Tag Archives: The Washington Free Beacon

A Decision That Upholds The Constitution

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On Friday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about President Biden’s student loan forgiveness program. The program represents the federal government interfering in a signed contract–similar to the government’s interference in contracts between renters and landlords during the Covid pandemic.

The article reports:

The United States government has stopped taking applications for student debt relief, after a federal judge blocked President Joe Biden’s loan forgiveness plan, according to a notice on a government website.

A judge in Texas who was appointed by former President Donald Trump ruled on Thursday that Biden’s plan to cancel hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt was unlawful and must be vacated. The Biden administration is appealing the ruling.

In July 2021, The New York Post reported the following:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi disputed the notion that President Biden has the authority to unilaterally ​cancel students’ federal loans.​

“People think that the president of the United States has the power for debt forgiveness,” Pelosi said during her weekly news conference on Wednesday.

“He does not. He can postpone, he can delay, but he does not have that power. That has to be an act of Congress.”

However, the President signed an Executive Order providing student loan forgiveness, and applications have poured in.

The student loan forgiveness program, even if it does not move forward, has served its purpose.

On Wednesday, Breitbart reported the following:

Voters between the ages of 18 and 29 cast their ballots in favor of Democrats 63 percent of the time in the 2022 elections, exit polling data found.

Data from NBC exit polls found that the demographic, comprised of Generation Z and the Millennials, voted 63 percent for Democrats and just 35 percent for the Republicans.

Generation Z and the Millennials were promised free stuff and do not have the education or the critical thinking skills to understand that free stuff isn’t free. The government has no source of revenue other than printing money or taxing Americans. I suspect we will see more promises of free stuff for this group in the future as this group traditionally does not come out and vote at election time. This time Generation Z and Millennials made the difference.

The Government Needs To Follow Its Own Laws

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In 2018, Congress passed the Taylor Force Act.

This is the summary of that bill from Congress.gov:

Passed House amended (12/05/2017)

Taylor Force Act

(Sec. 4) This bill prohibits certain FY2018-FY2023 economic support assistance that directly benefits the Palestinian Authority (PA) from being made available for the West Bank and Gaza unless the Department of State certifies that the PA, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and any successor or affiliated organizations:

    • are taking steps to end acts of violence against U.S. and Israeli citizens perpetrated by individuals under their jurisdictional control, such as the March 2016 attack that killed former Army officer Taylor Force;
    • have revoked any law, decree, or document authorizing or implementing a system of compensation for imprisoned individuals that uses the sentence or incarceration period to determine compensation;
    • have terminated payments for acts of terrorism against U.S. and Israeli citizens to any individual who has been fairly tried and imprisoned for such acts, to any individual who died committing such acts, and to family members of such an individual; and
    • are publicly condemning such acts of violence and are investigating such acts.

This assistance limitation shall not apply to: (1) the East Jerusalem Hospital Network, (2) wastewater projects, and (3) children’s vaccination projects.

Withheld funds shall remain available for up to two years before being reallocated.

(Sec. 5) The bill prescribes initial and annual reporting requirements.

On Tuesday, The Washington Free Beacon reported:

The Palestinian government is still paying imprisoned terrorists stipends and inciting violence against Israel, even as the Biden administration provides nearly half a billion dollars in American taxpayer funds to the government, according to a non-public State Department report recently furnished to Congress.

The Palestinian Authority, which committed to stop these acts to receive new tranches of U.S. aid money, “continued payments to Palestinian prisoners who had committed acts of terrorism, as well as the families of so-called ‘martyrs’ who died while committing acts of terrorism,” according to the report, a copy of which was reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Official Palestinian government media organizations and social media accounts also “broadcast or published content praising or celebrating acts of violence.”

Please follow the link to read the entire article.

In 2018 I posted the following picture of a Palestinian kindergarten class learning to be suicide bombers. Unfortunately, things have not changed.

Wishing I Had The Same Stock Advisors As The House Of Representatives

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On Friday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about a recent stock trade by Nancy and Paul Pelosi.

The article reports:

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) and her multimillionaire husband, Paul Pelosi, saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling their shares in Nvidia about one month before the U.S. government placed restrictions on the tech company, causing its stock price to plummet.

In July, the Pelosis sold all 25,000 of their shares in Nvidia. On Aug. 26, the government ordered Nvidia to stop selling microchips in China and Russia without authorization, which could cost the company up to $400 million, CNBC reported on Wednesday. The day after CNBC’s report, Nvidia’s stock price was down nearly 12 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Maybe we should all just keep a record of what stocks Congressmen are trading and simply follow suit.

The article continues:

By selling the shares before the news broke, the speaker and her husband saved around $600,000, according to multiple Twitter accounts that track the Pelosis’ controversial stock trades.

Paul Pelosi has a long history of making “timely” purchases in companies that his wife has worked to subsidize, the Washington Free Beacon has reported. He purchased the Nvidia stock in June as the speaker oversaw a bill that would grant billions of dollars in subsidies that could benefit the company.

Internet stock traders often follow Nancy Pelosi’s purchases and selloffs for investing tips, Business Insider reported, with some suggesting “she’s making the big bucks off of insider information.”

Stock trading is simply one of many ways that a middle-class American can enter Congress and emerge four years as a millionaire.

Rewarding Bad News Reporting

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Most of us remember this picture from the summer of 2020:

CNN’s intrepid reporter explained that the protests were ‘mostly peaceful’ as we watched the city burn down behind him.

On Friday, The Washington Free Beacon reported the following:

The CNN journalist best known for reporting from the burning scene of “fiery but mostly peaceful protests” following the justified non-fatal police shooting of armed sexual-assault suspect Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., has been nominated for an Emmy award.

CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez was one of five nominees in the “Outstanding Emerging Journalist” category. A Washington Free Beacon analysis determined that the word “emerging” is a euphemism for “non-white.” Other nominees included Anna Kook of Al Jazeera Plus, the controversial media outlet funded by Qatari oligarchs, and Vice correspondent Paola Ramos, a “Latinx Communications Strategist” who worked on Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign in 2016.

