StrategyPage.

Worldwide military spending reached a record $2.443 trillion in 2023. This was an increase of 6.8 per cent since 2022. This was the largest year-to-year increase since 2009. Global defense spending passed two trillion dollars a year in 2021. The nations with the largest defense budgets remain the same. In 2023 the top ten spenders were the United States, China, India, Britain, Russia, France, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and South Korea. As usual the United States accounted for the largest amount of global spending, 38 percent of it. China came in at 14 percent while India has 3.6 percent. The number ten nation, South Korea, had 2.4 percent. Russia, long the number two spender has not fallen to number five with 3.2 percent of world spending. The rest of the world, which has about 170 nations, account for 25.3 percent of global defense spending. The current global superpowers are the United States and China, with China a distant second to the Americans.

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Attorneys general representing half of the country on May 1 sued President Joe Biden’s administration over a new rule requiring criminal background checks for all gun sales, including private sales.

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The parole program allowed over 200,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua to enter the United States between January and August 2023. The program did not cover the cost of flights, but allowed them to enter and travel independently.

In a recent development, a House Committee subpoena has forced the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to reveal details of its parole program designed to allow entry for thousands of individuals from several nations.

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Iowa will face legal consequences if it enforces a recently passed immigration law that prohibits people from being in the state if they were previously denied entry into the United States, the Des Moines Register reported.

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The school psychologist for Indianapolis Public Schools was among those held when police arrested 14 masked adults who blocked traffic last month. They were charged with obstructing traffic April 25 at 10:30 a.m. on Meridian Street.

A psychologist for Indianapolis Public Schools was among those held when police arrested 14 masked adults who officers said were blocking traffic late last month just outside the Governor’s Residence in the state capital.

The school psychologist, Karisa Cole, and the other arrested protesters were charged with obstructing traffic April 25 at 10:30 a.m. on Meridian Street in Indianapolis.

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Mohamed Abdou is a pro-Hamas activist-scholar at Columbia University. Abdou teaches virtually every trendy pseudo-intellectual twaddle concocted by modern man. Nearly every student loan taken in the U.S. is either given by the government or fully guaranteed by taxpayers.

Mohamed Abdou is a pro-Hamas “anarchist interdisciplinary activist-scholar of Indigenous, Black, critical race, and Islamic studies, as well as gender, sexuality, abolition, and decolonization” at Columbia University. Now, I don’t mean to pick on Abdou. It’s just that he happens to teach virtually every trendy pseudo-intellectual identitarian twaddle concocted by modern man.

Ultimately, we make Abdou’s job possible. Nearly every student loan taken in the U.S. is either given by the government or fully guaranteed by taxpayers. This sounds wonderful in the abstract, since it allows every student a chance at higher education. The reality, however, is that we have incentivized universities to create hordes of debt-ridden, credentialed nitwits.

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A group of conservative leaders is calling on the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Kristen Clarke, to resign from her leadership position following an explosive report from The Daily Signal.

“The American people have lost trust in your ability to lead the Civil Rights Division,” reads a letter to Clarke, signed by Advancing American Freedom Executive Director Paul Teller, American Accountability Foundation President Tom Jones, Students for Life President Kristan Hawkins, and CatholicVote President Brian Burch. “We request that you resign immediately.”

The Daily Signal published a report on Tuesday highlighting evidence that Clarke had not disclosed a 2006 arrest and subsequent expungement during her 2021 nomination to the DOJ—and then explicitly denied ever having been arrested to Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton.

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The Biden administration announced a new rule on Friday that allows Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients to apply for health care under the Affordable Care Act. The program was established under President Barack Obama’s administration in 2012.

Illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children will be eligible later this year for federal health care coverage under the Biden administration.

The White House announced a new rule Friday that allows Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients to apply for health care under the Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as Obamacare.

Newsweek.

The Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) is a classic example of intrusive big-government overreach. It places a new compliance burden on main street Americans with an LLC, and failure to comply comes with criminal penalties that could land you behind bars.

The CTA requires individuals with “substantial control” over a company or an equity position of 25 percent or greater to disclose personal data with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) – a government bureau most Americans have never heard of before.

The CTA will impact small businesses across the nation in addition to millions of citizens who use LLCs to invest in real estate or to protect their assets. Over 32 million business entities are estimated to be affected by the law.

