President Joe Biden announced an executive order this week that he claims will “help us to gain control of our border, restore order to the process” by banning migrants from seeking asylum if they cross the border illegally. At first glance, this seems like a welcome move to reduce a major pull factor for illegal crossings, even if it flies in the face of Biden’s claim in January that he had “done all I can do” on the border.
As always, though, the devil is in the details. First, the limitations on asylum seekers only kick in once illegal crossings exceed 2,500 per day, which is nearly one million per year. As Ammon Blair, a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation told me, Biden is going to “meter the invasion.”
As you read further, the executive order contains all kinds of loopholes that render it effectively useless, even during the emergency scenario.
In the transparency case over a recording of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur, a lower court ruling could reach a verdict in August, one involved lawyer says. But he says that “fevered, emergency appeals” are likely to follow, regardless of the outcome.
Biden invoked executive privilege to shield release of the audio recording, although an edited transcript has been released of interviews in which the president showed “diminished capacities,” according to Hur’s report on Biden’s possession of classified documents.
“They altered their released transcript, which is a very big deal in that the arguments they’ve been making for not releasing the audio is that the transcript is already out there and you don’t need the audio,” Mike Howell, executive director of The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, said Wednesday in a conference call with reporters.
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What the U.S. Navy has not been able to produce are the cheap, effective UAVs and USVs the Ukrainian used to cripple the Russian Black Sea Fleet. The problem is situational and political. The American situation is peacetime, not wartime. When you are at war things are done quickly, effectively, and inexpensively. Ukraine demonstrated that with its domestic UAV and USV programs. In the United States peacetime defense procurement is a lot more expensive and takes longer than it would in wartime. That means the Ukrainian type UAVs and UUVs will cost the USN far more than the Ukrainian models and take years to reach the U.S. Pacific Fleet. If China goes to war over Taiwan that situation changes in a hurry. Meanwhile, you go to war with what you have when war is declared. Right now the American navy has none of those clever and effective Ukrainian UAVs and USVs. Keep in mind that it took the Ukrainians over a year, after the Russian invasion, to come up with their brilliant and effective UAV and USV tactics that crippled and defeated the mighty Russian Black Sea Fleet.
The United States knows that Ukraine did in the Black Sea but that knowledge does not quickly translate into similar American weapons. The primary problem is so few American naval commanders understand exactly what the Ukrainian did and how to replicate that for the American Pacific Fleet, where such Ukrainian technology is needed.
When 75-year-old Paulette Harlow was sentenced to 24 months in prison on Friday for attempting to dissuade women from getting abortions, she felt thankful—despite her chronic health conditions.
“I went to the sentencing, and I felt very confident, and I felt very joyful, and I felt like it was a tremendous privilege to stand in the court on behalf of the unborn, who have no voice,” she told The Daily Signal.
The jury found Harlow guilty in November under the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act and of a civil rights conspiracy. The FACE Act prohibits “violent, threatening, damaging, and obstructive conduct intended to injure, intimidate, or interfere with the right to seek, obtain, or provide reproductive health services.”
Let’s see: How many BLM rioters are in prison? That would be: None. How many AntiFa rioters are in prison. That would be: None.
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During the pandemic, the American people started to feel that Big Government was very cozy with Big Pharma. Now we know just how close they were.
New data from the National Institutes of Health reveals the agency and its scientists collected $710 million in royalties during the pandemic, from late 2021 through 2023. These are payments made by private companies, like pharmaceuticals, to license medical innovations from government scientists.
Almost all that cash — $690 million — went to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), the subagency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and 260 of its scientists.
Following Donald Trump’s conviction in New York—for allegedly causing 34 incorrect purpose tags to be entered in the Trump Organization’s private, internal account register with an intent to defraud and unlawfully interfere in the 2016 presidential election—Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg took a victory lap. He calmly explained that the trial was an ordinary example of what his office does every day, without “fear or favor,” and had simply done its job. Bragg lied.
Bragg ran for office on the promise he would get Trump. To do so, Bragg charged him with a low-level misdemeanor, for which the statute of limitations had already run, alleging that the Trump Organization “falsely” recorded $430,000 of payments to Trump attorney Michael Cohen in its accounts as “legal fees” or “legal expenses” rather than as “hush payments” or “repayment of hush payments.” Then he added 33 counts by separately charging each entry. Finally, he revived the statute of limitations and upped the potential crime to a Class E felony (the lowest of New York’s five felony classes) by alleging that Trump had “falsified” these business records with the intent to “commit another crime.” The indictment did not disclose that crime.
