Another Green Energy Assault on the West By Jonathan Lesser

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2023/05/24/another_green_energy_assault_on_the_west_901421.html

In March, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Mike Quigley (D-IL) introduced legislation, called the SITE Act, which will allow thousands of miles of high-voltage transmission lines to be sited over state and local objections, and allow developers to take privately owned lands through eminent domain.  The stated goal is to enable the development of vast quantities of heavily subsidized wind and solar power in rural areas and transmit it to cities where the electricity is needed to meet unrealistic and costly electrification mandates, such as those in California and New York.

The New York Times, for one, is celebrating.  Forcing rural states, which many Times readers deride as “flyover country,” to supply the electricity needs of coastal urban ones is seen by the Times as rural states’ obligation.  In a May 4, 2023, editorial, the Times wrote, “To tap the potential of renewable energy, the United States needs to dramatically expand the electric grid between places with abundant wind and sunshine and places where people live and work.”  Authority for siting new transmission lines would be under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which already has authority over siting of new natural gas pipelines.  

That same editorial also stated, “The federal government — the mechanism Americans have created to act in the interest of people in America as a whole — is where those decisions should be made.”  Given the actions taken in the past by the Bureau of Land Management, which has prevented ranchers from grazing on millions of acres of federally owned lands; the Forest Service, which last year began a prescribed burn on a windy day, despite please not to, and caused the largest wild fire in New Mexico’s history; and the Environmental Protection Agency, which considers every stream, pond, and arroyo to be a regulated wetland, many in rural states would likely disagree.

How Google manipulates search to favor liberals and tip elections By Miranda Devine

https://nypost.com/2023/05/24/how-google-manipulates-search-to-favor-liberals-and-tip-elections/?utm_campaign=iphone_nyp&utm_source=mail_app

While the focus has been on Twitter and Facebook’s censorship and liberal bias, the worst Big Tech culprit of all has been getting a free pass — and now it’s coming for our children.

That’s the warning from research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, a Californian Democrat with a Harvard Ph.D, who has spent the last decade monitoring Google’s manipulation of newsfeeds, search results and YouTube suggestions.

He shared his latest research with The Post when he was in New York this week to raise donations for the next stage of his project.

Epstein’s research shows that Google has the power to change minds and move elections to suit its liberal corporate worldview.

And despite regular protestations of innocence to Congress, the $1 trillion multinational tech giant is using its virtual monopoly as a search engine to elevate liberal views, stifle conservatives and manipulate the impressionable minds of our children.

Shifting 6 million votes

You thought Twitter and Facebook censoring The Post’s Hunter Biden laptop stories was bad?

How about 6 million votes shifted to Joe Biden by Google in the 2020 election by manipulating what we read and see online?

Liz Peek: Ron DeSantis: The good, the bad and the beautiful

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4020502-ron-desantis-the-good-the-bad-and-the-beautiful/

His campaign launch was something of a bust, but Ron DeSantis is nonetheless the man of the hour.

Through a conversation with Elon Musk hosted on Twitter Spaces that struggled to cope with an overwhelming audience, and in subsequent interviews on Fox News, Florida’s governor finally declared that he is running for president. In effect, he declared war on frontrunner Donald Trump. His supporters say it’s about time — Trump long ago declared war on him.

There has probably never before been a presidential candidate who has been so pummeled and bruised before even stepping into the ring. DeSantis has taken it on the chin not only from Trump but also from Democrats.

Why this pounding? Because all parties know DeSantis is a formidable, young and accomplished candidate with a superb record and CV who absolutely can beat President Biden. Polling says so, and so does common sense.

In late April, a poll showed that Biden would wallop Trump in a head-to-head but lose to DeSantis. More important, that same survey showed Florida’s governor beating Biden in most critical swing states; only in Wisconsin are the two men running neck and neck.

Of course, polls are changeable, and DeSantis has lost ground in recent months as Trump has vilified him, running nasty, mud-slinging ads about his votes in Congress and disparaging his accomplishments as governor.

Last fall, Trump warned DeSantis not to get in the race, threatening to dish “things” that were not “very flattering” about the governor. A day later, he called him a “fine guy.” Responding to the recent entry of Tim Scott into the race, Trump posted, “Tim is a big step up from Ron DeSanctimonious, who is totally unelectable.”

