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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Masked teens mugging moms, nannies in crime-ridden San Francisco: reports By Allie Griffin

https://nypost.com/2023/07/04/san-francisco-moms-nannies-robbed-by-masked-teens-in-violent-spree/

San Francisco mothers, including a pregnant woman, and nannies are being targeted in violent, broad-daylight robberies at the hands of masked minors in the crime-ridden city.

Police have connected a group of teenagers to at least 11 such attacks last week in Noe Valley and nearby areas, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The young suspects, wearing ski masks, allegedly pushed, and punched the female victims in order to steal their smartphones before escaping in a stolen runaway car, cops said.

One juvenile male suspect has since been arrested in connection to the string of robberies and police are searching for his alleged co-conspirators, the local paper reported.

The brazen crime in the affluent sections of the city has left residents on high alert.

The teens appeared to spare no mercy in the attacks, having victimized a pregnant woman and a person with a stroller in two cases, Noe Valley Supervisor Rafael Mandelman told the Chronicle.

One mother who asked to be identified by her initials CW for fear of retaliation, told the newspaper she was on her way to pick up her daughter from daycare last Monday when she was attacked.

She said she was pushing an empty stroller when a person in a gray ski mask hopped out of a car and knocked her to the sidewalk as he snatched her phone.

“I was shoved to the ground aggressively,” she said, adding that San Francisco police seemed reluctant to offer help.

A daycare worker who only provided her first name Laura told the publication that she too was violently robbed of her phone the same day while waiting for the train.

Say, Looks Like That Supply-Side Stuff Works After All

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/06/say-looks-like-that-supply-side-stuff-works-after-all/

Bidenomonics has been, and will continue to be, a disaster. This is what happens when lawmakers manipulate economies. No one should ever expect a different outcome when politicians enact ideas that they believe are so brilliant that they will overcome the laws of economics. The way out of this mess is to make a policy U-turn to both unleash the economy and expand precious liberty.

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

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

He probably would have blamed the Canadian wildfires on “trickle-down economics” had he thought about it. But there’s not much thinking going on in his head — and in fact there never has been, with his ungovernable mouth leading the way throughout his career as an elected grifter.

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

Justice Jackson’s Incredible Statistic Her dissent from the ruling on affirmative action makes an obviously implausible claim. By Ted Frank

https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-jacksons-incredible-statistic-black-newborns-doctors-math-flaw-mortality-4115ff62?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

Even Supreme Court justices are known to be gullible. In a dissent from last week’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of “diversity” in education. “It saves lives,” she asserts. “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.”

A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible. Imagine if 40% of black newborns died—thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that’s a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%.

How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake? A footnote cites a friend-of-the-court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which makes the same claim in almost identical language. It, in turn, refers to a 2020 study whose lead author is Brad Greenwood, a professor at the George Mason University School of Business.

The study makes no such claims. It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians).

Lacking Unity, Can America Survive Our Growing Differences? I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/05/lacking-unity-can-america-survive-our-growing-differences-ii-tipp-poll/

How are Americans feeling these days? Certainly not united. Our nation appears to be indivisible in name only. Even more surprising, a significant number of people have even begun to wonder if the United States of America as we know it will even exist in the future, data from the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

Starting with the Unity Index, the proprietary I&I/TIPP gauge of national harmony, we ask people each month if they feel our common bond remains. They are then given five possible responses: “very united,” “somewhat united,” “somewhat divided,” “very divided” or “unsure.”

For June’s national online I&I/TIPP poll of 1,358 adults, taken from May 31-June 2, just 24% of respondents declared that they felt the U.S. was “united.” Among that group, only 9% said the U.S. was “very united,” while 15% called it “somewhat united.”

But by nearly 3-to-1, 74% of respondents called America “divided.” Of those, 42% said it was “very divided,” while 32% termed it “somewhat divided.”