Americans with a CTA filing obligation must report their name, date of birth, address, and a scan of their government-issued photo ID to the Treasury Department. Any time this information changes, updated information must be submitted to FinCEN’s database within thirty days.

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Roughly 100,000 immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children are expected to enroll in the Affordable Care Act’s health insurance next year under a new directive the Biden administration released Friday.

The Foundry.

A White House official told the Agriculture Department to include left-leaning groups, including the United Food and Commercial Workers union and the League of United Latin American Citizens, among “stakeholders” to help implement President Joe Biden’s executive order aimed at turning out the vote.

At the same time, records obtained by The Daily Signal show that USDA brass had extensive discussions with the Raben Group, a Democrat-aligned lobbying group managed by former officials of the Clinton and Obama administration.

The Raben Group represented the left-wing advocacy group Demos, which has pushed the so-called Green New Deal and labor unions’ policy goals. As The Daily Signal previously reported, Demos worked with the USDA on “best practices” to boost voting.

The War Zone.

After seeing how well Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) anti-ballistic missile interceptors performed last month against Israel-bound Iranian ballistic missiles the Navy Secretary says he now wants more. Carlos Del Toro’s testimony at Wednesday’s Congressional budget hearing comes as the Pentagon’s Missle Defense Agency (MDA) wants to end procurement of SM-3 Block IB variants by the end of this year and limit its buy of the follow-on Block IIAs to 12 per year through Fiscal Year 2029.

“I truly believe that the SM-3s will be needed in greater numbers in the future, given the operations that took place in defense of Israel,” Del Toro testified during a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing. “Recently, some were fired. And very effectively. So I think given the future threat and our deterrence mission of the Indo-Pacific, we are going to need more SM-3s in the future.”

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A suspected Islamic State terrorist living in Baltimore who was recently arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been in the U.S. for two years after being caught crossing the southern border and then released.

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The Biden administration funneled nearly $1.3 million to the Taliban as part of reconstruction projects in Afghanistan that are being administered by the United States, according to a government oversight group.

Since 2021, when the Biden administration conducted its botched withdrawal from Afghanistan, the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs has allocated millions to weapons removal projects. As part of these activities, the U.S. government and its partners inside Afghanistan “have paid Taliban entities nearly $1.3 million in taxes, including $138,000 this quarter,” according to an audit by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), which monitors America’s $17 billion post-withdrawal investment in the country.

Another $5 million in U.S. funds remain available for future weapons removal projects, which will likely have to be conducted with the Taliban’s blessing. The United States’ payments to the Taliban—which seized power during the Biden administration’s evacuation—come amid warnings that Afghanistan “is once again becoming a terrorist haven,” according to SIGAR. The oversight group has repeatedly warned that billions in U.S. taxpayer dollars are potentially being diverted to the Taliban and that this money cannot be properly tracked because the Biden administration is stonewalling investigations.

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White House officials met with liberal activists to discuss boosting voting among prisoners and immigrants just four months after President Joe Biden signed an executive order on turning out the vote, newly released records show.

On July 12, 2021, White House officials held a “listening session” that included dozens of organizations, many known for turning out Democrat voters. Justin Levitt, who was the White House senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights at the time, kicked off the event along with Jesselyn McCurdy of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

Keeda Haynes, legal adviser with the Sentencing Project, a legal assistance and training organization for prisoners, said the administration should assist “eligible voters who are incarcerated have been left out of voting,” according to notes of the meeting. Haynes added, “Felony disenfranchisement is voter suppression.”

As Stalin famously said, it doesn’t matter who votes, what matters is who counts the votes.

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U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) officials found evidence that the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines caused multiple deaths before claiming that there was no evidence linking the vaccines to any deaths, The Epoch Times has learned.

UK Daily Mail.

You can’t make this stuff up.

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Last November, Biden met with China’s Xi and the two leaders reached an agreement to tackle the fentanyl crisis fed by the traffic in precursor chemicals from the Communist dictatorship.

Three months later, the bodies are everywhere.

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Internal data obtained by Fox News via a House Homeland Security Committee subpoena to Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas’ Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shows that thousands of illegal immigrants have been flowing into over 45 U.S. cities under a controversial program instated by the Biden administration.

The “CHNV” migration parole program stands for Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Immigrants from these countries are eligible to participate in the parole program. The program permits them to fly into the U.S. directly under certain conditions, such as having a sponsor in the U.S. and being approved for travel.

