Read it.

Donald Trump has outlined his plans for federal taxation should he be elected.

“I will make the Trump tax cuts permanent. You know they expire in a year. And we will cut your taxes even more than that,” he said in a speech in North Charleston, South Carolina, on Feb. 14, 2024.

But President Biden has also made his plan clear: He wants to wallop Americans with a $5 trillion tax increase.

Read it.

Can Democrats take a hint? The answer is obviously no, but with millions of people flooding out of Democrat controlled places and relocating to more conservative regions one might think they would finally get the message.

Blue cities and states across the US have been experiencing a mass exodus of legal residents since before the pandemic event; many of them business owners taking their money (and job opportunities) with them. The hardest hit states in the country include New York, Illinois and California, with cities like NYC, LA, Chicago and San Francisco seeing some of the most aggressive population shift. In states like California the standard operating procedure has been to lie about the situation, using the surge of illegal immigrants to hide population loss in the census.

NewsMax.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear oral arguments involving a federal obstruction law that has been used to prosecute hundreds of defendants involved in the events of Jan. 6, 2021, and the justices’ decision could affect former President Donald Trump.

The main charge that has sent so many 1/6 defendants to prison is one that had never before been prosecuted in such a context and (it is being argued) beyond the scope of what Congress intended with the law.

Read it.

Sen. Jacky Rosen says she’s committed to cracking down on the corporate landowners jacking up housing costs for her constituents. But the Nevada Democrat has no problem raking in campaign contributions from executives at America’s largest corporate landlord.

Rosen’s campaign and leadership PAC have accepted $83,250 in 2023 from executives of Blackstone, a leading corporate investor in the U.S. housing market, Federal Election Commission records show. Blackstone is the largest landlord in the country, with over 300,000 housing units in its portfolio, and is a direct contributor to the affordable housing crisis, according to a 2023 report by the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. Among Rosen’s donors is Frank Cohen, the chairman and CEO of Blackstone’s flagship real estate investment fund, which is heavily invested in Nevada. Cohen gave $13,200 to Rosen in August.

Now, Rosen says corporate landowners like Blackstone are responsible for driving up the cost of living for everyday Americans by monopolizing residential housing markets. Rosen introduced legislation in January that she said would limit the ability of companies like Blackstone to acquire an excessive amount of single-family residences in a single market and prohibit them from renting homes at an “unreasonable price.”

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Bound and determined to drive people with money, upon whom their incipient welfare state depends, out of the state.

Read it.

Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent string of rulings – including a 2022 New York case – that placed clear limits on how much state and local governments can restrict firearms ownership and possession, Democrat-run jurisdictions seem intent on persisting.

Read it.

Liberals are mounting a pressure campaign to force liberal Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to retire from the bench so President Joe Biden, who faces a tough reelection fight in November, can appoint a younger liberal successor before the election.

The Guardian.

When the office of the New York attorney general, Letitia James, announced that it would be suing the world’s largest meat company, JBS, for misleading customers about its climate commitments, it caused a stir far beyond the world of food. That’s because the suit’s impact has the potential to influence the approach all kinds of big businesses take in their advertising about sustainability, according to experts.

Not to mention driving even more businesses out of New York.

Read it.

Nations are either based on the rule of law or the rules dictated by the powerful. The former is meant to restrain, or better said, eliminate the possibility of the latter. But, as we’ve witnessed with the relentless political persecution of former President Donald Trump and, lately, of Elon Musk, laws only work when they’re fairly applied and enforced.

Neither of those things are happening with President Trump or Mr. Musk. President Trump was found guilty of fraud by a left-wing judge who determined this without considering, or despite, mountains of evidence to the contrary. The New York Attorney General Letitia James accused President Trump of over-valuing his real estate to obtain loans.

Coincidentally, Ms. James ran for the office of attorney general in 2018 with the campaign pledge to go after Trump, showing clear political animus toward President Trump. What’s more, Judge Arthur Engoron has been accused by Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York of violating “political giving rules with financial contributions to Democrats as recently as 2018, and ignored a decision on the appropriate statute of limitations in the case,” according to NBC News. Ms. James prosecuted President Trump in a civil trial, which was by design; criminal court cases require a trial by jury and proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Foundry.

