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The Biden administration allowed entry to U.S. territory to Arelys Casañola Quintana, an official of Cuba's communist Castro regime now requesting asylum proceedings out of "fear of socialism," according to a report published by Martí Noticias on Thursday.
The post Biden Grants Asylum to Cuban Communist Official as Political Prisoner Count Surpasses 1,100 appeared first on Breitbart.
The Biden administration must investigate reports of communist China and Cuba directly funding and influencing radical left-wing organizations to incite anti-Israel and anti-American protests across the U.S., according to Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz who noted the goal of such externally funded subversion campaigns is to create chaos, weaken the country, and “tear us apart.”
The post Ted Cruz Calls for Investigation into Reports of China, Cuba Fueling Anti-Israel Protests in U.S. appeared first on Breitbart.
Seven pro-life activists were sentenced to years in federal prison on Tuesday and Wednesday for protesting at the Washington Surgi-Clinic in Washington, DC, in 2020, an abortion clinic infamous for late-term abortions.
The post More Pro-Life Activists Sentenced to Years Behind Bars, Including Veteran, Two Women in Their 70s appeared first on Breitbart.
The Department of Justice under President Joe Biden failed to comply with federal protections when suspending whistleblowers’ security clearances, according to a memo released Tuesday by the Office of the Inspector General.
The inspector general found that the Justice Department doesn’t give employees a way to appeal suspended security clearances, which does not align with a federal regulation updated in 2022, according to its memo. Additionally, the inspector general found that the DOJ under Biden failed to provide employees a reasonable opportunity to stay on the federal payroll if they think the department suspended their clearance to retaliate against them for protected whistleblower activity.
“Existing DOJ practice is inconsistent with the intent of the federal statute,” the inspector general’s office announced in a news release.
House Republicans accused the FBI in a May 18, 2023, report of retaliating against FBI special agent Stephen Friend, FBI special agent Garret O’Boyle, and FBI staff operations specialist Marcus Allen for speaking out against the agency. O’Boyle said being placed on unpaid suspension by the FBI left his family effectively homeless.
The Office of Inspector General said it unearthed these concerns after receiving complaints from “employees alleging that their security clearances were suspended in retaliation for protected whistleblowing activity.”
Empower Oversight President Tristan Leavitt, who represents Allen through his organization, stated on social media that the memo was prompted in part by Allen’s complaint.
? This morning @JusticeOIG released a memo citing concerns about DOJ's compliance with whistleblower protections for employees with a security clearance. The review was in part prompted by the whistleblower complaint of @EMPOWR_us's client, Marcus Allen. https://t.co/Xg0u8bSCGM
— Tristan Leavitt (@tristanleavitt) May 14, 2024
Though the DOJ provides employees with an appeals channel if their security clearance is revoked, no such path exists for employees whose clearance is suspended pending a final decision on whether or not to revoke it, according to the Office of Inspector General. The inspector general identifies this as a problem because the law requires the DOJ to provide a path for whistleblowers to challenge suspensions lasting longer than a year as retaliatory.
Since the DOJ lacks a way for employees who suspect retaliation to contest suspensions if they go on for longer than a year, the agency “does not meet the requirements” required by law, according to the inspector general’s memo.
Losing security clearance often means DOJ employees can no longer do their jobs, seeing as jobs in the department can require that employees have clearance in order to perform their duties, according to the memo. This means, in addition to having their clearance suspended, these employees are often suspended from their jobs without pay.
Federal law mandates that individuals who believe the DOJ suspended their security clearance in retaliation for whistleblowing must be permitted, as far as it is practical, “to retain their government employment status” during the course of the suspension, according to the inspector general.
The Office of Inspector General also found that the DOJ’s existing policies create “the risk that the security process could be misused, as part of an inappropriate effort to encourage an employee to resign.”
The DOJ did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post Inspector General: Biden DOJ Broke Law on FBI Whistleblower Protection appeared first on The Daily Signal.
In previous years, people might have missed the irony. But not now—not after the meteoric rise of women’s basketball.
When the WNBA champs visited the White House last week, reporters didn’t cover it out of obligation. They covered it because it was a real story. And President Joe Biden’s betrayal of girls sports only made it more of one.
The timing of the photo op couldn’t have been more politically inconvenient for the president, whose administration has been lit up by lawsuits over the dismantling of the very thing the team was there to celebrate—women.
While Biden was applauding the champs for “showing that the future of women’s sports is brighter than the Vegas lights,” most people couldn’t help but notice how utterly disingenuous he was being. After all, Biden is the one trying to eradicate 52 years of women’s progress. He’s the one insisting biological men make better girls than our daughters. And it was his idea—not Congress’—to turn Title IX into a manifesto of transgender rights.
Yet, he stood at the podium and with a straight face declared, “It matters to girls and women, finally seeing themselves represented—and it matters to all of America.”
“That’s why,” Biden insisted, “as a nation, we need to support women’s sports … .” Not just during the championships, he tweeted later. “But all year-round. Let’s grow women’s sports and continue inspiring the nation.”
As a nation, we need to support women’s sports by showing up in person and watching on TV – with more sponsorships and programming.
— President Biden (@POTUS) May 10, 2024
Not just during championships. But all year round.
Let's grow women’s sports and continue inspiring the nation.
The reaction was instantaneous. After three years of this administration, most parents, coaches, and teachers understand exactly what this president wants to do to women’s sports—and it isn’t growing them. It’s erasing them.
“Here’s something @POTUS could do to support women,” Alliance Defending Freedom’s Kristen Waggoner fired back: “ … Keep men out of women’s sports.”
Here’s something @POTUS could do to support women instead of watching TV:
— Kristen Waggoner (@KWaggonerADF) May 10, 2024
Keep men out of women’s sports. pic.twitter.com/FZ7FP4bELn
The Family Research Council’s Meg Kilgannon was equally incensed by the president’s hypocrisy. “President Biden wants to ‘grow’ women’s sports by allowing men who ‘identify’ as women to play. Forcing women to accept men in our locker rooms, sports teams, and even prisons IS NOT supporting women,” she argued. “Protecting women’s sports and female athletes would be truly inspirational for the nation’s women and girls, and the men who love us.”
Former NCAA All-American Riley Gaines was just as appalled, saying on her “Gaines on Girls” podcast that the “easiest way to support women’s sports is to keep men out of them.” And frankly, the Independent Women’s Forum pointed out, it’s difficult to believe the “audacity” of Biden’s comments considering that he “just mandated that girls surrender their sports opportunities to boys.”
Members of Congress, who just took turns grilling Education Secretary Miguel Cardona on this absurd rewrite of Title IX, were appalled that Biden would try to play both sides of this debate based on the harm he’s already done. The rule Biden’s team released has already triggered a number of lawsuits from more than 20 states—a fact not lost on the House Education and the Workforce Committee.
After the president’s phony hype for girls sports, Republicans tweeted, “Three weeks ago, the Biden admin finalized a radical rewrite of #TitleIX that would ERASE women’s sports by allowing biological males to compete in female sports. The guy doing the most to harm women’s sports should sit this one out.”
In one of those hearings, Cardona’s refusal to even protect his own daughter prompted a passionate response from Rep. Burgess Owens, R-Utah. When Biden’s top education official couldn’t answer whether he’d step in if his daughter was uncomfortable dressing in front a biological boy, the dad of girls couldn’t believe his ears.
“I’ll say this, Mr. Secretary, before I go on to the next topic,” Owens paused. “With all due respect, I pray that our country will never, ever have the vision that your policies are driving us toward in terms of manhood. It’s a vision that teaches our boys that harming girls is no big deal. I pray that we remain a country that produces overwhelmingly massive majorities of men who feel the way I do about my girls.
I will give my life in a heartbeat for my girls. And the blessing I have is that they have no doubts about that. There are millions of men and women across this country that do not have faith, do not have trust in you protecting our girls because of policies you can’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to.
By the way, those are not very hard questions as a father.
He repeated that sentiment with Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on Saturday’s edition of “This Week on the Hill.” Asked why he took Cardona to task, Owens replied simply, “I have five girls—and I grew up in an age where we were taught, very simply, [to be] a very proud young man, have a good legacy, a good name, be happy when it’s all said and done. Learn to love God, country, family. Respect women … particularly motherhood and womanhood. We all know that’s what makes our country what it is—how we think of our ladies and what they bring to our culture.”
But right now, Owens pointed out, “We have an administration that could care less about our ladies.” Equally as frustrating, he said, they don’t care what their transgender agenda is doing to our sons. “Young men have no idea what it is to respect ladies. They have no idea what it is to not be bullies. And they don’t mind harming ladies in any way they can.”
The reason he put Cardona on the spot, he explained, is that leftists may have a way of dealing with the fallout of this rule in theory, “but when it comes down to their kids, they think quite differently. They use their common sense. Well, not [being] able to answer commonsense questions about putting his daughter in harm’s way shows the American people cannot trust him. He needs to leave,” Owens insisted, adding:
He needs to do something else. We cannot trust this guy to take care of protecting our kids or educating our kids standing up for our culture.
It’s all backward, Owens argued. “The upside is that we now know what they’re all about. And [the] American people will not stand for it.”
This past Friday, former President Donald Trump illustrated the stark difference between the two men’s policies when he vowed to roll back Biden’s extreme new Title IX immediately.
“We’re going to end it on Day One,” he promised.
“Don’t forget, that came down as an executive order. And we’re going to change it. … Tell your people not to worry about it,” he said, calling Biden’s idea of letting boys in the girls’ locker rooms “crazy.”
“It’ll be signed on Day One,” Trump repeated. “It’ll be terminated.”
A slightly modified version of this article was originally published at WashingtonStand.com
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
The post At WNBA Ceremony, Biden Urges America to Support the Women’s Sports He’s Destroying appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Republican senators slammed the Biden administration's announcement Tuesday of increased tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles as being more about President Joe Biden's attempt to bolster his green agenda at the expense of U.S. automakers.
The post Republicans Slam Biden Tariffs on China: ‘Phony Attempt’ to Cover Up ‘Far-Left, Green Agenda’ appeared first on Breitbart.
In response to new federal rules on pronouns and bathrooms based on gender identity, 18 state attorneys general are suing the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The lawsuit, led by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, a Republican, was filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee.
“This end-run around our constitutional institutions misuses federal power to eliminate women’s private spaces and punish the use of biologically accurate pronouns, all at the expense of Tennessee employers,” Skrmetti said in a public statement.
The Daily Signal first reported last month that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published guidance determining that an employer would be guilty of harassment for requiring someone to use a restroom that comports with his or her biological sex, or for referring to someone by a personal pronoun that the person doesn’t want used.
The guidance, which the EEOC adopted on a party-line vote of 3-2, would determine how the commission would handle an employee complaint on the matter and also could affect other employee litigation as the formal federal policy.
EEOC has 2,331 employees, according to its 2023 annual report.
Joining Tennessee in the lawsuit are Republican attorneys general from the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia.
“In America, the Constitution gives the power to make laws to the people’s elected representatives, not to unaccountable commissioners, and this EEOC guidance is an attack on our constitutional separation of powers,” Skrmetti, Tennessee’s attorney general, said. “When, as here, a federal agency engages in government over the people instead of government by the people, it undermines the legitimacy of our laws and alienates Americans from our legal system.”
The EEOC issued new sexual harassment guidance that extends Title VII’s prohibition of sex-based discrimination to cover gender identity. Title VII forbids employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It applies to any employer, public or private, with more than 15 employees.
Under this guidance, an employer may be responsible under Title VII if the employer, or another employee, uses a name or personal pronoun other than the one an employee prefers for his or her gender identity, or limits access to a restroom or other sex-segregated facility that isn’t consistent with what the employee prefers to use.
This rule prevails regardless of the biological sex of the employee in question.
“Harassing conduct based on sexual orientation or gender identity includes … repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s known gender identity (misgendering) or the denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity,” EEOC’s new enforcement guidance says.
An EEOC spokesperson referred The Daily Signal to the Justice Department for comment on this report. A Justice Department spokesperson didn’t respond by publication time.
In a previous public statement, EEOC Chairwoman Charlotte Burrows, a Democrat, praised the enforcement guidance.
“Harassment, both in-person and online, remains a serious issue in America’s workplaces,” Burrows said shortly after the commission announced the guidelines. “The EEOC’s updated guidance on harassment is a comprehensive resource that brings together best practices for preventing and remedying harassment and clarifies recent developments in the law.”
Joining Burrows to vote in favor of the updated harassment guidance were two other Democrats, Vice Chair Jocelyn Samuels and Commissioner Kalpana Kotagal. The commission’s two Republican members, Keith Sonderling and Andrea Lucas, voted against the guidance.