It will take some time before the Biden administration’s highly touted pier in Gaza is usable again after breaking apart in heavy seas. Humanitarian aid deliveries via the sea have subsequently ground to a halt and criticisms are growing about how the technically ‘no-boots-on-the-ground’ mission has proceeded to date. Yet the U.S. has a robust capability to conduct outsized deliveries from ship to shore without any of this infrastructure. So, if this is such a high-priority humanitarian mission, where are the U.S. Navy’s Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) hovercraft?
You can watch the video of the incident in which Trooper Londregan shot Ricky Cobb and see that any reasonable person would determine that the shooting was justified, even if they didn’t know that Rick Cobb was a lifelong menace to the community. But this happened in Minneapolis, where St. George of the Blessed Fentanyl is considered a civil rights martyr, and the usual suspects demanded “justice.”
…
In January, Mary Moriarty charged Trooper Londregan with three felonies — second-degree unintentional murder, first-degree assault, and second-degree manslaughter: “Our hearts are with Ricky Cobb’s family today, who are grieving an unimaginable loss. I know that they are devastated and will continue to feel this loss for the rest of their lives.”
Republicans put out the full transcript of their sit down interview with Fauci from January just days before his highly-anticipated public testimony on Monday.
They plan to grill him about COVID restrictions he put in place, that he admitted didn’t do much to ‘slow the spread’ of the virus.
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One day after Donald Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in his ‘hush money’ trial, a court-appointed officer overseeing the Infowars bankruptcy apparently went rogue on Friday and tried to seize and shut down Alex Jones’ studio without a court order, despite having a reported “path with the [bankruptcy] judge to continue on for years.”
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The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a report on the Constellation class frigate construction program delays and it’s an eye opener even for ComNavOps who predicted exactly these kinds of problems long ago.
To review, the contract delivery date is April 2026. Current estimates by the Navy put delivery sometime in 2029, three years late and seven years after the Aug 2022 start of construction (seven years to build a frigate?!), and you know that date is going to continue to be pushed further out with more delays.
As with all sizable ships, the Constellation is being built in sections, called blocks (although the Navy now calls them ‘Grand Modules’ in their typically PowerPoint-ish, pointless churn style; someone undoubtedly got a promotion for coming up with the phrase, ‘Grand Module’) and, according to a diagram in the report, the Constellation has 31 blocks. Of the 31 blocks, 11 are currently being manufactured despite not having completed design documents
If the devil is in the details, bureaucracy is hell on earth. Though terrain familiar to the Biden administration, Republicans must prepare to navigate it.
Witness the debacle over liquefied natural gas exports, wherein the White House, by “pausing” most new approvals, has catapulted the energy security of key U.S. allies straight into the buzzsaw of its climate ambitions. (The category of exports that will continue to be authorized is tiny.) The Department of Energy claims that a multifactor impact study due in early 2025 is required to determine whether and how the moratorium will be lifted.
Under a certain conception of executive power, it should be simple enough for a second-term Trump administration to end this national embarrassment by pressing “resume” on the authorization process. But as analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies have suggested, merely setting aside the study could provide a basis, however tenuous, for future litigation. In the modern administrative state, it is easier to open than shut the procedural door to delays.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner’s office provided free consultations and legal assistance to illegal aliens charged with violent felonies in 2023, documents reveal.
The taxpayer-funded consultations were provided to migrants charged with various heinous crimes—including rape, robbery, strangulation, aggravated assault, and homicide by vehicle—in an ostensible effort to help them avoid convictions that would lead to their deportation, documents obtained by the Immigration Reform Law Institute reveal.
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If you’re one of the millions of Americans struggling to save for retirement today, get ready for more struggle, at least if President Joe Biden gets his way. He’s proposing a tax hike on savings that would mean a negative rate of return for many people after adjusting for inflation.
As part of his trillions of dollars in tax hikes, Biden has proposed a 45% tax on capital gains, painting it as a tax on the boogeyman of “greedy” billionaires. In reality, 12.5 million Americans—mostly middle class—pay this tax on their retirement savings.
That’s why every American should be horrified that Biden wants to raise this tax to the highest rate in 111 years. Such a move would severely hamper people’s ability to save for retirement, and it would cripple economic growth.