The Kenosha riots in August 2020 lasted nearly a week and caused tens of millions of dollars’ worth of property damage. Rioters took to the streets after a bystander posted a video of Blake’s encounter with police. Mainstream journalists repeatedly spread disinformation by describing Blake as “unarmed.” In fact, he was armed with a knife and was harassing his girlfriend who had previously accused Blake of sexually assaulting her. Blake survived the shooting, which occurred after two officers unsuccessfully attempted to subdue him with a Taser and repeatedly ordered him to drop the knife.

Unbelievable.

On July 28, The Hollywood Reporter reported the following:

”At a time when critical, monumental, and world-changing events are more immediately available and accessible than ever before, the work of the journalists and documentarians that bring us the truth of these stories is under tremendous assault. We honor these individuals’ courage and excellence of craft that allows each of us to be better informed and understanding of the issues of our day,” said Adam Sharp, NATAS (National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences) president and CEO.

Just to give you some examples of the nominees:

Outstanding Live News Program

ABC World News Tonight with David Muir ABC

Anderson Cooper 360 CNN

CBS Mornings / CBS This Morning CBS

NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt NBC

The Lead with Jake Tapper CNN

Today NBC

Gee, I don’t see anything from Fox News, NewsMax or One America News. Why am I not surprised? How many lies have these news organizations told in recent years. How many stories about the Russian Hoax did they share? How many stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop did they not report? How many lies have they told about January 6th?

Should Political Campaign Money Come From Local Sources?

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When you run for office in a state, should the majority of your campaign donations come from that state (from the people who have to live with your policies if you win)? I am not planning to answer that question, I simply put it out there for everyone to think about.

On July 15th, The Washington Free Beacon reported that only 14 percent of the money raised by Stacey Abrams in her race for governor of Georgia came from inside the State of Georgia.

The article reports:

Nearly half the money raised by Abrams’s campaign and leadership committee ($22.7 million) came from donors in three deep-blue states and one liberal territory that wants to be a state but never will: California ($10.2 million), Washington, D.C. ($6.4 million), New York ($3.6 million), and Delaware ($2.5 million). The result is not entirely surprising given that Abrams recently described Georgia as “the worst state in the country to live.”

Those astonishing figures stand in stark contrast to the fundraising numbers posted by Abrams’s opponent, Gov. Brian Kemp (R., Ga.), who has raised most of his campaign funds from in-state donors. More than 83 percent of the $31.5 million raised by Kemp’s campaign and leadership committee came from Georgia residents, the analysis found.

So the takeaway here is that the people inside George want to see Brian Kemp elected and the people outside Georgia want to see Stacey Abrams elected. If you were a voter aware of this fact, who would you vote for?

It will be interesting to see who wins. Can elections really be bought in America?

The Rest Of The Story…

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On July 6th I posted an article about oil from the United States’ Strategic Oil Reserve being shipped overseas. I was willing to give President Biden the benefit of the doubt because evidently there are international rules that govern where oil is sold. However, new information about the transactions involved is troubling.

Today The Federalist reported the following:

On Wednesday, Reuters revealed that more than 5 million barrels of oil from the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserves were sent overseas as part of President Joe Biden’s latest release initiated in March.

Some of that oil went to India, some to the Netherlands, and some was sent to China where the president’s son has engaged in years of potentially criminal business activity embroiling the Biden White House in scandal since the 2020 campaign.

On July 7th, The Washington Free Beacon reported:

“The Biden administration sold roughly one million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to a Chinese state-controlled gas giant that continues to purchase Russian oil, a move the Energy Department said would ‘support American consumers’ and combat ‘Putin’s price hike,’” the Beacon’s Collin Anderson reported. “Biden’s Energy Department in April announced the sale of 950,000 Strategic Petroleum Reserve barrels to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrochemical Corporation. That company, which is commonly known as Sinopec, is wholly owned by the Chinese government.”

…Power the Future founder Daniel Turner admonished Biden for selling “raw materials to the Communist Chinese for them to use as they want.”

“We were assured Biden was releasing this oil to America so it could be refined for gasoline to drive down prices at the pump. So right off the bat, they’re just lying to the American people,” Turner told the Washington Free Beacon. “What they’re saying they did and what they did are not remotely related.”

Turner also said the decision highlights the Biden family’s “relationship with China.” Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, is tied to Sinopec. In 2015, a private equity firm he cofounded bought a $1.7 billion stake in Sinopec Marketing. Sinopec went on to enter negotiations to purchase Gazprom in March, one month after the Biden administration sanctioned the Russian gas giant.

Obviously some of the decisions made have not been in the best interests of Americans, and some of the decisions made have probably enriched the pockets of Hunter Biden. However, I predict there will be no consequences. It is too close to the mid-terms, and there are too many Republicans who are afraid to challenge any of the corruption in the Biden administration. It is a shame there are not enough principled Democrats or Republicans to speak out against obvious corruption.

Using Spin Instead Of Solving The Problem

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On Wednesday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article detailing how the Biden administration plans to address the problem of rising inflation as they approach what could be a disastrous mid-term election. Mid-term elections tend to lose seats for whatever party holds the White House. If this year’s mid-term is an honest election, the prospects for the Democrat party are looking bleak.

The article reports:

President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party finally have a plan to get inflation under control and address the economic anxiety felt by millions of Americans. It’s not a plan in the conventional sense, but rather a public relations campaign to convince the American people that “despite their current misgivings, the economy is actually doing quite well.”

Inflation is soaring and gas prices are through the roof, but Americans are wrong to be concerned about the direction of the country, the president and his allies will argue this month. Politico reports that Biden has assembled a team of experts and professional communicators to make the case that, actually, the economy is good. The White House effort to “communicate on our accomplishments” kicked off on Monday with a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which Biden touted his stewardship of “the most robust recovery in modern history” and cited a bunch of macroeconomic statistics to make his case.

No one who routinely makes trips to the gas station or the grocery store is going to believe that the economy is doing well.

The article concludes:

The dubious public relations campaign is in keeping with the Democratic Party’s longstanding belief that all of their electoral problems could be solved by simply explaining to skeptical voters that they have no good reason to be skeptical. It is also indicative of a White House in disarray. Biden is reportedly furious at his subordinates for failing to come up with a winning message ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, and White House chief of staff Ron Klain is rumored to be on the chopping block. Anita Dunn, a longtime Biden aide who once provided “damage control advice” to disgraced Hollywood rapist Harvey Weinstein, could take his place after the midterms.