In 2021, Burrows attempted to unilaterally include such actions under what constitutes harassment through a press release, without public comment or a vote by the full commission.
However, a federal court in Tennessee enjoined the guidance from going forward in 2022. Another federal court in Texas vacated Burrows’ guidance altogether. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission did not appeal the rulings.
The post 18 States Fight Federal Trans Agenda on Pronouns, Bathrooms appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The House Oversight and Accountability Committee is probing a controversial Biden administration executive order tasking the federal government with mobilizing voting groups it says are underrepresented.
In a letter obtained by RealClearPolitics, Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., has requested that Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young produce a slew of documents and information concerning the development and implementation of President Joe Biden’s sweeping “Executive Order on Promoting Accessing to Voting” no later than May 28 and a staff-level briefing by May 20.
The demand by the chairman of the House Oversight Committee signals an escalation in Republican lawmakers’ efforts to combat an effort they say may be unlawful, if not unconstitutional.
The administration characterizes its efforts as a remedy to “discriminatory policies and other obstacles … disproportionally affect[ing]” black, non-English-speaking, handicapped, and other minority voters. Executive Order 14019 calls on all federal agencies to develop and execute corrective plans to “promote voter registration and voter participation.”
It instructs officials government-wide to consider “soliciting and facilitating approved, nonpartisan third-party organizations … to provide voter registration services on agency premises.”
Seeing the order as potentially enabling “the executive branch to circumvent the legislative process,” Comer is asking Young to clarify the “constitutional or statutory authority the President relied on,” as well as all “White House and OMB documents and communications” pertaining to the drafting of it.
In past oversight letters, including ones delivered in June 2022 by then-ranking Republicans on various committees, including Comer, members have also raised concerns that officials could violate the Hatch Act prohibiting their engagement in political activities in carrying out the order.
Senate Republicans have also questioned whether the act violates the Antideficiency Act, which precludes federal agencies from using funds “for a purpose that Congress did not explicitly authorize,” namely “voter mobilization.”
“Overreach by the federal government often leads to confusion and inconsistencies,” Comer also stated. He cites a recent letter from Mississippi Secretary of State Michael Watson to Attorney General Merrick Garland to illustrate this issue.
The order mandates that relevant agencies seek to ensure “access to voter registration for eligible individuals in federal custody.”
To satisfy that charge, the Magnolia State official notes that the U.S. Marshals Service is modifying contracts and/or intergovernmental agreements with jails “to provide voter registration materials and facilitate voting by mail,” and likewise that the Justice Department is working to “facilitate voter registration and mail voting for individuals in the custody of the Bureau of Prisons.”
He says these efforts create “numerous opportunities for ineligible prisoners to be registered to vote in Mississippi.” Illegal aliens, Watson warns, may be among those receiving information on how to register to vote.
The Biden administration issued Executive Order 14019 in March 2021. Despite a raft of oversight requests from House Republicans of agencies within their respective committee jurisdictions, those agencies have largely withheld the strategic plans they were tasked with crafting and implementing, and information regarding the putatively nonpartisan groups with which they have coordinated.
The White House has rebuffed RealClearInvestigations in its efforts to solicit details about an order that Republicans characterize as little more than a taxpayer-funded Democrat get-out-the-vote effort.
As RealClearInvestigations has previously reported, the Biden administration has sought to drive voter registration through agencies as diverse as the departments of Labor and Housing and Urban Development via job training centers, public housing authorities, and child nutrition programs. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has issued guidance calling for the agency to register voters at naturalization ceremonies.
The Department of Education has blessed the use of “federal work-study funds to pay students for “supporting broad-based get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration,” and other activities.
In January, over two dozen Pennsylvania legislators filed a federal lawsuit challenging the executive order. The Foundation for Government Accountability—which has litigated with the Biden administration to pry loose documents concerning the order—submitted an amicus brief supportive of the suit, asserting that the agencies’ efforts have one thing in common: “They provide government welfare benefits and other services to groups of voters the vast majority of which have historically voted Democrat.”
Republicans’ concerns over the order extend to the involvement of the third-party groups with which agencies were to consider coordinating. The order itself was built on a blueprint from progressive think-tank Democrats. In a since-deleted but still archived analysis, the outfit estimates that if fully implemented, the order could generate 3.5 million new or updated voter registrations annually—a significant figure given that recent presidential elections have been determined by thousands of votes across a few states.
Democrats as well as the American Civil Liberties Union have reportedly worked to implement the directive. Documents obtained by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project and released earlier this month show that at a July 2021 listening session convened by the Biden administration, left-leaning activist groups encouraged some of the practices federal agencies would ultimately implement to carry out the directive, for example, in targeting prospective voters in prisons and at naturalization ceremonies. (The Daily Signal was foundation by The Heritage Foundation in 2014.)
“Every participant whose party affiliation or political donation history could be identified by the Oversight Project was identified as a Democrat except for one Green Party member,” the report noted.
While the participants suggested efforts to target constituencies—including criminals, immigrants, low-income families, including those in public housing, and Native Americans—the Oversight Project observed that “There is no corresponding evidence of efforts [to] increase voter access and education in likely Republican constituencies.”
As RealClearInvestigations has also recently reported, Democrats have made purportedly nonpartisan voter registration targeting groups that vote disproportionately Democrat a linchpin of their plans to prevail in recent election cycles.
“If the Biden Administration wants to use taxpayer-funded buildings to allow ‘nonpartisan third-party organizations’ to engage in voter registration,” Comer writes, “then the American people deserve to know who these organizations are.”
The Oversight Committee’s pursuit of information regarding the order comes in the wake of the House Small Business Committee’s recent escalation of its own probe of the order.
It recently subpoenaed two members of the Small Business Administration who refused to sit for transcribed interviews regarding an unprecedented partnership the agency inked with the Michigan Department of State. Under the relevant memorandum of understanding, among other things, state officials may conduct in-person voter registration at administration small business outreach events.
Fox News reported that the Small Business Committee found that nearly all, “22 out of 25 such outreach events, have taken place in counties with the highest population of Democratic National Committee target demographics.”
In March, a federal judge dismissed the Pennsylvania legislators’ case challenging the executive order on grounds of standing.
In late April, the legislators took their case to the Supreme Court, filing a petition for writ of certiorari and motioning for expedited consideration of their request in hopes the nation’s highest court will rule favorably on the matter of standing prior to the 2024 election.
This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
The post House Oversight Committee Probing Biden Voter Mobilization Order appeared first on The Daily Signal.
An American PPE manufacturer told Breitbart News that the Biden administration's tariffs on Chinese-made PPE are too little, too late.
The post Exclusive — American PPE Manufacturer: Joe Biden’s Tariffs on China Come ‘Too Little, Too Late’ appeared first on Breitbart.
The Biden administration claims that the Texas border island that was utilized by Mexican drug cartels for drug and human smuggling operations is owned by the federal government. The State of Texas recently secured the island from the Mexican drug cartels and cleared it of underbrush.
The post Biden Admin Claims Cartel-Utilized Border Island Seized by Texas is Federal Land appeared first on Breitbart.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The White House and its Office of Management and Budget instructed federal agencies to use a “template” for determining the cost of implementing President Joe Biden’s executive order to encourage voter participation, according to government emails obtained by The Daily Signal.
Critics use the term “Bidenbucks” to refer to the president’s controversial order from 2021, which directs federal agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get involved in elections.
Several members of Congress contend that Biden’s order on turning out the vote for elections could violate the Antideficiency Act, a law that has three parts. It prohibits federal employees from obligating tax dollars not authorized by Congress, prohibits officials from not spending money as appropriated by Congress, and prohibits agencies from accepting voluntary service from individuals.
Biden’s controversial Executive Order 14019 requires federal agencies to participate in voter registration activities and help third-party organizations perform those activities on agency premises.
Potentially, this could involve spending government funds, contracting with third parties for the payment of those funds, or accepting voluntary services by these “approved” third-party organizations such as Demos.
Biden’s order appears to violate at least two provisions of the Antidefieicncy Act, said Stewart Whitson, senior director of federal affairs at the Foundation for Government Accountability, a conservative watchdog group, told The Daily Signal.
But, Whitson added, to determine whether the Biden administration is violating that law, it’s necessary to know where the money is coming from, where it’s going, and what it’s being used for.
Existing pots of money, for example, could be distributed by the Department of Agriculture to state agencies to help carry out voter registration activities, he suggested.
“Even if the Biden administration were to claim that no public funds are spent to carry out EO 14019—a dubious and laughable claim—this effort would still violate the Antideficiency Act because it would mean federal agencies were accepting voluntary services from these third-party organizations to help carry out EO 14019, who also happen to be politically aligned with the current administration,” Whitson said.
Neither the Agriculture Department nor the Office of Management and Budget responded to The Daily Signal’s request for comment for this report.
OMB “created a template for budget requests for the Voting EO [executive order] within their equity template in case any funding is needed for implementation,” says a Sept. 23, 2021, email among Department of Agriculture officials.
Biden’s executive order also directed agencies to team with private organizations to boost voting. Chief among those groups is the liberal think tank Demos, which drafted the executive action before Biden took office on Jan. 20, 2021.
Akhil Rajan, then an assistant to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsak, sent the September 2021 email message about the OMB’s template to USDA senior adviser Kumar Chandran, now the department’s acting undersecretary. Rajan is now a senior policy adviser to the White House’s deputy chief of staff.
Rajan’s email to Chandran noted, “Contact K. Sabeel Rahman,” apparently meaning he was the one to contact with any questions.
By that fall, Rahman, who was president of Demos when the liberal think tank drafted the executive order on voting, had joined the Biden administration’s OMB as part of its Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. (Rahman is now a professor at Cornell Law School.)
The Daily Signal obtained 73 pages of emails from the Department of Agriculture through a request for public records under the Freedom of Information Act.
The documents were USDA’s second interim response to a request from The Daily Signal regarding Biden’s executive order on encouraging voter registration and voting. Some pages are heavily redacted.
The documents also prominently mention meetings and guidance from Demos, which is based in New York. The left-wing think tank drafted Biden’s executive order to agencies about voter registration in December 2020, the month after Biden defeated Donald Trump before he took office.
Although describing it as “minimal,” USDA acknowledges some budgetary impact from Biden’s order. Any amount, however, could mean obligating tax dollars without congressional authorization, in violation of the Antideficiency Act.
In an email dated Sept. 21, 2021, Anne DeCesaro, chief of staff for the USDA’s Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services, wrote to Chandran about several issues, including “assessment of budgetary impact.”
“For all actions, we expect minimal budgetary impact as providing memos and letters and regular interactions with states are part of our normal business practices,” DeCesaro wrote.
In that same email, DeCesaro explained to Chandran how other agencies within USDA could participate: The National School Lunch Program could promote voter registration in high schools, for example, and the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, could register its beneficiaries to vote.
Ten days earlier, on Sept. 10, 2021, Chandran emailed several senior USDA staff about Biden’s executive order on increasing voter participation.
“Thank you for your past work to complete our interim strategic plan for the voting rights executive order,” Chandran wrote in the email. “We are now being asked to submit a final strategic plan, based on what we provided in our interim plan.”
He later added: “The WH [White House] team leading this effort has put together a template for the final strategic plan. This template largely follows the same format as that for the interim [plan], except it also includes instructions for how to flesh out each proposed action.”
The second interim response from the USDA to The Daily Signal’s FOIA requests didn’t include the department’s strategic plan or the template provided by the White House or its Office of Management and Budget.
An email dated Aug. 3, 2021, refers to a meeting between USDA officials and Demos executives to discuss Biden’s order on voting.
The Agriculture Department and Demos communicated again about the president’s executive order in November 2021.
“We’d love to reconnect soon to learn about your plans and see how Demos and the ACLU [the American Civil Liberties Union] may be able to support you in their continued development and implementation,” Demos senior policy analyst Lauren Williamson wrote Nov. 5 to senior USDA officials.
“When we met last, we talked about wanting to explore additional programs in more detail to ensure maximal impact of the EO for the communities the USDA serves and we’re eager to continue that conversation,” Williamson said.
Four days later, Rajan, assistant to the secretary of agriculture, wrote to Chandan, saying: “[D]emos has been extremely helpful in thinking about ways to expand opportunities for voting, and the coalition they assembled for our last call was rich in the types of groups that have assembled rigorously-tested best practices. So from that perspective it may be helpful to hear from them but understand that REDACTED.”
Because USDA redacted Rajan’s next words, it is impossible to know what Vilsak’s assistant wanted Chandran to understand.
