IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

US Deports Over 1,000 Haitians But DHS Declines to Say How Many Released in America By Charlotte Cuthbertson and Zachary Stieberhttps

Posted By on September 23rd, 2021

/www.theepochtimes.com/us-deports-over-1000-haitians-but-dhs-refuses-to-say-how-many-released-into-america_4010774.html

The United States has deported more than 1,000 Haitians who streamed into the small border city of Del Rio, Texas, although officials are refusing to say how many others have been released into America’s interior.

The number of illegal immigrants, primarily from Haiti, rapidly grew under the international bridge near the border last week, at one point topping 14,000. The quick jump sparked the deployment of more than 600 agents and officers, as well as repatriation flights to Haiti.

U.S. officials have since moved more than 6,500 people from Del Rio to other parts of the border in an attempt to alleviate pressure. Approximately 1,083 have been deported back to Haiti on nine flights through Sept. 21, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.

Others are being released into the interior. How many is unclear, because DHS officials aren’t saying.

The same spokesperson declined to answer questions about those being released, while Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, both offices within DHS, referred The Epoch Times to DHS.

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has twice this week declined before Congress to share data about the number of illegal immigrants being released. On Sept. 21, he told senators in Washington he didn’t have the precise numbers and wanted to wait so he could provide accurate information; on Sept. 22, he again said he didn’t have the data.

“Yesterday, you were asked exactly the same question and you gave exactly the same answer. You would think you would be a little better prepared now that you’ve been asked that question. … You don’t have that information?” Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) wondered.

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Support for Shouting Down Speakers on Campus Spikes after Political Chaos of 2020 By Brittany Bernsteinhttps

Posted By on September 23rd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/author/brittany-bernstein/

A majority of college students support shouting down speakers with whom they don’t agree, according to a new survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

Sixty-six percent of students said they supported speaker shout downs, an increase of 4 percentage points over last year, the study found. Meanwhile, 23 percent said they support going so far as to use violence to stop a speaker, an increase of 5 percentage points from last year.

Wellesley College and Barnard College, both of which are elite women’s colleges, had the highest number of students supporting the use of violence, at 45 percent and 43 percent respectively.

Sean Stevens, a senior research fellow in polling and analytics for FIRE told National Review in a recent interview that the shift is likely reflective of the national political climate of the last year.

The country was rocked by months of rioting and counter-protests beginning in summer 2020 with the murder of George Floyd. Protests for various causes persisted through the general election in November, culminating in the deadly January 6 Capitol riot when a mob of former President Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol.

Stevens noted that the FIRE study results echoed findings from similar studies by the American National Election Studies and other outlets that have asked Americans about the acceptability of violence and have seen upticks in their data as well.

The results come as part of FIRE’s 2021 college free speech rankings. FIRE, a non-partisan, non-profit group that focuses on protecting free speech rights on U.S. college campuses, worked alongside College Pulse and RealClearEducation to survey over 37,000 students at 159 of the country’s largest and most prestigious campuses.

FIRE then compiled a list of free speech rankings assessing a school’s free speech climate based on seven main components: openness to discussion of controversial topics, tolerance for liberal speakers, tolerance for conservative speakers, administrative support for free speech, comfort expressing ideas publicly, whether students support disruptive conduct during campus speeches, and FIRE’s speech code rating.

The top five colleges for free speech, according to the rankings, included Claremont McKenna College, University of Chicago, University of New Hampshire, Emory University and Florida State University. The worst five colleges were Boston College, Wake Forest University, Louisiana State University, Marquette University and DePauw University, which ranked last.

Public schools largely performed better than private schools, accounting for just five of the bottom 30 schools on the list.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

By Charles C. W. Cooke:Congressional Democrats are Being Played

Posted By on September 23rd, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/congressional-democrats-moderates-are-being-played/

They’re starting to realize it, too.

