost all in heavily Republican areas, this was no small disenfranchisement. Many voters have come forward and told how they were unable to vote for this reason or similar, such as a man who couldn’t find parking in time due to the overcrowded parking lot…..

*****

Continue reading this article at Townhall.

Under The Biden Economy, The Average Family Lost $7,100 thumbnail

Under The Biden Economy, The Average Family Lost $7,100

/in , , , , /by

By Isabelle Morales

President Biden’s policies have now cost the average American family about $7,100, according to a new report by the Heritage Foundation. While Democrats have proven time and time again that they value their social agenda more than Americans’ economic security, the level of harm represented in this figure is shocking… and infuriating.

As the Heritage report outlines, the average family has lost $5,800 due to inflation and $1,300 due to higher interest rates:


Under Biden, prices have risen so much faster than wages that the average family has lost $5,800 in real annual income. That loss is thanks to the ‘hidden’ tax of inflation, caused by the Biden administration and congressional Democrats’ policies.

Higher interest rates are now costing the typical family another $1,300 annually. Combined with a lower real income, this effectively costs families a total of $7,100 in annual income under Biden.

In January 2021, before Joe Biden took over the presidency, annual inflation was at a stable 1.4%. Since then, the high inflation rate has broken numerous 40-year records, has significantly outpaced wage growth, and has driven Americans to take on more debt than ever.

Today, over a year since inflation began surging, the consumer price index is still at an alarming rate of 7.1%. The price of food has increased by 10.6% over the year: staples like rice and poultry have increased by 14.1% and 13.1%, respectively. Energy prices have risen by 13.1%, with the cost of fuel oil increasing by an astounding 65.7% and energy services by 14.2%.

Wages are also falling behind. In November, the real average weekly earnings decreased by 3%. This trend has also been consistent for over a year.

At this point, a significant majority of Americans—63%—are living paycheck to paycheck. In fact, many are losing money each month and taking on debt to pay for essentials. The total credit card debt in the United States is now at $930 billion after a 15% jump in balances—the largest annual jump in more than 20 years. Not only are Americans taking on more debt, but they’re carrying these balances for long periods of time, making it even harder to pay off as interest piles. Among Americans who carry credit card debt from month to month, 60% have been in debt for over a year.

Because most credit cards have a variable rate, millions of Americans are directly and negatively affected by the Biden administration’s interest rate hikes.

On top of the Biden administration’s monetary policies, Americans have primarily been harmed by the Administration’s fiscal policies that have driven inflation.

President Biden has passed bills and executive orders that paid Americans not to work, expanded tax credits, paused federal student loan repayments, canceled the Keystone Pipeline, and more.

Just a few months ago, during this time of high inflation and a recession, Democrats passed a massive tax-and-spend plan. Democrats’ reconciliation bill contained substantial tax hikes including a 15% corporate alternative minimum tax, a $6.5 billion natural gas tax, a $12 billion crude oil tax, a $1.2 billion coal tax, and several more. The reconciliation bill also included careless spending on climate initiatives, Obamacare subsidies, and supersizing the IRS.

Both tax hikes and reckless spending have driven inflation. According to a 2020 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, 31% of the corporate tax rate is borne by consumers through higher prices of goods and services. Further, the federal government has flooded the economy with so much money that demand is growing too fast for production to keep up, also resulting in inflation.

A $7,100 donation to one family, in many circumstances, could be life-changing. The theft of $7,100 over the course of the year is equally life-altering, though Democrats had hoped it would simply go unnoticed. They should not get away with it. For ineffective climate subsidies and COVID funds that disappeared before our very eyes, the Left has stolen thousands of dollars from working families.

*****

This article was published by Independent Women’s Forum and is reproduced with permission.

Trust “The Science”? No. thumbnail

Trust “The Science”? No.

/in , , , , /by

By Justin Hart

Here is Chapter Two of Gone Viral by Justin Hart

Thanksgiving weekend came and went in 2021. The soothsayers of Team Apocalypse were wrong again—the sky didn’t fall. Whole populations of families who dared to get together to celebrate were not wiped out. But that didn’t stop NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci. The Covid fatality rate doesn’t hold a candle to the risk of standing between Dr. Fauci and a camera. After a few softball questions the television host of CBS’s Face the Nation asked Dr. Fauci about recent criticism of him from various corners. He replied:


So, it’s easy to criticize, but they’re really criticizing science because I represent science. That’s dangerous. To me, that’s more dangerous than the slings and the arrows that get thrown at me. I’m not going to be around here forever, but science is going to be here forever. And if you damage science, you are doing something very detrimental to society long after I leave. And that’s what I worry about.

It is indeed dangerous to claim to represent science. Science doesn’t need sales reps, since it is the conceptualization of physical reality itself as determined by experiment and data. What Fauci truly represented is the authoritarian State with a capital “S.”

Emails released through the Freedom of Information Act show Fauci to be a manipulative man of politics, deftly brushing off lengthy diatribes against him or mustering forces to push back on Team Reality. It really is quite the position to be in as the highest paid federal employee in history to call upon the systematic enterprise of knowledge known as “science” to shield you from criticism.

The damage wrought upon our science as an actual institution is incalculable. As Dr. Jay Bhattacharya noted: “The current generation of top public health leaders will need to step down before trust is restored.”

The science is not what they say it is and you are not required to acquiesce to anyone’s determinations but your own. Indeed, when someone declares themselves to be the voice of authority in all things—run.

Science and the Application of Science Are Not the Same Thing

One keen realization our society must grapple with is separating the science from the application of that science. The science may indeed dictate that we experienced the spread of a highly transmissible deadly viral aerosolized respiratory pathogen, but it does not follow that you need to lose your job after that. Or that we ought to destroy the economy of a country. Or deprive a generation of children of proper learning.

Dr. Scott Atlas was lambasted by Team Apocalypse again and again for not being a virologist, but he was not sent to the White House to fix “the science”—he was there to fix the policy. Indeed, Dr. Atlas had keen and deep expertise in the application of science to public policy, something Dr. Fauci has failed at again and again in his career.

Our Constitution affords US citizens many enumerated rights and protections in our pursuit of happiness. Many of these endowed freedoms are couched in language specifically protecting us from the government writ large. While courts might attest to some extreme event placing some of these rights into dormancy, it did not give Dr. Fauci the right to put our rights, indeed our whole Constitution, into a coma.

The Institutions Lie. And Lie. And Lie.

Myriad once-trusted institutions have suffered greatly under the boom which Dr. Fauci and company lowered onto the American people and, frankly, the world.

The CDC has lost immense trust on all sides. From Dr. Redfield’s declaration that masks are better than vaccines to Dr. Walensky selling you a non-sterilizing sterilizing vaccine—this institution has wreaked the greatest havoc over the entire pandemic. They manipulated data, hid data, ignored data, invented data, deleted data, dismissed data, and all around succumbed to political pressure.  Whether it was from teachers’ unions or a meddling White House, the CDC failed to provide any real leadership. With a budget of billions and over twenty thousand employees the amount of work they produced was puny and questionable at every step.

The National Institute of Health (NIH) is another behemoth that needs a thorough cleaning. Their (now) former director, Francis Collins, penned the infamous email calling out the signers of the Great Barrington Declaration.

“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention—and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Collins ends the email: “Is it underway?”

If it wasn’t, the establishment institutional heads got in gear and made sure to jumpstart the process of attempting to destroy the reputations of the signers, all manifestly qualified and fantastically credentialled scientists and doctors.

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) headed by Dr. Fauci is one of the key culprits stalling any real progress on trust and communication around these vital topics. Fauci and Collins are keenly involved with all areas of research in this federal healthcare monstrosity and influence millions of dollars in grants given every year. No wonder the spectrum of literature produced here did little to further any alternate views on lockdowns, masking, vaccines, and other COVID-19 implementations. The folks setting the policy also hold the purse strings.

It was obvious from the get-go that the structure of our county-centric administration of health policy was going to be problematic. These local health directors and advisors have little if any accountability. They are unelected bureaucrats and were given immense powers over the lives of citizens in their areas. The replete inconsistency with how federal health policy and information was conveyed to the public is an embarrassment. These county entities were given massive outlays of taxpayer dollars for the fruitless effort of contact tracing. The impact was not just on our wallets. As Jay Bhattacharya noted: “Hospital staffing shortages are at least in part due to rigidly enforced vaccine mandates and to mass asymptomatic testing and contact tracing. How many more people must suffer because of the monomaniacal focus on COVID at the expense of public health?” Contact tracing at the county level became a de facto quarantine machine, especially for students.

Most did it, many of us knowing it was pointless. But the pointlessness became the point. Comply, or you are a bad person. Comply or it’s no more school for you.

And comply many people did, thinking they would weather the madness, counting the cost on their hearts and spirits as worth the sacrifice for their children’s education. One more stricture, and the schools will open. Follow one more edict and the playground tape will come off. And so it went for two plus years. So it still goes in many places. We were duped, but we also duped ourselves.

Public Trust Was Destroyed

The impact on the public trust is massive. Curiously, after the 2009 H1N1 debacle, an article was published on the NIH website entitled: “’Listen to the People:’ Public Deliberation About Social Distancing Measures in a Pandemic” The article notes the vital need for good and honest communication to the public about measures being taken the protect the citizenry. It notes: “Public engagement in ethically laden pandemic planning decisions may be important for transparency, creating public trust, improving compliance with public health orders, and ultimately, contributing to just outcomes.”

Ya’ think? This is something at which Fauci and company dramatically failed. At one point, early in the pandemic, Fauci advised against face masks but later admitted he was telling this “noble lie” to slow the impact on material needs and hospital settings. Honesty was a not a key feature of this pandemic.

The report continues: “We conducted focus groups with members of the public to characterize public perceptions about social distancing measures likely to be implemented during a pandemic. Participants expressed concerns about job security and economic strain on families if businesses or school closures are prolonged. They shared opposition to closure of religious organizations, citing the need for shared support and worship during times of crises.”

It was all right there. It is on the website of the National Institute of Health.

They ignored all of it.

The report concludes: “Social distancing measures may be challenging to implement and sustain due to strains on family resources and lack of trust in government.”

What a stark and terrible reminder that the institutions which prized themselves on public health damaged the public more than anything else. Your trust should be in the bedrock of our Constitution, not in some self-endowed title of “Science.”

*****

This article was published by Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

Exc: CCP State Outlet Warns US of Impending Nuclear War – AGAIN thumbnail

Exc: CCP State Outlet Warns US of Impending Nuclear War – AGAIN

/in , , /by

By Catherine Salgado

(Exclusive) “A prolonged and expanded Russia-Ukraine conflict will…increase the risk of a runaway control and nuclear crisis.” That’s a direct quote from a December 17 article (“US prolongs Russia-Ukraine conflict for three aims, aggravates nuclear war risk: experts at GT annual forum”) by Global Times, a state propaganda outlet of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This is the second time the CCP has warned the US of nuclear war. To be fair, to a certain extent, the CCP is merely blustering, especially since it is dealing with (or rather violently crushing) mass protests in its own country.