The post EXCLUSIVE: White House Issued ‘Template’ to Impose Biden’s Voter Mobilization Executive Order appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The following is an updated version of a column originally published in December 2022.
One of the bestselling books of the 1970s was “The Peter Principle,” a business management book by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull.
The book’s premise was that employees get promoted based on their performance in their previous jobs until they are ultimately elevated to a position in which they’re incompetent, since skills and success in one position don’t necessarily ensure success in the next. “In a hierarchy,” Peter explained, “every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
If “The Peter Principle” were published today, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre would be a case study in the phenomenon, now called “failing upward.” In Jean-Pierre’s case, that’s reflected in her work for the short-lived Democratic presidential campaigns of John Edwards in 2004 and Martin O’Malley in 2016, and now as the chief spokeswoman for the Biden administration. On Monday, she will mark her second anniversary in that role.
In recent weeks, however, with the 2024 election campaign shifting into high gear, there have been well-sourced reports that high-ranking figures in the Biden administration are not-so-subtly seeking to push Jean-Pierre out of the role—for which she was never qualified to begin with. Many of the same administration figures reportedly behind those efforts to oust her are, not surprisingly, denying the accuracy of the reports.
The New York Post quoted a source as saying the high-ranking administration figures “‘were trying to find Karine a graceful exit’ because of the ugly optics of removing her against her will,” especially because she thinks she’s doing a good job. (One face-saving exit strategy was to offer her the presidency of EMILY’s List, an abortion rights group.)
But as a textbook example of an affirmative-action hire, Jean-Pierre appears not to be going anywhere. An administration so thoroughly wedded to so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion is, in this case, now finding it difficult to divorce itself from DEI. (More on that below.)
The most glaring evidence that Jean-Pierre, 49, has been promoted to her level of incompetence as White House press secretary is her near-total dependence on a binder full of administration talking points, which she often reads from directly at her daily news briefings to the White House press corps.
It’s so bad that Fox News commentator Jesse Watters has taken to referring to her derisively as “Binder,” and it’s so, well, cringeworthy that other critics deliberately mispronounce “Karine” as “Cringe.”
Just as an aside, recall how 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was ridiculed mercilessly in the liberal media for saying during the second presidential debate that he had “binders full of women.” That was his awkward way of referring to files of résumés of women he would consider for staffing his administration were he to win the election. Many of the talking heads’ “binder” jokes snarkily suggested that the squeaky-clean Romney was engaged in some form of BDSM with those women.
It’s standard operating procedure for a press secretary to have notes for ready reference. It’s quite another thing to stare down at them and read those notes all but verbatim.
As far as we know, none of the talking heads who ridiculed Romney has ever mentioned—much less made fun of—Jean-Pierre’s near-complete dependence on her press-briefing binders. Nor have they satirized her oft-repeated deflection—“I don’t have anything”—when she doesn’t have answers to questions for which she’s unprepared.
Nor have the liberal media (or the late-night TV comics) noted, much less lampooned, how Jean-Pierre has mispronounced or mangled words and phrases in the course of her press briefings.
On Dec. 13, 2022, Jean-Pierre touted “bicarmel” support in Congress for the so-called Respect for Marriage Act. “Bicarmel, bipartisan support was had for this piece of legislation,” she said.
But this was no one-off slip of the tongue: She used the term “bicarmel” three times to describe it in the course of the half-hour press briefing. It should have been “bicameral,” of course; meaning, support in both chambers of Congress.
The official White House transcript of the briefing was dishonestly corrected in all three instances to “bicameral” with no indication that it was not an accurate reflection of what was actually said.
On Nov. 28, 2022, in congratulating three Americans who had won Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics, and economics, she mispronounced “Nobel” five times in 40 seconds as “noble.”
Two months to the day earlier, on Sept. 28, Jean-Pierre said that as part of Vice President Kamala Harris’ then-pending trip to South Korea, the veep would visit the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas. Jean-Pierre helpfully noted that it had been “nearly 70 years since the Korean ‘armtis’”—not to be confused with the Korean armistice.
Three weeks before that, on Sept. 6, Jean-Pierre conflated a Russian natural gas pipeline with an upscale American department store chain. She accused Russia of causing an energy crisis in Europe by shutting down its Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which she referred to as the “Nordstrom 1” pipeline.
One can only imagine how former President Donald Trump’s press secretaries, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and later Kayleigh McEnany, would have been pilloried by the liberal White House press corps had they made those sorts of repeated verbal gaffes.
One reason Jean-Pierre still has the high-visibility press secretary’s job, to which she was elevated on May 13, 2022, despite all of the gaffes, is because President Joe Biden is legendary for his own innumerable flubs and miscues.
“White House communications staff has had to correct President Joe Biden’s public remarks at least 148 times since the beginning of 2024, a review of official White House transcripts shows,” the Daily Caller reported April 29. Biden couldn’t very well hold Jean-Pierre to a higher standard, could he?
But the real reason Jean-Pierre remains in her post today is because of the identity politics to which the Biden administration and the Democratic Party have sworn undying allegiance. She is immune from criticism—and from reassignment to a less high-profile post—only because she checks all of the boxes of identity-politics “intersectionality” as the first black, first LGBTQ, and first immigrant White House press secretary.
In the Biden administration, Jean-Pierre demonstrates daily that meritocracy is an afterthought—if it’s thought of at all. The moral of this story: Live by DEI, die by it.
The post Biden Admin in a DEI Bind(er) of Its Own Making, Stuck With Incompetent Jean-Pierre appeared first on The Daily Signal.
President Joe Biden is “playing politics” with the lives of Americans being held hostage by the Gaza-based terrorist Hamas group, according to Iowa Republican Sen. Joni Ernst. She slammed the 81-year-old Democrat leader for “playing into Hamas’s hands” and “making terrorists rejoice, instead of tremble in fear” by withholding support from the nation's “greatest ally in the region,” Israel.
The post Exclusive — Joni Ernst: Biden ‘Playing Politics’ with Americans Held Hostage by Hamas, ‘Making Terrorists Rejoice’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Republican officials are blasting the current “wildly anti-Israel” administration for withholding crucial ammunition from Israel in its war on the terror group Hamas, accusing President Joe Biden of “carrying water for the pro-Hamas mob” in order to “appease his radical anti-Semitic base” and the Democrat party’s “pro-Hamas wing” for his own “personal political gain.”
The post GOP Accuses Biden of Withholding Arms from Israel for ‘Personal Political Gain’ – Pandering to ‘Pro-Hamas Mob’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott wrote a letter to President Joe Biden opposing a Department of the Air Force proposal to transfer National Guard units from state control to federal without the governors' authorization. The proposal calls for certain National Guard units to be transferred out of the National Guard to the newly created Space Command.
The post Texas Governor Joins with Bipartisan Coalition Opposing Biden Admin’s National Guard Power Grab appeared first on Breitbart.
The Biden administration is refusing to comment on if it is withholding aid from Israel after a Sunday report said that it was.
The post Biden Administration Refuses to Say if It Is Withholding Aid from Israel appeared first on Breitbart.
The United States diplomat who quit over President Joe Biden’s handling of the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas spoke out, saying she feels that the U.S. is on the “wrong side of history.” Hala Rharrit, the first U.S. diplomat
The post U.S. Diplomat Who Quit Over Biden’s Approach to Israel Speaks Out: ‘Wrong Side of History’ appeared first on Breitbart.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A White House official told the Agriculture Department to include left-leaning groups, including the United Food and Commercial Workers union and the League of United Latin American Citizens, among “stakeholders” to help implement President Joe Biden’s executive order aimed at turning out the vote.
At the same time, records obtained by The Daily Signal show that USDA brass had extensive discussions with the Raben Group, a Democrat-aligned lobbying group managed by former officials of the Clinton and Obama administration.
The Raben Group represented the left-wing advocacy group Demos, which has pushed the so-called Green New Deal and labor unions’ policy goals. As The Daily Signal previously reported, Demos worked with the USDA on “best practices” to boost voting.
The United Food and Commercial Workers, the League of United Latin American Citizens, and the Raben Group were not on a previously reported list of more than four dozen left-leaning organizations that participated in a “listening session” with White House officials on July 12, 2021, under six months after Biden became president.
Two days before that “listening session” via Zoom between White House officials and the left-wing groups, Raben Group associate Dylan Tureff wrote on behalf of Demos to DeWayne Goldman, USDA’s senior adviser for racial equality to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
Tureff’s goal: to set up a meeting with Goldman to “discuss how your office can play an essential role in protecting and expanding democracy.”
Biden signed the executive order in March 2021, directing federal agencies to partner with private organizations to increase voter registration and participation in elections.
Since that time, records emerged through Freedom of Information Act requests from multiple agencies showing that the Biden administration’s bureaucracy has enlisted an army of left-leaning nonprofits to mobilize voters.
Critics of Biden’s order have called it “BidenBucks.”
They also say Biden’s Executive Order 14019 weaponized taxpayer-funded agencies to advance his reelection effort—and those of Democrats.
Demos long has been associated with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
“Demos and its organizational partners have identified the below-stated agency systems and programs as areas of great opportunity for the implementation of this vital executive order,” Tureff told USDA’s Goldman in his July 2021 message.
Writing on behalf of Demos, Tureff said get-out-the-vote efforts for Agriculture Department offices could include online portals; “direct interaction programs”; grant programs “for both state and private actors” grants for governments and authorities; and programs focused on tribal services and support.
Goldman wrote to colleagues July 27: “Do we have any activities around this EO [executive order] on Voting Access? I have a meeting request from Demos to engage with USDA, but could use some help understanding the prioritization. Do you have any knowledge of this group?”
In response, Lynn Overmann, USDA senior adviser for data and technology, seemed to raise some concerns in the email thread under the subject line “Demos Meeting Request on Voting Rights EO.”
Overmann wrote to Goldman and others: “Has USDA supported voting rights efforts in the past? Given our footprint in communities, I could imagine offering voter registration information at in-person locations or sharing information broadly across our communications channels, but think there would be privacy/consent issues around sharing data.”
The Biden executive order directed all federal agencies to develop a strategic plan for increasing voting by September 2021.
The Agriculture Department’s first interim response to a records request by The Daily Signal didn’t include the department’s strategic plan, but did include emails discussing what its key priorities likely would be.
Kumar Chandran, acting undersecretary for food, nutrition, and consumer services, sent an email to colleagues on May 29, 2021, that said an attached draft strategic plan contained the “top 5 suggestions.”
The email released to The Daily Signal, in which several redactions were made, summarizes the top five recommendations as including voter registration at “Voter Registration & Information at Food and Nutrition Service Program Sites Though WIC and SNAP sites.”
WIC is an Agriculture Department food program for “women, infants and children.” SNAP, better known to Americans as food stamps, is an acronym for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
Critics of Biden’s executive order allege that government agencies could give a false impression to the public that benefits of social programs are tied to voting.
The USDA also listed “Rural Development” as the second of the top five suggestions. Details were redacted.
Third on the list was “voter registration and information through production and conservation,” but again details were missing.
Fourth was ensuring that the Agriculture Department’s 100,000 employees were registered to vote and had leave time to vote.
The fifth and last suggestion for implementing Biden’s order pertained to social media and communication about voter information using Twitter and other such platforms.
An email dated April 7, 2021, from Paul Zeiss with the White House scheduling office sent a list of “stakeholders” on voting issues to Akhil Rakam, then a USDA official.
The mail included the mentions of the United Food and Commercial Workers, or UFCW, and the League of United Latin American Citizens, or LULAC.
UFCW, the sixth-largest labor union in the United States, represents workers in the food production, retail, and chemical industries.
LULAC, an advocate for Hispanic Americans, sued Texas in 2006 over the state’s redistricting, alleging that the new election districts violated the Voting Rights Act. The Supreme Court upheld the districting plan, but found some districts needed to be revised.
In 2021, the League of United Latin American Citizens served subpoenas on several Republican state legislators in Texas in connection with a lawsuit over the state’s election reforms.
Other “stakeholders” the White House identified for USDA are more directly related to agriculture and not overtly political.
These groups include the Intertribal Agriculture Council, the National Black Farmers Association, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture, the National Association of Counties, the Rebuild Rural Coalition, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, the American Public Human Services Association, and Rural Organizing.
A USDA spokesperson didn’t respond to The Daily Signa’s request for comment on this report.
Demos, the Raben Group, UFCW, and LULAC also didn’t respond to inquiries from The Daily Signal.
The post EXCLUSIVE: Harvesting Voters? These Left-Wing Groups Are Teaming With USDA appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Why does the Biden administration want open borders? As a researcher and writer on immigration, that’s the question I often get asked.