F or the last two months, a ragtag group of parvenue political extremists has somehow managed to convince the leadership of the Democratic Party that what the swiftly ailing Biden presidency really needs at this moment is an acrimonious standoff over spending. More impressive yet, these radicals have managed to make it seem as if the blame for the standoff lies not at their own gormandizing feet, but with those whom they have routinely harassed. If, as they must, the Democrats wish to avoid a further collapse in their fortunes, they must snap out of this reverie and call their browbeaters’ bluff.

The progressives’ ploy rests upon their claim that the Democratic Party has just two political options before it: To go big, or to go home. More specifically, it rests upon their declaration that Bernie Sanders’s gargantuan, nation-changing reconciliation bill is nonnegotiable, and that, as a result, everything else that Congress does must be contingent upon its passage. Summing up this position last night, Representative Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.) confirmed that she and her like-minded colleagues intend to kill even the colossal infrastructure legislation that has passed the Senate if they don’t get what they want. “Try us,” Jayapal told reporters who questioned how serious she could possibly be.

Underpinning Jayapal’s strategy is the asseveration that the Democrats will lose badly in next year’s midterm elections if they do not pass something enormous. But this, of course, is nonsense. Certainly, there are some political risks associated with President Biden’s achieving nothing at all this year. But there is an extraordinary amount of space between doing nothing at all and engaging in the largest spending binge since the New Deal on a panicked, party-line vote. It is, of course, to be expected that the progressives in the party will try to spend as much money as possible; that is what progressives do. But, by pretending that the whole party is doomed if they don’t get their own way, they are doing the rest of their colleagues no favors at all. There is political hardball, and then there is assisted suicide, and the Jayapal plan is beginning to resemble the latter.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The foreign policy amateur Peter Van Buren So far Biden has alienated allies and layered on the bureaucracy — what next?

Posted By on September 23rd, 2021

https://spectatorworld.com/topic/joe-biden-foreign-policy-amateur/

Since Joe Biden was elected in part as a salve for Donald Trump’s perceived foreign policy blunders, it seems reasonable nine months in to go searching for the Biden Doctrine, to assess his initial foreign policy moves, to see what paths he has sketched out for the next three years.

…is that a tumbleweed?

Well, OK, there was Afghanistan, Biden’s most significant foreign policy action. Biden won election in November and took office in January. There was ample time for replanning and renegotiating anything that had been left behind by Trump, especially since Biden and his team had muddled in Afghanistan during the Obama era and knew well the mess they’d helped create.

The rush for the last plane out was a fully expected unexpected event. Yet the Biden administration did not quietly start the evacuation in February with high-value personnel, nor did it negotiate ahead of time the third country landing rights it knew would be needed. Mistakes made in Vietnam evacuating locals who worked with us were clear, yet Biden did not kick start processing SIV visas until literally the last flights were scheduled out of Afghanistan. The entire evacuation appeared as an unplanned free fall, just ‘land some planes and see if that works’.

Biden placed the fate of the evacuation, all those lives, in the hands of the Taliban, depending on them to uphold agreements, provide security, vet Americans en route to the airport, and generally play nice to save face as the door hit us in the ass on the way out. While the National Security Council spokeswoman called the Taliban ‘businesslike and professional’, Biden played like a rube. Even assuming good intentions (!), the Taliban are loosely organized, with plenty of local warlords and Isis spinoffs to ensure things can go wrong — like the terror bombing that killed 13 Americans and basically ended the evacuation.

Biden’s follow-up? Lie about the success of a revenge drone strike to make sure America’s final official act was to kill civilians. That capped the most amateurish foreign policy execution seen in a long time. Mistakes? How about assuming your enemies share your goals, negotiating after you have lost and hold no cards, failing to plan for anticipated events and then blaming your predecessor? For a foreign diplomat sitting in London, Tokyo, Beijing or Paris, the question had to have been ‘who if anyone is in charge in Washington?’

