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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

How Lawsuits Cost You $3,600 a Year A new study estimates the economic burden of the tort system at $443 billion a year, or 2.1% of GDP.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-lawsuits-cost-you-3-600-a-year-tort-system-chamber-of-commerce-institute-for-legal-reform-report-11670460820?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

We always knew trial lawyers were filling their pockets, but it’s still a surprise to learn how much they’ve been emptying ours. The total economic cost of the U.S. tort system in 2020 was $443 billion, according to a recent study by the Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform. That’s 2.1% of GDP, and it works out to $3,621 per household.

Only a small percentage of American families are involved in tort cases or class-action lawsuits in a given year, but the burden of jackpot payouts is carried by nearly everyone. The costs spread through the economy in the form of higher insurance premiums that fall on nearly every family, either directly (car insurance) or indirectly (medical malpractice or product-liability insurance).

And costs are rising. Between 2016 and 2020 the tort system grew 6% a year, the study says, more than inflation and GDP growth. Commercial liability grew the fastest, at 7% a year. Also alarming is that only half the money goes to injured parties. “We estimate that only 53 percent of the total expenditures of the tort system were paid to claimants,” the authors write. In other words, “for every dollar paid in compensation to claimants, 88 cents were paid in legal and other costs.”

The boom in tort costs is owing to the boom in litigation financing, in which investors fund lawsuits and then claim a portion of the winnings.

There Were 17 Americans in Russian Prisons. Only 1 Mattered to the Left Unfortunately, they’re all the wrong race, sexuality or gender. by Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/there-were-17-americans-in-russian-prisons-only-1-mattered-to-the-left/

Here’s another of the men whom Biden left behind to extract a black lesbian pothead who hates America because she embodies his rotten base.

 A teacher from Oakmont who’s been detained in Russia for more than a year remains in custody.

This summer, Butler native Marc Fogel was sentenced to 14 years in a maximum security prison after he was caught with 17 grams of medical marijuana for a spine condition.

The U.S. State Department had previously asked Russia to release American citizen Fogel on humanitarian grounds. Prior to that request, a group of nine bipartisan senators called on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to immediately designate Fogel as “wrongfully detained.”

Not a priority. If Marc wants to become one, he needs to claim that he changed gender, learn to play basketball and jeer the national anthem.

He’d still have to overcome the handicap of “being assigned white at birth”.

Fogel, 61, was arrested in August 2021 for possessing 17 grams of what he said was medical marijuana. The former history teacher, like Griner, was arrested in Moscow when the pot was found in his luggage.

Fogel was sentenced to 14 years in prison in June — just over a month before Griner was handed a nine-year sentence.

All The Times Twitter Execs Lied To Our Faces About Their Insidious Shadowbanning By: Evita Duffy

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/09/all-the-times-twitter-execs-lied-to-our-faces-about-their-insidious-shadowbanning/

Remember all the times Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and top Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde assured us that Twitter neither shadowbans nor targets conservatives? Well, they lied. 

In the second installment of Elon Musk’s “Twitter Files,” independent journalist Bari Weiss exposed how the Big Tech company was secretly “blacklisting” conservative tweets and users by keeping “disfavored” tweets from trending and secretly hiding whole accounts or topics without users’ knowledge.

One Twitter team, the “Strategic Response Team – Global Escalation Team” (SRT-GET), was reportedly committed to censoring “up to 200 ‘cases’” per day. Victims included prominent conservatives Dan Bongino and Charlie Kirk, as well as Stanford University professor and co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

Another secret censorship group, the “Site Integrity Policy, Policy Escalation Support team” (SIP-PES), was responsible for the most “politically sensitive decisions.” The group included Gadde, Dorsey, trust and safety head Yoel Roth, former CEO Parag Agrawal, and others, and it was personally responsible for suppressing the viral Libs of TikTok Twitter account, among other high-profile censorship calls.

But remember when Twitter execs repeatedly insisted they didn’t engage in shadowbanning?

‘We Do Not Shadow Ban’

On July 25, 2018, Vice News reported that several prominent Republican politicians, such as Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan, and Matt Gaetz, did not show up in a drop-down menu of automatically suggested searches, even when typing in the politicians’ names.

