We live in a world with more and more devices that require charging. Nothing shows the downside of that better than the recent storm that hit Houston, where thousands of residents still lack power.
Houstonians with electric stoves can’t cook, those with electric water heaters lack hot water—and those with electric cars can’t charge them.
The range of an electric vehicle without electricity is zero.
While the CIA is strictly prohibited from spying on or running clandestine operations against American citizens on US soil, a bombshell new “Twitter Files” report reveals that a member of the Board of Trustees of InQtel – the CIA’s mission-driving venture capital firm, along with “former” intelligence community (IC) and CIA analysts, were involved in a massive effort in 2021-2022 to take over Twitter’s content management system, as Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi and Alex Gutentag report over at Shellenberger’s Public (subscribers can check out the extensive 6,800 word report here).
According to “thousands of pages of Twitter Files and documents,” these efforts were part of a broader strategy to manage how information is disseminated and consumed on social media under the guise of combating ‘misinformation’ and foreign propaganda efforts – as this complex of government-linked individuals and organizations has gone to great lengths to suggest that narrative control is a national security issue.
Former Secretary of State John Kerry blocked multiple FBI arrest operations against individuals linked to Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs to further negotiations on the failed Iran nuclear deal, according to unclassified internal FBI emails obtained by Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson via legally protected whistleblower disclosures.
IRS whistleblowers Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler must be extraordinarily brave men. They blew the whistle on Hunter Biden, the Biden family business, and the Biden Department of Justice’s sham investigation of same.
Yesterday the House Ways and Means Committee the Ways and Means Committee released more than 100 pages of newly obtained evidence provided by Shapley and Ziegler. Chairman Smith’s expository press release is posted here, the documents themselves here. The documents suggest that Hunter Biden lied in his testimony before the committee this past February.
Shapley and Ziegler comment on the related lawsuit brought by Biden in this New York Post column. Miranda Devine characterizes the documents released yesterday as the second prong of a double whammy that includes the possible entrance of the CIA from stage left.
A new analysis suggests COVID-19 was reported more frequently than it should have been as an underlying cause of death, inflating COVID-19 mortality numbers and attributing deaths from other causes to the virus.
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This is the last in my series on “Three Reasons the Left Wants Open Borders.” I’ve covered ideology and electoral politics; now, let’s turn to extortion.
By turning on the taps of illegal immigration, open-borders proponents hope to create bargaining chips to negotiate amnesties and increased immigration flows. Since he took office, Joe Biden has paroled a million and a half inadmissible aliens under bogus premises, caught and quickly released into the U.S. the better part of 7 million more, and allowed at least 1.8 million more to evade Border Patrol—the “gotaways.”
As Jason Riley wrote in The Wall Street Journal last year, “The White House knows that an overwhelming majority of the people coming aren’t fleeing persecution but are economic migrants gaming our asylum laws. They know that there will be no serious effort to deport people whose claims are denied.”
Democrats are counting on such ‘immigrants’ voting for the Party of Free Stuff.
Some U.S. Border Patrol agents blame President Joe Biden for the agency losing nearly a quarter of its workforce since the 2020 presidential election, the Washington Examiner reported.
Former President Donald Trump’s criminal trial not being televised is both preventing the public from seeing a judge acting as a “tyrant,” and failing to offer a “check on partisan reporting,” according to legal expert Alan Dershowitz.
Illegal immigrants are surging the border now because they believe Donald Trump is going to win the election in November and enforce security, according to a report quoting the illegals themselves.
My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
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Connecticut law enforcement officials released an illegal immigrant convicted of killing two young children in a drunk driving accident, despite a detainer request lodged against him, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said.
ICE agents arrested the man, identified as Israel Alejandro Gonzalez-Arcinega, 40. The Mexican national was convicted 10 years ago of two counts of manslaughter, illegal operation of a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol, and other crimes in Connecticut, the agency announced in a press release Monday.
As Americans struggle to keep up with the rising tide of prices and feel the squeeze of high interest rates on housing, President Joe Biden continues to claim that the economy is good. “Bidenomics” is working, there’s no recession to see here, so shut up and enjoy the drag queen performances at the White House.
