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Border Patrol agents — frustrated by the border situation — are reportedly concerned the Senate will undermine the impeachment trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

After the Feb. 13 House impeachment vote, five federal law enforcement agents said they worry Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., will scuttle Mayorkas’ trial before it can begin, The Washington Examiner reported.

“I want to see our government take action!!” a California agent wrote in a text message to the outlet about the impeachment effort. “It took them long enough.”

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The number of Chinese migrants being encountered in a key sector of the southern border is exceeding that of Mexican nationals, a trend ongoing for years that has renewed national security concerns.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data obtained by Fox News shows that Chinese nationals are the second-largest nationality encountered at the border in San Diego Sector since the fiscal year began in October.

There have been 21,000 Chinese nationals encountered, second only to Colombia (28,000). Third is Mexican nationals with 18,000, followed by Brazil (8,700) and Ecuador (7,700). Other countries of origin include Turkey, Guinea, India, Guatemala and Peru.

John Derbyshire was fond of saying that there wasn’t anything wrong with New York City that about a million ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix. I guess we’ll find out.

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A town hall hosted by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. touting the apparent benefits of the Green New Deal ended up turning some attendees red with anger on Thursday.

The socialist lawmaker was speaking at an event in Queens in New York City where she was heckled by two attendees who accused her of caring more about illegal immigrants than those whom she was elected to represent. One of the hecklers, Jonathan David Rinaldi, said he is challenging Ocasio-Cortez for her congressional seat.

“My name is Jonathan David Rinaldi and I’m running for Congress against AOC, the Green New Deal is a scam,” Rinaldi shouted as Ocasio-Cortez was championing environmental justice provisions and climate change policies under the deal.

The problem with electing an ideologue to represent you is that he or she won’t do that, but rather represent their ideology.

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Washington is once again facing a potential shutdown. Funding for the federal government will run out in early March unless the House and Senate can bridge their differences and pass spending legislation.

At the same time, the city of San Francisco seems to have few problems doling out huge amounts to well-connected activist groups and hard-left ideologues.

While those two realities might seem disconnected, there are important links between them.

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said on Thursday that it seized 6.5 tons of methamphetamine at Eagle Pass port of entry in Texas. It is the largest seizure ever made at a port of entry in a single enforcement action.

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Very capable but very expensive … like shooting your enemies with golden bullets.

The Tomahawk missile has become an iconic part of the U.S. military inventory, but due to conflicts overseas and production issues at home, America is in danger of running out of the venerable missile.

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It may take more than 10 years for someone injured by a COVID-19 vaccine to receive a decision on whether their claim is eligible for compensation by the government’s vaccine compensation program—if they receive a response at all.

It only seems fair that if someone is injured by getting a vaccine that was mandated by the government, the government ought to pay appropriate compensation. But that compensation doesn’t dome out of the pockets of the bureaucrats that mandated the vaccine–heaven forbid!– but out of the pockets of the American taxpayer … i.e. you.

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President Biden traveled to the West Coast this week to raise money for his campaign. While there, he decided to spend some money, too. Yours.

On February 21, Biden announced that he was canceling $1.2 billion in federal student loans for 153,000 borrowers. That’s on top of more than $130 billion in student debt that he has canceled to date. The Penn Wharton school says that Biden’s efforts will cost a total of $475 billion over 10 years.

How awful is this policy? Ah, let us count the ways.

UPDATE: President Biden’s Transfer of Other People’s Debts To You

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Fact check true: For the first time in history spending on interest will exceed spending on defense.

I hear that Singapore isn’t run by morons, as the U.S. apparently is.

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Arizona prosecutor Rachel Mitchell said on Wednesday she will not extradite a New York murder suspect back to the state because Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg cannot be trusted to keep the man locked up, the New York Post reported.

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An injury on a high school girls basketball team is another reminder of why Title IX exists and why the definition of “sex” is not up for interpretation.

A high school girls basketball team decided to forfeit a game earlier this month after a male athlete playing for the other team injured one of the young women.

The game was between Collegiate Charter School of Lowell in Massachusetts and KIPP Academy in Lynn, Massachusetts. A male who identifies as female plays on KIPP Academy’s girls basketball team, and during the game, he wrestled with one of the other team’s female players for the ball. Video shows the female player from Collegiate Charter School of Lowell falling to the ground after the exchange and holding her back in pain.

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Buy those votes!  Buy those votes!