Here are the three reasons I think are behind President Joe Biden’s deliberate border chaos: electoral politics, extortion, and, most insidiously, ideology. I’ll start with ideology and come back to the other two reasons in my next two weekly BorderLine columns.
The most dangerous driver behind Biden’s open borders is ideological. Policy differences can be negotiated, but as we’re seeing on college campuses, people fanatically committed to an idea can prove intransigent, regardless of the facts.
When you see the word “abolition” used in connection with criminal justice and immigration, you might be confused. Americans rightly associate the term with ending slavery and abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison who were active before the Civil War.
Why are academics, politicians, and race professionals using it in 2024?
Those saying “abolitionist” today have appropriated it for the positive historical connotation it possesses, but they mean something else entirely. To see the roots of their ideology, you have to go back to the dawn of the New Left, as described by Chris Rufo in his book “America’s Cultural Revolution.”
Under their intellectual godfather, German academic Herbert Marcuse, Marxist-Leninists, Black Panthers, the Weather Underground terrorist group, and Students for a Democratic Society gathered.
This leftist alliance believed—as the Students for a Democratic Society magazine Prairie Fire explained—that the U.S. was founded on genocide, slavery, and racism. Its goal was to abolish the existing capitalist America and build a new society. One element of this was destroying the justice system. The Black Panthers’ manifesto thus called for the release of all black men who were incarcerated, no matter for what crime.
As Rufo writes, “[Communist Angela] Davis and her comrades began to call not for the release of individual criminals, but for the abolition of the entire system.” Davis said that “a society without racism … has to be a society without prisons.”
The Black Lives Matter organization adopted the same agenda of “abolition.” The mobs that destroyed a police station and looted Minneapolis in 2020 shouted, “Abolish the police, then the prisons.” The “abolitionist” activists in the Seattle CHAZ commune wanted to abolish the police, prisons, and courts.
BLM founder Patrisse Cullors was crystal clear in this Harvard Law Review essay from 2019: “Abolition means no borders. Abolition means no Border Patrol. Abolition means no Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” America is the source of world evil, in her view, and thus has no right to exist as a nation state nor keep anyone in the world from entering its borders.
Some Biden administration officials seem to share this core belief. Avideh Moussavian, a senior appointee at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, tweeted “#abolishICE” in 2018 and “cut ICE and [Customs and Border Protection] funding” in 2019.
Another Biden appointee, Claire Trickler-McNulty, undermined ICE from within before leaving for a nongovernmental organization partly funded by the Vera Institute for Justice. The Vera Institute says, “The U.S. immigration system is an arrest-to-deportation pipeline rooted in racism,” wants no detention of people in the U.S. illegally, and grants millions to nongovernmental organizations defending illegal immigrants.
“Abolition” ideology also has clear links with today’s campus support of Hamas. Take a look at this course taught at Columbia University this Spring by professor Mohamed Abdou, titled “Decolonial-Queerness and Abolition in SWAN.” SWANA likely stands for South West Asian and North African people. A sentence from the course description sums it up:
Using intersectional/assemblage-based theories, what decolonial, gender-based readings and formulations of feminisms/queerness exist that evade the apparent tidiness of European feminist and narrow LGBTQIA categories that characterizes most (non)Euro-American political queer-feminist scholarship beyond the depiction of queer BIPOC as co-opted and duped, colonized pawns of ‘Gay Empire’ towards elucidating critical discussions on identity, agency, subjectivity, and dissidence?
Parents are paying $90,000 a year for their kids to learn that kind of balderdash. But even if you can’t make any sense of that sentence, you can be sure of what Abdou means by “abolition.”
Columbia University now resembles Gaza as designed by outdoor equipment retailer Eastern Mountain Sports. Meanwhile at Princeton University, students briefly set up a camp last week “in solidarity with Gaza to protest Princeton’s role in funding the ongoing genocide,” according to organizers Princeton Israeli Apartheid Divest.
Dan-el Padilla Peralta was among faculty who signed a letter supporting the Princeton students and boycotting Columbia University. He is a “classics” professor who calls his field “equal parts vampire and cannibal” and the foundation of white supremacy, and argues that it should be abolished.
Peralta came from the Dominican Republic as a child, and his family overstayed their visas and became illegal immigrants. Leftist academics such as Peralta do not like nations or borders any more than they do classical antiquity. In his book “Undocumented,” Peralta wrote, “Demography is a b**ch. Holla at me if you want me to break it down for you.” By this, Peralta implies that without immigration enforcement, the “global majority”—defined here as everyone but white Europeans—will be able to dominate every country.
What we’re seeing at the southern border and on college campuses comes from the same ideological roots and ends the same way: anarchy.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues like human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
US Should Adopt UK’s ‘Rwanda Plan’ to Address Illegal Immigration
Biden’s Precarious Parole Programs for Illegal Immigrants
My Look Inside Biden’s Illegal Immigrant Catch-and-Release Craziness
What I Saw on My Latest Visit to the Border
You Can’t Fool All of the People All of the Time About Immigration
The post The Ideological Roots of the Open Borders Push: The BorderLine appeared first on The Daily Signal.
White House officials met with liberal activists to discuss boosting voting among prisoners and immigrants just four months after President Joe Biden signed an executive order on turning out the vote, newly released records show.
On July 12, 2021, White House officials held a “listening session” that included dozens of organizations, many known for turning out Democrat voters. Justin Levitt, who was the White House senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights at the time, kicked off the event along with Jesselyn McCurdy of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
Keeda Haynes, legal adviser with the Sentencing Project, a legal assistance and training organization for prisoners, said the administration should assist “eligible voters who are incarcerated have been left out of voting,” according to notes of the meeting. Haynes added, “Felony disenfranchisement is voter suppression.”
The records were obtained from the Justice Department by The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project through the Freedom of Information Act. (The Heritage Foundation founded The Daily Signal.)
That session with White House and other Biden administration officials included staffers from more than four dozen left-leaning groups, including the AFL-CIO, the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Democracy Fund, the Al Sharpton-founded National Action Network, the George Soros-backed Open Society Policy Center, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. But only a few of the groups were participants in the meeting. Participants were sent a Zoom link.
The meeting and agenda were first discovered by the Foundation for Government Accountability, a government watchdog group in 2022. What’s new from the recently released batch of documents are details about what was said in the meeting, as well as Justice Department communications leading up to the conference.
The records also show the email correspondence between the White House and the Justice Department for the weeks leading to the meeting. The documents showed that voting for certain incarcerated individuals was a priority.
Less than a month after Biden signed the order, then-associate White House counsel Larry Schwartztol emailed Associate Deputy Attorney General Myesha Braden on April 1, 2021.
Schwartztol said the White House counsel’s office is working with the Domestic Policy Council and wrote about helping people in custody or under the supervision of the Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. Marshals Service to vote.
“Section 9 of the [executive order] directs the [attorney general] to take various steps to facilitate voter registration and voting for people in [Bureau of Prisons] and [U.S. Marshals Service] custody and to coordinate with the probation and pretrial services on providing similar resources and assistance to people under supervision,” Schwartztol wrote.
The Daily Signal previously reported that the Bureau of Prisons partnered with left-leaning groups such as the League of Women Voters, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Campaign Legal Center, and the Washington Lawyers’ Committee to boost voting among eligible citizens who were incarcerated while awaiting trial or other circumstances, or in restoring their voting rights after serving their sentence.
At the July 2021 meeting with White House officials and liberal groups, Nik Youngsmith, legislative staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, spoke to the gathering about “immigrants and noncitizens.”
The public record showed Youngsmith wanted to be cautious.
“We support registration efforts. We also want to make sure they are done in a careful way,” the meeting notes paraphrase Youngsmith as saying. “All fed employees must be well trained in this. Need to trust people are acting in bounds of the law. Especially when there are language issues. Federal employees should know who should be properly registered and not. Don’t want someone to face charges for registering on bad info.”
The Washington Examiner first reported on the Justice Department documents obtained by the Oversight Project.
“One of the biggest dangers to free and fair elections is the Biden Administration’s weaponization of every single federal agency to work with far-left groups for the biggest get-out-the-vote operation in human history,” said a joint statement from Mike Howell, executive director of the Heritage Oversight Project, and Kyle Brosnan, chief counsel for the Oversight Project.
“Of course, these efforts are only being pointed in one direction in an illegitimate attempt to keep President Biden in the White House,” the Howell and Brosnan statement continued. “Our findings prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this whole effort was implemented in a radically partisan manner. We will be releasing much more on this threat soon and urge all members of the public to stay alert.”
Jose Morales, the deputy director of Fair Fight Action, an anti-voter ID group founded by twice-losing Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, also spoke. Morales called for allowing federal employees to take the day off to vote. He also complained that “based on experiences last year and this year, there are many new ID requirements,” according to the Justice Department notes about the session.
Fair Fight didn’t get everything it wanted from Biden on federal employee voting.
While the administration did not give federal employees a whole day off to vote, The Daily Signal previously reported the Office of Personnel Management adopted a policy to give four hours of leave to federal employees to vote and volunteer to be election workers.
Two staffers from the ACLU—Sarah Brannon and Ceridwen Cherry—told the gathering that the HealthCare.gov website, better known as the Obamacare exchanges, reaches 20 million people per year and should be used for signing up voters.
Demos, a liberal think tank that drafted much of the executive order after Biden was elected but before his inauguration, was also part of the gathering.
Laura Williamson, then associate director of Demos, said the Department of Housing and Urban Development should register voters at public housing units. It also called for the Fair Housing Administration to engage in voter registration when making loans to buy homes.
The Daily Signal first reported that under the executive order, HUD authorized targeting votes at public housing units.
The post Here’s the Kind of Voters Left-Wing Activists Are Scheming With the White House to Turn Out in November appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Vice President Kamala Harris is continuing her "Fight for Reproductive Freedoms" tour in Florida on Wednesday — the same day a six-week abortion restriction is set to take effect in the state.
The post VP Kamala Harris to Give Abortion Speech in Florida as Six-Week Restriction Takes Effect appeared first on Breitbart.
Seventeen Republican-led states are suing President Joe Biden's Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) for forcing employers across the United States to accommodate workers' abortions.
The post 17 States Challenge EEOC Rule Making Employers Accommodate Workers’ Abortions appeared first on Breitbart.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Under new federal guidelines, an employer would be guilty of harassment for requiring someone to use a restroom that comports with his or her biological sex, or for referring to someone by a pronoun the person doesn’t want used.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission published the guidance on Monday. The guidance passed on a 3-2 vote, along party lines on Friday, a source familiar with the EEOC confirmed.
“Harassing conduct based on sexual orientation or gender identity includes … repeated and intentional use of a name or pronoun inconsistent with the individual’s known gender identity (misgendering) or the denial of access to a bathroom or other sex-segregated facility consistent with the individual’s gender identity,” the new enforcement guidance says.
The guidelines would affect most employers, private or public.
The EEOC announced last fall a proposed update of its harassment policy affecting to include sexual orientation and gender identity rules. This prompted opposition from 20 state attorneys general, led by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti.
In November, the attorneys general contended what was then the proposed “Enforcement Guidance on Harassment in the Workplace” updates would threaten the First Amendment rights of employers, employees, and possibly customers.
“Here, the proposed guidance would require employers to affirm or convey to employees and customers—often against religious conviction or deeply held personal belief—messages that a person can be a gender different from his or her biological sex, that gender has no correlation to biology, or that they endorse the use of pronouns like ‘they/them,’ ‘xe/xym/xyrs,’ or ‘bun/bunself,” the letter from the attorneys general says.
“This mandate flouts First Amendment freedoms of religion and speech—yet EEOC rejects any role for accommodation of contrary religious beliefs or speech,” the attorneys general add. “Further, EEOC’s for-cause insulation from direct presidential supervision unconstitutionally blurs the lines of accountability for this overhaul of workplaces nationwide.”
In 2021, EEOC Chairwoman Charlotte Burrows attempted, in a statement, to unilaterally include these actions under harassment without public comment or a vote by the full commission. However, a federal court in Tennessee enjoined the guidance from going forward in 2022. A separate federal court in Texas
vacated Burrows’ guidance altogether. The commission did not appeal the rulings.
Title VII prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It applies to any employer with more than 15 employees.
“Harassment, both in-person and online, remains a serious issue in America’s workplaces,” said Burrows, a Democrat, of the new guidelines in a public statement issued Monday afternoon. “The EEOC’s updated guidance on harassment is a comprehensive resource that brings together best practices for preventing and remedying harassment and clarifies recent developments in the law.”
