https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=–QS_UyW2SY
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/own_goal_bidens_bid_to_discredit_trump_with_maralago_raid_has_only_made_him_more_popular_iitipp_poll.html
If Joe Biden and his ruling Democrats had intended to discredit President Trump through their showy Mar-a-Lago raid, a new poll suggests they have failed miserably.
They’ve actually accomplished the opposite of what they set out to do.
According to the highly reputable and accurate I&I/TIPP, Trump has lost not a whit of popularity with Republican voters since the FBI raid.
In fact, he’s actually gained.
What do the numbers say about Trump, who, between those two polls, endured the FBI’s raid, which has no precedent in U.S. history?
In August, 53% of Republicans said they would vote for Trump. In September, that number rose to 54%, a small gain. But Trump has a majority of his party, while Biden barely ekes out a third of the Democrats.
And, the important point, he lost nothing from the Mar-A-Lago raid. If anything, he gained support, while other potential challengers slipped.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who received 17% in the August poll, dipped to 15% in September, while former Vice President Mike Pence dropped from 10% to 8%. No other GOP challenger received more than 2% in September.
Trump has the support of more than half his party with that 54% popularity figure commonly characterized as landslide territory.
Biden by contrast has the support of only one out of three Democrat voters, and though the numbers show that Biden’s “popularity” rose from 30% to 34% among Democrats, that’s a chump-change figure, given that so few of them support him at all.
It looks as though that broad effort to smear, criminalize, and discredit President Trump through the Mar-a-Lago FBI raid has actually backfired badly on Democrats. They’ve actually made him more popular.
https://amac.us/soros-backed-prosecutors-face-backlash-in-virginia/
In what has become a disturbing and alarming pattern in Fairfax County, Virginia, a defendant charged with sexually assaulting a minor walked free with only misdemeanor charges last week following a mishandling of the case by Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano, one of nearly 100 Democrat prosecutors funded by far-left billionaire George Soros. Now, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares are ramping up pressure on Descano as well as the Old Dominion’s other radical prosecutors to enforce the law, just the latest example of widespread backlash against Soros-backed prosecutors’ radical criminal justice “reform” agenda.
In the case that concluded last week and drew considerable public outrage, 36-year-old Ronnie Reel, who was originally arrested in July of 2021 on charges of forcible sodomy and aggravated sexual battery against an 11-year-old boy, was released on time served. According to the victim’s mother, Reel “was confessing every little detail that he did, and it was making me sick to my stomach…It was horrible. He literally confessed to me why he did it.”
The case seemed like a slam dunk, and a successful conviction likely would have led to the offender receiving life in prison. But when the case came to trial, the Judge ruled that most of the evidence, including the criminal’s confession, was inadmissible in court due to Descano’s office missing a filing deadline. The case then fell on the shoulders of the 11-year-old victim, who was forced to testify to the assault. Without the corroborating evidence, it was clear that the sex offender would be found not guilty. Descano ultimately offered the sex offender a deal in which he needed only to plead guilty to Misdemeanor Assault and Battery. Notably, the charges Reel pled guilty to do not require him to register as a sex offender, and he is not on supervised probation.
Descano has denied any responsibility for the failure, and incredibly seemed to blame the adolescent victim, saying in a statement that “young victims often have difficulty recalling the details of such significant trauma – which is why prosecuting these crimes is uniquely challenging.”
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/3664064-the-west-needs-leadership-biden-has-failed-the-test/
Global economies are in free fall even as inflation runs unchecked. The Western world looks to the president of the United States for leadership; they look in vain.
President Biden has not undertaken the two things that might help the economy here at home and others around the world regain their footing: stop the gusher of cash coming from the federal government and help U.S. oil and gas industries ramp up production to bring down energy prices.
By determining to cut our deficits and drive energy production higher, Biden could immediately signal that he is serious about helping the Federal Reserve fight inflation and willing to buck climate-obsessed progressives in his party in the face of a global emergency.
Currently, he is signaling the exact opposite. While Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has (finally) undertaken stiff measures to rein in money supply growth, the White House nullifies his efforts by continuing to pump money into the economy as fast as possible.