That narrative took a hit back in 2022, however, when America experienced two consecutive quarters of decline in gross domestic product—the traditional definition of a recession. In the first quarter of 2022, inflation-adjusted GDP declined in the U.S. by 1.6%, and it declined by an additional 0.6% in the second quarter of that year.
The Biden administration responded by simply redefining the word “recession.” The move made a bizarre kind of sense coming from a bureaucracy that has redefined what it means to be a woman.
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The Biden administration’s experiment with a relatively open southern border has been shocking in the sheer number of people who have come across in just over three years, estimated to be about ten million. But the most shocking thing about the border policy may have just been revealed.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), headed by the impeached Alejandro Mayorkas, recently proposed a new rule. In a statement announcing the rule, DHS unwittingly revealed that it has not been doing background checks on these millions of illegal immigrants in order to immediately deport those with criminal records or terrorism ties. Instead, they have been leaving that determination until the asylum hearing, which occurs many years down the road. In the meantime, they remain in the U.S. awaiting the hearing.
Thanks to a 7-2 vote of the Supreme Court, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will continue to be funded by the Federal Reserved instead of congressional appropriations. As the people should know, the court ruling does not confer any merit on the CFPB, a legacy of the Carter-Era Community Reinvestment Act. The CFPB was based on the assumption that even educated and informed consumers are unable to look out for themselves without help from politicians.
The U.S. Air Force’s vaunted Self-protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator (SHiELD) program closed out without ever reaching its goal of testing a laser-directed energy weapon on a fighter. This revelation came just days after the U.S. Army disclosed it was facing major hurdles with its new laser-armed variants of the 8×8 Stryker light armored vehicles. Earlier this year, the Air Force also announced it was no longer proceeding with a long-held plan to fit a laser weapon onto an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship. These are just the latest examples of U.S. military laser weapon programs facing stark reality checks despite significant advances in this technology in recent years.
Military.com was first to report on the end of the SHiELD program last Friday. SHiELD was a three-part initiative that involved separate development of the laser, turreted mount, and pod under the Laser Advancements for Next-generation Compact Environments (LANCE), SHiELD Turret Research in Aero Effects (STRAFE), and Laser Pod Research & Development (LPRD) subprograms, respectively.
One of the biggest defense topics as of late is the supply of advanced missiles. Russia’s continuous onslaught of aerial attacks on Ukraine, as well as Kyiv’s ability to defend against them, and the defense of Israel from Iran’s large-scale drone and missile barrage, as well as the threat of China in the Pacific, has brought supply and cost concerns regarding these weapons to the forefront. But the Houthi’s constant barrages on shipping in and around the Red Sea, and the defense put up to counter it, has really highlighted just how fast these weapons can be depleted in the naval domain, even against relatively lowly threats.
With this in mind, we followed up on a story of ours from a few years ago on the actual unit costs of the Navy’s diverse array of ship-launched missiles, from SAMs to anti-ship and land-attack types, with the latest figures and put it into a comprehensive video as part of our new YouTube channel.
While nobody would venture to guess that any of these weapons are cheap, some will be very surprised just how expensive they are. Still, it’s always worth remembering that what the missiles are defending or what targets they are attacking are often far more costly or precious, at least in a big-picture sense, than their own value.
Back in March, when reading the mammoth, 1050-page bill that was meant to avert government shutdown, but was yet another pork filled free-for-all bonanza authorizing $1.7 trillion in in discretionary spending, we stumbled upon something that was truly shocking: after Biden singlehandedly drained half of the US strategic petroleum reserve to avoid obliteration for Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections, Congress has snuck in a provision that would sell off and shutter the Northeast Gasoline Supply Reserve, a move that while perhaps keeps gas prices lower for a day or two, would also leave the entire continental northeast defenseless to any true environmental catastrophe or shock. We were so dismayed by the inclusion of this particular text, we wondered if it hadn’t been put there solely for the benefit of America’s enemies…
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Minnesota’s Department of Education allowed taxpayers to be defrauded of somewhere between $250 million and $500 million in programs that ostensibly were intended to feed poor children during covid.
Of course, if you did the math, there aren’t that many poor children in Minnesota, and the facilities whose operators got the money couldn’t possibly have fed the many thousands of kids for whom they claimed reimbursement. The fraud was open and obvious.