Joining Burrows to vote in favor of the updated harassment guidance were two other Democrat commissioners, Jocelyn Samuels and Kalpana Kotagal. The two Republican members, Keith Sonderling and Andrea Lucas, voted against the guidance.
Women’s rights are under attack by the EEOC, said Lucas in a statement issued Monday.
“Biological sex is real, and it matters. Sex is binary (male and female) and is immutable,” Lucas said in a public statement. She added, “It is not harassment to acknowledge these truths—or to use language like pronouns that flow from these realities, even repeatedly. Relatedly, each sex has its own, unique privacy interests, and women have additional safety interests that warrant certain single-sex facilities at work and other spaces outside the home. It is neither harassment nor discrimination for a business to draw distinctions between the sexes in providing single-sex bathrooms or other similar facilities which implicate these significant privacy and safety interests.”
In 2020, the Supreme Court held in the case of Bostock v. Clayton County that a firm violates Title VII if it fires an employee “simply for being … transgender.” But, the Republican state attorneys general argued in the November letter, “Bostock gives no license to these and other of EEOC’s novel proposals.”
“Nor, in all events, can EEOC permissibly require these deeply controversial gender-identity accommodations without express congressional authorization—authorization not found in Title VII,” the letter continued.
The guidance does not carry the same weight as a law passed by Congress or a regulation imposed by an agency. However, the guidance essentially states the position of the EEOC. This means an employee inclined to claim harassment regarding a restroom or pronoun dispute would have the guidance to refer to. Also, under private litigation, a plaintiff could refer to the formal position of a federal agency.
“If you still believed that the Biden administration’s pedal-to-the-metal advancing of gender ideology is all about freedom and individual rights, this new EEOC ‘guidance’ should dispel that myth,” Jay Richards, director of the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. (The Heritage Foundation founded The Daily Signal.)
“Employers may now find themselves in legal hot water if they prefer to use language, including pronouns, and preserve private spaces that comport with biological reality rather than the bizarre canons of gender ideology,” Richards continued. “We’re dealing with a totalitarian ideology that wants to destroy the present order. The sooner normal people understand that, the sooner we can dispatch this ideology to the history books.”
The EEOC website describes guidance as “official agency policy and explains how the laws and regulations apply to specific workplace situations.”
“The Biden administration is no stranger to twisting federal law to suit its aims, and the publication of the EEOC’s final rule on workplace harassment is a prime example,” Sarah??? Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow for The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal.
Perry added:
According to the Biden administration, gender identity and expression are tantamount to ‘sex’ in federal law and require an employer to facilitate an employee’s ‘preferred pronoun’ use and requested bathroom use or face a possible complaint for sexual harassment.
This is both an untenable conclusion, and not supported by the underlying Supreme Court decision on which the Administration so greatly relies: Bostock v. Clayton County. What’s more, biological women are again rendered to second-class citizens under the EEOC rule and forced to give up any vestige of privacy and security they previously enjoyed.
And as if that wasn’t enough, the mandatory use of an employee’s requested name and pronouns—those which differ from that employee’s biological sex—is a patent violation of the 1st Amendment, and creates an unavoidable conflict between gender ideology, and freedom of speech and religion. I expect the swift filing of multiple legal challenges against the new rule.
This story was updated to include comments from commission members of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission.
The post ‘Harassment’: Feds Impose Trans Agenda on Employers for Pronouns, Bathrooms appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The unprecedented “lawfare” being waged against former President Donald Trump by the Biden Department of Justice “goes well beyond” the former president and actually targets “anybody” who supports Trump or is conservative. That was the warning from Maryland Republican Rep. Andy Harris, who cautioned against the use of “third-world tactics” that have no place in the U.S., as well as how many on the left would likely “deny the outcome” of a democratically-elected Trump in 2024.
The post Exclusive: Rep. Andy Harris Blasts Biden DOJ’s ‘Third-World’ Lawfare Tactics Against Trump, Warns All Conservatives ‘Targets’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Dave Walsh said in an interview that grid coordinators are warning they will not be able to meet demands for electricity under the EPA's latest rules.
The post Exclusive — Dave Walsh: Electrical Grid Operators Are ‘Sounding Alarm’ over EPA Rules appeared first on Breitbart.
U.S. global influence is declining under President Joe Biden, whose presidency is a continuation of Obama's policies, according to Congressman Keith Self.
The post Exclusive: Rep. Keith Self Warns U.S. Constitutional Republic Can’t Survive ‘Fourth Obama Term’ appeared first on Breitbart.
The Biden administration decided to delay a ban on menthol cigarettes after receiving criticism from black voters and cigarette companies.
The post Biden Administration Delays Ban on Menthol Cigarettes as Black Leaders Pan Proposal appeared first on Breitbart.
If a belligerent state launched 185 explosive drones, 36 cruise missiles and 110 surface-to-surface missiles from three fronts against civilian targets within the United States, would President Joe Biden call it a “win”?
Would the president tell us that the best thing we can do now is show “restraint”? What if that same terror state’s proxy armies had recently helped murder, rape and kidnap more than 1,000 American men, women and children? What if this terror state were trying to obtain nuclear weapons so it could continue to agitate without any consequences?
This is what Biden and the Barack Obama acolytes, Iranian dupes and Israel antagonists he’s surrounded himself with demand of the Jewish state.
And by “Iranian dupes,” I don’t only mean the Jake Sullivans and Antony Blinkens of the world, who worked to elevate the mullahs over Sunni allies and the Israelis, or even a Hamas bestie like Rob Malley or Israel hater like Maher Bitar. I mean assets of the Islamic State who promised the Iranian government to help out in any way possible.
Their worldview is a cancer that’s metastasized within the Democratic Party. To these people, Israel will always be the villain. And if the Iranian regime’s murder of more than 600 American servicemen couldn’t cool that bromance, 1,200 dead Jews certainly aren’t going to do the trick.
The Trump administration undercut Palestinian terror efforts, stifled Iranian ambitions, and created space for the Gulf states and Israel to enhance ties.
Biden immediately reversed those gains, reverting to Obama-era Iranian boosterism. We’re now experiencing the consequences of pacifying Islamic ideologues. Obama might have sent the mullahs pallets of cash in the middle of the night, but the Biden administration openly subsidized the Revolutionary Guard with a $6 billion ransom payment, at least $25 billion in sanction relief, including $10 billion via a waiver, and so on.
Let’s also remember that one of Biden’s first foreign policy decisions was to overturn Trump-era policy by releasing millions to Gaza that would be sifted off by Hamas, releasing funding to Hamas-allied United Nations Relief and Works Agency, and removing the Iranian-backed Houthis from the terror list.
It should be mind-boggling that Biden likely knew Iran was moving forward with its attack but still gave his goofy and impotent “don’t” when asked about it by the press.
Indeed, the Biden administration’s position seems to be that Israeli military and defense forces exist to allow Iran to have a hissy fit and save face. The Iranian attack is only “symbolic” because it failed.
Just because you shoot at someone and miss doesn’t mean you’re not trying to kill them. Yes, the Iranians were embarrassed. But they almost surely view this as a win. And they also crossed a red line by firing on Israel from their own territory. Yet Israel is apparently the only nation on Earth that is permitted to fully defend itself only if its enemies succeed.
Every conflict against Israel unfurls the same way: Its enemies threaten or attack the country. Israel responds and heads for a victory. Only then does the world demand “restraint.” Finally, the antagonists demand Israel rewind history to a more convenient spot. (Modern Democrats demand that Israel show restraint before it even has a chance to respond. That’s a new twist.)
Those, for instance, who contend that Israel started the conflict when it hit a “diplomatic mission” in Syria last week are engaged in restarting the historical clock when it suits them. There are no Iranian diplomatic missions in Syria. There are buildings where Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps terror leaders coordinate attacks on civilians — against Arabs as well as Jews. Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the “general” Israel killed last week, helped plan the barbarism of Oct 7.
Recall that the United States atomized Qasem Soleimani at a neutral nation’s airport. Though, of course, Obamaites protested that killing as well.
Now, it is something of a cliche to contend that Israel must be right 100% of the time while its enemies only need to be right once. It also happens to be true. Israel, a country the size of New Jersey with a dense population area, relies on deterrence and preemption.
Democrats blamed their strawman, Benjamin Netanyahu, not Hamas or Iran, for trying to “drag” the world into war. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman, perhaps the wrongest person ever to tread on this planet, theorized that the prime minister wanted “a war to shore up his own crumbling political base.”
Axois reports that Netanyahu was reluctant to strike back, while his cabinet wanted to move immediately. The “war hawk” perception of him is a myth, created by the Left because of the prime minister’s open opposition to Obama’s mullah bootlicking.
We have no idea what Israel will do. Maybe caution is the best policy. The notion that the Jewish state simply lashes out in revenge and doesn’t rationally consider all its options is preposterous. Whatever happens, it should be on Israel’s terms, not Iran’s.
COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM
The post The World Is Paying a Deadly Price for Barack Obama’s Foreign Policy Legacy appeared first on The Daily Signal.
HHS finalized a rule this week that prevents medical records from being used in criminal investigations regarding women who leave their states to get an abortion.
The post Biden Admin Bars Using Medical Records to Investigate Out-of-State Abortions appeared first on Breitbart.
Current antisemitic protests on U.S. campuses are “horrifying” and “the worst that we've seen since the 30s,” according to Israel's Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli, who described the “orchestrated, organized, [and] funded” demonstrations as the “nightmare” of America and Western civilization, arguing that supporters of Hamas are enemies of both.
The post Exclusive: Israel’s Diaspora Minister Slams Antisemitic U.S. Campus Protests as ‘Nightmare of America’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Florida is vowing to fight the Biden administration's radical Title IX changes, which are being interpreted as promoting gender confusion.
The post Florida Vows to Fight Biden Administration’s Title IX Changes: Joe Biden Trying to ‘Gaslight the Country’ appeared first on Breitbart.
Supreme Court justices appeared split during oral arguments on Wednesday in a case surrounding the Biden administration’s attempt to require emergency room doctors to perform abortions under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act of 1986 (EMTALA).
The post Supreme Court Seems Split on Biden Mandating Emergency Room Abortions appeared first on Breitbart.
Biden, a self-professed Catholic, made the sign of the cross while Florida Democratic Party chairperson Nikki Fried decried the state's six-week abortion limit.
The post Biden Makes Sign of the Cross During Florida Trip Promoting Abortion appeared first on Breitbart.
Syrian dictator Bashar Assad claims his regime has meetings “from time to time” with officials from the Biden administration.
The post Syrian Dictator Bashar Assad Claims Meeting with Biden Administration ‘from Time to Time’ appeared first on Breitbart.
As President Joe Biden and his Democratic colleagues continue to undermine the U.S.’ longtime strategic alliance with Israel, a recent event saw top faith leaders, Republican lawmakers, and conservatives gather to underscore a unified stance against the failed two-state solution, while promoting the idea of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) as integral to Israel, grounded in a religious and political opposition to Palestinian statehood.
The post Top Faith Leaders, Conservatives Gather to Reject Biden’s Failed Two-State ‘Solution’ for Israel appeared first on Breitbart.
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—Eva Edl turned 10 years old in a World War II-era death camp.
She believes she may die in a United States prison.
Charged by President Joe Biden’s Justice Department with violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, Edl faces up to 11 years in prison and $350,000 fines. She is about to turn 89 years old.
“When I was indicted, I began to prepare to die there,” she said thoughtfully in a phone interview with The Daily Signal. “Right now, I am ambivalent. … I’m doing the best I can to get ready. Haven’t talked to a funeral director yet.”
“I’m just being sensible,” she added. “There’s no guarantee that I survive it.”
Drawing on her brutal experiences with communism in what was then Yugoslavia, she refuses to underestimate those who have the power to oppress her, recalling how her mother couldn’t believe they were in danger until it was too late.
“We haven’t done anything wrong! Who would harm us?” she remembered her mother saying.
“Then our whole people was destroyed,” Edl said. “We hadn’t done anything wrong, as far as I know.”
As Danube Swabians, an ethnic German-speaking group, Edl and her family were rounded up in the aftermath of World War II by soldiers under the direction of Yugoslavia’s communist leader, Josip Broz, commonly known as Tito.
She described how she was shipped off in cattle cars to a concentration camp in Yugoslavia at age 9: “We were packed body to body, and being a small child, I could hardly breathe. We had no food, no water … .”
The camp (named Gakowa, or Gakovo, according to Edl) was “primitive,” she said, and its purpose was the extermination of the Danube Swabians. Many of those in Gakowa with Edl died from starvation or disease and were buried in mass graves.