But the US had better beware of pushing China and Russia too far with its idiocy surrounding the Ukraine conflict. It is better not to antagonize an enemy (China) that told its people in 2019 it was at war with you, particularly when that enemy is the greatest mass murderer of all time.

I must admit that the US is in fact essentially fighting a “proxy war” in Ukraine, as Global Times said. The reasons Global Times listed may not be correct, but the reality is that, regardless of the reasons, Ukrainians are still dying while the US and Russia use the war for their own political ends. It is the Ukrainian people who suffer the most from their own corrupt government, and for America’s and Russia’s mistakes. China is entirely wrong to support Russia’s unjust and destructive invasion of Ukraine, however. Neither Russia nor the U.S. has any right to be in Ukraine.

“A prolonged and expanded Russia-Ukraine conflict will have a far-reaching impact and damage the future of the globe, and increase the risk of a runaway control and nuclear crisis, Chinese foreign affairs experts and scholars warned at the 2023 Global Times Annual Conference on Saturday…

There are three major uncertainties in the future development of the Russia-Ukraine conflict – direct military confrontation between Russia and NATO members, nuclear contamination in Ukraine, and Russia being forced to use nuclear weapons, Zhu said [emphasis added]…

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, great power relations have eased and the world has entered an era of globalization.”

I find it interesting that China advertises the wonders of globalization in this piece. The CCP’s goal, of course, is to rule the world, but it sure knows how to use the CCP-enamored West’s pablum against the West.

*****

This article was published by Pro Deo et Libertate and is reproduced with permission.

Judge Dismisses Kari Lake’s Election Lawsuit thumbnail

Judge Dismisses Kari Lake’s Election Lawsuit

/in , , /by

By Zach Schonfeld

An Arizona judge on Saturday ruled against Kari Lake in her challenge of Gov.-elect Katie Hobbs’s (D) victory, dismissing the highest-profile case challenging the midterm election results.

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson following a two-day trial found that Lake had not proven that election officials committed intentional misconduct sufficient to change the race’s outcome.

Lake, who lost to Hobbs by about 17,000 votes, had alleged election officials in Maricopa County intentionally sabotaged her victory by causing Election Day printer malfunctions and violating chain of custody procedures.

Lake asked the judge to declare her the rightful winner or order a new election in Maricopa County. Hobbs will be inaugurated on Jan. 2.

Thompson previously dismissed eight other counts alleged in Lake’s lawsuit prior to trial, ruling that they did not constitute proper grounds for an election contest under Arizona law, even if true, but the judge permitted Lake an attempt to prove the two remaining counts in trial.

The ruling marks a major defeat for Lake, a vocal supporter of former President Trump’s unfounded 2020 election claims who has railed against the conduct of last month’s midterm elections, calling it “botched” and a “sham.” Lake sat in the courtroom during the trial but did not testify.

Her allegations largely focused on Maricopa County, which spans the Phoenix area and about 60 percent of Arizona’s population, the epicenter of voter disenfranchisement allegations in the midterms.

Election officials acknowledged that some of the county’s Election Day vote centers experienced printer malfunctions that prevented tabulators from reading ballots, but they insisted voters could utilize backup options to ultimately have their ballot counted…..

*****

Continue reading this article at The Hill.

Bob Farrell’s 10 Rules and the Market in 2023 thumbnail

Bob Farrell’s 10 Rules and the Market in 2023

/in , , /by

By Neland Nobel

Banks, brokerage houses, and financial pundits are all issuing their post-mortem reflections on 2022 and looking into the new year. They will attempt to tell us what is likely for stocks, bonds, real estate, gold, and crypto for the coming year.

We will make our own attempt in due time, but we admire the effort of the financial community. We humans just don’t have reliable ways of looking into the future and there are many unpredictable variables that can influence the outcome.  So, we admire that some would stick their necks out knowing full well they could have them chopped off by unpredictable events.

Bob Farrell for many years was the chief technical analyst for Merrill Lynch. This was long before Mother Merrill got absorbed into a giant bank. As such, Farrell taught an entire generation, a generation now dying off, about how to think about markets. Over 40 years ago, we listened to his daily commentaries.

Farrell saw the benefit in what is called technical analysis. This basically is a system that subjects market price fluctuations to tools such as trendlines, moving averages, momentum indicators, sentiment indicators, and many other systems. It is based on the notion that prices are information. Further, it is based on the idea that price patterns can be helpful in predicting market movement in the future. Much like in the physical world, once price starts in one direction, it will tend to persist in that direction, at least for a while.

For technical people, price action is not random, but follows identifiable patterns and rules. In this sense, they disagree with academics that say investing is a “random walk”, and the only way to succeed is to buy and hold. No, technical people think there is a good and bad time to invest.

In some sense, this is the same as fundamental analysis which studies the economy, earnings, and accounting data in an attempt to determine if conditions are good or bad, cheap or expensive, for investing in stocks or other investments.  Fundamentalists believe that by studying the economy and companies, one can identify the good conditions to invest in and the bad conditions to avoid.  Think of Warren Buffet.

In his long years of dealing with the practical aspect of investing, Farrell came up with 10 Rules, and more recently, added one more.

There are some variations of this list one can find on the internet, but the following are from Walter Deemer, who worked alongside Farrell at Merrill for many years.

1. Markets tend to return to the mean over time.

2. Excesses in one direction will lead to an opposite excess in the other direction.

3. There are no “new eras” – excesses are never permanent.

4. Exponentially rapidly rising or falling markets usually go further than you think, but they do not correct by going sideways.

5. The public buys the most at the top and the least at the bottom.

6. Fear and greed are stronger than long-term resolve.

7. Bull markets are strongest when they are broad and weakest when they narrow to a handful of blue-chip names. 

8. Bear markets have three stages: sharp down, reflexive rebound, and a drawn-out fundamental downtrend.

9. When the experts and forecasts agree – something else is going to happen.

10. Bull markets are more fun than bear markets.

Subsequent to his retirement, Farrell added one more:

11. Though business conditions may change, corporations and securities may change, and financial institutions and regulations may change, human nature remains essentially the same.

In his book, Deemer on Technical Analysis, he says:  …”what Bob Farrell’s Rules do is to elevate you past the basics; they make you think about the stock market and your investments, not just follow them via some mechanical interpretation of some rules.”

The coming year is likely to be turbulent. The FED will tighten they say until the inflation fever is broken. They are raising rates into an already slowing global economy that is badly overburdened with debt and runaway government spending. The range of possible scenarios is from the “soft landing” predicted by most, to something much more ugly on the downside. It could vary from inflation to actual deflation.

Keeping your cool won’t be easy. When stressed, consider these rules.

Deemer himself has come up with one final rule worth pondering. When it is time to buy stocks, you won’t want to.

18 Absurdities of the McConnell-Schumer Omnibus Spending Bill thumbnail

18 Absurdities of the McConnell-Schumer Omnibus Spending Bill

/in , , , , , /by

By Richard Stern

Congressional leaders have dropped 6,825 pages of text for their “omnibus” spending bill, plus explanatory materials that include a list of at least 4,000 earmarks, on the doorstep of every American family.

When announcing the gargantuan spending bill, its authors put “the federal government” before “American families,” and that is exactly what this bill is intended to do.

However, it’s only the beginning of the list of absurdities in this spending bill.

In a stunning betrayal of the American electorate, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., worked with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and other Democrat leaders to author this example of congressional corruption. (House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, D-Calif., expected to succeed fellow Californian Nancy Pelosi as House speaker Jan. 3, leads GOP opposition to the spending package in that chamber.)

Far from the guise of keeping government’s light on, the foundation of this omnibus spending bill is a vast collection of special-interest handouts and fuel for the fires of inflation and the woke, leftist establishment.

The burdens of this bill, tragically, will stifle our economy and accelerate the dissolution of the fabric of our civil society for many years to come.

Here are 18 of the absurdities of the omnibus, compiled by myself and fellow Heritage Foundation policy experts Doug Badger, Preston Brashers, Lindsey Burke, Matthew Dickerson, David Ditch, Leslie Ford, Rachel Greszler, Edmund Haislmaier, Melanie Israel, Robert Moffit, Lora Ries, Thomas Spoehr, and Katie Tubb. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

1. An Egregious Oversight

In under two weeks, the new GOP majority in the House finally will have the chance to use the power of the purse to rein in the reckless administration of President Joe Biden.

Instead, Republicans seem poised to give up this oversight power without firing even a single shot. This omnibus bill would provide a full year’s worth of funding to the administration—locking in its regulatory regime and capacity to abusively wield the power of the executive branch.

Blocking this $1.85 trillion omnibus, and passing a short-term continuing resolution, would allow the new Congress to set funding levels for the federal government in an appropriate and transparent manner after convening Jan. 3.

This would allow Congress to work in the interest of the American people and stop Biden’s abuse of power.

2. Promoting a Culture of Death

The omnibus monstrosity retains longstanding pro-life and conscience protection riders such as the Hyde Aamendment, which prohibits the Department of Health and Human Services from spending tax dollars on elective abortions.

Including these consensus policies that have applied to federal spending bills for decades is a bare-minimum expectation for policymakers to meet. However, the spending bill includes provisions that are cause for concern for pro-life Americans.

In perhaps the clearest example of the frame of mind of the authors, the $575 million in a global health section allocated for “family planning/reproductive health, including in areas where population growth threatens biodiversity or endangered species.” This section quite literally puts plants before people.

This provision portrays humanity as a parasite, as a threat to the plants and animals that the bill’s drafters clearly see as vastly more important than the Americans and their families who Congress is supposed to protect.

As Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., points out, this is a nod to the long-disproven notions of Thomas Malthus.  In the 18th century, Malthus argued that population growth would overtake our ability to grow food and other resources, ending in mass starvation.

Of course, history proved Malthus wrong: Mankind’s penchant to innovate and adapt instead has led to vast expansions of our ability to provide resources for our world’s burgeoning population, making each new generation more prosperous than the last.

Dire Malthusian predictions were wrong in the 1700s, and they’re still wrong in the 21st century. In practice, authoritarian responses to “overpopulation” have caused significant human rights abuses. Take China’s devastating one-child (later two-child) policy, for example.

Incredibly, the omnibus gives a wink and a nod to curbing population growth not for the sake of people, but for the sake of plants and animals. Government spending decisions reflect not just priorities, but values. To say the bill’s crafters missed the mark is an understatement.”

Make sure you’re seated before you continue reading through the rest of the absurdities of this omnibus.

3. Costing at Least $1.85 Trillion, Then More Later

The press releases from the House and Senate Appropriations committees and congressional leadership describe the omnibus as costing $1.7 trillion. However, this is only a selective accounting, hiding the total costs to taxpayers.

In reality, the legislation would cost at least $1.85 trillion in fiscal year 2023, which began Oct. 1, once the additional provisions attached to the 12 regular appropriations bills are included.

Waiving enforcement of what is known as Statutory PAYGO would increase outlays by $132 billion in fiscal 2023 relative to what the underlying law prescribes. The supplemental appropriations for Ukraine would add $45 billion and those for natural disasters would cost another $41 billion.

