President Trump has been unduly mocked by Democrats and corporate media journalists regarding his desire to purchase Greenland from Denmark. But he now has the Danes and Greenland’s full attention.
As The Gateway Pundit reported, Trump for months has pushed for purchasing the world’s largest island and is not ruling out possible military action. He argues that Greenland becoming part of America is absolutely necessary for national security.
Trump is, of course, correct. The Arctic island is rich in natural resources and holds immense geopolitical value due to its proximity to the Arctic Circle and the presence of U.S. military assets, including Thule Air Base.
Moreover, China and Russia are circling Greenland seeking to take advantage of the islands enormous potential. Buying Greenland would enable the U.S. to seize control of the Arctic and deal a heavy blow to the ambitions of their two biggest global adversaries.
During a press conference Saturday, a journalist asked Greenland Prime Minister Mute Egede if he had spoken to President Trump regarding Greenland. Egede said “no” but that he was ready to.
“We are ready to do so (talk),” he said. “I think we are both ready to increase dialogue and reach out.”
“And therefore also talk about things that bring us together in the world we live in.”
Egade reiterated that he does not wish for Greenlanders to become Americans. However, the fact that he will speak with the soon-to-be 47th president shows the effectiveness of Trump’s bold ideas and dealmaking.
Meanwhile, Axios revealed Saturday that Denmark sent Team Trump a private message regarding the possible future of the island. While they still do not want to sell Greenland to America, they are open to discussing bolstering security on the world’s largest island or increasing the U.S. military.
They are also open to any other request from Trump outside of giving up territory.
No other president has been able to accomplish what Trump has done so far on Greenland, and he now stands in an incredibly advantageous position even before taking office. Even if Greenland does not become part of America, our national security will almost certainly be enhanced to the detriment of the Russians and Chinese.
But if Trump decides to go all or nothing on a Greenland purchase, it would be unwise to underestimate the man who wrote the world-famous “The Art of The Deal” all those years ago.
In honor of Denny from the Grouchy Old Cripple who is long gone now and missed, I decided to bring this back, for now. Here is the first one.
While Karen Bass and Gavin Newsome let LA burn, they were woke losers and hopefully LA will recover and the liberal voting in of incompetents will stop.
President Joe Biden gave more than $3 billion across 30 agencies to outside contractors to implement his diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) executive order in federal government agencies. These billions are on top of the already exorbitant cost of existing DEI funding for each department.
On Biden’s first day in office, January 20, 2021, he began implementing his DEI agenda, making it his top priority for America. DEI initiatives even took priority over the defense of the nation and the fentanyl crisis. Biden’s day-one executive order to advance “racial equity” through the federal government signaled to America and federal bureaucracies that his most urgent issue was cultural Marxism—not China, Iran, or the border crisis.
“Equity,” as opposed to “equality,” is a term closely aligned with communism used to force equal outcomes rather than equal opportunities. In June 2021, Biden doubled down and issued another executive order requiring the federal workforce to promote DEI in its departments.
. . .
Deloitte Consulting: $7.1 million contract for DEI consulting services to Health and Human Services Center for Medicaid Services. Deloitte is a far-left organization that bathes in racist equity policies, claiming that “diversity, equity, and inclusion are core” to their values. They also support harmful transgender agendas, donating $1 million to the Trevor Project, which advocates for child gender mutilation.
CALCO Enterprises: $8 million for two non-competitive bid contracts to provide DEI training to the Job Corps program under the Labor Department.
Tyler Federal, LLC: $3.2 million in contracts for DEI database services with the Defense Department.
Timothy Londagin, LLC: At least 3 contracts—$2.9 million for a DEI contract with Health and Human Services and $2.1 million through 2 contracts with the Agriculture Department. These contracts were given to Londagin without competitive bidding. Londagin has a long history of employment in federal government agencies and likely has key connections.
Accenture Federal Services, LLC: $2.8 million for a DEI implementation phase at the Treasury Department. Accenture advocates for the transgender agenda and they fund employee gender transition surgeries through their “transgender-inclusive” health care benefits.
LMI Consulting: $2.4 million to incorporate and “deeply engrain diversity, inclusion, equity and accessibility” in the culture and business at NASA. NASA staff recently called on Elon Musk to clean up wasteful DEI spending in the organization.
Booz Allen Hamilton: $3.3 million for DEI data analytics and assessment for NASA in 2024. Yet almost 1,000 employees have been laid off from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
The Millennium Group International: $2 million for DEI professional support services for the Department of Homeland Security. They promote “cultural competence” training among other courses.
Grant Thornton: $1 million to the Commerce Department for DEI strategic planning. This company hires based on racial quotas rather than merit, claiming 30 percent of their new hires will be of certain races.
SSG Advisors: $7.4 million to provide the Agency for International Development general support for the Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility.
The HHS Equity Agenda is Off the Rails
The Department of Health and Human Services may win the award for most woke government agency. In 2022, they spent over $57.4 million on 303 employees to fund a DEI strategic plan that reads like a communist playbook. This plan requires programming to increase cultural sensitivity and DEI propaganda training for all hiring managers. All senior executives have DEI measurements in their performance plans for extra assurance that leaders are complying with Biden’s equity mandates.
The problems are most glaring in the National Institute of Health (NIH), where race plays a factor in grant applications and NIH has a Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office that leads its radical work. It commissioned a study using taxpayer dollars to measure sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. The published report summary asserts that sex and gender are different and the terms “male” and “female” are used to refer to sex, but “man” and “woman” must refer to gender. This nonsensical “research” is how the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine—a division of NIH—is wasting taxpayer money.
If there ever was a lesson for being energy independent and ditching the climate scam, read this.
The effect of the green agenda can be summed up as a long path to the gradual degradation of Europe’s energy security and a resulting path to de-industrialization. The Ukraine conflict only exacerbated it…
Germany’s once-envied efficient economy is in freefall, and the climate change cult and European Green Deal are directly to blame. State policies subsidizing EVs and other products, shutting down coal and nuclear plants, and mandating forced conversion to untested, unimplemented “renewables” resources for energy have decimated industrial efficiency. Industries and blue-collar jobs are fleeing Germany for polluting, profitable operations in China, India, and elsewhere abroad. Will the United States follow suit?
As natural gases skyrocket during a European cold snap, and Russian gas pipelines through Ukraine are shut down for the first time since 1991, Germany has transitioned from Europe’s economic darling to its leading economic anchor. Followed closely by France and the UK, similarly weighted by economically destructive climate fantasies that are crashing to Earth like ideological meteors, the latest blow to gas supplies compounds the crisis occasioned by the mysterious sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2.