Between January and August 2023, approximately 200,000 migrants flew into the U.S. via this program. Notably, 80 percent of these arrivals, totaling 161,562 individuals, landed in four cities in Florida: Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, and Tampa.

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The World Health Organization is urging the U.S. and 193 other governments to commit next month to a new global treaty to prevent and manage future pandemics. Current estimates suggest over $31 billion per year will be needed to fund its obligations, a cost most lower income countries cannot afford. But that isn’t the only reason to oppose it. Validating this treaty is a vote for the disastrous policies of the Covid years. Rather than taking time for deep reflection and serious reform, those pushing the pandemic treaty are set on ignoring and institutionalizing the WHO’s mistakes.

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The Biden administration has rolled out a set of new guidelines, under which an employer would be deemed liable for harassment for referring to a worker by an unwanted pronoun or requiring the worker to use a restroom that aligns with his or her biological sex.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) published the new workplace harassment guidelines on Monday after approving them in a party-line 3–2 vote on Friday. The new document enshrines gender identity as a category protected against harassment, just like sex, race, religion, or disability.

The Administrative State in action.

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Tucked away in the $95 billion military aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan is a $3.5 billion slush fund to open new processing centers for Muslim migrants, in what Sen. Eric Schmitt described as a bid to “supercharge mass migration from the Middle East.”

Play stupid immigration games, win stupid immigration prizes.

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Just when you thought you’ve already witnessed a lifetime’s worth of examples of the government being excellent capital allocators with your tax money, one more shining example comes along.

Last week it was reported that Washington Governor Jay Inslee has announced $45 million worth of subsidies that is going to allow “low income” families to purchase an electric vehicle.

The initiative offers families the opportunity to receive financial assistance for either leasing or purchasing electric vehicles, with up to $9,000 allocated for leasing and $5,000 for purchasing, according to Must Read Alaska.

The most profitable gig in America is being one of the Official Poor.

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Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., is again facing censure in the House after referring to some Jewish students at Columbia University as pro-genocide.

CBS News.

Prosecutors said Monday they will not retry an Arizona rancher whose trial in the fatal shooting of a Mexican man on his property ended last week with a deadlocked jury.
The jurors in the trial of George Alan Kelly were unable to reach a unanimous decision on a verdict after more than two days of deliberation. Santa Cruz County Superior Court Judge Thomas Fink declared a mistrial on April 22.
After the mistrial, the Santa Cruz County Attorney’s Office had the option to retry Kelly — or to drop the case.

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A good time not to live in New York.

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A bill that would make providing shelter to U.S. military veterans a priority over migrants failed in the Massachusetts House of Representatives last week.

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The U.S. military’s cost estimate to build a pier off Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid has risen to $320 million, a U.S. defense official and a source familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The figure, which has not been previously reported, illustrates the massive scale of a construction effort that the Pentagon has said involves about 1,000 U.S. service members, mostly from the Army and Navy.

Still, the cost has roughly doubled from initial estimates earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Sounds like government work to me.

Democratic president Joe Biden announced the pier in March as aid officials implored Israel to ease access for relief supplies into Gaza over land routes. By opening a second route for aid, this one by sea, Biden administration officials hope to avert famine in northern Gaza.

God forbid the people trying to kill all the Jews should go hungry.

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President Joe Biden’s taxpayer-funded American Climate Corps is looking to hire dozens of “Garden Educators” who will work on “activating elementary school gardens as a learning laboratory for environmental education.” Job postings for the $20-per hour-position list “a commitment to social justice and anti-racism” as one of the “preferred qualifications.”

At last: A jobs program for all of those Grievance Studies majors.

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This week in Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon unsealed a trove of new documents that Jack Smith fought to keep hidden. And you’ll soon find out why. Among the documents unsealed were extensive exhibits, motions, and other filings shedding light on the intricate web of communication between the Biden White House and the National Archives and Records Administration in the lead-up to Trump’s indictment.

Politico.

New details about Jim Biden’s foreign fundraising efforts are spilling out in a Kentucky bankruptcy court, where recent testimony indicates that President Joe Biden’s brother partnered with Qatari government officials in his quest to find money for U.S. health care ventures.

The sworn testimony by fund manager Michael Lewitt, a former business partner of Jim Biden’s, attests that two companies that facilitated the efforts were part-owned by “members of the Qatari government.”

One company named in the testimony partnered directly with Jim Biden in the multi-year fundraising efforts.