The latest spending spree from Biden is his plan to cancel student debt, a regressive program estimated by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to cost $400 billion. Given that the CBO neglected to cost out parts of the program that could add to the tally, the Committee for a Responsible Government Budget puts the expense at closer to $600 billion.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/09/27/bidens-depletion-of-the-strategic-petroleum-reserve-could-be-catastrophic-soon-n1632699
Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan may have tanked his approval ratings, but record inflation and soaring gas prices kept them underwater.
As fuel prices reached historic highs, Biden stubbornly refused to do anything that would increase domestic supply, opting instead to buy fuel from overseas before eventually raiding the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. It was a foolish thing to do, and while gas prices have gone down, the impact of raiding the reserves is debatable. But one thing is for sure: Biden depleted the reserves, which are now at a 37-year low, to boost his poll numbers.
Now that Hurricane Ian is headed for Florida, the folly of Biden’s tactic is on full display.
That’s not to say he shouldn’t have seen this coming. Jeffrey Lord predicted this exact scenario back in July.
“The Biden administration, for political purposes with an eye on the November election, is using the SPR to lower the price of gas. And just where is the SPR getting its crude in the first place? That would be the Gulf of Mexico — which is exactly where so many hurricanes wind up in the United States,” Lord wrote at The American Spectator. “All of which means Biden is lowering U.S. reserves — and taking the chance that no hurricane will hit the gulf in this coming hurricane season that will halt the ability of the U.S. to refill the reserves it has used for the purely political purpose of lowering the price of gas at the pump.”
https://thefederalist.com/2022/09/27/fbi-seized-86-million-in-raid-on-innocent-americans-safe-boxes-after-duping-judge-for-warrant/
‘The government’s theory is that having cash makes you a presumptive criminal, and I think every American should be worried about that.’
There is no denying anymore that our federal agencies have weaponized their power against the political adversaries of the left. But if you think the feds’ abandonment of all standards only affects outspoken critics of the regime, think again. More allegations of FBI corruption and hubris are coming to light after a lawsuit last week revealed FBI agents misled a judge so they could illegally seize and withhold property from innocent American citizens.
Agents took more than $86 million in cash, jewelry, and gold from 1,400 safe deposit boxes during the raid of a Beverly Hills vault company in March 2021. Lawyers representing a group of deposit box owners claim their items were illegally taken and not returned to them more than a year after the raid of the Beverly Hills, California, branch of U.S. Private Vaults.
Seizing Innocent Americans’ Assets
This past March, a year after the raid, the owners of U.S. Private Vaults pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder drug money. However, the hundreds of citizens whose assets were seized by the FBI are not suspected of any crimes, according to court documents.
Deposit box holders whose property was taken sued the bureau for violating their rights. Robert Frommer, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice, the libertarian, nonprofit law firm that filed the suit, said in the court papers: “We brought suit on behalf of seven clients, but we were representing a class of at least 400 people. What we’ve been trying to show for the past several months is that the government’s actions violated the search-and-seizure protections of the US Constitution in the Fourth Amendment.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/09/did_the_fbi_finally_go_too_far.html
On reading about the Saturday arrest of pro-life activist Mark Houck, I thought the author at this alternative site had to be exaggerating. It struck me as beyond belief that two dozen or so armed FBI agents would swarm the house of a Catholic father of seven, rifles drawn, and arrest him in front of his weeping children for anything short of murder.
I have had to recalibrate my belief system. The “crime” fell quite a bit short of murder. On October 13, 2021, Houck brought his 12-year-old son with him for his weekly sidewalk counseling outside of a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Philadelphia. A volunteer escort at the abortion clinic reportedly called Houck’s son a “fag” among other insults and threatened him. Houck pushed the man away from his son, and the man fell. Houck, the founder of an organization that promotes Christian virtue among men, was not charged with a crime.
However petty the incident, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Pennsylvania, had Houck seized at gunpoint nearly a year later and bragged about the arrest. Said PR hack Jennifer Crandall in a press release, Houck “assaulted a man because he was a volunteer reproductive health care clinic escort.”
Before proceeding, this sentence needs parsing. The most problematic word is “because.” Houck has had hundreds of opportunities to assault escorts if their offense in his eyes was to be an escort. Although the press release claims two incidents on that same day with the man, Houck had no prior or subsequent altercations.