Considering all of the information bubbling beneath the surface about Hunter Biden’s laptop and what is on it, Anita Dunn might be a really good choice for chief of staff.

 

This Should Be Called Treason

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On Friday, Gregg Jarrett reported that during the Trump administration as President Trump was attempting to negotiate with Iran, former officials of the Obama administration “engaged in a secret meeting with Iran.”

The article reports:

A group of senior Obama administration officials met with Iran in 2018 as “part of an effort to undermine the Trump administration’s diplomatic push to isolate the hardline regime, according to an internal State Department document” reports The Washington Free Beacon.

“The document is the firmest proof to date that Obama-era officials were engaged in back-channel efforts to keep negotiations with Iran alive” writes The Beacon. The memo states then-President Trump and his administration were working to increase economic pressure on Iran in 2018, but the delegation of U.S. former ambassadors held a secret, “off-the-record” meeting with former Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif at his residence in New York City.

The seven-page memo was assembled during the meeting with Zarif, during which Zarif claimed that Trump’s policies have fomented anti-U.S. fervor in Iran and pointed to the popularity of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) leader Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated by Trump two years later in a drone strike.

“I was as popular as Soleimani, but now I am at 47 percent and his is up,” Zarif said, according to the memo. “He is closer to 80 percent. People of Iran once preferred engagement, now opted for resistance as the only reality. That is what the polls are telling us now and it is the reality of the region.”

The article quotes The Washington Free Beacon:

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was not aware of these meetings while leading the State Department, said the memo corroborates reports from the time about Kerry’s efforts to salvage the 2015 nuclear deal through back-channel powwows with Iranian officials.

“This memo reflects even more than we already knew about former State Department officials continuing on as if they were still in office,” said Pompeo, who is now senior counsel for global affairs at the ACLJ. “Trying, at every turn, to work with the foreign minister for a terrorist regime, Iran, to undermine the very sanctions put in place by America. It’s worse than not knowing when to get off stage. Actively seeking to protect the terrible deal they struck, these former officials—two years after Obama left office—were signaling that Iran should stand firm against America.”

Everyone involved should be tried for treason.

Remote Learning Is An Oxymoron

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On Thursday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about the impact the closing down of our schools during Covid had on our children.

The article reports:

Remote learning had an even worse effect on U.S. students’ education than was previously known, new research shows.

K-12 students who attended school from home in the 2020-2021 school year lost 50 percent of their typical math curriculum learning, according to a Harvard study first reported by the New York Times. Even students who went back to school in fall 2020 lost 20 percent of their typical math curriculum learning due to pandemic disruptions in the spring. The learning disparities were the worst for poor, black, and Latino students, a gap that one of the study’s authors called “the largest increase in educational inequity in a generation.”

The schools were closed by the Teachers’ Unions. Many teachers were afraid of catching Covid from their students (a largely unfounded fear, but understandable at the beginning of the Covid crisis), and many teachers simply enjoyed teaching remotely from wherever they chose to be.  After scientists realized that children were neither major spreaders of the virus and generally not at high risk from complications from the virus, the schools should have reopened, but not all of them did.

The article notes:

“It’s pretty clear that remote school was not good for learning,” Emily Oster, a Brown University economist and the coauthor of a similar study, told the Times. Oster was one of the first to sound the alarm about the danger of school closures. In October 2020, she wrote a piece for the Atlantic, “Schools Aren’t Superspreaders,” which argued the risk of COVID spread in schools was overblown.

Children are at low risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19. In-school transmission is also “extremely rare,” according to a 2021 study by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“In places where schools reopened that summer and fall, the spread of COVID was not noticeably worse than in places where schools remained closed,” the Times‘s David Leonhardt wrote on Thursday. “Schools also reopened in parts of Europe without seeming to spark outbreaks.”

The article concludes:

Students who suffered the greatest learning losses were often in districts that succumbed to powerful teachers’ unions and Democratic officials who fought to keep schools closed. Schools in the poorest areas on average stayed remote five weeks longer than affluent areas.

As late as March this year, Chicago Public Schools, in coordination with its teachers’ union, was implementing at-home learning periods for classes after COVID exposures. Additionally, any school could flip to remote learning provided at least 30 percent of teachers were absent for at least two days or at least 40 percent of students were told to quarantine by the city’s health department.

Let’s hope that the damage done to the ‘children of Covid’ can be undone by the time they reach high school.

While We Were Watching Ukraine

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Yesterday The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about the Biden administration’s negotiations with Iran over a nuclear arms treaty.

The article reports:

Republican lawmakers in Congress are fed up with the Biden administration’s secret diplomacy with Iran and refusal to inform the American public about what concessions will be granted to the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism as part of a new nuclear deal.

With negotiations stuck in their final stage amid Iran’s demands that all U.S. sanctions be lifted on its chief terrorist outfit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), Republican foreign policy leaders are pressing top Biden administration officials to publicly brief Congress on the state of diplomatic talks.

“With uncertainty surrounding the status of the negotiation, the American people have a right to know what their diplomats agreed to in Vienna, what alternatives your administration is considering, and how you intend to address the wider range of threats from Iran—including its increasingly dangerous missile and drone programs and taking American hostages,” a group of Republican lawmakers on the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees wrote in a letter sent on Wednesday to the White House and obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon.

The secrecy surrounding the talks—and Iran’s demands for billions of dollars in sanctions relief that will likely fund its regional terrorism enterprise—are unacceptable and hint that the Biden administration is poised to enter a deal that is weaker than the original 2015 accord, according to Republican representatives Claudia Tenney (N.Y.), María Elvira Salazar (Fla.), Greg Steube (Fla.), Ronny Jackson (Texas), and Don Bacon (Neb.).

During more than a year of negotiations, the Biden administration has refused to brief Congress in an open setting. Biden administration officials, including U.S.-Iran envoy Robert Malley, have only consented to classified briefings, unlike the Obama administration, which discussed the talks openly with lawmakers and the public. Classified briefings on the deal—which came after lawmakers from both parties chastised the administration for cutting Congress out of the negotiations—are no longer tolerable, Tenney and her colleagues say.