S Corporation shareholders and partners in a partnership could see their effective federal income tax rate increase by 30% by the end of December 31, 2025, due to the expiration of certain tax laws. With the sunsetting of the 199A deduction and an increase in individual federal income tax rates scheduled to occur as of December 31, 2025, the effective tax rate for pass-through entity owners will jump from 30% to 39.6%. Taxable income could also increase due to the sunsetting Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions, including the capitalization of research and experimental expenditures, bonus depreciation dropping to 60% in 2024 and to 40% in 2025, and the application of a more restrictive interest expense limitation calculation.
A dramatic increase to the effective tax rate may catch many pass-through entity businesses by surprise. Doesn’t Congress have to pass a bill to change federal income tax law? Unfortunately, not in this situation. For tax law to be passed, the Senate normally needs a 60-vote majority to overcome a filibuster. However, provided the political party controls the Presidency, House and Senate, laws can be passed under the budget reconciliation process where only a simple majority in the Senate is needed. The budget reconciliation process was utilized to pass the Tax Cut and Jobs Act (“TCJA”) in December of 2017, which bypassed the need for bipartisan support. Under the reconciliation process, the bill cannot increase the deficit beyond a 10-year budget window. Under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, taxes were reduced substantially between 2018 through 2025, resulting in an anticipated $1-$2 trillion increase to the national deficit. Both parties have used the budget reconciliation process when controlling the Presidency and Congress. In 2010, the budget reconciliation process was utilized to amend the Affordable Care Act and modify the federal student loan program. This process was utilized most recently in 2021 to enact additional COVID-19 relief via the American Rescue Plan.
Zman takes a look at our foreign policy, if you can call it that.
Most men can remember back to a time on the schoolyard when two kids got into a confrontation and one of them kept promising to do something bad to the other if the other did not stop whatever it was he was doing. The threat of consequences was supposed to deter the other, but the other kid was undeterred, and the result was a fight, with the kid making the threats getting the worst of it. Bullies often come to a bad end like this as their bullying is based on threats.
If you are a member of the managerial elite, it is unlikely that you have such a memory as you were raised by women, so no school yard fights. As a result, the logic of the bully, issuing escalatory threats, makes perfect sense. After all, if you can conjure something worse than the other guy is conjuring, then you win! Therefore, success is determined by who has the greatest mastery of escalatory dominance, the alleged ability to escalate a conflict beyond that of an opponent.
The State Department is funding an array of LGBTQ pride events across the globe ahead of June, some of which include events focused on children, federal grant records show.
President Joe Biden’s State Department is bankrolling a gay film festival, an LGBTQ community conference, and other pride events in Australia, the Czech Republic, and Bulgaria in the lead-up to June, according to grant records.
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In June 2023, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management proposed a rule that would require stricter financial assurance standards for oil companies operating in the Outer Continental Shelf. This costly rule became final on April 15, 2024, but in the 10 months since its initial proposal, BOEM did nothing to alleviate concerns for smaller companies that comprise of 76 percent of oil and gas operators in the Gulf. As a result, many of these companies could be forced out of business by extreme and unnecessary costs from this rule. The situation threatens an estimated 36,000 jobs, more than $570 million in federal government royalties, and $9.9 billion from our GDP.
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There are three layers to the U.S. state that lord it over the American people and the world: deep, middle, and shallow. It’s a typology of how technocracy works in practice. Let’s talk about how it works and how the layers interact.
The House Oversight and Accountability Committee has launched an investigation into potential vulnerabilities in the Secret Service’s ability to protect President Biden, Vice President Harris, and former President Donald Trump and their families after an incident last month raised new concerns about the agency’s diversity, equity, and inclusion hiring decisions and vetting process.
A footnote to John’s post awaiting the verdict: Alvin Bragg’s case against President Trump is a Stalinist joke. It is fundamentally lacking in due process. One glaring element of this is the failure to identify the second crime that revives the otherwise time-barred misdemeanor charges and turns them into a viable felony.
The U.S. Navy’s future Constellation class frigates could see their top speeds cut back to help mitigate unexpected growth in their overall weight. The Navy and shipbuilder Fincantieri Marinette Marine otherwise continue to grapple with the impacts of major changes in the ship’s configuration compared to its Franco-ItalianFregata Europea Multi-Missione (FREMM) parent design. The entire purpose of basing the Constellations on an existing in-production frigate was to help reduce costs, delivery times, and risk, but they have shaped up to be larger, heavier, and now years behind schedule.
New details about weight growth, design instability, and other issues with theConstellation class frigate came in a report the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), a Congressional watchdog, published yesterday. Just last week, the Navy awarded a new contract to Fincantieri Marinette Marine, valued at just over $1.04 billion, for another two of the frigates. The service now has six Constellations on order, the first of which is currently under construction.
