Tag Archives: Issues & Insights

What Happened To The Revenue?

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On Tuesday, Issues & Insights posted an article about tax revenues under the Biden administration. The Laffer Curve is at work.

The article reports:

Friday afternoon, the Treasury Department reported that, despite a growing economy and low unemployment, the federal deficit shot up by $320 billion in fiscal year 2023. That’s unusual. But what’s really bizarre is why the deficit exploded.

According to the report, overall spending actually dropped by 2% compared with 2022 as the COVID-19 spending splurge abated.

What drove up the deficit this year was a sudden and completely unexpected 9% drop in tax revenues. Not only did revenues come up hundreds of billions lower than last year, but they were well below what everybody expected them to be.

At the start of the year, the Treasury Department and the Office of Management and Budget projected revenues for fiscal 2023 at around $4.7 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office figured it would be $4.8 trillion.

The actual amount: $4.4 trillion.

In other words, there’s between $300 billion and $400 billion worth of missing tax revenues.

…In a normal world, a better-than-expected economy would result in more revenues for the federal government, not less.

Keep in mind, too, that it’s exceedingly rare for tax revenues to drop from one year to the next. In fact, it’s happened only eight times since 1960 – always around an economic downturn – and the average decline was just 4.7%. Even when the COVID lockdowns caused a massive recession, revenues only dipped by 1.2% in 2020. (Revenues plunged nearly 17% during the financial crisis.)

It’s also worth noting that revenues continued to climb after the Kennedy, Reagan and Trump pro-growth tax cuts went into effect.

The article concludes:

But that’s not what happened this year. The federal government is still tremendously bloated – spending in 2023 will be 43% higher than it was the year before COVID-19. The national debt now tops $33 trillion. Social Security and Medicare are racing toward insolvency. Biden is pushing Congress for another $100 billion to finance the never-ending war in Ukraine and provide aid to Israel.

Did the Biden administration overcount revenues in the past two years to paper over the colossal spending increases? Is the White House goosing employment and other economic data today to make the economy look better than it is? Is Biden’s budget team just hopelessly incompetent?

Preston Bashers of the Heritage Foundation speculates that the shortfall could be the result of a sharp drop in capital gains tax revenues, the explosion in “green” tax credits, and other factors.

Somebody in the Biden administration should be made to explain what happened.

In the meantime, we’re now deeper in debt than ever. Way to go Brandon.

I am not sure, but I don’t believe there is anyone in the Biden administration who has actually run a business. We need to go back to the days of putting a businessman in the White House–not a politician.

Some Thoughts On Impeachment

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I don’t like the fact that an impeachment inquiry has begun. First of all, I think it’s theater–I don’t expect much to come of it. I don’t expect the media to report most of what is uncovered; and frankly, it may simply be a distracting waste of time and money. However, it is resulting in some interesting observations and commentary.

On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article about the impeachment of President Biden.

Some observations from the article:

In just the past few days we’ve seen a multitude of such warnings. Here’s a small sampling:

    • “Impeaching Biden Is a Desperate Gamble That Will Backfire”
    • “Republicans would love to impeach Biden. It would backfire on them.”
    • “How Republicans’ Push to Impeach Joe Biden Could Backfire”
    • “Could the Biden impeachment inquiry backfire on Republicans?”
    • “Will the House GOP’s Biden impeachment probe backfire?”
    • “This is the White House’s Dream!”

Here’s the strange thing. Every one of these headlines appeared in leftist newspapers, were penned by leftist authors, or were uttered on leftist cable news programs.

It’s almost as though these outlets all got their marching orders from a single source. Which, it turns, out, they did – the Biden White House.

An Aug. 31 story in The Hill – headlined “White House warns GOP Biden impeachment will backfire” – says that “the White House remains steadfastly confident that if the GOP goes forward with an inquiry … it will hurt Republicans more than it could hurt Biden.”

The story quotes White House spokesman Ian Sams saying that:  

This baseless impeachment exercise would be a disaster for congressional Republicans, and don’t take our word for it: just listen to the chorus of their fellow Republicans who admit there is no evidence for their false allegations and that pursuing such a partisan stunt will ‘backfire.’

Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y, added “It’s vitally important for congressional Democrats to be in sync with the White House and the Biden campaign.”

We all remember the story of Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox and the briar patch. That’s what the leftist talking points remind me of–they are saying that if the Republicans impeach President Biden, it will hurt Republicans. They are implying that it would be better for the Republicans not to impeach President Biden. They are not admitting that making the evidence against President Biden public will hurt Democrats.

 

 

The Results Of Out-Of-Control Spending

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On Wednesday, Issues & Insights posted an article about the budget deficit.

The article reports:

Over the weekend, the Washington Post let it slip that all is not well in Bidenomicsville. The deficit, it reports, could end up hitting $2 trillion when the current fiscal year ends in three weeks, which it describes as an “unexpected deficit surge.”

In other words, the deficit will nearly double this year, calling the lie on one of President Joe Biden’s favorite boasts about how he cut the deficit more than any president in history.

But while this apparently comes as a shock to the Post, as well as other liberal news sites that picked up on the Post report, anyone paying attention knew this was happening.

Back in February, for example, we pointed out that Biden’s reckless economic policies had added more than $5 trillion to projected deficits, even as he claimed he’d done more to cut the deficit than “any president in history.”

…Now, households are paying dearly in the form of sharply higher prices for food, energy consumer goods, rents, and just about anything else they buy.

At the same time, Biden pushed through tax hikes and unleashed federal regulators, who are now gleefully writing rules to ban gas stoves, force electric car sales, slap massive new costs on energy producers, with plenty more to come. These are all anti-growth policies that are having their expected effect.

This is what Bidenomics is all about. And now we have a budget crisis that is snowballing.

That’s because while revenues keep coming in “unexpectedly” low (thanks to Biden’s sluggish economy), interest rate hikes are fueling massive increases in the cost of financing the federal government’s $30 trillion debt load.

Shutting down the government to stop the spending may be the only way we even have a possibility of not seeing our economy collapse under the weight of the federal debt.

We Need A President Who Will Put Americans’ Interests First

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Every four years, we elect a President of America. That person is not elected to be President of the world, he is elected to be President of America. Lately it seems as if some of our Presidents have forgotten this basic fact.

