Social Determinants of Health: A Trojan Horse thumbnail

Social Determinants of Health: A Trojan Horse

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By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

Yesterday, I told you how government healthcare programs are getting bigger and how this is the wrong direction for the country.  I also mentioned a relatively new theory from the Left – social determinants of health [SDOH] – that is about to make government healthcare programs even bigger.

Social determinants of health is the idea that social factors like housing, income, and employment have more to do with a person’s health than do individual risk factors like behavior and genetics.  So, if you give poor people free housing, free food, free employment services, free education, free transportation, other free services, and guarantee their income, their health will get better.  This will reduce hospital admissions, as well as overall health spending, the theory goes.  At least that’s the cover story.  The real agenda is radical egalitarian redistribution of income.  But the theory sounds good.  It sounds right.  It sounds plausible.  However, there’s just one problem.  There’s very little evidence for this happy-face assertion.  Billions have already spent on the theory, but the track record of real-world results is not good.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped the government from rushing pell-mell into social determinants of health and into the arms of the people pushing it.  The Biden administration recently announced it is giving states discretion to cover social services under their Medicaid programs.

No one is asking how much this is going to cost.  The federal deficit is already $421 billion for the current fiscal year which began in October.  Sorry, but Uncle Sugar doesn’t have unlimited pots of money.  If the true agenda is redistribution, how much more do you think there is to get with a deficit like that?   Would we even be talking about spending money on social determinants of health if we had to balance our budget?    Also, no one is asking about the downsides.  Nothing in life is perfect.  Shouldn’t lawmakers be informed of the negative consequences before being asked to vote on such a thing?  And speaking of Congress, this sounds like a major change that cannot be done by agency regulation alone under recent Supreme Court jurisprudence.  So where is Congress on this?  Are they falling down on the job again by not reining in agencies from committing us to huge new expenditures without congressional authorization?  Why am I the only one asking these questions?

Tax-exempt hospitals spent $2.5 billion on social determinants of health – housing, employment, education, and food security – from 2017 to 2019.  They are obligated to provide community benefit in exchange for their tax exemptions.  But their spending on social determinants initiatives has fallen off more recently because the evidence such initiatives are effective is limited, a study found.  Another study found social spending reduces unnecessary healthcare use but the costs outweigh the benefits.  Other researchers found no association between overall community benefit spending and hospital readmission rates.  These researchers concluded “the evidence for health outcome improvements from interventions focused on social determinants is thin…. This is very little evidence on which to base billions in investment….”  The study concluding the costs outweighed the benefits found $3.4 million in healthcare savings after $22.4 million was spent on a social determinants case management program.  Costs running seven times bigger than the savings – doesn’t sound like a smart investment to me.

This begs the question: if the evidence is so thin and even counter to what proponents claim, why proceed?  Why is the federal government itching to spend more money on social determinants of health?  Especially when social determinants theory has been criticized for ignoring the importance on health outcomes of personal choices and responsibility regarding alcohol, tobacco, junk food, drugs, and gambling.  Moreover, in a previous commentary, I criticized social determinants theory for ignoring the magnet effect of free stuff from the government drawing ever-larger numbers of people into government dependency.  Wrong direction.

The current administration has made no bones about working towards ‘equity’, ensuring equal outcomes, and redistribution.  Social determinants of health theory – which comes from the redistributionist World Health Organization – is tailor-made for the Biden administration’s goals, whether the theory makes any sense or not.

In making its announcement states can add social determinants to their Medicaid programs, the administration said it will require states to show their social outlays are cost-effective, something the research has failed to show convincingly, so far.  Whether the administration really means it is anybody’s guess, but Republicans on Capitol Hill need to police this to make sure the analysis is on the up and up and to shut the initiative down if it turns out it’s just another redistributionist boondoggle without any real benefit, aside from making redistributionists feel good about being so virtuous in giving away other people’s money.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

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Tentacles of Government Healthcare Extending Their Reach

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By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

Government healthcare programs are getting bigger, and we are not better off for it.  Things are trending in the wrong direction.

First, we have recent news nearly 100 million Americans – one in three – are now on Medicaid.  Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion for childless able-bodied adults transformed Medicaid from a poverty program into a middle-class entitlement.  Build it and they will come.  In my own state of Virginia, for example, Democrats promised Medicaid expansion enrollment would never exceed 400,000.  It now stands at more than 700,000 – 75 percent over worst-case projections.  In other states, enrollment was double or even quadruple estimates – 110 percent beyond estimates overall.  Another reason Medicaid rolls have ballooned is the COVID emergency that never ends.  The federal government told states ‘we’ll throw a bunch of money at you for Medicaid during the pandemic but, oh, by the way, you can’t take anybody off your rolls, even if they become ineligible.’  Joe Biden just extended the COVID emergency declaration to April, so this state of affairs will persist at least a while longer, leaving an estimated 20 million ineligible people on the rolls.  You are paying for them.

Second, U.S. government healthcare is also getting bigger because Obamacare subsidies got super-sized some months ago.  The jumbo subsidies have lured more people to sign up for Obamacare, understandably.  More on that on another day.

Third, the so-called Obamacare ‘family glitch’ was addressed, making five million more Americans on employer-based coverage eligible for Obamacare.

The growth of government-run healthcare shows up in the smaller share consumers actually pay out of pocket for healthcare expenses.  Between private insurance and government healthcare programs, people directly pay in aggregate only 10 percent of the cost of the medical services they consume.  It’s 90 percent a third-party payer system, now, which is too bad, because being insulated from true costs incentivizes consumers to over-consume, distorting the market.  Another distortion is the growth in the number of administrators – all the people needed to administer third-party payments and deal with red tape – which far exceeds the growth in the number of physicians.

These inefficiencies are only the start of why all of this is the wrong direction.  Hate to break it to you but, contrary to what Democrats would have you believe, government-run healthcare is not all it’s cracked up to be.

The growth in government healthcare imposes enormous costs.  Annual Medicaid spending increased by $198 billion during the pandemic, about as much Medicaid spending grew from 2012 to 2019.  Jumbo Obamacare subsidies were initially estimated to cost $22 billion for two years, but the figure is actually $50 billion.

Medicare dragged its feet on providing drug coverage even though private insurers had long since discovered such coverage, in general, gives more bang for the buck than doctor or hospital therapies.  Among other problems with Medicare include paying for small expenses while leaving seniors exposed to catastrophic costs, and sticking it to seniors with high drug costs while subsidizing those with low drug costs.

People who believe in government healthcare like it was a religion or something should look at the latest sins of the VA.

A VA hospital in Florida denied treatment to a veteran dying of heart failure because first responders could not verify his military service, in violation of federal law.  The VA hospital in Spokane injured 148 veterans when its computer system failed to deliver 11,000 orders for specialty care, lab work, and other services and, further, failed to alert staff the orders had been lost.  Despite all the publicity about long wait times at VA hospitals, the problem is growing worse after initially improving.  An Inspector General report found $4 billion in employee or contractor embezzlement, kickbacks, theft, and other wrongdoing.  There were 104 arrests and 500 administrative actions taken to address these problems in just the first half of 2022 alone.  One kickback scheme involved 17 doctors, two executives, and millions of dollars in penalties.

Unfortunately, too many people still love government healthcare and it’s poised to get even bigger under a left-wing theory called ‘social determinants of health’.  More on that tomorrow.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

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If I Wanted To Reshape The World To Have Fewer People →

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By Vlad Tepes Blog

It occurs to me that our failings in the past decades all have one thing in common. We consistently and with a flawless record, fail to think as big as the people creating the problems facing us. That is to say, when we oppose a line of effort against us, we always treat the problem or issue as presented. When in fact it’s larger, and part of a much bigger planed assault on ourselves.

Take Global Warming.

There are a few layers of opposition. Those who know the science is fabricated and argue the science and try and get people to understand that Global Warming by man’s actions simply isn’t a real thing. That has nearly no chance of succeeding, but its one level of activism people can do.

Then, there are those who think Global Warming is a dialectic device to take control of especially Western industrial man using control of CO2 production as a means of ending productivity, or at least being in full control of it. One may notice that no alternatives to create of energy, such as nuclear or other means can be allowed. Only the problem of CO2 must remain in the forefront as a means to shape the future. Even when there are multiple ways to create the needed energy without producing it. Bad solutions, like electric cars are encouraged. Sorry, not bad solutions, things that kinda sorta look like solutions but actually make no difference or add to the problem and create new ones.

But a real psychopath might take it to the next level.

Imagine being so committed to the idea that the world has too many people on it that you needed to embark on a serious plan to reduce the world’s population.

Imagine that you had convinced enough people that the world was warming, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to the point that no one would interfere with a plan to geo-engineer the atmosphere to block out solar radiation for a time that would significantly cool the Earth.

Imagine that you had managed to get millions of people from warm parts of the Earth to move to cooler parts, even though it would multiply their carbon footprint by a factor of FOUR and the resources needed for life are far greater for each individual in say, Canada than in Namibia.

Imagine that the people doing the geo-engineering to “solve Global Warming” know damn well it isn’t happening. They would also then know that a warmer Earth means more food and more plant life and more animal life. Especially if the level of CO2 goes up a few more parts per billion.

So what would happen to the available food supply if the temperature of the Earth’s most productive growing regions fell by a few degrees?

