The Antiplanner.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is asking a state court to cancel Austin’s light-rail plans. Capital Metro, Austin’s transit agency, persuaded voters to raise taxes to build light rail in 2020. Soon after the vote, however, the agency admitted that rail would cost a lot more than it had claimed and so less would be built than promised. Paxton says that in doing so it has breached its contract with the voters and its plans should be rejected.

A government agency lied! Wow–didn’t see that coming….

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Two former Biden family business associates testified Wednesday before a House committee conducting an impeachment inquiry into influence peddling by the president and close relatives.

Tony Bobulinski, who was a business partner to Hunter Biden, accused his one-time ally of lying under oath to congressional investigators about his father’s involvement.

“Joe Biden was more than a participant and a beneficiary of his family’s business,” Bobulinski testified to the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. “He was an active, aware enabler who met with business associates such as myself to further the business despite being buffered by a complex scheme to maintain plausible deniability.”

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I am often asked if President Joe Biden is intentionally trying to dismantle the American economy with his imbecilic energy, climate change, crime, border, inflation and debt policies. But I’ve always believed these policies are driven by a badly mistaken ideology — not malice.

Then I watched Biden’s State of the Union speech. When Biden thundered that he was going to make corporations “pay their fair share,” the Democrats in Congress leapt to their feet in applause.

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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., called on House Republicans to name the specific crimes President Joe Biden is accused of as their impeachment inquiry continues.

Well, let’s see:

• Treason. “… adhering to the enemies of the United States, giving them aid and comfort….” — U.S. Constitution
• Bribery. (Ten percent for the Big Guy!)

That’ll do for a start.

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That would certainly be amusing.

Might I suggest that the Hamptons on Long Island ought to be added to the destination list?

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Among the air-defense weapons sent to Ukraine, the NASAMS system was the most anticipated because of its reputation. NASAMS is far superior to the similar Russian Buk M1 system Ukraine and Russia use, or anything else in its class. NASAM systems began arriving in Ukraine during November 2022 and, by late 2023, there were eight NASAMS batteries in Ukraine. In 2024 there will be more NASAMS for Ukraine as well as longer range AMRAAM ER missiles for it. NASAMS has been very effective against Russian missile attacks, often intercepting all the Russian missiles headed for an area defended by a NASAMS battery. The impact of NASAMS on Russian missile attacks led the Russians to try and detect and destroy NASAMS batteries or components of batteries. As of early 2024, only one NASAMS battery has come under heavy Russian attack and lost some components. So far NASAMS has intercepted several hundred Russian missiles and UAVs. The latest version of NASAMS has a missile range of 50 kilometers and a target detection radar with a range of 120 kilometers. The older and larger Patriot system has a missile with a range of 120 kilometers. NASAMS systems are more compact and mobile than Patriot and the Ukrainians have found that NASAMS and Patriot systems complement each other. In Ukraine Russia is having a difficult time finding worthy targets that are not defended by NASAMS or Patriot.

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Since Oct. 7, the federal office that handles investigations into campus civil rights has kept many details of its work confidential — including which cases focus on antisemitism.

But now the U.S. Department of Education has begun revealing more about the investigations it has launched since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war. The new revelations follow a series of reports from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency uncovering the opaque mechanics of how the department enforces Title VI anti-discrimination law.

Meanwhile, the department’s Office of Civil Rights continues to open new investigations into allegations of campus antisemitism, including one this week at the University of Hawai’i.

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A nonprofit organization dedicated to “assisting migrants with their paperwork and legal needs” in New York City has been caught on video illegally filling out residency documents for a man without procuring any form of identification from him.

Video shot by Muckraker.com and obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project appears to show the nonprofit organization, La Jornada, saying that distributing such documents is against the law but then proceeding to do so with another person the next day. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)

The video also shows the organization distributing paperwork to get a government-issued New York City identification card through the city’s IDNYC program.

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West Point is dropping “Duty, Honor, Country” from its mission statement, to be replaced with the nebulous phrase, “Army Values.” Superintendent Lt. Gen. Steve Gilland said “Duty, Honor, Country” would remain West Point’s “motto.”

But “motto” is not mission, which declares what a unit is and does. Troops live and die for the mission. No “motto” could ever mean so much.

West Point leadership wants us not to be alarmed. Just trust the process, they say. The “process” – apparently of erasure and reinvention – began two years ago with removal of plaques and images of Robert E. Lee in favor of “appropriate language and images,” as Gilland described them.