On Friday, Issues & Insights reported:

The Biden administration has just spent two years negotiating with a group of foreign countries to raise taxes on U.S. companies operating overseas. Now we’re being told it’s been “delayed” for two more years. But why delay a bad decision? It’s an awful idea that should be rejected out of hand.

“Americans have already been crushed by inflation caused by the Biden administration,” argued West Virginia congresswoman Carol Miller, in a recent op-ed. “But now, they want to add fuel to the fire by giving American taxes to foreign countries, raising costs for Americans, and sticking us with the bill for funding a global socialist agenda.”

Her analysis is spot on. The U.S. Treasury and White House have no business negotiating a deal to subvert America’s sovereignty and erode its economic power, which the accord with the 38-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), headquartered in the ultra-deluxe Château de la Muette in Paris, is clearly meant to do.

For the record, the U.S. already imposes a 10.5% minimum tax on U.S. businesses’ foreign income, and last year imposed a 15% “global minimum tax” on big multinational companies’ profits. And the standard corporate rate here in the U.S. is now already 21%, well above 15%. So what’s the issue?

Under the OECD “deal” that both President Joe Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have embraced, there’s something called the Undertaxed Profits Rule (UTPR). That guideline basically would let other countries tax a U.S. company at a higher rate if the country determines that it is paying less than the 15% somewhere else. And the other country, not the U.S. taxpayer, gets the revenue.

The opportunity from this rule for global tax abuse and even graft are clear. Moreover, U.S. tax rates by law have always been determined by Congress and the president, not by foreign bureaucrats.

The first thing to understand here is that corporations do NOT pay taxes–they simply consider them a business cost and past the expense on to consumers. Higher taxes mean lower wages for employees and higher prices for the product produced.

The article concludes:

The House Ways and Means Committee has already held hearings, and will no doubt hold more in the future to halt or radically change the Biden-Yellen “deal,” which excluded congressional input. No doubt, more hearings are on the way.

Meanwhile, a post from the Committee’s website after a hearing earlier this month said it all: “Committee Members found the proposal would hurt American companies, kill American jobs, give Chinese Communist Party-sponsored businesses a global economic advantage, and surrender $120 billion in U.S. tax revenue.”

Sound like a good deal to you?

Who does our representative government represent?

The Individual States As Laboratories

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When our Founding Fathers put together the Constitution, they envisioned that the states would act as policy laboratories–that when one state enacted a policy that worked, the other states would copy that policy. That is a great idea, but unfortunately egos, lust for power, and other things interfere with that basic idea.

On Thursday, Issues & Insights posted an article illustrating the differences in the outcomes of some of the economic policies various states have chosen.

The article reports:

President Joe Biden last week bragged that his economic policies — straight from the Democrats blueprint that says “borrow, tax, spend, regulate, then do it all again” — are working. But as we’ve noted, Bidenomics has been a wreck, a flop that is taking us into a recession.

Not only did Biden openly boast as our sclerosis grows worse, he also, as Democrats always do, took a jab at “trickle-down economics,” claiming it has “failed the middle class … failed America … blew up the deficit” and “increased inequity.”

…We don’t see Biden or any other Democrat ever coming around to supply-side economic policies, the correct terminology for what they sneeringly call “trickle-down economics,” which asserts that lower taxes and less regulatory meddling fuel economic growth. Yet they are exactly what our economy — any economy – needs, now and forever.

In our post-lockdown world, the states that have the strongest economic recoveries are the red ones on the map. And what do they have in common? Low taxes and light regulation.

We can see this vividly in the rankings of states that have had the greatest increases in hiring over the last year. Of the top 10, only two are blue, or Democratic, states.

(The Washington Post marks Georgia, fourth on the list, as one of three blue states because Biden took its 16 electoral votes, but that is misleading [intentionally, we’re sure] because it is a red state with large Republican majorities in both chambers of the legislature and a popular [53% of the vote in 2022] GOP governor. Nevada, next at fifth, is also considered blue even though it too has a GOP governor.)

The next seven states, according to the Post, are also red or Trump states and they tend to “​​have unusually low tax rates and lean on extractive industries such as mining or petroleum. We’ve seen firsthand the economic boom that gas and pipelines can bring to struggling regions.”

The article also notes:

“Heavily taxed blue states such as New York and California,” the Free Beacon continues, “last year had some of the country’s most drastic drops in tax revenue. At the same time, Republican states are enjoying the highest revenue increases even as they keep income taxes low.”

All I ask is that when people who have the sense to get out of blue states and move to red states move is that they don’t bring their blue state policies with them!

When Fact Checkers Check President Biden

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Recently President Biden made a speech where he claimed that Bidenomics was working for everyone–inflation was down, jobs were up, etc. Well, that sounds wonderful, but the numbers tell a different story.

Issues & Insights reported:

The middle class made huge gains during the “trickle-down” Reagan boom and was making huge gains during the Trump boom until the Biden-backed COVID lockdowns gutted it.

Truth is, the only way Biden can make the case for “Bidenomics” is by lying. Examples:

    • “U.S. has had the highest economic growth rate, leading the world economies since the pandemic.”

Except it didn’t. The U.S. ranks 146th in real GDP growth in the world so far this year, came in 151st place last year, and was 66th in 2021, according to the International Monetary Fund.

    • “We created 13.4 million new jobs.”

Also false. Because almost 10 million of those were simply refilled jobs lost during the pointless COVID lockdown. Under Biden, the number of net new jobs is less than 4 million — which is nothing to brag about, given that the working-age population has grown by 6.8 million since Biden took office.

    • “Americans are back to work who’ve been on the sidelines, and they want to come back.”

Another falsehood. There are almost 10 million people who’ve dropped out of the labor force as of today, which is 2.7 million higher than it was just before all the COVID lockdowns.

    • “Just in my first two years in office, my team and I have reduced the deficit by $1.7 trillion.“

His biggest lie yet. As we pointed out in this space earlier, a Congressional Budget Office report released at the start of this year showed that “Biden sharply increased the deficit last year, this year, and next year, and he has set the country on course to add a total of $5.45 trillion to the federal deficit over the following decade.”

The only thing that Biden said that was truthful in his speech is that “Bidenomics is working.”