UPDATE: Joe Biden’s Brother Embroiled In High-Ranking Qatari Scheme To “Provide Wealth Of Introductions” Through “My Family”: Politico

Reuters.

Dave Duttlinger’s first thought when he saw a dense band of yellowish-brown dust smearing the sky above his Indiana farm was: I warned them this would happen.
About 445 acres of his fields near Wheatfield, Indiana, are covered in solar panels and related machinery – land that in April 2019 Duttlinger leased to Dunns Bridge Solar LLC, for one of the largest solar developments in the Midwest.
On that blustery spring afternoon in 2022, Duttlinger said, his phone rang with questions from frustrated neighbors: Why is dust from your farm inside my truck? Inside my house? Who should I call to clean it up?
According to Duttlinger’s solar lease, reviewed by Reuters, Dunns Bridge said it would use “commercially reasonable efforts to minimize any damage to and disturbance of growing crops and crop land caused by its construction activities” outside the project site and “not remove topsoil” from the property itself. Still, sub-contractors graded Duttlinger’s fields to assist the building of roads and installation of posts and panels, he said, despite his warnings that it could make the land more vulnerable to erosion.
Crews reshaped the landscape, spreading fine sand across large stretches of rich topsoil, Duttlinger said. When Reuters visited his farm last year and this spring, much of the land beneath the panels was covered in yellow-brown sand, where no plants grew.
“I’ll never be able to grow anything on that field again,” the farmer said. About one-third of his approximately 1,200-acre farm – where his family grows corn, soybeans and alfalfa for cattle – has been leased.

Gizmodo.

The laws surrounding 5th Amendment protections and biometric passwords are still undecided, so just turn it off.

Washington Poop.

D.C. police rejected pleas from George Washington University officials to clear pro-Palestinian demonstrators out of an on-campus encampment early Friday morning, saying they worried about the optics of moving against a small number of peaceful protesters, according to two officials familiar with the talks.

In blue states, police apparently won’t do their  job if it makes them look bad.

The American Mind.

The relentless criminal and civil prosecution of former president Donald Trump is an unprecedented weaponization of our legal system to attack a political opponent. The goal is to re-elect Joe Biden by any means, without regard to the rule of law Democrat prosecutors and officials pretend to be enforcing.

Beyond E. Jean Carroll’s so far successful defamation cases funded by billionaire Reid Hoffman, and failed efforts in 36 states to take Trump off the ballot for purportedly engaging in insurrection, Trump is a defendant in five active criminal or civil actions, and an unindicted co-conspirator in two additional criminal cases, all brought by partisan progressive Democrat prosecutors seeking hundreds of millions of dollars of fines and more than 100 years of prison time. The timing of these cases was coordinated to inflict maximum inconvenience and cost on Trump, and to make it impossible for him to campaign actively. State and federal prosecutors met in the White House to refine their cases and for purposes that have never been disclosed.

The success of ‘lawfare’ depends on a politicized and corrupt legal system, something that is becoming increasingly manifest in blue states.

The Foundry.

Given the Marxist fixation with seizing power, it’s strange that woke university administrators can’t seem to use it better.

After all, they, not the students, are the legitimate authority on campus. For campus administrators who need remedial training on how to do their jobs, Texas provided a tutorial Wednesday when University of Texas at Austin students tried to establish a Gaza solidarity encampment there within sight of the state capitol building.

Here’s a six-step handbook to shutting down illegal campus takeovers, the Texas way.

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Apparently not risking losing the black vote is more important than virtue-signaling about protecting people’s health.

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If the Federal government refuses to do its job, then the states have to step up.

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“DOE believes at this time that circadian-friendly integrated LED lamps do not possess unique attributes compared to other (GSLs).” (i.e. light bulbs, which they refer to as general service lamps). (p. 28877)

This is nonsense. Circadian-friendly light bulbs have distinct spectral power distributions—i.e., the relative amounts of light at each color wavelength. Circadian-friendly lights are rich in 480 nm blue during the day and emit minimal 480 nm blue in the evenings and at night. This can easily be measured with a handheld spectrophotometer.

Evidence establishes that circadian-friendly lights should be less than 2 percent 440-495 nm blue in the evening and at night, and more than 20 percent 440-495 nm blue during the daytime.

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When defendants go on trial, the allegations against them are generally clear. Not so with former President Donald Trump and his “hush money” case.