Trump’s unanswered parries have taken a toll, but do not count DeSantis out. Part of Trump’s surge in the polls has stemmed from what many feel are the politically inspired legal attacks on the former president. Outrage about what appears to be two systems of justice, while maddening, will only take Trump so far. Will a majority of the country really support a man who has now been found guilty of sexual assault?

At High School Debates, Debate Is No Longer Allowed James Fishback 

https://www.thefp.com/p/judges-ruin-high-school-debate-tournaments

At national tournaments, judges are making their stances clear: students who argue ‘capitalism can reduce poverty’ or ‘Israel has a right to defend itself’ will lose—no questions asked.
Members of the Walter Johnson High School debate team in Bethesda, Maryland, take part in an American tradition in 2005. (Nikki Kahn via Getty Images)

My four years on a high school debate team in Broward County, Florida, taught me to challenge ideas, question assumptions, and think outside the box. It also helped me overcome a terrible childhood stutter. And I wasn’t half-bad: I placed ninth my first time at the National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA) nationals, sixth at the Harvard national, and was runner-up at the Emory national. 

After college, between 2017 and 2019, I coached a debate team at an underprivileged high school in Miami. There, I witnessed the pillars of high school debate start to crumble. Since then, the decline has continued, from a competition that rewards evidence and reasoning to one that punishes students for what they say and how they say it.

First, some background. Imagine a high school sophomore on the debate team. She’s been given her topic about a month in advance, but she won’t know who her judge is until hours before her debate round. During that time squeeze—perhaps she’ll pace the halls as I did at the 2012 national tournament in Indianapolis—she’ll scroll on her phone to look up her judge’s name on Tabroom, a public database maintained by the NSDA. That’s where judges post “paradigms,” which explain what they look for during a debate. If a judge prefers competitors not “spread”—speak a mile a minute—debaters will moderate their pace. If a judge emphasizes “impacts”—the reasons why an argument matters—debaters adjust accordingly. 

But let’s say when the high school sophomore clicks Tabroom she sees that her judge is Lila Lavender, the 2019 national debate champion, whose paradigm reads, “Before anything else, including being a debate judge, I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist. . . . I cannot check the revolutionary proletarian science at the door when I’m judging. . . . I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist positions/arguments. . . . Examples of arguments of this nature are as follows: fascism good, capitalism good, imperialist war good, neoliberalism good, defenses of US or otherwise bourgeois nationalism, Zionism or normalizing Israel, colonialism good, US white fascist policing good, etc.” 

THE SOROS AGENDA BY RACHEL EHRENFELD

There has been a spate of columns and commentary on the elusive George Soros. Even his son Alexander,  is listed as a celebrity, flush with a 20 billion dollars allowance from his dad to continue the turpitude of the Soros agenda.

 Here is what the Honorable Michael Mukasey has to say about Rachel Ehrenfeld’s superb book.

“Rachel Ehrenfeld here has undertaken an ambitious project – to sketch the sprawling agenda of a billionaire who has called the United States “the main obstacle to a stable and just world.”  She shows how he has used his resources to undermine this country’s justice system, its sovereignty, and its social cohesion. The only other country on which George Soros arguably has inflicted comparable damage is Israel.  Although Soros was born Jewish, he has done more to spread anti-Israel propaganda than anyone on the face of the earth, according to a former U.S. ambassador to Israel, and has cynically used his Jewish birth to hurl promiscuous accusations of anti-Semitism at anyone who dares to criticize him.  In this wide-ranging description of what Soros does through the ironically named Open Society Foundation, Ehrenfeld describes not only the multi-faceted malign conduct of George Soros, but also the obstacles he puts in the way of anyone who would expose the financial underpinnings of his various organizations.  Rachel Ehrenfeld brings skill and passion to present a damning indictment of a dangerous man. ”

*Michael B. Mukasey served as Attorney General of the United States from 2007 to 2009, and as a U.S. District Judge from 1988 to 2006. 

Report from Ukraine: Why They Fight by Richard Kemp

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19673/report-from-ukraine

I asked what they now needed most from our countries. Of course more guns, more ammo, more tanks, more rockets plus combat planes always featured. But another consistent answer was striking even if not surprising: please do not try to force our country to make peace with the invaders.

