We forecast that undocumented entry will exceed U.S. job growth in 2024.
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Showing posts with label Washington Examiner. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Washington Examiner. Show all posts
Saturday, March 16, 2024
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
RFK Jr. is on the ballot in AZ, GA, UT, NH, and HI so far
The states Kennedy remains focused on are Michigan, another key battleground state, Maryland, South Carolina, West Virginia, Indiana, Texas, Illinois, New York, California, and Massachusetts . . ..
More.
Saturday, February 17, 2024
Another town dies hard and no one gives a shit, right Joe Manchin?
Cleveland-Cliffs Steel announced it was idling its tinplate production plant, a move that directly cost 900 people their jobs.
Salena Zito, here.
Friday, February 16, 2024
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
Alejandro Mayorkas finally impeached 214-213 for failing to keep out 6 million illegal aliens since 2020
House Republicans have impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in a contentious vote Tuesday evening, making the Biden administration official the first Cabinet member to be removed in nearly 150 years. ...
Three Republicans joined all Democrats in rejecting the articles of
impeachment: Reps. Ken Buck (R-CO), Mike Gallagher (R-WI), and Tom
McClintock (R-CA). They were the same three as last week’s failed vote,
but the return of Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) from cancer
treatment tipped the math against Mayorkas on Tuesday. ...
Since Biden took office, more than 7.5 million illegal immigrants have been encountered attempting to enter the United States, and 6 million of that figure entered illegally between ports of entry, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. The Biden figure far exceeds the number of illegal immigrants encountered during the Trump administration’s four years and the Obama administration’s eight years combined.
More.
Sunday, September 10, 2023
Thursday, August 24, 2023
Ramaswamy's endless flipflops
Lose yourself: Vivek Ramaswamy's 2024 presidential campaign haunted by endless flip-flops:
on: his voting history
pardons for the Biden family
drug decriminalization
foreign aid to Israel
support for Taiwan
masking
Juneteenth
Sunday, August 20, 2023
Friday, August 18, 2023
Ha ha ha, kinda like Trump's taxes, see . . . except Hunter Biden had a history of filing late in 2002, 2004, and 2005, didn't report his Burisma income in 2014, and didn't file at all in 2016, 2017, and 2018
Not to mention the falsely claimed deductions, like no-show employees, a hooker, and a sex club membership fee.
Byron York has no problem explaining it . . . at all:
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
Well, well, well, close Biden family associate Alexander Mackler worked in the Delaware US Attorney's office 2016-2019
Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf featured prominently in the testimony of two IRS agents who spent years working on the Hunter Biden investigation. Both Gary Shapley and Ziegler, the IRS whistleblowers, said Wolf intervened to stop multiple investigative steps from moving forward, including by preventing FBI agents from asking witnesses any questions about Joe Biden’s involvement in foreign business affairs and by tipping off Hunter Biden’s attorneys about a planned search of his storage unit.
Wolf worked alongside Mackler in the U.S. attorney’s office before Mackler’s departure. She and Mackler prosecuted a major case together, for example.
More.
Saturday, June 24, 2023
Influence-peddling WhatsApp message to Chicoms from Hunter Biden in July 2017 came from his father's guest house in Delaware
Byron York, here:
Hunter Biden wanted something from Zhao — it appears it was a payment of some sort — and he wanted it immediately. "I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled," Hunter Biden wrote. "Tell the director that I would like to resolve this now before it gets out of hand, and now means tonight. And Z, if I get a call or text from anyone involved in this other than you, Zhang, or the chairman, I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction. I am sitting here waiting for the call with my father."
Shapley said the IRS team discovered the message in August 2020. Even for people who questioned the authenticity of the Hunter Biden laptop — and we now know the FBI had verified its authenticity in December 2019 — the WhatsApp message was worth investigating. "In August 2020, we got the results back from an iCloud search warrant," Shapley said. "Unlike the laptop, these came to the investigative team from a third-party record keeper and included a set of messages. The messages included material we clearly needed to follow up on."
No kidding. The July 30, 2017, WhatsApp message was the clearest evidence ever
that Joe Biden, then the former vice president, knew about his son's
business dealings. Now, maybe Hunter Biden was lying in the message.