RELATED VIDEO: Frederik Jansen on the Frankfurter Schule – The Laughland Report

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column published by   is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Blue States Attempted To Crackdown On Guns. Firearm Sales Skyrocketed Instead

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By The Daily Caller

Blue states have recently introduced restrictive gun laws that aim to remove firearms from the streets, but numerous states are now seeing massive increases in gun sales as Americans begin to “vote with their wallets,” according to data from the Firearm Industry Trade Association (NSSF).

Gun sales in Oregon, Washington and Illinois jumped either before or after legislators introduced or passed restrictive gun measures, according to National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) data adjusted by the NSSF. The number of gun sales per month in each state was based on the number of firearm background checks performed by NICS.

‘Threats, and actual legislation to limit the right of law-abiding citizens to own the firearm of their choosing, does have an effect on firearm sales,” NSSF Public Affairs Managing Director Mark Oliva told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

In November, Oregon residents narrowly passed Ballot Measure 114, a gun law that requires background checks, firearm training, fingerprint collection and a permit to purchase a gun. Following the law’s passing, background checks jumped from 29,472 in October to 86,075 in November, according to NSSF data obtained by the DCNF.

“Oregon’s figures easily demonstrate that Oregonians acted while they had the opportunity to buy the guns of their choice before the state moved to infringe on their Constitutional rights,” Oliva told the DCNF.

In March 2022, Democratic Washington Gov. Jay Inslee signed three gun laws that restrict gun usage, including where guns can be carried, how to handle firearms without serial numbers and what kinds of magazines can be made and sold, according to The Spokesman-Review. After signing the laws, background checks jumped from 39,247 in February to 59,419 in March, according to the NSSF data.

In December 2022, Inslee announced additional gun control legislation that would ban “assault-style” weapons, hold manufacturers and retailers accountable for gun sales and implement a permit-to-purchase requirement for all gun buyers, according to a press conference.

“We intend in this session of the legislature to give Washingtonians assertive, effective and protective laws to protect them and their children against this epidemic of gun violence,” Inslee said.

Background checks in Illinois were at 33,326 in November, jumping to 42,305 in December, according to NSSF data.

“Every time new restrictions on firearms ownership are enacted we always see a spike in gun sales. The gun prohibition lobby is the best gun salesman out there. When people’s Second Amendment rights are attacked they respond by exercising them,” Second Amendment Foundation Founder Alan Gottlieb told the DCNF.

Firearm Sales Spiked in Illinois Before Gun Control Law Took Effect https://t.co/hV3Z2JNpPd

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) January 12, 2023

In January, Illinois passed a ban on “assault weapons” that went into effect immediately. The law banned more than 100 guns that were deemed “weapons of war” and limited magazine capacity to 10 rounds for long guns and 15 rounds for handguns, according to the legislation. However, the law states that gun owners can keep any firearm purchased before the ban took effect.

Leading up to the law’s passing, background checks climbed from 33,318 to 51,301 over a three-month period, according to NSSF data. “There’s been quite a rush of people trying to get in under the wire,” Maxon Shooter’s Supplies Owner Dan Eldridge told the Illinois Newsroom.

“Obviously, the law-abiding gun owners are concerned. And they’re voting with their wallets,” he continued.

AUTHOR

BRONSON WINSLOW

Contributor.

RELATED ARTICLE: Gun Sales Jump In Oregon With 36,000 People Waiting On Delayed Background Checks

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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U.S. Coast Guard Apparently Had Pre-Written Denials For Vaccine Exemption Requests, Docs Show

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By The Daily Caller

  • Coast Guard documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation appear to show canned justifications commanders can cut and paste into vaccine exemption requests, experts told the DCNF.
  • Existence of the statements suggests the Coast Guard may have violated requirements to consider the unique circumstances surrounding each request, experts said.
  • “It is very easy for a commander to have a closed mind when there is a pre-written language presented to them in draft form,” Dwight Stirling, former military attorney and founder of the Center for Law and Military Policy, explained to the DCNF.

The Coast Guard had pre-written justifications for denying COVID-19 vaccine exemption requests, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Justifications in the document differ according to the position each Coast Guard member requesting an exemption occupied and where he or she was stationed, but each of the 30 listed follows a similar pattern of highlighting the operational requirements for each position and explaining why vaccination is necessary. The DCNF could not determine exactly how those in charge of deciding exemption cases applied each justification to individual requests, but the document indicates they failed to consider the unique circumstances of each applicant, a violation of Coast Guard policy and U.S. law, experts told the DCNF.

“All the commander needs to do is sign the memo and the matter is finished,” Dwight Stirling, former military attorney and founder of the Center for Law and Military Policy, explained to the DCNF.

Coast Guard policy aimed at protecting First Amendment rights requires leaders to individually review each vaccine exemption request, and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act says armed forces must demonstrate a “compelling interest” in overruling religious accommodations.

Mike Rose, general counsel for Stand Together Against Racism and Radicalism in the Services, said he could not confirm whether the document was used to help the Coast Guard violate policy. However, he agreed that it appears to contain pre-written statements “designed to be applied automatically to each individual Coast Guardsmen based on the nature of their assignment.”

“I also considered that you are assigned to an operational billet,” reads one of the justifications, directed at a cook aboard CGC Angela McShan. “Your duties as the senior Culinary Specialist requires frequent interactions with the entire crew in smaller, enclosed spaces that do not afford the opportunity to consistently social distance in accordance with the Center for Disease Control’s recommended guidelines.”

The document contains a separate section labeled “COVID-19 and Other Requests” with responses to multiple religious exemptions related to the COVID-19 vaccine listed below.

The first response addresses Coast Guard members’ request to be exempt from all future vaccines developed from mRNA or viral vector technology, which are used in the top COVID-19 vaccines.

“The Coast Guard cannot predict which vaccines in the future will be mandated and of those which will be developed with mRNA or viral vector technology. Therefore, because of the broad nature of your request, it is denied,” the document reads, with “it is denied” in boldface type.

The document also contains language for commanders denying religious exemptions to any COVID-19 vaccine: “I am the adjudication authority for religious accommodation requests pursuant to reference (d),” it reads.

“I have carefully reviewed your request in accordance with references (d)-(f). Your request is denied,” it concludes, also with the final sentence in boldface.

The document does not contain any language that would seem to approve an exemption request.

Of 1,350 religious accommodation requests received since the mandate came into effect in August 2021, the Coast Guard approved 12, along with eight permanent medical exemptions, a Coast Guard spokesperson told the DCNF.

“Giving commanders suggested reasons to consider that might justify denying an exemption from the vaccine in an individual case might not be wrong and could be justifiable legal advice,” Rose told the DCNF. “What would be wrong and impermissible would be to deny an exemption without regard to the individual circumstances and to use the pre canned statements to justify those denials.”

Military lawyers often cut and paste from memos or briefs, Stirling explained.

“While we don’t know whether the Coast Guard commanders pre-judged the exemption cases before them, it would not be shocking to learn that they did so,” he said. “From my experience, it is very easy for a commander to have a closed mind when there is a pre-written language presented to them in draft form.”

House Oversight Committee Republicans confirmed the document’s authenticity, saying they had obtained a similar document, but did not respond to further questioning about its contents. The document’s metadata says it was created in August 2022.

🚨@RepJamesComer, @Rep_Clyde & Oversight Republicans probe @USCG‘s failure to provide due process to members requesting religious exemptions to the COVID vaccine mandate.

They denied nearly every applicant seeking an exemption.

We need answers. https://t.co/3lbk9jVa6E

— Oversight Committee (@GOPoversight) October 18, 2022

The Coast Guard fell under scrutiny after an investigation by members of the Oversight Republicans found that the Coast Guard used a computer-based tool, consisting of drop-down menus with premade answers for sections of the appeal response form, to issue mass denials of religious accommodations, Fox News first reported.

However, lawmakers alleged that the Coast Guard deliberately stood up the exemption request review system “to reach predetermined conclusions with the goal of rejecting applications” in a letter to Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Linda Fagan.

“Every request received individualized review and analysis in accordance with law and Coast Guard policy,” a Coast Guard spokesperson told the DCNF.

The Department of Defense (DOD) officially nullified the military vaccine mandate Tuesday; while the Coast Guard operates under the Department of Homeland Security, it has followed DOD guidance related to COVID-19.

AUTHOR

MICAELA BURROW

Reporter.

RELATED ARTICLE: Court Decides Air Force ‘Wrongly’ Dismisses Religious Exemption Requests From Unvaxxed Airmen

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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Why Banning Gas Stoves Is Not a Serious Way to Fight Climate Change

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By Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

In July, in an effort to combat global warming, Berkeley, California, became the first city in the United States to prohibit natural gas in new buildings, including residential homes.

“We need to tackle climate change every way that we can,” said Berkeley City Councilwoman Kate Harrison, who led the effort.

Other cities, including Sacramento, Los Angeles, and San Jose, are developing their own policies in what appears to be the latest trend to save the planet. But does banning gas for heating and cooking in residential developments make sense?

Lawmakers and environmental activists often overlook important issues.

Assuming that people will continue to cook their meals at home and that exotic solutions such as sun-powered grills are exercised by a tiny fraction of the population, people will still need devices that heat their pots and pans for cooking.

On a gas stove, you burn natural gas to heat the water for your tea. In the case of an electric stove, you burn natural gas (or coal, oil, or biomass) in a power plant to heat water that turns turbines that produce electricity that heats the stove that heats the water for your tea. Simple physics reminds us that as energy passes from one state of matter to another, energy loss is inevitable. Burning gas to make electricity is only about 40 percent efficient, on average.