The results of this disastrous state-controlled economic carbon dioxide experiment continue to be as evident as explosives in a controlled demolition. Germany terminated massive EV subsidies at the end of 2023; EV sales promptly fell 69%. Despite gushing economic promises of “high-paying jobs” in the renewables industry, Germany announces more layoffs almost daily. Chinese companies, unhindered by escalating energy and regulatory costs, are leading in EV and other manufacturing technologies while spewing more chemicals into the ecosystem than German manufacturing industries.
The climate cult is pushing jobs and pollution out of Europe, amplifying both for nations like India. German icon Volkswagen has threatened to close factories for the first time in its history, and recent layoffs of 35,000 (and wage reductions for 120,000) employees are harbingers of more to follow. Consumers are burdened by high energy prices for heat and travel. Fund managers and NGOs may be profiting from renewables manufacturing policies, but workers, consumers, and the ecosystem are all being systematically eviscerated in the boondoggle pursuit.
Will the U.S. continue to follow Germany’s demonstrable folly? If the legendary German industrial model is being crippled by destructive climate change policies, the anemic American one (with unpredictable tariffs looming) is similarly threatened.
However, there is hope stateside — the United States possesses precious natural gas supplies that Germany now lacks and has not shuttered its fossil fuel production. Renewables manufacturing, as well as the production of plastics, cement, steel, and fertilizers, all depend on high-temperature processes only available through fossil fuels or nuclear power. They cannot be replaced with solar, wind, or other energy sources, as Germany is proving despite big plans to convert its entire economy to renewables overnight. (Indeed, cutting traditional energy production in Germany fueled a vicious economic cycle by inflating natural gas prices.)
Reflecting back on 2024 and looking forward to a future with less misinformation and more facts, Just Facts has summarized 50 false or misleading claims spread by journalists, commentators, and so-called fact checkers during the past year.
Each of these examples quotes a specific media outlet or individual, but nearly all of these fictions were propagated by multiple outlets and people, and many of them were broadcast by dozens.
1: Inflation
Margaret Brennan and John Dickerson of CBS News claimed that “the president of the United States has nothing to do with the price of bacon,” “or eggs,” “or gas,” “or any of it.”
In fact, presidents impact the prices of virtually everything through federal deficits that spur inflation, regulations that prohibit the use of cost-effective production methods and resources, price and wage controls, trade deals, tariffs, and more.
2: “Bloodbath”
Reporting on the first assassination attempt against Donald Trump, George Stephanopoulos and Martha Raddatz of ABC News claimed that Trump “contributed” to “violent rhetoric” because he said “it’s going to be a bloodbath” if “I don’t get elected.”
In fact, Trump didn’t use the term “bloodbath” as a call to violence but to describe the effects of Biden’s policies, especially on the auto industry.
3: Crime Trends
PolitiFact reported that “the violent crime rate today is near a 50-year low.”
In fact, that claim is derived from FBI data, which is based on voluntary reports of crimes by state and local law enforcement agencies and “excludes” crimes like “sexual assault,” “simple assault,” “attempted robberies,” and “crimes not reported to law enforcement.”
The DOJ’s National Crime Victimization Survey—which is widely considered to be the “gold standard” for measuring crime trends—showed a 37% increase in violent crime from 2020 to 2023. Moreover, the latest rate of murder—which is the best-measured and worst violent crime—was 36% higher in 2023 than in 2014.
4: Jobs
The New York Times reported that “President Biden is presiding over a job-creation boom that would have gotten almost any of his predecessors re-elected in the postwar era.”
In fact, all real job growth under Biden went to immigrants, while jobs held by people born in the USA barely recovered from Covid lockdowns, are drastically below their pre-Covid trajectory, and flatlined over the past year:
A group of mischievous Afghan youngsters in the Swedish city of Kristianstad celebrated New Year’s a few days early by gang-raping a 20-year-old girl over the weekend. Now the errant youths are being brought up on charges, and I expect the Swedish judicial system to throw the book at them — they’ll probably get at least a month in detention for their unfortunate behavior.
Many thanks to Gary Fouse for translating this article from Samhällsnytt:
Three Afghans detained for gang rape in Skåne
January 2, 2025
Three young Afghan men, ages 18, 19 and 23 respectively, have been detained by a Kristianstad court on suspicion of rape, assault, and unlawful detention of a 20-year-old woman this past weekend. The local Kristianstadsbladet that reported on the incident is misleading the readers with the claim that the perpetrators “are natives of Kristianstad.”
According to court documents obtained by Samnytt, the crime was committed in a residence in Kristianstad during the night between Saturday and Sunday. The three foreign suspected gang rapists were arrested at 1:30am the same night, booked into jail early Sunday morning, and remanded to custody on Monday by the district court in Kristianstad.
“The three prisoners are acquainted with each other. I know nothing about the relationship between them and the woman,” says Anja Steiber, press spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office in a press statement.
Kristianstadsbladet misleads
According to Kristianstadsbladet, which is reporting on the incident, the three men are “natives of Kristianstad’. However, that is not true. Instead, all of them are natives of Afghanistan.
They let in everybody. My friends in Sweden are afraid to go out at night and instead of stop, drop and roll, they are teaching the kids how not to get raped.
Just for the record, the Green New Deal is a Communist inspired strategy to spend money we don’t have until banrupt. Reagan did this to bring down the USSR. Learn from history. They only thing it would have helped would have been the bank accounts of the people supporting it.
Coming with the new year is a new president with a very different vision on energy than President Joe Biden, who campaigned on a promise to “end fossil fuel.”
President-elect Donald Trump is dismissive of the immediate “climate crisis” narrative that drove much of Biden’s energy policies. He promises to establish American “energy dominance” and focus policy on bringing down the cost of energy.
While Trump can overturn Biden’s industry-punishing executive orders and create a friendlier regulatory environment for the oil, gas, coal and mining industries, experts say there are economic and technical limits to what the outcomes of his policies will be. Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, here’s what we might expect for energy and industry in the second Trump administration.
Market forces
During a speech at the Economic Club of New York luncheon in September, Trump said he would end the Biden-Harris administration’s “anti-energy crusade and implement a policy of energy abundance, energy independence, and even energy dominance.” This would include, he said, getting the price of gasoline down below $2 per gallon, which would decrease the cost of all goods and services.