Maybe his father wasn't in the room. Maybe there's some other
explanation. What was clear was that the WhatsApp message was evidence
that needed to be investigated. But Shapley and the other IRS
investigators soon ran into a brick wall at the Justice Department.
The IRS team wanted to execute a search warrant at the guest house and Joe Biden's house in Delaware, where Hunter Biden was staying at the time of the message. In discussions with the Justice Department, they were told that there was more than enough probable cause to get a warrant but that "optics" were a problem. A Justice Department official told them, in Shapley's words, that "a lot of evidence in our investigation would be found in the guest house of former Vice President Biden but said there is no way we will get that approved."
IRS team investigating Hunter Biden's alleged crimes never investigated the Ukraine-Burisma bribes allegations
Jerry Dunleavy, here:
Mykola Zlochevsky, the Ukrainian owner of Burisma, was the "foreign national" involved in the alleged "criminal bribery scheme" aimed at shaking an alleged investigation into Burisma by then-Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin, according to sources familiar with the FBI record who described its contents to the Washington Examiner.
The sources said Zlochevsky said he believed it would be difficult to unravel the alleged bribery scheme for at least 10 years because of the number of bank accounts involved.
Amid the threat of being held in contempt of Congress, FBI Director Christopher Wray allowed members of the GOP-led House Oversight Committee to review an FD-1023 form this month that contained redacted versions of the allegations from the paid FBI informant.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, repeatedly claimed following a late May FBI briefing that Barr and his “hand-picked prosecutor” — Scott Brady, then the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania — ended the investigation into the bribery claims in 2020. But Barr quickly said that is false.
“It’s not true,” Barr soon told multiple outlets in early June. “It wasn’t closed down. On the contrary, it was sent to Delaware for further investigation.”...
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) also revealed this month that a less redacted version of the form he has viewed says Zlochevsky claimed to have 17 recordings of his conversations with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden (two of the former and 15 of the latter) as an "insurance policy."
Zlochevsky’s alleged reference to Joe Biden as the “big guy” appears independent of the apparent reference to the now-president as the “big guy” by a Hunter Biden business associate during negotiations with Chinese intelligence-linked businessmen. The China-related reference occurred in a May 2017 email not made public until October 2020.
Shapley said that Assistant U.S. Attorney Lesley Wolf instructed FBI and IRS investigators not to ask witnesses about “dad” (Joe Biden) or about “the big guy.”
Hunter Biden reached a plea deal on federal charges related to tax crimes and the illegal purchase of a handgun, Weiss’s office revealed in a court filing on Tuesday.
The IRS whistleblower claims detailing the politicization and slow-walking of the Justice Department investigation were made public on Thursday, including allegations that Weiss had sought special counsel status from the DOJ and sought to file charges in California and in the nation’s capital but was repeatedly denied. The whistleblowers also pointed to new apparent links between Joe Biden and his son’s China deals and that the FBI authenticated Hunter Biden’s laptop by November 2019.
Friday, June 23, 2023
So the Delaware Assistant US Attorney Lesley Wolf is the one who stymied the FBI investigation of Joe Biden's links to Hunter Biden's deals
[Whistleblower] Shapley said that, prior to the interview with [Hunter Biden business associate Rob] Walker, “we had obvious questions like who was H, who the big guy was, and why this percentage was to be held separately with the association hidden.” But the whistleblower said that Delaware assistant U.S. attorney Lesley Wolf “interjected and said she did not want to ask about the big guy” and stated that she did not want to ask questions about "dad."
The whistleblower said that “when multiple people in the room spoke up and objected that we had to ask, she responded, there's no specific criminality to that line of questioning.” Shapley said, “This upset the FBI too.”
“There were multiple times where Lesley Wolf said that she didn't want to ask questions about dad,” Shapley said. “We referred to Hunter Biden's father, you know, as dad.”
Shapley quoted the Delaware prosecutor as saying, “I don't want to talk about the big guy. I don't want to ask about dad. … Don't ask about the big guy.”
Shapley said, “The IRS and FBI agents conducting this interview [of Walker] tried to skirt AUSA Wolf's direction.” He added that the FBI agent tried to get Walker to talk about the email “while not directly contradicting” the direction by Wolf not to ask about “the big guy.”
