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For millions of Americans, Social Security is an essential lifeline during retirement. The annual cost-of-living (COLA) is designed to help beneficiaries escape the effects of inflation by providing an annual increase that matches inflation. However, this theory doesn’t always work out well in practice.

The prospects of the 2025 COLA have cast a long shadow and become a matter of debate. Soaring inflation has caused the downsides of the COLA system to be felt more dramatically. As inflation soars, more and more seniors are finding that COLA isn’t enough.

Social Security’s projected 2025 cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) falls short of addressing the escalating financial burdens faced by retirees, potentially exacerbating economic hardship for millions of Americans.

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A Roman Catholic diocese is appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court a New York appeals court ruling that requires religious charities to provide abortion coverage in their employee health insurance packages.

ObamaCare: “If you like your plan you can keep your plan … so long as it covers everything WE want it to cover (not YOU) and of course you’ll have to pay through the nose for that extra coverage.”

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Iran reported raking in nearly $16 billion in profits from its illicit oil trade over the past several months, highlighting the Biden-Harris administration’s perennially lax enforcement of sanctions meant to stymie Tehran’s cash flow.

Tehran exported a total of “$15.7 billion worth of oil in the first four months in the Iranian calendar” year, which lasted from March 21 to July 22, Mohammad Rezvanifar, the head of Iran’s Customs Administration, said on Monday. Most of this crude oil was offloaded in China, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Germany, and India, according to the country’s state-controlled press.

Iran’s illicit oil trade, which is heavily sanctioned by the United States and other Western nations, has hit a boom period under the Biden-Harris administration, topping around $90 billion as of March. This cash has helped to keep the hardline regime afloat amid economic uncertainty and helps Tehran fund its network of terror proxies, including Hamas and Hezbollah.

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The United States’ national debt has reached another milestone. According to the House Budget Committee, the national debt is set to surpass $35 trillion.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

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This woman was in charge of the Federal Reserve, which may explain why inflation is eating our lunch.

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Parents in Palo Alto are fuming about the school district’s plans for an upcoming ethnic studies class, saying they’re worried the curriculum is too political and will push left-leaning political activism on impressionable high school students. The district denies the charge and says it’s working on an inclusive model for the class.

The battle in Palo Alto reflects fights that have played out elsewhere in the Bay Area and are expected to escalate when the state mandate to teach ethnic studies is rolled out at all schools starting in the 2025-26 school year.

Time to leave.

Read it.

The medical establishment is teeing up for the launch of another “pandemic,” this one centering around H5N8 Influenza, also known as avian influenza or bird flu.

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The Biden-Harris administration is facing pressure from a top Republican lawmaker and the head of a federal law enforcement union, who accused it of looking the other way in response to a pro-Hamas protest on federal property in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.

Rep. Bruce Westerman (R., Ark.), the chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, fired off a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland late Wednesday saying that Park Police requested additional manpower prior to the protest, but that the Interior Department denied those requests. In his letter to Haaland, he said the brazen attacks on federal property are correlated to the failure of Interior’s leadership to provide support.

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We previously discussed the free speech lawsuit of Portland State University Professor Bruce Gilley who was blocked from the Twitter account of the University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion after tweeting “All men are created equal.”

The court just granted a preliminary injunction holding that there was a substantial likelihood that he would prevail on the merits against the University of Oregon.

Time to leave.

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Recently, a number of peer-reviewed papers have come to light, exposing just how pervasive and damaging the use of nudges was during COVID-19. They also reveal how nudging, including fear nudging, is being used to control individuals and populations on matters such as health, climate change, meat-eating, tobacco use, alcohol use, weight control, electoral candidates, political campaigns, and more.

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Environmental groups represented on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s own environmental justice council are among the largest beneficiaries of the president’s environmental programs, collectively receiving hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a database of federal grants reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

In total, four leading environmental justice organizations—WE ACT for Environmental Justice, the Bullard Center for Environmental & Climate Justice at Texas Southern University, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, and Kean University’s Center for the Urban Environment—have been awarded a staggering $229 million in Environmental Protection Agency grants and have been named as partners to grantees awarded another $200 million.

Leaders of those groups serve on the White House’s so-called Environmental Justice Advisory Council, which is formally housed at EPA, the same agency doling out the grants. The council provides the administration with “independent advice and recommendations on how to address current and historic environmental injustice,” the White House description notes.