This past weekend a funeral was held for Officer Jonathan Diller, who was fatally shot during a traffic stop in Far Rockaway, Queens, in March.

The event was attended by hundreds of police officers and a few politicians.

Some of those politicians, among them New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, weren’t exactly warmly welcomed. That shouldn’t be a surprise, as the top officials in New York seem more consumed by their ideological, banana republic-style crusades against former President Donald Trump and his supporters than in dealing with escalating chaos in the city.

The Foundry.

insanity: They keep trying and failing to legalize racial preferences, and yet, they expect a different outcome each time.

When will they learn from their failures?

Not any time soon.

Read it.

The “Black Mayors’ Coalition on Crime” gathered this week in Memphis, Tennessee to discuss the dangers of crime across the US, as well as apparent solutions to the growing threat. The question is, was the meeting really about stopping crime, or, was it all about maintaining optics and making the public believe crime is going down when it’s not?

It’s difficult to say because public and media access to the event was strictly limited. In many states private meetings between public officials related to policy are illegal. However, in Tennessee the regulations are a bit more lax in terms of what constitutes a “meeting subject to law.”

The Tennessee Open Meetings Act defines a “meeting” as “the convening of a governing body of a public body for which a quorum is required to make a decision or to deliberate toward a decision.” A “governing body” is “any public body [consisting] of two or more members, with the authority to make decisions for or recommendations to a public body on policy or administration.”

In other words, a quorum is required, which means Tennessee was very carefully chosen by the Black Mayor’s Coalition (the vast majority of them Democrats) because it allowed them more legal room to hold closed door meetings. But why not include the press and the public in this discourse?

Perhaps they don’t want people seeing what goes on behind the curtain?

Read it.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) was confronted by a mourner during the wake for slain NYPD officer Jonathan Diller Friday afternoon, after which a round of applause could be heard as she left the scene.

Newsbusters.

For some American Jews, the months since Oct. 7 have felt like a horror movie, as they watch, with increasing alarm, as our president—for whom many voted, and in whom many placed inviolable trust—seemed to, moment after crucial moment, throw Israel under the bus.

Earlier this month, a U.N. report from its Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary General revealed what Israel has been saying for months, namely that Hamas committed the most vile sexual violence and torture on Oct. 7, and such treatment likely continues to be perpetrated on hostages. Experts from the U.N.—an organization that is routinely hostile to the Jewish state—actually found “clear and convincing information that some [hostages] have been subjected to various forms of conflict-related sexual violence including rape and sexualized torture and sexualized cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and it also has reasonable grounds to believe that such violence may be ongoing.”

In reaction, Joe Biden’s State Department chose to level the charge of sexual abuse—at Israel. Recently, IDF Brig.-Gen. (res.) Amir Avivi recounted his meeting with a senior State Department official—since identified as Jill Hutchings, director of the Office of Israeli and Palestinian Affairs—who proceeded to accuse Israel of “systematically sexually abusing Palestinian women.” The State Department’s claim was based on information from Hamas pushed by Al Jazeera—which ended up deleting the story after it proved to be fabricated.

Read it.

Baltimore leader Brandon Scott appeared on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show to assert that white conservatives “should be afraid” of the consequences of calling him the ‘DEI Mayor’ and that his “purpose in life” was to make them uncomfortable.

Watch the white people leave your city. Whom will you get to run it then?

Read it.

During a speech at the Human Rights Campaign Dinner in LA Sunday, Jill Biden suggested that not having gay porno books available in children’s libraries in schools is akin to Nazi Germany.

Biden’s wife stated “Rights are being stripped away. Freedoms are eroding. More and more state laws are being passed…Just last night, we had to fend off more than 50 anti-gay amendments that Republicans tried to force into the government funding bill… they served only one purpose: to spread hate and fear.”

She continued, “History teaches us that democracies don’t disappear overnight. They disappear slowly. Subtly. Silently.”

Well, Democrats certainly know about that….

Jonathan Turley.

Below is my column in the New York Post on reported plan of the Democratic National Committee and allied groups to try to block third-party candidates from the 2024 ballot. The contradiction is stunning as these groups raise money to “save democracy” by limiting democratic choice.