She slept on straw. She had her one dress. Very little food.
“You couldn’t wash your clothes because all you have is that one dress,” she explained. “So, you were filthy. And then we had diarrhea, dysentery, typhoid, and rats and anything you could imagine, and we had no toilet facilities to contain all that. We had an outhouse. Well, how do you have masses of people with diarrhea just go to one outhouse? So, you know what happened. And filth and disease went rampant.”
Her mother, forced to work as a slave laborer in the fields, escaped and smuggled herself into the camp in a wagon full of corn, determined to find her young daughter among the thousands of prisoners, Edl says. Soldiers poked through the load of corn with bayonets, just barely missing her mother.
Edl’s mother finally found her young daughter lying on a pile of rancid straw, starving, too weak to walk, “festering” with lice and other creatures.
The scene was so horrific that it caused Edl’s mother to rush outside and vomit, although Edl did not learn this until years later. At the time, she was so weak she could barely register her mother’s presence, and she could scarcely recognize her mother, thin and emaciated as she was. But it seemed to Edl a miracle that they had been reunited—even in a concentration camp.
“I just couldn’t believe it was her,” she explained. “It took a while.”
Edl’s stories of her time in the death camp feature many brave women: her grandmother, who voluntarily chose to go to the concentration camp with her in order to protect her; her mother, who repeatedly risked death to reunite her children and get them safely to the United States; and her sister, who, forced by a soldier to dig her own grave, looked him in the eye and dared him to kill her. (He didn’t, according to Edl.)
So, it should come as no surprise that Edl, after she came to the United States in 1955 and was exposed to a human rights crisis she had never before heard of, decided that she must do whatever was in her power to save lives.
Edl took an English course around 1968, and during the course, someone brought up whether or not the United States should legalize abortion. (Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that there was a constitutional right to abortion, did not come about until 1973.)
“I didn’t know what [abortion] meant,” Edl said. She was blown away by the explanation she received. As she spoke with The Daily Signal, she reflected that an unborn baby is not a tumor, but a life. No one should have the ability to just end a baby’s life, she said.
“I tried to speak up in that subject, but I must have done a very bad job because I don’t think I convinced the person that I was speaking with. And after that, I just brought the subject up all the time because it bothered me that people would actually think of killing their own children.”
During the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, she first learned that abortions don’t take place in a secretive, underhanded fashion; rather, that unborn babies are aborted within abortion clinics, places that openly advertise their gruesome services. Edl was shocked.
Hundreds of pro-life protesters demonstrated outside the convention beginning in July 1988. In October 1988, police arrested about 400 protesters in connection to those demonstrations, The New York Times reported.
It was during that time period, after discussing the matter with her husband and getting his blessing, that Edl joined the protesters as they prayed outside an abortion clinic in Atlanta and attempted to dissuade women from going inside and aborting their babies.
“We are doing what we are condemning others for,” Edl says she told her husband at the time. “This is what people should have done for us.”
She was arrested that day with many others, led by Operation Rescue leader Randall Terry.
Edl says the police treated them brutally, dislocating the arms of many of the protesters arrested. The pro-life activists had been warned that police were prepared to be brutal, she explained, and to avoid any appearance of accosting police, the activists crawled on their knees rather than walked.
“I was weeping the whole time,” she said. “I must have left a trail of tears … .”
She was inconsolable that America would even consider aborting its unborn.
“America, in my eyes, was this country of justice and opportunity and everything that is good,” she said. “A beacon for us, over there, that didn’t know what all that meant, because we had nothing but oppression from whoever was ruling us at the time.”
When an officer put his hand on her shoulders, she froze, as she had been instructed.
“I heard somebody say, ‘Just use your nightstick,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, Lord, here they come. They’re going to club me.’ They just put the club, the nightstick, behind my arms. They hung me on it and nearly dislocated my shoulders, and just threw me on the bus. Other people got their shoulders totally dislocated; others got their heads bashed in. Some ended up in the hospital.”
That was her first “rescue”—the term that pro-life activists use for their attempts to stop abortions from taking place at an abortion clinic. Under the FACE Act, such activity is considered a crime.
The FACE Act prohibits use of force, obstruction, or property damage intended to interfere with “reproductive health care services.” Though it theoretically protects houses of worship and pregnancy resource centers, as well as abortion clinics, the Biden administration’s Justice Department has largely used FACE to prosecute pro-life activists like Edl.
Since 2022, the year the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the Justice Department has hit a total of 40 pro-life activists with FACE-related charges at five different rescues, or “blockades” as the DOJ calls them.
Edl describes a rescue in the following way: “We would put our bodies in front of the entrance of the abortion clinic, which I call the ‘death camp,’ so nobody could come in and kill the babies.”
Since that October 1988 incident, Edl says, she has been part of more than 50 rescues throughout the United States. She also says that she has been arrested about 50 times.
Now, she faces prison time.
“To the best of my knowledge, I am facing around 11 years in prison and $350,000 fines,” she said.
The Justice Department has thrice charged Edl with violating the FACE Act, first for an “August 2020 blockade” of a Sterling Heights, Michigan, abortion clinic; second for an April 2021 “blockade” in Saginaw, Michigan; and third for a March 2021 incident at a Nashville, Tennessee, abortion clinic. The DOJ charged eight defendants in the Sterling Heights incident and 11 defendants in the Nashville incident.
Edl maintains that she never committed any violence against those at the abortion clinics. (The DOJ would not respond to requests for comment about its charges against her.) She says that her actions are completely justified, given that she is trying to save the lives of babies about to be aborted.
“Let me liken it to something,” Edl explained thoughtfully as we discussed her arrests around the country. She referred back to her time in Gakowa. “When we were rounded up to be killed, we were placed in cattle cars, and our train was headed toward the extermination camp. What if citizens of my country would have overcome their fear, and a number of them stood on those railroad tracks between the gate of the entrance to the death camp and the train? The train would have to stop. And while the guards on those trains would be busy rounding up the ones that were in front of the train, another group could have come in, pried open our cattle car and possibly set us free, but nobody did.”
She has heard stories that people stood by the roadside and wept as the cattle cars went by. “But that didn’t help us any,” she said.
“So, when we place our bodies between the woman and the clinic, we buy time to get our sidewalk counselors the opportunity to speak with women, and hopefully open their hearts with love for their babies and let their babies live,” the death camp survivor said.
“After all,” she added, “we offer them everything there is, including adoptions. I’ve offered to adopt babies on the spot … we’re standing between the killer and the victim.”
Congress passed the FACE Act in 1994, and then-President Bill Clinton signed it into law that same year. Spearheaded by the now-deceased Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., the legislation was a response to attacks on abortionists and abortion clinics. Pro-life advocates made sure that the legislation included clauses stating that it also protects churches and pregnancy resource centers.
In recent months, some conservative lawmakers and activists have called for the legislation to be repealed, arguing that it has been weaponized against pro-life activists.
They point to the large number of DOJ FACE charges against pro-life activists, noting that hundreds of churches and pregnancy resource centers have been attacked by pro-abortion vandals since the May 2022 leak of the draft Supreme Court opinion indicating that Roe v. Wade would soon be overturned. The DOJ has charged only five pro-abortion vandals in connection with attacks on Florida pregnancy centers and an Ohio pregnancy center.
It appears that no vandals have been charged with FACE for attacking churches.
Edl, who has followed the FACE Act and its application since its inception, said she was arrested in Kennedy’s office when she went to talk to him about it in the 1990s.
“Instead of talking to us, he had us arrested,” she said of Kennedy.
She believes that she and her fellow pro-life activists are being targeted through the FACE Act because they “are in the way of [the Biden administration’s] agenda.” She has lived through 13 presidents in her lifetime, and she says that Biden is the worst of them.
Edl and the other defendants accused of violating the FACE Act have said that they are not allowed to show images or pictures in their trials. They are not allowed to say that they acted in order to save lives—the lives of unborn babies.
At the end of the day, however, she seems very at peace about the possible penalties. She’s getting her affairs in order. She had a bench trial in federal court in Nashville, where a federal judge found her and several others guilty of violating the FACE Act.
Edl and the other three defendants face a maximum of six months in prison, five years of supervised release, and fines of up to $10,000 in this case, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Tennessee.
She will be sentenced July 30, she said. And her next trial is in federal court in Detroit on Aug. 6.
“I feel very strongly, because of my background, that human life is sacred,” she said simply. “Government does not have the authority to permit what God forbids.”
“And murder is forbidden by God.”
The post EXCLUSIVE: She Survived a Death Camp. Facing Biden DOJ Charges, She Is Prepared to Die in Prison appeared first on The Daily Signal.
The Biden administration has announced restrictions on oil and gas leasing on over 13 million acres of an Alaskan petroleum reserve to conserve land valuable to the "Alaska Native people" and "important fish and wildlife," as Republican lawmakers protest the "illegal" move.
The post Biden Administration Announces Anti-Oil Restrictions on 13 Million Acres of Alaskan Petroleum Land appeared first on Breitbart.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) released a final rule including abortion in the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act (PWFA).
The post Biden’s EEOC Says Employers Must Accommodate Workers’ Abortions appeared first on Breitbart.
Israel is “fighting for America too” and Iran’s declarations of its ambitions to destroy the U.S. should be taken seriously, according to Israeli lawmaker Ohad Tal, who vowed that Israel will act to protect its citizens and combat the Islamic Republic of Iran regardless of U.S. support, while lamenting that Israel has become “too dependent” on America.
The post Exclusive: Knesset Member Vows Israel Will Strike Back at Iran With or Without U.S. Support appeared first on Breitbart.
Democratic officials are throwing billions at California high-speed rail projects that have yet to be built, funding thousands of jobs specifically for union members.
Despite funding initially being approved by a referendum in 2008, the California High-Speed Rail project currently has less than a quarter of its expected length under construction and was initially supposed to have connected Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2020, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents 48 local unions and more than 150,000 members in California, boasted of the creation of 13,000 unionized construction jobs due to continued funding of California’s high-speed rail project.
The California High-Speed Rail Authority, in its community benefits agreement regarding the construction of the rail, lays out that it will exclusively bargain with union representatives for craft labor and that no employee will be required to join a union, but workers who are at the site for more than eight total days will be required to pay union dues.
The agreement outlines that union members will be the primary source of labor and that the local unions will be given the opportunity to refer employees for the job.
“The project has been a windfall for the union workers who’ve been on the job,” Kerry Jackson, William Clement fellow in California Reform at the Pacific Research Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “By some counts, as many as 13,000 have been hired. The California High-Speed Rail Authority itself even brags about the ‘steady union jobs that provide union wages and benefits’ they get. That’s not to mention the benefits the union bosses everywhere always enjoy when they have more dues-paying members supporting their salaries and perks.”
The Biden administration announced $3 billion in federal funds for the project in December to push along the first phase of the project connecting Merced, Fresno, and Bakersfield, adding to the $9 billion already appropriated by the state and the approximately $3.5 billion in grants given by the Obama administration.
The project has been estimated to need between $88 billion and $128 billion to be fully completed, and the rail authority told the Daily Caller News Foundation that it is aiming to be operational from Bakersfield to Merced between 2030 and 2033.
“Of course, project costs are affected by higher, nonmarket wages,” Jackson told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “When you have so many workers making these wages over the years, it adds up. The unions are a force behind the rail and one of the reasons, if not the main one, that this project has not been halted even though it’s far behind schedule, way over initial cost projections, and looks like a failed enterprise.
“The community benefits agreement that serves as the Project Labor Agreement requires unions to be the primary source of all craft labor.”
The California High-Speed Rail Authority told the Daily Caller News Foundation that, so far, 22.5 miles in the Central Valley have reached substantial completion, but that efforts are underway to design stations and track systems, complete environmental reviews and procure trains.
“The project is very much happening and continuing to make progress with our commitment unwavering as we remain active and aggressive in moving the project forward while actively pursuing federal funding,” the authority told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Big News: Today, President Biden announced funding to build the first high-speed rail projects in our nation’s history.
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) December 9, 2023
These investments will get people and goods where they need to go more quickly, reduce emissions, increase passenger safety, and create good-paying union jobs. pic.twitter.com/zxR6SQawIw
“Even if we didn’t have the Project Labor Agreement, there would be prevailing wage and benefits on this project, both because of state requirements and federal funding requirements,” Anne-Marie Otey, communications and editorial director at the LA/OC Building and Construction Trades Council, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “So, they’d be there no matter what, so we might as well make the best of it. I think it is better for the workers when there’s also a union agreement on the project.”
