Displaying posts categorized under

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

DeSantis’ COVID Vaccine Grand Jury Gets the Green Light From the Florida Supreme Court By Lincoln Brown

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2022/12/22/desantis-covid-vaccine-grand-jury-gets-the-green-light-from-the-florida-supreme-court-n1655816

On Thursday, the Florida Supreme Court gave the go-ahead to a request by Gov. Ron DeSantis to impanel a statewide grand jury to investigate potential wrongdoings related to COVID-19 vaccines.

The Tampa Bay Times reported that Hillsborough County Circuit Judge Ronald Ficarrotta will preside, with members to be selected from five judicial districts. DeSantis made the initial request on the 13th of this month, stating at the time that “there are good and sufficient reasons to deem it to be in the public interest to impanel a statewide grand jury to investigate criminal or wrongful activity in Florida relating to the development, promotion, and distribution of vaccines purported to prevent COVID-19 infection, symptoms, and transmission.”

DeSantis was a one-time proponent of the vaccines for certain demographics, namely senior citizens. However, he became skeptical of them over time, in particular because of the claims about their efficacy. The Associated Press reported that DeSantis contends that drug manufacturers had a financial interest in creating a mindset that vaccinated people could not transmit the virus to another person. According to the article in the Times, the scope of the grand jury will include:

…people and ‘entities, including, but not limited to, pharmaceutical manufacturers (and their executive officers) and other medical associations or organizations involved in the design, development, clinical testing or investigation, manufacture, marketing, representation, advertising, promotion, labeling, distribution, formulation, packing, sale, purchase, donation, dispensing, prescribing, administration, or use of vaccines purported to prevent COVID-19 infection, symptoms, and transmission.’

The Subsidy Tango of Bill Gates and Joe Manchin The West Virginia Senator and the billionaire investor score a windfall in the Inflation Reduction Act.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-subsidy-tango-of-bill-gates-and-joe-manchin-terrapower-climate-spending-john-barrasso-jennifer-granholm-11671741449?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Bill Gates sold West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin on this year’s Democratic climate spending blowout as a way to put unemployed coal workers to work building advanced nuclear reactors. Now we learn, belatedly, that these projects depend on Russia for fuel and will cost taxpayers more than advertised.

The Energy Department last year awarded up to $2 billion for an advanced nuclear reactor “demonstration” project in Wyoming being developed by TerraPower, a company Mr. Gates founded. These advanced reactors have been promoted because they take up significantly less space than conventional reactors and could theoretically use reprocessed nuclear fuel.

TerraPower’s reactors will also supposedly be able to ramp up and down to balance intermittent solar and wind power on the grid. But the technology currently requires enormous government subsidies to be commercially viable. Reactors also require many more years to build than renewable and fossil-fuel plants owing to stricter licensing requirements and environmental reviews.

TerraPower planned to complete the Wyoming generator by 2028 assuming no hang-ups. There always are. So it wasn’t surprising when TerraPower disclosed this month that completion will be delayed by at least two years. But the reason was alarming: TerraPower was counting on Russia to supply it with high-assay, low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel.

The Marine Corps Goes Woke Sarah Arnold  

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/saraharnold/2022/12/22/marine-corps-goes-woke-n2617456

In a world where everything that was once normal is now woke, it’s no surprise that the Marine Corps has also turned the tide. 

A newly released academic report from the University of Pittsburgh recommended that the U.S. Marine Corps drop the words “sir” and “ma’am” used to address senior officers to avoid “misgendering” drill instructors despite there only being 14,000 females in the Marine Corps, which makes up of only 7 percent of the branch.

Instead of using the words “sir” and “ma’am,” recruits in the military services refer to their drill instructors using their ranks or roles followed by their last names. 

The 738-page report highlights a $2 million study that was conducted to examine gender-integrated recruit training, which claimed that the change would make both genders feel more comfortable when being addressed by peers. 

However, not everyone is on board with the woke change. 

According to the Marine Corps Times, Col. Howard Hall, chief of staff for Marine Corps Training and Education Command, expressed several concerns. 

“That’s going to take some effort,” Hall said, adding “honestly, that’s not a quick fix. What is inculcating in our young recruits that will or will not be reinforced when they graduate and enter the fleet Marine force? So again, we want to avoid any quick-fix solutions that introduce perturbations down the line.”

Are Universities Doomed? Elite university degrees certify very little. And the secret is out.  By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/21/are-universities-doomed/

In a famous exchange in the The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway wrote: “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually, then suddenly.”

“Gradually” and “suddenly” applies to higher education’s implosion. 

During the 1990s “culture wars” universities were warned that their chronic tuition hikes above the rate of inflation were unsustainable. 

Their growing manipulation of blanket federal student loan guarantees, and part-time faculty and graduate teaching assistants always was suicidal. 