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Some of the largest social media platforms in the world will soon try to convince a US court their platforms did not contribute to the radicalization of a mass shooter who killed ten people and injured three more in a New York grocery store in 2022.

Depending on the outcome, the case could reshape liability rules for social media sites.

In a court order published on Tuesday, New York 8th district Supreme Court justice Paula Feroleto denied a dismissal request from Meta, Reddit, Twitch’s company Amazon, YouTube owner Alphabet, plus Discord and 4Chan. They all need to go to court to argue their case.

“Many of the social media/internet defendants have attempted to establish that their platforms are mere message boards,” Feroleto wrote.

“This may ultimately prove true,” the judge noted. However, “the Court has determined the complaint sufficiently pleads viable causes of action to go forward at this stage of the litigation,” she added.

And they have to prove that they love Big Brother.

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This week, the military junta that rules the African country of Niger announced the revocation of its military agreement with the United States, and the coming expulsion of U.S. troops based in the country. The country’s leadership also announced its turn to Russia. The move followed a disastrous visit by American officials, who arrived to lecture the hard men who led last summer’s coup about the need to restore democracy, and to stop talking to Iran about providing it uranium.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the top American officials, Molly Phee and Celeste Wallender, incensed Niger officials by speaking to them in a “condescending” way. If the U.S. can’t somehow convince the Niger junta to reverse its decision, America will not only lose an important drone base in the heart of a region that produces Islamist terrorists, but will also give Russia significant footing in a strategically significant African region. Plus, it will be easier for Iran to gain access to uranium.

Never send a Karen to do a diplomat’s job.

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The top two U.S. generals who oversaw the evacuation of Afghanistan as it fell to the Taliban in August 2021 blamed the Biden administration for the chaotic departure, telling lawmakers Tuesday that it inadequately planned for the evacuation and did not order it in time.

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People who have been reading my analysis for a long time are well aware of my expectations on the eventual outcome of the US economic debacle: A stagflationary crisis followed by a massive crash similar to the Great Depression (or worse). I based this prediction on a number of circumstances, but primarily I went back to the history of currency devaluations and central bank policy. These kinds of things have happened before and they tend to follow a pattern that is visible today.

Specifically, I studied the 1971-1981 stagflation crisis for reference and I found some startling similarities. It was one of the worst economic declines in American history next to the depression, and it’s an event that almost no one talks about. A lot of people (specifically Gen Z) believe that our current era is the worst financial era of all time and that their generation has been shafted by previous generations.

This is inaccurate; the stagflation disaster of the 1970s was far worse. That said, it shows us where our country is eventually headed and it’s not looking good. What is a manageable economic crunch today has the potential to become a calamity tomorrow.

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In a ruling that had both proponents and opponents of the Second Amendment do a curious double take, a federal judge has ruled that an illegal immigrant was wrongly banned from possessing firearms.

Matt Taibbi.

On January 17, 1961, outgoing President and former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower gave one of the most consequential speeches in American history. Eisenhower for eight years had been a popular president, whose appeal drew upon a reputation as a person of great personal fortitude, who’d guided the United States to victory in an existential fight for survival in World War II. Nonetheless, as he prepared to vacate the Oval Office for handsome young John F. Kennedy, he warned the country it was now at the mercy of a power even he could not overcome.

Until World War II, America had no permanent arms manufacturing industry. Now it did, and this new sector, Eisenhower said, was building up around itself a cultural, financial, and political support system accruing enormous power. This “conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience,” he said….

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In Houston, a scandal recently broke when it became public that the police department had closed the investigation of over a quarter of a million crimes with a code indicating the case was being dropped for lack of manpower. The cases closed included thousands of murders and sexual assaults. The department did not inform victims or their families that the investigations had been closed. While the disclosure has roiled Houstonians, it should be of no surprise to anyone that law enforcement agencies generally do an abysmal job at solving crimes.

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At dawn or dusk, Kristy Brow used to enjoy alone time walking in the woods on her 21-acre property in Highgate, Vermont, a small rural town near the U.S.–Canada border.

Lately, however, she’s cautious—she’s worried about potential encounters with illegal immigrants along the remote logging trail.

“I don’t go out by myself anymore—especially at night,” said Mrs. Brow, who runs a dog obedience business from her home.

Democrat administration = life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The Antiplanner.

Someone recently asked me what I thought were the nation’s worst-managed transit projects. I suggested the Honolulu rail was number 1, the Maryland Purple Line was number 2, and BART to San Jose was number 3. But maybe I underestimated the insanity of the BART-to-San Jose line.