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Administration critics say these moves reflect the resurgence of a practice embraced by the Obama administration and rejected during Donald Trump’s presidency: “sue and settle.” The tactic is simple: An advocacy group sues a federal agency for failing to enforce laws or regulations. Agency officials and the plaintiffs then come to a private agreement and that deal is ratified by the courts via a binding consent decree.

The practice is common at every level of government. New York City, for example, is obligated to house and feed tens of thousands of migrants because of a consent decree it entered into to settle a 1979 lawsuit brought by advocates for the homeless. But it is most prevalent in the environmental field, where well-funded groups commonly sue the Environmental Protection Agency or the Bureau of Land Management within the Department of the Interior alleging failure to enforce provisions of the Clean Air Act or regulations regarding federal leases for energy production.

Although such consent decrees do not have the force of laws passed by Congress or regulations issued by the government that have gone through formal review and allow for public comment, they set the rules of the road. Critics say it has allowed government to advance policy goals that cannot be achieved through normal democratic channels.

The distinguishing characteristic of Democrats is that they avoid anything that smacks of actual democracy.

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Back in early 2022 just weeks into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Western officials began raising suspicions that the Islamic Republic of Iran was supplying arms, and especially kamikaze drones, to Moscow for use on the Ukrainian battlefield. This proved true, and allegations of Tehran supplying ballistic missiles soon followed.

Now, just days away from the grim two-year mark of the start of the major war, there are fresh reports of a dramatic escalation in Iran’s military supply pipeline to Russia. Reuters reports Wednesday that Tehran has provided Moscow with a “large number of powerful surface-to-surface ballistic missiles.”

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US state COVID-19 vaccine mandates didn’t significantly change uptake, and states with mandates actually had lower COVID-19 booster and voluntary adult and child flu vaccine coverage than those that banned vaccine requirements, an analysis of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data suggests.

Researchers from the University of Arizona at Tucson and Furman University in South Carolina parsed the data to identify changes in COVID-19 vaccination rates and COVID-19 boosters and seasonal flu vaccines in the 2 months before and after implementation of state-level mandates for targeted groups (eg, state employees). Baseline attitudes were collected before the vaccine rollout as part of the COVID States Project.

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A shocking ten million illegals have crossed the southern border into the US under President Biden’s watch so far. Thousands of lucky migrants who end up in the progressive hellhole of New York City could soon receive pre-loaded debit cards with amounts as much as $10,000 under a new controversial program launched by Democrat Mayor Eric Adams.

The New York Post reports Adam’s genius plan to give unvetted illegals taxpayer funds is set to begin with 500 families staying at the luxurious Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown Manhattan.

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Your tax dollars at work — to laud violent Marxism and a cop killer for Black History Month.

PBS News Weekend on Sunday devoted its semi-weekly “Hidden Histories” segment to praise the militant Marxist-black power group the Black Panther Party, founded by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale in Oakland.

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Earlier this month, I broke down the jobs report that was hyped as evidence that Bidenomics was working and found that at least 1 in 5 jobs being created were actually government jobs.

Worse still, 1 in 10 jobs added in January came from “employment in social assistance”. What was driving this sudden boom in welfare jobs? The real boom was happening on the border. Cities are being flooded with masses of migrants who need social workers to care for them.

New York City is cutting school lunches for kids while Denver is slashing funding for parks to be able to care for migrants. Some of the job growth in Bidenomics consists of the country, and states and cities going deeper into debt to provide more benefits for the illegal alien invaders.

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A record 7.3 million illegal aliens have crossed the southwest border under President Biden’s watch, a number which according to Fox News.is greater than the population of 36 individual states.

That figure is sourced from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which has already reported 961,537 Southwest land border encounters in the current fiscal year, which runs from October through September, and if the current pace of illegal immigration does not slow down, fiscal year 2024 will break last year’s record of 2,475,669 southwest border encounters — a number that by itself exceeds the population of New Mexico.

The total number of southwest land border encounters since Biden assumed office in 2021 is 7,298,486, CBP data shows.

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‘Numerous’ Nevada voters were shocked to discover that they voted in the Feb. 6th presidential primary, despite not having done so – the Las Vegas Review-Journal reports.

Las Vegas resident and registered Republican Daphne Lee told the outlet that her family checked the secretary of state’s website on Sunday to look up their voter history after hearing about the issue. The site showed that she and her family had voted in the primary despite none of them having done so. She attempted to opt out of future mail-in ballots and was unable to do so – with a message saying she was not currently registered to vote, and that her voting history no longer existed.

“It’s just so frustrating,” Lee said, adding “This makes everyone uncomfortable.”

