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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

22 State AGs Sue Biden Regime Over Threat to Withhold Nutrition Assistance from Schools That Don’t Submit to Radical LGBTQ Policy By Debra Heine

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/28/22-state-ags-sue-biden-regime-over-threat-to-withhold-nutrition-assistance-from-schools-that-dont-submit-to-radical-lgbtq-policy/

More than 20 Republican attorneys general have filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration over the Department of Agriculture’s threat to withdraw funding from school meal assistance programs unless the schools submit to the regime’s “expansive and unlawful interpretation of federal antidiscrimination laws.”

The lawsuit, led by Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery, was filed on Tuesday. The coalition of 22 State AGs claim that the federal government has adopted “a new and unlawful application of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County as it applies to antidiscrimination requirements.”

In a statement Tuesday, Slatery said, “these transformative changes were made without providing the States and other stakeholders the opportunity for input as required by the Administrative Procedures Act (APA).”

The coalition of attorneys general said in a letter to Biden last month, that a new USDA guidance greatly expanded the concept of “discrimination on the basis of sex” to include gender identity and sexual orientation, and did “much more than offer direction.”

“It imposes new—and unlawful—regulatory measures on state agencies and operators receiving federal financial assistance from the USDA,” the letter stated. “And the inevitable result is regulatory chaos that would threaten the effective provision of essential nutritional services to some of our most vulnerable citizens.”

The AGs allege in the lawsuit that the Biden administration “inappropriately expanded the law far beyond what statutory text, regulatory requirements, judicial precedent, and the U.S.
Constitution permit.”

To be clear, the States do not deny benefits based on a household member’s sexual orientation or gender identity. But the States do challenge the unlawful and unnecessary
new obligations and liabilities that the Memoranda and Final Rule attempt to impose—obligations that apparently stretch as far as ending sex-separated living facilities and athletics and mandating the use of biologically inaccurate preferred pronouns.

U.K. Transgender Clinic to Close after Damning Report: ‘Not Safe’ for Children By Wesley J. Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/u-k-transgender-clinic-to-close-after-damning-report-not-safe-for-children/

As the Biden administration continues to try to use its regulatory powers to force a “gender-affirming” approach to children who question their sex, in other countries the rubber-stamping of a gender-dysphoric child’s belief and the prescribing of puberty-blocking drugs are under serious reconsideration. The U.K., Sweden, Finland, and France — not exactly Bible Belt countries — are all pulling back from the rush to transition children.

Now, in the U.K., the Tavistock Gender Clinic — run by the National Health Service — is being shut down because it is not safe for children. From the Daily Mail story:

The NHS‘s controversial child transgender clinic will shut its doors after a damning report found it was ‘not safe’ for children.

The gender identity service at Tavistock & Portman NHS Foundation Trust will be replaced by regional centres at existing children’s hospitals, which will provide more holistic care with ‘strong links to mental health services’.

It comes in response to an ongoing review led by senior paediatrician Dr Hilary Cass, who warned the gender clinic was ‘not a safe or viable long-term option’. She found other mental health issues were ‘overshadowed’ in favour of gender identity issues when children were referred to Tavistock’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS).

In other words, children will not be pushed toward transitioning — as the Biden administration wants done here — but their mental and emotional issues will be more thoroughly explored.

Pelosi’s January 6th Committee and the Death of American Justice The Committee’s real agenda. Ed Brodow

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/pelosis-january-6th-committee-and-death-american-ed-brodow/

One of my favorite Hollywood movies is John Frankenheimer’s thriller, “Seven Days in May,” which describes an attempted military takeover of the US government. Written by “Twilight Zone” fabulist Rod Serling, the plot seemed far-fetched back in 1964. We knew that could never happen in America. Something equally sinister is playing out right now, only this time it is not a movie. The very cornerstone of our republic, the American justice system, is being sabotaged by the Democratic Party with the eager collaboration of the Biden administration.