Biden’s other foreign policy gesture, the recent submarine agreement with Australia which alienated the French, raises the same question.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

How Russiagate Became a Story of Old Friends in High Places Eric Felten

Posted By on September 23rd, 2021

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/09/22/how_russiagate_became_a_story_of_old_friends_indeed_795476.html

The indictment of Washington attorney Michael Sussman — accused of lying to the FBI in order to smear Donald Trump during the 2016 campaign — reveals the ace up the sleeve of high-powered Democrats. It’s a card they played time and again to advance the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory: friends in high places.

They used friends in law enforcement to launch secret investigations; they used friends in the federal government to broaden those investigations; and they used friends in the media to spread the word about Trump and his organization being under investigation.

Michael Sussmann: Securing a meeting with the FBI’s top lawyer can’t have been easy, but for him it was.

CSPAN

James Baker of the FBI: Sussmann came to him “based on a preexisting relationship.”

RCP

The Russia fiasco metastasized in large part because those involved in advancing the false allegations had important connections. They used friendships with powerful federal officials to encourage investigations against team Trump. Those targeted by Sussmann and others were unabashed outsiders, and as such lacked the sort of connections the insiders exploited so adroitly.

Sussmann was a partner at the Washington law firm Perkins Coie in 2016, which represented the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president. But, according to the indictment handed down by Special Counsel John Durham last week, when he met with the FBI’s general counsel, James Baker, to allege that Trump was in cahoots with the Russians, Sussmann claimed he was representing another client. The indictment alleges this was false.

Securing a meeting with the FBI’s top lawyer can’t have been easy. But for Sussmann it was.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Tom Cotton: The World ‘Laughs’ At Biden After Weak UN Address Reagan McCarthy

Posted By on September 23rd, 2021

President Joe Biden’s address to the United Nations on Tuesday drew criticism from Republicans for failing to adequately address adversaries, including Russia and China. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) slammed Biden for failing to identify China as an enemy, and warned that the world sees the commander-in-chief as laughable.

“I think a lot of the world sees Joe Biden and just laughs at the statements he made yesterday. You just mentioned or played a clip there, he said we don’t seek a new Cold War. Well, of course we don’t seek a new Cold War. We would rather have peace with all nations. But when China is waging a Cold War against the United States, we don’t have a choice whether we’re in it or not. We only have a choice to win or to lose. But beyond that, he didn’t even mention China’s name,” Cotton said during an appearance on Fox News on Wednesday. “It’s like he was scared to mention China’s name. Now, I know the White House is doing damage control today, saying that was by design. Let me give you a contrast. In 2014, after Russia invaded Crimea, Barack Obama, who’s no one’s idea of a chest-beating American nationalist, used Russia’s name more than 10 times in his United Nations speech. So I think Xi Jinping and China’s communist leaders in Beijing are laughing today at Joe Biden. And that’s a dangerous thing for China not to take the American president seriously.”

Rather than confronting adversaries, Biden spent much of his speech addressing climate change.

 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

New York’s Superstar Progressive Isn’t A.O.C. By Bret Stephens

Posted By on September 23rd, 2021

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/opinion/Ritchie-Torres-AOC.html

Ritchie Torres, a congressman from America’s poorest district — New York’s 15th, in the Bronx — quietly bristles at the A.O.C. comparison.

“There’s a sense in which the media narrative diminishes me,” he tells me over plates of pasta at a restaurant in the Bronx’s Little Italy when I raise the subject of his notorious fellow Democrat from an adjoining district, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I resist the temptation to fit into a preconceived narrative. My career in politics long predates the Squad.”

No need to explain who and what is meant by the Squad — the House members seen by some as the bright dawning of a new Democratic Party and by others as the Four Horsewomen of the Wokepocalypse. Not long after our lunch, A.O.C. once again became Topic A of national conversation for posturing politically while posing pictorially at the Met Gala.

The bigger mystery is why Torres (who was emphatically not at the gala) hasn’t yet become a household name in the United States. On the identity-and-background scorecard, he checks every progressive box. Afro-Latino, the son of a single mom who raised three children working as a mechanic’s assistant on a minimum-wage salary of $4.25 an hour, a product of public housing and public schools, a half brother of two former prison inmates, an N.Y.U. dropout, the Bronx’s first openly gay elected official when he won a seat on the City Council in 2013 at the age of 25 and the victor over a gay-bashing Christian minister when he won his House seat last year.