It’s working all right, assuming that Biden’s plan was to destroy America.

Please follow the link to the article. It includes a number of charts that actually illustrate what has happened to the American economy since 2021.

It’s The Economy, Stupid!

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It’s the economy, stupid! Those were the words Bill Clinton used to win the 1992 election. The economy was slowly rebounding from the bi-partisan tax increases that President Bush had agreed to, but a lot of Americans did not realize that. On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article about our present economic state.

The article reports:

Once upon a time, Democratic presidents understood how important a healthy economy was. President Bill Clinton and his advisers won two elections living by the mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Get that right, they thought, and everything else follows. But today, Americans think President Joe Biden doesn’t get it, June’s I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

The online I&I/TIPP Poll, taken from May 31-June 2 and including responses from 1,358 adults nationwide, asked the following: “To what extent do you agree or disagree with the following statement: The American economy remains strong, as it transitions to steady and stable growth.”

That statement, by the way, was not made up. It’s a direct quotation of what Biden told Americans after the Commerce Department reported in April that real GDP growth in the first quarter was a disappointing 1.1%. It has since been revised up slightly to 1.3%. We did not, when surveying Americans, identify who made that statement.

Do Americans agree with Biden that the economy’s strong, steady and stable? Overall, I&I/TIPP found, 55% of Americans disagreed that the economy “remains strong,” while just 36% agreed. The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.7 percentage points.

The article concludes:

Meanwhile, the World Bank has slashed its growth estimate for the U.S. in half, saying the economy is “likely to remain weak.” That could impact America’s standing around the world.

“Nearly all the economic forces that powered progress and prosperity over the last three decades are fading,” the World Bank warned. “The result could be a lost decade in the making … for the whole world.”

One major indicator of economic misery: weekly wages, adjusted for inflation. The current “recovery” features 26 straight months of shrinking wages, after taking into account not just pay but also inflation and number of hours worked. When real wages decline for middle-class Americans, their standard of living also declines.

…It wasn’t until the economy soured, with roaring inflation and soaring oil prices, that the Watergate scandal really began to gain traction. Americans simply lost patience with someone they saw as both economically incompetent and corrupt. Nixon resigned on Aug. 9, 1974, rather than face almost certain impeachment.

I&I/TIPP publishes timely, unique, and informative data each month on topics of public interest. TIPP’s reputation for polling excellence comes from being the most accurate pollster for the past five presidential elections.

The people who write Issues & Insights are the former editorial board of Investor’s Business Daily. They are very well educated on economic issues.

The Question Of The Day

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On Wednesday, Issues & Insights posted an article asking the question, “If Biden’s Economic Plan Is ‘Working,’ Why Are Tax Revenues Plunging?” That is a very good question.

In 2018, Investors.com reported:

Taxes: Critics of the Trump tax cuts said they would blow a hole in the deficit. Yet individual income taxes climbed 6% in the just-ended fiscal year 2018, as the economy grew faster and created more jobs than expected.

The Treasury Department reported this week that individual income tax collections for FY 2018 totaled $1.7 trillion. That’s up $14 billion from fiscal 2017, and an all-time high. And that’s despite the fact that individual income tax rates got a significant cut this year as part of President Donald Trump’s tax reform plan.

Income Taxes After Trump Tax Cuts

True, the first three months of the fiscal year were before the tax cuts kicked in. But if you limit the accounting to this calendar year, individual income tax revenues are up by 5% through September.

Other major sources of revenue climbed as well, as the overall economy revived. FICA tax collections rose by more than 3%. Excise taxes jumped 13%.

As John Kennedy once said (as he lowered taxes), “A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats.”

The article at Issues & Insights reports:

President Joe Biden loves to brag about the masterful job he’s doing managing the nation’s economy, as he did on Tuesday when cheering the latest inflation news – which saw food prices up almost 7% from last year – and “our historic economic progress.”

The day before that, the Treasury Department released its monthly financial statement, which shows that the federal deficit for this fiscal year has already topped $1 trillion and that’s a big factor behind this is a sharp reduction in federal tax revenues from last year.

Wait, you say. If the economy is “strong” and “historic” as Biden claims, why are revenues cratering and deficits exploding?

Or, as the Washington Times put it: “Uncle Sam’s income has plummeted this year, sending the federal deficit spiraling deeper into the red than analysts had predicted and leaving officials grasping for answers.”

The article concludes:

…But what we can say for certain is that the only thing “historic” about the current economy is how delusional the president and the media are about what is actually going on.

You can only lie to people about how good the economy is for so long when they are feeling inflation every day in gas and supermarket prices.

We Can Dream

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On Tuesday, Issues & Insights posted an article with the following headline:

Headlines We’re Never Going To See In Our Lifetime

Here is the list:

“Scientists Blame Climate Crisis For Unusually Mild Weather“

“Washington Post Wins Pulitzer for Exposing Biden Corruption“

“Transgender Woman Charged With Hate Crime in Men’s Room Mass Shooting“

“Sloth and Gluttony Added to Months Celebrating Cardinal Sins“ “

D.C. Memorial to 45th and 47th President Set to Open Next Week“

“Berkeley Suspends Students for Disrupting Conservative Speaker“

“Teachers Union Announces It Will No Longer Donate to Political Candidates“

“MSNBC Documentary About EVs — ‘Rape of the Planet’ — To Air Next Week“

“Democrats Realize They’ve Been Using The Word ‘Fascist’ Wrong For Decades“

“Latest Star Wars Trilogy Voted Better Than Original“

“New York’s High Taxes, Crime Cause Massive Influx of Citizens“

“After Lifetime of Public Service, Senator Retires With Modest Wealth“

“Big Tech Firms Denounce Censorship, Vow Never to Work With Gov’t Again“

“Bullet Train from L.A. to San Francisco Opens“

“Eight Cabinet Agencies Shuttered After Audit Finds Them Useless“

“Why Is The Mainstream Media So Fixated on Democratic Scandals?“

“5 Years Later: ‘Net Neutrality’ Zealots Admit They Were Entirely Wrong About Everything“

“Time Needed to File Federal Income Taxes Dips Below 30 Minutes”

“After Drifting Leftward for Years, Drudge Rediscovers Conservative Roots“

“God Gets Most Number of Thanks At Oscars”

There is also a list of headlines we might actually see:

Meanwhile, here are some headlines that we just might see someday.