Considering the PAYGO provision, “emergency” funding, increases in baseline budget authority, and expected increases in debt-servicing cost, this bill would increase the 10-year deficit by $2.65 trillion—$20,000 per household—adding to current inflationary pressures.

4. No Lawmaker Has Read This Package

No member of Congress is physically able to read all of this spending package before voting on it.

In addition to the 12 regular appropriations bills, the omnibus bill includes two supplemental spending acts and 21 other separate divisions spanning topics as complex and varied as the Electoral Count Act, public land management, and antitrust enforcement.

As mentioned, the package contains 6,825 pages: 4,155 pages of legislative text plus 2,670 pages of explanatory materials that instruct agencies how to carry out the provisions and include at least 4,000 earmarks to pay for the pet projects of representatives and senators.

All totaled, this material is roughly twice as long as the Bible, and lawmakers planned to vote on it in fewer than four days.

5. Offering an Unprecedented Pork-ibus of Earmarks

Incredibly, the 4,155 pages of the omnibus bill don’t cover everything Congress wants to spend your taxpayer dollars on. The other 2,670 pages of “explanatory statements” contain many key details.

Included in the extra documents are hundreds of pages that detail some 4,000 earmarks, aka pork projects, costing billions of dollars that the federal government doesn’t have—and that will come out of your wallets.

Earmarks were banned for 10 years, but lawmakers from both parties have brought them back. A small sampling of this year’s rancid pork includes:

  • $1.5 million to encourage people to eat outdoors in sunny Pasadena, California.
  • $1.1 million for a solar array in cloudy Kirkland, Washington.
  • $2 million for B360, a group that promotes dirt-bike culture in Baltimore.
  • $3 million for the tiny and remote island of St. George, Alaska, for water infrastructure and $2.5 million for harbor improvements, for a total cost of over $82,000 per resident.
  • $500,000 for a skate park in Rhode Island.
  • $4.8 million for an environmental impact report on the possible expansion of Chicago’s rail transit system. Bureaucracy at work.
  • $13 million to expand the airport in the tiny city of Abbeville, Alabama.
  • $4 million for “Soy-Enabled Rural Road Reconstruction” in Iowa.
  • $2.35 million for the Leahy Center in Vermont, named after Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. The member who requested the earmark? Sen. Patrick Leahy.
  • Funding for a wide array of woke organizations and left-wing activists.

While hardworking families struggle under the weight of inflation caused by Washington’s reckless spending spree, Congress is going hog-wild with wasteful and inappropriate earmarks.

Calling this shameless would be an understatement.

6. Waiving Statutory PAYGO Enforcement, Increasing Inflationary Spending

In an extraordinary example of fiscal irresponsibility, the omnibus spending bill includes a provision that would waive enforcement of Statutory PAYGO this year and next, resulting in a $132 billion government spending increase in each of the next two years.

The Statutory Pay-As-You-Go Act of 2010, often called PAYGO, is a budget law put into place by President Barack Obama that requires Congress to pay for new deficit spending over time with cuts elsewhere in the budget.

Today, Biden’s irresponsible spending spree, including the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and the misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act, have egregiously violated these rules and would trigger $132 billion in spending cuts in January.

If Biden and Congress didn’t want the reductions specified in Obama’s Statutory PAYGO to take effect, they could have replaced them with other targeted reductions, such as repealing the doubling of the size of the IRS.

Unfortunately, by waiving the budget rules, deficit-financed government spending would be much higher in 2023 and 2024 if this package passes, increasing inflationary pressures.

7. Encouraging Borrowers to Take Advantage of Debt Amnesty

The omnibus includes $2.3 million for Biden’s secretary of education to contact student loan borrowers to let them know they may qualify for cancellation of student loan debt, and to “encourage borrowers to enroll in a qualifying repayment plan.”

8. Intensifying Biden’s Border Crisis

The Biden administration’s open border and NGO processing operations have quickly resulted in America’s worst-ever border crisis.

The omnibus spending bill would prolong this crisis and spend more good money on bad policies. Congress should reject the omnibus, defund these operations, and, at the beginning of the next Congress, pass a border security bill that would truly end the crisis.

The omnibus spending bill would give the Justice Department more money ($234 million) for state and local detention in the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program to collect information on aliens and provide it to federal law enforcement. This would occur even though the Biden administration implements a “sanctuary country,” prohibiting U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from enforcing immigration laws or cooperating with state and local law enforcement regarding criminal aliens.

The spending bill would give $20 million to the Secretary’s Office at the Department of Homeland Security to transfer to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Federal Assistance for the Alternatives to Detention Case Management pilot program.

This program simultaneously allows the left to gut immigration detention while using the facade of (alternatives to) detention without tracking the aliens, while also giving money to their preferred nongovernment organizations, or NGOs, that manage the caseload.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection also would be required to transfer $800 million to FEMA-Federal Assistance. Of that, $785 million would go for emergency food and shelter to “families and individuals encountered by the Department of Homeland Security, CPB’s parent agency.

The omnibus spending bill would require Customs and Border Protection to transport more unaccompanied alien minors, whom the Biden administration continues to entice to cross the border illegally and unaccompanied.

The bill also would provide $4.2 billion to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, for enforcement, detention, and removal operations. These include more transportation of unaccompanied alien minors.

Another $11.2 million would be given to ICE to fund or reimburse other federal agencies for costs associated with the care, maintenance, and repatriation of smuggled aliens unlawfully present in the U.S.

In addition to the DHS secretary’s office and Customs and Border Enforcement’s transfer of money to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to care for illegal aliens, FEMA would directly receive $130 million from Congress for their food and shelter.

The spending bill also would extend a prohibition last year on using funds to construct border fencing in certain areas.

The omnibus would provide the Department of Health and Human Services with $6.4 billion over three years to house, assist, and educate refugees and aliens, especially unaccompanied minors.

The bill would provide an additional $27 million for the next two years if the number of unaccompanied minors exceeds 13,000 in any month. It must be noted that the number of Border Patrol encounters with such minors exceeded 13,000 a month 12 times since Biden took office Jan. 20, 2021.

9. Even More Funding for Leftist Groups Involved in Immigration

The omnibus also would provide significant money to other departments for immigration grant programs. Several of the same NGOs receiving money in the programs outlined above also receive money from these grants.

An immigration industrial complex has developed in this country and abroad and Congress needs to cease feeding it more money, including the proposed:

  • $13 million to the Department of Health and Human Services for migrant and seasonal Head Start programs.
  • $29 million to the Justice Department for services and activities provided by the Legal Orientation Program for illegal aliens.
  • $97.4 million to the Labor Department for migrant and seasonal farmworker programs, including housing.

The bill also would give $25 million to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for the Citizenship and Integration Grant Program. The NGOs that regularly receive this grant money are some of the same organizations that receive money in other grant programs cited above.

Congress has rapidly and significantly increased this grant amount. For years, it gave $10 million annually, but doubled it last year to $20 million. Now, Congress proposes to provide $25 million.

10. Rewarding CDC for Incompetence

Since March 2020, Congress repeatedly has increased funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, despite the agency’s poor response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The bill would reward the CDC for refusing to modernize its data systems—despite a statutory requirement in effect since 2006—by lavishing the agency with more money for data modernization.

The additional money for the CDC would come without holding it accountable for recommendations that schools remain closed for extended periods, that 2-year-olds wear masks, and other policies that harmed children.

The agency also escaped scrutiny for its unlawful decision to impose a moratorium on evictions and a mandate to wear masks on public transportation. Nor has Congress held the CDC accountable for misinformation in several of its published studies.

The fiscal 2019 budget authority for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was $6.5 billion. The omnibus would allocate $9.2 billion for fiscal 2023, an increase of 42% over a period during which the agency’s dysfunction became evident.

These are appropriated amounts and don’t include additional mandatory allocations. Congress may believe that money buys competence, but in the case of the CDC, that faith is misplaced.

11. Providing Self-Defeating Environmental Credits

One part of the omnibus spending bill, Section 201 of Title I, illustrates yet again the incoherence of a too-big government. The bill would create a verification and registration framework managed by the Agriculture Department for voluntary environmental credit markets.

Farmers, ranchers, and owners of private forestland would be able to generate credits to be sold for projects that “prevent, reduce, or mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.”

Given Biden’s liberal use of executive power and his campaign focus on global warming as an existential crisis—requiring an “all of government” response—it is anyone’s guess how long these programs will actually remain voluntary.

Ironically, one activity that would qualify for a credit is “prevention of the conversion of forests, grasslands, and wetlands.” It’s ironic because other federal subsidies and programs—namely the Renewable Fuel Standard and exorbitant biofuel tax credits—incentivize and indeed have caused the conversion of millions of acres into corn and soybean fields. These measures actually may increase greenhouse gas emissions.

The other irony: Expanding these programs likely would increase costs for consumers while having a negligible impact on global temperatures, regardless of one’s opinion of global warming.

When the government is working at cross-purposes with itself, perhaps it’s a sign that government has grown too big.

12. Doubling Down on Distortion of Energy Supply

The Jones Act requires that products shipped between U.S. ports be carried only on the small number of vessels that comply with the law by being U.S.-made, flagged, and crewed.

Because of the Jones Act, it’s often cheaper for states to import petroleum from other countries rather than do business with oil refineries in the U.S. It’s why what little oil the U.S. used to import from Russia was going to Northeastern states and one reason why those same states face real supply insecurity this winter.

And yet, the authors of the omnibus spending bill seem not to care about this very real crisis; shockingly, page 692 would increase barriers to waiving Jones Act restrictions in times of emergency. The bill would prevent waivers to deliver oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on non-Jones Act ships without first going through yet more paperwork to approve such a waiver by the Homeland Security, Energy, and Transportation departments.

Theoretically, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is meant for situations of severe supply disruptions and emergencies. In such a situation, the last thing victims want to hear is that fuel couldn’t arrive in time because the paperwork wasn’t done yet.

13. Increasing Funding for IRS

The so-called Inflation Reduction Act included $80 billion in new supplemental and mandatory funding for the Internal Revenue Service.

Despite that, the omnibus spending bill would leave unchanged the prior year’s level of spending in the IRS budget for enforcement and other main categories.

This would lock in the looming threat of a doubled IRS army coming for every American family and small business.

14. Providing a Chauffeur for IRS Chief

A provision in the spending bill reads:

Notwithstanding section 1344 of title 31, 17 United States Code, funds appropriated to the Internal Revenue Service in this Act may be used to provide passenger carrier transportation and protection between the Commissioner of Internal Revenue’s residence and place of employment.

15. Raiding Social Security to Fund Woke Union Agenda

The Congressional Budget Office just reported that Social Security will be insolvent by 2033.

Yet this massive spending package would allow money to be diverted from Social Security’s trust fund—and then reimbursed by taxpayers—to cover union expenses.

The trust fund also could be used to pay Social Security Administration employees to work for their union instead of performing the jobs they were hired to do for America’s seniors and retirees.