How stupid was 2024? Let’s start with the art world, which over the centuries has given humanity so many beautiful, timeless masterpieces. This year, the biggest story involving art, by far, was that a cryptocurrency businessman paid $6.2 million at a Sotheby’s auction for . . . A banana. Which he ate. ”It’s much better than other bananas,” he told the press. And that was not the stupidest thing that happened in 2024. It might not even crack the top ten. Because this was also a year when: —The Olympics awarded medals for breakdancing. —Fully grown adults got into fights in Target stores over Stanley brand drinking cups, which are part of the national obsession with hydration that causes many Americans to carry large-capacity beverage containers at all times, as if they’re setting off on a trek across the Sahara instead of going to Trader Joe’s. —Despite multiple instances of property damage, injury and even death, expectant couples continued to insist on revealing the genders of their unborn children by blowing things up, instead of simply telling people. —The number of people who identify as “influencers” continued to grow exponentially, which means that unless we find a cure, within ten years everybody on the planet will be trying to make a living by influencing everybody else. —Hundreds of millions of Americans set all their clocks ahead in March, then set them all back in November, without having the faintest idea why. (Granted, Americans do this every year; we’re just pointing out that it’s stupid.) But what made 2024 truly special, in terms of sustained idiocy, was that it was an election year. This meant that day after day, month after month, the average American voter was subjected to a relentless gushing spew of campaign messaging created by political professionals who—no matter what side they’re on—all share one unshakeable core belief, which is that the average American voter has the intellectual capacity of a potted fern. It was a brutal, depressing slog, and it felt as though it would never end. In fact it may still be going on in California, a state that apparently tabulates its ballots on a defective Etch-a-Sketch. For most of us, though, the elections, and this insane year, are finally over. But before we move on to whatever (God help us) lies ahead, let’s ingest our anti-nausea medication and take one last cringing look back at the events of 2024, starting with… JANUARY …when the nation finds itself trapped in a 1970s slasher movie, the kind in which some teenagers — played by the major political parties—are in a creepy house, being pursued by a terrifying entity, played by a rerun of the 2020 presidential election. The only sane thing for the teenagers to do is get the hell out of there, but instead they pause by the dark, scary-looking doorway leading down to the basement, and despite the fact that the theater audience—played by the American public—is shouting “DON’T GO DOWN THERE! JUST LEAVE THE HOUSE YOU IDIOTS!”, the teenagers decide to go down into the basement, only to find “OH GOD NOOOOOO…” And so, thanks to our political system—under which the nominees for the most powerful office in the world are chosen by approximately 73 people in approximately four rural states while the vast majority of Americans are still taking down their Christmas decorations—we once again find ourselves facing a choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. Both candidates carry baggage. Trump is wanted on criminal charges in something like 23 states and, if elected, could become the first president to govern from a secret hideout. His speeches are sounding increasingly unhinged, which is no small feat since he did not sound particularly hinged in the first place. For his part, President Biden keeps saying words that do not appear in any known human language and gives the impression that any day now he’s going to shuffle into a state dinner wearing only a bathrobe. But not necessarily his bathrobe. In other words, we have one candidate who lost the last election but claims he won it, and another candidate who won the last election but might not remember what year that was. America, the choice is yours!
Meanwhile the nation is facing a number of serious problems. Foremost among them is the situation on the border with Mexico, which at one time was a legally separate nation from the United States but is now basically functioning as a vestibule. This has resulted in a tense confrontation between the federal government and Texas, which is alarming because, in the words of one military analyst, “Texas has way more guns.” In government news, the Pentagon is harshly criticized for taking more than three days to notify the White House that Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III had been hospitalized. This prompts the administration to check up on the rest of the cabinet, only to discover that at least four other secretaries are missing, and the Secretary of Commerce apparently died three years ago. Abroad, fighting continues to rage in both Ukraine and Gaza, although these conflicts are no longer getting a ton of attention in the U.S. media because of all the news being generated by Taylor Swift. In a troubling aviation incident, an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 flying at 16,000 feet suddenly develops a refrigerator-sized hole in the fuselage when an improperly attached panel blows off, terrifying passengers who have reason to wonder whether the airline crew, instead of making a big deal about the position of everybody’s tray table, should maybe be checking to see if the plane has been correctly bolted together. As a safety precaution, the Federal Aviation Administration grounds all Max 9s and advises passengers on other Boeing aircraft to “avoid sitting near windows.” For its part, Boeing states that “at least the plane didn’t lose a really important part, like one of the whaddycallits, wings.” Here’s a rare shot of a Boeing 737 in flight with all the parts still attached. Here’s a rare shot of a Boeing 737 in flight with all the parts still attached. Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren/Special to USA TODAY Speaking of big corporations making questionable products, in…
In 2024, you couldn’t escape artificial intelligence even if you tried.
Companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and others released new AI models and expanded their capabilities. Their consumer-friendly tools like Claude and ChatGPT continued to become more powerful.
Elon Musk is building his own rival, rolling out improvements to Grok, his version of AI within X. “We will have something that is, for the first time, smarter than the smartest human,” Musk has predicted.
With big questions about government regulation and its application in everyday life, this technology is truly, in Musk’s words, “the most disruptive force in history.”
Joe Biden
President Joe Biden signs a proclamation during a ceremony at the Department of Labor on December 16, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Yes, you read that right. What is left of President Joe Biden is a winner in the year of our Lord 2024. Even though Biden’s own party threw a coup against him (the sitting president of the United States!) and removed him from the presidential race, the flip at the top of the ticket ended up being a flop.
Trump carried the Electoral College and the popular vote in his mandate victory. Now, it’s a serious question as to whether Biden would have performed better in the places that mattered most to carry the presidential election—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin.
Biden was a party man for half a century, but ever since Democrats switched Biden for Kamala Harris, Biden has seemingly helped Republicans at every turn and acted purely out of self-interest.
His loyalists leaked details of the coup and Democrat infighting to the press, he wore a MAGA hat, and he gave Republicans a last-minute turnout boost by calling Trump supporters garbage. And, of course, since losing the election, he’s pardoned his son, Hunter Biden, after promising for years he would not. He’s created one political mess after another, and the Democratic party will be left to clean it up. Meanwhile, the president and his son will be on the beach in Delaware.
Bitcoin
The price of bitcoin was $44,000 on Jan. 1 and exceeded $100,000 in the weeks following Trump’s election.
With crypto-friendly officials dotting Trump’s new administration, there’s genuine excitement about its future. Paul Atkins is set to replace Gary Gensler as chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission and billionaire David Sacks, co-host of the “All In” podcast, will serve as Trump’s AI and crypto czar.
Dennis Porter, CEO and co-founder of the Satoshi Action Fund, told The Daily Signal that cryptocurrency like bitcoin can combat inflation and preserve individual freedom.