The government in Kyiv has so far documented 19,393 kidnapped children, and there are most likely many more that are as yet unidentified.

Like the torture and murder of civilians in Izium and elsewhere, and the summary execution of prisoners of war, these kidnappings are war crimes. It is for these abductions that the International Criminal Court in March issued arrest warrants against Vladimir Putin and his so-called Children’s Rights Commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova.

Putin’s forces and civilian bureaucrats have seized children from orphanages and children’s homes, removed them directly from their parents or taken them into “care” after killing their families. Some have been forcibly fostered or adopted in cities including Moscow, Saint Petersburg and Rostov. Names and dates of birth are sometimes changed to render them untraceable.

While torture and murder cannot be undone, Russia’s child kidnapping can, and it is inexplicable that so far there has been no large scale international outrage.

[K]nowledge of these wicked depredations is why they fight; and why they and the fighting men on Ukraine’s other battlefields remain determined to keep attacking, holding the invaders from their families’ doors until they drive them back beyond their borders, no matter what the personal cost might be.

This week, near Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, I spent time with commanders and soldiers who have been fighting the Russian invaders in the shattered city, sometimes for months on end. This has been one of the longest battles anywhere in the world since 1945 and by far the most brutal in this war, with Russians and Ukrainians often fighting at close quarters, artillery hammering the city into Stalingrad-like rubble and a level of slaughter unequalled anywhere else in Putin’s vicious war.

The IRS Opened its Investigation into Reporter Matt Taibbi’s Taxes on Christmas Eve, the Same Day He Dropped Twitter Files #9 By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/24/the-irs-opened-its-investigation-into-reporter-matt-taibbis-taxes-on-christmas-eve-the-same-day-he-dropped-twitter-files-9/

In a letter to IRS Director Daniel Werfel Wednesday, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) revealed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) opened a case targeting independent journalist Matt Taibbi on Christmas Eve 2022, coinciding with Taibbi’s Twitter Files reporting on the intelligence community’s collusion with multiple tech platforms. The IRS, according to recently obtained documents, then produced a dossier on Taibbi that included information such as his voter registration records, whether he possessed a hunting or fishing license, and whether he had a concealed weapons permit.

The “case” has since been resolved, and the documents confirm that not only did Taibbi not owe the IRS any back taxes, the IRS owed him a “substantial refund.”

The House Judiciary Committee has been investigating the circumstances surrounding the IRS’s visit to Taibbi’s house on March 9, 2023, the same day he testified before the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

The IRS on May 6 produced some documents responsive to the Committee’s March 27 request for information regarding an IRS agent’s suspiciously timed visit to Taibbi’s home.  These documents “raise more questions than they answer,” Jordan wrote in his letter to Werfel.

The IRS asserted to the Committee that it sent a letter to Mr. Taibbi on October 24, 2019—nine days after Mr. Taibbi filed his 2018 tax return—asking Mr. Taibbi to verify his return because it met identity theft criteria and could not be processed until he confirmed. The IRS alleged that it sent a second letter to Mr. Taibbi on March 23, 2020. However, according to Mr. Taibbi, neither he nor his accountant received either of these letters or any other notification that there was an issue with his 2018 tax return—that is, until the IRS conducted a field visit at Mr. Taibbi’s home three years later. The IRS also failed to produce these purported letters to the Committee.

The Left Has Pushed the Envelope Why are our government, corporations, and popular culture colluding in mass suicide—to the delight of our enemies like Communist China? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2023/05/24/the-left-has-pushed-the-envelope/

The Left is waging a full-fledged cultural revolution against traditional America. And the Maoist results are often as absurd as they are terrifying.

Special-counsel John Durham just issued his final report on wrongdoing within the FBI, CIA, and the Department of Justice. 

The summary confirms that our premier investigatory and intelligence agencies interfered in the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns. 

Directors and high-ranking FBI officials lied under oath. They misled Congress. They altered court documents and deceived federal judges. 

The FBI hired a foreign national to gather dirt on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign—while he was being paid by the rival Hillary Clinton campaign.

The FBI contracted Twitter to suppress news stories. It kept the Hunter Biden laptop under wraps, even as former intelligence officials flat out lied it was likely “Russian disinformation.” That was a blatant effort to aid the 2020 Biden campaign.