16. Using Defense Funding for Other Purposes

The defense funding levels of the omnibus generally follow the National Defense Authorization Act and would favorably affect our national defense capabilities, but they do come with the usual waste and inefficiency.

Of the additional $45 billion in aid slated for Ukraine, only 62% of it would go toward military activities. A total of $17 billion would go to economic assistance and efforts to support the Ukrainian government.

The omnibus also would direct $2 billion in defense dollars toward so-called clean energy investments. Billions more would go toward research and woke items unrelated to the military, such as implementation of recommendations from bureaucratic independent review boards.

At a time when rising autocratic powers threaten the interests of the American people, our allies, and the free world, our defense investments must be aimed at bolstering our military capabilities rather than empowering the woke, radical Left or entrenching civilian bureaucracies here and abroad.

17. Throwing Good Money After Bad at NIH, Biden Initiative

The omnibus spending bill would award the National Institutes of Health a 5.6% increase in funding, bringing the total to a whopping $47.5 billion.

And yet, NIH has been uncooperative with Congress on vital issues, including the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic and the troubling revelations about agency leadership’s response to scientific dissent on the issue of comprehensive lockdowns.

The omnibus also would give $1.5 billion to something called the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H. This Biden administration initiative is supposed to “support the development of high-impact research to drive biomedical and health breakthroughs.”

The administration’s justification? “Whereas most NIH proposals are ‘curiosity-driven,’ ARPA-H ideas would be largely ‘use-driven’ research—that is, research directed at solving a practical problem.”

If the initiative does indeed offer a more effective and promising approach, then it would make sense to take some of NIH’s current $45 billion in annual funding and redirect it to the new project. Instead, the omnibus would give $2.5 billion more to NIH (bringing its budget to $47.5 billion) and then throw another $1.5 billion at ARPA-H.

Apparently, the Biden administration and congressional Democrats don’t believe their own press releases, since they would increase funding for NIH’s current activities (which they claim are suboptimal) by more than what they would spend on ARPA-H.

18. More Wasteful Food Stamp Funding

In the omnibus spending bill, Congress has punted on real accountability for the food stamp program. The lawmakers would fully fund food stamps, including the Thrifty Food Plan increase, for fiscal 2023.

This comes just after the General Accountability Office released its final report investigating the process by which the Agriculture Department updated the Thrifty Food Plan. As GAO detailed, this update was the first “increase beyond inflation for the first time in 45 years,” resulting in an unprecedented 21% increase in food stamp benefits.

The report illustrates how a lack of documentation and transparency unilaterally increased spending for the food stamp program, also known as SNAP, by $256 billion.

The omnibus would require a report on the extent of skimming from electronic benefit transfers, in which criminals attach to point-of-sale or POS machines and PIN pads to steal from EBT cards. However, even before Congress knows the full extent of this problem, this bill would require states to provide at least two months of “replacement” benefits for recipients who simply report money “stolen” by way of EBT skimming.

Before Congress investigated the effectiveness of “Pandemic EBT,” where the Agriculture Department sent schoolchildren temporary emergency nutrition benefits loaded on EBT cards, lawmakers authorized a permanent program to send summer EBTs to families with children who qualify for free or reduced-price meals during the school year.

This massive omnibus spending bill would significantly increase the size and scope of the federal government and inflation-driving deficits, at a time when American families are suffering from a high inflation tax and the national debt is reaching record levels.

Passage of this package would advance a radical liberal policy agenda that has been rejected by voters across the country. With the next session of Congress beginning in less than two weeks, lawmakers instead should allow the House’s new Republican majority to write responsible funding bills that cut excessive spending and reflect the priorities and values of the American people.

*****

This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

Bombshells You Might Have Missed About the FBI’s Censorship and Election Meddling thumbnail

Bombshells You Might Have Missed About the FBI’s Censorship and Election Meddling

/in , , , , /by

By Adam Mill

Matt Taibbi’s analysis of FBI-related internal Twitter documents and the Missouri Attorney General’s release of the deposition transcript of FBI censor Elvis Chan have revealed shocking interference by the bureau in the most sensitive political debates leading up to elections.

As many suspected, Taibbi just confirmed the FBI meddled extensively in election-related speech on Twitter in 2020. Separately, Chan confirmed that the FBI’s election interference extended to Google and Facebook. Using a huge team of 80 agents, the joint task force of censors from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI flagged multiple posts for censorship. Taibbi offered few examples of the types of materials the FBI sought to censor. But some of the examples included obvious jokes, such as one about adding votes to the Democrats’ total in retaliation for posting negative comments on a thread.

Were these rogue agents operating in violation of the FBI’s long-standing policy against interfering in elections? It now appears that the FBI’s censorship of American citizens enjoyed the approval and ratification of FBI Director Christopher Wray himself as the FBI responded to the scandal with this dismissive remark:

The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities. Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.

Stop for a moment to parse this bureaucratic-speak. Under what authority does the FBI censor non-U.S. citizens in our domestic forums? Censorship injures the rights of the listeners as much as the speakers. Can the FBI legally prevent citizens access to Britain’s Daily Mail or the Russian media outlet RT just because they originate from a foreign source? Legal precedent suggests that the First Amendment includes guarantees of citizen’s access to foreign-based speech. This has become increasingly important because accessing foreign press is sometimes the only way to find reporting on issues that the FBI-influenced domestic media would rather not cover. Don’t we need to know what foreigners are saying about America in order to make informed election decisions?

The permanent domestic security apparatus, led by the FBI, is not terribly concerned about whether information it sought to suppress might be true. Indeed, the call to prevent a repeat of 2016-style “hack and dump,” implicitly seeks the suppression of truthful information that hurts Democrats. The Wikileaks DNC emails accurately depicted Clinton campaign collusion with the press and a pay-for-influence operation run from the Clinton family charity. If it weren’t true, there would be no need for censorship.

The government call this, “malinformation,” or sometimes, “disinformation.” The former, includes “information that is based on fact but used out of context,” while disinformation includes “information that is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate.” Truth is not a defense. Mind you, left-wing sources can call conservatives racists and Nazis all day long. But if a dissident offers information that might “harm” Democrats or “manipulate” voters into not voting in the manner approved by the FBI, then the government needs to act to “protect” the election. This is exactly why the Hunter Biden laptop story was censored. It didn’t matter whether it came from the Russians or Santa Claus. The government acted to impose an election result on the American people. Everyone knows that.

Chan all but spelled out exactly that in his deposition.

I remember that the FBI warned—that I or someone from the FBI warned the social media companies about the potential for a 2016-style DNC hack-and-dump operation . . . .

Chan saw the FBI’s role as countering the influence of such information.

Q. And I think you—in your thesis you talk about how in 2016 they had high, high levels of success, right, because there were essentially no countermeasures taken by social media platforms?

 That is correct.

The FBI’s “countermeasures”? Directly intervening to flag and encourage censorship to protect the Democratic candidate from a leak like 2016.  They called it, “information sharing,” but the tech companies read the creepy euphemism exactly as intended—encouraging censorship. If the FBI “shared” the identity of objectionable speech on a social media platform, social media complied and censored.

Back to Chan’s deposition.

Q. So—so specifically your thesis focuses on information sharing between the FBI and basically Facebook, Google and Twitter, right?

 That is correct.

Second, missing from the FBI’s statement is any acknowledgement that it bothered to consider the constitutional rights of Americans seeking to inform themselves before elections. We so often hear members of the Justice Department, which includes the FBI, tell us they have taken a sworn oath to protect the Constitution. It’s usually a response to legitimate oversight or questions about the FBI’s abuse of secrecy. But they never mean what they say or they would have a much better record on protecting free speech.

Third, the FBI did not limit its censorship efforts to foreigners (not that censoring speech originating from foreign sources is acceptable). As Taibbi notes, the censorship included posts which joked about election integrity. Are these crimes? The FBI is supposed to be a law enforcement agency, not a speech moderation (i.e. censorship) agency.

Overlooked by much of the reporting on the Chan deposition is this bombshell: The FBI appears to have also started a secret lobbying campaign to influence legislation.

Among the approximately 140 objections Justice Department attorney Indraneel Sur made during the deposition of FBI censor Elvis Chan was one that involved a particularly disturbing secret communication channel between the FBI and congressional staffers. When Chan was asked “what kind of legislation?” the FBI had made recommendations about to congressional staffers, Sur claimed the FBI had a legal right to keep secret the FBI’s legislative interference. “I am going to object,” Sur said. “The deliberative process privilege extends not just to the executive branch, but all sorts of executive communications within the government.”

Did the FBI’s legislative lobbying “relate to Section 230 of the Communications Act?” Sur refused to let Chan answer. “I stand by the same objection on the grounds of deliberative process privilege,” Sur said. “So I will continue to assert and ask that the witness not answer the question on the grounds of the deliberative process privilege.”

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Congress just signed on to an omnibus spending bill without any attempt to rein in the FBI’s election meddling.  Once again, Congress lavishes billions on the FBI with no effort to subordinate it to the constitution’s protections against intrusive law enforcement.

We also learned from Chan’s deposition that the FBI was aware that its censorship recommendations were applied to categorically similar users not identified by the FBI. How did the FBI ensure that its recommendations didn’t quash legitimate political speech? It didn’t, instead relying on Twitter to ensure the accuracy of its account takedowns.

Q. Right. OK. But it sounds like sometimes your reports lead to more takedowns than the accounts you have—you flagged, fair to say?

That is correct.

How confident are you that they are not, you know, kind of making mistakes in taking down real user accounts?

So this is just my personal opinion, obviously not based on being able to see any of their data. In my experience, they take account takedowns very seriously because this affects their bottom line. . . . in my opinion, they take it very seriously. And I would say that to the best of their ability, they are very careful before doing account takedowns.

In other words, the FBI would notify social media companies of content it found objectionable. The companies would occasionally apply the FBI’s recommendations to additional accounts that, while not flagged by the FBI, had the same characteristics that the FBI found objectionable. The only safeguard against social media overzealously applying the FBI’s censorship request is whatever miniscule loss of revenue the social media might experience from the overly broad censorship.

In many cases the FBI sought censorship of supposedly foreign-originating posts after significant engagement. In one example, highlighted in the deposition, users reacted 793 times before Twitter deleted the account that originated the post to which the FBI objected.

Q. And then those comments are people who presumably said something, whether they agree or disagree or just want to say something about this kind of political ad, fair to say?

Yeah. I don’t know what the nature of the comments are, but your characterization is probable.

The accounts—I suppose you have talked about account takedowns earlier. If this account that posted this ad is taken down, do all those comments get taken down with it?

I don’t know.

Oh, so you think that the comments may stay up with the account gone?

 I—to be honest with you, I do not use any social media.

Incredibly, Chan failed to inform himself, or even care, whether censoring a supposedly foreign-originating post would also delete the many comments and reactions by legitimate Americans expressing protected political speech. This one remark reveals volumes about the FBI’s disregard for the First Amendment.