“L.A. Bans Use of Sidewalks by Pedestrians After Homeless Complain About Traffic“

“In Science Breakthrough, Man-Made Air to Power Wind Turbines“

“NFL Promises Next Super Bowl Will Feature Better Ads“

“San Francisco Converts Downtown to World’s Largest Water Park“

“Electric Grid Fails Stranding Millions of Drivers“

“Math-Fluid Group Demands ‘≃’ Get Added to LGB Acronym “

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

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On Thursday, Issues & Insights posted an article about the impact the Biden administration has had on the pocketbooks of Americans. It’s not a pretty picture.

The article notes:

In one of the most memorable presidential debate moments, Ronald Reagan asked voters if they were better off in 1980 than they were when Jimmy Carter was elected in 1976. The obvious answer was, for most, a resounding “no.” Whoever runs against the Democratic nominee next year needs to bring back that question, because it’s a certainty that in the fall of 2024, we’ll still be worse off than we were in pre-pandemic 2020.

And for that, we can thank, or rather blame, Joe Biden.

In a poll taken earlier this year, 41% of Americans said they were financially worse off than they were two years earlier when Biden took office, the highest number in “ABC News/Washington Post polls dating back 37 years.” Only 16% said they were better off, the lowest number since 2009, when only 8% said their financial situations were better.

At roughly the same time in Donald Trump’s term, only 13% said they were worse off than when he became president while a quarter said their finances had improved.

An America struggling under Biden is not a new development. In a survey conducted in the spring of 2022, 52% said they were worse off than a year earlier; 39% said they expected to be worse off in one year than they were when they were asked the question in June.

Last year’s New York Times|Momentive Poll further discovered that “The number of people who expect periods of widespread unemployment or depression to occur in the next five years has risen to 71%, another new high,” while 41% said “now is a bad time to make large purchases.” This was “up from 36% in April and slightly” exceeded “the 39% that number reached in April 2020 at the start of the COVID pandemic.” 

A few months after those poll results were released, the Heritage Foundation published an analysis that determined the average American had lost $4,200 in annual income since Biden stumbled into the Oval Office.

It’s where we are, folks. I will make a calculated guess that most Americans want the economy to improve. Unfortunately, under the Biden administration, the economy will not improve. When the economy tanks in the next month of two, the Democrats will blame the Republicans for not raising the debt ceiling. That’s how Washington works. A recession is coming. The only way the Democrats can avoid being blamed is if the Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling–then the Democrats can blame the Republicans. Refusing to raise the debt ceiling will not be the cause of the recession, but Americans who watch the mainstream media will not know that. Hang on to your hats–the next two years is going to be rough, and if a Democrat is elected to the White House in 2024, the next six years are going to be very rough.

Remembering The Yugo

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On Tuesday, Issues & Insights posted an article titled, “EVs Are The Yugo Of The 21st Century.” I think they are on to something.

The article reports:

Way back in the mid-1980s, communist Yugoslavia exported the Yugo, a compact car that sold for around $4,000. It was so poorly made that bumping into a pole at 5 mph could total it.

Fast forward to today, and a new class of cars has a similar problem. A minor accident can cause a total loss, even if the car’s been driven only a few miles. The only difference is that these cars aren’t cheap imports from some godforsaken socialist state. These are state-of-art electric vehicles that come with an average sticker price of $55,000.

Why are insurance companies totaling low-mileage EVs that have been in a fender bender? For the same reason you could total a new Yugo when backing out of a parking spot. The cost of repair is exorbitant.

As Reuters reported recently, “For many electric vehicles, there is no way to repair or assess even slightly damaged battery packs after accidents,” which means the only viable option is to replace the battery, which represents about half the cost of the car.

The article notes:

A replacement battery for a $44,000 Tesla Model 3 can cost up to $20,000.

One expert told Reuters that Tesla’s Model Y has “zero repairability” because its battery is built into the structure of the car.

The article concludes:

EV advocates say not to worry. Car makers, they say, are designing batteries to be more modular and replaceable. They promise that repair costs will eventually come down, and all will be well.

Maybe so, but that’s why force-feeding this technology is so reckless.

In a normal market, carmakers would work out such kinks before mass producing a vehicle, much less converting their entire fleets over to a new and relatively untested technology. If they couldn’t resolve problems of affordability, reliability, and repairability to consumers’ satisfaction, automakers would scrap the effort and move on to something else.

But our elites think they know better. And they want new cars to be 100% electric within a decade. So, carmakers feel like they have little choice but to plow ahead.

Which brings up another way that today’s EVs are like the Yugos of yesteryear.

One auto critic said of the Yugo that it “had the distinct feeling of something assembled at gunpoint.”

That was probably literally true in the case of the Yugo. But it is essentially the situation with EVs today. Consumers aren’t banging on dealership doors demanding EVs. Ford reported last week that its e-car division is losing billions of dollars a year.

Car companies are pouring money into electric cars only because the government is holding a gun to their heads, saying build EVs or die.

About the same time the Yugo came out, the first Hyundai arrived in America. My husband and I bought the first Hyundai that arrived in New England. Hyundai was made in a free country under the free market; Yugo was made in a communist country where free enterprise was not the way things were done. Hyundai is still going strong. My husband actually drives a Hyundai today. Where is the Yugo?

Changing The Numbers By Redefining The Terms

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On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article explaining how the Biden administration can claim to have cut the number of illegal border crossings simply by changing the definition of the words.

The article reports:

The Biden administration’s bulletin board, also known as the Washington Post, featured an article last week headlined: “Biden takes heat for border measures, but illegal crossings are down.”

Various other news outlets echoed this theme, using terms such as “plunged” and “plummeted,” to describe what is, in fact, a record-high number of illegal crossings in both January and February.

How did the administration pull off this “plunge”?

Basically, by narrowing the focus and by redefining what counts as an illegal border crossing.

This is the new way to do things:

“The Biden administration has started using its port parole program shell game to feign ‘lawfulness’ and distract from the true numbers of illegal aliens entering the U.S. each month,” reports the Daily Signal.