DEA.

A government agency celebrates its own inconpetence in pursuit of a greater budget.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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With a title containing “Cowboys”, “Yankees” and “Patriots” it soundsAn illustration of Joe Biden looking at a map of the world. like a post about great sports dynasties, but it is actually about a recent podcast with Jack Posobiec and Mike Benz. In this podcast, Mike Benz, who is an “internet security expert” describes how US foreign policy is driven by two factions: the Yankees and the Cowboys.

The Yankees are the financial titans in New York and London. The Cowboys are the agrarian and military industries. Benz says that the factions use their political power and tools (sanctions for Yankees and military/regime change for Cowboys) to control foreign policy to their benefit. If a country is not cooperating with the American sugar industry, then they get an upgraded leader. If a country is not trading in dollars, then the financial hammer is dropped on them. He said it basically started with the Monroe Doctrine and continues to this day

The Foundry.

One of the big takeaways from the newly released transcript of President Joe Biden’s two-day interview with Robert Hur is that the special counsel was being exceedingly generous when describing the president as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Much of the conversation with Hur is littered with barely incoherent answers and spiraling word salads. Though, the reader is occasionally entertained by Biden’s blowhard-y non sequiturs.

We learn about Biden’s Corvette—twice. We learn that the president is a frustrated architect but an excellent archer. Biden even jokes that there might be risque pictures of first lady Jill Biden.

Then again, the fact that the entire two-day interview isn’t a giant nonsensical rant is not as impressive as his defenders might believe. The president is, indeed, completely coherent at times. And those are the times he’s probably lying.

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The open??fields doctrine gives government vast powers to invade nearly 96 percent of all US private land.

Terry Rainwaters owns 136 acres of rural land in northwest Tennessee. He lives on the property with his son, rents a second house on the property to long??term tenants, and farms the property commercially. Because he values his privacy, he has a locked gate posted with “no trespassing” signs at the entrance to the property.

Nevertheless, for years Tennessee wildlife officers have entered his land, roamed around in camouflage, spied on his son while he was hunting, and even installed a surveillance camera in a tree—all without consent, a warrant, or even probable cause.

The officers think they can treat Rainwaters’s private land like public property because of a state statute that allows them to “go upon any property, outside of buildings, posted or otherwise” to enforce hunting regulations. This statute embodies a legal rule called the open??fields doctrine, which gives government officials a blank check to enter private land whenever and however they please.

During Prohibition, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Fourth Amendment—which typically requires officials to get a warrant before searching private property—does not protect “open fields.” Despite its name, the open??fields doctrine covers far more than fields. It applies to nearly all private land that does not immediately surround a home.

The American Mind.

ederalism is being tested in ways not seen in more than a century. The Biden Administration has openly refused any real effort to slow illegal entries, while as many as 13 million foreigners have crossed illegally since his inauguration. It took Texas longer than it should have to grasp that they were actually working to facilitate illegal entries. Eventually, though, Governor Greg Abbott recognized that the Lone Star State would have to act alone against Biden’s open border policy. After he implemented aggressive actions to stop the flow, the feds went to extraordinary measures to ensure that the border would remain open, cutting razor wire placed along the Rio Grande and doggedly fighting Abbott’s policies in federal court.

A major escalation occurred when the governor formally declared the situation an “invasion.” Predictably, Democrats howled at the use of a term with such rhetorical force. But if “invasion” is a faithful characterization of what is happening, then we have an obligation to call it that. And if there is an invasion at the southern border, then it must be stopped by all means—whether by federal intervention or in defiance of it.

What exactly constitutes an “invasion”? What are the characteristics that have defined invasions throughout human history? I propose that there are five. The first is that an invasion is something that the inhabitants of the nation being invaded never requested or invited. Second, invading forces are comprised predominantly of military-aged men. Third, invaders are primarily motivated by self-interest. Fourth, invaders carry the insignia of their home nations with them. And, finally, an invasion must pose a genuine threat to the existing social order of the place being invaded. With these criteria in mind, let’s examine the situation at our southern border.

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Five Americans are still being held hostage by Hamas, and Biden has sent no troops to help them, but at the State of the Union address, he promised to send troops to build a pier for Gaza.

The estimated over 1,000 troops will spend as long as 2 months laboring to build a floating pier in a war zone under potential attack to help transfer aid to the Hamas supporters living in Gaza.

Nothing about this plan makes sense.