“You are able to operate wholly on your own with no third parties, without asking permission, you are able to access the bitcoin network globally, anywhere in the world and be able to participate in the economy without asking permission,” Porter said.
Tucker Carlson
Donald Trump sits down for a conversation with Tucker Carlson during his Live Tour at the Desert Diamond Arena on October 31, 2024, in Phoenix, Arizona. (Chip Somodevilla/via Getty Images)
After leaving Fox News and launching his own Tucker Carlson Network in 2023, the popular conservative commentator continued to influence the Republican Party’s agenda under Trump.
Known for his populist and common-sense perspectives, Carlson propelled to the top of the charts with millions watching or listening to his interviews and monologues.
His trip to Russia for a two-hour conversation with Vladimir Putin has more than 20 million views on YouTube. Another interview with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele has more than 5 million, reflecting Carlson’s international reach.
Tucker Carlson Films expanded his content offerings even further. “The Art of the Surge,” a series produced by Justin Wells, offered viewers a behind-the-scenes look at Trump’s historic comeback, including shocking footage from the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt.
In September, Carlson hit the road for a cross-country speaking tour that featured conservative newsmakers, drawing sold-out crowds to hear from the likes of JD Vance, Donald Trump Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Dogs and Cats
At their only debate in September, Trump and Harris squared off on a range of policy issues. But the most memorable moment came amid reports of Haitian immigrants overwhelming the community of Springfield, Ohio.
“In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating—they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said.
ABC News anchor David Muir, who repeatedly interjected during the debate, attempted to correct Trump. But it didn’t matter.
The story dominated the news for days as Americans saw Springfield as a representation of America’s broken immigration system. An estimated 20,000 immigrants were living in the community of 60,000.
Fox News
Fox News anchors Lawrence Jones, Steve Doocy, Ainsley Earhardt and Brian Kilmeade interview Chris Janson during “Fox & Friends” at Fox News Channel Studios on October 29, 2024, in New York City. (John Lamparski/via Getty Images)
In a year when other TV networks lost viewers—and respect—Fox News maintained its position as the leader in cable news.
“Fox News Channel obliterated competitors in 2024, finishing the year with its highest share of the cable news audience since 2015,” Brian Flood reported for Fox News Digital.
Since the Nov. 5 election, Fox News has dominated its competition—both cable and network TV—with more than 4 million prime-time viewers (from 8-11 p.m. ET), according to Nielsen Media Research data. That makes Fox News the most-watched network, beating legacy media networks ABC, CBS, and NBC in prime-time.
In terms of market share, Fox News commanded 73% of the prime-time cable news audience as CNN’s and MSNBC’s ratings cratered following Trump’s victory.
Podcasters and social media personalities are getting deserved praise for their growing influence, but Fox News Channel is still the go-to destination for political and election news.
Former immigration officials Tom Homan, left, and Mark Morgan answer questions Monday during a press conference at The Heritage Foundation’s Policy Fest event at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. (Virginia Allen/The Daily Signal)
Tom Homan
Homan was among the first political figures Trump tapped for his new administration following his victory on Nov. 5.
After serving at the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the first Trump administration, Homan will now serve as Trump’s border czar and lead the way on Trump’s mass deportation plan.
Homan spent the last four years watching the Biden administration welcome over 10 million illegal aliens into the county, and now, with the full support of the president, he will have the opportunity to enforce U.S. immigration law and secure a border that he has spent his career defending, both in the Border Patrol and ICE.
Patrick and Brittany Mahomes
Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs, Brittany Mahomes, and their two kids pose following the NFL Super Bowl at Allegiant Stadium on Feb. 11, 2024, in Las Vegas. (Michael Owens/Getty Images)
The three-time Super Bowl champion quarterback for the Kansas City Chiefs orchestrated an overtime victory in February and has his team positioned for another appearance in 2025.
Patrick’s wife, Brittany, made headlines of her own when she liked an Instagram post of then-candidate Trump about the Republican Party’s platform. After facing a backlash, she wrote, “Jesus didn’t have to agree with people to be kind to them.”
Two other members of the Mahomes family endorsed Trump: Patrick’s younger brother Jackson and his mother Randi, who showed up to a Chiefs’ game in a MAGA hat.
McDonald’s
Donald Trump works behind the counter during a campaign event at McDonald’s restaurant on October 20, 2024, in Feasterville-Trevose, Pennsylvania. (Doug Mills-Pool/via Getty Images)
The iconic American fast-food restaurant found itself at the center of news on several occasions.
Donald Trump’s October campaign stop at a McDonald’s in the Philadelphia suburbs was a brilliant photo opportunity for the Republican candidate. But it also symbolized the difference between his appeal to working-class Americans in contrast to Kamala Harris.
Trump wore an apron and worked as a fry attendant. It was one of the most viral moments of the 2024 presidential election and a classic Trump move, particularly given Harris’ questionable employment at McDonald’s earlier in her life.
“As we’ve seen, our brand has been a fixture of conversation this election cycle. While we’ve not sought this, it’s a testament to how much McDonald’s resonates with so many Americans,” McDonald’s wrote after Trump’s visit. “McDonald’s does not endorse candidates for elected office and that remains true in this race for the next President. We are not red or blue—we are golden.”
McDonald’s made news again in December when a customer in an Altoona, Pennsylvania, restaurant spotted murder suspect Luigi Mangione, leading to his arrest.
Elon Musk
Tesla CEO Elon Musk arrives on Capitol Hill on Dec. 5, 2024, in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, and his transformation of the platform into the free speech engine that is X today, likely helped Trump’s historic election victory. Musk also contributed to that victory by endorsing Trump and urging swing-state voters to sign his petition for the chance at winning $1 million.
Musk not only played a historic role in the election; he will also help lead the Department of Government Efficiency, an external advisory board to trim waste and prevent abuse in the federal government.
In December, Musk rallied Americans on X to oppose a must-pass government funding bill that had been stuffed with pork. His opposition to the bill grew naturally out of his work on the Department of Government Efficiency and his efforts led Trump to oppose the bill and House Speaker Mike Johnson to withdraw it from consideration.
Podcasters
Podcasting took center stage this year, with 2024 being the first ever “podcast election,” and for good reason.
Over 53 million Americans tuned in to hear Trump’s three-hour conversation with Joe Rogan covering everything under the sun—from tariffs to golfing to fixing the “wrongs” of his first term. America also watched Vance communicate Trump’s vision for the country over the next four years with Theo Von—all while proving he can joke around and isn’t “weird.” Even Kamala Harris’ failed campaign hopped on the podcast bandwagon with a 45-minute appearance on “Call Her Daddy.”