The FBI should not be involved in “moderating” political speech. But when the FBI does violate this principle, it should be seen for what it is: a deprivation of an essential constitutional right without due process. The FBI should be required to notify the target of the censorship and provide an opportunity to that individual to contest this state action before a neutral third party.

The FBI’s censorship “recommendations” should be reported to Congress and the public. If the target of the FBI’s censorship prevails, he or she should be entitled to damages and attorneys’ fees for the loss of civic participation rights that can never be restored. Without a substantial remedy for the injured, the FBI will continue to meddle in our public speech forums to manipulate elections.

We seem to have reached a point at which the Justice Department has seized so much power that it no longer feels the need to lie about its Chinese-style censorship regime. As I’ve previously noted, international election standards require equal access to a media independent of government censorship. Without that, you can’t have a fair election. No foreign adversary could have so effectively harmed the constitutionally protected interplay between free speech and elections.

The FBI has become what it says it’s trying to prevent. It is, above all rivals and adversaries, the greatest single threat to free and fair elections.

*****

This article was published by American Greatness and is reproduced with permission.

The Bigger the Government The Smaller the Democracy thumbnail

The Bigger the Government The Smaller the Democracy

/in , , , /by

By Neland Nobel

Dennis Prager is always a source of wisdom. One of his more pithy axioms is “the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.” We would like to add a corollary. The bigger the government the smaller the space in which democracy can function.

During much of this year, we have been bombarded by Democrats about the “threat to Democracy” or “the end of Democracy” in America.

Usually, this is in the context of criticizing anyone who questions the veracity of election results or procedures, or the January 6th incursion into the US Capitol building. We only wish their concern extended beyond these narrow topics.  We think they are missing the broader crisis.

We would like to take a view from 20,000 feet. We will purposely avoid the definitional debate about a democracy versus a republic.  Our concern here is the degree to which voters can determine their own fate either directly or through their elected representatives. 

People are free when most aspects of their life and under their control, subject to their judgment, facing the consequences of their decisions based on their circumstances and their life philosophy. Democracy is really the freedom to choose, especially the freedom to choose who runs the government.

So, our working definition of democracy is the freedom to choose on the maximum level possible the terms of one’s own life, and the freedom to choose one’s government through voting.

By our definition, a country is more democratic if both individuals and their representatives largely control policy in the country. We say this recognizing our republic has a Constitution that stipulates “Congress shall make no law”, whether the majority wants it or not. There are limits to what democratic processes can do in our system.

Thus, we are a constitutional republic.

But within the confines of what voters can do, there seems to be ever-diminishing space for actual decision-making. 

Moreover, we supposedly operate in a system where the just powers of government come from the consent of those governed. However, that consent is now increasingly subject to a flawed election system.

The more actual power that voters have to decide who governs is in fact a fair measure of the degree of democracy in any given nation. If democracy is regarded as good, then most things should be controlled by “we the people” as long as they don’t violate the rights of others.

Let’s look at the budget decisions made by the US Congress. Government cannot function without money and the appropriation of funds is a key power of the House of Representatives.

It is estimated that about 85% of the current budget is in fact on “automatic pilot”. Previous decisions have erected a vast array of welfare state, pension, and medical benefits. People qualify for these benefits often just because of reaching a triggering age or income level, and thus Congress has little to say in actuality on budget matters. The partisan battles that you see are over a diminishing 15% slice of the total budget?

Is that really democratic?

We would contend it is not.  If elected representatives don’t even vote on most of the budget, how much control indirectly do citizens actually have on the process? Not much. Who has power, in reality, is the automatic pilot flying the budget, not a pilot elected by the passengers.

Younger voters never got to say how their tax dollars are being spent thus in the vast majority of programs. Two or three previous generations made the decision for them. The opinions and consent of more recent generations were never part of the process. How “democratic” is that? Does one generation have the right to impoverish another generation? Are these major budgetary items forever off limits to democratic scrutiny?

But digging a bit deeper, even the sliver of 15% we get to fight over is conducted in a way that is very undemocratic. We see it operating right now before our eyes. So-called omnibus legislation, where everything is lumped together in one giant “take it or leave it” proposition. Either voting for a lot of wasteful special interest spending or “we will close down the government” are the parameters under which the decisions will really be made. That really narrows the range of choices of our “elected representatives.”

Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs has noted the recent McConnell pact with Democrats effectively removed the leverage the House of Representatives had to investigate the abuses of both the FBI and the Department of Justice. In fact, the omnibus bill gave them both huge raises, a reward for bad behavior.

Under the current system, Congressional budgetary votes are largely symbolic. Symbolic of a system that is not democratic.

In fact, the legislation is usually introduced at one in the morning and voted on at five in the morning without anyone really having a chance even to read the legislation. The real job of legislating is actually done in secret by special interest lobbyists and party leadership.  

Thus, we have no control whatsoever over 85% of the budget, and barely any control over the remaining 15%. 

If democracy is “we the people” having much to say about what happens, then our present system cannot be regarded as very democratic, can it?

Moreover, a vast portion of our lives is determined by unelected bureaucrats that run the fourth branch of government, the regulatory agencies within the ‘administrative state’ and under the control of the Executive branch. These agencies exercise legislative, executive, and judicial functions, all without the proper division of power. We have little if anything to say about what they will order us to do.

With so much of our lives ruled by the permanent bureaucracy, it is difficult to describe this as a democracy in action. And as previously noted, with control of the budget, Congress has little power to reign in the bureaucracy.

Therefore, regulatory agencies exercise powers without the consent of the governed.

This unelected bureaucracy now extends to international organizations to which no one is elected.  We are speaking about organizations like the United Nations with their global warming agenda. This may determine our standard of living, the reliability of our electrical grid, our competitive position in the world, even the choice we have of automobiles.

The same can be said for the World Economic Forum. When is the last time you voted for Klaus Schwab or Bill Gates to lord over you or the planet?

This is a huge exercise of power over us, and we have no democratic influence on them at all.

Finally, as to the “democratic process” by which we do get to elect our representatives, the last few years have been revelatory.

Democrats pay for bogus opposition research, which is then turned into two impeachment proceedings and multiple legal actions. The FBI helps finance this bogus research and keeps an office with the law firm representing the Democrats. The FBI further lies to the FISA courts and illegally spies on a Republican campaign and a Republican administration. They even spy on Congressman Nunes and his staff, looking into their ‘abuses’!

After years of telling us Russia was interfering in our elections we find it is our own government, largely the unelected part of that government that interferes in our elections.

Lawyers who hatch these schemes get hired by social media companies, which then use their power to suppress information and influence election outcomes. The FBI actually pays millions of dollars to social media firms and employs over 80 agents to stifle our right to free speech. Even the CIA gets into the act of influencing social media.

Hundreds of former employees of our intelligence agencies get hired by social media companies, who then get subsidized by those same agencies and follow government orders. While technically  Congress “makes no law abridging the freedom of speech”, the government outsourced the violations to “private” companies, that live and die by the regulatory relationship they have with the government.

This is just one step shy of state-owned and controlled media companies.

Do you get to vote on policy for these private media partners in government?

Private companies and the government blend together under the fascist ideal and work together impervious to democratic input. Our present system would make Benito Mussolini proud.

The election process by which we choose our representative is then rigged by Federal agencies which use our own tax dollars to suppress our own democratic choices.

If our representatives actually survive that process, they don’t get to vote on much that is relevant, and that which they do get to vote on, they are not allowed to read and have little choice but to follow party leadership in giant omnibus legislation.

Meanwhile, most of our lives are determined day to day by rules and regulations written and enforced by people we neither vote for nor can fire.

No wonder there is a populist backlash building.  People feel the government is no longer listening to them because they aren’t.

The citizen is getting smaller and smaller, and the control of government is now largely out of the control of our elected representatives.

Gratitude thumbnail

Gratitude

/in , , , /by

By Bruce Bialosky

Many Americans believe that Thanksgiving is the time to express gratitude.Families go around the Thanksgiving table and talk about what they are grateful for at that particular time. Gratitude is something that should be expressed all year long. And, during the “holiday season,” even a little more.

I am truly fortunate to have realized long ago that gratitude is the most important aspect of life. You cannot be genuinely happy without first being grateful. One is most likely unhappy without gratitude. Simple as that.

You do not have to be a religiously observant person to understand the importance of gratitude. But I have found that one is more likely to be a religiously observant person if you understand the importance of gratitude.

That is part of the reason in our country the “merchants of ungratefulness” are having their day. They tell people that they are taken advantage of by our society, and they divide people into groups – you know all of them. Then they tell the people over and over again that they cannot be happy because of their gender or skin color. This serves to feed only the merchants of ungratefulness as they feed their coffers and build their ranks with disillusioned.

I believe gratitude starts with the micro and expands out to the macro.

I am grateful I wake up every day full of energy without aches and pains. I told that to one friend and he said he was just grateful to wake up every day. That made me more grateful for the other part. I am grateful I can exercise and watch a wonderful movie on my treadmill.

I am grateful for my music. I listen to a broad array of music. Most know that between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it is Christmas music only. No matter how challenged I am feeling at the time, listening to my music makes me happy and for that I am grateful.

I am grateful someone invented baseball and basketball and football and tennis and more. What a wonderful way to enjoy your life even if your favorite team does not win all the time.

I am grateful for all those people who write the books I read and the movies I watch. They enrich my life and make me a more knowledgeable and better person.

I am grateful for The Beautiful Wife every day. I am grateful there has never been a day where she did not want to see me or talk to me. Everything we do we share with each other. We have our separate activities, but then we share those with each other. What a gift we have been given.

I am grateful for my children, Sam and Hannah. They have never made me feel shame at being their father. Through every life stage from being an infant through their current adult lives they are an undeniable blessing.

Our doggies. All of them, including the ones who have gone to doggie heaven, has been such a joy. Thank you, God, for filling the world with dogs.

I am grateful for the rest of my family, my brother, and his family. My other relatives. It reminds me how wonderful and important family is beyond the immediate few.

I am grateful for all my friends. They sustain me and support me. They give me joy and share good times and challenging times with me. And they tell me they love me. To be able to have lunch with a friend and engage in a heated debate then get up and hug each other is something one just must be grateful for.

I am grateful for my clients and how so many have been with me for decades. I am grateful I have them as part of my life and that I can help them with their challenges.

I am grateful that I say on a regular basis “Yes, this is the United States of America and I get to say that.” Nothing like freedom and particularly freedom of speech.

I am grateful for the fact that my relatives moved to the United States a long time ago. It is amazingly special to live in a place where people from two hundred countries have come here to stake their fortunes. People of all creeds and religions. And we get along together like nowhere else on earth ever has. Sure, there are a few nudniks, but with over 330 million people from every corner of the earth, there is bound to be. As Americans, we can be working with someone from Indonesia and then talking to someone of Danish heritage. I am so grateful to have spent my life in this magical fairyland of a country. What a blessing.

This is just my list of some of the things that keep me grateful daily. I hope that it prodded you to reflect in thought about those things that make you grateful. And if you have not focused on the importance of gratitude in your life then I hope this helps to push you in that direction and puts a smile on your face and love in your heart.