Otey pointed to the Davis-Bacon Act, which is a federal law that requires the government to pay at least the local rate to workers when constructing public projects, as the reason why using union workers on the project would not raise labor costs.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated that if the Davis-Bacon Act were repealed in 2020, it would have reduced government spending outlays by $10.7 billion by 2030.
“It’s benefiting workers,” Otey told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “And these workers are represented by unions, but no, we didn’t look at it as ‘What can we do for unions?’ We said, ‘What can we do for workers in the state?’ Especially again, in areas like the Central Valley, where they can’t just drive to San Francisco, Sacramento or L.A. for jobs, they live in the great heartland of our state.
“So, we wanted to figure out a way to keep them employed and keep them working at least somewhat near where they live. So, we think it’s a positive.”
Around $3 billion in federal funding was also announced in December for a high-speed railway between Las Vegas, Nevada, and Rancho Cucamonga, California, with Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., claiming that 35,000 union jobs would be created as a result. The funding for the project comes from the $1.2 trillion in new spending that was approved by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021.
“We disagree that the California high-speed rail project has yet to make substantial progress,” a spokesperson for the California State Transportation Agency told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Quite the contrary. There are 119 miles currently under construction, with one construction package already substantially complete, and preconstruction work is underway to complete the initial 171-mile operating segment between Merced and Bakersfield. The nation’s first high-speed trains will be tested by the end of the decade, and we expect service to begin between 2030 and 2033.”
California is one of the more unionized states in the U.S., ranking sixth in terms of the share of workers in unions, exceeded only by five other blue states (Connecticut, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York, and Washington), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The share of California workers who were members of unions declined from 16.1% in 2022 to 15.4% in 2023.
The Biden administration’s push for high-speed rail funding in California is part of a larger national push for increased passenger rail access for Americans. President Joe Biden announced in November that $16.4 billion would be given to Amtrak, the national passenger railroad of the U.S., to fund 25 passenger rail projects along the East Coast.
“Although in California, public works projects are always union labor, so I think their biggest reason they like high-speed rail is that it’s just such a long-term project,” Edward Ring, director of water and energy policy at the California Policy Center, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The unions get behind these projects because they’re big. The other reason, though, that they get behind these projects is because these are projects that the environmentalist community won’t vehemently oppose. They ought to be building things that are more practical; they ought to be upgrading freeways. But the environmentalists want us on a road diet.”
Biden has also boasted of new train sets for the California rail project being all-electric, resulting in zero emissions and powered through renewable energy, according to a White House fact sheet.
The president claims that all of his proposed rail projects will create “tens of thousands” of union jobs. As of September, the state of California had spent more than $600 million on environmental reviews for the rail project, not including a 78-mile stretch out of 500 miles that had not yet been evaluated.
“The environmentalists are so powerful that the unions go, ‘Well, if we’re going to get our guys working, we’re going to have to play ball with the environmentalists,’” Ring told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “And so, the environmentalists will buy off on projects that really have no practical value. High-speed rail has no practical value in California. You could also argue that it has no environmental value, and I think you could argue that very convincingly.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request to comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation
The post California’s High-Speed Rail Project Far From Finished, but It Is Putting Money in Unions’ Coffers appeared first on The Daily Signal.
Here we have the video of the day. It depicts a horde of illegal aliens breaking through the razor wire (mounted, I assume, by Texas authorities) and overrunning Texas National Guard soldiers seeking to resist them in El Paso. The video raises many questions, among them how many many “migrants” does it take to mount used to be known as an “invasion”?
We have now entered year four President Biden’s open borders program. Why does Biden refuse to see that the law is faithfully executed? Why does he support the invasion of the United States? When do we get to defend ourselves? How long can this go on?
This is the moment when TX National Guard became overrun by migrants rioting to get across the border here in El Paso today
We were there and saw it all happen. Absolute chaos here. pic.twitter.com/VN6Kf663ie
— Jennie Taer (@JennieSTaer) March 21, 2024
In Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets,” the heroine announces that she’s unable to lunch today. Why? She has a good excuse — because she was strung up by a mob for killing “the man who had led her so far astray.”
Now Ms. Yellen regrets. Janet Yellen holds the venerable office of Secretary of the Treasury. Former chairman of the Federal Reserve, Yellen is well qualified for the job and an ostensibly serious person. Yet she has proved unfit for the office, regurgitating administration talking points with an utter lack of seriousness. Inflation — she declared in 2021 that it was “transitory.” Abortion — restricting it would be “very damaging” to the economy. By contrast, she supports the administration’s gusher of “green” spending as constructive. ‘S wonderful.
Ms. Yellen regrets she has revealed herself to be a political hack. “I regret saying [inflation] was transitory,” Yellen said in a March 13 interview on Fox News. “It has come down. But I think transitory means a few weeks or months to most people.” Three years later, it might be worth asking what “transitory” means to her and who suggested she use the term in coordination with the other occupants of the Biden administration clown car.
When Yellen adopted the administration line on inflation being “transitory,” nobody had led Yellen astray. She killed her own reputation. However, she is also able to lunch today. Why anyone should even believe anything she says is not exactly a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. No one should.
The New York Post devotes its cover story to President Biden’s election-year budget. By Josh Christenson, the story is headlined “Biden unveils massive $7.3T budget with $5.5T in tax hikes, plans for ‘highest burden’ in US history.” The Post has created a classic cover to flag the story (below). It should probably come with some kind of a warning: “Viewing may induce nausea.” I’m filing this under Laughter Is the Best Medicine.
Joe Biden unveiled his 2025 budget proposal earlier today. In general, presidents’ budgets are hardly worth discussing. They project revenue and spending over the next ten years, and if you go back and look at them a few years later, they usually bear no relation to reality. And, in this instance, there is zero chance that Congress will pass anything resembling Biden’s budget, which can best be seen as a campaign document.
But, for what it is worth, this is what the Wall Street Journal had to say about it:
President Biden proposed Monday a $7.3 trillion budget for the next fiscal year that would raise taxes on wealthy people and large corporations, trim the deficit and lower the costs of prescription drugs, child care and housing.
Other than spending $7.3 trillion and raising taxes, it wouldn’t do any of those things. For purposes of comparison, federal spending in 2000, the last year of the Clinton administration, was $1.79 trillion. So Biden wants to spend almost exactly four times that much.
The fiscal 2025 budget would cut the deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade, and it would raise taxes by a net total of $4.9 trillion, or more than 7% above what the U.S. would collect without any policy changes.
Those hypothetical deficit cuts depend on economic forecasts in the out-years that won’t come true. The only meaningful fact is that Biden wants to raise taxes by nearly $5 trillion.
Biden’s purported budget is largely an exercise in fantasy:
The budget leaves some blank spaces. It lists principles for shoring up Social Security, without specifying a plan. It calls for paying for extensions of tax cuts for most households after 2025 but doesn’t detail how that would be paid for. And it calls for restoring the expanded child tax credit, but only temporarily, lumping that into the broader 2025 tax debate.
Biden’s budget proposes absurd taxes on corporations and “the rich”:
The budget repeats many past Biden tax-increase proposals, including higher tax rates on corporations and high-income individuals along with minimum taxes on the wealthiest Americans’ unrealized capital gains.
Which is insane. If the government taxes unrealized gains on unsold securities when the market goes up, will it write checks to investors when the market is down? Logically, it would have to, but of course that is not part of Biden’s proposal.
Biden rolled out several new tax increases last week, such as raising his new corporate alternative-minimum-tax rate to 21% from 15% and denying deductions when corporations pay any workers, not just top executives, more than $1 million.
The net effect of Biden’s proposals would be to give the United States one of the heaviest tax burdens in our history, equaled only once since World War II.
Is that because people are dying to give the federal government more money to waste? No, it is because many people are too naive to understand that, as has been said a million times, corporations don’t pay taxes, they collect them. Those taxes are actually paid mostly by customers (i.e., all of us) and secondarily by employees (i.e., most of us). But Biden’s budget is not about economics or, for that matter, mathematics, as the numbers will never add up. Rather, it is about politics:
Biden’s advisers are betting that a focus on lowering costs for families will help push the president to re-election.
Needless to say, Biden’s budget, if actually enacted, would raise costs for families, not lower them. Fortunately, there is zero chance of that happening.
A final (I hope) footnote to Joe Biden’s disgraceful SOTU performance: he referred to Jose Ibarra as an illegal, which was, as I said here, perhaps the only true statement in the entire speech. But Biden met with blowback from Democrats who don’t seem to mind that Ibarra is an (alleged) murderer, but were horrified by Biden’s admission that his presence here is illegal.
So, as recorded at the link above, Biden apologized on MSNBC for using the word “illegal.” (The correct legal term is “illegal alien.”):
President Biden apologized Saturday for using the word “illegal” during his State of the Union address to describe the Venezuelan migrant accused of killing Georgia nursing student Laken Riley.
“An undocumented person. I shouldn’t have used illegal, it’s undocumented,” Biden told MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart in an excerpt from an interview airing Saturday….
***
“So, you regret using that word?” Capehart asked.“Yes,” Biden responded.
I, and everyone else, called that an apology. But the White House is now backtracking on its backtrack:
The White House on Monday pushed back against claims President Biden apologized for using the term “illegal” to describe the migrant accused of killing Laken Riley — just days after the president said he had “regret” for using the loaded term.
***
White House deputy spokesperson Olivia Dalton attempted to clarify on Monday, telling a reporter that “the president absolutely did not apologize” despite his expression of regret.“There was no apology anywhere in that conversation,” Dalton told reporters on Air Force One. “He did not apologize. He used a different word. I think what we should be really clear about is the facts.”
“He used a different word.” All right, then! Biden said that he “shouldn’t have used” the word illegal, and he “regrets” doing so. Talk about a fine distinction. So, why did the White House bother to walk back, at least partially, Biden’s MSNBC comments? I suppose because if you apologize, you have to apologize to someone. In this case, who is that someone? The (alleged) murderer, Jose Ibarra. Many have criticized Biden for apologizing to a murderer for calling him an illegal. Hence his handlers’ most recent spin: it wasn’t an apology, it was only an expression of regret for something he shouldn’t have done.
Got it, Joe.
And, finally, for a spokesman for the Biden White House to say that “what we should be really clear about is the facts” is, in its own way, a classic of dark comedy.
Referring to an illegal alien as “illegal” in unscripted remarks during his State of the Union Address this past Thursday, President Biden inadvertently offended a core Democratic constituency (i.e., illegal aliens). That could not stand and it didn’t. As John notes nearby, Biden recanted and apologized within 48 hours.
Illegal or undocumented — which is the correct term. As a matter of fact, “Illegal alien” is the correct term.
When we got married, my wife was an illegal alien. Having graduated from law school and been hired by Hennepin County District Judge Robert Bowen as a law clerk, she applied for a work visa. In response she received a letter from the INS apprising her that her student visa had expired and that she was out of status. She applied for legal residency.
We went down to the local INS office for an interview. We had been advised that we would be asked a few questions to establish that our marriage was bona fide — not a fraudulent exercise undertaken solely to allow an illegal immigrant to escape deportation. As it turned out, we appeared to be the only bona fide couple of the four or five with us in the waiting room. And this was early in the Reagan years.
In the course of the interview, the INS officer asked me what toothpaste “the alien” used. It seemed funny because “the alien” was sitting next to me at the time, but we took no offense. We thought it was funny and I was happy to ace the quiz.
Today a question in that form would probably get the guy fired. Today the prescribed term is “undocumented.” Today that is the term on which the Democrats insist. Today it is the term that every mainstream media outlet (including Fox News) uses. What’s happening here?
What’s happening is the blessing of illegal immigration and the destruction of citizenship. The left seeks to break down our resistance to illegal immigration by means of a mandated euphemism. It’s an Orwellian device. The phenomenon of illegal immigration is not even to be described with tolerable accuracy. The underlying distinction is to be rendered meaningless.
As I say, illegal aliens have become a core constituency of the Democrats. To illegal aliens the left requires that the knee must be bent. I’m not sure why Fox News is compliant. It is frankly disgusting.
Here I speak for my wife and me. We support enforcement of the law. We oppose illegal immigration. We do not seek to accommodate it. We do not respect it. We desire the return of illegal immigrants to their home country or deportation to some other place. We do not want to support them with our tax dollars. We are sickened by the invasion of illegal aliens promoted by Biden and the Biden administration. The abuse of the English language that accompanies it is the least of it, but it deserves at least to be noted.
Brian Deese is “an MIT Innovation Fellow, focusing on the impact of economic policies that strengthen the United States’ industrial capacity and on accelerating climate investment and innovation.” Before that, Deese assisted Joe Biden as Director of the National Economic Council. Asked in 2022 how American families could cope with surging gasoline prices, the NEC boss said, “this is about the future of the liberal world order, and we have to stand firm.” As Sir Bedevere(Terry Jones) might say, who is this who is so wise in the ways of economics?