But why the sudden interest in podcasts? Americans are fed up the corporate media lies, so they fled to a more uncensored platform. An October Gallup poll revealed that trust in the media hit a historic low, with 36% saying they have “no trust at all in the media,” and 33% expressing “not very much” confidence.
Now, everyone and their mother—from CNN’s Chris Wallace to former Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley—are scrambling to hop on the podcasting wave. The Daily Signal launched a brand-new podcast this year, “The Signal Sitdown,” where members of Congress explain how the sausage really gets made in Washington, DC.
Dennis Quaid
Actor Dennis Quaid speaks at a campaign rally for former U.S. President Donald Trump on Oct. 12, 2024, in Coachella, California. (Mario Tama/via Getty Images)
The longtime Hollywood actor starred in the hit movie “Reagan.”
Based on Paul Kengor’s book, “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism,” the movie was a box-office success. It made more than $30 million worldwide, far exceeding expectations.
Quaid’s performance was a big reason for the movie’s success.
“Dennis was always my first choice because he required almost no hair and makeup touchups to get him camera-ready,” producer Mark Joseph told The Daily Signal. “He’s a natural, and he has that great Reaganesque smile and persona. He’s a busy guy, so it took some time to nail him down, but he was always the one for me.”
Joe Rogan
Joe Rogan speaks before the UFC 309 event at Madison Square Garden on Nov. 16, 2024, in New York City. (Chris Unger/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images)
In the weeks before Election Day, Trump shunned CBS News’ “60 Minutes” and other corporate media outlets in favor of modern-day influencers like Joe Rogan, Theo Von, and Logan Paul. Megyn Kelly, whose show is regularly among the top 10 podcasts, joined Trump on the campaign trail in Pittsburgh.
Trump’s interviews with these influencers accumulated more than 100 million views—and reached voters who don’t get their news from traditional media sources.
Donald Trump Jr. told Daily Wire podcast host Michael Knowles that he and his father discussed giving Rogan a press pass to the White House to shake up the status quo.
“I was sitting there, and we were talking about, like, the podcast world, and some of our friends, and [Joe] Rogan, and guys like you, and me to a lesser extent—I wouldn’t be able to get a seat, that would be nepotism or whatever the hell,” Trump Jr. said. “But we had the conversation about opening up the press room to a lot of these independent journalists.”
Trump has disrupted the corporate media’s business as usual, and Rogan appears to be coming out on top.
Josh Shapiro
Pennsylvania’s Democrat governor was on the short list to become Kamala Harris’ vice president. Instead, Harris picked Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz after a few notable TV appearances
In retrospect, Shapiro should count his blessings.
After a strong debut in August, Harris failed to live up to the fanfare down the stretch. Walz will be an afterthought in the history books.
Shapiro, meanwhile, can now position himself for a future presidential run without Harris’ baggage. He’ll need to win reelection in 2026 and then overcome the left’s fears about his support for Israel and past endorsement of school choice.
Donald Trump
Donald Trump pumps his fist as he is rushed offstage during a rally on July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania, following an assassination attempt. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
After easily vanquishing his Republican rivals in the GOP primaries, Donald Trump did the same to the incumbent president. Joe Biden was no match for his predecessor after their June debate, setting into motion an unprecedented turn of events over the summer that resulted in Vice President Kamala Harris being anointed the Democrat nominee—without winning a single vote.
As if those political hurdles weren’t enough, Trump also emerged unscathed from the Left’s lawfare and then survived two assassination attempts on his life. A bullet came within mere centimeters of killing him in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13.
Heading into Election Day, legacy media outlets were convinced it was a toss-up race between Harris and Trump. Instead, it turned out to be a historic Trump mandate, sweeping all seven swing states, capturing the popular vote, and making major gains with blacks, Hispanics, and younger Americans.
As he departed the White House in 2021, Trump left at a political low point. Few pundits gave him a chance at redemption, and yet Americans witnessed in 2024 the greatest political comeback in U.S. history. With Biden already AWOL, Trump is wasting little time to make his mark, recognizing the precious little time he has to implement his policy engage, deliver on his promises, and finally drain the swamp in Washington, D.C.
Losers
College Presidents
Claudine Gay, then-president of Harvard University, and Liz Magill, then-president of University of Pennsylvania, testify before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Dec. 5, 2023. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Anti-Israel protests continued to rock college campuses. They also ended the careers of three Ivy League university presidents.
Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania resigned in December 2023, the first of three presidents to lose their jobs. Harvard’s Claudine Gay stepped down in January and Columbia’s Minouche Shafik in August.
Magill and Gay’s downfall came after facing off against Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., at a congressional hearing. Shafik was unable to handle antisemitic protests at Columbia.
“THREE DOWN, so many to go,” Stefanik said. “We will continue to demand moral clarity, condemnation of antisemitism, protection of Jewish students and faculty, and stronger leadership from American higher education institutions.”
As the year drew to a close, George Mason University President Gregory Washington found himself under scrutiny for its own problems. Three of its students, all of Middle Eastern origin, had run-ins with the police over weapons and pro-terror material.
Mark Cuban
Mark Cuban speaks onstage at WIRED’s The Big Interview 2024 on Dec. 3, 2024, in San Francisco, California. (Jon Kopaloff/WIRED via Getty Images)
Best known for his role on “Shark Tank,” the Dallas Mavericks owner was among the most vociferous defenders of Harris when she replaced Biden atop the ticket.
Cuban appeared at campaign rallies, on television, and regularly engaged online in support of the Democrat presidential candidate. He extreme rhetoric—calling Trump a “threat” with “fascist tendencies”—epitomized the left’s hyperbolic language.
At one point during the campaign, he admitted to ABC News that “Harris is just not a good salesperson,” prompting his own involvement in the race.
Some pundits speculated that Cuban wanted a high-profile job in a Harris administration, perhaps leading the Securities and Exchange Commission. Instead, he’ll be watching the action from the sidelines.
After Trump’s victory, Cuban wrote on Bluesky, “Don’t expect any politics or speculation about what might happen for a while.”
Nikki Haley
Nikki Haley visits “Special Report with Bret Baier” at FOX News D.C. Bureau on Oct. 29, 2024, in Washington, DC. (Paul Morigi/via Getty Images)
After suspending her political campaign in March, Haley has found herself somewhat politically homeless among a shifting Republican Party.
Haley was a fierce critic of Trump during the 2024 presidential race, despite serving as ambassador to the U.N. under a portion of his first administration. Though Haley made an appearance at the Republican National Convention, Trump was clear after his victory that there was no place for Haley in his administration.