The IRS whistleblower argued that “based on guidance provided by the prosecutors on a recurring basis to not look into anything related to President Biden, there is no way of knowing if evidence of other criminal activity existed concerning Hunter Biden or President Biden.”
The whistleblower said that “in August 2020, we got the results back from an iCloud search warrant” and that “the messages included material we clearly needed to follow up on.” Shapley said that “nevertheless, prosecutors denied investigators' requests to develop a strategy to look into the messages and denied investigators' suggestion to obtain location information to see where the texts were sent from.”
More.
Tuesday, May 30, 2023
The debt ceiling compromise freezes spending in the next fiscal year about $400 billion too high, and does nothing to pay for the $4.9 trillion added to the debt over and above "normal" deficit spending
The Washington Examiner, here:
In exchange for a two-year hike in the federal borrowing limit, the legislation roughly freezes next year's spending at fiscal 2023 levels, followed by a 1% increase in 2025. The legislation also imposes some changes to work requirements for food stamps and will speed the development of energy projects with permitting reform.
Fiscal outlays for 2023 are projected to hit $5.792 trillion. Adjusted for inflation since 2019 that should be more like $5.385 trillion.
Meanwhile, deficit spending since 2019 through fiscal 2023 has added, will add, $8.5 trillion to the debt, which has been the solution to, and the cause of, all our problems.
We are not governed by serious people.
We have the government we deserve.
Wednesday, May 10, 2023
Byron York: E. Jean Carroll case v. Trump was bankrolled by a billionaire when she said it wasn't, also claimed to have suffered after saying she hadn't
'Hoffman's money has made some waves in the Carroll case because, in her October 2022 deposition, Carroll denied that anyone was paying her legal fees. Here is what Carroll said:
Q: Are you presently paying your counsel's fees?
A: This is a contingency case.
Q: So you're not paying expenses or anything out of pocket to date. Is that correct?
A: I'm not sure about expenses. I have to look that up.
Q: Is anyone else paying your legal fees, Ms. Carroll?
A: No.
'As the trial approached, Kaplan, Carroll's lawyer, wrote to the Trump legal team to admit that what Carroll said was not true. ...
'In addition, advocates for the Adult Survivors Act wanted to address the tremendous suffering that victims of sexual abuse experience. The lawsuit says Carroll endured "significant pain and suffering" and uses some form of the word "suffer" 11 times. Yet in a June 24, 2019 interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, part of the book promotion, Carroll declined to refer to what happened to her as a "rape" and offered this statement: "I just have trouble with the word. I just have trouble. I write an advice column for 25 years and women write to me with these devastating stories and they have been violently, you know, disposed of by men. And I just — I feel too much respect for their suffering. I didn't suffer, Anderson. I did not suffer. I did not lose my job. I wasn't beaten."'
Thursday, April 20, 2023
Wednesday, March 29, 2023
The always feckless Barack Obama makes speeches abroad for $1 million, blames threat of China on Trump when he himself failed to recognize the new threat in Xi Jinping from 2012
The vacuum was all his.
Here's Obama:
“With my successor coming in, I think he saw an opportunity because the U.S. president didn’t seem to care that much about a rules-based international system,” Obama said, the Daily Mail reported. "As a consequence, I think China’s attitude [is], 'Well, we can take advantage of what appears to be a vacuum internationally on a lot of these issues.'"
It was Obama who never cared about the rules, never challenged China's military expansion in the South China Sea under Xi, and telegraphed nothing but weakness to China.
Here's Xi Jinping as early as 2014:
Tabled by the popular ultranationalist blogger Zhou
Xiaoping, the plan would authorize the assassination of blacklisted
individuals—including Taiwan’s vice president, William Lai Ching-te—if
they do not reform their ways. Zhou later told the Hong Kong newspaper Ming Pao
that his proposal had been accepted by the conference and “relayed to
relevant authorities for evaluation and consideration.” Proposals like
Zhou’s do not come by accident. In 2014, Xi praised Zhou for the
“positive energy” of his jeremiads against Taiwan and the United States. ...
But the most telling moments of the two-sessions meetings, perhaps unsurprisingly, involved Xi himself. The Chinese leader gave four speeches in all—one to delegates of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, two to the National People’s Congress, and one to military and paramilitary leaders. In them, he described a bleak geopolitical landscape, singled out the United States as China’s adversary, exhorted private businesses to serve China’s military and strategic aims, and reiterated that he sees uniting Taiwan and the mainland as vital to the success of his signature policy to achieve “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese ethnos.”