God Bless.

DeSantis Asks for Florida Grand Jury to Investigate COVID-19 Vaccines thumbnail

DeSantis Asks for Florida Grand Jury to Investigate COVID-19 Vaccines

/in , , , , /by

By Brett Rowland

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Tuesday new actions designed to hold the federal government and pharmaceutical companies accountable for decisions related to COVID-19 vaccines.

DeSantis will establish the Public Health Integrity Committee, overseen by the state’s surgeon general, to assess federal public health recommendations and guidance. The governor also petitioned the Florida Supreme Court to impanel a statewide grand jury to “investigate crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the COVID-19 vaccine,” according to the announcement.

Further, the governor plans to look into sudden deaths of people who got a COVID-19 vaccine in Florida, based on autopsy results. The state will collaborate with the University of Florida to compare research with studies done in other countries.

“With these new actions, we will shed light on the forces that have obscured truthful communication about the COVID-19 vaccines,” Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo said in a statement.

Ladapo will oversee the Public Health Integrity Committee, which will asess federal decisions, recommendations, and guidance related to public health and health care.

“This has been a tremendously difficult time for everybody, but we are near the tail end of it, and it is time to start taking stock of what went wrong and make reforms so this doesn’t happen again,” committee member Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of health policy at Stanford University Medical School, said in a statement.

DeSantis filed a petition asking the state’s Supreme Court to put together a statewide grand jury to investigate issues around COVID-19 vaccines. The petition said that federal agencies, medical experts, and others “created an expectation that receiving a COVID-19 vaccine is an ethical or civic duty and that choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID-19 is selfish and harmful to others.”

“It is impossible to imagine that so many influential individuals came to this view on their own,” according to the petition. “Rather, it is likely that individuals and companies with an incentive to do so created these perceptions for financial gain.”

*****

This article was published by Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

Why So Many Families Are Uprooting and Fleeing to Freer States thumbnail

Why So Many Families Are Uprooting and Fleeing to Freer States

/in , , , , /by

By Kerry McDonald

Emily Burns had every intention of staying in Massachusetts. A longtime Boston resident, she, her husband, and three children left the city to settle in the upscale suburb of Newton in January 2020.

What followed were two years of ongoing disruption and frustration. Prolonged school closures and continued coronavirus policies such as mask mandates angered Burns. Initially, this mom chose fight over flight.

She announced a conservative run for US Congress, representing Massachusetts’s 4th district, a long-shot attempt in a staunchly Democratic area. Her primary issue was pushing back against COVID policies, particularly those that impacted school children. Her message resonated and Burns collected more than $100,000 in donations for her campaign in just one quarter. She was an outspoken advocate for children and families and called out the Massachusetts politicians who continue to double-down on coronavirus mandates even as elected officials elsewhere eliminate them.

Burns was recently featured in a popular article, “Revenge of the Covid Moms” on Bari Weiss’s Substack, that spotlighted mothers who are fed up with endless virus restrictions and are taking action to end them.

Ultimately, Burns had enough of fighting. This week, she terminated her political campaign and explained that she and her family are fleeing to Texas where her husband has an opportunity to open a new company office.

“My leaving is entirely predicated on what is best for my family,” Burns wrote. “My trust in the political and cultural leadership of this state is totally broken. The past two years have shown me that I cannot protect my children from the ill effects of that leadership. Given the chance to escape those malign forces, I had to take it.”

Fight or flight is a choice that more Americans are facing, especially those who live in parts of the country with continued coronavirus restrictions and the constant threat that, even if ended, those restrictions could re-emerge at any time by political decree.

Indeed, this is the topic of this week’s LiberatED podcast: Should You Move?

In the episode, I talk to homeschooling mom, Bretigne Shaffer, who left California last month for more freedom elsewhere. Like Burns, Shaffer initially tried to fight, to push back against extended COVID policies and build community with like-minded people in her area. Also like Burns, she finally got tired of fighting.

This is a national trend, as US Census Bureau data released in December showed that restrictive states such as California, Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts lost population between July 2020 and July 2021, while states with less-restrictive virus policies like Texas, Arizona, and Florida gained population during that time. Writing about these population trends for FEE, economist Peter Jacobsen explained: “Lockdowns, documentation mandates, school closings, and other COVID regulations are likely just too cumbersome for some to tolerate.”

Fight or flight is a tough choice for families, but at least it’s a choice that Americans can enjoy thanks to federalism and the ability to vote with our feet. We can choose to live in a different city or state, and select different state and local governance, due to the decentralization of power envisioned by our Founding Fathers.

As more people move to states they see as offering greater freedom and opportunity, there is some concern about political change in their new states. Could newcomers bring with them policies and perspectives that could threaten the very freedom they are seeking? FEE’s Fresh Start States project helps to prevent this through outreach and information promoting the principles of personal and economic freedom to those settling in new areas.

What if You Can’t Move?

Still, for a whole host of reasons, many families can’t or don’t want to move somewhere else. In that case, they can keep fighting. Burns has some advice for families staying put.

“Start talking about your concerns publicly–and don’t pull punches,” she told me in an interview this week. “Don’t vacillate and say things work when you think they don’t. That’s how we got stuck here. You will find more people agree with you than you think. Then, if you can, run for something, and run on these issues–lean into them. These issues shouldn’t be Republican or Democrat, so run however you feel comfortable. Talk about the things that concern you–not whatever the party line is supposed to be. Being public about it will help you find the people in your area who are sympathetic, and who will form the base of your support,” she said.

It’s a dynamic moment in the US, and many individuals and families who never before considered uprooting their life for a new one elsewhere are giving it serious thought. Perhaps you are one of them.

Listen to this week’s LiberatED podcast for more insights on this topic. You can listen here, on Apple, Spotify, Google, or wherever you get your podcasts.

*****

This article was published by FEE and is reproduced with permission.

Game-changer? Huge Revelation in Kari Lake’s Election Challenge Trial thumbnail

Game-changer? Huge Revelation in Kari Lake’s Election Challenge Trial

/in , , /by

By Matt Margolis

It was, perhaps, a small miracle that Kari Lake’s election challenge was allowed to go to trial, but the tough part still lies ahead: proving beyond a reasonable doubt (Count II) that ballot printer problems on Election Day were intentional, designed to affect the results of the election—and that they, in fact, did—and (Count IV) that additional votes were allowed to be counted in violation of the County Election Manual.

On Wednesday, Lake’s team took a huge step toward doing that.

When asked by Lake’s attorney Bryan Blehm if the county knew on Election Day how many ballots had been submitted by the voters, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer testified that they did not. According to Richer, individual polling places did not tally the number of votes cast — an apparent violation of state law.

This is significant because Lake’s lawsuit claims, among other things, that between Nov. 9 (the day after Election Day) and Nov. 11, the number of votes the county reported having counted in the election increased by nearly 25,000 — which exceeds Katie Hobbs’ alleged 17,000-vote victory.

“Highlighting the chain of custody failures … is the fact that two days after Election Day was completed, Maricopa County found more than 25,000 additional ballots, whereas properly followed chain of custody procedures would require Maricopa County election officials to know the exact number of ballots submitted by the day after Election, November 9, 2022,” Kari Lake’s attorney explained in their legal brief…..

*****

Continue reading this article at PJ Media.

Kari Lake Trial: Election Day Chaos in Maricopa County Was Enough to Change the Results, Pollster Testifies thumbnail

Kari Lake Trial: Election Day Chaos in Maricopa County Was Enough to Change the Results, Pollster Testifies

/in , , , /by

By Debra Heine

The widespread voting machine issues that caused long lines and delays in Maricopa County on Election Day “definitely impacted the outcome” of Arizona’s gubernatorial midterm election and was “substantial enough” to change the result, pollster Richard Baris testified on day 2 of the Kari Lake trial.

Republican candidate Kari Lake and her legal team claim that she would have beaten Democrat Katie Hobbs had the voting equipment failures not disenfranchised her voters on Election Day.

Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson previously dismissed eight out of the ten claims Republican candidate Kari Lake made in her lawsuit, allowing only her claims that a Maricopa County employee interfered with ballot-on-demand printers, and the county didn’t follow proper chain-of-custody procedures, to go forward.

Thompson said that she would have to prove that “the printer malfunctions caused by this individual directly resulted in identifiable lost votes,” and that those lost votes impacted the results of the election.

On Wednesday, Lake’s lawyers revealed that a review of random ballots found that 48 out of 113 (42.5 percent) were “19-inch ballots produced on 20-inch paper,” causing them to be rejected.

Clay Parikh, a witness who examined the defective ballots on behalf of the Lake campaign, testified that the discrepancy looked deliberate because someone had to have changed the printer configurations.

Baris, the director of Big Data Poll, testified under oath on Thursday that the Election Day chaos caused by the tabulator issues, disproportionately affected Republican Voters and probably affected the outcome of the election.

The pollster said that people heard about the long lines in the news and on social media, and that deterred many of them from voting.

Baris explained that it may be hard for hardcore politicos to understand, but Average Joe voters have a life, and don’t have hours to spend waiting in line to vote.

“We can conclude with a degree of mathematical certainty that this affected this chunk of voters,” he said. “Is that enough to have changed the outcome? And I am offering the opinion that that range is enough to put the outcome in doubt.”

“In my professional opinion,” he added, “this definitely impacted the outcome. The only question for me is whether it had the potential to change the result, and in my professional opinion, it did—it was substantial enough change the leader board.”

*****

This article was published by American Greatness and is reproduced with permission.

10 Steps to Save America thumbnail

10 Steps to Save America

/in , , , /by

By Victor Davis Hanson

Most Americans know something has gone terribly wrong—and very abruptly—with the United States. They are certain that our wounds are almost all self-inflicted. The current pathologies are not a result of a natural disaster, an exhaustion of natural resources, plagues, or an existential war.

Crushing national debt and annual deficits, spiraling food and fuel costs amid “normal” seven-percent-plus annual inflation, bread-and-circuses entitlements, a nonexistent border, a resurgence of racial tribalism, pandemic violent criminality, and humiliation abroad—all these pathologies are easily cited as symptoms of a sick patient. Our crises are not as the Left maintains—a nine-person Supreme Court, the Electoral College, or the filibuster—all distractions from existential problems the Left largely created.

So, what are the therapies and prognoses for America?

In the spirit of constructive rather than blanket criticism, here is a partial, 10-point plan of national recovery.

Cut the Debt

Americans’ national debt is now $31 trillion. That is about 123 percent of current GDP. The liabilities are unsustainable. We run annual deficits of $1.6 trillion. These financial obligations will eventually ensure that rising interest rates to service the debt crowd out essential spending for national defense and the general welfare.

Or in extremis, in the not too distant future, the government will be forced to default on what it owes the “rich” bondholders and foreign debt holders. Or the government will be forced to confiscate private wealth, as for example occasional crazy suggestions to nationalize and absorb 401(k)k retirement plans into the soon-to-be-insolvent Social Security system. Or the state will simply print millions of dollars to pay off obligations, Weimar-style.