Read it.

The Chicago Board of Elections says it “mistakenly left out” 10,000 vote-by-mail ballots when tabulating the results for the Democratic primary race for Cook County state’s attorney that is currently separated by approximately 2,000 votes, the Daily Mail has reported.

Imagine that.

UPDATE: Election Fraud Never Happens. Election Fraud Never Happens. Election Fraud Never … Oh, Wait — Chicago?

Read it.

Let us examine the 2024 Democrat political narrative surrounding abortion, including efforts to leverage the 2022 Dobbs decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that has roiled American politics for 50-plus years and counting.

Rolling Stone.

Long before Trump began leading in battleground-state polling — and years before he was a declared 2024 candidate — the ex-president and many of his influential allies were already busy plotting ways to tilt the election in his favor. These yearslong efforts, conducted both secretly and out in the open, have already yielded tangible results for Trump and the conservative election denier movement. These wide-ranging operations have alarmed the Democratic Party elite, who aren’t just worried about Biden’s sagging poll numbers. Numerous Democratic lawmakers, operatives, Biden campaign advisers, and administration officials tell Rolling Stone that if the president does ultimately beat Trump this November, the election will be exceedingly close.

Over the past year, Team Biden has been conducting war games, crafting complex legal strategies, and devoting extensive resources to prepare for, as one former senior Biden administration official puts it, “all-hell-breaks-loose” scenarios. The preparations include planning for a contingency in which Biden’s margin of victory is so razor-thin that Trump and the GOP launch a tidal wave of legal challenges and political maneuvers to rerun his 2020 election strategy: declare victory anyways, and try to will it into existence.

The Law of Progressive Projection says that this indicates that the Left is intending to steal the election, and how it intends to do so.

The New Neo.

I’ve had a number of interesting – although short – conversations with friends about the lawfare cases against Trump. A pattern has emerged: they’re upset that the cases have been stalled, and they perceive the courts and prosecutors as going too easy on Trump.

I find this extraordinary. But when I really think about it, it’s not so very extraordinary at all. For starters, they probably read and hear plenty of information in the MSM from “legal experts” about how valid and righteous these cases are. In addition, most people are unfamiliar with the details of law and why they protect both sides if followed scrupulously. That part of our education has been either neglected in the first place or forgotten by most people if once learned. Lawyers remember, but so many lawyers are activists (and on the left) these days that they mostly employ their knowledge and skills in sophistry to help the left.

Read it.

All carefully calculated not to touch rich Democrats and rich Democrat donors.

The Foundry.

I’m guessing they’re for it.

CBS News.

The thought of fewer New Yorkers is a blessing that everyone can get behind.

Now, if we could only make it mandatory in blue states….

Read it.

During a segment on the political sentiments of Black voters in Georgia, a reporter was shocked when a couple who were formerly Democrats declared that they are now going to vote for Donald Trump.

Read it.

“Don’t be so down on D.C.,” Bowser said when asked about the crime surge at the Axios What’s Next Summit Monday night. Bowser, who is in her third term leading the nation’s capital, has faced growing scrutiny over her handling of the district’s crime spike. In 2023, while many cities saw crime rates fall, D.C. saw homicides increase by 35 percent, robberies by 67 percent, and carjackings by 82 percent.

UPDATE: DC and our dying blue cities

Read it.

I wonder whether French has given over pretending to be a conservative? Probably not.

Power Line.

Donald Trump has held a narrow but consistent lead in just about every poll for several months now—having never led in the polls in either the 2016 and 2020 election cycles. More significant is where this lead has come from. Trump has not improved his share of white vote at all; his improved standing has come from huge gains in minority votes, as John pointed out recently in drawing our attention to a Financial Times meta-analysis of polls going back several cycles.

Read it.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., has been a young darling of the Democratic Party, but residents of a Queens neighborhood in her district have become disenchanted with the lawlessness and illegal activity, including prostitution.

My, what a surprise….

You can’t say she doesn’t reflect her district.

Read it.

In 2022, Seattle’s City Council passed an ordinance mandating a minimum earnings floor for app-based food delivery drivers in the city. The law finally went into effect in January 2024, but so far the main result has been customers deleting their delivery apps en masse, food orders plummeting, and driver pay cratering.