The environmental effect of switching from gas stoves to electric stoves depends largely on how the electricity is produced. If your electricity comes from renewable sources, there is greater potential for shrinking your carbon footprint. If your electricity comes from coal-powered plants that don‘t capture carbon dioxide, then switching could be worse for the environment since coal produces more carbon dioxide emissions than natural gas.

In 2018, about 17 percent of electricity produced came from renewables, with 35 percent coming from natural gas, 27 percent coming from coal, and 19 percent coming from nuclear.

Given current U.S. electricity production, if you banned natural gas stoves across the country, only two out of ten would be powered by renewable energy—the remaining eight would be powered by electricity generated from coal (three), nuclear (two), and natural gas (three).

California produces about 44 percent of its electricity from renewables, so swapping natural gas for electricity makes more sense there than, say, Florida, where renewables generate just three percent of the state’s electricity.

There are other problems, however. Take peak demand. Electric heating usually uses a lot of energy—to such an extent that British grid operators need to predict when a major soccer match ends so that they can ramp up production at tea time, when millions of Brits plug in electric kettles. (This is less of a problem today because of on-demand streaming.)

What this means is that even if electricity from renewables increased substantially, due to the intermittent nature of wind and solar power, you might end up in a situation where gas-powered electricity production plants are working overtime during peak demand. This is an issue that electric grid operators face on a daily basis.

While cooking is far from the main consumer of electricity, a mass switch from cooking on gas to cooking on electricity could add stress to the system. Moreover, if bans extend from cooking on gas to heating homes with gas, the problems would likely be even more severe.

Of course, in some cases, especially where natural gas infrastructure is not in place, cooking with electricity from the grid might make more sense than expensive new investments in natural gas pipelines. But if operational pipelines are already there, banning gas is a poor use of resources.

To be sure, these issues are not unsolvable. Smart grids, better planning and forecasting, more efficient methods to store and release electric power (think giant batteries or hydroaccumulation plants), superior electric stoves, and better technology in general might solve some or all of these problems. But banning gas-powered stoves before this better technology has arrived is similar to banning horses before cars had been invented.

Some say bans on cooking with natural gas is a symbolic gesture. Indeed. But it is the worst kind of symbol—one designed to make people feel good rather than do good. An outright blanket ban on natural gas in homes, especially if extended throughout the country, would make little environmental sense—and no economic sense.

Frankly, such ill-conceived gestures undermine the good faith efforts of those seeking to pass sound environmental policy.

This article originally appeared in the Washington Examiner. 

AUTHOR

Zilvinas Silenas

Zilvinas Silenas is the president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).

EDITORS NOTE: This FEE column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Federal Aviation Administration Grounds All Domestic U.S. Flights

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By The Daily Caller

All domestic flights in the U.S. were grounded overnight Wednesday into the morning due to a technical error. Some flights gradually started to resume shortly before 9:00 am (eastern time).

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) worked overnight to restore a system that allows air traffic control to alert pilots when there are potential hazards on their flight path. Normal air traffic operations resumed just before 9am on Tuesday while agents continued to look into the original cause of the issue, according to an update from the FAA.

Update 4: The FAA is making progress in restoring its Notice to Air Missions system following an overnight outage. Departures are resuming at @EWRairport and @ATLairport due to air traffic congestion in those areas. We expect departures to resume at other airports at 9 a.m. ET.

— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) January 11, 2023

“We are performing final validation checks and reloading the system now. Operations across the National Airspace System are affected,” the FAA wrote on Twitter. “We will provide frequent updates as we make progress.”

Roughly an hour after their initial tweet, the FAA sent an update to followers, announcing that the agency had “ordered airlines to pause all domestic departures until 9am Eastern Time,” to allow for research to be done on the “integrity of flight and safety information.”

Cleared Update No. 2 for all stakeholders: ⁰⁰The FAA is still working to fully restore the Notice to Air Missions system following an outage. ⁰⁰While some functions are beginning to come back on line, National Airspace System operations remain limited.

— The FAA ✈️ (@FAANews) January 11, 2023

Delays for arriving and departing domestic flights are likely to be substantial Wednesday, just a few short weeks after a significant winter bomb cyclone disrupted tens of thousands of flights through the holiday season.

Twitter users were quick to express concerns over the total shutdown of domestic travel, with the CEO of Evercontact writing, “This is alarming. There should be an independent audit on such a large-scale incident. Is it due to obsolete equipment? is it a hack? Human error? Accountability is key to restoring trust in an industry that can’t allow mistakes!”

The FAA then retweeted a post from White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, who noted that “there is no evidence of a cyberattack at this point, but the President directed the Department of Transportation to conduct a full investigation into the causes.” She furthered that the FAA would continue to provide regular updates.

AUTHOR

KAY SMYTHE

News and commentary writer.

RELATED ARTICLE: Amtrak Trolls Southwest Airlines For Highly Questionable Free Ukulele Giveaway

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

Elite University Department Bans Use Of Word ‘Field,’ Claiming It’s Too Racist thumbnail

Elite University Department Bans Use Of Word ‘Field,’ Claiming It’s Too Racist

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By The Geller Report

Last week, it was American that was racist, now this. These people are nuts. Evil and nuts.

Elite University Department Bans Use Of Word ‘Field,’ Claiming It’s Too Racist

Elite University Department Bans Use Of Word ‘Field,’ Claiming It’s Too Racist

By: Alexa Schwerha, Daily Caller, on January 10, 2023

The University of Southern California (USC) Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work will no longer use the world “field” in its curriculum or its practices as part of its anti-racist framework, according to an email reportedly sent Monday.

The school reportedly stripped the word from use due to alleged ties to “anti-Black” and “anti-immigrant” rhetoric, according to the email sent by the Practicum Education Department to the campus community, faculty, staff and students. The school informed that the word “practicum” would be used instead to “ensure [its] use of inclusive language and practice.”

“This change supports anti-racist social work practice by replacing language that could be considered anti-Black or anti-immigrant in favor of inclusive language,” the email reportedly reads. “Language can be powerful, and phrases such as ‘going into the field’ or ‘field work’ may have connotations for descendants of slavery and immigrant workers that are not benign.”

Today, @uscsocialwork sent out this letter announcing that they will no longer use the word “field” (as in “conducting field work”) because it’s perceived as racist. Is this with merit or empty virtue signaling? @elonmusk @IngrahamAngle pic.twitter.com/kgM9p4MAb5

— Houman David Hemmati, MD, PhD (@houmanhemmati) January 10, 2023

Keep reading.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED ARTICLES:

Saying ‘American’ Is Now RACIST and Stanford University’s List of Other UNACCEPTABLE WORDS

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Numbers Don’t Lie: America’s Border Crisis Is Biden-Made

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By The Daily Signal

The Biden administration’s open-border policies and its refusal to fully enforce federal immigration laws have imposed huge costs on local communities across the country. Border states are groaning under the enormous cost of sheltering, feeding, educating, policing, and providing medical care for tens of thousands of illegal aliens.

There are humanitarian costs, as well, paid by those who are assaulted and killed by the human traffickers, those who die from the fentanyl flooding across the border and those victimized by vicious criminals who have entered illegally.

This crisis is unprecedented crisis. And it is entirely man-made. Put more precisely: It is Biden-made.

The numbers don’t lie. In fiscal year 2022, ending Sept. 30, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported a record 2.76 million alien “encounters” at our border. CBP reported another 278,102 in October and an even-more-staggering 283,189 in November. More than 3 million illegal aliens will have crossed our border illegally in the past 15 months—all because of the administration’s irresponsible stewardship of the Department of Homeland Security.

And that number is conservative. It doesn’t include the “gotaways”— those who made it across the border illegally, without getting caught. Border officials estimate there were at least 600,000 “gotaways” in fiscal year 2022, compared to only 60,000 in fiscal year 2020.

Supporters of open-border policies argue that this flood of illegal aliens is beneficial. Try telling that to the victims of violent crimes committed by illegal aliens who should never have been allowed to enter the United States.

Texas is one of the few states that provides reports on crimes committed by aliens, and the numbers are appalling. The latest report from the Texas Department of Public Safety notes that, from June 1, 2011, through Dec. 31, 2022, more than 389,000 criminal aliens were booked into local Texas jails. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security confirmed that 70% of those arrested were here illegally.

Keep in mind that Homeland Security can only confirm the illegal status of aliens who were previously detained by DHS and had their fingerprints entered into the department’s alien database.  Given the huge number of “gotaways” whose fingerprints never make it into the system, it is highly likely that many more of those arrested are also here illegally.

But just those 269,000 arrested aliens confirmed to be here illegally were charged with more than 454,000 criminal offenses. That included 847 homicides, 55,509 assaults, 901 kidnappings, 22,139 thefts, 2,551 robberies, 5,579 sexual assaults, 6,729 sexual offenses, 54,885 drug charges, 35,538 obstructing police charges and 5,315 weapons charges. And this is only in Texas.

Sanctuary states like California and New York deliberately refuse to collect or report this data. But we know that Americans are being killed and victimized all over the country. Just ask the families of the victims of criminal aliens at organizations like the Remembrance Project.

The violence, bloodshed, and mayhem caused by these criminals should shock the conscience of every government official, particularly President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris (his designated “Border Czar”) and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Those three have worked to obstruct the enforcement of our immigration laws and destroy the security of our borders.

Biden’s latest proposal for mass amnesty and mass parole would only make the problem worse.