“I will not be inviting former Ambassador Nikki Haley, or former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, to join the Trump Administration, which is currently in formation,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in November.
Haley is now working in the private sector at Edelman, a global communications firm.
Sunny Hostin
Sunny Hostin attends a discussion of the View’s “Behind the Table” podcast on Oct, 8, 2024, in New York City. (Gary Gershoff/Getty Images)
What was supposed to be a friendly question for Kamala Harris turned into a disaster. Appearing on “The View” in early October, Hostin asked Harris if she would do anything differently from Biden.
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris replied.
The answer surprised even friendly Hostin, who followed up to give Harris another opportunity. After the election, Hostin admitted that Harris missed the mark.
“The reason I followed up was because that wasn’t a gotcha question,” Hostin said. “That was a layup, really.”
Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller pointed to the interview as a turning point in the campaign.
“I think this Kamala Harris strategy of going out and doing a whole bunch of media has really backfired. I mean, who would’ve thought that Sunny Hostin from The View really killed Kamala Harris’ candidacy?” Miller said.
Legacy Media
Election Day was not just a high-stakes contest of competing visions for America’s political institutions and future. It was about the future of our other commanding heights institutions as well—academia, finance, the media, and the like.
None of these institutions or industries had as high of stakes as the media: 2024’s campaign cycle was a test to see if the corporate media could put an empty suit (whether by the name of Joe Biden or Kamala Harris) in the White House, or if alternative media could pose a real threat to the corporate media’s power.
Trump’s victory, not to mention conservative control of the House and Senate, proved the latter.
To add insult to injury, ABC has agreed to pay Trump $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit after George Stephanopoulos falsely claimed Trump was found “liable for rape.” For some reason, the corporate press feels threatened by this settlement. “Trump is already delivering on his promise to go after the press,” one Politico headline read.
If going after the press means the corporate media can no longer spread malicious lies with impunity, Americans ought to hope Trump delivers on this promise tenfold.
Mitch McConnell
Senate Minority Whip John Thune, R-S.D., will succeed Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., as the GOP’s new leader in the 119th Congress. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Senate Republicans will have a new leader for the first time in 18 years—and there’s palpable excitement on Capitol Hill for the changing of the guard.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., stepped down from his leadership perch after pressure from conservatives and his own health problems. He’ll serve out the remainder of his term, which ends in 2027.
In recent years, McConnell made more headlines for his clashes with Trump and the MAGA movement than any legislative accomplishments. Even on his way out, he couldn’t help taking a shot at Trump.
“To pretend that the United States can focus on just one threat at a time, that its credibility is divisible, or that it can afford to shrug off faraway chaos as irrelevant is to ignore its global interests and its adversaries’ global designs,” McConnell wrote in Foreign Affairs. “America will not be made great again by those who simply want to manage its decline.”
McConnell leaves his leadership job as one of America’s most unpopular politicians.
His successor, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., won a three-way race for the top job. Even though he wasn’t the first choice of MAGA voters, Thune has signaled support for Trump’s agenda and nominees.
Planned Parenthood
Pro-life voters ended their losing streak at the ballot box, stopping three statewide constitutional amendments in support of abortion.
Those wins in Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota give the pro-life cause a reason for optimism, even as measures passed in seven other states.
More importantly, the left’s pro-abortion enthusiasm appeared to wane at the ballot box. Unlike the 2022 midterm election, when the issue halted the Republican “red wave,” this time Democrats were on defense for a range of other issues, including inflation, border security, and crime.
With the incoming Trump administration poised to restore pro-life protections, Planned Parenthood will also be a target of Congress. The abortion giant relies on taxpayer funding for its operations.
In recent years, Planned Parenthood has expanded its portfolio to include transgender services. Abortion remains its priority, however. With approximately 200 abortions for every adoption referral, there’s no mistaking this organization’s evil intentions.
Taylor Swift
Taylor Swift arrives at the stadium before an NFL game between the Houston Texans and Kansas City Chiefs on Dec. 21, 2024, in Kansas City, Missouri. (Scott Winters/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Among the major celebrities endorsing Harris, there was no one bigger than Taylor Swift. But just like her uninspiring 2018 endorsement of Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s Democrat opponent in Tennessee, Swift’s embrace of Harris ended with a loss.
Swift weighed in after the presidential debate between Harris and Trump in September.
“I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos,” Swift wrote on Instagram. “I was so heartened and impressed by her selection of running mate [Tim Walz], who has been standing up for LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body for decades.”
She signed the note, “Childless Cat Lady,” in reference to a comment Sen. JD Vance made in an earlier interview.
Swift should stick to her day job. Her popular Eras Tour was far more successful than her political picks.
The Woke Bureaucracy
As Tyler O’Neil’s forthcoming book “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government” reveals, the Left’s dark money network props up a system of woke nonprofits that staff and advise the federal government, pushing the bureaucracy to support critical race theory (the notion that America is systemically racist against blacks and for whites), gender ideology, climate alarmism, and technocratic government.
The woke elites lost big in the 2024 presidential election, and woke activist groups like the Human Rights Campaign have been losing steam all year. Human Rights Campaign runs a Corporate Equality Index that acts as a shakedown operation, demanding cash and public celebrations of the LGBTQ agenda in exchange for protection from the woke mob. Many companies have opted to leave that index, and Human Rights Campaign lost a key ally when it became clear the Biden-Harris administration would not continue.
Woke bureaucrats are going to fight to maintain their grasp on power, but thanks to the incoming Trump administration and allies like the Department of Government Efficiency, those bureaucrats will be playing defense.
Never in U.S. history has a president-elect been welcomed as the real president before his January 20 inauguration. And never has the incumbent president so willingly surrendered his last two months in office and all but abdicated—to the relief of his nation and the rest of the world.
One reason so many are welcoming Trump’s return is the universally desperate hope that his election spelled an end to a collective madness at home and its ripples abroad during the last four years. And why not?
Nations overseas had never quite witnessed anything like the lethal August 2021 American flight from Afghanistan. That utter humiliation and impotence of the U.S. military likely signaled to Russia there would be no consequences if it invaded Ukraine—and it did; to Iran that it could now unleash Hamas and Hezbollah on Israel—and it did; and to China that it could daily threaten Taiwan and send a spy balloon across the United States with impunity—and it did.
The result was the current global chaos perhaps not seen since the late 1930s when a confused United States was similarly a bystander to the rise of bellicose regimes and wars. The Biden administration shrugged that the Red Sea, the Black Sea, the South China Sea, the Straits of Hormuz, and the Eastern Mediterranean Sea all became dangerous to the U.S. Navy and unsafe to world shipping.