The ordinance, part of a legislative package called “PayUp,” was passed under the banner of protecting gig workers. By setting a compensation floor for app-based delivery drivers based on miles driven and amount of time worked, the ordinance operates as a (supremely complicated) minimum wage.

The wage floor is based on labyrinthine calculations: the “engaged minutes” for drivers are multiplied by a “minimum wage equivalent rate,” which is then multiplied again by an “associated cost factor” and then multiplied yet again by an “associated time factor.” Next, this sum is added to the total of “engaged miles” of drivers, multiplied by the “standard mileage rate” and then multiplied once more by the “associated mileage factor.” (If you’re lost, don’t worry—the text of the ordinance itself literally does the math for you).

Read it.

Apparently making up lies about Republican-adjacent celebrities is a genuine career path these days.

Read it.

Fulton Country district attorney Fani Willis must fire her former lover Nathan Wade if she wants to continue to prosecute former president Donald Trump for election interference, a Georgia judge ruled on Friday.

Liberal lawyer Bradley P. Moss, Esq., who frequently appears on CNN, posted his reaction to the news on social media. “I am trying to imagine something scarier right now than being prosecuted by an angry Fani Willis,” he wrote.

Come on, dude. You must not be trying very hard. Here are 10 things that are definitely scarier than being prosecuted by an angry Fani Willis.

The Antiplanner.

“What drives Republican opposition to transit?” asks Governing magazine. I’ve often wondered the reverse of this question: Why do Democrats support transit?

Governing‘s implicit assumption is that transit is a good thing and anyone opposed must have some warped reason to question it. The magazine’s answer is that opposition to transit reflects an urban-rural divide and since Republicans are more likely to represent rural areas that get less or no transit service than urban areas, they have little reason to support it. This belief may be why the Federal Transit Administration is so eager to support rural transit as it is a way to co-opt more political support for transit in general.

Power Line.

As John notes, blue collar workers or minorities voting for policies that actually help them is an important trend, and a complement to Steve’s post about the border problem. As he showed, “immigration” helped to flip California from red to blue in presidential elections, so Democrats seek to repeat that trend “across the entire country.” That’s why Biden has brought in millions, and that’s a problem.

The possibility of becoming a public charge can cancel the prospect of legal immigrants becoming legitimate American citizens. On the other hand, for many illegals becoming a public charge is the goal. The ideal set-up is to get on welfare and work under the table for cash. That’s what enables the transfer of more than $63 billion to Mexico in 2023, a seven-percent hike from the previous year. In effect, the USA subsidizes the Mexican government.

Those on welfare have a problem becoming U.S. citizens and that’s what California attorney general Xavier Becerra was on about when he cited 10 million “immigrants” in California alone. It is illegal for foreign nationals and even registered aliens to vote, but California’s “motor voter” program registers false-documented illegals to vote when they get their driver’s license. Squads of politiqueros bribe, coerce and threaten the illegals to vote “a certain way,” code for Democrats.

Read it.

And, of course, guaranteeing to get Paul’s vote(s), which is the whole point.

Axios.

New data shows that Democrats’ longtime advantage with Black, Latino and Asian American voters has shrunk to its lowest point in more than 60 years — creating a massive vulnerability for President Biden and congressional Democrats.

Why it matters: One of the most loyal parts of the Democratic coalition is suddenly in danger. Black and Hispanic men could vote Republican in numbers not seen since President Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected in the 1950s.

The big picture: Latinos, the nation’s largest non-white group, still lean Democratic. But they’ve been shifting Republican over the last two decades, and are no longer the slam-dunk Democrats they were in 1960 when JFK ran for president.

PETA.

Ahead of the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, PETA sent a letter to Dr. Jill Biden today asking the first lady to modernize the celebration by replacing eggs with dyed Easter potatoes. PETA notes that an annual “White House Potato Roll” would please everyone who doesn’t eat these cholesterol bombs for health, cultural, religious, or environmental reasons or because they don’t want to support filthy factory farms, where hundreds of millions of hens are confined to cages smaller than a letter-size sheet of paper, unable to stretch even one wing. In starch contrast, potatoes are cheaper and healthier than eggs and leave birds in peace.