Left-wing indoctrination, administrative bloat, obsessions with racial preferences, arcane, jargon-filled research, and campus-wide intolerance of diverse thought short-changed students, further alienated the public—and often enraged alumni.

Over the last 30 years, enrollments in the humanities and history crashed. So did tenure-track faculty positions. Some $1.7 trillion in federally backed student loans have only greenlighted inflated tuition—and masked the contagion of political indoctrination and watered-down courses. 

 But “gradually” imploding has now become “suddenly.” Zoom courses, a declining pool of students, and soaring costs all prompt the public to question the college experience altogether. 

Nationwide undergraduate enrollment has dropped by more than 650,000 students in a single year—or over 4 percent alone from spring 2021 to 2022, and some 14 percent in the last decade. Yet the U.S. population still increases by about 2 million people a year.

Men account for about 71 percent of the current shortfall of students. Women number almost 60 percent of all college students—an all-time high. 

Monotonous professors hector students about “toxic masculinity,” as “gender” studies proliferate. If the plan was to drive males off campus, universities have succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. 

Thanks to Elon, the FBI has a lot to answer for By Michael Letts

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

Things have not been good for the Federal Bureau of Investigation this year.

Thanks to its new owner Elon Musk, the “Twitter Files” have been making the rounds, revealing just what kind of relationship the social media giant has with the bureau. Apparently the two had “constant and pervasive” communications, with the FBI treating Twitter as a “subsidiary.” In other words, they were making note of accounts and tweets that needed to be taken action against.

That aligns with reports about surveillance on citizens and infringing on free speech rights in a number of ways — all in the name of “justice.”

Republicans are working on getting hold of these “Twitter Files,” in hopes of being able to get several subpoenas against both the FBI and the Department of Justice. Leading this charge is Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), who will soon be the chairman for the House Intelligence Committee.

Speaking with Fox News on a recent episode of Sunday Morning Futures, he stated, “We are definitely pursuing the Department of Justice and also the FBI. We certainly intend to pursue subpoena power to expose the extent to which the FBI has been doing this.”

“While we pursue intelligence community to try to hold them accountable, while we’re doing that, Elon Musk is showing what’s happening on the other side with the willing partners, the mainstream media, social media, and really exposing coordination that was occurring between the FBI and them,” he continued.

And how. With Republicans set to take back the House next month, it appears they can finally get things moving as far as taking a closer look at what the FBI is really doing.

Turner believes that, by attaining these files, “we can cut off the funding and prevent, obviously, average Americans being impacted by FBI actions.”

But this goes much deeper than that. “The FBI… under the cover of saying they were pursuing foreign malign influence, had really exploded into activities that involved engaging with mainstream media and social media, and really impacting what is the normal debate of democracy. What’s really troubling here in my opinion is this is not based on intelligence.”

Our President, The Pathological Liar A shameful characteristic throughout his whole 52-year political career. by Jeff Crouere

https://www.frontpagemag.com/our-president-the-pathological-liar/

The sad reality is that the President of the United States, Joe Biden, is a pathological liar. This is not a new personality trait for our Commander-in-Chief, but a characteristic that has been apparent throughout his 52-year political career.

Biden has been telling lies, including massive untruths, for decades. It is a major reason he had to exit the 1988 presidential campaign. He lied about his law school grades and plagiarized speeches from United Kingdom Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock.

Regularly, Biden lies about his childhood, his family, his academic career, and his record as a politician.

Does anyone really believe that, as a young lifeguard, he faced off with a “bad dude” named “Corn Pop” who had a “bunch of bad boys” armed with “straight razors?” Biden claimed he used a six-foot chain to force the gang to leave.

Biden pretends he was a tough guy and has boasted that in high school, he would have taken Donald Trump “behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.”

He likes to embellish his career as a college football player and lied about being on the University of Delaware team that beat the Ohio Bearcats. He said he quit the team to date the woman who would become his first wife, but, instead, he was forced to leave due to bad grades.

This week, Biden told a series of lies that are impossible to reconcile. At a town hall meeting with U.S. veterans in Delaware, Biden told a story of awarding a Purple Heart to his uncle, Frank Biden. He said that his uncle had served heroically in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II, and had earned the Purple Heart, but never received it.

He declared he “got” his uncle the Purple Heart after he was elected Vice President in 2008. Biden said he awarded it to his uncle in front of family members. According to Biden, his uncle did not want the award because “the others died, I lived, I don’t want it.”

The Persistence of the Left Why an ideology so graphically repudiated by history – and so bloody in its application – continues to endure. by Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-persistence-of-the-left/

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 sparked a wave of optimism and triumphalism across the West. Our nuclear-armed rival and ideological enemy had suddenly disappeared, taking with it the shadow of nuclear apocalypse. But for the Left, since 1917 the Soviet Union had been the locus of the hopes and dreams of leftist collectivism. Now history, understood as an ideological game of thrones, had ended, dashing that hope. Liberal democracy, private property, and free-market capitalism had prevailed, and no credible alternative remained.