The real moral of the story is that Democrats are not actually opposed to the government being defrauded. They think that the purpose of government is to take money from some and give it to others–i.e., the ones who vote for them. If hundreds of millions are obtained by fraud, so what? The dollars went to their friends and supporters. In the Democrats’ eyes, there is little difference between legitimate social welfare payments to qualified claimants and outright theft. Which, now that I think of it, should tell you something.
The latest blotter entry comes to us from the US Government Accounting Office (GAO), via a new report pointedly titled “F-35 Joint Strike Fighter: Program Continues to Encounter Production Issues and Modernization Delays.”According to GAO, Lockheed Martin is running out of parking space for all the completed F-35s that the Pentagon refuses to accept.
These aren’t one-by-one rejects. Last summer, the DOD put a complete freeze on accepting the stealth fighters until Lockheed fixed huge hardware and software problems associated with “Technology Refresh-3” (TR-3), a $1.8 billion package intended to expand the planes’ capabilities.
In the first – but certainly not last – major shake up at a key US financial regulator under the Biden admin, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Martin Gruenberg bowed to pressure to resign from the bank regulator after an external investigation found widespread sexual harassment at the agency and lawmakers of both parties berated his leadership, capping a nearly two-decade career at the agency.
But he’ll undoubtedly still receive a lush pension.
In a press release, Gruenberg said he would resign once a successor had been confirmed, avoiding an outcome that would leave FDIC Vice Chairman Travis Hill, a Republican, as the agency’s acting chairman. Hill is a former staffer at the agency who has served on the five-member board for about a year.
God forbid that a Republican should ever be in charge of anything at any time, however much qualified.
ByteDance may be suing the Department of Justice (DOJ), but the two have now joined forces in an effort to fast-track the company’s legal challenge to a potentially imminent TikTok ban.
‘Opposing parties’? Say rather ‘the two wings of the Establishment UniParty’.
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More than half of U.S. voters support deporting all illegal immigrants in the country according to a new poll from Reuters and Ipsos released on Monday.
The Sept. 1, 2021, mandate “clearly violates the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause as interpreted by our precedents,” a majority of a U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit said in the May 7 decision.
While the mandate was later updated, the newer version also violates the Constitution, the judges said.
The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in 2021 required COVID-19 vaccination of all students and employees. It initially offered religious exemptions to anyone who checked a box, but later said administrators would “only recognize religious exemptions based on religious beliefs whose teachings are opposed to all immunizations.”
Newly released testimony from former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins confirms that Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx did not base the pandemic-era six-foot social distancing rule on science, and instead were making things up as they went along.
The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office condemned Sean “Diddy” Combs’ shocking surveillance video, in which the music mogul is seen assaulting ex Cassie Ventura — but is unable to file charges.
The office of district attorney George Gascón explained in a lengthy statement released via Instagram Friday why their hands are tied due to the statute of limitations.
Some minorities are more equal than others.
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An Australian man calling himself Sasha Jane Lowerson must be allowed to compete in a California surfing competition, which “cannot discriminate on the basis of gender.” As Sir Bedevere (Terry Jones) might say, who is this who is so wise in the ways of biological science and athletics? Why, it’s the California Coastal Commission (CCC), an unelected body that overrides the elected governments of cities and counties on the California coast. As Steve once noted, the commission combines Stalinist regulation with mafia-style corruption, a reference to coastal commissioner Mark Nathanson, packed off to prison for extorting bribes from Hollywood celebrities.
The CCC’s prime mover was Peter Douglas, a regulatory zealot of considerable ferocity. Douglas authored Proposition 20, the 1972 ballot initiative that created a temporary 15-member commission aimed at preventing disasters like the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. Douglas also wrote the California Coastal Act of 1976, signed by governor Jerry Brown, which made the Commission permanent. The next year, Douglas became deputy director and in 1985 executive director, a post he held until 2011.
While running roughshod over property rights, the CCC prevents Californians from tapping their greatest asset, the vast Pacific Ocean. In 2022 the Commission voted unanimously to reject the Poseidon Water desalination plant in Orange County. As the California Globe noted, the plant was “decades in the works during a time when California needs more freshwater to combat a drought in the state.” The plant would have provided 50 million gallons of freshwater a day but the Commission wasn’t having it.