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catastrophic wave of violent crime committed by illegal immigrants. This comes amid the ten million migrants that have invaded the nation, alongside recent calls from radical progressive lawmakers across crime-ridden metro areas to defund the police and limit criminal prosecution. As a result, many law-abiding Americans express growing concern about insecurity amid a new era of explosive crime and chaos.

Let’s begin with a series of news headlines that show Chilean crime gangs have been on a nationwide burglary spree, targeting wealthy neighborhoods from coast to coast.

Scott Adams regularly complains on his Coffee With Scott Adams podcast that South American gangs are targeting upscale homes in his neighborhood in California.

Power Line.

Sen. Alex Padilla, the California Democrat appointed to fill Kamala Harris’s Senate seat after she became vice president, wants Americans to be more certain to register to vote by linking it with free tax preparation. Padilla is leading a push for the U.S. Treasury Department to provide voter registration services at federally funded centers that prepare taxes for low- to moderate-income people, disabled people and people with limited English at no cost to them.

“Limited English,” like “undocumented” or “migrant,” is code for those illegally present in the United States. Federal law bars illegals from voting but Sen. Padilla helps them violate the law. As California’s secretary of state he deployed the “motor voter” plan that registers illegals to vote when they get their driver’s license.

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The Biden administration renewed a sanctions waiver against the Iranian regime Wednesday that unlocks billions of dollars in previously frozen funds, The Washington Free Beacon reported.

The administration’s sanctions waiver, extended for another four months, allows Tehran access to $10 billion in previously frozen Iranian revenues collected from electricity exports, according to The Washington Free Beacon, which viewed the renewal notice.

“Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason and shall suffer death, or shall be imprisoned not less than five years and fined under this title but not less than $10,000; and shall be incapable of holding any office under the United States.”  — 18 U.S.C. s. 2381.

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A Republican secretary of state sent a letter this week to the Department of Justice (DOJ) alerting it to an executive order signed in 2021 that he says will allow felons and illegal aliens to register to vote in elections.

In the letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Republican Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson wrote that a Biden-signed executive order has led to agencies under Mr. Garland’s charge “attempting to register people to vote, including potentially ineligible felons and to co-opt state and local officials into accomplishing this goal.”

The Foundry.

something in his budget for everyone—everyone who loves tax hikes, that is.

Biden would raise taxes by $5 trillion over 10 years, and—based on his budget—would allow an additional $2 trillion of middle-class tax cuts to expire after 2025. Between 2023 and 2034, tax receipts would rise by 95%, according to the White House.

Biden would aim most of the new taxes at small and big businesses, entrepreneurs, investors, and job and wealth creators.

Middle-class workers and consumers would be devastated by the economic collateral damage.

The Biden administration acts as if business capital is an endless fountain that will never run dry, no matter how much the government siphons out of it, and as if no matter how severely they’re taxed, investors will invest just as much, and businesses will keep building, hiring, and raising salaries.

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The U.S. Military Academy no longer will use the motto “Duty, Honor, Country” as its mission statement, according to West Point’s superintendent.

I guess reality finally caught up with them.

UPDATE: Duty, Honor, Country … Gone

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Special Counsel Robert Hur testified for some five hours before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday on his investigation into President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents over his too long career in public life. I have posted the Washington Post’s YouTube video of the hearing at the bottom. At the same time, transcripts of Hur’s interview of Biden in the investigation were released: October 8 (99 pages) and October 9 (157 pages).

Mr. Techno Fog provided his hot take on the transcripts here (“confusion, evasion, and outright lies”). David Harsanyi cut to the chase in the Federalist column “Turns out Biden lied.” The Free Beacon’s Andrew Kerr reviews both Hur’s testimony and the Biden transcripts in “Interview Transcript, Congressional Testimony Shed Light on Biden’s Memory Lapses During Classified Doc Investigation.”

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Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio) wants to declare racism a “public health crisis,” the symptoms of which include “microaggressions” and the “forms of violence” that black Americans face when “jogging in neighborhoods.”

Brown on Monday introduced “a resolution declaring racism a public health crisis,” which calls for “a nationwide strategy to address health disparities and inequities across all sectors in society.” The resolution does not offer strategies for “dismantling systemic practices and policies that perpetuate racism” but does call for “governments to engage significant resources to empower the communities that are impacted.”

It’s a potentially risky resolution for Brown, one of the Senate’s staunchest progressives, who faces a tough reelection bid in a state that swung for former president Donald Trump by more than 7 points in 2020. Brown, who votes with President Joe Biden 98 percent of the time, has attempted to position himself as a defender of blue-collar workers.