He’s dazzlingly smart. He sees himself “on a mission to radically reduce racially concentrated poverty in the Bronx and elsewhere in America.”

In other words, Torres is everything a modern-day progressive is supposed to look and be like, except in one respect: Unlike so much of the modern left (including A.O.C., who grew up as an architect’s daughter in the middle-class Westchester town of Yorktown Heights), he really is a child of the working class. He understands what working-class people want, as opposed to what so many of its self-appointed champions claim they want.

HISTORY Comments turned off

How Pre-Prohibition Drinking Laws Led New Yorkers to Create the World’s Worst Sandwich It was everywhere at the turn of the 20th century. It was also inedible. Darrell Hartman

Posted By on September 22nd, 2021

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/to-evade-pre-prohibition-drinking-laws-new-yor

Read when you’ve got time to spare.

Near the end of the 19th century, New Yorkers out for a drink partook in one of the more unusual rituals in the annals of hospitality. When they ordered an ale or whisky, the waiter or bartender would bring it out with a sandwich. Generally speaking, the sandwich was not edible. It was “an old desiccated ruin of dust-laden bread and mummified ham or cheese,” wrote the playwright Eugene O’Neill. Other times it was made of rubber. Bar staff would commonly take the sandwich back seconds after it had arrived, pair it with the next beverage order, and whisk it over to another patron’s table. Some sandwiches were kept in circulation for a week or more.

Bar owners insisted on this bizarre charade to avoiding breaking the law—specifically, the excise law of 1896, which restricted how and when drinks could be served in New York State. The so-called Raines Law was a combination of good intentions, unstated prejudices, and unforeseen consequences, among them the comically unsavory Raines sandwich.

The new law did not come out of nowhere. Republican reformers, many of them based far upstate in Albany, had been trying for years to curb public drunkenness. They were also frustrated about New York City’s lax enforcement of so-called Sabbath laws, which included a ban on Sunday boozing. New York Republicans spoke for a constituency largely comprised of rural and small-town churchgoers. But the party had also gained a foothold in Democratic New York City, where a 37-year-old firebrand named Theodore Roosevelt had been pushing a law-and-order agenda as president of the city’s newly organized police commission. Roosevelt, a supporter of the Raines Law, predicted that it would “solve whatever remained of the problem of Sunday closing.”

In his crackdown on vice in New York, Theodore Roosevelt supported the Raines Law.

New York City at the time was home to some 8,000 saloons. The seediest among them were “dimly lit, foul-smelling, rickety-chaired, stale-beer dives” that catered to “vagrants, shipless sailors, incompetent thieves, [and] aging streetwalkers,” Richard Zacks writes in Island of Vice, his book-length account of Roosevelt’s reform campaign.

The 1896 Raines Law was designed to put dreary watering holes like these out of business. It raised the cost of an annual liquor license to $800, three times what it had cost before and a tenfold increase for beer-only taverns.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Follow the (Political) Science The Biden administration’s attempt to extend vaccine booster shots to all adults contradicts its pledge to listen to experts at the CDC and FDA. Joel Zinberg

Posted By on September 22nd, 2021

https://www.city-journal.org/bidens-politicized-vaccine-booster-plan

Both before and after the 2020 election, Joe Biden complained that President Donald Trump had politicized the Covid-19 pandemic. Biden insisted that he, in contrast with Trump, would “follow the science” and listen to the experts at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. And yet, President Biden has pushed vaccine booster shots for all adults despite opposition from the very agencies he touted as sentinels of science. Now an outside advisory panel to the FDA has overwhelmingly rejected the Biden plan, opting to recommend boosters only for a high-risk subset of those who have received the vaccine.