A federal appeals court ruled that the largest school district in Maryland does not have to afford parents the opportunity to opt-out their elementary school-age children from LGBTQ lessons.
Time to leave.
Eventually public schools will contain only the children of the poor and proglodyte. This will not end well.
Republicans on two House committees voted to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress on Thursday night despite President Joe Biden’s intervention to block them from obtaining his recorded interviews with special counsel Robert Hur.
After a spirited debate, members of the House Judiciary Committee voted 18–15 on May 16 to approve a resolution to hold Mr. Garland in contempt for refusing to provide impeachment investigators with the recordings in defiance of congressional subpoenas.
The House Oversight Committee followed suit hours later, voting 24-20 to approve their own resolution.
As Eric Holder demonstrated, being held in contempt of Congress don’t mean shit.
Electric vehicles (EVs) may be the most subsidized product in America. Federal taxpayers shell out $7,500 every time a new eligible electric vehicle is purchased (usually by wealthy buyers). State and local taxpayers chip in an additional $1,500 for each EV purchase. Then, there’s the tens of billions of dollars “invested” by policymakers into building EV plants. Even these bank-breaking concessions aren’t enough to please the Biden administration. Recently finalized EV tax credit rules expand eligibility for the subsidy while maintaining bizarre trade sourcing rules likely to lead to further tariffs from China. It’s time for President Biden and lawmakers to ditch protectionism and finally end EV subsidies.
With the threat of a conflict in the Pacific looming, a congressional subcommittee says the Navy is not moving fast enough to figure out how to better push munitions to its ships at sea and wants to know what is being done to fix the problem.
This is hardly a new issue, but it has come into sharp focus in the Red Sea as Arleigh Burke class destroyers had fired more than 100 Standard family surface-to-air missiles alone as of mid-February at Houthi missiles and drones. The need to rapidly replenish warships would be far more pronounced in a large-scale fight with China that would occur over a vast, contested battlespace
President Joe Biden’s retelling of economic history could win a fiction award.
He recently claimed in an interview that inflation “was 9% when I came into office,” even though it was 1.4% at that time. Not only is Biden lying about the historical record, but it was his policies that fueled the inflation fire.
The facts are clear: Biden was handed an economy that was recovering at an unprecedented pace. Gross domestic product was rising at an annualized rate of $1.5 trillion. Annual inflation as measured by the consumer price index was 1.4%. A monthly average of 1.5 million people were returning to work as lockdowns were lifted.
“Diversity, equity, inclusion? Yeah, of course, they [military colleagues] think it’s a waste of time. Except my boss, I mean, Lisa, the admiral, she doesn’t think it is. She likes it. But secretly, everybody else is like eh,” said Riggs. “You know what’s going to happen when the first missile hits the first side of the first DEG [Guided Missile Escort Ship]? What’s it going to matter? It won’t. Diversity, equity, inclusion. It’ll just be out the window.”
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With Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel filing the “climate” lawsuit that campaign supporter Michigan LCV had lobbied her to file against energy companies, and the UM law school faculty putting the shoulder to the wheel as well, GAO recalls the recently unearthed record of just how occupied Michigan’s government is with donor-financed “climate staff”.
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U.S. officials have cut off funding to a nonprofit that funneled government money to a laboratory in China located in the same city where the first COVID-19 cases appeared.
A school district in Riverside County will pay $360,000 to settle a suit by a former high school teacher who was fired after refusing, for what she described as religious reasons, to promise to call transgender students by their chosen pronouns or to keep their gender identity secret from their parents.
The Jurupa Valley Unified School District agreed Tuesday to pay $285,000 to former high school gym teacher Jessica Tapia and $75,000 to her lawyers at Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative religious nonprofit. The settlement said it was not an admission of wrongdoing by district officials, but Tapia’s lawyers proclaimed a victory for religious rights.
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Two legal challenges were filed over the new emissions rules, Nebraska Attorney General Hilgers said in a statement on May 13.
They include a petition for review filed by a coalition of 24 states in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit which challenges the Biden administration’s new regulation setting stronger greenhouse gas emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles.
That petition lists the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and its administrator Michael Regan as defendants.
