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1 in 10 college students answered that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez had created the New Deal. And only 1 in 10 knew James Madison’s role in shaping the Constitution.

That survey from the ‘American Council of Trustees and Alumni’ was one of several warnings about the catastrophic illiteracy of college students and graduates.

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute did its own survey of over 28,000 undergraduates from 80 colleges and the average score on the civic literacy exam was an F. At top schools, including Yale, seniors actually knew less than freshmen. A Collegiate Learning Assessment found that after two years almost half of students showed “no significant gains in learning”.

Watch it.

Between governments and activists, our best prospect for clean energy is being strangled in its cradle.

The only country that has actually built a couple of small modular reactors is (wait for it) Red China. (My, what a surprise.)

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The White House and its Office of Management and Budget instructed federal agencies to use a “template” for determining the cost of implementing President Joe Biden’s executive order to encourage voter participation, according to government emails obtained by The Daily Signal.

Critics use the term “Bidenbucks” to refer to the president’s controversial order from 2021, which directs federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get involved in elections.

Several members of Congress contend that Biden’s order on turning out the vote for elections could violate the Antideficiency Act, a law that has three parts. It prohibits federal employees from obligating tax dollars not authorized by Congress, prohibits officials from not spending money as appropriated by Congress, and prohibits agencies from accepting voluntary service from individuals.

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One of Chevy’s longest running vehicle models has now fallen at the hands of the company’s transition to EVs. The Chevy Malibu will be no longer, according to a new report from Car and Driver.

The Chevy Malibu, one of the longest-running and most successful vehicles in history, is being discontinued again. Chevrolet informed Car and Driver that production will end in November 2024 as the automaker invests $390 million in its Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas.

Car and Driver reports that GM will also pause production of the Cadillac XT4 in January to retool for the Ultium-based Bolt EV. Production will resume in late 2025, with the XT4 and Bolt EV sharing an assembly line.

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U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials in the El Paso region seized more than 124 pounds of fentanyl and cocaine last week in four separate incidents, amid criticism of lax border policies.

On April 30, officers working at the Bridge of the Americas seized cocaine totaling 42.5 pounds, according to a May 3 press release from the CBP. The drugs were found to be concealed inside a Hyundai Elantra vehicle allegedly driven by a 48-year-old American citizen. “The seizure was made when CBP officers monitoring the Low Energy Portal inspection system spotted anomalies in the appearance of the vehicle and advised primary CBP officers,” the release noted.

The Foundry.

Apart from the taxpayer-funded lawfare being waged against former President Donald Trump by leftist prosecutors in New York, Atlanta, and Washington, there is no clearer proof that the Left has embraced “by any means necessary” as its credo than the politicization of Secret Service protection of President Joe Biden’s presidential rivals.

Not only has Biden’s Department of Homeland Security denied five requests for Secret Service protection from independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the flimsiest of grounds, but now the Democratic congressman from Mississippi who chaired the kangaroo court Jan. 6 committee is proposing to strip Trump of his Secret Service detail if he were convicted in any of the politically motivated trials he’s facing.

Never mind that this brazen legislation, championed by Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., has no chance of being enacted by Congress or that the courts would surely enjoin it as unconstitutional if it were. Its sheer cold-bloodedness is appalling.

New York Post.

A daunting list, set forth in black and white.

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Public confidence in the military has slipped. One major reason is the politicization of senior military officers, who show an increasing propensity to compromise their integrity to gain influence and achieve both budgetary and policy goals. Their willingness to spin carefully parsed and knowingly misleading testimony and advice compromises civilian control of the military. Simply stated, these generals and admirals are not providing full and complete representations of plans, concepts, and assessments to senior civilians in the executive and legislative branches, thereby depriving them of the unbiased information they require to make decisions required by the Constitution.

Generals are required by their positions to be political, since a lot of their job is dealing with civilian politicians both at home and abroad.  Some, like Norman Schwarzkopf, rise above it. Some, like Wesley Clark, don’t.

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The Biden administration is stealthily preparing to surrender our sovereign, constitutional republic and the freedoms it guarantees to the World Health Organization’s unaccountable, Marxist director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Ph.D.

Power Line.

I still argue that the only good thing that happened during the Obama years was all-day breakfast at McDonalds, and COVID took that away from us. Which is when I started saying that COVID won’t be truly over until we get all-day breakfast at McDonalds back again. And it looks like that isn’t going to happen.

One reason might be that consumers can’t afford it.

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The United States government is not appropriately addressing the threat posed by growing Chinese ownership of American land, according to a report released by The Heritage Foundation Thursday.

The federal government is woefully ill-equipped to track Chinese-owned real estate in the country, despite the serious threat these Chinese Communist Party-affiliated entities can pose to critical U.S. infrastructure, according to the report. The report calls on federal and state leaders to take action, such as increasing transparency and conducting more critical reviews of land purchases.

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Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Mark Warner (D-VA) broke the news during a press briefing at the tech-tied RSA Conference, according to tech outlet Nextgov/FCW. At the event, the senator reportedly conceded that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are back to their old work of coordinating censorship of free speech ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

An FBI representative admitted the resumed Big Tech communications to The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood. CISA would not confirm the report, however.

“The FBI remains committed to combating foreign malign influence operations, including in connection with our elections,” the bureau’s representative claimed, as reported by The Federalist. “That effort includes sharing specific foreign threat information with state and local election officials and private sector companies when appropriate and rigorously consistent with the law.”