America’s Censorship Regime is in Congress’s Crosshairs: Ben Weingarten

https://weingarten.substack.com/p/americas-censorship-regime-is-in?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Chilling revelations on the rise of feds’ Orwellian speech police

Imagine an America where the feds surge actual speech police wherever chatter on social media questions the integrity of the vote — speech police who then take to the airwaves to attack those making the claims.

If this sounds far-fetched, consider that last summer a national-security agency actually mulled the idea of deploying a “rapid response team” to local jurisdictions to help election officials fend off “mis-, dis- and mal-information”-related “threats,” including through communications — an idea one federal official called “fascinating.”

That revelation comes from a new report from the House Weaponization Subcommittee on little-known Homeland Security sub-agency Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — which as readers know was the focus of my Congressional testimony in May as the linchpin of federal government-led speech policing.

I wrote about that report in today’s New York Post, detailing the ways in which through both oversight and legislation action, the Republican-led House is working to defund and dismantle the regime.

My column comes on the heels of an incredible July 4th ruling from Judge Terry Doughty out of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana.

The judge, who presides over Missouri v. Biden, the case that has blown the lid off the mass public-private surveillance and censorship regime under which Americans have been suffering, issued a temporary injunction on Independence Day freezing all federal government-led censorship efforts.

In 4th of July Ruling, Federal Judge Prohibits Biden Regime From Colluding With Social Media Companies to Censor Opposing Views By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/04/in-4th-of-july-ruling-federal-judge-prohibits-biden-regime-from-colluding-with-social-media-companies-to-censor-opposing-views/

In a highly significant ruling on the 4th of July, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction prohibiting the White House, FBI, Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), State Department, and other agencies from colluding with Big Tech to censor speech on social media.

In his 155-page ruling U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana compared the Biden regime to an “Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth’” and called its censorship activities “almost dystopian.”

The judge’s injunction came in the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit led by the Republican attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana.

Last September, then-Attorney General Eric Schmitt of Missouri and Attorney General Jeff Landry of Louisiana released communications between federal officials and social media companies revealing how the Biden regime and Big Tech coordinated to silence opposing views on a number of topics—including COVID-19 vaccines, the origin of the pandemic, election integrity, and Hunter Biden’s laptop—in what they called “a vast censorship enterprise.”

The communications, which were obtained pursuant to a court order, revealed that Biden officials held weekly censorship meetings with social media companies to suppress posts about the COVID vaccines that countered the regime’s “safe and effective” narrative.

California Dems Trash America’s Gay Hero Senate Dems walk out on Ric Grenell, America’s first openly gay presidential cabinet member. by Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/california-dems-trash-americas-gay-hero/

“As Pride month nears an end,” Katy Grimes of the California Globe reports, “Republican lawmakers announced they were honoring Ambassador Grenell, the first openly gay presidential cabinet member, for his accomplishments and stellar career in service to the country.”

As Bruce Bawer noted in 2020, Grenell is “America’s gay hero,” with distinguished service as US ambassador to Germany and director of national intelligence. It was acting DNI Grenell who “declassified the list of Obama Administration officials who, in the interval between the 2016 election and the Trump inaugural, requested the ‘unmasking’ of Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Trump’s choice for National Security Advisor, so they could listen in on his phone calls.” That service cut no slack with California Democrats.

Cheers rang out in the California Senate, Grimes explains,  “until five Senators walked out during Republican Senator Brian Jones’ introduction of Grenell.” The walkout followed a “nasty Tweet” on June 26 from San Francisco Democrat Sen. Scott Wiener:

“This is their way of celebrating Pride, by bringing in a guy who is truly a self-hating gay man, who takes tons of anti-LGBTQ positions  There are plenty of gay Republicans who don’t do the unhinged things that [Grenell] does. I’m not lumping all gay Republicans together – he is a particularly vile person.”

In an American first, cocaine was found in the White House By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/07/in_an_american_first_cocaine_was_found_in_the_white_house.html

At first, it was scary: A bag of white powder was found in the White House’s West Wing, causing the Secret Service to do a partial evacuation. However, once it became known that the white powder in the White House was cocaine, that opened the way to some interesting questions. Is there a Biden staffer (or more than one) who uses cocaine while working for a person who is theoretically the most powerful man in the world? Or has Hunter Biden, an acknowledged serious drug addict who’s allegedly “clean” and who’s been hanging around the White House lately, relapsed?