Six migrants charged with attacking New York City police officers in January were offered plea deals on Tuesday, the New York Post reported.
During a court appearance, it was also revealed that one of the migrants had been arrested again while out on bail.
Six young adults identified as asylum-seekers were arrested following the alleged assault of two police officers near Times Square, ABC News reported on Jan. 31.
What comes after repealing parking mandates? Lots of newly legal homes. Studies from two cities observed that in the years following reform, 60 to 70 percent of new homes would previously have been illegal to build.
The new data add to the heap of evidence that parking mandates—local rules that ban new homes and businesses unless they have a pre-determined number of off-street parking spaces—are a binding constraint on housing construction. While only a few buildings opted out of providing parking entirely, most new homes in the studies ultimately benefited from the increased flexibility.
“It isn’t surprising,” said researcher C. J. Gabbe, who authored one of the studies. According to Gabbe, homebuilders have been saying for a long time that demand for off-street parking was lower than what zoning rules required.
Head of the Mezha Anti-Corruption Center, Martyna Bohuslavets, has written a report in Pravda asking “Where are the fortifications?” She reports that millions of dollars that were intended for the construction of fortifications in Ukraine were instead “transferred to Kharkiv OVA to front companies of avatars.”
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The programs are taking place in at least four states, a Washington Free Beacon review of online offerings found.
In Battle Creek, Mich., for example, the VA offers a “BIPOC Support Group,” an “8-week curriculum designed to provide support for Veterans that identify as people of color/BIPOC, or as multiracial or biracial,” according to a program description. The Battle Creek VA also offers a “Race-Based Stress/Trauma and Empowerment” program, a “weekly group, tailored to our Veterans of color, to address race-based stress and trauma in a safe and validating environment.”
In Long Beach, Calif., the VA also offers a “Race-Based Stress/Trauma Empowerment Group,” which it says is for “Veterans who identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and who are interested in addressing issues of race-based stress, trauma, resilience, and empowerment.” A similar program in Palo Alto, Calif., invites “Women Veterans of color” to join a “10-week group to explore [the] impact of racism on your well-being.”
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The Education Department’s ongoing meltdown due to its failed implementation of its new website for its Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) should, on the merits, be an ongoing major national story. But the Regime Media have chosen only to cover the story in a very sparing manner, shielding those responsible for the FAFSA meltdown from any scrutiny or accountability.
Taxpayer millions allocated to border crisis charities are being diverted to unconventional expenses like music therapy and “people-plant interactions” for migrants, alongside hefty salaries for staff, a recent report reveals, the N.Y. Post reported.
Vice President Kamala Harris is apparently at last unburdened by what has been, and has reached what can be, speaking today before the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Relations, and it apparently involves kicking and breaking a lot of things, followed by cackling.
As North Carolina’s public university system considers a vote on changing its diversity policy, the system’s flagship university board voted Monday to cut funding for diversity programs in next year’s budget.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Board of Trustees approved a change that would divert $2.3 million of diversity spending from state funds to go toward public safety and policing at a special meeting to address the university’s budget. The board’s vote would only impact UNC-Chapel Hill’s diversity funding, which could result in the loss of its diversity office.
UNC will join the ranks of other notable public universities that have stripped diversity spending, such as the University of Florida in Gainesville, which announced in a March memo it was reallocating funds to faculty recruitment. But unlike UF, which implemented its funding rollback after the state Legislature passed a bill banning diversity program spending at state universities, UNC “set the tone” on funding cuts before the North Carolina Legislature stepped in, budget chair Dave Boliek said.
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Biden’s tax proposals would effectively increase the top federal marginal tax rate on long-term capital gains to 44.6%, a record high since the tax was enacted in the 1920s. As a result, taxes paid on long-term capital gains would reach levels above 50% in some states after accounting for state capital gains taxes. Biden also proposed increasing the corporate income tax rate from 21% to 28% and presented a 25% tax on unrealized capital gains for individuals whose net worth exceeds $100 million.
These proposals present two problems. First, they showcase a disregard for the personal property, earnings, and lives of the individuals and organizations subject to the taxes. Second, these taxes would have dire consequences for economic growth and, thus, would negatively impact the living standards of everyday Americans.