Keep in mind that theoretically all treaties have to be approved by the Senate. President Obama avoided this by signing ‘accords’ which were not approved by Congress. I would hope that President Biden would not be permitted to sign an Iran Nuclear ‘Accord” to avoid the Senate approval process. Aside from not being transparent, the Biden administration seems to function more like a dictatorship than a functioning republic.

The Perils Of Green Energy

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On Thursday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about ESI Energy, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy.

The article reports:

A renewable energy firm that conspired with former president Barack Obama to maim and murder hundreds of majestic bald eagles has finally been brought to justice.

ESI Energy, a subsidiary of NextEra Energy, was sentenced in federal court on Tuesday after pleading guilty to three criminal counts of violating the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. The company will serve five years probation and was ordered to pay more than $8 million in fines and restitution for its role in the deaths of at least 150 eagles that were slashed to pieces by its wind turbines.

The article notes:

NextEra, which operates more than 100 wind farms in the United States and Canada, received hundreds of millions of dollars in federal tax credits as part of Obama’s efforts to promote renewable energy. The Obama administration typically granted permits to operators of wind and solar farms that exempted them from federal laws prohibiting the killing of bald eagles and other protected species. NextEra didn’t even bother to apply for these permits, which prosecutors said gave the company an advantage over its competitors that did seek Obama’s permission to commit bird genocide.

Wind farms during the Obama administration were responsible for the murder of more than 573,000 birds each year, including 83,000 hawks, falcons, and eagles, according to the Associated Press. Weaponized solar farms, which also benefited from taxpayer subsidies, were another key component of Obama’s genocide campaign. Sunlight reflected from the massive arrays of solar panels creates a “kill zone” where temperatures can reach up to 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. According to Bloomberg, some birds are “incinerated in flight,” while others fall to their deaths after having their feathers singed. Birds that survive the fall are often “too injured to fly and are killed on the ground by predators.”

When discussing green energy, shouldn’t the impact on bird life in America be considered?

It’s Only Okay To Question Some Elections

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On Tuesday, The Washington Free Beacon reported that election lawyer Dara Lindenbaum, who is President Biden’s pick to serve on the Federal Election Commission, is representing Stacey Abrams’s nonprofit and Raphael Warnock’s church in a lawsuit that challenged the validity of Georgia’s 2018 election due in part to the state’s use of “unreliable” electronic voting machines. So the electronic voting machines were unreliable in 2018, but reliable in 2020?

The article reports:

In November 2018, election lawyer Dara Lindenbaum signed on to a federal legal complaint on behalf of Abrams’s Fair Fight Action. The complaint challenged the constitutionality of Georgia’s 2018 election, which saw Abrams lose to Republican governor Brian Kemp in a race she never conceded. Warnock’s Ebenezer Baptist Church joined the suit in early 2019, just months before the Democrat entered Georgia’s 2020 Senate race.

There were some changes made to the complaint in December 2020:

According to the complaint, the state of Georgia “grossly mismanaged” the election by depriving “Georgia citizens, and particularly citizens of color, of their fundamental right to vote.” As a result, the complaint said, Georgia’s election “violated the First, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution.” The complaint also lamented the use of “insecure and unreliable” electronic voting machines that “lack a paper trail” and thus “cannot be audited”—those machines even “switched” votes from Abrams to Kemp, according to the complaint.

While the lawsuit remains active, Fair Fight and other plaintiffs amended the complaint in December 2020 to remove many of its assertions detailing problematic voting machines. The move came after former president Donald Trump said voting machine irregularities led to his defeat against Biden.

The article concludes:

Prior to her role representing Fair Fight Action, Lindenbaum served as general counsel to Abrams’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign. Abrams lost that race to Kemp by roughly 2 points, but she never conceded her defeat, instead saying the election was “stolen” due to “voter suppression.” In the aftermath of her loss, Abrams launched Fair Fight Action, a nonprofit that says it is “leading the charge to protect voting rights.” Fair Fight’s website touts the group’s “historic civil rights lawsuit in federal court … challenging the gross mismanagement of the 2018 election that discouraged and disenfranchised voters.” Lindenbaum still serves as legal counsel to Fair Fight Action and the group’s political arm, Fair Fight PAC, her Office of Government Ethics disclosure shows.

Neither Fair Fight Action nor Ebenezer Baptist Church returned requests for comment.

This lady does not belong on the Federal Elections Commission.

Parents Need To Pay Attention

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On Monday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about a video shown as part of a social studies class in a New Jersey public middle school.

The article reports:

As part of a social studies class, a New Jersey public middle school forced students to watch a video about a transgender man’s hormone treatment—all without notifying parents.

The video, “Ten Years on Testosterone,” details the transition of LGBT activist Aydian Dowling through hormone injections. Teachers and administrators at Pearl R. Miller Middle School in Kinnelon, N.J., did not notify parents about the lesson, which included slideshows with definitions of different gender ideologies, beforehand.

…Dowling later spoke at a school-wide assembly as part of the school’s “Stories Of Adversity & Resilience Program,” about which administrators notified parents ahead of time, giving them the option to opt out their children. Concerned parents flocked to a school board meeting last Thursday, where board members admitted parents should have similarly been informed about the hormone therapy video.

“I felt as if I was blindsided,” Loren Malfitano, whose two sons were shown the video, told the Washington Free Beacon. “They’re learning about this ideology of gender before they even have classes on the actual biologies of males and females.”

The article notes:

New Jersey is set to enact updated health standards in September pushed by Democratic governor Phil Murphy that teach second-graders about genitalia, reproduction, and “gender expression.” Fifth-graders will be required to define masturbation and differentiate between sexual orientation and gender identity, and eighth-graders will have to define gender identity, gender expression, vaginal sex, oral sex, and anal sex. The governor-appointed New Jersey Board of Education adopted the standards in 2020.

Why are schools spending so much time of this sort of thing while the SAT scores of their students are dropping drastically. Is there anyone in the education hierarchy who is actually concerned with educating our children in the skills that will help them succeed in the future?