Joe Biden started this parole program for Venezuelans, and in January expanded it to include Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans. People from those nations can get into the country – without a visa – if they show up at a port of entry and agree to some minimal rules under a supposed two-year parole.

“The administration has directed would-be illegal aliens of numerous nationalities to use the CBP One app to make an appointment at a port of entry, where they will be paroled into the country,” the Daily Signal explains.

The Customs and Border Patrol reports that illegal crossings by people from those four countries fell from 84,190 in December to 2,050 during February.”

Well, no kidding. Why cross illegally when you can tap an app and get into the country without having to follow the rules to enter legally?

“The administration calls this process a ‘lawful pathway,’ but mass paroling tens of thousands of inadmissible aliens through the ports make neither the process, nor the aliens using it, lawful,” notes the Daily Signal.

There is no way the number of people crossing our border every day can be assimilated. They won’t be able to grasp the concept of America quickly enough to become good citizens. The Biden administration’s border policies are truly a threat to the survival of America as we know it.

My Head Is Spinning!

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The Covid pandemic has brought us a lot of information and a lot of censorship of information. Oddly enough, a lot of the information that was censored is now being reported as true. Currently the difference between a conspiracy theory and a major news story is a few months.

On Tuesday, Issues & Insights reported the following:

This disinformation business sure has gotten complicated lately.

In the past few days, a key federal agency concluded that COVID was likely the result of a Chinese lab leak. A prestigious medical journal reported that natural immunity is better than vaccines against COVID. Another that mask mandates were worthless. And President Joe Biden’s advanced age is now, according to Biden, a legitimate issue.

All of these claims had been labeled as “disinformation” by the mainstream press, by “independent” fact-checkers, by social media platforms. Anyone who espoused them was attacked as a crazy anti-vaxxer, QAnon racist, Russian stooge who deserved to be de-platformed, demonetized, and discredited.

Take the lab-leak story. The Energy Department, “citing new intelligence,” changed its view on the origins of COVID-19 and now thinks it did, in fact, escape from a lab in Wuhan, China.

The article notes how the lab leak theory was treated in the past:

A-list journalist Anne Applebaum once compared Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to a Soviet propagandist for suggesting that COVID came from a lab. A New York Times reporter said the lab-leak theory had “racist roots.” The editor in chief of Scientific American called it a “conspiracy theory.” CNN said it was “like something out of a comic book.”

Politifact, one of the supposed independent guardians against disinformation, said that any such claim was “inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!” Facebook banned posts mentioning the lab-leak theory.

The article concludes:

One of the articles that Google is right now targeting is our Feb. 23 editorial applauding Congress for investigating COVID vaccines (Congress To Probe COVID Vaccines — And It’s About Time).

Apparently, merely calling for a congressional investigation “promotes harmful health claims or relates to a current, major health crisis and contradicts authoritative scientific consensus,” according to Google’s thought police.

So, let’s review.

The stuff labeled as dangerous disinformation keeps turning out to be true. The supposed guardians of credible information turn out to be some of the biggest peddlers of actual disinformation. And groups that are supposedly targeting disinformation are really just out to defund conservatives.  

In all this confusion, one thing is perfectly clear. If you want to know what will be labeled as disinformation tomorrow, just look at whatever is on the left’s agenda today.

The mainstream media is simply pointing out the need for Americans to find alternative sources for their news.

The Consequences Of An Open Border

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On Tuesday, Issues & Insights posted an article about a consequence of our open southern border that is not widely reported.

The article reports:

In a data dump Friday, the Biden administration announced that more than a quarter million people crossed the border illegally in December – the highest ever recorded. The timing of this release was designed to bury the news, not that it mattered, since the mainstream media have ignored the growing border crisis with fierce determination. 

But that’s not the worst of it. Border deaths also reached all-time highs. That news is so bad, the “most transparent administration in history” tried to keep it hidden altogether, coughing it up only in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. When that data did come out … crickets.

This silence is particularly galling, given that the left was screaming bloody murder about border deaths during the Trump administration.

The publicly released news showed that Border Patrol agents stopped 251,487 illegal crossers in December. That’s a 7% increase from November, a 40% increase from the year before, and a 240% increase from December 2020.

But that’s only part of the story.

The article continues:

A better description is an invasion, one aided and abetted by the Biden administration, the Democratic party, and the legacy media that has covered it up.

It’s also a deadly one to the migrants themselves.

Over the last fiscal year, 880 immigrants died trying to get into the U.S. That is the highest number of deaths since data became available, according to numbers obtained by the Epoch Times through a FOIA request. 

The second-largest number of migrant deaths occurred the year before, when 566 perished.

By comparison, in fiscal 2020, there were 247 border deaths — a record low.

If the media weren’t so corrupt, they would have been all over this story.

For one thing, they’d demand to know why “the most transparent” administration decided to stop releasing the number of border deaths, which had previously been part of the CPB’s reporting.

Then, they’d want to know why all those Democrats — including Biden — who were screaching about every border death during the Trump administration have been silent now.

This is another example of the mainstream media and its biased reporting. Thank goodness for reporters and watchdogs who know how to use FOIA requests.

Reporting On The American Economy

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On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article about inflation and the state of the American economy.

The article includes the following:

Ronald Reagan, in his 1980 campaign for president, updated Harry Truman’s useful definitions of two key economic terms.

“It’s a recession,” Truman had intoned, “when your neighbor loses his job. It’s a depression when you lose yours.”

To which The Gipper appended, entertainingly: “And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.”

The article notes:

These articulations sprang to mind in pondering the variations of inflation measurements advanced by economists to determine whether price growth is “easing,” as the counterfeit chief executive would have one believe.

Should the focus be the “headline” Consumer Price Index? The one the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes as “a measure of the average change over time in the prices paid by urban consumers for a representative basket of consumer goods and services” (listed on the chart below)? Should the guide be a CPI subset referred to as “core inflation,” which excises “more volatile” food and energy prices? And how about the latest craze: “super core inflation?”

According to Fortune magazine, super core “does not have an established definition” but “refers to price measures that exclude sectors that economists feel distort the broader inflation figure.”  Economists like Paul Krugman (yeah, we know; kind of like discussing “military intelligence”) surmise that super core leaves out not just food and energy but also housing.

The article concludes:

Yet both the spending and the inflationary outcome – a dragon that had been largely slain since the Reagan Administration – are now revived for one reason: provide another set of tools of power and oppression.