The greatest threat to the health of black people is a black teenage gang-banger is a gun. I don’t see any mention of it in the Senator’s plans.

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Since January 2023, President Joe Biden’s National Science Foundation (NSF) has spent millions of dollars on grants funded by the American Rescue Plan, Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus package. The grants have nothing to do with COVID, but they do fund studies on climate change.

The American Rescue Plan, which Biden said would bring “direct relief to families bearing the brunt of the COVID-19 crisis,” sent $600 million to the NSF. The agency pledged to use the funding to “support groups of individuals and institutions most strongly affected by the pandemic.” Three years after Biden signed the legislation, that money is still going out the door—through research grants that aren’t COVID-related.

One July 2023 grant, for example, funded a $246,000 Amherst College study meant to “deepen our understanding of how floodplains have responded to … climatic changes.” A more than $7 million grant awarded one month earlier to the University of Texas at Austin will help develop “a learning environment that is welcoming to marginalized and minoritized researchers.” The NSF sent another $181,000 to California Polytechnic State University in December to investigate “the structural organization, and changes therein, of a school of fish.”

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Anybody who has ever observed and studied the homeless situation in California will readily see how the nonprofit homeless service providers that have been enabled by our political leaders have not only helped create the crisis, but have institutionalized homelessness as a way of life.

Now, a new conduit for corruption in the state of California is rearing its ugly head, and a word to the wise is to recognize this demon for what it really is. In brief, it is the role that nonprofits are playing in the California State Housing Mandate that the governor’s office and our legislature are promoting.

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Three small business owners filed suit and won in court against the Biden administration for attempting to choose winners and losers solely based on race when deciding who would receive government financial support.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) sued the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), a federal agency that was expanded under the Biden administration and charged with supporting minority-owned businesses, in March 2023 on behalf of Jeffrey Nuziard, Matthew Piper and Christian Brucker.

The MBDA sought to serve “minority business enterprises (MBEs) owned and operated by African Americans, Asian Americans, Hasidic Jews, Hispanic Americans, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders.” The agency was created as part of a presidential executive order in the 1960s, and permanently authorized through the Infrastructure Act in 2021.

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The University of Virginia (UVA) has at least 235 employees under its “diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)” banner — including 82 students — whose total cost of employment is estimated at $20 million. That’s $15 million in cash compensation plus an additional 30-percent for the annual cost of their benefits.

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A federal judge on Friday blocked the Biden administration from unlawfully redirecting taxpayer funds away from the construction of a wall along the southern border.

StrategyPage.

The U.S. Navy has finally started repair work on an SSN (nuclear attack submarine) that returned damaged from its last time at sea nine years ago. The Newport News Shipbuilding firm is to carry out a $1.24 billion overhaul of Los Angeles-class submarine USS Boise at a shipyard in Virginia. The work will be completed by 2029.

The work includes maintenance and restoration of hull structure, tanks, propulsion systems, electric plant, auxiliary systems, armament, and furnishings in addition to many useful alterations.

The delays in doing the work on the USS Boise were caused by submarine maintenance backlogs resulting from not enough shipyards. The Boise was originally supposed to have this work done in 2016, but for eight years there were not enough shipyards available to do the work.

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The Senate passed six government funding bills on March 8 to avoid an impending shutdown deadline that was poised to activate at midnight later that night.

Senators approved the funding package 75–22 early in the evening on March 8 after hours of debate. Democrats pushed for a faster vote, while Republicans proposed several amendments to the funding package that all inevitably failed.

After the House of Representatives passed its measure on March 6, only the Senate was left to pass its funding bills before they were all sent to President Joe Biden to be signed into law. In addition to the March 8 deadline, there is another looming shutdown deadline on March 22.

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New York Attorney General Letitia James has been sued by a Nassau County executive who has accused her of unconstitutional discrimination for trying to override the county’s decision to block biologically mmale transgender athletes from competing in women’s sports.

The lawsuit was filed by Nassau County official Bruce Blakeman, who said on X that he filed the lawsuit “to protect women’s sports and ensure a safe environment for women.”

“Bullying of women and girls will not be tolerated!” he added, in response to James’ cease and desist letter and threat to use legal action to force the county to allow trans athletes to compete.

Daily Beast.

Gee, I wonder why?