Our Insane Foreign Policy

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On Sunday, The Washington Free Beacon reported that Iran has claimed responsibility for the ballistic missiles that struck the U.S. consulate and other targets in Erbil, Iraq’s northern Kurdish regional capital, early Sunday morning. We are currently negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran. Obviously they have very little respect for us or our foreign interests.

The article reports:

The missile attack comes as talks to revive the 2015 Iran nuclear deal face the prospect of collapse after a last-minute Russian demand forced world powers to pause negotiations for an undetermined time despite having a largely completed text.

The missiles, which targeted the U.S. consulate‘s new building and a neighbouring residential area, caused only material damage and one civilian was injured, the Kurdish interior ministry said. An Iraqi security official told Reuters that the missiles were manufactured in Iran.

Iran‘s Revolutionary Guards released a statement taking responsibility for the missile attack against Israeli “strategic centres” in Erbil, Iran‘s state media reported.

“Any repetition of attacks by Israel will be met with a harsh, decisive and destructive response,” the Revolutionary Guard said in the statement.

There are a lot of things going on here. First of all, Iran would like to be in control of Iraq. Kurdistan is an impediment to that control. Secondly, Iran needs to drag out the nuclear talks long enough to get an atomic bomb. They are almost there, and they probably have some sort of acceptable delivery system. When they have both, their bullying tactics may turn into action–not a good thing for anyone in the world.

The article concludes:

“Iran had carried out attacks against American targets and did not shy away from publicizing this,” said Hamidreza Azizi, Visiting Fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

“I see this more as a warning sign to Israel and a show of force in the negotiations.”

A Kurdish spokesperson for the regional authorities said there were no flight interruptions at Erbil airport.

Residents of Erbil posted videos online showing several large explosions, and some said the blasts shook their homes. Reuters could not independently verify those videos.

Iraq has been rocked by chronic instability since the defeat of the Sunni Islamist group Islamic State in 2017 by a loose coalition of Iraqi, U.S.-led and Iran-backed forces.

Since then, Iran-aligned militias have regularly attacked U.S. military and diplomatic sites in Iraq, U.S. and many Iraqi officials say. Iran denies involvement in those attacks.

When America has a weak President, the world is less safe.

What An Amazing Coincidence

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On Friday, The Washington Free Beacon reported the following:

Federal authorities are investigating three Democratic megadonors who made an enormous bet on shares of Activision Blizzard just days before Microsoft agreed in January to acquire the video game company for $69 billion.

The U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are both looking into the suspiciously timed trading activity of Barry Diller, owner of the Daily Beast, his stepson Alex von Fürstenberg, and his friend David Geffen, a longtime Democratic donor who gave $500,000 to the scandal-plagued Lincoln Project in 2020.

…The Journal (The Wall Street Journal) notes that Activision stock options similar to those purchased by Diller, Geffen, and von Fürstenberg were “sparsely traded” in the days before the Microsoft acquisition was announced, but “exploded” in response to the news. The wealthy Democrats’ stock options instantly surged in value by more than 60 percent—an amazing coincidence, indeed.

The men have yet to exercise their options, which don’t expire until 2023. They could realize a profit of about $60 million if they sold today, based on Activision’s current share price of $80. They stand to make more than $100 million if the Microsoft acquisition, expected to close this summer, goes forward at the agreed-upon price of $95 per share.

What better way to ensure generous donations than to help those donors make money in the stock market? Is this an incredible coincidence as those involved claim?

When It’s Not Your Money, You Don’t Always Spend It Wisely

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One of the problems with the establishment in Washington, D.C., is that they do not treat the taxpayers’ money as if it were their own. Actually, the problem is not limited to Washington–how many politicians offices have spend thousands of dollars simply on drapery? Just as an example, in November 2013, The Boston Globe reported that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, who spent $27,000 on new drapes and furniture for his office early in his first term, has authorized a $9 million project to dramatically upgrade the office before he leaves in 2014. The Biden White House has made a recent purchase that illustrates the problem of not shopping carefully.

On March 11, The Washington Free Beacon reported the following:

The Office of Management and Budget spent $2,735 in October for the order and delivery of the 12′ by 9′ rug, the government documents show. The custom Bora Bora rug in the chosen color of “Starfish” was sold to the agency for $1,972, with additional costs attributed to freight, delivery, and padding.

A Washington Free Beacon investigation found that the White House budget office likely got ripped off, and could have purchased an identical rug for far less than what it paid. The Bora Bora rug is manufactured by Fabrica and cut into custom sizes by retailers. New York-based carpet retailer Kanter’s Carpet & Design Center told the Free Beacon it charges just $1,600 to custom-build a 12′ by 9′ Bora Bora rug, a price the company said includes binding, pads, and local delivery.

That may seem like a small thing, but it illustrates how careless the government and its minions are with taxpayers’ money. That’s $1100 that could have been used toward the deficit. It would only be a drop in the bucket, but how many other ‘drops in the bucket’ are out there?

At a time when Americans are being severely hurt by inflation, it would be nice if the White House would curtail its spending a little. 

 

Why Are The Names Always The Same?

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On February 15th, The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Biden campaign paid nearly $20,000 to Neustar Information Services, the cybersecurity firm at the center of Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe, in 2020 for accounting and compliance work,

The article reports:

The campaign paid Neustar Information Services in 2020 for accounting and compliance work, according to Federal Election Commission records. According to Durham, Neustar’s chief technology officer, Rodney Joffe, accessed sensitive web traffic data that the company maintained on behalf of the White House executive office in order to collect “derogatory” information about Donald Trump. Joffe allegedly provided the information to Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann, who in turn gave it to the CIA during a meeting in February 2017. Durham charged Sussmann in September with lying to the FBI about his investigation of Trump.

The Biden campaign’s payments raise questions about whether Joffe continued snooping on Trump in the most recent election. The Biden and Clinton campaigns are the only two presidential committees to have ever paid Neustar, according to Federal Election Commission records. Biden’s campaign paid Neustar $18,819 on Sept. 29, 2020, the records show. The Clinton campaign paid the firm $3,000 in May 2015 for mobile phone services. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee paid $3,000 to Neustar in 2017. Neustar executives and staffers contributed $17,906 to Biden’s campaign, FEC records show.