The IRS just conceded whistleblowers were correct and the agency fired its entire multiyear audit team responsible for investigating Hunter Biden’s purported tax irregularities. 

The agency claimed it was ordered to do so by the Department of Justice, headed by Biden’s appointee Merrick Garland.

California is facing a crushing $32 billion deficit. Yet it flirts with an $800 billion-dollar “reparations” payout to the state’s black residents. 

No one has any idea where the money for that would come from. No one can define who would qualify. No one can explain why a state that never allowed slavery eight generations ago now owes selected Californians billions of dollars it does not have. 

One of the reparations board leaders asserts blacks might be willing to accept an “installment” plan of payments.

The NAACP just issued a “travel alert” advising blacks not to visit Florida. The announcement was timed to draw negative attention to conservative Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ announcement of a presidential bid. 

Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis—all outside Florida—have the highest black murder rates in the nation. 

Florida in contrast, with a black population of 3.3 million, has the second largest number of black businesses in the nation. The chairman of the NAACP’s board of directors is himself a Florida resident! 

A Strong El Niño in 2023? Not Likely. By Robert Cutler

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/a_strong_el_nio_in_2023_not_likely.html

Global warming completely stopped in 2018.  Temperatures will likely remain steady until 2025 and may decline slightly by 2030.  A strong El Niño in 2023 is unlikely.  I’ll explain all of my predictions — after we hear from the experts.

NOAA recently predicted a 55% chance of a strong El Niño in late 2023.  The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) threw more fuel on the fire when it announced, “There is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record.”  Obviously, the MSM had a field day with this.  Take for example this headline from USA Today: “Scientists warn an El Niño is likely coming that could bring scorching heat to Earth.”

Rather than taking the well worn path of pointing out flaws in the predictions of NOAA, the IPCC, or the WMO, I’ll instead show how the sun is likely responsible for almost every detail in global temperatures over the last 125 years, and that it is also responsible for triggering strong El Niños.

Two empirical, or black-box, models were created to predict global temperature.  The first model uses solar magnetic field data from the Wilcox Solar Observatory (WSO).  The second model uses sunspot data from WDC-SILSO, the Royal Observatory of Belgium, Brussels.  Both predictions will be compared to global temperature anomaly data from NOAA.

Solar magnetic field data collection began in 1976.  The complete WSO dataset can be viewed in a single graphic, often referred to as a butterfly diagram.  It looks complicated, but it’s really not.  It’s just a plot of solar magnetic field intensity over time as a function of the sun’s latitude.  The two colors represent north and south polarity magnetism.  Unlike the Earth, where magnetic north has conveniently stayed in the Northern Hemisphere for the last 780,000 years, the sun’s magnetic field changes polarity every 11 years.

What to Do and Why It Matters By J.B. Shurk

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/05/what_to_do_and_why_it_matters.html

Among the sharp-witted reader comments that come my way, some clonk me on the head with reasonable gripes that take a couple of forms: (1) sure, Shurk, the country is a mess, but what precisely are we going to do about it?  Or more despondently: (2) Given how awful everything is, how could anything we do possibly matter?

I would like to address the second question first by stating emphatically: what you do matters tremendously.  Your efforts influence others in ways you may never know.

As but a single illustration of this truth, consider this message from a young woman that was reposted to a comment thread at The Conservative Treehouse:

My heart goes out to the men and women who have been awake for years if not decades.  I cannot imagine the frustration and hopelessness you must have felt when you were literally watching the world burn with no one to talk to.  We’re here now and we are awake.  Sorry we’re late.

If those fifty words don’t give you a bit of a jolt, check yourself for a pulse.  The moment we stop believing that our actions can make a difference in this world is the moment we thank our enemies for having dug the six-foot hole up ahead.  When we refuse to surrender and force our enemies to keep digging, then the only question that matters is this: who will get tired first?  

Even when you feel alone, there are people watching and wondering whether you will hold the line.  Some of those people are even carrying shovels.  But over time, your resilience changes minds.  Diggers throw down their tools to join sides with the people who refuse to go away.  It is an enduring certainty that all movements for great change begin with a smattering of strong-willed truth-tellers who seed the ground with inspiration before a harvest of raw courage sweeps the land.  Nobody can keep you from being that seed.  Perseverance is its own reward.