Already exacerbating this public safety problem are rogue prosecutors such as Joe Gonzalez, John Creuzot and Jose Garza, the elected district attorneys in Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin, Texas, respectively.

Disregarding their fundamental duty to protect the public, they refuse to prosecute most misdemeanors, water down violent felonies, turn a blind eye to most illegal drug offenses, and refuse to seek cash bail for known criminals. These policies send a loud message to those inclined to commit crimes: Go ahead and do it!

One of the many reasons why people from all over the world come to the U.S. is because they want to live in a country where the rule of law, undergirded by the Constitution, matters and is honored. The rule of law is the cornerstone of an ordered society.

But when “progressive” officials—from the president down to local district attorneys—refuse to enforce the law, chaos ensues.

It’s time to end the chaos, enforce the law, and hold Biden and all federal and state executive branch officials accountable for failing to do their jobs.

Originally published at the DailyCaller.com.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

AUTHORS

Hans von Spakovsky

@HvonSpakovsky

Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission, and former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice. He is a member of the board of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

Cully Stimson

@cullystimson

Charles “Cully” Stimson is a leading expert in national security, homeland security, crime control, immigration, and drug policy at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. Read his research.

The Daily Signal depends on the support of readers like you. Donate now

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

House Rules Package: A Step in the Right Direction thumbnail

House Rules Package: A Step in the Right Direction

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By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

Frank Gaffney pointed out on his show yesterday that every major country in the Americas is now in the hands of the Left – Canada, the United States, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, and Chile.  That’s really disturbing when you consider how authoritarian leftist governments become.  An island in this sea of misery is the Republican-controlled House of Representatives in the United States which just elected a new Speaker and passed a rules package that will appeal to anyone concerned about the advance of the authoritarian Left in this country.

The full text of the rule package isn’t posted yet on Congress.gov, so what I’m about to tell you is from the House Rules Committee version 3 dated January 6th.  (text – analysis).  Even if some of the details of my summation are not correct, the point will remain the same – the Republican House is standing strongly against misrule by the authoritarian Left.

The first thing that caught my eye in the rules package is the institution of CUTGO – proposals to increase spending in one area must contain equal or greater offsets to spending in other areas.  Put that together with the new rule a 60 percent majority is required in the House to pass tax increases, and you’ve got a start on getting government spending back under control.  The Left always wants to tax and spend.  Half their mischief would go away if government were forced to live within its means like the rest of us.  I also like that this restores the Holman Rule that allows members to offer amendments to reduce the salary of specific abusive federal bureaucrats and to cut specific bloated government programs.  I’d start with no more paycheck for DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas who is single-handedly dismantling the nation’s immigration laws.

Other provisions in the package I like include allowing the public to bring ethics complaints directly against House members, and limiting bills to a single subject.  The latter will make it much easier for members and the public to follow proposed legislation.  Hopefully, this means no more secret deals stuffed into giant bills passed in the middle of the night when nobody knows what’s in them.  What Pelosi said during Obamacare – ‘we have to pass it so you can see what’s in it’ – became standard operating procedure under the Democrats, making a mockery of representative government.

Other ideas I’ve seen floating around I hope made it into the final rules:

  • Requiring the text of legislation to be made available at least 72 hours prior to a vote in the House
  • Ending proxy voting in the House and remote proceedings in committees
  • No more automatic suspensions of the debt ceiling when a budget resolution is adopted.  A separate vote to raise the debt ceiling would be required.
  • No more prohibitions against gender-specific language such as “mother” or “father” on the House floor or in committee.   That’s a deserved poke in the eye to the Woke Left.

Best of all are the investigations.  One will look into the origins of COVID, the government’s involvement in gain-of-function research, COVID vaccines and vaccine mandates.    Others will take up the weaponization of government agencies against the people.  The Justice Department will be investigated for going after ordinary parents as ‘domestic terrorists’ for speaking their minds against leftist policies at school board meetings.  The FBI and other federal agencies will be investigated for their roles in censoring truthful information about COVID and election fraud.  There will also be a Select Committee established to look into the threat the Chinese Communist Party poses to the country – it’s about time.  I also hope the investigation into Hunter Biden and the Biden crime family’s foreign business dealings made the final cut.  I will be following all these investigations very closely.

Finally, I hope somewhere in all this is the restoration of regular order, that is, a return to actual separate appropriations bills with committee hearings – not just the giant take-it-or-leave-it omnibus budget packages we’ve seen under the Democrats in recent years.  Thousand page monstrosities loaded up with all sorts of leftist spending priorities that members can’t possibly read before they vote.

The battle has been joined.  May the House Republicans summon the courage to stick to their principles in the face of the onslaught from the authoritarian Left that is coming.  Democrat operative David Brock has formed a $5 million ‘SWAT team’ to deflect House Republican investigations of the administration.  That’s in addition to another multimillion-dollar ‘war room’ set up by other leftist organizers for the same purpose.  Where do they get all this money?  Big money versus sound principles and representative government – I know what side I’m on.  Do you?

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

RELATED ARTICLE: 7 Key Reforms in New House Rules

RELATED TWEET:

pic.twitter.com/c380OTUQn5

— Rep. Mary Miller (@RepMaryMiller) January 7, 2023

RELATED ARTICLE: Republican-led House passes rules package and bill to cut IRS funding

In 2022, The IRS Went After the Very Poorest Taxpayers thumbnail

In 2022, The IRS Went After the Very Poorest Taxpayers

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By The Geller Report

And so many of them vote Democrat — Stockholm Syndrome.

I am sure they are comforted in their freezing beds in the knowledge that Ukraine is living large on their dime.

In 2022, the IRS Went After the Very Poorest Taxpayers

By: Liz Wolfe, Reason Magazine, January 5, 2023: (thanks to Van):

Despite $80 billion in new funding, the agency is living up to its reputation of hassling low-income taxpayers over rich people.

On Wednesday, Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) released data provided to it by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) on audits performed by the agency in fiscal year 2022. Despite the infusion of new funding earmarked for the IRS via last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, the agency continued historic trends of hassling primarily low-income taxpayers, with relatively few millionaires and billionaires getting caught up in the audit sweep.

“The taxpayer class with unbelievably high audit rates—five and a half times virtually everyone else—were low-income wage-earners taking the earned income tax credit,” reported TRAC, noting that the poorest taxpayers are “easy marks in an era when IRS increasingly relies upon correspondence audits yet doesn’t have the resources to assist taxpayers or answer their questions.”

In fact, “if one ignores the fiction of auditing a millionaire through simply sending a letter through the mail, the odds that millionaires received a regular audit by a revenue agent (1.1%) was actually less than the audit rate of the targeted lowest income wage-earners whose audit rate was 1.27 percent!”

The Inflation Reduction Act, passed in August 2022, directed $80 billion worth of new funding over the next decade to the IRS so it could hire 87,000 new workers, purportedly to better target millionaire and billionaire scofflaws. The Biden administration and credulous journalists claimed that this would in no way increase audits for those making under $400,000 annually—suspect assurances not provided within the text of the actual bill. This increased capacity meant only those at the top would be targeted, supporters insisted. But this ignores how the IRS’s incentives work and how agencywide reform might be too heavy of a lift.

Correspondence audits—which are conducted via mail, and are the type frequently used when interacting with the poorest of taxpayers—are much easier and cheaper to conduct than other types of audits. Plus, the earned income tax credit is easy to get wrong. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that new hires with experience in the field will take almost three years of ramp-up time, with more junior new hires taking longer. The lag time between 2022’s infusion of funding, and legitimately increased capacity, will be enormous—if the agency can even snag the best in the industry when TurboTax and H&R Block will surely be swelling their own ranks. It makes sense that, given a dearth of experienced auditors not likely to be fixed soon, the agency would rely on the easiest and least time-consuming types of audits.

But be suspicious of the idea that an infusion of cash will solve longstanding problems within the IRS. This is, after all, the agency that sent $1.1 billion in child welfare payments to the wrong people over the course of merely five months during the pandemic. It’s the agency that was hacked back in 2015, resulting in the personal information of more than 700,000 taxpayers being compromised. It’s the agency that has been foolishly going after Americans who hold $10,000 or more in a foreign bank since 2010, never mind the fact that many of them are middle-class expats, not folks with yachts in the Mediterranean. And it’s the (leaky) agency that enabled the richest Americans’ intimate financial information to be thumbed through by ProPublica readers. It will take more than a little cash to fix all this, and, as the IRS’s competence and tenacity increase, so too will the tenacity of the vast infrastructure of accountants and lawyers hired by the rich to creatively minimize their tax burdens.

AUTHOR

Pamela Geller

RELATED TWEET:

Watch: Newly-elected Speaker Kevin McCarthy: “I know the night is late, but when we come back, our very first bill will repeal the funding for 87,000 new IRS agents.” pic.twitter.com/1IAbz27NsR

— TV News Now (@TVNewsNow) January 7, 2023

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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The Pentagon’s Pronoun Wars

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By Jihad Watch

Our woke military brass don’t know how to win wars, but know their pronouns.

In 2020, the Air Force conducted a classified war game which showed Communist China launching a biological attack and then invading Taiwan.

And we lost.

“At that point the trend in our war games was not just that we were losing, but we were losing faster,” Air Force Lt. Gen. S. Clinton Hinote stated.

With abysmal readiness rates that have an average of only 7 out of 10 planes operational, and down to 50% for the F-22 stealth fighter, 50% for the CV-22 Osprey and 40% for the B-1 Lancer, the Air Force isn’t even trying to win a possible war, but it’s fighting one for pronouns.