The supreme outrage of Biden’s idiotic prisoner swap with Putin By Justin O. Smith

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/the_supreme_outrage_of_bidens_idiotic_prisoner_swap_with_putin.html

Joe Biden, our all-American  foul-up, is holding true to his nature, as he recently made the worst deal on a prisoner swap ever on December 8, 2022, aside from Obama’s deal that swapped Bowe Bergdahl for four top Taliban jihadi terrorists, who now run Afghanistan’s government.  Seeing the public relations fantasy dance through his head and hoping to get a win that would deflect from all his administration’s miserable failures, from the economy to the border and more, Biden ordered the release of Viktor Bout, a miserable, death-dealing arms merchant who has left thousands of dead in his wake.  In exchange?  The return of Brittney Griner, a black, lesbian, anti-American, anti-God, anti-family, pot-headed basketball player, who has turned her back on America more than once.  Biden chose this swap rather than using the full weight of the U.S.’s resources to secure the release of Paul Whelan, a Marine veteran and a heterosexual male, who has spent the past four years in a Russian prison on false charges of espionage. 

Yes.  The P.R. optics heavily favored Griner over Whelan.

On December 8, the day the swap was announced, Representative Nicole Malliotakis (R-N.Y.) observed:

If [Joe Biden] is going to release a guy convicted of providing aid to a terrorist organization [and] conspiring to kill American citizens, he should have at least gotten BOTH Brittney Griner and Paul Whelan in return.

A U.S. Marine is left behind in another bad deal made by Biden.

All one is left to imagine is that the Biden regime really does want America’s enemies to win.

Why the ‘Smart’ Party Never Learns If your views by definition are enlightened and progressive, why should you bother understanding those of the other side? Barton Swaim

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-the-smart-party-never-learns-democrats-self-reflection-elite-culture-media-universities-covid-inflation-election-excuses-11670592902?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

The most obvious change in American politics this century is the sorting of voters along educational lines. The Democrats are increasingly the party of educated urban elites; the GOP belongs to the white working class. The dispute is over suburban and minority voters. The latter still plump mostly for Democrats, although the party’s social radicalism is pushing them toward the GOP. Voters with impressive educational credentials tend to be Democrats, and those without them lean strongly Republican.

That one party is the educated party—that its members see themselves, in some respects accurately, as more cultured and informed than their opponents—has generated an intellectual pathology that is obvious to everyone but themselves. Adherents of the smart-people party have lost the capacity for self-criticism. Which on its face makes sense. If your views are by definition intelligent, those of your critics must be dumb. Who needs self-reflection?

We can start to understand the Democrats’ predicament by ridding ourselves of a set of metaphors. For a decade or more, we’ve been told that left and right live in “silos” or “bubbles” or “echo chambers” or “information cocoons.” The left watch MSNBC and read the New York Times, and the right watch Fox News and listen to talk radio.

Exacerbating this state of affairs, we’re told, are social-media platforms whose algorithms give politically attuned users only content they’re likely to agree with. Facile claims to the contrary, Facebook, Twitter and similar platforms don’t have this effect. A 2019 study, “Are Filter Bubbles Real?” by Axel Bruns of Queensland University Technology in Australia surveys a wide array of evidence and finds that social-media users on all sides get plenty of exposure to content with which they disagree. “Ironically,” Mr. Bruns writes in an aside, “echo chamber and filter bubble concepts may have become so popular with some journalists, media critics, and politicians because members of these professional classes are genuinely more likely to inhabit an information cocoon of sorts.”

Wholesale prices rose 0.3% in November, more than expected, despite hopes that inflation is cooling: Jeff Cox

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/09/wholesale-prices-rose-0point3percent-in-november-more-than-expected-despite-hopes-that-inflation-is-cooling.html

The producer price index, a measure of what companies get for their products in the pipeline, increased 0.3% for the month and 7.4% from a year ago.
A 38% surge in wholesale vegetable prices helped push the food index up by 3.3%, offsetting an identical 3.3% decline in energy costs.

Wholesale prices rose more than expected in November as food prices surged, dampening hopes that inflation could be headed lower, the Labor Department reported Friday.

The producer price index, a measure of what companies get for their products in the pipeline, increased 0.3% for the month and 7.4% from a year ago, which was the slowest 12-month pace since May 2021. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a 0.2% gain.

Excluding food and energy, core PPI was up 0.4%, also against a 0.2% estimate. Core PPI was up 6.2% from a year ago, compared with 6.6% in October.

Kyrsten Sinema leaves Democratic Party, registers as independent, cuts fragile margin in US Senate by Ronald J. Hansen

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/kyrsten-sinema-leaves-democratic-party-registers-as-independent-cuts-fragile-margin-in-us-senate/ar-AA155dHr

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema said Friday she is leaving the Democratic Party and will formally become an independent in a move that more fully places her at the center of a narrowly divided chamber.

“I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington,” she wrote.

Sinema maintained she doesn’t plan to change her voting habits: often aligning with Democrats but backing Republicans on certain issues. And she won’t dispense with the legislative filibuster that has led many Democrats to call for her to face a primary challenge in 2024.