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Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., introduced articles of impeachment against Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday for high crimes and misdemeanors over her refusal to “uphold Federal immigration laws” and misleading the public about Biden’s “physical and cognitive well-being.”

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A recent graduate of St. Cloud State University in Minnesota is suing the university administration, alleging that she was forced to pay a fee that went to a liberal student activist group.

Tayah Lackie filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota in May, with assistance from the Liberty Justice Center and the Upper Midwest Law Center.

My, what a surprise.

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more outrageous the entire thing becomes. Anthony Fauci had the utter audacity to sit in Congress and admit they had no data, so they just creatively improvised things like social distancing measures. They fooled a lot of folks once, so shame on them. It looks like they’re about to try and fool us twice with the Bird Flu. If we fall for it again, then shame on us.

They did everything from withholding effective medications to depriving people of employment to shaming people publicly, discriminating against them, and wishing them dead.

Then as if 2020 and 2021 weren’t brutal enough, we find out from Congressional investigations and Anthony Fauci’s recent testimony it was all a bunch of baloney to make Big Pharma rich and Big Government powerful. People died who didn’t need to die, the elderly became isolated from their loved ones, medical personnel became burned out and traumatized, and children lost an entire year of educational experiences. Others were vaccinated, some eagerly and some grudgingly, and are suffering longterm disability and even death from the hastily created mRNA vaccine.

Washington Examiner.

Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) introduced impeachment articles against Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle on Monday after a fruitless House Oversight Committee hearing in which she provided little to no information on the assassination attempt of former President Donald Trump.

Steube announced his intention to file impeachment articles after Cheatle testified before the committee on what she described as the most “significant operational failure” in decades.

“In light of Kimberly Cheatle’s unacceptable handling of the Trump assassination attempt, her disastrous appearance before the House Oversight Committee today, and her refusal to resign, we have no choice but to impeach,” Steube said in a statement to X.

Read it.

The secret service fumbled badly.

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No doubt. She’s got more mileage than an F1 McLaren.

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Hundreds of migrants from around a dozen countries left from Mexico’s southern border on foot Sunday, as they attempt to make it to the U.S. border.Some of the members of the group said they hoped to make it to the U.S. border before elections are held in November.

Note that none of them doubt that they’ll be able to get across and vanish into the interior.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

Navy Matters.

‘Defeat in detail’ is a military tactic of destroying an enemy force by engaging its small, isolated units one by one with a larger force.

This is a great military theory – and proven successful – but it requires that the enemy present his forces in small, dispersed packets ready to be defeated. This generally only happens if one is fighting an utterly inept foe or if the enemy’s units are forced to disperse due to unrecoverable circumstances such as the rout of a main force or the end of a conflict when the enemy lacks the forces to mass and fight.

In other words, no sane military is going to willingly present its forces to the enemy in small, isolated units. Unfortunately, this is exactly what the Navy and Marines seem determined to do. They seem committed to a war doctrine of small, isolated, individually weak units that will, in some unexplained and unfathomable manner, not only survive and avoid defeat in detail but will go on to exert an effect greater than the woefully weak sum of its parts.

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The bizarre resignation of President Joe Biden plunged the United States into a crisis unlike any it has known. This is what Biden and his party, those stalwart Defenders Of Democracy against the Trumpian menace, have done to the country, out of their arrogant self-righteousness.

The June 27 Atlanta debate with Donald Trump destroyed the lie told by the White House, the Democrats, and their lackeys in the news media: that aging, enfeebled Joe Biden was fit for office. The post-debate network interviews and the campaign speeches at worst reinforced the declinist narrative, and at best failed to reassure anybody not already blinded by ideology. That number includes donors, whose idealistic political zeal is tempered by the hard fact that they have to pay for it.

Donations dried up. More and more Democratic members of Congress began to say Joe must go. Over the past few days, the Democratic leadership played an extraordinary game of psychological pressure, leaking to the media stories that the president was on the verge of withdrawing from the race, forcing the White House to issue denials. Was this an attempt at some kind of soft coup, an attempt to gaslight Biden into quitting?

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“The strength of our organization,” Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle argued in the 2023 report, lay in, among other things, “seeking out the boundless benefits of diversity.”