Patriotism Under Siege But we still have much to celebrate by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/patriotism-under-siege/

This year’s Fourth of July arrives at a time of doubt and even disdain for our nation’s birth and foundational principles. For most of our history this day has celebrated the bold, epochal Declaration of Independence that staked a claim to self-government and freedom from the world’s most powerful empire. The nation that followed after eight years of war went on to become, and still is, the freest, most prosperous, and, for all its all-too-human betrayals of those principles, the most generous great power in all of history.

The heart of our affection does not come from blood and soil, but from truly revolutionary ideals expressed in the Declaration’s preamble: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The new nation was created to “secure these rights,” not to bestow or create them, and it “derives [its] just powers from the consent of the governed.”­­

Such obvious truths, however, have been for decades contested by some of our country’s most privileged beneficiaries, and the patriotism that expresses our country’s goodness disparaged and mocked. In its place a fashionable oikophobia­­––the hatred of one’s country, principles, virtues, history, and the fellow citizens who still believe in our civic ideals and their goodness––preens morally and embraces the impossible utopias that such oikophobes promote.

Patriotism, the beating heart of our “unum” that binds the “pluribus,” is besieged at a time when we face dangerous developments like enormous debt, open borders, and assaults on our Constitutional order and Bill of Rights at home, and abroad totalitarian rivals “filled with passionate intensity” to supplant our global power, and diminish our freedom.

Equality/Inequality? – Focus on Mobility Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.bllogspot.com

Of all the canards foisted on the American public, one of the lamest is the assertion that outcomes should be equal. Equality of outcomes (something that can never be) should not be confused with the fact that we are all, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg in 1863, created equal (something that we are) – equal in the eyes of God and equal under the laws of the United States, or at least we all have been since the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. Equality of outcomes should also not be confused with the idea that we should all have equal opportunities to succeed in our chosen fields, something we do not have. There are other false tales told the American public: that the Earth will self-destruct if we do not reduce fossil fuel consumption, or the assertion that one’s sex is a social construct, that fairness requires the forgiveness of student loans, and the demeaning implication that affirmative action is necessary for Blacks to achieve parity with whites.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm was published in August 1945, while the Soviet Union was still a World War II ally. It was written as an allegory on how the inequalities of Tsarist Russia became replicated in the inequalities of Stalin’s Communist Soviet Union. In the 1930s and through the early 1950s, many intelligent people responded to the siren call of the “Communist utopian state.” However, the promise of state-directed equal outcomes was a lie. In fact, wealth inequality worsened. In 1900, Russian per capita GDP was roughly 30% of the United States’. Under Putin’s Russia, a hundred and twenty years later, Russian per capita GDP had shrunk to about 17% of that in the U.S. In spite of that discrepancy (or perhaps because of it), Putin is considered to be the richest world leader, with a net worth of $200 billion

Here at home, the promise of equal outcomes is, of course, a political ruse, meant to detract from promises unfulfilled. Merit has been subsumed by calls for diversity. While we are all, as the Declaration of Independence states, endowed by our Creator “with certain unalienable rights,” people have never been equal; they are not now, and they never will be. We are unique individuals. Some are tall, others short. Some are artistic, others athletic, and still others musical. Some have a talent for liberal arts; others for mathematics. Some are intellectually brilliant; others must study to keep up. Some are born wealthy; others are born poor. Some are born to two-parent households, others to single mothers. Some are born in small towns, while others are born in cities or suburbs. A few have the benefit of private schools; most rely on public schools. A few are born with physical, mental, or emotional challenges; others live charmed lives. Some are aspirant, others content to be followers. Yet, we are equal under the law. As citizens, we have equal rights to vote. As humans, we should expect to be treated with equal measures of respect and dignity.