The article concludes:

Joffe began helping the Clinton campaign in mid-2016 after he found what he claimed was suspicious Internet chatter between the servers of Russia’s Alfa Bank and Trump’s real estate company, the Trump Organization. Sussmann shared Joffe’s findings with journalists and then-FBI general counsel James Baker. Sussmann is accused of lying to Baker during a Sept. 19, 2016, meeting by denying that he was investigating Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign.

According to Durham, Clinton campaign lawyers told campaign officials, including Jake Sullivan, about the Alfa Bank claims. Sullivan later joined the Biden campaign and currently serves as national security adviser. His wife is counselor to Attorney General Merrick Garland, who oversees the Durham probe and has final say over a release of a report of the investigation.

Federal investigators have debunked Joffe’s allegations of secret channels of communication between Trump and Russia. The Justice Department inspector general said the FBI determined by February 2017 that there was no basis to the Alfa-Trump allegation. Durham said in his court filing on Friday that his investigators found “no support” for the information Sussmann gave the CIA.

The swamp that is the deep state runs deep and wide.

The Wrong Way To Go

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On Monday, The Washington Free Beacon reported the following:

The Biden administration is set to fund the distribution of crack pipes to drug addicts as part of its plan to advance “racial equity.”

The $30 million grant program, which closed applications Monday and will begin in May, will provide funds to nonprofits and local governments to help make drug use safer for addicts. Included in the grant, which is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services, are funds for “smoking kits/supplies.” A spokesman for the agency told the Washington Free Beacon that these kits will provide pipes for users to smoke crack cocaine, crystal methamphetamine, and “any illicit substance.”

What in the world is the administration thinking?

The article notes:

Sgt. Clyde Boatwright, president of the Maryland Fraternal Order of Police, said government resources are better spent on preventing drug abuse rather than making it safer.

“If we look at more of a preventive campaign as opposed to an enabling campaign, I think it will offer an opportunity to have safer communities with fewer people who are dependable on these substances,” Boatwright told the Free Beacon.

Funding for the “harm reduction” grant program is provided through Democrats’ American Rescue Plan, which the Senate passed along party lines after Vice President Kamala Harris cast a tie-breaking vote. Other equipment that qualifies for funding include syringes, vaccinations, disease screenings, condoms, and fentanyl strips. The grant program will last three years and includes 25 awards of up to $400,000.

An HHS spokesman declined to specify what is included in the smoking kits. Similar distribution efforts provide mouthpieces to prevent glass cuts, rubber bands to prevent burns, and filters to minimize the risk of disease.

It is against federal law to distribute or sell drug paraphernalia unless authorized by the government.

The idea of the government distributing drug paraphernalia is insane. I wonder if the Congressmen who voted for the Democrats’ American Rescue Plan knew what was in the bill. Illegal drug use is dangerous for a number of reasons–you have no idea what is in the street drug you are taking. If it contains fentanyl, even a small amount could be fatal.

This is a really bad idea that needs to be challenged quickly before it does major damage.

This Is Disconcerting

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On Monday, The Washington Free Beacon reported that the Biden administration has disclosed that it possesses almost one billion records of firearm purchases by Americans.

The article reports:

The Biden administration is in possession of nearly one billion records detailing American citizens’ firearm purchases, far more than Congress and the public has been aware of, according to new information from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The ATF disclosed to lawmakers that it manages a database of 920,664,765 firearm purchase records, including both digital and hard copy versions of these transactions. When a licensed gun store goes out of business, its private records detailing gun transactions become ATF property and are stored at a federal site in West Virginia. The practice has contributed to the fears of gun advocacy groups and Second Amendment champions in Congress that the federal government is creating a national database of gun owners, which violates longstanding federal statutes.

The article concludes:

More than half-a-million traces were performed in 2021, according to the ATF, and just under half a million in 2020. The ATF, however, says it does not have the ability to determine if the database actually helps solve crimes. The ATF’s National Tracing Center “has no ability to determine the successful prosecution of hundreds of thousands of crime gun traces it completes annually, nor does it have any way to link a trace for a specific prosecution for a particular year,” the agency informed Congress.

Aidan Johnston, director of federal affairs for Gun Owners of America, an advocacy group that has closely tracked the ATF’s database, told the Free Beacon that it is becoming clear the Biden administration is on its way to creating a national gun registry.

“Make no mistake—this is clear evidence that a partial national gun registry exists,” Johnston said. “If the American people don’t stand up for their rights now, Biden’s anti-gun ATF will be able to track gun owners, infringe on our rights, and potentially even confiscate our firearms.”

Do we have anyone in Washington who has read the U.S. Constitution and is protecting the rights of Americans?

Unfortunately, This Is Not Surprising

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On Monday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article that might explain the fact that Democrats recently blocked a GOP-led effort to impose sanctions on a Russian natural-gas pipeline amid deteriorating talks with Moscow over its military buildup along Ukraine’s eastern border (article in Politico January 13th).

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

Affiliates of two European companies that fund Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline contributed to the campaign of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), who Republicans say has blocked sanctions on the Kremlin-backed project.

ENGIE North America and BASF Corporation each gave $2,500 to Schumer in September through their corporate political action committees, according to newly disclosed Federal Election Commission records. ENGIE North America’s parent company and a BASF subsidiary are part of a consortium of five companies that finance Nord Stream 2, which will transport natural gas from Russia to Germany. While President Joe Biden has called the pipeline a geopolitical threat to Europe that helps Russian president Vladimir Putin, last year he waived sanctions on the project.

…The contributions to Schumer came amid an aggressive lobbying effort in Washington over sanctions on the 764-mile pipeline. The five European companies that back Nord Stream 2—Wintershall, ENGIE, Uniper, Shell, and OMV—have paid millions of dollars to lobbying firms to block sanctions.

Nord Stream 2 AG, the Swiss company that is building the pipeline, lobbies Congress through Democratic donor Vincent Roberti. Roberti gave maximum donations of $5,800 to Schumer and other Senate Democrats last year, Axios reported. Thomas McLarty, the founder of McLarty Inbound, a firm that lobbies for the five European companies, in April gave $2,500 to Schumer.