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A dramatic increase in Chinese illegal immigration is on track to break records at the southern border, with apprehensions from the communist country in one sector alone already eclipsing fiscal 2021 in just a few days.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sources tell Fox News that between Saturday and Monday there were 452 Chinese nationals apprehended by Border Patrol in the San Diego Sector alone.

That’s more than the 450 apprehended in fiscal 2021 altogether across the entire southwest border.

The number of Chinese nationals has been increasing since fiscal 2021. In fiscal 2022, numbers increased to more than 2,000 border-wide. In fiscal 2023, that number then surged to more than 24,314.

John Derbyshire used to say that there wasn’t anything wrong with New York City that the addition of a million ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix. (“Turn NYC into Singapore? We can’t have that!”)

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A new study on COVID-19 vaccines that looked at nearly 100 million vaccinated individuals affirmed the vaccines’ previously observed links to increased risks for certain adverse effects including myocarditis and Guillain-Barré syndrome.

The researchers noted in their analysis that COVID-19 infections have consistently been found to be more likely to cause the conditions observed in this study than vaccinations, adding that factor should be considered when weight the risk-to-benefit ratio of immunization.

The study was conducted by the Global COVID Vaccine Safety project and took into account 99,068,901 vaccinated individuals across eight countries: Argentina, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, New Zealand and Scotland.

The report specifically looked at adverse events following administration of the Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines.

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The Biden Administration will soon allow year-round sales of E15, gasoline with higher ethanol content, but only from 2025, to avoid potential regional spikes in gas prices ahead of the presidential election in November, sources with knowledge of the talks have told Reuters.

The Administration is prepared to approve by the end of March a request from Midwest governors – whose states are some of the battleground states in the presidential election – to allow year-round sales of E15, gasoline with 15% ethanol content.

Currently, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has an effective ban on E15 fuel sales for the summer season because it contributes to smog, but in 2022 the ban was lifted for the summer sales in an emergency waiver to lower prices at the pump.

Buy those votes! Buy those votes!

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The U.S. Department of Agriculture is working with a left-wing advocacy group to boost voter turnout as part of President Joe Biden’s executive order directing federal agencies to get involved in elections.

The USDA worked directly with Demos, a New York-based group that helped draft Biden’s Executive Order 14019, according to records obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.)

Biden signed his order on agencies and voter registration in March 2021. On Aug. 9, 2021, Demos’ Adam Lioz emailed USDA officials, many in the office of Secretary Tom Vilsack, under the subject line: “Demos Meeting on Voting Rights EO.”

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Democrats constantly crow about their faith in “the right to choose.” But that applies to little beyond abortion. Any woman who chooses to buy a gun or send her child to a charter school should expect “pro-choice” Democrats to stand in her way.

Democrats crave control and uniformity, even when it comes to medical care for America’s veterans. Democrats want vets in the Veterans Affairs, not getting cured in the private sector.

The Obama-Biden VA waitlist scandal found veterans dying before they could see their doctors. Donald Trump promised to fix that lethal mess. And he did.

The VA is the poster child for what a US-government run universal health care system, like Britain’s NHS, would be like. (Hint: Horrible.)

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Despite a month of U.S.led airstrikes, Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels remain capable of launching significant attacks just this week, they seriously damaged a ship in a crucial strait and apparently downed an American drone worth tens of millions of dollars.

Makes you wonder how Roosevelt or Reagan would have handled this situation.

ZMan turns over a rock.

The Hemingway line about bankruptcy happening gradually then suddenly is a great line because it applies to many things. The suddenly part is what everyone can see and what everyone remembers. It is the gradually part that is overlooked. It is the important part of the dynamic because it explains why the event occurred. Landslides are not random events but the accumulation of many small, unobserved events that eventually reach a tipping point and we get the big event.

That is something to keep in mind as the military struggles to both meet its recruitment numbers and maintain the human capital needed for its operations. Fifty years ago, after the Vietnam war, the military put an emphasis on quality over quantity in both its arms and the men using those arms. The lesson of the Vietnam and post-Vietnam era, the so-called Stripes period, was that the modern military needed to be smarter, relying on intelligence rather than just brute force.

There is a lot more to the renaissance of the American military that began fifty years ago, but the salient factor today is the emphasis on intelligence. The reason for that is the military is suffering from a brain-drain. The overall intelligence of the military is in decline and it is most acute among the officer class. According to that linked report from National Defense Press, “Two-thirds of the new officers commissioned in 2014 would be in the bottom one-third of the class of 1980.”