In addict style, the more we come to realize that our binging habit cannot go on, the less we can practice self-restraint. And the more it is the case that those who receive government redistributions outnumber those who pay the majority of federal income taxes, the less hope there remains to avoid insolvency.

In 2010 then-President Barack Obama appointed a bipartisan “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.” More commonly remembered as the Simpson-Bowles commission, after chairmen Senators Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and Erskine Bowles (D-N.C.), it included private citizens and elected officials.

The commission recommended radical tax simplifications and some cuts—along with reductions in tax deductions and credits, an increase in the gas tax, restraints on entitlement spending, and various spending caps.

Obama and Congress ultimately rejected the recommendations and the commission’s blueprint died. But had it succeeded, the current debt would have long been frozen at the 2014 level of $17 trillion—with annual reductions ensuring that this coming year 2023 the debt would have plunged to $10 trillion and then disappeared in another decade.

Something like Simpson-Bowles could still stop the madness and avoid the natural corrective on the horizon of financial collapse. Note that federal tax revenue has increased almost every year since 2010. Sometimes it grows by nearly a half-trillion dollars per annum, even as we sink deeper in debt. Our crisis, then, is one of spending what we do not have rather than one of declining revenue.

Secure the Border

We no longer have a southern border. There have been 5 million illegal border crossings just since Joe Biden took office. He intentionally destroyed immigration law for cheap political advantage. Nearly 50 million current American residents were not born in the United States. Well over 20 million—and perhaps 30 million—are illegal aliens. Old melting-pot efforts at assimilation and integration eroded into the salad-bowl metaphor that has just become tribalism—even as intermarriage is at an all-time high.

The Left brags that “demography is destiny” as it cheers the changes in the electorate aimed at ensuring its political dominance. And simultaneously, it smears conservatives who agree with its triumphalism as “great replacement theory” conspiracists.

Yet we finally found a solution in 2019-2020. Had we continued replacing rickety border fencing with an effective wall and then completed it along the entire border, had we stopped catch-and-release, had we continued demanding that refugee status be obtained before entry, had we forced Mexico and Central American governments to stop exporting human capital and subjected them to taxes on more than $60 billion in annual remittances (along with trade penalties) for their complicity with the situation at the border, had we continued to deport those who entered illegally, had we returned to assimilation and integration on the theory any who entered America did so because they wanted to become Americans, then a desired legal, meritocratic, and diverse immigration policy might easily have assimilated and absorbed perhaps 200,000 skilled and legal immigrants per year.

Again, we had the outlines of a solution and then simply destroyed it for liberal political agendas and cheap corporate labor.

Tap Natural Resources

Similarly, by 2020, the United States enjoyed inexpensive fuel. It was all but independent in gas and oil. It had become the world largest combined gas and oil producer. That status radically curtailed the need for optional military engagements in the Middle East. It gave America enormous clout against hostile oil exporters like Russia, Iran, and Venezuela. And such independence helped reduce vast trade deficits.

Again, the Biden Administration simply exploded the idea of fossil-fuel independence as a gradual transition to sustainable energy. So simply doing the opposite of its policies would correct the pathology almost immediately: Issue more federal gas and oil leases, approve the Keystone and Constitution pipelines, reopen the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, and build nuclear power plants. The present course of high-priced and scarce gasoline and oil is eroding the middle class, spiking inflation, widening class divisions, and reducing American autonomy abroad.

Oppose Discrimination

Never has the United States seen more evidence of progress in racial relations, and never has such progress given way to more tribalism. If we do not return to a Martin Luther King, Jr. “content of our character” policy—one that views race as incidental rather than essential to who we are—then our future is a sectarian one with echoes of the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Iraq.

Affirmative action was never envisioned as permanent quotas and race-based reverse-discrimination. Yet after over a half-century it has ballooned under the idea of “diversity” to invent a victim class of nearly a third of the nation, absurdly and loosely defined—in an age of commonplace intermarriage—as “non-white.”

Help for the underprivileged should be race-neutral and entirely based on class and income, given numerous ethnicities exceed the so-called white medium income. The labyrinth of racial categories grows unfathomable. The identity politics mess logically results, on the one hand, with rank iconic frauds like Elizabeth Warren, Ward Churchill, and Rachel Dolezal, and, the other hand, with well-off poseur victims in the manner of a Meghan Markle, Colin Kaepernick, or Jussie Smollett.

Substitution of racial criteria for merit, rather than aiding the poor of all races, is creating a commissar-like drag on the economy, spiking racial and ethnic tensions, and ensuring that every group will eventually, for its survival, go tribal on the basis of the same logic that applies to nuclear proliferation. Again, the remedy? Just enforce civil rights statutes that prohibit racial discrimination and consider the Pavlovian shriek of “racism!” as the revealing projection of racists.

Disrupt and Reform Higher Education

Our universities are failing to produce competent graduates essential to a meritocratic nation engaged in fierce global competition. Increasingly, students are politicized, largely ignorant, indebted, bitter, and unable to ensure American preeminence in basic science, technology, engineering, and math.

Yet the solutions are again simple: get the government out of the student-loan business that ensures escalating tuition hikes greater than the rate of inflation. Eliminate faculty tenure and replace it with five-year contracts that require demonstrable achievement. Subject large endowments to taxation on their interest income to curb their wasted spending. Allow public schools to hire either those with school of education credentials or one-year master’s degrees that focused solely on academic study. Require standardized exit tests, in the fashion of erstwhile SAT and ACT entry tests, for the certification of the bachelor’s degree. Force universities to follow the Bill of Rights on campus, regarding due process and freedom of expression.

These are not radical suggestions. Yet the likely fierce faculty opposition to them is proof that the Left envisions higher education as it views Silicon Valley—another private monopoly that helps to maintain political power in lieu of popular support.

Revive the Armed Forces

Our military is in dire straits. It is overcommitted, under-resourced, and without any geo-political strategy other than ad hoc responses without defined objectives. It has become politically weaponized and, inevitably, unable to meet recruitment goals. The Pentagon remains obsessed with exorbitantly priced weapons that cannot be produced in sufficient numbers in an age of hostile swarms of cheap, mass-produced drones and thousands of batteries of ground-to-air and shore-to-ship missiles.

Constant profiling, racial, and gender quotas and obsessions over proportional representation and disparate impact increasingly apply to training, education, and promotion—to everything except worries over the disproportionate profile of those killed in battle. The Pentagon has become adept in publishing racial data on every aspect of military service to emphasize disparity and bias—except concerning the combat dead.

To address the changes, retiring high-ranking officers should refrain from board memberships on contracting corporations for at least five years upon leaving the military. The uniform code of military justice must be strictly enforced, including article 88 which prohibits retired officers from attacking in personal terms high-ranking elected officials, and in particular their commander-in-chief.

Woke training is destroying morale and battlefield efficacy. The military must return to a race and gender neutral stance that does not erode meritocratic standards to fit political agendas. We should never again witness a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff virtue signaling to Congress and the nation his intention to understand “white rage” in the ranks, without supplying any confirmatory evidence or data for his apparent allegation of systemic racism in the ranks—particularly not while the greatest U.S. defeat and humiliation in a half-century was unfolding on the horizon in Kabul. Any high-ranking military officer who informs his Chinese counterpart of his own psychiatric diagnosis that his commander-in-chief is unhinged and thus U.S. strategic intentions will first be relayed to Beijing should be summarily dismissed.

Fix Voting

Elections are a mess. The greatest political revolution in our election history has been the change—accelerated under the cover of COVID and the George Floyd riots—in many key states from a 20-30 percent “absentee ballot” vote to 70-80 percent early/mail-in balloting. In a mere four years we have all but destroyed Election Day voting and Election Night final tabulations as we had known them for decades.

All discussions of voter IDs, fraud, and charges and countercharges of election denialism are irrelevant if there is no real mechanism to validate the authenticity of mail-in ballots that have incomplete or false addresses, names, and signatures, or do not match registration rolls. Third-party ballot harvesting and ballot curing should be outlawed at the federal level, and we should return to the requirement of requesting absentee ballots rather than automatically sending them out. Otherwise, no future election will again win the confidence of a majority of Americans. And without trust in balloting, consensual government becomes nonexistent.

Drain the Swamp

Americans distrust the “swamp,” administrative state, or deep state. Call what you will, the Washington nexus of bureaucracies, media, and lobbyists has created a huge, unelected permanent army of auditors, regulators, investigators, and punishers, all mostly exempt from audit and accountability and without fear of their elected overseers.

The easiest solution is to break up concentrations of power. Transfer out of Washington, in this age of zoom and telecommunications, major cabinet departments like Health and Human Services, Energy, or Agriculture into the hinterland. Restore the idea that lying to Congress, feigning amnesia, or pleading ignorance under oath to Congress or federal investigators or in depositions is a prosecutable felony with jail time.

Had we restored equality under the law, then an Andrew McCabe, James Clapper, and John Brennan would not have dared lie under oath. And a Robert Mueller, James Comey, Anthony Fauci, or Jack Dorsey might have not so easily believed they simply could plead memory loss or mislead in a fashion that no American would dare to do with the IRS.

Being forced to tell the truth would be a powerful deterrent against bureaucratic overreach.

Finally, ossified centralized agencies like the FBI need to be broken up and their bureaus redistributed through the cabinet-level departments to avoid past pathologies resulting from a concentration of power.

Upend the Welfare State

The number of those receiving federal and state subsidies is beginning to match the number of those who subsidize them. “No one wants to work anymore” is now a common public lament. Inflation and recession may come and go, but workers are now scarce whether we are in boom or bust times. Labor non-participation remains at an all-time high. Soon only 60 percent of the available labor force will be working. Trillion-dollar COVID subsidies have accelerated the idea that Americans need not work full-time to maintain a living.

We can easily return to the “workfare” championed by a triangulating Bill Clinton in the 1990s that demanded healthy and able recipients to be gainfully employed upon receipt of state and federal cash. In the context of the homeless, we need to return to pre-Reagan norms of institutionalizing the mentally ill and creating hospitals and safe spaces away from American downtowns to house those who either cannot or will not take care of themselves. Defecating, urinating, injecting, and fornicating on city-streets are not victimless crimes, but assaults on civilized life as we once knew it.

Restore Norms

The fact is, few public norms are left. Rather than the current therapeutic obsessions that seek to divide Americans into binaries of oppressors and the oppressed, we are in desperate need of civic education in K-12 that acquaints all children and teens with American institutions, key events like Gettysburg or D-Day, and familiarity with the Constitution and the duties of the citizen. We will get nowhere basing our understanding of the world on psychodramas and therapeutics.

Neither journalists nor elites understand, much less appreciate, the First Amendment, and in ignorance despise the Second.

Like it or not, the nuclear family remains the bulwark of the American nation, which will not survive if current fertility rates of below 1.7 children per woman continue to diminish and age the population. The government must incentivize childbearing and child raising.