Real estate billionaire Jeff Greene sat in his oceanside mansion in Palm Beach on Thursday as President Biden unveiled a proposal to raise taxes on the ultra-rich—a central element of his State of the Union address. The plan would impose a 25 percent minimum income on anyone worth at least $100 million. Greene, with an estimated $7.5 billion net worth, would easily make the cut.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the real estate tycoon doesn’t support Biden’s proposal. “I don’t agree with the idea of just singling out people because of how much they have or don’t have,” he fumed to The Daily Beast.
“The progressive income tax, I understand,” he continued, though he argued that tax rates in some parts of the country have already grown out of control. “You have to leave incentives for people who are the ones who are going to create the jobs for all those people trying to climb the ladder.”Greene also contended that wealth can be difficult to measure. Some billionaires, like Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos, have net worths composed mostly of publicly traded stock, which is easy to value. In his world—real estate—that kind of analysis is often subjective.

(Hint: If you’re the whipping boy, don’t give your money to the guys with the whips. Just sayin’.)

The Foundry.

Throughout all of history, education has been understood as being about learning the truths of reality and conforming oneself to those truths in order to flourish in civil society.

The Biden administration wants to turn that idea on its head. The administration thinks one should try to twist reality to conform it to oneself and one’s emotions.

That brainwashing starts at the highest levels of the federal government and percolates down into the classrooms. And that’s exactly what’s happening with the Department of Education.

Power Line.

• Esquire used to pose a rhetorical question as a caption on a photograph of Richard Nixon that it published in its annual Dubious Achievement Awards edition: Why is this man laughing? The question to be posed for this speech is Why is this man shouting? He is an angry old man.

• This was a terrible speech terribly delivered. It’s a good thing no drug test was required before the address. Biden sounded hopped up. He spoke too fast. He slurred his words. He was frequently difficult to understand. He shouted a variety of clichés and shibboleths as though we might otherwise miss their depth and meaning. The disparity between the shibboleths and the shouting was almost funny.

• Biden sounded like a 45 rpm record playing at 78. It was an old record — it had scratches at several places that caused it to skip the groove.

Read it.

The president made numerous claims, many of them contentious and sharply partisan. The Daily Signal fact-checked many of those claims to assess whether they were truthful and accurate.

Newsbusters.

Hey, somebody needs to.

mmediately following President Biden’s State of the Union Address Thursday night, CNN’s band of liberal anchors (Jake Tapper, Dana Bash, and Abby Phillip) praised his attacks on former President Trump, his “fight,” and tried to do damage control for his plethora of senior moments.

Tapper made sure to tout how Biden alluded to Trump 13 times (ABC counted 16) during the address. Once he quickly exhausted all the nice things he had to say, Tapper awkwardly pivoted to trying to downplay Biden’s bumbling, stumbling, and disgraceful mispronunciation of Laken Riley’s name (the young college student Biden’s open border policies killed) by calling her “Lincoln”.

The War Zone.

Five months after the attacks by Hamas on Israel sparked what has been an incredibly violent war, according to multiple reports, the Biden Administration is planning to set up a beachhead to move large amounts of aid to Gaza, from ship to shore. Such an operation, which would be fraught with risk, comes days after the United States joined a growing number of countries executing airdrops of aid into Gaza. Significant portions of the Gaza Strip have been largely destroyed by tens of thousands of Israeli strikes and ongoing ground fighting.
Politico reports that Biden will formally announce the plan during his State of the Union address tonight. Citing three undisclosed senior administration officials, the outlet states that “Biden will order the U.S. military to establish a temporary port in Gaza so more humanitarian aid can get to Palestinians in need.” One administration official has reportedly said the plan will not “require U.S. boots on the ground.” How exactly that is possible is not clear. Gaza currently has no functioning port facility.

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Ahead of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address this evening – what concerns do the political elites on Capitol Hill have that require security crews to erect a large steel fence around the immediate perimeter of the Capitol Complex?

In several posts on X, FOX News Senior Congressional Correspondent Chad Pergram said the steel, grated 12-foot fence around the Capitol Complex was erected on Wednesday night on the orders of the Secret Service.

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Politico reports that President Biden has a big announcement to make tonight. During his State of the Union address, he will order the military to establish a temporary port in Gaza so more humanitarian aid can get to Palestinians in need. Enough with the airdrops, or to supplement the airdrops. We’re going in big time to keep Hamas in business.

Read it.

A longtime Safeway employee from San Mateo, California, has won a court victory after she was terminated for trying to stop a suspected shoplifter, FOX-KTVU out of Oakland has reported.

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Legislation introduced on March 5 would strip COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers of liability protections, enabling Americans injured by the shots to sue the companies.