The spending is to get citizenry and businesses alike hooked on federal largess. Inflation is another means of weakening the populace and private institutions as their labor and investment yields less and, in yet another spiral, they get all the more dependent on Uncle Sam and its cohort of crony capitalists.

The cynical, midterms-oriented pause in the upward price of fuel, occasioned by further manipulation of energy markets in the form of petroleum reserve releases, is only a stall in this brutal power play.

No matter the Fed’s efforts to run twice as fast – and come up with new fictions when it comes to measuring the real price of the dollar – there is no way for the central bankers even to stay in the same place when Jerome Powell’s exertions are swept under by a continued flood of Inflation Reduction Act and Omnibus(t) largess and excess.

Meanwhile, this correspondent will continue to define inflation as what it is: the loss of his dwindling dollars’ buying power. And relief, again paraphrasing The Great Communicator, as the prospect of another loss of power: Joe Biden’s.

Hang unto your hats. Unless Congress develops a spine to stop the spending, the future looks a little shaky.

When The Facts And The Statements Just Don’t Agree

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On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article about a recent statement by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. I am amazed when politicians make false statements that can be so easily checked. So in case you missed it, here is the statement and the actual facts.

The article reports:

For more than a year, Democrats have dismissed inflation, pointed the finger of blame at everyone but themselves, or tried to make it sound like we should be grateful because inflation “always happens” when the economy recovers.

Way back in June 2021, President Joe Biden said higher prices “were expected and are expected to be temporary” because, you see, “you can’t flip the global economics light back and not expect this to happen.”

The public never bought into this, but kudos to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for sticking with the Big Lie. In that Oct. 18 interview, Pelosi says that Democrats need to focus on the fact that Biden “brought unemployment [down], cut it in half,” to explain why prices went up.

Pelosi’s been making this claim for a while. Back in February, she said: “The fact that people have jobs always contributes to an increase in inflation, and that’s a good thing.”

Is she right? Does inflation go up when unemployment goes down? Look at the four charts below and see for yourself. These show inflation rates during four sustained and strong drops in the unemployment rate over the past 40 years.

The article includes five charts:

How many voters who automatically vote for Democrats are aware of this information?

That Was Then; This Is Now

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On Sunday, Issues & Insights posted an article about the current idea that denying the results of an election is a danger to our democracy. First of all, we are a republic–not a democracy. Secondly, the people who do not believe that the 2020 election was honest are not a danger to our republic–questioning elections is not a new thing.

The article includes the following video:

There seems to be a bit of a double standard here.

The article concludes:

While YouTube took no action against any of those individual comments when they were made, it decided to demonetize this video. Because it apparently doesn’t like videos that make Democrats look bad. As Taibbi (Matt Taibbi who writes in Substack), who by the way is no conservative, writes:

The decision to assemble these materials in one place, inviting audiences to consider their meaning, apparently crosses a line. Now we know: you can deny election results on a platform like YouTube as much as you want, you can even promise disruption, but drawing attention to such behavior angers the algorithm. It’s hard to imagine a better demonstration of the double-standard in content moderation.

Limiting free speech is always more dangerous to our republic than questioning an election will ever be.

The Democrats Claim A Successful Two Years Of The Biden Presidency

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On Friday, Issues & Insights posted an article listing the accomplishments of the Biden administration that Democrats are planning to highlight in the mid-term elections.

The article includes the list:

So, will they try to run on their record of “accomplishment”? Brent Budowsky, a columnist for The Hill, says they should. In a piece headlined: “A closing message for Democrats to win,” he says they just need to ask voters: “Do you want to build on, or reverse, the achievements of Biden and the Democratic Congress?”

What achievements? Budowsky lists them. Democrats, he says:

    • lowered prescription drug costs,
    • created tens of millions of high-wage jobs,
    • made “dramatic” improvements in veterans’ health care,
    • “important” progress to combat gun violence, and
    • “historic” progress climate change,
    • strengthened the Violence Against Women Act,
    • passed the American Rescue Plan,
    • expanded Child Care Tax Credit,
    • and got a bipartisan infrastructure law passed.

Wow. The article explains how each of these so-called accomplishment has not only had a negative impact on the majority of Americans, most of them have not actually been accomplished.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. It is an illustration of how media consultants can spin failure so that it sounds like success.

I Think We Can File This In The ‘Fiction’ Section

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On Monday, Issues & Insights posted an article about some recent comments by former President Obama. The former President claimed that Americans are better off because Joe Biden is President. Actually, I don’t think that is true.

The article reports:

When he wasn’t admiring his White House portrait, Barack Obama managed to say a nice thing about President Joe Biden. He must have been joking, though, because what he said defies reality.

“Joe, it is now America’s good fortune to have you as president,” Obama said. “The country is better off than when you took office. We should all be deeply grateful for that.”

Our “good fortune”? Let’s review just how much “better off” we all are thanks to Biden and his fellow Democrats.

Here are the highlights. Please follow the link to the article to read the details:

COVID deaths

Inflation

Real earnings

Financial stress

Economic optimism

Unity

Stock market

Crime

Direction of the country

The article concludes:

Finally, there’s the fact that a majority of Americans now favor impeaching Biden. A new Rasmussen survey finds that 52% of likely voters want him impeached. Even among Democrats, almost a third (32%) want him impeached.

Ask yourself, are you “deeply grateful” for how things have turned out under Biden? If not, what are you going to do about it?

It might be a really good idea to keep these items in mind when you vote in November.

Equal Justice For All

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For years, most Americans have been content to let the government run the country. We have not paid close attention to what that government is doing, and we have not paid close enough attention to political races and candidates. We have assumed that the people in power to some degree had our best interests at heart. We have assumed that our justice system truly embraced the idea of equal justice for all. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case, and many Americans are waking up to a country with a justice system they no longer recognize.

On Wednesday, Issues & Insights reported the results of The Golden/TIPP Poll (TIPP is also Issues & Insights’ polling partner) which asked the question, “Generally speaking, do you agree or disagree with the statement: “There is a two-tiered system of justice in America depending on your political affiliation and ideology?”