In 2020, American cities and towns were ravaged by marauding mobs of crazed leftists. Dozens of lives were lost and damages amounted to billions. Hundreds of businesses, the product of years of struggle and sacrifice, were utterly destroyed. Buildings were looted and burned. Statues were torn down. Innocent people were beaten and murdered. With the complicity of Democratic mayors and governors, police in 2020 were told to stand down and allow the violence to continue. As a consequence, beautiful cities like New York and San Francisco will never be the same.

In the aftermath of more than 600 violent riots, virtually no one has gone to jail and the public servants who enabled the chaos are seeking re-election. Thousands of rioters, looters, and arsonists either were not arrested or received suspended sentences. Democratic-controlled media went out of their way to label them as “peaceful demonstrators.” The laissez faire attitude toward the 2020 mayhem has encouraged all other forms of felonious activity. You are much more likely to be robbed, beaten, shot, or raped than you were before the 2020 riots. Our negligent justice system is more likely to support criminals than innocent victims of crime.

Rigging the War on Fossil Fuels Taxpayer dollars to make the world green and red. David Horowitz and John Perazzo

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/07/rigging-war-fossil-fuels-david-horowitz-and-john-perazzo/

With the 2022 midterm elections less than four months away, a New York Times/Siena College poll revealed that just 1 percent of registered voters viewed climate change as a “top priority,” let alone the most important issue facing the nation. The poll placed climate change far behind concerns about inflation, the economy, record crime rates, and the humanitarian crisis on America’s southern border. Even among voters younger than 30 — the demographic that is typically most energized by debates about environmental policy — the corresponding figure was a mere 3 percent.

The same poll showed that public concern about climate change has actually declined significantly from the already-low levels of concern documented by previous surveys. In the summer of 2020, climate change ranked a lowly eleventh in a Pew Research Center poll. In September 2020, a Gallup poll likewise found that climate change ranked eleventh in a list of registered voters’ top concerns – well behind such items as the economy, terrorism/national security, the COVID-19 pandemic, health care, education, race relations, gun policy, crime, abortion, and immigration.

Notwithstanding the public’s consistent and overwhelming lack of concern about climate change as an urgent problem, the main concern of the Biden administration and the entire agenda of the Democrat Party has been, and continues to be, driven by this issue. In the words of President Joe Biden, “climate change poses an existential threat” – in fact, the chief existential threat to the United States – greater than terrorism, or Chinese expansionism, or the invasion by 2,400,000 unvetted illegal migrants annually across America’s broken southern border.

Defining Recessions Down: Biden Tries To Gaslight America

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/07/29/defining-recessions-down-bidens-attempt-to-defy-reality-wont-end-well/

‘For the first time in a decade, our economy is in recession. It’s not official yet – the group that dates recessions doesn’t act until after the fact – but there’s little doubt that we’re in the midst of a downturn.”

That was economist Jared Bernstein back in December 2001. He went on: “The downturn is already taking a toll on those who traditionally bear the brunt of recessions, blue-collar workers in manufacturing, minorities, and other less-advantaged workers.”

That year saw only two non-consecutive quarters of GDP decline. The unemployment rate never got over 5.7%. And when the year was over, GDP had climbed 1%. But it’s still listed on the recession roster.

Today Bernstein, who sits on President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, is trying to argue that, despite two consecutive quarters of a shrinking economy, we aren’t in a recession right now.

“What is a recession?” he and CEA chair Cecilia Rouse asked in a blog post. “While some maintain that two consecutive quarters of falling real GDP constitute a recession, that is neither the official definition nor the way economists evaluate the state of the business cycle.”

“Donald Trump – Antihero?” Sydney Williams

http://www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Antihero is defined as a character who lacks qualities of a traditional hero – morality, courage, an obeisance to traditional rules of behavior. Wikipedia lists such fictional characters as typifying the antihero: Shakespeare’s Othello, John Milton’s Lucifer, Jane Eyre’s Edward Rochester, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, and George MacDonald Fraser’s Harry Flashman. Do you, as does Wikipedia, see our former President among that group? I leave you to be the judge.