Gina Ortiz Jones, a two-time losing congressional candidate who wasted millions before being appointed by Biden as Air Force Undersecretary, declared that adding pronouns to the emails of air force personnel will make them “a more inclusive force”.

”An inclusive force is a mission-ready force,” she contended, all evidence to the contrary.

This proposal was cheered by Lt. Col. Bree (Bryan) Fram, LIT Transgender Policy Team co-lead. He describes himself as a “Rocket Scientist, Author, Advocate, Nerd”. Warrior does not make the list. But he was in attendance when Biden signed the Disrespect for Marriage Act, abolishing religious freedom and marriage.

“The use of correct pronouns is an easy way to show care and respect,” Mr. Fram insisted.

It’s a short hop from pronouns being voluntary to becoming mandatory.

Pacific Air Forces went further by warning its personnel not to use “he/she” pronouns. The Air Force Academy, always in the vanguard of wokeness, told cadets to stop referencing “mom and dad”, and to ask people for their gender identity. This was described as a “warfighting imperative”.

The Navy, like the Army, has jettisoned the use of ‘ma’am’ or ‘sir’ for drill instructors.

Earlier this year, the Navy released a video teaching personnel to use proper gender pronouns. An editorial at the Naval Institute complained about the use of such terms as “manpower, manning, man overboard, man the rails, sideboy, man hours”.

The authors even urged replacing “man overboard” with “shipmate overboard.”

Now when a man falls overboard, there will have to be a debate about gendered language and what he identifies with before he can be rescued. And by then he’ll probably have drowned.

The Navy’s Special Ops creed changed its wording from  “elite brotherhood of sailors” to “elite group of maritime warriors”. SEALs no longer mention “brave men who have fought and died building the proud tradition and feared reputation that I am bound to uphold.”

Nor do they say, “I am that man.”

There are no female operators because none have met the standards. But it’s only a matter of time until those standards are lowered.

Chris Beck, the retired Navy SEAL who became the poster boy for the transgender movement when he spent a decade claiming to be a woman, has returned to his senses, and calls it the “worst mistake of my life.”

Beck describes getting a prescription for hormones after a brief consultation at the VA.

“I got propagandized. I got used badly by a lot of people who had knowledge way beyond me,” he admitted. “They knew what they were doing. I didn’t.”

The VA, whose delays are still killing veterans, offers a special field for gender identity and a list of pronouns for “nonbinaries” that include xe/xem. Earlier this year, House Democrats blocked an effort to expose VA delays in veteran care. Some VA facilities still have delays that drag on for months, but pronouns remain a leading priority. Patient care takes a back seat to wokeness.

As it does across the military in the Obama and Biden eras.

Military policy demands that personnel “should be sensitive to the use of pronouns when addressing others.” There is no expectation that the men who wake up one morning and decide that they’re women should stop putting their fetishes and neuroses ahead of the mission.

The United States is following in the footsteps of the Canadian Armed Forces which mandates the use of gender neutral pronouns and the British Ministry of Defence which orders officials to state their gender pronouns.

“Pronouns aren’t just used inside the 2SLGBTQI+ communities but are used by everyone,” Canada’s Department of National Defence states.

The only people who use pronouns are ordered to use them by their employer or institution. With control of the military, the Trudeau regime and other woke governments have a sizable class of personnel that, to their endless delight, they can order to do anything they want.

Western nations can’t think of any better use for their militaries than performative dogma.

NATO has a 38-page manual on “gendered language” which emphasizes that it is “important to distinguish between grammatical gender and gender as a social construct.” What would have been an obscure dilettante academic’s thesis in the 80s are now military marching orders.

During the Cold War, NATO focused on tactics and strategy while the Russians wrote papers on Marxism-Leninism. Now NATO is stuffed with personnel writing papers on cultural Marxism.

We no longer have a serious military leadership and so we’re not ready for a serious war.

But that’s because our ideologically captured institutions have no interest in fighting one. If China invades Taiwan, South Korea or Hawaii, they’ll issue a strong statement, supply some weapons to the remaining defenders and go back to emphasizing pronoun discipline.

These are the preoccupations of ideologically captured institutions which are not interested in winning military conflicts, only ideological ones.

As Clausewitz suggested, war is politics by other means. Inversely, politics is also war by other means. The Left is fighting a political civil war and has little interest in foreign wars. Leftist control over any institution transforms it into another battalion in its culture war against us.

While China and other enemy nations expand outward, America is stuck in a civil war. That’s why we continue to lose to China in our war games. Instead of being prepared for a war, our woke military brass, men like Secretary of Defense Austin, Gen. Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Charles Q. Brown, Air Force Chief of Staff, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday, and others have made it abundantly clear that their priority is enforcing wokeness.

They have no plan to fight or win a war against any substantial enemy. They’re here to enforce the identity politics mandates on the military in between schmoozing at D.C. cocktail parties.

Ask them how to beat China and they don’t have an answer, but just ask them their pronouns, ask them about green energy, systemic racism and abortion and they’ll talk your ears off.

The woke military brass with its pronouns and allegiance to the ideals of the same enemy they were tasked with fighting during the Cold War is a national security threat to our nation.

AUTHOR

RELATED ARTICLES:

Here’s What the Feds Are Teaching in “Diversity” Training

Understanding Why Banning Words is Worse than Burning Books

Islamic Republic of Iran: Police resume warnings that women must wear hijabs even in cars

Racist Profs Complain They’re Too Afraid of DeSantis to be Racist

Biden’s handlers send air marshals to border: ‘We’re not going to catch al Qaeda trying to grab a plane in El Paso’

EDITORS NOTE: This Jihad Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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VIDEO: Study—The More Vaxxed You Are, The Higher The Risk Of Getting Covid

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By Vlad Tepes Blog

In what will almost certainly be Dr. John Campbell’s last YouTube video, he reveals the real stats on mRNA injections and your risk of getting Covid. This of course doesn’t deal with the risks of other things from the mRNA.

The risk of COVID-19 also varied by the number of COVID-19 vaccine doses previously received. The higher the number of vaccines previously received, the higher the risk of covid infection.

Download free high-res PDFs of the posters, download free copies of Dr. John Campbell’s two text books. Any donations using this link help the work of Dr. Campbell’s teaching.

Order a hard copy Physiology book in the UK.

Vaccine doses versus risk of Covid during the 3-month study period,

  • One dose, 1.7 times more likely to test positive for Covid
  • Two doses, 2.63 times more likely to test positive for Covid
  • Three doses, 3.1 times more likely to test positive for Covid
  • More than three doses, 3.8 times more likely to test positive for Covid

So compared to the unvaccinated,

1, x 1.7

2, x 2.36

3, x 3.1

4, x 3.38

P = 0.001 means 999 out of 1,000 likely to be a genuine result.

That 99.9% likely to be a genuine result.

Effectiveness of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Bivalent Vaccine

In 2020 (published in 2021)

Evidence that vaccines prevented Covid infection

This was when the human population had just encountered the novel Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus

Things Have Changed (Dylan)

Bivalent antigens

Original vaccine and BA.4/BA.5 lineages of Omicron.

(Approved without demonstration of effectiveness in human clinical studies)

(Approved without demonstration of safety in human clinical studies)

Background

To evaluate whether a bivalent COVID-19 vaccine protects against COVID-19.

Methods

Employees of Cleveland Clinic, n = 51,011

Cumulative incidence of COVID-19 was examined over the following weeks.

Protection provided by recent and prior vaccination was evaluated

First bivalents given, 12 September 2022

Three-month study results among 51,011 employees,

20,689 (41%) had had a previous documented episode of COVID-19,

42,064 (83%) had received at least two doses of a vaccine.

10,804 (21%) were bivalent vaccine boosted

COVID-19 occurred in 2,452 (5%) during the study.

(Pfizer 89%, Moderna 11%)

Risk of COVID-19 increased with time since the most recent prior COVID-19 episode

Risk of COVID-19 increased with the number of vaccine doses previously received. Note, this is based on large numbers:

Doses, 0 = 6,419 (12.6%)

Doses, 1 = 2,528 (5%)

Doses, 2 = 14,810 (45.9%)

Doses, 3 = 23,396 (45.9%)

Doses 4, 3,757 (7.4%)

Doses 5, 85 (less than1%)

Doses 6, 16 (less than 1%)

The bivalent vaccinated state

Was independently associated with lower risk of COVID-19 (HR, 0.70)

(over the 3 months of the study)

Leading to an estimated vaccine effectiveness (VE) of 30%

CDCs latest variant data

Things Have Changed (Dylan)

RELATED ARTICLE: Covid Vaccines Fueling New Covid Variants

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog post by Eeyore is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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POLICE STATE: All Vehicles Will Require KILL SWITCH So Government, Police, Can DISABLE YOUR CAR

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By The Geller Report

Don’t buy them. Buy an old, used American classic. They’re prettier and more fun anyway. Start preparing for what’s coming.

By Cullen Linebarger, TGP, January 2, 2023:

BREAKING REPORT: Beginning in 2026 all vehicles will require a KILL SWITCH giving the government, the police, and car makers the ability to DISABLE YOUR CAR from a remote location…

RT if you think the DEMS are handing too much control to the Government…

— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) January 1, 2023

Many people view cruising alone down the open road as the ultimate form of freedom. We regret to inform you that liberty will completely evaporate soon unless Congress acts.