The Secret Service offers “leadership training on how best to support LGBTQ+ employees” and “training on unconscious bias” which is the idea that all white people are innately racist, and tries to guide more “more inclusive decisions” while “increasing empathy” for minorities.

Special Agents in Charge are tasked with DEI which distracts from their core duties, but diversity and its boundless benefits was not why the Secret Service existed. The Left was.

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Pandemic social distancing is linked to higher rates of preterm births and newborn deaths within one to two months, according to a new study.

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Thank you, Joe Biden.

Roger Kimball.

Human beings are animals that often operate by proxy. Here’s a familiar example from the world of — well, I was going to say “the law,” but what I have in mind is not the law but its perversion, so let’s say “the legal bureaucracy.” Everyone has heard the phrase “the process is the punishment.” It covers a multitude of sins. In its core signification, the phrase describes an increasingly common situation in which the machinery of the law is deployed to harass, enervate, stymie and otherwise hobble someone the regime does not like but whom, for the time being anyway, it chooses not to incarcerate. Sometimes it is easier to bankrupt and demoralize an opponent into submission.

Relevant here is a conversation I had more than a decade ago with a couple of worldly friends who can fairly be described as experts in the operation of the law. A prominent businessman had just been indicted and one of my friends observed that the indictment meant that he was sure to be cashiered, and soon. But what about being presumed innocent until proven guilty? I asked. My friends did not actually laugh, but they did smile as they explained that in our system the actual dispensation was “innocent until indicted.” Once indicted you are a marked man, as your banker will explain.

The political landscape is littered with victims of our extralegal legal process, as such names as Mike Flynn, Peter Navarro, John Eastman and of course Donald Trump will remind you. Their fates help to explain why you hear more and more people talking about our “two-tier” justice system, which is just periphrasis for “injustice,” and our “Stalinist” courts and judges, which is just an illuminating historical parallel to what is actually happening.

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The serialization of Paul Weston’s book about the COVID-19 scam (most recent chapter here) has made me ruminate on the official mendacity that has been the main feature of whole deadly process. We were lied to about how dangerous the disease was. We were lied to about its origin. We were lied to about the PCR testing regimen that putatively detected infection with the disease. We were lied to about the effectiveness of the measures used to mitigate and contain it.

And above all we were lied to about the safety and effectiveness of the alleged “vaccine”, the experimental mRNA treatment intended to mitigate the effects of infection with the Wuhan Coronavirus.

Most of the liars who told the official lies could fall back on some sort of plausible deniability, no matter how flimsy, to allow themselves to evade responsibility. “Mistakes were made,” “We didn’t know that at the time,” “It was judged to be the best course of action, based on the available data,” etc.

But that wasn’t the case with the promise that the “vaccine” was safe. There is no plausible deniability for those who confidently asserted the safety of the experimental mRNA treatment.

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They might actually have to do their jobs. Ain’t nobody got time for dat.

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Instead of admitting to facilitating an assassination attempt on Donald Trump last Saturday, either through ‘malice or massive incompetence,’ the US Secret Service is ‘appalled’ that people are criticizing their decision to place short, incompetent women on Trump’s security detail.

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The Department of Health & Human Services:

“Health” means killing unborn children.

“Human Services” hiding the mutilation of children from their parents.

No wonder our population is decreasing.

UPDATE: ‘Usurpation of Parental Rights’: District’s ‘Gender Inclusion’ Training Costs Taxpayers $1.5K

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Maybe if they were to take their shoes off….

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“I’m about to come out with a major initiative on limiting the court. … I’ve been working with constitutional scholars for the last three months,” Biden said, according to the Washington Post. Sources familiar with the deliberations confirmed to CNN the president is “seriously considering” endorsing significant changes to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks, including proposals to establish term limits for the justices, an enforceable ethics code, and a constitutional act that would overturn the recent immunity ruling.

In an effort to save his stumbling reelection campaign, Biden—who entered the presidency as a center-left moderate—has cozied up to progressive Democrats, who largely have remained faithful to his campaign.

Last week, Biden unveiled a plan to cap landlords’ ability to increase rent prices, as continued inflation has made the cost of housing one of the biggest hurdles for Americans. The move has been celebrated by progressives such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.).

Biden must be the new Mussolini, since the position of new Hitler is already taken.

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The assailant, identified by D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) as Walter James, fought with Capitol Police officers on July 5 after trespassing at the Capitol Building, according to court documents. He was released without bond the next day.