At the same time, the Navy has already confirmed that it now the first Constellationclass frigate may not be delivered until 2029, three years behind schedule. This would also be around nine years after Fincantieri Marinette Marine received its initial contract for the frigates and some seven years after the start of construction of the USS Constellation.
Washington and London have, since January, been waging a brutal campaign of airstrikes against Yemen in response to the pro-Palestine naval operations that Ansarallah and the Yemeni army began in November last year.
The start of the US-led war against Yemen prompted Yemeni forces to begin targeting US and British vessels alongside those linked to or bound for Israel.
The western campaign has done nothing to deter the Yemenis. US and EU maritime task forces have failed to progress in preventing attacks on ships in the Red Sea, Arab Sea, Indian Ocean, and elsewhere, which have resulted in a strain on both the Israeli economy and international shipping as a whole.
The White House on Wednesday unveiled nearly $900 million in awards to 530 school districts to replace thousands of aging, gas-fueled school buses with cleaner, mainly electric models.
As President Joe Biden considers adopting a global health agreement that would turn the power of the federal government over to leaders of a world government, dozens of governors have put him on notice that they “stand united in opposition” to handing over America’s national sovereignty.
Nearly every Republican governor in the country has signed a letter asking Biden to reconsider adopting a forthcoming accord enhancing the power of the World Health Organization before, during, and after global health crises.
Negotiators are working around the clock to hammer out a final version of the WHO Pandemic Agreement before the World Health Assembly meets on Monday. The current text of the accord would require nations to agree with WHO regulations on “routine immunization,” “social measures” such as lockdowns and mask mandates, and a massive global redistribution of U.S. wealth and technical information based on “equity.”
The Biden administration has signaled it will accept the agreement without congressional approval.
Migrants being stored in fancy New York City hotels didn’t seem to make much sense, did it? Why would these hotels willingly surrender business from their high class patrons to take in migrants?
Now we have our answer, and it’s the same answer it always is: money.
A former hotel worker told Fox News on Monday that the hotels involved in the resettlement of illegal immigrants “are making lots of money through New York City’s shelter program for illegal immigrants”, the Daily Caller reported.
The worker, Carlos Arellano, said that “everybody’s loving this because the money is just going around and around.”
Everybody line up for the gravy train! Taxpayers, get out your wallets!
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Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Republicans have spent years aggressively turning the state into a haven for school choice. They have been wildly successful, with tens of thousands more children enrolling in private or charter schools or homeschooling.
Now as those programs balloon, some of Florida’s largest school districts are facing staggering enrollment declines — and grappling with the possibility of campus closures — as dollars follow the increasing number of parents opting out of traditional public schools.
How about that? Give people a choice, and they’ll make it.
Education officials in some of the state’s largest counties are looking to scale back costs by repurposing or outright closing campuses — including in Broward, Duval and Miami-Dade counties. Even as some communities rally to try to save their local public schools, traditional public schools are left with empty seats and budget crunches.
The taxpayer-funded trough is running dry, and the pigs are squealing.
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The average daily rate of hotel rooms in New York City jumped 8.5% from 2022 to 2023 and remained high through the first few months of 2024 during the conversion of roughly 135 hotels to housing illegals.
Four U.S. Army vessels supporting the temporary pier in the Mediterranean Sea used to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip ran aground because of heavy seas.
Early in the interview CBS’s Margaret Brennan called out Mayor Pete on something we wrote about just days ago: after spending more than $7 billion since 2021 on EV infrastructure, the nation has less than 10 EV chargers to show for it.
Joe Biden sure can pick ’em.
YOU are paying this guy.
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California Senate Bill 961 (SB 961) was passed by a 22-13 vote this week requiring that 50 percent of new vehicles manufactured or sold in California must have passive speed limiters installed by 2029. By 2032, that percentage increases to 100 percent.
A passive speed limiter is a system that warns drivers with audible and visual signals when their speed exceeds the posted speed limit by more than 10 miles per hour. SB 961 applies to all trucks, buses and passenger vehicles manufactured or sold in the state. Emergency vehicles are exempt from the passive speed limiter requirement.
“California, like the nation as a whole, is seeing a horrifying spike in traffic deaths, with thousands of drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians dying each year on our roads,” said Senator Scott Wiener who put forth the bill. According to the California Office of Traffic Safety’s (OTS) 2023 Traffic Safety Report, one third of all traffic fatalities in the state between 2017 and 2021 were speeding-related.
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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