The website Motorious reported on Friday that former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr has been sounding the alarm on a terrifying item buried within the Biden-McConnell “infrastructure” legislation, which passed in August 2021. According to Barr, the government will now have the power to shut off your vehicle if they determine you are partaking in any “illegal” activity.

Does anyone really believe the Biden Regime will not abuse this newly obtained power? Of course, they will! Particularly if such power can effectively target those opposed to the Regime’s agenda.

Better not be driving a gas-guzzling vehicle. The Regime might think you are a conservative and leave you stranded in the middle of a highway.

TRENDING: January 6 Book Released: FIRSTHAND TESTIMONY of Harrowing Tragedy from the J-6ers Living It! “The American Gulag Chronicles: Letters from Prison”- Please Purchase a Copy to Support Political Prisoners of Biden Regime!

Yet another reason to remove Biden as soon as possible. Here are the full details from Motorious:

According to an article written by former U.S. Representative Bob Barr, hidden away in the recently passed infrastructure bill, the very one I warned before would negatively impact drivers across the country if it were to pass, is a measure to install vehicle kill switches into every new car, truck, and SUV sold in this country. The regulation likely won’t be enforced for five years, so maybe there’s time to do something about this.

As we’ve seen both in this country and others recently, what constitutes “law-abiding” can change drastically overnight. For example, in September a car was pulled over in New Zealand and the occupants arrested when police discovered the trunk was full of Kentucky Fried Chicken meals.

They were smuggling the fast food to customers in locked-down Auckland, against quarantine measures. Yet not too long before, delivering restaurant orders to people was considered a reputable, legal activity.

It gets even better: Barr points out that the bill, which has been signed into law by President Biden, states that the kill switch, which is referred to as a safety device, must “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired.”

In other words, Big Brother will constantly be monitoring how you drive. If you do something the system has been programmed to recognize as driver impairment, your car could just shut off, which could be incredibly dangerous.

There is the possibility the kill switch program might measure your driving as impaired, then when you try to start the car up again the engine won’t fire up. That would potentially leave you stranded.

Keep reading.

EDITORS NOTE: This Geller Report is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

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Kick Woke Criminal Justice Reforms to the Curb

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By The Daily Skirmish – Liberato.US

The Illinois Supreme Court halted the state’s new law eliminating cash bail pending further litigation.  Good.  Maybe sanity will prevail in the end.  Here’s what no-cash bail laws do:  A New York man was arrested for beating his wife.  He was released on no bail.  Less than 24 hours later, he shot her dead in front of her three children.  The no-bail situation in New York City has gotten so bad, Mayor Eric Adams now calls it ‘catch and release’ and said, “We have to stop passing laws that protect the guilty.”

Eric Adams might finally be telling the truth, but other Democrats who brought you insane ideas like no-bail are now trying to cover up the consequences of their insanity.  In Chicago, the mayor – who condones riots – wants to switch from police scanners to encrypted radio frequencies.  This will prevent journalists from reporting breaking crime stories and the public from learning about threats to their safety.  In Colorado, a Democrat senator’s wife is urging lawmakers to defund the police the sneaky way by reallocating funds to social services.  In case you don’t know, several cities got mugged by the reality of what happens when you defund the police and moved to re-fund their police departments.  But not in Seattle, which has found another sneaky way to defund the police.  The tolerance for riots and disparagement of police professionals caused a number of vacant positions in the police department and the city council voted last month to eliminate 80 of them.

But try as they might, the stupid Democrats can’t cover up the fact that large cities like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles are now more dangerous than war zones like Iraq or Afghanistan for young males.  The most dangerous city is actually St. Louis where the progressive prosecutor won’t accept arrests by 300 officers and the mayor won’t authorize pay increases for officers, causing the police department to operate at less than half strength.  Staffing shortages and progressive prosecutors are being blamed for the rise in violent crime in many cities across the country last year.

And Democrats can’t cover up the fact that Target lost $400 million last year to organized retail theft.  Overall, retail theft is up more than 26 percent and is closing in on $100 billion a year.  Houston – and elsewhere – we got a problem.  Walmart is warning it will have to raise prices and close stores, if this keeps up.  The CEO specifically blamed progressive prosecutors and their soft-on-crime policies.  The violence is so bad in North Philly, a gas station owner hired armed security.  Police don’t respond and nobody feels safe, he said.  A restaurant in D.C. is closing down because employees are being attacked and their cars are being broken into.  The insane Democrats who run the city voted late last year to reduce penalties for illegal gun possession, carjacking, robbery, and other crimes.

Another business closed, this one in Portland, another Democrat city that loves riots.  The owner cited “unrelenting criminal behavior” and “escalating safety issues” for employees. “We have no protection, or recourse, against the criminal behavior that goes unpunished,” an open letter posted on the front door said.  Here’s the interesting part:  You hear these progressive prosecutors and other apologists for high crime say, ‘don’t worry about it, insurance will cover any losses.’  Not true.  The owner went on to write: “Do not be fooled into thinking that insurance companies cover losses. We have sustained 15 break-ins … we have not received any financial reimbursement since the 3rd.”

Think about all this the next time the Democrats are flashing you a big smile and asking you to keep them in power.  Better yet, take action now.  The city council in Roanoke recently asked state lawmakers to undo the Democrats’ woke criminal justice reforms and bring back no-knock warrants, traffic stops for broken tail lights and other minor infractions, and holding suspects without bond for violent offenses.  Voters in Democrat-controlled Kansas City, Missouri voted up a constitutional amendment requiring the city to spend more on police.

This is not a situation where reforms swing between competing values on a pendulum.  The Democrats threw the pendulum out the window with their woke criminal justice reforms.  But this is still America and citizens like you can take action so they can’t turn your life into a war zone.

©Christopher Wright. All rights reserved.

Visit The Daily Skirmish and Watch Eagle Headline News – 7:30am ET Weekdays

Remembering When Gun Control Was at Least Remotely Rational thumbnail

Remembering When Gun Control Was at Least Remotely Rational

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By Selwyn Duke

A curious mutation in gun control activism occurred during the last few decades, whence began a fixation on something dubbed the “assault rifle.”

Never mind that an assault rifle, insofar as the designation was ever at all valid, had always referenced a weapon with a “select fire” feature allowing three types of operation: semi-automatic, fully-automatic or in three-shot bursts. This doesn’t, of course, describe the class of rifles (e.g., AR-15-style) now targeted, whose operation is semi-automatic only (one bullet released per trigger pull), just like 50 percent of all new guns sold. But whatever you call them, here are two facts:

The obsession with banning them is much, much newer than they are.

They’re merely part of a weapons class (rifles) used in fewer killings than are “personal weapons” — hands, fists and feet. That’s according to the FBI, mind you.

In contrast, handguns are used in 62 percent of murders committed with firearms. There was a time when this guided gun-control activists’ thinking, too.

Back in the ’80s and into the ’90s, our rancorous firearms debates centered around banning handguns. I disagreed with such a course, but at least the gun-control set’s arguments contained a smidgen of logic.

These weapons are used to commit a robust plurality of our nation’s murders, they said.

They’re concealable and thus are criminals’ firearm of choice, they said. So if anyone believed in gun control as remedy, the focus on handguns at least made sense: Banning firearms would reduce crime, the thesis went, so it was rational to focus on the guns most used, by far, in crimes. It was today’s SJW’s grandfather’s gun control.

But those days now almost seem quaint. Emotion, which always figured prominently in gun-control appeals, has now completely taken over. No longer is there focus on handguns, not even a peep. Instead, it’s all Assault Weapons™ all the time. A couple of reasons for this leap to mind:

  • High-profile mass shootings, which became a lamentably regular phenomenon starting in the ’90s, are often committed with semi-automatic sporting rifles such as the AR-15 (even though a semi-automatic shotgun would be far more effective in such a scenario; i.e., against soft targets at close range).
  • They’re low-hanging fruit — Gun grabbers’ previous failures perhaps taught them that targeting handguns is currently in vain; pistols are the most commonly owned type of firearm, after all. So they focus on AR-15-type weapons.

This can be effective because

  • laymen often find them scary, as they may look like sub-machine guns they see in movies. And as anti-Second Amendment activist Josh Sugarmann demagogically put it in 1989, “Assault weapons…are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully-automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons — anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun — can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons”;
  • AR-15-type rifles are possessed by only a minority of gun owners, and with gun owners being just 32 percent of the country, this translates into their being in relatively few Americans’ hands. And people are more amenable to banning a product when doing so won’t affect them directly; and
  • given how the weapons have been misrepresented, the argument “Why do you need such things, anyway?” can be persuasive.

As to the last point, one correct response is that if our freedoms are based on “needs,” we’ll have relatively few freedoms left. We don’t need a fast sports car, ice cream, opera, palatial homes, swimming pools (drowning is the most common cause of death in children 1-4), to go hang-gliding (one of the more dangerous sports) or a multitude of other things. This is why a freedom must be considered innocent until proven guilty; the burden must lie not with the person who’d retain it, but with the one who’d remove it.

Lastly, those who’d criminalize firearms generally believe the weapons are at best superfluous because they trust the government to protect them. That’s certainly a quaint idea. Remember the L.A. riots in 1992, when the government, constrained by political correctness, refused to quell the unrest and allowed miscreants to run amuck? Hapless truck driver Reginald Denny was beaten to within an inch of his life, and some of the only people we saw who could defend themselves were Korean store owners wielding firearms. There also was Hurricane Katrina in 2005, during which many police abandoned their posts and armed gangs were roaming about. Then, of course, there were 2020’s 600-plus BLM/Antifa riots, which also were allowed to proceed unfettered and destroyed billions in property and claimed at least two dozen lives.