Prosecutors in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office offered new transparency not only to the public, but seemingly also to Trump’s defense attorneys on Tuesday when, one year after indicting the former president, they finally pulled back the curtain to reveal the motivating “crime” in their case: a violation of state election law.

Former federal prosecutors told the Daily Caller News Foundation that Bragg’s lack of clarity is unfair to the defense, which can’t prepare to argue against a charge they don’t know, and unlike what they’ve seen before.

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Case in point: The administration’s new “solar energy plan” for western states, where the vast majority of land is owned by the federal government. The Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, is proposing a new plan for “Utility-Scale Solar Energy Development” that is supposed to expand the development of solar projects across 11 western states. In fact, far from expediting the permitting of solar projects, the new solar plan throws pointless obstacles in their path and could shut down solar energy development in the desert West altogether.

 

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In a 4-3 decision, the court found that the trial judge in the disgraced mogul’s case had made a critical error, allowing prosecutors to call a series of women as witnesses who said that Weinstein had assaulted them, but whose accusations weren’t part of the charges against him, the NYT reports.

New York Justice. Can Trump expect any better?

Newsweek.

The roughly four dozen migrants that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis helped fly from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard about a year and a half ago have been granted legal designations due to the Republican’s crimes against the “victims.”

On September 14, 2022, DeSantis emulated immigration policies enforced by Texas Governor Greg Abbott—who has become known for busing migrants to liberal, sanctuary cities like New York and Chicago—and sent two planes of about 50 migrants, including children, from San Antonio to the small, liberal island south of Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

Critics of DeSantis said that sending the migrants, mostly from Venezuela, to the popular vacationing spot was a political stunt that cost Florida taxpayers about $615,000 in total, or about $12,300 per migrant paid out of a $12 million fund to relocate unauthorized immigrants from Florida. Days after they touched down, the migrants—aided by civil rights attorneys—filed a class action lawsuit demanding financial compensation for “economic, emotional and constitutional harms.”

Those same migrants are now able to temporarily live and work legally in the U.S. while avoiding deportation due to applying to receive special visas, the migrants’ immigration attorney, Rachel Self, told The Miami Herald.

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) hid how a woman who suffered chest pain and other symptoms following COVID-19 vaccination received a shot because of a mandate at work, newly obtained documents show.

The Foundry.

New York state lawmakers plan to hand out tens of millions in taxpayer dollars to local media outlets to help pay for journalists’ salaries.

The state will dole out $30 million over three years to local media outlets in the form of tax credits, giving publishers the ability to offset up to 50% of the first $50,000 in journalists’ salaries, according to a Tuesday release from New York State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie.

Ah, but will they stay bought?

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Kansas university officials have spent millions of dollars on diversity, equity, and inclusion, in what appears to be just a jobs program for DEI staff.

A state auditor could not determine what DEI means at state universities or what DEI programs produce, and Kansas lawmakers made a proactive decision to reinforce civil rights laws and protect everyone on state college campuses from the discriminatory effects DEI programs have had on campuses around the country.

Kansas legislators last week adopted a law that prohibits state university officials from requiring prospective employees to complete a DEI statement as a condition of employment or requiring students to write a DEI statement when they apply to a university. Faculty also cannot require professors to write a DEI statement as a condition of being promoted.

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The migrant has been in prison for TEN YEARS after attacking a teenage girl in 2014.

GB News reports that an appeal claiming that the migrant wouldn’t be able to access care for PTSD or depression in the East African country has been successful.

The Foundry.

Even as Americans grow increasingly pessimistic and agitated about their personal finances, Congress is about to ask struggling families to cover the cost of more funding for Ukraine.

The $95 billion foreign aid package adopted Saturday by the House and facing near-certain passage in the Senate includes an additional $61 billion for Ukraine. Once added to the money already appropriated for Ukraine since 2022, the United States will have spent approximately $173 billion.

That translates to more than $1,300 per American household, according to Heritage Foundation economist Richard Stern, director of the Grover M. Hermann Center for the Federal Budget.

RealClearPolitics.

If the economy is so good, why do small business leaders feel so bad?
The latest Small Business Optimism Index from the National Federation of Independent Business could hardly be more depressing. It finds that the men and women who run our 33 million small businesses and hire more than half of American workers are in a somber mood. The survey finds that small-business confidence has reached its lowest point in 12 years.
Amazingly, small company CEOs are even more fearful of the future today than during the COVID-19 pandemic, when most businesses were shuttered.