Without clear punishment for violent crimes, deterrence is lost, and the innocent become victims of the exempt criminal class. Critical race theory, critical legal theory, and critical criminology theory are euphemisms for unleashing lawbreakers upon the vulnerable. We are in a strange cycle in which we deliberately do not enforce gun laws in our cities and then when murder reaches near historic proportions we blame unenforced guns laws rather than the criminals who are exempt in using deadly weapons as the cause.

These are just a few of the many ways that the United States could stop the present madness—which, after all, was entirely self-created.

*****

This article was published by American Greatness and is reproduced with permission.

Gov.-Elect Katie Hobbs to Scrap Arizona’s Position As Top State for School Choice thumbnail

Gov.-Elect Katie Hobbs to Scrap Arizona’s Position As Top State for School Choice

/in , , , /by

By Susan Berry, PhD

When Katie Hobbs becomes Arizona’s next governor, she plans to utilize the support of teachers’ union lobbyists to undo the nation’s most expansive school choice program.

Hobbs promised on her campaign website she would be “addressing unaccountable expansion of school vouchers”:

Too often, Republicans have completely disregarded public opinion in an effort to defund our public schools. At every turn, they have moved to expand school vouchers without common-sense measures of accountability, with the clear intent to eventually do away with our local public schools. Arizona Republicans pressed forward with their latest attack on our schools by passing a law to expand school vouchers universally, a decision that 65 percent of Arizona’s voters readily rejected in 2018.

“Katie continues to oppose the universal expansion of school vouchers,” her campaign website stated. “As governor, she will work to roll back universal vouchers, which the legislature enacted against the will of voters this year. Vouchers should not have been expanded to provide an unaccountable means of enriching private schools and defunding our local public schools.”

Hobbs’ campaign promise is aligned entirely with the position of national teachers’ unions, which holds that allowing taxpayer funds to follow the child, and not the government school system, is a move to “dismantle public education,” as her website stated…..

****

Continue reading this article at The Arizona Sun Times.

How Blackrock Investment Fund Triggered the Global Energy Crisis thumbnail

How Blackrock Investment Fund Triggered the Global Energy Crisis

/in , , , , , /by

By F. William Engdahl

Most people are bewildered by what is a global energy crisis, with prices for oil, gas and coal simultaneously soaring and even forcing closure of major industrial plants such as chemicals or aluminum or steel. The Biden Administration and EU have insisted that all is because of Putin and Russia’s military actions in Ukraine. This is not the case. The energy crisis is a long-planned strategy of western corporate and political circles to dismantle industrial economies in the name of a dystopian Green Agenda. That has its roots in the period years well before February 2022, when Russia launched its military action in Ukraine.

Blackrock pushes ESG

In January, 2020  on the eve of the economically and socially devastating covid lockdowns, the CEO of the world’s largest investment fund, Larry Fink of Blackrock, issued a letter to Wall Street colleagues and corporate CEOs on the future of investment flows. In the document, modestly titled “A Fundamental Reshaping of Finance”, Fink, who manages the world’s largest investment fund with some $7 trillion then under management, announced a radical departure for corporate investment. Money would “go green.” In his closely-followed 2020 letter Fink declared,

“In the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant re-allocation of capital…Climate risk is investment risk.” Further he stated, “Every government, company, and shareholder must confront climate change.” [i]

In a separate letter to Blackrock investor clients, Fink delivered the new agenda for capital investing. He declared that Blackrock will exit certain high-carbon investments such as coal, the largest source of electricity for the USA and many other countries. He added that Blackrock would screen new investment in oil, gas and coal to determine their adherence to the UN Agenda 2030 “sustainability.”

Fink made clear the world’s largest fund would begin to disinvest in oil, gas and coal.  “Over time,” Fink wrote, “companies and governments that do not respond to stakeholders and address sustainability risks will encounter growing skepticism from the markets, and in turn, a higher cost of capital.” He added that, “Climate change has become a defining factor in companies’ long-term prospects… we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.” [ii]

From that point on the so-called ESG investing, penalizing CO2 emitting companies like ExxonMobil, has become all the fashion among hedge funds and Wall Street banks and investment funds including State Street and Vanguard. Such is the power of Blackrock. Fink was also able to get four new board members in ExxonMobil committed to end the company’s oil and gas business…..

*****

Continue reading at Global Research.

BREAKING: Kari Lake Trial Reveals 42.5% of Randomly Examined Ballots Were Improper thumbnail

BREAKING: Kari Lake Trial Reveals 42.5% of Randomly Examined Ballots Were Improper

/in , , , /by

By Collin Rugg

According to Republican governor candidate Kari Lake’s legal team, 42.5% of examined ballots in Maricopa County for the 2022 governor’s race were illegitimate. Lake’s trial began on Wednesday were she is attempting to prove that wide scale fraud took place in Maricopa County on election day.

The Lake War Room tweeted on Wednesday that 48 of the 113 ballots that were reviewed during examination were “19-inch ballots produced on 20-inch paper.”

“This one-inch discrepancy caused chaos on Election day causing the mass rejection of these votes as they were attempted to be read through the tabulators,” the Kari Lake War Room tweeted.

In a separate tweet, the Lake War Room wrote, “This is how they disenfranchised Maricopa County voters on Election Day. The ballots were designed to be unable to be read through the machines. This wasn’t an error. It was malice. The process worked exactly as they intended it to.”

One commenter on Twitter noted that there was no way the improper ballot size could have been because of “error.”

“The expert testified there are only 2 ways for the 19 inch image to have been projected onto the 20 inch ballot which would cause tabulator errors. Both methods require an administrator to change. This could not have happened by chance or error. It was fraud.”…..

*****

Continue reading this article at Trending Politics.

Rapid Factory Growth in Arizona Led by Record-Breaking Commerce Authority Effort thumbnail

Rapid Factory Growth in Arizona Led by Record-Breaking Commerce Authority Effort

/in , , , /by

By Carly Moran

Last week, two technology companies announced new factories in Arizona, leading to over 500,000 total private sector jobs created by the Arizona Commerce Authority under Gov. Doug Ducey.

These three factories are a part of over a dozen manufacturing companies that announced their expansion in Arizona this year. In total, over 15,000 manufacturing jobs have been created under the Ducey Administration’s ACA since January 2015.

“The Governor’s tenure has been transformational for our state,” said Sandra Watson, CEO of the Arizona Commerce Authority. “With his leadership, the right business environment, and a thriving innovation ecosystem, Arizona has become an international hub of advanced manufacturing, bringing new opportunities for small businesses and rural communities across our state.”

The ACA includes aerospace and defense, bioscience, technology and manufacturing as its targeted industries. The rapid factory development in Arizona is only a small piece of the state’s innovation at work.

One of the two companies that announced new locations in Arizona is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, hoping to return semiconductor production to the United States. The business seeks to build two plants in Phoenix, one by 2024 and the other by 2026.

“When complete, TSMC Arizona aims to be the greenest semiconductor manufacturing facility in the United States producing the most advanced semiconductor process technology in the country, enabling next generation high-performance and low-power computing products for years to come,” said TSMC Chairman Dr. Mark Liu. “We are thankful for the continual collaboration that has brought us here and are pleased to work with our partners in the United States to serve as a base for semiconductor innovation.”

Production of the two facilities is estimated to create 10,000 tech jobs and employ an additional 10,000 construction workers. The project is a $40 billion investment in the Valley of the Sun, with an estimated 600,000 wafer per year output.

The American Battery Factory was the other company to push Arizona to create 500,000 jobs. The group has plans to build a $1.2 billion lithium ion factory in Tucson, with the goal of 1,000 jobs on-site.

“With this first factory, we will secure a strategically positioned company headquarters while taking the critical first steps in making it possible to one day move the country and the entire world to 100% renewable power,” said Paul Charles, CEO of ABF. “We are honored to start this journey in Tucson and give back to the community through innovation, quality job creation, revenue generation and environmental protection.”

The nearly 2 million square foot campus will be the largest gigafactory in lithium iron phosphate production and is the first to break ground in a series of ABF locations nationwide.

“When we took office, our economy was broken, and fixing it was a top priority,” said Governor Ducey. “The engine of our economic growth has always been our people. Today, Arizonans have access to abundant jobs as well as the opportunity to work in good-paying industries with the potential for advancement. With this kind of momentum and our incredible talent, Arizona is unstoppable.”

*****

This article was published by The Center Square – Arizona and is reproduced with permission.

FBI Promised ‘No Impediments’ To Data Sharing With Twitter Before 2020 Election, Internal Docs Show thumbnail

FBI Promised ‘No Impediments’ To Data Sharing With Twitter Before 2020 Election, Internal Docs Show

/in , , , , /by

By John Hugh Demastri

The FBI promised that there were “no impediments to information sharing” between itself and Twitter in a Sept. 16, 2020 meeting with Twitter legal executive Stacia Cardille, according to internal documents published by journalist Matt Taibbi Friday.

Cardille reported the promise to then-Deputy General Counsel James Baker — a former FBI lawyer who was instrumental in securing approval for the surveillance of former Trump campaign aide Carter Page using information from the discredited Steele dossier — in an email sent following the meeting, according to Taibbi. Cardille also expressed dismay that Twitter’s Public Policy account tweeted about the meeting without first consulting the legal team.

The policy team’s tweets mention that the collaboration was working with the government to address the impact of COVID-19 on the election — something that Cardille does not mention in her email. Cardille tells Baker that the meetings are soon set to become weekly, but no further tweets from the policy team during that election cycle mention meeting with government agencies.

“The FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities,” the FBI said in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Private sector entities independently make decisions about what, if any, action they take on their platforms and for their customers after the FBI has notified them.”

The relationship between the FBI and Twitter appeared to remain in some capacity as recently as Nov. 10, 2022, when the agency reached out to notify Twitter of four accounts that “may potentially constitute violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service,” according to Taibbi. One of the accounts, @fromMA, which regularly posts anti-Republican and anti-Trump comments, was brought to Twitter’s attention for jokingly reminding Republicans to vote “Wednesday November 9,” while Election Day was actually Nov. 8, Taibbi reported.

Although the @fromMA account remains active, the tweet that caught the attention of the FBI appears to have been deleted. Taibbi noted that all four accounts, including @fromMA, were suspended.

The FBI forwarded the names of 25 accounts to Twitter on Nov. 6, 2022, with Twitter taking action against 17 of them, Taibbi reported. The Twitter account for the pro-Trump Right Side Broadcasting Network and actor Billy Baldwin were the only high-profile accounts on the list, and neither had actions taken against them.

Taibbi’s report comes after Twitter CEO Elon Musk temporarily suspended eight journalists from the platform, amid allegations that they were endangering the safety of him and his family for sharing his location on the platform. Several news outlets whose journalists were suspended disputed these allegations, with the Washington Post’s Executive Editor Sally Buzbee saying in a statement to the Daily Caller News Foundation that the suspensions undermined “Elon Musk’s claim that he intends to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech.”

*****

This article was published by The Daily Caller and is reproduced with permission.

STAY INFORMED

Receive regular news, commentary, and analysis straight to your inbox.

POWERED BY

DrRichSwier.com | ThePricklyPear.org

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.