A disparate group of nuclear and near-nuclear powers—Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—are either at war with Western allies or threatening war with them. Their confidence was predicated on the assumption that the U.S. after 2020 was engaged in a Maoist-like cultural revolution that warred on its own security, energy, military, universities, and social unity—and would continue with a second Biden term.
The Biden-era cultural revolution has done great damage to the United States. The U.S. border was systematically and deliberately destroyed to allow some 10-12 million illegal entrants to pour into the U.S. without legality or background checks. Never has an outgoing administration spitefully sold taxpayer-purchased border wall material for pennies on the dollar—rather than see it used for the purposes for which it was purchased.
Never had the U.S. experienced such an immigrant surge. And never had more than 50 million, and over 15 percent of the resident American population been foreign-born.
Why did Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas erase the border? What madness and hate drove them to dismantle federal immigration law? Was it sheer nihilism? Or a desperate but calculated effort to alter American demography for political purposes?
For four years, the public, elected officials, and pundits have all warned that Joe Biden was dangerously cognitively challenged and indeed completely unfit to fulfill the duties of the presidency.
A long-suffering nation winced as Biden slurred his words, spoke in unintelligible sound bites, stood frozen and mute, screamed at and libeled half the country, tripped, fell, wandered aimlessly, became bewildered, and more or less proved a global embarrassment. All knew Biden was not able to run the country; yet none knew exactly who was actually in charge of America in his stead. The Obamas? Leftists like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, the Squad, Jill Biden, and the Biden staff?
Our allies worried that the usually resilient American president was now all but demented. Our enemies enjoyed these leaderless years of opportunity. And the left serially misled the public that the decrepit Biden, whom they feared in private was senile, was “dynamic,” “energic,” and “fit as a fiddle.”
Never has a president so deserved to be removed by the 25th Amendment or through impeachment and conviction. And never has even his inner circle finally but silently agreed as they left office, the very enablers who had done their political best to mask his dementia for four long years.
Rarely have the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, the Department of Justice, and the Pentagon become weaponized and so flagrantly and with impunity broken the law, abandoned their mission statements, and served political agendas rather than the American people. Not since the J. Edgar Hoover era has the FBI hierarchy serially lied under oath, stonewalled Congress, forged a court affidavit, or partnered with the media to suppress the news. Has the FBI ever raided an ex-president’s home, spied on parents at school board meetings, monitored Catholics, or tried to terrify and harass pro-life activists?
Never has the justice system, from local to state to national jurisdictions, so systematically and coordinately, sought to bankrupt, render inert, and jail an ex-president and current presidential candidate.
Never has a presidential family so brazenly profited by selling its influence to foreign interests. Never has it used the powers of the FBI and DOJ to cover up its crimes and to ensure the family filial bagman would be for years exempted by the DOJ and later pardoned by the president himself, the father of the family miscreant and privy to the family syndicate’s illegal activities.
Seldom has a president and his administration sought to fuel a veritable cultural revolution to change the fabric of the nation by institutionalizing a third, transexual gender, violating civil rights law, and systematically admitting, hiring, and promoting Americans on the basis of their race and gender.
Never since the Civil War era had local and state insurrectionist governments established 600 nullification zones, in which they vowed to break federal law and consider it null and void within their jurisdictions. Never have rioters looted, burned, killed, assaulted, and occupied large swaths of cities for over 120 days, and largely with impunity.
Never had the U.S. Treasury borrowed so much money so quickly and owed $37 in national debt—and been so intent on borrowing continuously nearly $2 trillion a year in annual deficits.
Never has a political party sought to systematically violate long-standing traditions, customs, and often the law itself to destroy a political opponent: hiring a foreign national to spread smears among the media and bureaucracies, impeaching a president twice, trying an ex-president in the Senate, seeking to remove a presidential candidate from 16 state ballots, using five different judicial jurisdictions to try an ex-president, and serially so defaming a candidate and ex-president as a dictator, fascist, and Nazi to create a climate that encouraged two near-miss assassination attempts on him.
In sum, for the last four years, the world has watched aghast as the United States lost its collective mind and became a radical Jacobin revolutionary society.
So why is there not a sense of almost ecstatic relief, not just among conservatives but even among Democrats, that the years of darkness and madness are ending?
The global public believes that the United States will again become lawful, have a secure border, return as a beacon of free-market economics, protect its allies, deter its enemies, win over its neutrals, return to the rule of law, restore the professionalism and prestige of its government agencies, check predatory nations abroad with a new deterrent military, and prepare to lead the world in energy production, exploration of space, and scientific and technology development.
Summed up, the welcomed counterrevolution is one of restoration—to dream again that nothing is impossible, and the dreary age of stasis, envy, cynicism, and nihilism is ending, replaced again by a world without limits. No one knows quite what is ahead, but all know that it is at least better already than the current nightmare.
They come for the free money, housing and food. Biden has shipped them in and shipped them around the US. All the while, Hurricane Helene victims are freezing to death while FEMA does nothing.
In Europe, they suck off of the hind teat of socialism. Free money for being there, except for the legal residents who foot the bill
Germany’s Christian Democrat Union (CDU) candidate for chancellor Friedrich Merz says that Germany cannot accept more Syrians from Syria and that those Syrians who are not integrated should return to Syria.
Notably, Merz is pointing to the sky-high levels of unemployment among many of the country’s Syrian population. The chancellor candidate, during an appearance on ARD, said the “one-third” who “work and are integrated” in Germany can stay, “but the two-thirds do not work, they are overwhelmingly young men, many of them can go back, and many must go back.”
He said that a push to return many of these migrants must occur, saying:
“We must now speak very openly with them and say: You have no place in Germany in the long term… We have long been of the opinion that at least people could have returned to the north a long time ago, and now to other parts of the country as well.”
There are currently 1 million Syrians in the country, and those not working have become a major burden for German taxpayers. According to government data, 210,000 are employed, while 250,000 are currently “looking for work.” Another 150,000 are unemployed.
Following the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government, there is a European-wide push to return Syrians to their country; however, the ruling German government has expressed caution about the security situation in the country.
The WEF and global government types know they can break down civilizations, customs, traditions and hundreds of years of history by bringing in illegals to ruin the economies and enact the Cloward-Piven strategy.
“may have several negative impacts on the local environment and economy”
See the post below about Germany being dumbasses about the same thing. Use gas. It’s cheap and it isn’t killing whales or the environment. Those are lies made up by hypocritical zealots whose religion is green (money, not sustainability like Al Gore and John Kerry).