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In Artis Shepherd’s recent article, which I highly recommend, he aptly detailed the numerous benefits of homeschooling and data showing that homeschooled students—far from being socially stunted, academically insular young people—are actually generally high-achieving, socially adroit young adults ready to provide value in the world.

Thus, in this commentary, I want to address a common argument against homeschooling: namely, that homeschooling is a breeding ground for propaganda—mainly “far right” political and religious ideologies—from parents and religious institutions, which is dangerous for social cohesion and democracy.

In the Good Old Days, when public schools and their teachers reflected the values and morality of the local community, they were a good thing. Now, when they only reflect the values and morality of the New Clerisy, they are a bad thing. This is not, as we used to say, rocket science.

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In recent months, stories from both the legacy media and the independent media have continued to pile up on how undocumented foreign nationals – also known as “migrants” and “illegal aliens” – are able to take advantage of a vast network of taxpayer funded benefits in daycare, medical care, housing, and more.

…

Just how much in taxpayers’ resources is going to foreign nationals? It’s difficult to estimate for a number of reasons. The spending is done through numerous different government agencies at various levels of government. Moreover, much of the money if filtered through non-profits (i.e., “NGOs”) that are labeled “charities” but are simply adjuncts of the regime.

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Lawmakers in New York City are pushing a ban on Tide Pods, made by Procter & Gamble, and other single-use laundry detergent products in the name of climate consciousness.

City Councilman James Gennaro introduced the legislation earlier this month, dubbed the “Pods are Plastic Bill.” It would make it illegal to sell any laundry pods or laundry sheets made with a certain form of alcohol.

Time to leave.

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When the Biden administration stepped in last year to block seven oil and gas leases in Alaska, it said it was doing so in part to recognize the “Indigenous Knowledge” of the Native Americans who originally inhabited the land.

The move was indicative of the administration’s embrace, in late 2022, of “Indigenous Knowledge”—that is, Native American folk wisdom—as part of their scientific assessments. so when Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland announced on Sept. 6 2023, that the entire United States Arctic Ocean was off limits to new oil and gas leasing, and canceled seven oil and gas leases issued by former president Donald Trump after a review, she cited “the best available science” and said the decision was also a “recognition of the Indigenous Knowledge of the original stewards of this area.”

That announcement has prompted a scientific integrity complaint by Protect the Public’s Trust, a watchdog group. “Indigenous Knowledge,” the complaint says, privileges “subjective beliefs over and above evidence derived from the application of the scientific method.”

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San Francisco’s Elections Commission has, for what is believed to be a first time in history, appointed a non-U.S. citizen, who isn’t legally allowed to vote, to serve as an official.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Reality is what remains when you wake up from dreaming.

Wall Street Journal.

Anne “LaVerne” Gaither teared up when workers dismantled the hunter-green plywood and metal scaffolding that for 21 years obscured the entrance of her Harlem apartment building.
The 220-foot-long structure, known here as a sidewalk shed, was New York City’s oldest existing shed until it came down in December. It was originally built in 2002 to protect pedestrians during required repairs to the neo-Georgian facade of 409 Edgecombe Ave., a century-old landmark once home to luminaries such as W.E.B. DuBois and Thurgood Marshall.
Gaither, 93 years old, used to keep bottles of water for the workers on the wooden platform outside her second-story window. “My tears were thanks for being alive to see it come down,” she said.
A few weeks later, damage caused by a deadly fire forced the rise of a new shed.

Matt Taibbi

The State Department is so unhappy a newspaper published details about where it’s been spending your taxes, it’s threatened to only show a congressional committee its records in camera until it gets a “better understanding of how the Committee will utilize this sensitive information.” Essentially, Tony Blinken is threatening to take his transparency ball home unless details about what censorship programs he’s sponsoring stop appearing in papers like the Washington Examiner.

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Recent years have seen a significant rise in the importance placed on anti-ship missiles, and the most prominent of these missiles has been the Naval Strike Missile (NSM)1 developed by Norwegian defense contractor Kongsburg. NSM offers a major improvement in capability over legacy missiles like Harpoon and Exocet, and while competitor missiles have begun to emerge in recent years, NSM was good enough to be adopted not only by much of NATO but also by the United States, which is famously hostile to foreign systems.

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There are three basic problems with the CIA: its objectives, methods, and unaccountability.

Its operational objectives are whatever the CIA or the President of the United States defines to be in the U.S. interest at a given time, irrespective of international law or U.S. law.

Its methods are secretive and duplicitous.

Its unaccountability means that the CIA and president run foreign policy without any public scrutiny. Congress is a doormat, a sideshow.