Deese is the son of Boston College political science professor David Deese, who “researches the international and comparative politics of energy and climate policies worldwide.” Brian’s mother, Patricia Stanton, served as deputy commissioner at the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources and assistant commissioner of waste prevention at the state Department of Environmental Protection.
At Middlebury College Deese earned an undergraduate degree in international politics and economics. He got into Yale Law School but left a few credits short of graduation to work for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Composite character president Obama tapped him to help out with climate change.
In a 2016 interview with Rolling Stone, Obama touted the “amazing” Brian Deese, who “engineered the Paris Agreement, the Aviation Agreement,” and “may have helped save the planet.” The auto industry was also in trouble.
“The wunderkind in charge of saving our auto industry is a 31-year-old with about as much experience as a summer intern,” noted Glenn Beck. “Despite having no formal business education, no business experience and no auto industry experience, 31-year-old Brian Deese is now in charge of dismantling General Motors.” David Sanger of the New York Times also weighed in with, “Meet the 31-Year Old in Charge of Dismantling GM.”
In 2017, Deese became a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. From there it was on to BlackRock, where Deese headed the sustainable investing division, advising clients on meeting environmental, social and governance (ESG) criteria. Deese was reportedly bagging some $2.8 million a year, and building a net worth of $4 million.
In June of 2021, the amazing Deese outline his vision for a “new industrial strategy,” an “activist government,” approach including “targeted public investment, public procurement, climate resilience and equity.” As Deese contends, “markets on their own will not make investments in technologies and in infrastructure that benefit an entire industry.”
And so on, in what Olson Johnson of Blazing Saddles might call “authentic statist gibberish.” Or, in the style of Monty Python, the wealthy MIT Innovation Fellow could qualify for “upper class twit of the year.”
Jeffrey Anderson presents a comparative analysis of presidents and inflation. The mainstream press to the contrary notwithstanding, he explains what Biden has done to make us feel so black and blue. It’s not our imagination. It’s the inflation, stupid! See his City Journal column “No great mystery.” Anderson manages to review the data and perform the analysis with a sense of humor.
The daycare minders at the White House have persuaded Biden to single out “shrinkflation” as the villain. However, “shrinkflation” reflects “inflation.” It is a manifestation of rising prices. Sentient observers understand that Biden economic policies have triggered the inflation that we have suffered, just as they understand that Biden’s senescence has slowed the windmills of his mind. Biden trusts we won’t notice he indicts himself when he decries “shrinkflation.”
Biden’s daycare minders take us for fools. Thus the administration’s critique of Republicans for causing the invasion of illegals that Biden invited, facilitated, and denied. They think we are stupid.
We hear that Biden threatens to point the finger at alleged corporate wrongdoing as the source of our pain in tonight’s State of the Union address. For some reason or other this wave of alleged wrongdoing has run riot under the regime of…Joe Biden. It was somehow held in check under the regime of…Donald Trump. James Bovard seeks to immunize us against the foolishness of the Biden party line in his New York Post column “Joe Biden’s State of the Union ‘shrinkflation’ swindle.”
Reading about the ceasefire negotiations that the ceasefire negotiations with which the Biden administation hopes to engineer a Hamas victory requires a certain kind of immunity to savagery. Hamas seeks to trade kidnapped Israelis for terrorists who can help Hamas finish the task it undertook on October 7. The Hamas terrorists are murderers and genocidaires. The Israelis are, well, you know, Jewish. Hamas seeks ten terrorists in exchange for every kidnapped Israeli and Israel seems okay with the proposition and the ratio.
However, the Israelis declined to show up in Cairo for further negotiations so long as Hamas refuses to provide a list of living kidnap victims. The Israelis assess that 31 of the kidnap victims taken by Hamas on October 7 are now dead. This is either elided in mainstream news accounts or referred to euphemistically as one of the “sticking points.” The Times of Israel summed up the status of negotiations yesterday:
Israel has said that 31 of the 130 hostages held since October 7 are dead. The first phase of the mooted deal is reported to provide for the release of 40 of the living hostages, including women, children, the elderly and the sick, in the course of a six-week truce, and in exchange for some 400 Palestinian security prisoners. The outline reportedly provides for negotiations on the further phased release of the remaining hostages, living and dead, in return for longer pauses in the fighting and many more Palestinian prisoner releases.
On Sunday afternoon, a Hamas official told CNN that the group will not agree to a deal without Israel consenting to an end to the war in Gaza, a non-starter for Israel.
Citing “a highly placed source” in the terror group, CNN reported that the two other areas of disagreement holding up a deal are the withdrawal of IDF troops from Gaza, and Gazan civilians being allowed to return to the northern Gaza Strip.
Vice President Harris found this a good time to hammer Israel yesterday in Selma, Alabama (White House transcript here). Israel is apparently responsible for “the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.” Why, “just a few days ago, we saw hungry, desperate people approach aid trucks, simply trying to secure food for their families after weeks of nearly no aid reaching Northern Gaza. And they were met with gunfire and chaos.” The savages of Hamas have their allies among the idiots, useful or otherwise, of the Biden administration.
“Centuries of capitalism were held to have produced nothing of value,” Winston Smith discovers in George Orwell’s 1984. “One could not learn history from architecture any more than one could learn it from books. Streets, inscriptions memorial stones, the names of streets – anything that might throw light on the past had been systematically altered.” In other words, “history has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” For all but the willfully blind, the parallels are apparent on every hand.
For the Biden Junta, America is nothing more than a bastion of racist oppression, and the American Declaration of Independence, as Orwell noted, is pure thoughtcrime. The unelected ranks of the deep state constitute the “Inner Party,” deploying the FBI against the people. Under the Delaware Democrat, pretty much every week is hate week. Should that be doubted, recall Biden’s September 1, 2022 speech. Also relevant for current conditions is Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which the place of wild, non-domesticated creatures must be decided.
The revolutionary animals rule that rats are comrades, a view now institutionalized in America. Witness the rise of pro-crime district attorneys such as Chesa Boudin and George Gascon. Criminals also do the heavy lifting that woke politicians won’t perform, such as torching businesses and assaulting people at random, all passed off as “peaceful protest.”
Joe Biden brings in some eight million illegals with no criminal background checks. A criminal illegal is charged with murdering University of Georgia Biden student Laken Riley on February 22. In his February 28 speech on crime, Biden failed to name the victim or mention the case, and made no reference to illegal immigration.
In 1984, Winston Smith came to love Big Brother but it’s hard to believe that people approve Joe Biden’s steady demolition of America. It’s even harder to believe that this is what the American people were panting for in 2020. As Trump likes to say, we’ll have to see what happens in 2024.
Laken Riley was a 22-year-old nursing student in Athens, Georgia. Thursday morning, she went for a run and didn’t return. Her body was found on the campus of the University of Georgia. Riley was murdered by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela:
Jose Antonio Ibarra, 26, who was arrested Friday in connection to the murder of the 22-year-old Augusta University student, crossed into El Paso, Texas, from Venezuela in September 2022, NewsNation reported Saturday, citing Department of Homeland Security sources.
He had been released due to a lack of detention space, the sources added.
Laken Riley
Ibarra is one of millions of illegals whom Joe Biden has deliberately welcomed into the United States, in violation of federal law, the Constitution, and Biden’s oath of office. Biden’s motives are hard to understand. But in the law, one is held to have intended the natural and inevitable consequences of one’s actions. Occam’s Razor, like the common law, implies that Biden is trying to bring chaos and destruction to the United States.
Having entered America with no problem, Ibarra set out for New York. I don’t believe it has been reported how he got there, but he spent a year or so in New York City before relocating to Georgia. His social media accounts suggest that he was living it up:
In September 2022, however, the Venezuelan native looked carefree, smiling in Times Square and Rockefeller Center in New York City, posts on a Facebook account linked to his name showed.
Of course, he got into trouble in New York, too:
Police sources in New York confirmed to NewsNation that a suspect matching Ibarra’s name and age was arrested in the Big Apple for endangering a 5-year-old child last year.
But illegals who commit crimes are rarely punished. Ibarra eventually joined his older brother Diego, who I assume is also an illegal although I haven’t seen this reported, in Athens. The older brother is a criminal, too; he was arrested three times between September and December 2023. Ho hum. Liberals refuse to enforce our laws, until a known criminal commits a crime so heinous that it attracts national attention. Like this one.
So, because Joe Biden opened our southern border, Jose Ibarra waltzed in from Venezuela, spent a year or so hanging out in New York, where any crimes he committed went unpunished, then joined his brother in Georgia. Where, day before yesterday, he saw Laken Riley jogging on the University of Georgia campus and decided it would be fun to kill her. Congratulations, Joe. This one’s on you.
A postscript: the U.S. isn’t the only country dumb enough to admit large numbers of illegal aliens, often referred to in the press as “asylum seekers.” Western Europe has problems even worse than ours, as exemplified by this case:
Police in Vienna launched a criminal investigation after three women were found dead in a brothel, authorities said Saturday.
A witness discovered traces of blood outside the building, located near the Danube River, and alerted police on Friday evening. The bodies of the three victims had “cuts and stab wounds,” police spokesperson Philipp Hasslinger told The Associated Press.
A 27-year-old man was soon arrested in the vicinity of the brothel while carrying a knife, the supposed weapon. Police said the suspect is an asylum-seeker from Afghanistan and will be questioned by police later on Saturday.
The Vienna brothel was legal, but apparently the “asylum seeker” disapproved of it. Hey, some of us may disapprove of it, too. But we wouldn’t murder the women who work there. Open-borders immigration policies have been a disaster wherever they have been implemented.
UPDATE: It turns out that Jose Ibarra had a “wife.” Sort of:
“We got married so we could join our asylum cases,” she told The Post. “He was the person I thought I could see through. We’ve known each other our entire lives.”
So, just another species of immigration fraud. Honestly, though, Ibarra and his “wife” needn’t have bothered. Joe Biden’s welcome mat is out, and everyone is here to stay–especially those who will degrade our country.
The Biden administration has fashioned another program of student debt relief forgiveness. The so-called SAVE plan was promulgated by regulation last year. It takes the load off the fanny of beneficiaries of certain federal college loan programs and puts it right on the back of taxpayers. Politico reports that Biden is emailing 153,000 student loan borrowers that he’s canceling their debt. “I hope this relief gives you a little more breathing room,” the message says.
Those of us who actually pay taxes could use a little breathing room, but there is no breathing room to be found. Suffocation is the order of the day.
President Biden is himself a suffocating demagogue, as in his victory lap in the video below (White House transcript here). We thought the Supreme Court had spared us this particular outrage by its decision last year in Biden v. Nebraska. Apparently the justices needn’t have bothered themselves.
Biden declares that he has discovered a workaround. To the extent that one can understand what he’s saying in the clip below, he strikes a defiant note. He’s unafraid of consequences. He’s daring someone to stop him.
Biden on student loan cancellation: “The Supreme Court blocked it. But that didn't stop me." pic.twitter.com/ZomPnhTU1k
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) February 22, 2024
NRO’s James Lynch has a good story on Biden’s announcement in “Biden Administration Wiping Out another $1.2 Billion in Student-Loan Debt.” Matt Continetti adds up the damage:
On February 21, Biden announced that he was canceling $1.2 billion in federal student loans for 153,000 borrowers. That’s on top of more than $130 billion in student debt that he has canceled to date. The Penn Wharton school says that Biden’s efforts will cost a total of $475 billion over 10 years.
NRO’s Charlie Cooke has posted a cry from the heart expressing his indignation over the unfairness of Biden’s action. In his concluding paragraph, he seems unfairly to blame House Republicans. According to Politico, however, the House actually voted to kill SAVE this past December, but the Senate saved it. Now what?
The regulatory background to the current monstrosity is set forth by Jill Desjean in “ED Releases Final Rule on Latest Income-Driven Repayment Plan.” The final regulation was announced in the Federal Register here last year.
In light of the Supreme Court decision in Biden v. Nebraska, the regulation purports to find authority for the regulation under section 455 of the Higher Education Act than under the HEROES Act. See the “Legal Authority” section of the Federal Register announcement linked above.
What we have here is a monstrosity. James Bovard has an entertaining New York Post column satirizing it, but Bovard has no proposal to kill it. The current monstrosity comes to life this coming July 1. What we need to kill it is a new president to rein in the Education Department, or Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate, or some serious legal analysis on which to premise a challenge to the madness of King Joe.
Vaunce News 