ENGIE North America, a subsidiary of the French firm ENGIE, contributed to Schumer’s campaign on Sept. 9. BASF, the parent company of Wintershall, donated to Schumer on Sept. 22. ENGIE also contributed to Schumer’s campaign in 2020, while BASF gave to the Senate leader in 2016, according to FEC records. Each member of the European consortium loaned 1 billion euros to Nord Stream 2 AG in 2017. Nord Stream 2 AG is controlled by Russian state oil company Gazprom. Nord Stream 2 AG’s chief executive officer, Matthias Warnig, is a Putin ally and former officer of the East German secret police.

The article concludes:

Schumer’s office did not respond to requests for comment from the Washington Free Beacon. ENGIE North America did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokesman for BASF said that its American subsidiary does not lobby Congress on Nord Stream 2 and that Wintershall has no presence in the United States.

“Any implied connection between our Employee PAC contributions and Nord Stream 2 is incorrect,” the spokesman said.

And I have some waterfront property I would like to sell you in Arizona.

The Incestuous Swamp

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On December 10th, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article which may explain why we are not hearing an awful lot from the Durham investigation.

The article reports:

A top adviser to Attorney General Merrick Garland is facing calls to recuse herself from the Justice Department’s investigation of the Trump-Russia probe, which has looked into the actions of her husband, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.

Margaret Goodlander serves as counsel to Garland, who oversees Special Counsel John Durham’s investigation. Garland has oversight of Durham’s budget, the scope of the investigation, and the release of a report Durham is believed to be writing. Sullivan, who married Goodlander in 2015, has been referenced in Durham’s indictment of a cybersecurity lawyer who worked for the Clinton campaign. While there is no indication that Durham is targeting Sullivan, the national security adviser could be a witness for the investigation given that he was a foreign policy adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Durham’s report could also reveal embarrassing details about Sullivan’s work on the campaign to dig up dirt on Donald Trump’s possible links to Russia.

A spokesman for the Justice Department said Goodlander “has no role in Mr. Durham’s investigation,” but it is unclear whether she has formally recused herself from the matter or whether the Durham probe is outside her Justice Department portfolio. Fox News reported that Goodlander advises Garland on antitrust and international issues.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and the watchdog group Empower Oversight say Goodlander should be formally recused from the Durham investigation to maintain public trust in the probe.

Maybe I’m missing something, but if your husband is under investigation by the Justice Department, you shouldn’t be working for the Justice Department.

The article concludes:

According to the indictment, Sussmann’s (indicted cybersecurity lawyer Michael Sussmann) former Perkins Coie partner, Marc Elias, in September 2016 briefed Sullivan and others on the Clinton team about his firm’s efforts to investigate the Alfa Bank data. Sullivan days before the election issued a statement that cited the Alfa-Trump allegations as evidence of collusion. It was unknown at the time that the Clinton campaign was investigating the Alfa Bank issue. The FBI later determined that there was no nefarious link between the bank and Trump.

Elias was the attorney who hired Fusion GPS, the firm that commissioned the Steele dossier. Durham indicted the primary source for the dossier, Igor Danchenko, on charges that Danchenko lied to the FBI about the identity of his sources. Dancheko allegedly lied by saying that a longtime Democratic operative, Charles Dolan, was not one of his sources.

Grassley and Empower Oversight have pressed the Justice Department over the recusal of another official, Susan Hennessey, who has pushed the false claim that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. Hennessey, who serves in the national security division, last year criticized Durham’s investigation, calling it “partisan silliness.”

Grassley said Garland has stonewalled his requests for information about Hennessey and other Justice Department officials’ conflicts of interest.

“I’ve raised concerns about potential conflicts of several Biden Justice Department officials and can’t get a straight answer from the attorney general,” he told the Free Beacon.

The Free Beacon was once a client of Fusion GPS. All of the work Fusion GPS performed for the Free Beacon was based on public sources, and none of the work product appeared in the Steele dossier. For more information, see here.

The swamp is deeper and has more entangled vines than most of us ever imagined.

 

An Amazing Coincidence

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On Friday, The Washington Free Beacon reported that a company owned by a man who gave generously to the Biden campaign has received a $500 million government loan to build a manufacturing facility in India. Why is the government giving out loans to build manufacturing facilities in India instead of in America? Isn’t it an incredible coincidence that a large donor to the Biden campaign receives a $500 million government loan?

The article reports:

The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation granted the loan to First Solar, which is owned by billionaire Walmart heir Lukas Walton, to build a solar module plant in India. Walton contributed over $300,000 to President Joe Biden’s campaign last year, and over $100,000 to the Democratic National Committee, according to campaign finance records.

The loan to First Solar is the “largest single debt financing transaction” issued by the DFC, the agency announced this week. The DFC said the investment in the India project will “promote DFC’s commitment to diversifying supply chains,” following demands from lawmakers that the agency avoid funding any solar projects connected to forced labor in China.

Ethics watchdogs said the loan raises questions about whether First Solar’s political connections played a role in the DFC’s decision. The federal financing agency, which was formerly known as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, has faced criticism in the past for funding projects linked to political donors. The loan also comes nine years after the Obama administration came under fire for approving $3 billion in loan guarantees to the same company—funding that Republican lawmakers alleged the company wasn’t qualified to receive.

The article concludes:

“The information currently accessible to the public raises the question of whether these companies received approval to use federal lands and taxpayer monies based not on the best value for the American people but the political clout of the recipients,” then-senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, said at the time.

Although First Solar’s chairman testified to Congress that the company was “financially strong,” the business was forced to furlough half of its employees at its solar plant near Los Angeles weeks later.

Last year, First Solar paid $350 million to settle a shareholder lawsuit brought by two United Kingdom pension funds, which claimed the company inflated its stock price and misled investors about its finances.

The article does mention that the manufacturing facility is being built in India in order to create a supply chains that do not utilize forced labor. However, that does not answer the question as to why the plant was not built in America.

Will Future Reparations Be Paid?