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With the state and some local governments facing significant budget shortfalls this year, finances could become even tighter after the Federal Emergency Management Agency, better known as FEMA, informed California officials that it will deny some pandemic-related reimbursement claims.

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President Joe Biden discarded advice to maintain a military presence in Afghanistan unless the Taliban complied with the Doha Agreement, former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad told a House panel on Feb. 15.

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In case you wondered where, oh where, all the trillions of dollars go, transgender Assistant HHS Secretary Admiral Rachel Levine is here to help.

In what some have called the ‘woke trifecta’, the white trans official took to social media today to explain that, apparently, climate-change is racist.

“Climate change is having a disproportionate effect on the physical and mental health of black communities.”

So, to be clear, climate-change is an existential threat to all of mankind, right?

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A solid majority of American citizens now recognize that Biden’s many millions of alleged refugees are anything but the real deal. In all probability, some of these illegal immigrants are members of the “tired and poor” seeking a shortcut into the United States, but also include a number of spies, drug mules, human traffickers, criminals, and convicts. As for legitimate refugees, in all likelihood they represent less than 10% of the total.

The Spectator.

After consecutive Supreme Court terms with major rulings on abortion, guns and affirmative action, the justices don’t have anything on the docket now that will roil the culture wars. (The Trump ballot case to be argued as this goes to press will be a small blip.) Instead, this year our black-robed philosopher-kings are doing battle with the administrative state — which Steve Bannon promised to “deconstruct” when Donald Trump took office last go-round.

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If you’re one of the many people worried that US foreign policy is in the hands of a visibly declining eighty-one year-old president, Alexander Ward’s account of the Biden administration’s first two years in office may — or may not — make you feel better, for he leaves readers with little doubt as to who is actually the executive branch’s most influential decision-maker: forty-seven year-old national security advisor Jake Sullivan.

Ward might deny any such authorial intent, but time and again he shows his hand, as when he invokes “Sullivan’s first two years at the helm alongside Biden.” Secretary of state Antony Blinken is of course close on Sullivan’s heels, but Ward’s thoroughly reported book, along with Chris Whipple’s similar tome from early 2023, The Fight of His Life, both remind anyone tempted to forget that the calamitous August 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan remains the defining event of Joe Biden’s first term in the White House.

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While Special Counsel Robert K. Hur has raised the issue of mental deterioration in explaining why he declined to prosecute 81-year-old Joe Biden for illegal retention and sharing of classified documents, the president chose another rationale to declare himself not culpable: He shifted the blame to the staffers who boxed up his records as he left the vice president’s office in 2017.

The American Mind.

Never believe what bipartisan foreign policy establishment hacks say about China and Russia. They don’t believe what they say, either. The Blob (as Obama aide Ben Rhodes called it) learned through generations of strategic blunders that if everyone closes ranks and sticks to the same story, its members will survive a strategic disaster of any magnitude with their careers intact. The same principle explains why not a single American banker went to jail after the subprime collapse of 2008, the biggest fraud in all financial history. The Blob’s logic is simple: If you go after one of us, then you have to go after all of us, and who will be left to put things back together?

NBC.

Criticism of Biden from that notorious right-wing misinformation monger NBC News.

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in the district, the latest to shut down amid a surge in violence that has affected residents’ safety.

“D.C. is getting a bad rap right now,” Doron Petersan, who owns the popular vegan spot Sticky Fingers Diner, told Fox 5. “There’s crime, for sure, and it makes it extremely difficult to operate.”

Petersan added that she herself was the victim of a carjacking while making deliveries for her business, which specializes in vegan sweets. She lambasted the district’s government for not doing more to stop crime.

The first obligation of any government is to keep people safe. If it’s not doing that, it’s a failure. We are seeing that Democrats literally cannot be trusted to run a government competently.

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The United States is bankrolling its own “invasion” by funding the United Nations and its partners, which, in turn, give hundreds of millions of dollars in cash and aid to migrants who eventually cross the U.S. southern border illegally.

While the U.N. has aided migrants for decades, the scope of its operation has dramatically expanded as the number of illegal immigrants—from at least 160 countries—into the United States has surged.

That expansion has been fueled by more than $1 billion in funding from the U.S. government to the U.N. and other agencies assisting migrants, according to a government spending database.

“We’re actually funding our own border crisis,” Todd Bensman, senior national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a “pro-immigrant, low-immigration” think tank, told The Epoch Times.

“And it’s provided by, ultimately, the United States taxpayer.”