The administration announced plans for vaccine boosters beginning September 20 before any vaccine maker had even applied for booster approval. The first application, and thus far the only completed application ready for consideration, came from Pfizer on August 25, one week after the booster announcement. It seeks booster authorization for ages 16 and up. Pfizer’s supporting evidence was thin. Its application reported increased immune responses to the original viral variant following boosters in 317 subjects aged 18 to 55 and 12 subjects ages 65 to 85. Evidence on activity against the Delta variant that currently predominates was limited to just 11 subjects aged 18 to 55 and 12 subjects aged 65 to 85. No increase in severe adverse events related to boosters was found in the 329 subjects. Pfizer extrapolated safety and effectiveness for 16-17-year-olds from the adult data even though young males have the highest risk of heart inflammation (pericarditis/myocarditis) reported after initial vaccinations.

Politico reports that several CDC officials disagreed with the Biden administration’s booster plans, announced in mid-August. Many felt that the timetable was too rushed to allow the agency to complete studies and review vaccine manufacturer data that would justify the shots before the September 20 start date.

Two top FDA vaccine regulators, Marion Gruber and Philip Krause, announced their retirements shortly after the announcement in a move that many interpreted as a protest against the plan. Both joined with 16 other authors in a recently published Lancet article that concludes the booster policy is not supported by current evidence. They argue that vaccine efficacy remains high and that the unvaccinated remain the major drivers of transmission. Going ahead with boosters now, before adequate data and analysis are available, risks vaccine side effects that could undermine confidence in vaccines and undercut efforts to increase primary vaccinations. Moreover, they suggest that new vaccines, crafted against currently circulating variants, would likely be better boosters than administering additional doses of the original.

Other reports suggest widespread dissatisfaction among FDA staff and outside vaccine advisers who feel that White House political officials steered the announcement and cut key, career FDA employees out of the decision-making. Members of the CDC’s independent vaccine-advisory panel— the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)—voiced frustration that the administration announced a plan before scientists had an opportunity to review the data and approve boosters.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Who is Controlling the Biden Presidency? by Chris Farrell

Posted By on September 22nd, 2021

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17762/controlling-biden-presidency

To answer the question of who is controlling the Biden presidency, we should consider the Biden administration’s disastrous policy decisions. “Cui bono?” – Who benefits?

Why would Biden abandon Bagram Air Force Base? It is key to all of Southwest Asia – just 400 miles to China and 500 miles to Iran. It is a vitally important geopolitical, military and intelligence platform with consequences and “reach” that involve far more than just Afghan regional matters. Who, specifically, made the recommendation to just walk away from Bagram – and then who gave the order?

If we suggest that there is a combination or passing alliance of these various interests and groups, each seeking to advance their own agenda behind the official, hollow, front of “President Joe Biden” – then we run the risk of being branded conspiracy theorists. That is both dishonest and unfortunate, because asking questions of, and seeking accountability from, elected officials is not “crazy.” Interest groups do, in fact, lobby presidential advisors, White House staff, and even members of the president’s family.

We must press on – asking questions, examining records, seeking accountability and documenting facts. The truth will prevail.

The question has been asked dozens of different ways, depending on the questioner and the public policy issue. “Who is controlling the Biden presidency?”

One thing appears certain: It is not President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. He gives incoherent, rambling speeches, and often declines to take questions.

A May 2021 powder-puff profile of President Biden in the Washington Post was written as both a hagiography and a politically therapeutic assurance that there’s been a “return to normalcy” in the White House. The article’s author, Ashley Parker, was clearly given extraordinary access to personal details by White House staff and Biden handlers in order to compose her report. The resulting article is an interesting mix of Ms. Parker taking careful dictation from the White House, and her own ambition to pledge allegiance to the larger Biden “family.” In fairness, here is how Ms. Parker describes the sourcing of her article:

“This account of Biden’s daily schedule is based on interviews with seven people familiar with the president’s daily life, most speaking on the condition of anonymity to disclose private details.”

There is genuine journalistic value in Ms. Parker’s work – and a mere four (+) months later – given the lightning fast and tumultuous downturn in the Biden presidency, 20/20 hindsight and review of her article may help answer our question: “Who is controlling the Biden presidency?”