The article reports:

The results of the poll, which had a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points, were lopsided: 63% agreed either “strongly” (28%) or “somewhat” (35%) that America is moving toward a two-tiered system of justice. Just 17% said they either disagreed “somewhat” (11%) or “strongly” (6%). (Numbers may not add up perfectly due to rounding of the data).

This is a chart showing their results:

The article includes the following chart:

The article notes:

One need only look to President Joe Biden’s widely criticized “Soul of the Nation” speech last week, in which he suggested that the millions of people who voted for President Donald Trump in 2020 “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.“

His harsh remarks, many commentators on both the left and right agreed, were out of bounds, and certain to further widen the growing cultural, social and political differences that have led to some bitter disputes and even violence.

The discrepant treatment of Jan. 6 rioters and the BLM and Antifa rioters is another factor.

Jan. 6 invaders of the Capitol building have been held for over a year and in some cases allegedly seriously mistreated. Some of the estimated 903 people charged with crimes received harsh sentences for their behavior.

Not so BLM and Antifa, who were lauded by the left, including some elected officials, for trashing dozens of cities around the country during the long summer of 2020.

Those riots caused over $2 billion in damage across the nation and led to an estimated 30 deaths or more, yet few were held to account for the violence.

The difference in treatment within the media, both news and opinion outlets and social media, is even more glaring.

In recent weeks, new revelations have emerged about how the White House and FBI have manipulated social media into silencing critics in the center and on the right.

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It is fascinating.

The Plan

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On Tuesday, Issues & Insights posted an article about the Biden administration’s plan to fight inflation.

The article reports:

“Today the Democratic House takes a strong step to bring down crucial kitchen table costs of the pump and grocery store and across the board.”

That’s the transcript of what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on the House floor before all but five of her fellow Democrats voted for the “Lower Food and Fuel Costs Act” last week.

Pelosi’s garbled syntax aside, the only thing this bill would lower is the public’s trust in anything Democrats say these days. Despite its title, this bill would expand government but do nothing – repeat, nothing – to lower prices today, tomorrow, or any time in the future.

Among the Democrats’ brilliant inflation-fighting ideas is to create a new meat police to harass the meat industry. Another is to expand a subsidy program for farmers that has already proved ineffective in keeping food prices from skyrocketing. Finally, it would expand the use of ethanol – a plan that even President Joe Biden admits will fail to lower fuel prices.

…The bill also claims to lower food costs by encouraging farmers to adopt “precision farming” techniques that would lower their reliance on fertilizer, the cost of which has also spiked.

Here’s how Democrats on the House Agriculture Committee describe this: “Expanding access to precision agriculture has the potential to reduce fertilizer use and lower costs while also providing resource benefits including clean water and reduced carbon use. It is also a priority to help deal with the water shortages facing growers in much of the Western United States.”

But this program has been around for 26 years and Washington has dumped more than $25 billion into these subsidies. What effect has all this largesse had on food price inflation today? Go to your nearby grocery store for the answer.

The article concludes:

Biden doesn’t believe this will make any difference either. The Washington Post reported recently that while talking up E-15 as a money saver in public, “privately, Biden dismissed the policy as ineffective” and “worried … that it exaggerated ethanol’s ability to cut gas prices and could harm his climate goals.”

There’s also the inconvenient truth that encouraging farmers to turn more corn into fuel will leave less corn for food, pushing up grocery prices. So even if consumers did see gasoline prices fall, they’d pay for it in higher food prices

The Democrats’ bill does have one thing in its favor. It makes it clear that the only way to change the direction of economic policy coming out of Washington is to change the leadership in Washington.

I am praying for an honest mid-term election.

From Recovery To Shortages

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Issues & Insights posted an article today about what almost eighteen months of the Biden administration has done to the American economy.

The article reports:

It’s taken President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats all of 16 months to turn the land of plenty into one plagued by empty shelves and rationing. Well, Biden did promise to “transform” America, but how many voters knew that this is what he had in mind?

The latest in the growing list of shortages is the chronic and dangerous scarcity of baby formula that is causing new parents to scramble to find supplies and stores to ration how much customers can buy. The latest industry data show that 40% of America’s baby formula supplies are out of stock, up from 29% in March and 11% last fall.

This is a potentially deadly situation if parents can’t get the food they need for their babies or try to make their own formula. As CNN reports, “Specialized formula is even harder to locate amid the widespread shortage. Parents are driving to neighboring states to try their luck, and many are pleading for help on social media, imploring strangers to share or even barter any extra supply they may have.”

One industry observer said that “supply chain issues, product recalls and historic inflation” are driving the baby formula crisis. As it turns out, Biden is at least partially responsible for all of those.

His spending spree fueled the price spiral, his “rescue” plan exacerbated labor shortages and supply chain problems, and, as Just the News reports, “gross incompetence by federal officials on Biden’s watch … inflamed a baby formula shortage now panicking parents nationwide.”

A whistleblower had alerted the Food and Drug Administration last October about contamination problems at an Abbott Nutrition plant in Michigan. But Biden officials didn’t get around to recalling the formula until late February, when the industry was already under pressure from Biden-fueled labor shortages and price hikes.

The article also mentions other shortages:

  • “New York Hospitals Battle Supply Shortages”
  • “Over Half of Consumers Report Grocery and Food Shortages”
  • “Fertilizer shortage could cause food shortages in Michigan”
  • “Inflation, shortages could delay Georgia road projects”
  • “Cold Stone Creamery continues to deal with shortages”
  • “April auto sales fall on shortages; Honda at 3-day supply”
  • “California officials warn of summer power shortages, blackouts”
  • “Labor and Materials Shortages Prompt New Approaches to Building and Design”
  • “Worker shortages hamper U.S. private payrolls, services sector in April”
  • “Trucker shortage causing supply chain disruptions”
  • “Diesel fuel is in short supply as prices surge”

This is either gross incompetence of an intentional destruction of the fabric of
America. Either way, it needs to be slowed down by the mid-term elections. Hopefully that will happen.

Analyzing The Data

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Issues & Insights recently posted an article comparing how the blue and red states and cities have handled the COVID pandemic. We need to learn from the mistakes made.

The article reports:

…Those that hewed to the Red State model of lower taxes, less regulation, and respect for the rule of law thrived – while those that followed the “woke” blue-state model, built on socialist top-down control, forced equality, and divisive racial identity politics, suffered.