Sinema’s move will jar Democrats who had hoped Sen. Raphael Warnock’s runoff victory in Georgia on Tuesday would provide the party a measure of breathing room on difficult votes that often hinged on Sinema and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.

“We’ve seen in recent years that the parties have pulled folks to the political edges,” Sinema said during a 45-minute interview with The Republic. “There’s an increasing demand that you kind of fit in with one political orthodoxy or the other. … I’ve never fit that.”

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose In victory and defeat, Democrats continue to push the voter-suppression myth. Jason L. Riley

https://www.city-journal.org/georgia-senate-race-demolishes-voter-suppression-myth

“The voter suppression we’re seeing in Georgia and across the country is Jim Crow in new clothes,” Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia wrote on Facebook last year while campaigning for reelection. Such rhetoric has become commonplace on the political left, even while it has never been more divorced from reality.

In January, President Biden traveled to Atlanta and used similarly charged language to describe voting rules supported by Republican lawmakers in Georgia and other states. “Jim Crow 2.0 is about two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion,” Biden said. “It’s no longer about who gets to vote. It’s about making it harder to vote.” Vice President Kamala Harris added that she would “not stop fighting against the anti-voter legislation that Republican legislatures continue to push at the state level.” Anti-voter legislation?

Democrats insist that Republicans have made it harder to cast a ballot by passing voter ID laws, limiting the timeframe for early voting, and reverting to pre-Covid voting protocols now that the pandemic has subsided. But if that’s true, why has voter participation been rising, including among the minority groups that Democrats claim are being targeted for disenfranchisement?

Warnock defeated his Republican challenger, Herschel Walker, in a runoff election on Tuesday that saw voter turnout exceed what it was on Election Day last month. It “surpassed expectations of election officials, who expected fewer voters to show up for the second round of voting,” reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Instead, turnout “increased by 200,000 voters from the 1.4 million people who cast ballots in Nov. 8 in the general election.”

Twitter Files Damn the Government and the Media They show a coordinated attempt to suppress speech and cover up Hunter Biden’s laptop: Charles Lipson

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/the-twitter-files-are-damning-to-government-and-the-media/

There are two pieces of deeply disturbing news to emerge from the “Twitter Files” released by Elon Musk. The first is that Twitter, under its old management, was not the open, politically neutral platform it pretended to be. Journalist Bari Weiss has shown that Twitter had secret “blacklists” and related methods specifically designed to limit the reach of conservative commentators. When Twitter’s old management denied that bias, as it did repeatedly, it was lying.

Second, we are learning that Twitter worked closely with like-minded government bureaucrats to squelch legitimate news, information, and discussion. They did so to protect favored candidates (Democrats) and political positions (progressive). We will undoubtedly learn that Facebook, Google and other media giants had similar ties to Washington. We certainly need to know.

The government’s role here is damning. Its primary job under the First Amendment is to protect free speech, not to kill it. It botched that vital job, and it did so deliberately to increase its own control over private speech in public fora and, apparently, to promote certain political views.

The only good news here is that Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, is exposing the old management’s efforts to suppress speech and promote political bias on its platform. To expose those malign efforts, he ordered some of Twitter’s internal documents be given to two journalists: Matt Taibbi (who quickly published some of his findings as tweets) and Bari Weiss (who is beginning to publish some findings and promises to publish a longer analysis).

These 7 Trump-Critical GOP Senators Have No Plan To Deal With Unconstitutional, Election-Altering Censorship By: Evita Duffy

https://thefederalist.com/2022/12/08/these-7-trump-critical-gop-senators-have-no-plan-to-deal-with-unconstitutional-election-altering-censorship/

The Federalist asked the seven senators if they have a plan to remedy the unconstitutional censorship of voters and news during the 2020 election. Not one of them responded.

Seven Republican U.S. senators who slammed former President Trump for suggesting that new censorship revelations warranted a reconsideration of the 2020 presidential election results have no plan to address the First Amendment-violating censorship Trump was reacting to in “The Twitter Files.”

More and more evidence is exposing how our corrupt FBI brazenly violated the Constitution by dictating to social media monopolies what speech to censor from public and private discourse ahead of the 2020 election. Yet GOP senators are more preoccupied with Trump talking about altering the Constitution than they are with the deep state committing actual violations of it.

After revelations uncovered that Twitter colluded with the Biden campaign to censor content in the lead-up to the election and misused its “hacked material policy” to annihilate the Hunter Biden laptop story, Trump posted to Truth Social:

So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!

Trump clarified his comments on Monday, saying that he does not want to terminate the Constitution, but that there was “‘MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION’” that has been “irrefutably proven in the 2020 Presidential Election” and “steps must be immediately taken to RIGHT THE WRONG.”