No matter one’s opinion, the word ‘antihero’ may make wince the large swath of Americans who see Mr. Trump as a villain – some for his character, which was revealed in his lack of positive response during the afternoon of the January 6 riots; others for his antiestablishment/anti-elitist credentials, which threatened official Washington, including members of January 6 committee. ‘Hero,’ even when preceded by ‘anti’ would not be to their liking.

Yet even those who despise him cannot ignore the fact he was (and is) a hero to his estimated twenty to thirty million die hard supporters, most of whom live in non-elitist communities and work in non-establishment jobs. His supporters, who encompass all genders and races, see big-city and suburban financial and cultural elites as sanctimonious, hypocritical, and uninterested in the social and economic mobility that has characterized the United States. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Joseph Epstein, wrote “My sense is that just as Mr. Trump gave us Joe Biden, liberal culture earlier gave us Mr. Trump.” I agree. Mr. Trump was thrust upon us, in reaction to those who derided American history, patronized minorites and who treated millions of white, working-class Americans as ‘deplorables.’  Those who now reject him most vehemently bear primary responsibility for his political rise.

THE OLD WORLD ORDER: DANIEL GREENFIELD

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/?utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=

When President George H.W. Bush delivered a speech to Congress envisioning the emergence of a “new world order”, he had it backward. The new world order wasn’t emerging, it was over

A “new world”, Bush claimed, “is struggling to be born, a world quite different from the one we’ve known” and he shared that vision with Gorbachev. The Soviet Leader, a year away from being toppled, who had cut his teeth on Communist visions of a new world being born only to inherit a failing system that could no longer win wars or feed its own people, must have been amused.

Gorbachev understood what Bush did not, that no new world order was coming, an old world order was returning. Bush lasted a year longer in office than his Soviet counterpart. And yet his own farewell speech couldn’t help but echo Bush, declaring, “we live in a new world now.”

The new world we live in now is one where Russia is trying to rebuild a Czarist empire, and China, Iran, and every other power or power that was, is fighting to recreate its glory days.

The patchwork international order had been a product of the Cold War that Bush and Gorbachev were eagerly bidding farewell to. Globalism, or the post-Cold War international order based on trade, human rights and conferences proved to be as much of a joke as the UN, the WTO, the NGOs and the multilateral organizations that served as its shaky infrastructure.

Bush envisioned “a world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle” and “nations recognize the shared responsibility for freedom and justice” on the brink of the original Gulf War.

But the only law that ever existed was the law of force enforced by self-interest or idealism.

The Message America’s Future Doctors Need to Hear The University of Michigan medical students who walked out of their white coat ceremony missed a transcendent lecture about staying human in an age of machines. Vinay Prasad

https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-message-americas-future-doctors?utm_source=email

Dr. Kristin Collier is an assistant professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, where she has served on faculty for 17 years. She also is the director of the medical school’s Program on Health, Spirituality and Religion and has been published in publications including the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Many describe her as a consummate physician and superb teacher—deeply liked and respected by her peers. That’s why, out of some 3,000 faculty at Michigan, Dr. Collier was chosen by students and her peers to be this year’s White Coat Ceremony speaker. The White Coat ceremony is one bookend of medical school (graduation is the other), where students put on their white coats for the first time, take a modified Hippocratic oath and begin the long path to becoming a doctor. 

The trouble is that Professor Collier has views on abortion that are out of step with many Michigan medical students—likely the majority of them. She has stated that she defines herself as pro-life, though she does not state the extent of her position (i.e. whether she allows exemptions for rape or incest). In that same interview, in which she talks about her personal transformation from a pro-choice atheist to a Christian, she laments the intolerance for religious people among medical colleagues. “When we consider diversity in the medical profession, religious diversity is not—should not—be exempt from this goal.”

After Michigan announced her speech, the university made it clear that Dr. Collier would not be addressing abortion in her talk. “The White Coat Ceremony is not a platform for discussion of controversial issues, and Dr. Collier never planned to address a divisive topic as part of her remarks,” the dean of the medical school, Marshall Runge, wrote to students and staff earlier this month.