In his first speech on March 6, Xi appeared to be girding China’s industrial base for struggle and conflict. “In the coming period, the risks and challenges we face will only increase and become more severe,” he warned. “Only when all the people think in one place, work hard in one place, help each other in the same boat, unite as one, dare to fight, and be good at fighting, can they continue to win new and greater victories.” To help the CCP achieve these “greater victories,” he vowed to “correctly guide” private businesses to invest in projects that the state has prioritized.
Xi also blasted the United States directly in his speech, breaking his practice of not naming Washington as an adversary except in historical contexts. He described the United States and its allies as leading causes of China’s current problems. “Western countries headed by the United States have implemented containment from all directions, encirclement and suppression against us, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our country’s development,” he said. Whereas U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration has emphasized “guardrails” and other means of slowing the deterioration of U.S.-China relations, Beijing is clearly preparing for a new, more confrontational era.
On March 5, Xi gave a second speech laying out a vision of Chinese self-sufficiency that went considerably further than any of his previous discussions of the topic, saying China’s march to modernization is contingent on breaking technological dependence on foreign economies—meaning the United States and other industrialized democracies. Xi also said that he wants China to end its reliance on imports of grain and manufactured goods. “In case we’re short of either, the international market will not protect us,” Xi declared. Li, the outgoing premier, emphasized the same point in his annual government “work report” on the same day, saying Beijing must “unremittingly keep the rice bowls of more than 1.4 billion Chinese people firmly in their own hands.” China currently depends on imports for more than a third of its net food consumption.
In his third speech, on March 8 to representatives from the PLA and the People’s Armed Police, Xi declared that China must focus its innovation efforts on bolstering national defense and establish a network of national reserve forces that could be tapped in wartime. Xi also called for a “National Defense Education” campaign to unite society behind the PLA, invoking as inspiration the Double Support Movement, a 1943 campaign by the Communists to militarize society in their base area of Yan’an.
In his fourth speech (and his first as a third-term president), on March 13, Xi announced that the “essence” of his great rejuvenation campaign was “the unification of the motherland.” Although he has hinted at the connection between absorbing Taiwan and his much-vaunted campaign to, essentially, make China great again, he has rarely if ever done so with such clarity.
One thing that is clear a decade into Xi’s rule is that it is important to take him seriously—something that many U.S. analysts regrettably do not do. When Xi launched a series of aggressive campaigns against corruption, private enterprise, financial institutions, and the property and tech sectors, many analysts predicted that these campaigns would be short-lived. But they endured. The same was true of Xi’s draconian “zero COVID” policy for three years—until he was uncharacteristically forced to reverse course in late 2022.
Xi is now intensifying a decade long campaign to break key economic and technological dependencies on the U.S.-led democratic world. He is doing so in anticipation of a new phase of ideological and geostrategic “struggle,” as he puts it. His messaging about war preparation and his equating of national rejuvenation with unification mark a new phase in his political warfare campaign to intimidate Taiwan. He is clearly willing to use force to take the island. What remains unclear is whether he thinks he can do so without risking uncontrolled escalation with the United States.
Thursday, March 23, 2023
Wednesday, March 22, 2023
Byron York is crystal clear, as usual
Five things to remember about a 'zombie' Trump indictment
3) The "zombie" timing.
Bragg's indictment, if it comes, is often referred to as a "zombie" case
because federal officials earlier declined to prosecute Trump on these
grounds, and then Bragg himself considered and rejected a prosecution on
the same grounds. Now, with time running out on the statute of
limitations and to charge Trump before the 2024 presidential campaign is
fully underway, Bragg has flip-flopped. The "zombie" case has been
revived and is apparently going full speed ahead.
Sunday, January 15, 2023
Joe Biden: One law for me, another for thee
Why was it not until Nov. 2, 2022, that his lawyers were emptying the old [UPenn] office? ... The biggest problem with the Joe Biden documents story is that we know only what Joe Biden's lawyers have told us. And that is just the way Biden wants it.
Byron York here.
The Mar-a-Lago raid was on August 8, 2022, that's why.
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