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Illegal immigrants at a Denver, Colorado encampment that is set to be removed are refusing to leave until the city meets a list of 13 demands, which include access to “fresh, culturally appropriate ingredients” for food, unlimited showers, “the same housing support that has been offered to others,” legal services, and fair warning before kicking them out.

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If you are like most Americans, the cost of living has been going up much faster than your income has been. Right now, millions of Americans that were once prospering are now deeply struggling. When I was growing up, most of the population could afford to live “the American Dream”, but now that is no longer true. At this point, the basics of a middle class lifestyle are out of reach for most Americans. Poverty and homelessness are steadily rising, and the economy has become the number one issue during this election cycle. Most of us just want things to go back to the way that they once were, but thanks to the very foolish decisions of our leaders that simply is not possible.

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A bill being considered in the House this week would add a citizenship question to future census counts could have big implications.

Basic Congressional districts on the number of people rather than the number of citizens has never made sense except to those who benefit by it politically. The southern states tried the same trick with their slaves during the crafting of the Constitution, which is the origin of the notorious ‘three-fifths’ rule.

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The latest inflation numbers show 3.5% annual growth for consumer prices, still well above pre-pandemic levels. That means millions of families are struggling to get back to where they were in 2021.

This should come as no surprise, since excessive deficit spending from Washington remains much too high. In 2023, the federal government spent $6.1 trillion (roughly $47,000 per household) and ran a staggering $1.7 trillion deficit.

Yet the Biden administration seems determined to make this worse, consistently choosing policies that increase deficits in pursuit of its ideological agenda.

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Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., called for the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and charge him with committing genocide during the Israel-Hamas war.

While we’re at it, we can arrest Congressperson Tlaib for treason and violating the Logan Act.

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Republican-led states are suing the Biden administration and advising schools to ignore the new federal Title IX changes that expand sex discrimination protection to students who identify as the opposite sex, or transgender.

Don’t bother to change the law–just change the definition!

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The New York Times has released 10,000 pages of raw government data on unaccompanied alien children who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years. More than 550,000 minors crossed the border illegally between 2015 and 2018.

The New York Times has released a trove of raw government data on the unaccompanied alien children who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years. Among over 10,000 pages of information is data on the number of children who crossed the border into America without an adult and then were handed over to someone other than a family member.

From January 2015 through May 2023, the U.S. Department of Human Health and Services released tens of thousands of minors who crossed the border illegally to sponsors who weren’t an immediate or distant relative, raising concerns about human trafficking and forced labor.

Oh, ya think?

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The peer-reviewed systemic review, published in the Frontiers in Psychiatry journal on April 12, examined cases of new-onset psychosis among people who took the vaccines. Psychosis refers to symptoms that occur when an individual has difficulty differentiating between reality and fantasy, with hallucinations and delusions being two key types. The review looked at 21 articles describing 24 cases of psychosis symptoms following vaccination. The researchers concluded that “data suggest a potential link between young age, mRNA, and viral vector vaccines with new-onset psychosis within 7 days post-vaccination.”

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Maddison Bergmann, a 24-year-old Wisconsin elementary school teacher, was arrested recently after allegedly making out with one of her 5th grade students. Screenshots from numerous text message conversations between the victim and Bergmann suggest that the sexual abuse took place during lunch or after school, CBS News reported.

Apparently, the victim’s mother overheard a phone call between Bergmann and her son which prompted the mother to go through her 11-year-old’s cellphone. The victim then told investigators that he spoke with Bergmann “almost daily.”

When the child’s father found out about the alleged relationship, he marched to River Crest Elementary with the printed conversations from his son’s phone, leading to police being called “regarding inappropriate conduct between a current teacher and a 5th grade student.”

More female grade school teachers engage in inappropriate relationships with their students than there are school shooters. Yet nobody is talking about it.

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What was the “intent to commit another crime or aid and conceal the commission thereof” that prosecutors used to raise falsification of business records from a misdemeanor to a felony? In nearly every case of alleged falsification of records that has been charged as a felony in New York, the defendant was charged with another crime — that is, prosecutors made it clear what the other crime was. In Trump’s case, the indictment did not specify any other crime. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said the law did not require him to specify the other crime.

So Trump faced felony charges without knowing what he was accused of doing. And the really amazing thing is that the trial is now underway and Bragg has still not specified what the other crime is. It is a key element of the case. Without it, the charges against Trump could never have been brought because they were misdemeanors long past the statute of limitations. It is the other crime that makes this whole prosecution possible. But the prosecutor has not specified what it is.

If that sounds vaguely unconstitutional to you, you’re right. As former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy points out, the Fifth Amendment “requires a felony charge to be spelled out in an indictment whose criminal elements have been established by probable cause to the satisfaction of a grand jury.” The problem, McCarthy continues, is that the election-stealing conspiracy Bragg’s prosecutors are accusing Trump of engaging in is “not charged in the indictment” and, further, “there is no such conspiracy crime in New York penal law.” McCarthy also argues that the charges violate the New York Constitution.

It’s a political witch-hunt, pure and simple.

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Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team admitted on Friday that key evidence in Trump’s classified documents case was altered or manipulated – leaving two different chronologies; one that was digitally scanned vs. what’s in the actual boxes.

Smith also misled the court, after originally telling U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that the boxes remained “in their original, intact form as seized,” when in a footnote they conceded that they removed classified documents and left placeholder sheets, which prosecutors acknowledged has created an “inconsistent” record – in which some of the documents are no longer in the same order as they appear in digital scans made in the fall of 2022.

“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the footnote reads, according to Just the News.

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.