Then there is the Orwellian phrase “reproductive health care clinic escort.” Ms. Crandall is somehow fusing the “reproductive rights” euphemism favored by abortion activists with the function of the escort, whose mission, of course, is to assure that no reproduction takes place on his watch.
https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-poverty-crisis-dems-will-never-let-go-to-waste/
Whether hard or soft, the Left operates through a few core tactics. One is “by any means necessary.” Double standards, “big lies,” violence, censorship––all are justified by the alleged nobility of their goals like “equity” and “social justice.” The other is the precept “You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste,” as Barack Obama’s chief of staff Rahm Emanuel put it, since a crisis is “an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
And if there isn’t a “serious crisis”? Manufacture one by employing the tactics of “any means necessary.” If statistical data tell us that unarmed black men are not disproportionately and wantonly being gunned down by the police, just keep yelling the “big lie” that they are, while violently rioting, assaulting, and looting and burning businesses for the television and iPhone cameras. Shake down corporate hegemons for danegeld, intimidate mayors and governors into defunding police departments, demonize cops into retirement, and soon you can do things you “could not do before,” like hiring prosecutors who release violent criminals back on the streets to keep on killing and maiming.
Not wasting manufactured “crises” has been the progressives’ most successful methods for expanding and concentrating the power of the federal Leviathan.
One of the oldest “crises” the progressive technocrats have exploited for over half a century is “poverty,” especially “child poverty.” Last year, for example, Democrat Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer promised that expanding the tax credit for children would “cut child poverty in half,” and Biden repeated that promise.
In fact, as Phil Gramm and John Early pointed out recently, the poverty rate barely budged from 2020’, and remained higher than 2019’s, “even though government spent an extra $2.6 trillion on transfer payments in 2020-21.” And don’t forget, this largesse is added to the $23 trillion tab run up since Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty” legislation of 1964. Worse, all that money has lowered official poverty rates by only a few points at best from 1964’s rate. So why do we continue this dysfunctional approach?
https://www.wsj.com/articles/huzzah-a-student-loan-plaintiff-frank-garrison-lawsuit-biden-pacific-legal-foundation-11664311394?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
The Biden Administration has to know it lacks the authority to unilaterally cancel a half-trillion dollars in student debt, but it may have calculated that no one could demonstrate the injury needed to bring a legal challenge. Well, maybe someone can.
An Indiana borrower on Tuesday filed a federal lawsuit to block the President’s student loan write-off. He makes a strong case that he is harmed by the loan cancellation and that it’s illegal. Federal courts only hear cases and controversies. As a threshold matter, plaintiffs must show that they have suffered a concrete and particular injury.
Individual taxpayers aren’t directly harmed by the write-off, even if they will ultimately bear the cost. The cancellation is unfair to Americans who repaid their loans or didn’t go to college, but they haven’t suffered a concrete injury. Frank Garrison argues he will be harmed owing to quirks in federal loan repayment plans and Indiana tax law.
Mr. Garrison is enrolled in the federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which limits his monthly payments to a share of his income and discharges the remaining debt after 10 years of payments. The President’s loan forgiveness will immediately cancel $20,000 in debt. But this won’t reduce his monthly payments since they are already capped.
However, it will require him to pay more than $1,000 in state tax on the canceled debt this year. Indiana doesn’t tax Public Service Loan Forgiveness, so he wouldn’t face a state tax liability several years from now. Thus he won’t receive an “additional benefit from the cancellation—just a one-time additional penalty,” according to his suit.
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/biden-thinks-stock-market-doesnt-matter-heres-what-he-doesnt-get
Stock markets are crashing, but Joe Biden doesn’t care.
The cheery president is oblivious, even though U.S. investors have lost $7.6 trillion since he took office and we are now officially in a bear market.
Politico reports that Biden wants to hit the road, eager to tout his economic achievements and confident that the “nation’s outlook is brightening.”
This, as economists from Bank of America, among many others, are predicting a recession in 2023 and rising unemployment thanks to the Federal Reserve’s efforts to combat inflation. And, as prominent companies like FedEx and GE confirm such gloomy forecasts by warning more trouble lies ahead.
But then this is the same clueless president who hosted an “Inflation Reduction Party” featuring James Taylor crooning about drug addiction (???) the same day a bad inflation read caused the Dow to plunge 1,200 points – one of the worst drops this year.
Asked recently about the slide in share prices, Biden said, “The stock market doesn’t necessarily reflect the state of the economy, as you well know. And the economy is still strong.” Actually, the economy shrank during the past two quarters, the housing market is in freefall and an inverted yield curve is flashing red.