This optimism was expressed by George H.W. Bush in 1991, when he celebrated this “new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind––peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law.” Yet the demise of the USSR did not mean the end of various Marxist ideals like collectivism and the “command economy,” which haven’t just survived, but in recent decades have grown stronger under progressivist rule.

How is it that an ideology so graphically repudiated by history and so bloody in its application, has managed to endure, especially in the West, which has provided the greatest and most widespread prosperity, political equality, and freedom in human history?

The survival of the Left has nothing to do with the intellectual coherence or truth of its ideas. Leftism is predicated on dubious, if not wildly absurd, assumptions and ideas about human nature and motivation: secularism, philosophical materialism, determinism, and the technocratic fallacy that “science” can discover and exploit the timeless forces and laws of human progress and social improvement. The latter claim in particular has been repudiated by Marxism’s ghastly toll of 100 million dead, and millions more enslaved in gulags and forced-labor camps like the ones we see today in Communist China’s Xinjiang western region, where more than a million Muslim Uighurs are being subjected to forced labor and brutal “re-education.”

You Have to Watch Rand Paul’s ‘Twas the Week Before Christmas’ VIDEO ****

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/12/21/you-have-to-watch-rand-pauls-twas-the-week-before-christmas-n1655507

Sen. Rand Paul has written his own retelling of the classic poem “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” called ‘”Twas the Week Before Christmas” about the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill, and performs it in a video, which is currently going viral on social media.

The senator from Kentucky is seen donning a red blazer before a backdrop of a Christmas tree and a fireplace. “‘Twas a week before Christmas and all through the Senate and House, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse,” he begins. “The earmarks were hung by the chimney with care, in hopes that Saint Nicholas soon would be there. The senators were nestled all snug in their beds, while visions of pork danced in their heads.”

As for the rest, well, just watch the video.

Biden Should Be Fired So Americans Can Have Jobs

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/12/22/biden-should-be-fired-so-americans-can-have-jobs/

The Biden White House bragged in July that the economy added more than 1.1 million jobs in the second quarter. The Scatter Brain in Chief said that from April through June “we created more jobs than in any quarter under any of my predecessors in the nearly 40 years before the pandemic.” Now we learn that the real number of jobs added was only about 1% of that.

Maff are hard.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia, “in the aggregate, 10,500 net new jobs were added during the period rather than the 1.12 million jobs estimated by the sum of the states.”

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Employment Statistics estimate of a little more than 1 million new jobs was also a bit off, says the Philly Fed.

Not only did the administration celebrate the “new” jobs in the spring, Biden’s allies were so excited they could hardly keep their pants on. In October, the headline of a Center for American Progress post promised “The Swift Jobs Recovery Under Biden Will Have Long-Lasting Benefits for Workers.” At roughly the same time, The New Yorker gushed that “Biden Heads To The Midterms With 10 Million New Jobs,” while Yahoo senior columnist claimed in October “no other president comes close to matching his record on jobs.” 

Now it’s possible the Philly Fed is wrong and the higher numbers are more accurate. If so, it would be a miracle. Biden’s policies are not designed to create jobs.

On his first day at work as president, Biden killed 70,000 jobs by pulling the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. In doing so, he might “have set a single-day record for the number of jobs killed by an American president.

American kids are in the grip of a gender contagion By Mary Harrington

https://nypost.com/2022/12/20/american-kids-are-in-the-grip-of-a-gender-contagion/

American kids are in the grip of a gender contagion. New research from the Ethics and Public Policy Center reveals that the number of prescriptions for puberty blockers to under-18s doubled between 2017 and 2021.

The data, based on information gathered from insurers, provide the clearest picture to date of the booming industry of gender butchery being practiced on American minors.
In this medical Wild West, a well-oiled campaigning machine with tentacles into nonprofits, schools and even the White House recruits healthy kids and spits out sterilized simulacra of the opposite sex, often with lifelong health issues.

Concerned parents, meanwhile, are bullied into compliance with threats of suicide — and the “treatments” themselves don’t even make their victims happier. A recent study by the UK campaign group Sex Matters found puberty blockers and hormone treatments do no more to improve teens’ mental health than a placebo.

And yet, as the EPPC numbers show, demand continues to soar. Why? The driver seems to be a toxic blend of teen angst, educator activism and Internet addiction.

Puberty is often tough, and most teens are now exposed to hardcore porn at a young age via smartphones. Many add this corrupted picture of sexual relations to mental health and body issues — then seize on “LGBTQ+” activism in schools and the wider culture as a refuge.

Digging deep for a rainbow “identity” of their own, many more stumble upon forums and YouTube influencers that inspire with “before” and “after” images and tales of how transition will take all the angst and pain away.