One of the new studies, by Phil Kerpen of The Committee to Unleash Prosperity, Casey Mulligan of the University of Chicago, and Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, and published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, ranked states by how they performed in three major areas during the pandemic: economics, education, and mortality.

That study, for good reason, has garnered much attention. It shows that red states, in general, beat blue states hands down during the pandemic, largely due to the latter’s dedication to damaging COVID lockdowns.

“Shutting down their economies and schools was by far the biggest mistake governors and state officials made during COVID, particularly in blue states,” said Moore, a co-founder of the Committee To Unleash Prosperity.

New Jersey was the worst-performing state, while neighboring blue-state giant New York was next, ranked 49th. Also flunking out were California, Illinois, and Washington, D.C.

“They had high age-adjusted death rates, they had high unemployment and significant GDP losses, and they kept their schools shut down much longer than almost all other states,” according to the study.

So who did best? Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Montana, South Dakota – and Florida.

Meanwhile, a second study from the U.S. Census Bureau showed that there has been massive population movement away from large blue-state cities toward red-state cities.

The article concludes:

As for New York, its leaders seem to think crime-ridden streets and more government spending will do the trick. Sorry, but New York’s losing its wealthiest citizens after years of misrule.

Far-left Democrats have an iron lock on government in Albany, so tax cuts and a crackdown on crime seems highly unlikely. In the meantime, one key group is leaving the state and city of New York in droves: Millionaires.

“New York’s share of the nation’s total millionaire earner population dropped to 9.9%, down from 12.7% as of 2010, the year after the state enacted a supposedly temporary and ultimately permanent higher rate on millionaire earners,” noted E.J. McMahon of the Empire Center for Public Policy think tank.

Good riddance you say? Millionaires pay 40% of taxes in New York. So losing so many to Florida, Texas and other red states is a disaster. All New York will suffer.

Truth is, America is being re-made, moving van by moving van, family by family, as the states’ demographic profiles and political leanings undergo dramatic shifts. It all points to a possible shift in political power toward conservative-leaning red states and away from once-dominant blue states. But how big that shift is remains to be seen.

As we’ve said before, the red-state model works. It has proved itself in good times and bad. Americans, you do have a choice: Red pill, or blue pill. Which is it going to be?

Our government was designed to give individual states the power to experiment with ideas to see what worked and what did not. The idea was that less successful states would copy what the successful states did. Unfortunately in our highly politically-charged atmosphere of today, blue states are not interested in learning from red states. Hopefully they will change their ways as their populations relocate.

The Sky Is Falling…Maybe

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On April 6th, Issues & Insights posted an article about the latest alarm about climate change.

The article reports:

We’ve heard so many declarations that our “last chance” to avoid global warming has arrived that we’ve lost count of the number of times the world has ended. But the sirens continue to wail, the latest from a United Nations grandee who says humanity has to act “now or never” to avoid overheating its host planet. Pardon us while we yawn.

According to Jim Skea, a European academic who co-chairs the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III, “it’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming” to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Keeping Earth’s temperatures in check “will be impossible,” he said, “without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors.”

Skea’s comment arrived wrapped up in Working Group III’s just-released report on global warming mitigation, part of the IPCC’s sixth climate assessment. The media, which loves to breathlessly report the demise of the world caused by human carbon dioxide emissions, says the 1.5-degree limit “is recognized as a crucial global target because beyond this level, so-called tipping points become more likely. These are thresholds at which small changes can lead to dramatic shifts in Earth’s entire life support system.”

OK, then. But let’s back up a moment. Or maybe 13 years. That’s when Prince Charles said, with a deep, trust-me earnestness, that our world had only “100 months to act” before we had done so much damage that the effects of global warming would become irreversible.

Then last year, about 150 months after his previous doomsday prediction, the prince said that the upcoming climate summit in Glasgow was “quite literally … the last chance saloon” to stop the scourge of warming.

None of the people who continually yell that the sky is falling are willing to note that there was an extended period of global warming during the Middle Ages. During that time crops flourished, and people survived. It should also be noted that plant fossils have been found under the Greenland ice cap. At some point, green things grew in Greenland. The earth’s climate is continually changing. Man’s impact on that change, if at all, is minimal. I support clean air and clean water. I don’t support authoritative governments trying to steal the wealth of successful democratic countries and give it to poorer countries ruled by tyrants.

Asking Valid Questions

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There are some valid questions that need to be asked about Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court. Hopefully these questions will be asked in a respectful way and answers will be given in a respectful way. I may be overly optimistic on this, but hope springs eternal. On Tuesday, Issues & Insights posted an article reminding us of the decorum (or lack thereof) of the Democrats in two recent hearings for potential Supreme Court Justices.

The article notes that the Democrats standards for nominees by Republican Presidents probably do not apply here:

…They also, no doubt, have jettisoned previous standards for Supreme Court nominees, including the ones put forth by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, such as that a nominee who can’t get 60 votes in the Senate shouldn’t be approved, nor can anyone “with a deep-seated ideology” because they wouldn’t have “a neutral legal mind.”

The article quotes a few questions asked of Justice Kavanaugh:

  • Who or what is Lowenbrau? A classmate? A secret party place? Is it related to the ‘Devil’s Triangle,’ or a type of ‘boofing’?
  • I don’t know if it’s “boufed” or “boofed” — how do you pronounce that?
  • Since you became a legal adult, have you ever made unwanted requests for sexual favors, or committed any physical or verbal harassment or assault of a sexual nature?
  • Have you ever passed out from drinking?
  • What do you consider to be too many beers?
  • Was there ever a time when you drank so much that you couldn’t remember what happened, or part of what happened the night before?
  • Do you believe Anita Hill?
  • Do you agree that it is possible for men to both be friends with some women, and treat other women badly?
  • Do you believe that climate change is happening and is threatening the air we breathe and the water we drink?”

What the Democrats have done to Republican President’s Supreme Court nominees in recent years is disgraceful. It would be a good idea for the Republicans not to follow that model and simply ask appropriate questions. I doubt the Republicans will get answers, but they can ask. It is bad enough that we have an ultra-liberal Supreme Court nominee chosen by a quota system, but hopefully she will answer questions honestly during her hearing.