On July 10, James approached Golfeyz near George Washington University’s hospital and abruptly started punching him in the face, knocked him to the ground, and continued attacking him, the victim told the Washington Free Beacon. Golfeyz told police that James said during his attack, “You are not the real Jewish [sic] and you guys are murderer [sic], you guys kill people in Gaza and in America.”

Golfeyz, whose parents fled Iran in 1979 to avoid religious persecution, said he would stop wearing his kippah in public places, believing it made him a target. Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime.

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“And I say to you: Make unto you friends of the mammon of iniquity; that when you shall fail, they may receive you into everlasting dwellings.”

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I’m sure it’s somehow Trump’s fault.

Washington Examiner.

“Squad” Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) recently cut more checks from her campaign to her husband and longtime security guard — payments that came after the Justice Department opened an investigation into her major spending on private security.

Bush dished out $15,000 between April and June to Cortney Merritts for a “wage expense,” adding on to the more than $137,000 she has paid her husband since 2022, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The new payments come months after Bush noted she is “fully cooperating” with a DOJ investigation into the private security disbursements, which are north of $750,000 combined, documents show.

The new filings show that Bush separately spent $16,720 on security services, paying two men named Joseph Walter and Joel Beard.

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Three Beaver County police snipers were reportedly stationed inside the building used by the shooter in Saturday’s assassination attempt on Donald Trump, a local law enforcement officer with ‘direct knowledge’ of the incident tells CBS News‘ Anna Schecter, and as first reported by the Beaver Countian.

A sniper, stationed on the second floor providing overwatch, saw the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, outside the building and looking up at the roof. He then walked away, returned, whipped out his phone, when one of the snipers took the first of two pictures of him.

Crooks then took out a rangefinder – at which point the sniper radioed to a command post. Crooks then disappeared again and came back a third time with a backpack. The snipers called in once again with information that he had a backpack and that he (Crooks) was walking toward the back of the building.

You can’t make this shit up.

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Inflexible Secret Service protocols, overworked special agents, and a decision against deploying more counter snipers to President Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania all contributed to creating the opening for a gunman to wound Trump, kill a bystander, and seriously injure two others, according to several sources in the Secret Service community.

StrategyPage.

In the United States the army is having major problems maintaining its strength. Since the 1970s the army has depended on volunteers, not conscripts. The army was always able to get all the volunteers although it occasionally had to tinker with recruiting standards to make its numbers. In the last four years the usual methods have not been working. In 2021 the army had its authorized 485,900 personnel, a number that was expected to remain the same for the foreseeable future. Then problems with recruiting began and got worse and actual strength declined. By 2023 there were only 473,000 soldiers and the recruiting problems continued.

This time the usual explanations did not apply. This was discovered by asking a sample of military age men eligible to volunteer or be conscripted about their attitudes towards the military. Potential volunteers had been influenced by a reduction in motivation among military age men. This is defined as healthy men aged 18-35. There was a similar decline in their opinion of military service and this could be measured.

I certainly wouldn’t want to join today’s American military.

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Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Thursday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) pushed a false “safe and effective” COVID vaccine narrative by underreporting adverse events. The mRNA shots “never should have been mandated,” Redfield told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday.

God forbid we should let people decide for themselves based on accurate evidence.

Steve Graham.

Sixty years ago, Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK and John Connally from an elevated position. He used a mail-order military surplus rifle, and he still got impact with two out of three shots. Clearly, the Secret Service has learned absolutely nothing since then. They let a man climb onto a white roof in broad daylight, carrying a rifle, and shoot a former president a couple of Frisbee throws away.

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The Democrat platform is to make life in America solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

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The Biden administration is planning to allow migrants to circumvent in-person check-ins with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and allow them to use an app instead, the New York Post reported on Friday.

Democrats, being by nature scofflaws, like to encourage scofflaw behavior in others.

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Democratic Rep. Cori Bush (Mo.) steered nearly $1 million in taxpayer money to a youth nonprofit led by Farrakhan Shegog, an anti-Semitic activist who said that those living in Israel are not “real Jews” and that the nation is ruled by “the ones who crucified Jesus.”