Feds Drop Assault Charges Against Man Accused in Sicknick Attack By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/07/27/feds-drop-assault-charges-against-man-accused-in-sicknick-attack/

Federal prosecutors today dropped felony assault charges against one of two men accused of attacking Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick on January 6, 2021. George Tanios of West Virginia was arrested in March 2021 and charged with numerous felonies including assault on federal officers with a dangerous or deadly weapon and obstruction of an official proceeding.

In an superseding indictment filed Wednesday morning by the office of Matthew Graves, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia handling all January 6 prosecutions, Tanios now faces two misdemeanor counts: entering or remaining on restricted grounds and disorderly conduct.

Tanios and Julian Khater, his co-defendant in the alleged attack, have been portrayed by Joe Biden’s Justice Department and the national news media as the Trump supporters responsible for the death of Sicknick on January 7, 2021. After the New York Times in February 2021 retracted its initial account of what happened to Sicknick—that he was bludgeoned to death by Trump “loyalists” using a fire extinguisher—the media then suggested Sicknick died after suffering an allergic reaction to chemical spray. (Khater remains accused of using pepper spray against a line of officers, including Sicknick, outside that afternoon.)

In April 2021, the D.C. Medical Examiner ruled Sicknick died of natural causes and suffered no internal or external injuries during the Capitol protest.

After prosecutors sought pretrial detention for Tanios and Khater, D.C. District Court Judge Thomas Hogan, 83, denied their release. Both men were sent to the D.C. gulag set aside for January 6 defendants; in August 2021, the D.C. Circuit Court overturned Hogan’s order to keep Tanios behind bars and he was released on strict home detention orders. Khater remains incarcerated awaiting an October 5 trial.

In an interview with American Greatness last October, Tanios, father of three young children, explained how the false charges destroyed his life, including the loss of his sandwich restaurant. “In the court of public opinion, we’ve all been destroyed,” Tanios told me during a phone interview. “The truth is going to come out, though, it has to.”

Tanios is expected to plead guilty today to both misdemeanor counts in Judge Hogan’s courtroom.

The National Tragedy of Hunter Biden’s Laptop How a country’s political corruption, institutional decay, and moral decline can be summed up in one sad family saga By Lee Smith

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-national-tragedy-of-hunter-bidens-laptop

The recent release of more gigabytes of images and information from Hunter Biden’s laptop adds to the evidence that the all-out elite effort to bury the scandal before the 2020 election wasn’t just to protect Joe Biden, the preferred candidate of the American oligarchy. Sure, the 50-plus senior U.S. intelligence professionals who signed a letter claiming the laptop’s contents were “Russian disinformation” wanted to stop Donald Trump from sending angry tweets at them, but the laptop suggests there was much more at stake.

The U.S. spy chiefs who signed that infamously misleading letter—including John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and James Clapper—had directed America’s foreign intelligence services while Biden was vice president and before that chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They knew what his son Hunter was doing abroad, because it was their job to know what foreign services know about leading U.S. officials and their families, and how it might affect U.S. national security.

But none of these powerful and experienced men, presumably dedicated to defending the national interest, lifted a finger to stop Hunter Biden—and really, how could they? He was Joe Biden’s son, after all. And by doing nothing about him, the pillars of America’s intelligence community became the curators of the Biden family’s scandal.

When Trump started asking questions in 2019 about Hunter and his father, prompted by Joe Biden’s public comments about protecting Hunter’s business associates abroad, it became clear that the only way to contain the mushrooming scandal involving key U.S. interests in Ukraine and China—a scandal whose magnitude they had known about for a decade—was to provide the former vice president with all the resources the U.S. government could muster. And that helped make him president.

There is so much data on Hunter Biden’s laptop that it’s hard to keep straight the sequence of images and information that have come from it since the New York Post started sourcing stories to the personal computer in October 2020. The most recent release includes 80,000 images that a Switzerland-based cyber expert recovered from deleted iPad and iPhone accounts backed up on the laptop.