But, hey, we’re sure that the next time the boogeymen come, the gubmint will be there for you, right?

Well, you just rest secure in that knowledge, Mr. Liberal, and may you, if worse comes to worst, rest in peace. I’ll just rest with a piece, thank you.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on MeWe, Gettr or Parler, or log on to SelwynDuke.com

©Selwyn Duke. All rights reserved.

ELECTION INTEGRITY: New York City Removes 441,083 Ineligible Names from Voter Rolls Thanks to Judicial Watch! thumbnail

ELECTION INTEGRITY: New York City Removes 441,083 Ineligible Names from Voter Rolls Thanks to Judicial Watch!

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By Judicial Watch

New York City Removes 441,083 Ineligible Names from Voter Rolls Thanks to Judicial Watch!

We just settled a federal election integrity lawsuit against New York City after the city removed 441,083 ineligible names from the voter rolls and promised to take reasonable steps to clean its voter registration lists in the future.

We filed the lawsuit in July after the city failed to clean voter rolls for years. The lawsuit, filed under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), pointed out that New York City removed only 22 names under federal law over six years (Judicial Watch v Valentine et al. (No.1:22-cv-03952)).

Our suit detailed how New York City’s “own recent data concedes that there were only 22 total” removals under this provision “during a six-year period, in a city of over 5.5 million voters. These are ludicrously small numbers of removals given the sizable populations of these counties.”

Moreover, the “almost complete failure of Kings, Queens, New York, Bronx, and Richmond Counties, over a period of at least six years, to remove voters” under a key provision of federal law “means that there are untold numbers of New York City registrations for voters who are ineligible to vote at their listed address because they have changed residence or are otherwise ineligible to vote.”

The settlement details how the city responded to our notice about its voting roll deficiencies with a massive clean-up:

[The Board of Elections] notified Judicial Watch that, in February 2022, they removed, pursuant to Section 8(d)(1)(B) of the NVRA, 82,802 registrations in Bronx County, 128,093 in Kings County, 145,891 in New York County, 66,010 in Queens County, and 18,287 in Richmond County, for a total of 441,083 registrations.

[The Board of Elections] notified Judicial Watch that going forward they intend to cancel registrations pursuant to Section 8(d)(1)(B) in each odd-numbered year in the months following a federal election.

Specifically, the city also agrees to track in detail and report its voter roll maintenance efforts through 2025:

For both 2023 and 2025 … the [Board of Elections] will notify Judicial Watch … on or before March 31, by means of separate excel spreadsheets for Bronx County, Kings County, New York County, Queens County, and Richmond County, of the number of removals, including removals pursuant to … the NVRA, made during the previous two years.

The NVRA requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove” from the rolls “the names of ineligible voters” who have died or changed residence. Among other things, the law requires registrations to be cancelled when voters fail to respond to address confirmation notices and then fail to vote in the next two general federal elections. In 2018, the Supreme Court confirmed that such removals are mandatory (Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Inst. (138 S. Ct. 1833, 1841-42 (2018)).

This historic settlement is a major victory for New York voters who will benefit from cleaner voter rolls and more honest elections. We are pleased that New York City officials quickly acted to remove 441,000 outdated registrations from the rolls. We look forward to working together under this federal lawsuit settlement to ensure New York City maintains cleaner rolls for future elections.

We are a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of our work, we assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in California, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other achievements.

California settled an NVRA lawsuit with us and began the process of removing up to 1.6 million inactive names from Los Angeles County’s voter rolls. Kentucky also began a cleanup of hundreds of thousands of old registrations last year after it entered into a consent decree to end another Judicial Watch lawsuit.

In February 2022, we settled a voter roll clean-up lawsuit against North Carolina and two of its counties after North Carolina removed over 430,000 ineligible names from the voter rolls.

In March 2022, a Maryland court ruled in favor of our challenge to Maryland’s Democratic legislature’s “extreme” congressional redistricting gerrymander.

In May 2022, we sued Illinois on behalf of Congressman Mike Bost and two other registered Illinois voters to prevent state election officials from extending Election Day for 14 days beyond the date established by federal law.

Robert Popper, Judicial Watch senior attorney, leads our election law program. Popper was previously in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, where he managed voting rights investigations, litigations, consent decrees, and settlements in dozens of states.

Happy New Year!

As we welcome the new year, we recall a few of our successes in 2022:

We made it more likely that voters in North Carolina will have cleaner elections, and we are making headway for voters in Illinois by challenging its election law permitting mail-in ballots to be received as long as two weeks after Election Day.

We scored a win against two unconstitutional California quota mandates for sex, race, ethnicity, and LGBT status requirements for corporate boards.

We continue to uncover unsettling information regarding COVID-19, including the Biden administration’s extensive media plan for a propaganda campaign to push the vaccine.

I anticipate that Judicial Watch will carry its largest and most important caseload in our 29-year history into 2023 and engage our full arsenal of research, investigations and litigation into critically important public policy fronts. For example, uncovering critical race theory in our public institutions:

We successfully settled a civil rights lawsuit that we filed on behalf of a Massachusetts teacher who lost his position as head football coach after raising concerns about the promotion of critical race theory and Black Lives Matter propaganda in his daughter’s seventh-grade history class.

We uncovered critical race theory instructional materials from the U.S. Military Academy, West Point, including a PowerPoint slide with a graphic titled “MODERN-DAY SLAVERY IN THE USA.” We are pursuing similar lawsuits against the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Air Force Academy to see if they are teaching similar racist, anti-American propaganda.

We’re certainly eager to learn more about Hunter Biden and apparent efforts by the administration to block investigations.

After the Allied victory over Hitler in 1945, but before the victory over Japan, Winston Churchill found himself in a similar situation of looking both back and forward. He declared: “We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing, butlet us not forget for a moment the toil and efforts that lie ahead.”

Dark clouds hang over our country, but they only motivate us. As Churchill also observed, “This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.”

We are grateful that you are with us as we enter 2023. All of us wish you and yours a Happy New Year!

I hope you’ll make a special New Year’s contribution in support of our essential work ahead.

Until next week …

EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

HHS Records Reveal Biden Admin Flights Stopping in Multiple Cities to Drop Unaccompanied Alien Children–Plane Originating in San Diego Stopped in Three Cities thumbnail

HHS Records Reveal Biden Admin Flights Stopping in Multiple Cities to Drop Unaccompanied Alien Children–Plane Originating in San Diego Stopped in Three Cities

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By Judicial Watch

Washington, D.C. – Judicial Watch announced today that it received 16 pages of records from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) detailing the nighttime transportation of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) by air from Texas to Tennessee, as well as two other flights making multiple stops across the country. 

The Administration for Children and Families, a division of HHS, produced the records in response to an October 2022 lawsuit filed after HHS failed to respond to a May 20, 2021, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (No. 1:22-cv-03044)), asking for:

· All documents related to the preparation and logistics involved in the transportation of Unaccompanied Alien Children (UACs) to and from Chattanooga’s Wilson Air Center on May 14, 2021.

· All ACF officials’ internal email communications related to the transportation of UACs to and from Chattanooga’s Wilson Air Center on May 14, 2021.

The records include a May 15 email from a person whose name is redacted to an unnamed person at MVM Inc’s Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) Transport DFW (Dallas Fort Worth) Command Center detailing charter flights.

One flight travelling from SAN-OKC-CHA-EWR [San Diego, Oklahoma City, Chattanooga, Newark airports] via “Swift Air,” which was operating a Boeing 737 with “148 seats” [likely the number of passengers]. It indicates that there would be two buses at the San Diego Convention Center, two buses in Oklahoma City, two buses in Chattanooga, and two buses at Newark.

A second flight, from MFE-ELP-EWR [McAllen, El Paso, Newark] also via “Swift Air,” and a 737, with 150 seats, notes: “Pecos [TX] will be bused to ELP [El Paso] to catch charter flight. 1 bus will report 0800. 2 buses to report at 0800 at Delphi EIS [Delphi Emergency Intake Site]

The records also include a May 13, 2021, email thread from a redacted person at MVM Inc. to RF1Badging@rf1.us [likely Response Force 1] and others regarding an Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF) Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) transport of minors from Kay Baily Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas on Friday, May 14, 2021, before dawn, at 3 a.m.

RF1 Badging then replies, “Please be advised that the following UCs [Unaccompanied Children] … does not match in our system.” He then proceeds to list the details of nine children. 

Also in this thread is an email from an individual at Culmen International stating that one of the minors is “not cleared to travel.” 

The records include a list for a charter of 36 children from Honduras, Guatemala, Mexico and El Salvador. A handwritten note on the spreadsheet says: “Dallas to Tennessee Air Charter Flight 5/14/2021.” The record notes that the children are to be transported to these shelters: La Casa de Sidney, Lincoln Hall Boys’ Haven, Children’s Home of Kingston, Children’s Village Shelter, and Cayuga Center TFC. It indicates three of the minors are “reunifications.”

(Chattanooga’s unaccompanied migrant minor housing facility, La Casa de Sydney, was closed in 2021 after reports of runaways and sexual battery.)

An undated “Transfer of Custody” form indicates the transfer of six Guatemalan and Honduran children from “KBH” [likely Kay Baily Hutchison Convention Center in Dallas] to La Casa de Sidney. 