I rather suspect that everybody working for PETA is pro-abortion. I guess a bird’s egg is more worthy of respect than a human egg.

Of course, if ‘Dr.’ Jill Biden is in need of a vegetable to roll, Creepy Joe is right to hand.

Read it.

Joe Biden has claimed that his opponents are assaulting democracy on the basis of the January 6, 2020, buffoonish riot.

Aside from the fact that storming the Capitol Rotunda sometimes is apparently deemed permissible – as in the recent pro-Hamas takeover of it – or aside from the fact that disrupting a federal government proceeding is deemed exempt – as in the recent pro-Hamas throng that blocked the route of the presidential motorcade and thus delayed the State of the Union address to the nation by 26 minutes – who really is attacking democracy?

Read it.

Your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

New York Democrat Gov. Kathy Hochul’s subway bag checks continue to make headlines as she has banned the National Guard from carrying rifles while in the subway system.

Well, that’s all right, then.

Perhaps they ought to wear smiley-face armbands, just to be sure.

Read it.

I guess they didn’t love Big Brother enough.

Read it.

The National Guard and the State Police are now patrolling the New York City subway system in an attempt to do something about the explosion of crime. As part of this, there are bag checks and new surveillance of all passengers. No legislation, no debate, just an edict from the mayor.

Read it.

An interactive slide show posted to the New York Times site on Wednesday, the day before President Biden’s State of the Union address (“How the State of the Union Became a Picture of Disunion”) relayed a slanted history of partisan scrapping at recent State of the Union addresses that suggested Republicans were almost wholly responsible for the turn to incivility.

The slideshow featured historical text by Peter Baker, White House correspondent.

Here’s the entry for George W. Bush suggesting nothing untoward had happened at a SOTU before at least 2007: “Even at the height of the Iraq war, decorum still reigned. In 2007, George W. Bush called it a “high privilege” to address the first female speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, even though she was a vocal critic of his war policy.”

But Baker completely skipped over the start of the present-day SOTU partisanship: The booing of George W. Bush by Democrats during his State of the Union addresses in both 2004 and 2005.

The Foundry.

I remember learning about democracy back in grammar school. We learned about it in the context of the American Revolution: Britain’s King George III may have ruled as a capricious monarch, but the intrepid Colonists fought for the then-novel concept of democratic self-government.

A cursory glance at Merriam-Webster is instructive. That venerable dictionary defines “democracy” as “government by the people” or, more elaborately, as “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.”

Simple enough. But someone ought to remind our nation’s liberal elites and the foot-soldier activists of today’s Democratic Party.

Read it.

The essence of progressivism is to obsess about trivialities and ignore the main issue.

Read it.

A controversial bill that would let illegal immigrants receive the same kind of homebuyer assistance as U.S. citizens has advanced in the California state legislature, drawing criticism from those who object to granting perks to people who break the law by entering the country illegally.

Funny how that works.

Power Line.

Politico reports that Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes (a Democrat, of course) is accelerating an investigation that may lead to prosecutions of people close to President Trump’s 2020 campaign. Which is odd on its face, since the events that are the basis for the investigation happened more than three years ago. Why the sudden hurry? Obviously, Democrats see that Joe Biden is losing, and are throwing the kitchen sink at Trump.

Tim Graham.

The pro-Biden media perpetually pat themselves on the back. They are a gift to the people, the essence of democracy, as in, “We inform the voters and then we expect the voters to make smart choices” (the ones we recommend). But when journalists lose, they have a disturbing tendency to argue democracy lost.

On Monday, the Supreme Court unanimously disapproved of the Left’s latest desperate attempt to rip Donald Trump’s name off the ballot, pushed by blue states, among them Colorado and Illinois. Their novel theory was that the 14th Amendment contains Civil War-era verbiage about keeping “insurrectionists” off the ballot.

To the average American, it might seem odd that it’s somehow “protecting democracy” to remove the Republican front-runner’s name from the ballot. That looks like throwing large obstacles in the way of democracy, not protecting it.

Read it.

At least we’re finding out which judges are willing to break the law in pursuit of a partisan agenda.