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In the past year of so, we have heard a lot about paying reparations to black residents of America because their ancestors were sold as slaves. But what about putting a nail in the coffin of modern-day slavery? On Thursday, The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about modern-day slavery in China and the efforts by some Congressmen to end it.

The article reports:

Senate Democrats are blocking legislation that would prohibit imports from China made with Uyghur slave labor, in response to pressure from Biden administration officials who fear the bill would torpedo climate negotiations with the Chinese government, congressional sources told the Washington Free Beacon.

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a bill sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) that has long been circulating in Congress and is backed by the human rights community and opponents of China’s forced labor camps, was included in a package of 25 amendments to the annual defense authorization bill, according to a list distributed by Senate leadership on Wednesday.

But Democrats excluded the amendment from a vote late Wednesday night, after members of the party privately objected to it, sources told the Free Beacon. Earlier in the evening, Democrats tried to use a procedural mechanism that would have allowed a vote on the act but stripped it from the final authorization bill, according to a hotline memo from Senate leadership.

The pushback from Senate Democrats comes amid efforts by senior Biden administration officials to quietly kill the bill over concerns it will hinder the White House’s climate agenda and limit solar panel imports from China. Presidential climate envoy John Kerry, among others, has been lobbying House members against the bill, the Free Beacon reported last month. The bill is widely backed by the human rights community and easily attracted Republican support in the narrowly Democrat-controlled Senate. Congressional officials tell the Free Beacon that the new opposition to the measure among Democrats is a product of the Biden administration’s lobbying efforts.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer offered conflicting explanations for the holdup on Wednesday, with his office initially suggesting to the Free Beacon that Republicans were blocking a vote on the amendment.

The anti-slavery act has “been on the list of amendments Senate Democrats proposed the Senate to vote on that the Republicans have been objecting to … so you should ask the Senate Republicans why they’re blocking the vote,” Schumer spokesman Justin Goodman told the Free Beacon.

The article concludes:

Michael Sobolik, a fellow in Indo-Pacific studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, said the Senate Democratic opposition to the amendment was the “latest episode in a series of concessions to the Chinese Communist Party.”

“With their words, the administration and its congressional allies insist that America can simultaneously cooperate and compete with Beijing,” said Sobolik. “By their actions, they are dismissing potential complicity in an ongoing genocide to pocket dubious climate concessions from a regime with a track record of lying and breaking promises. That’s the opposite of ‘responsible competition.'”

I wish we could afford to pay all of our representatives and politicians in Washington as well as China pays them.

This Really Isn’t A Surprise

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On Wednesday The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about a recent poll in Maryland.

The article reports:

According to internal polling obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, 88 percent of black voters support Maryland governor Larry Hogan’s (R.) effort to “re-fund the police,” an initiative state Democrats denounced as “divisive” and “misguided.”

The poll, which was provided by an outside group aligned with Hogan, shows that 64 percent of likely black voters in the state “strongly support” the governor’s proposal to “provide greatly increased funding to state and local police agencies,” while 24 percent “somewhat support” the policy. Hogan’s initiative enjoys similar support across racial lines—89 and 74 percent of white and Hispanic voters support it, respectively.

Those numbers contradict state Democrats’ criticism of the plan. After Hogan announced his proposal to invest an additional $150 million into local and state police, state house speaker Adrienne Jones (D.) accused the Republican of working to “politicize” public safety.

…In addition to his plan to increase police funding, Hogan said Tuesday he will introduce two emergency bills to combat violent crime in Baltimore. The move comes one week after the city experienced its 300th homicide for the seventh year in a row—victims include a 69-year-old woman who was stabbed to death inside a church, a 5-year-old girl, and a 13-year-old girl.

“People are being shot nearly every single day in Baltimore City, and we all have an obligation to do something about it right now,” Hogan said in a statement. “With all of the actions we have announced today, I want those families and all of the victims of this violence to know that we will not stop pursuing those criminals who are terrorizing our community.”

The article concludes:

During his Tuesday press conference, Hogan also announced a review of state funds provided to Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby, one of many progressive prosecutors across the country with ties to liberal billionaire George Soros. Homicides have skyrocketed since Mosby took office in 2015, and she will now have to provide data on cases her office chose not to prosecute in order to see its funding returned.

“As I have repeatedly said, we also need a prosecutor who will actually prosecute violent criminals,” Hogan said Tuesday. Mosby’s office responded by pointing the Free Beacon to a statement that called the Republican’s press conference “a political stunt with no basis whatsoever.”

We won’t have law and order in America until those who break our laws pay a price for what they did. Governor Hogan seems to be moving in a direction that will restore some semblance of order to Baltimore.

A Totally Botched Plan

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Yesterday The Washington Free Beacon reported the following:

During America’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan earlier this year, the Biden administration issued a directive that evacuation flights be filled to “excess” with refugees who had not been properly vetted before arriving in America, according to an internal administration communication disclosed on Tuesday by Sen. Josh Hawley (R., Mo.).

“Total inflow to the U.S. must exceed the number of seats available. Err on the side of excess,” reads an Aug. 16 email to U.S. officials involved in the exit from Afghanistan. “This guidance provides clear discretion and direction to fill seats and to provide special consideration for women and children when we have seats.”

This was (and is) a recipe for disaster.

The article concludes:

“We now know that we’ve got major problems of vetting of the people who were brought to this country, who were evacuated and brought to this country,” Hawley said. “So, you testified in September that those evacuated, about 6,000 American citizens, you testified in September that the [Special Immigrant Visas] were about 1,200 to 1,300, that leaves about 116,700 people, based on the 124,000 neo-number that you’ve been offering, 116,700 people who were not citizens, who were not SIVs, and we just don’t know much about who were those people?”

Kahl, in response to Hawley’s questions, said that about 84 percent of the Afghans evacuated by the Biden administration were deemed to be at risk under Taliban rule. “It’s a mishmash of a lot of different categories,” Kahl said.

It’s a little late to consider the problem of bringing people from a terrorist nation into this country without vetting. Meanwhile, many of those who helped us and many Americans trapped in Afghanistan are still hoping that they will be able to leave Afghanistan alive. There is no excuse for the chaos of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. There is also no excuse for the fact that no one has been held responsible or faced any consequences for the failures involved.