“These shocking documents forced out by a Judicial Watch lawsuit show the Biden administration effectively trafficking unaccompanied alien children, dropping them off in city after city like items for delivery,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The Biden open borders crisis is resulting in the most massive child and human trafficking operation ever.”

In a May 26, 2021, letter to HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Tennessee Senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, along with Tennessee Congressman Chuck Fleischmann, detailed their concerns regarding unaccompanied minors:

We write to seek information on the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) management of unaccompanied alien children (UAC) in federal custody and the facilities used to house them. We are particularly concerned about recent reports regarding the use of Chattanooga, Tennessee, as a central location for resettling UACs in the United States.

There are media reports that, within the last week, at least four planes carrying UACs landed at Wilson Air Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, before swiftly boarding the children onto buses and transporting them to multiple cities across the southeastern United States for apparent resettlement, with zero transparency regarding what was happening. For months, reports have detailed how thousands of children are being housed in neglectful conditions at mass shelters operated by HHS under a veil of secrecy. We are deeply troubled by the lack of transparency and accountability regarding the conditions that HHS is subjecting these children to.

In September 2021, Judicial Watch revealed HHS documents that list 33 separate incidents of alleged sexual abuse in a one-month time period tied to unaccompanied alien children shelters.

EDITORS NOTE: This Judicial Watch column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

ICE Admits It Has ‘No Records’ For Hundreds Of Thousands Of Illegal Immigrants Released With Electronic Monitors thumbnail

ICE Admits It Has ‘No Records’ For Hundreds Of Thousands Of Illegal Immigrants Released With Electronic Monitors

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By The Daily Caller

  • U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) that it has “no records” of 377,980 illegal immigrants enrolled in its “Alternatives to Detention” program.
  • TRAC sent a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for data on the program, which used to electronically monitor illegal immigrants into the country.
  • “ICE’s response that they could no longer find records on immigrants in Alternatives to Detention (ATD) that they had previously released came as a shock, particularly after they informed us recently that they had been misleading the public for several months by releasing extremely inaccurate ATD data. The agency really needs to come clean. The American public deserves to have accurate data about the ATD program,” TRAC assistant Professor Austin Kocher told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) admitted it has “no records” of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants released into the country with electronic tracking devices, the agency said in a Dec. 22 letter to Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

ICE informed TRAC that it had “no records” of the 377,980 individuals monitored by the agency’s “Alternatives to Detention” (ATD) program used to electronically track illegal immigrants released into the country. TRAC had asked for data via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on those in ATD custody from the start of fiscal year 2019 to August 2022. (RELATED: ‘Didn’t Have To Happen’: This Wyoming Sheriff Wants An Illegal Alien Who Raped An 8-Year-Old Imprisoned, Not Deported)

“ICE’s response that they could no longer find records on immigrants in Alternatives to Detention (ATD) that they had previously released came as a shock, particularly after they informed us recently that they had been misleading the public for several months by releasing extremely inaccurate ATD data. The agency really needs to come clean. The American public deserves to have accurate data about the ATD program,” TRAC assistant Professor Austin Kocher told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

ICE started the ATD program in 2004 to monitor illegal migrants released into the country using ankle monitors, GPS tracking and cellphones. With limited detention space, ICE relies on the program to hold those awaiting the years-long backlogs in immigration courts.

The agency has previously provided TRAC with data on individuals enrolled in ATD, disclosing which technology was used, dates of entry into the program among other key details.

Just days after announcing that the agency had been misleading to the public for months about how many immigrants were on gps ankle monitors, @icegov claims it can’t find records on over 350,000 immigrants in alternatives to detention program.https://t.co/UVzYiyklLG pic.twitter.com/mAJKz9UfPw

— Austin Kocher, PhD (@ackocher) December 28, 2022

TRAC’s latest issue with ICE isn’t the first time the data on the ATD program has faced scrutiny.

The DCNF recently reported on errors and miscalculations in the ATD data on illegal immigrants not tracked with any technology and others tracked using GPS monitoring. At the time, ICE had privately disclosed different data to participants of a private event that showed an over 18,000% discrepancy in public data on those not tracked with any technology and another roughly 600% difference in publicly disclosed GPS tracking data.

ICE later apologized for the issue and updated the data.

“Upon further inspection of what participants were provided against what was publicly available online, it became clear there was a data miscalculation. Teams worked quickly to address and reconcile the issue, now updated on ICE.gov. We regret ICE provided erroneous ATD enrollment data and worked to resolve the miscalculation going forward,” an ICE spokesperson told the DCNF at the time.

TRAC is concerned over ICE’s consistent errors.

“When Congress ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to publish data on immigrant detention, perhaps it should have been clearer that it expected ICE to produce accurate data—not inconsistent, error-ridden, and misleading data that the agency currently provides to the public on a regular basis. These sloppy, uncorrected errors—more of the norm rather than the exception—demand immediate attention from both the public and from Congress,” TRAC wrote on Sept. 20 after ICE incorrectly released data from May 2021 instead of September 2022.

ICE didn’t respond to a request for comment.

AUTHOR

JENNIE TAER

Investigative reporter.

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

The EPA’s Latest Regulation Could Devastate The Trucking Industry thumbnail

The EPA’s Latest Regulation Could Devastate The Trucking Industry

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By The Daily Caller

  • The Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule Tuesday that will impose stricter emissions standards on new heavy-duty vehicles, a regulation that will significantly raise operating costs for truckers, experts and industry representatives told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
  •  “The costs associated with this are also a concern because these are costs that not only the industry will bear … prices will go up for everybody,” Texas Trucking Association President John Esparza told the DCNF.
  • “It’s an overreach that is indicative of this administration’s tendency to set aside balance to achieve the goals of activists that they are politically aligned with,” Mandy Gunasekara, a senior policy analyst for the Independent Women’s Forum and former EPA Chief of Staff during the Trump administration, told the DCNF.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalized a rule Tuesday that will impose stricter nitrogen dioxide emissions standards on new heavy-duty trucks, a move that will substantially hike operating costs for truckers, experts and industry representatives told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The EPA’s rule, which is more than 80% stricter than the previous regulation, will require large trucks, delivery vans and buses manufactured after 2027 to cut nitrogen dioxide emissions by nearly 50% by 2045, according to an agency press release. The agency’s rule is intended to push truckers to phase out diesel-powered vehicles and use electric vehicles (EV) instead; however, the compliance costs associated with such rules could suffocate an industry that is not ready to transition to EVs, experts told the DCNF.

“It’s an overreach that is indicative of this administration’s tendency to set aside balance to achieve the goals of activists that they are politically aligned with,” Mandy Gunasekara, a senior policy analyst for the Independent Women’s Forum and former EPA Chief of Staff during the Trump administration, told the DCNF. “It’s going to squeeze out the mid-sized and smaller trucking companies because they’re not going to be able to afford to purchase the new, extremely expensive equipment required to continue to do what they do.”

The new rules are intended to phase out older trucks that emit more nitrogen dioxide and will push drivers to purchase electric trucks or newer models of diesel trucks that do not produce as much nitrogen dioxide when they burn fuel, according to the EPA.

“If small business truckers can’t afford the new, compliant trucks, they’re going to stay with older, less efficient trucks or leave the industry entirely,” Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association President Todd Spencer told trade publication Freight Waves. “Once again, EPA has largely ignored the warnings and concerns raised by truckers in this latest rule.”

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said that the rule would protect “historically overburdened communities,” that are disproportionately affected by trucking emissions as truck freight routes are often located near “vulnerable populations,” according to the press release. Nitrogen dioxide gas can exacerbate respiratory diseases like asthma and form acid rain in the atmosphere which can damage lakes and forests, according to the EPA.

“The EPA is happy to go easy on big trucking since they support regulations that will harm their smaller competitors far more,” Steve Milloy, Energy and Environmental Legal Institute senior legal fellow and former Trump administration EPA transition team member, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Regan announced the new rule in front of an electric garbage truck produced by Mack Trucks and following his remarks, Mack spokesman John Mies stated that his company supports the administration’s zero emissions targets for trucks and is working to cut “dangerous” emissions produced by diesel trucks, according to CNN.

“Companies have taken the initiative to electrify a certain percentage of their fleet by a certain year and have made plans to build the necessary infrastructure, but they are then told that there isn’t enough power to achieve what they’re seeking,” Texas Trucking Association President John Esparza told the DCNF. “The costs associated with this are also a concern because these are costs that not only the industry will bear … prices will go up for everybody.”

The EPA’s final rule is the first step in its “Clean Trucks Plan” which seeks to heavily regulate trucks’ emissions to push drivers to adopt electric trucks.

Gunesakara echoed Esparza’s comments and said that such targets were a “technological fantasy” that could cost truckers their jobs due to the high price of electric trucks. Gunesakara added that the EPA’s rules would force truck drivers to drive older, more polluting and less efficient vehicles for longer as diesel trucks will be rapidly phased out long before EVs can become a more viable alternative.

The EPA touted its new rule and said that it will result in up to 2,900 fewer premature deaths, 18,000 fewer cases of childhood asthma and 6,700 fewer hospital admissions as well as an overall annual net economic benefit of $29 billion due to fewer missed work days. The agency’s trucking rules are less strict than California’s regulations as heavy vehicles in the state must cut nitrogen oxide emissions by 75% starting in 2024, and 90% starting in 2027, according to a California Air Resource Board rule.

The EPA did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

AUTHOR

JACK MCEVOY

Energy & environment reporter.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Caller column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved. All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.

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