Bush boasted on July 7 about her role in funding a new headquarters for Young Voices With Action, a St. Louis group that encourages young people to become involved in leadership in the city. She included a photo of herself at the groundbreaking alongside Shegog, the group’s founder and president, and posted a follow-up featuring another picture of the two with their arms around each other.

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The Biden administration is facing a congressional probe over its actions functionally prohibiting oil and gas production across roughly 41 million acres of federal property—nearly equivalent to the size of the combined land and water area of Florida—the Washington Free Beacon has learned.

Republicans on the House Small Business Committee, led by chairman Roger Williams (R., Texas), penned a letter to Interior Secretary Deb Haaland on Thursday morning, informing her that they are investigating her agency’s environmental policies targeting fossil fuel drilling. The lawmakers’ probe is largely responding to the administration’s recent actions curbing drilling in Alaska, but they argued those policies are emblematic of President Biden’s broader climate agenda.

“As with nearly every other action the Biden Administration has taken related to fossil fuels and mining, these actions will cost American consumers and businesses money without achieving any real environmental benefit,” they wrote in the letter, which was first reviewed by the Free Beacon. “Cars still need oil, batteries still need mineral resources, and power plants still need natural gas and coal.”

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I am not making this up.

Biden says ‘Vice President Trump’ when discussing Harris (CNN)

Trump mocks Joe Biden over Kamala Harris blunder (UK Telegraph)

Biden won’t drop out of election against Trump unless polls say ‘there’s no way you can win’ (CNBC)

I’m ready to give up my citizenship now, Maybe I can buy a passport from the Cayman Islands or someplace like that. (Nomad Capitalist)

NavyMatters.

In WWII, a dozen or more shipyards built Fletcher class destroyers. The yards were given a set of blueprints and contracted to build the ships according to the plans. It didn’t matter which yard built any given destroyer, they were all the same. This worked because the Navy designed the ship and generated the blueprints. Once that was accomplished, any yard could build the ship. It was just a matter of following the plans.

In contrast, because the Navy no longer designs ships, generates blueprints, or even requires complete designs and blueprints prior to the start of construction, only the contracted yard can build a given ship. The LCS is the standout example of this badly flawed approach. Lacking any guidance or blueprints, both Lockheed and Austal generated their own LCS designs, spec’ed their own equipment and combat systems, and no one else could build them. Thus, we wound up with two LCS classes that had almost nothing in common; the epitome of inefficiency.

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Shortly after Laura Daniel-Davis failed Senate confirmation for the second time last year, the White House appointed her to serve as the second in command at the Department of the Interior—a promotion. Now, she has been given yet another senior role crafting energy policy potentially impacting millions of Americans.

Last month, the White House created a new task force to oversee the government’s controversial review of four federally managed dams located within the Columbia River system in southern Washington State. The task force’s work could ultimately lead to the dams, which provide power to millions of residents and allow large quantities of agricultural products to be transported, being torn down over environmental concerns.

Buried in the announcement was the revelation that Daniel-Davis, the Interior Department’s acting deputy secretary, will co-chair the task force alongside Deputy Secretary of Energy David Turk and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration assistant administrator for fisheries Janet Coit.

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The study done by the university’s Center for American Institutions argued that there is an emphasis on training new soldiers about social issues like “unconscious bias” and “intersectionality” in a way the center says runs contrary to typical American ideals. The study examined DEI plans in different sectors of the military, including DEI office staffing and education at academies like West Point.

“The massive DEI bureaucracy, its training and its pseudo-scientific assessments are at best distractions that absorb valuable time and resources,” the executive summary states. “At worst they communicate the opposite of the military ethos: e.g. that individual demographic differences come before team and mission.”

Wall Street Journal.

Questionable diagnoses of HIV and other maladies triggered extra Medicare Advantage payments; ‘It’s anatomically impossible’.

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As reported by Fox News, the average hotel room for an illegal costs $156 per night, with some costing over $300 per night. As such, the city government has already spent at least $1.98 billion on housing for illegals, with 80% of that amount going to hotels or inns that have been converted into shelters, rather than to shelters operated by the city. Overall, the city has spent at least $4.88 billion on the mass migration crisis.

Some of the contracts agreed upon between the city and various hotels include a deal for $5.13 million per month with the Row NYC hotel, located in Midtown Manhattan. In South Jamaica, Queens, the Crowne Plaza JFK is being given $2 million per month to continue renting out its 335 rooms to illegals.