Drill baby drill and bring down the cost of energy, bringing down the cost of everything else. For those who worship the planet, watch and see that it won’t harm a thing. It will actually be better for everything except their wallets
Everyone knows this has been a boondoggle, even the left, but they’re so committed to supposed ‘green’ energy that they can’t let go.
A government regulator recognizing offshore wind’s destructive environmental effects is as rare as a North Atlantic right whale. But a recent, 600-plus page report from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) admits that the offshore wind development planned for the New York Bight—the triangular area bordered by the New Jersey and Long Island coastlines—may irreversibly harm whales, commercial and recreational fisheries, and seabirds.
The BOEM report is the agency’s first to evaluate the cumulative impacts of offshore wind development. Its authors cite a wide range of potential effects, from negligible (or even beneficial) to major. Acknowledging potentially “major” harms is a radical departure from the agency’s previously accepted Environmental Impact Statements for offshore wind projects, which have always focused on the impacts of individual projects, rather than the cumulative impacts of multiple projects.
The report, which BOEM bills as a “programmatic environmental impact statement,” admits that the proposed offshore wind projects on the New York Bight may have several negative impacts on the local environment and economy. The authors note, for example, that the effect on the North Atlantic right whale could be “major,” defined as having “severe population-level effects” that would “compromise the viability of the species”—in other words, potential extinction. The report also concedes that the projects could have major effects (“substantial disruptions”) on commercial and recreational fishing, which contribute billions of dollars to the New Jersey and New York economies.
While the report discusses the consequences of these wind turbines on ocean views and even on local housing prices, it makes no mention of these projects’ adverse effects on electric ratepayers and economic growth. These effects are substantial, as New Jersey’s experience reveals. The state’s Board of Public Utilities estimated that its two approved offshore wind projects in 2024, with a total capacity of 2,400 MW, would raise the monthly electric bills of a typical residential customer by about $7, a commercial customer by about $59, and an industrial customer by over $500. Those estimated costs, which don’t include what those customers will pay for new transmission lines and the backup generation needed to offset wind’s inherent intermittency, cumulatively amount to more than a $750 million annual increase in electric bills for the state’s 8.5 million electric ratepayers. , based on the numbers of these customers. If the Garden State succeeds in its goal of developing 11,000 megawatts of offshore wind electricity, despite mounting costs and the cancellations of two major in-state projects, ratepayers alone will end up paying an additional $3 billion to $5 billion more each year for their electricity.
What is it with Europe right now. The UK has gone Bats**t crazy and is converting to Islam faster than Iran, not this.
Another wind drought has led to soaring electricity prices across Europe. Norway, which exports power to its European neighbors, has seen enough.
Europe’s electricity prices soared on Thursday amid a wind drought. Source: Alexander Stahel on X.
For the second time in a month, Germany’s electric grid has been hit by a wind drought, known in German as a Dunkelflaute. The lack of wind sent Europe’s electricity prices soaring to their highest levels since the end of 2022, when Europe was in the midst of an energy crisis due to concerns about supplies of Russian gas. That’s saying something since Europe — and Germany in particular — now appears to be amid a permanent energy crisis.
Yesterday, German consumers paid an average of $400 per megawatt-hour for electricity. During peak times, prices in Germany’s wholesale power market came close to $1,000 per MWh, the highest level in 18 years. Here’s how a reporter with Spain’s El Pais newspaper explained the situation:
Dunkelflaute is a cursed word in the German electricity sector. The combination, typical of cold anticyclones, of low temperatures (which increase demand) and the almost total absence of wind (which hinders wind generation) configures one of the worst possible scenarios for the price of electricity: it forces the burning of more gas in combined cycle plants, which are much more expensive, and that substantially increases the bill…The main factor behind this escalation is the lack of wind. While at this time of year Germany’s powerful wind power sector (onshore and offshore) usually averages almost 20 gigawatts (GW) of power, according to data from the specialist portal Montel, thus becoming the country’s main source of electricity, on Wednesday it will just exceed 3 GW. With the cloudy skies, solar photovoltaic power is also operating well below its potential and forces combined cycle plants — in which gas is burned to obtain electricity — to operate at a higher rate than usual, driving up prices.
The wind drought isn’t just hitting Germany. As shown in the graphic at the top of this article, electricity prices across Europe soared amid the wind drought. In response, Norwegian politicians are promising to dismantle the undersea power cables that connect Norway’s grid to mainland Europe to protect Norwegians from Europe’s tumultuous electricity market. Electricity prices in Norway, which gets 90% of its power from hydro, hit record prices this week despite having full hydro reservoirs.
According to the X account of Visegrád 24, a Norwegian news outlet, the two links that connect Norway to Europe will reach their technical lifetimes in 2026 and 2027. The two cables have 9 GW of exchange capacity, of which 5.1 GW connects to Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, and the UK.
“Electricity bills in New England are poised to experience a sharp increase driven by the clean energy mandates in five of the six states, which require duplicative, overbuilt renewable energy.”
Connecticut ratepayers suffered sticker shock this summer when they opened their July electric bills. While their energy consumption was relatively flat, the “public benefits” component doubled for some and tripled for others. The culprit was not hard to find given a legislative requirement for utilities to itemize the cost components of monthly bills.
“Public benefits” cover the cost of subsidies the state provides for low-income electricity customers and energy-efficiency programs. They also include solar, electric vehicle, and other renewable energy incentives.
The wide array of renewable energy subsidies and aid to low-income residents who cannot afford high-cost electricity, growing everywhere, is an increasing cost burden for power users in the Northeast.
Connecticut: Worst of the Worst
The Northeast has become the most expensive region in the continental United States for electricity. Connecticut has the most expensive electricity in the 50 states outside of Hawaii. Connecticut’s overall electricity price for this September, according to the Energy Information Administration, was 27.08 cents per kilowatt-hour (ȼ/kWh), compared to Hawaii’s 35.46 ȼ/kWh.
When I worked in sustainability at IBM (a joke in itself there), the Northeast was the most smug and misguided about the whole energy/carbon/climate issue. Never have I seen so many smart people (inside and analysts paid by IBM) get an issue so wrong because of ideology.
Well, take your smugness to the electric company and out of your bank account.
Gas is cheap and efficient. It’s not the bogeyman that you made it out to be. You picked your poison, now drink it.
I asked AI to list some of his boners. Here’s what came up
Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate economist and columnist for the New York Times, has been known to make predictions and argue for certain economic policies that have been proven wrong or controversial over time. Here are a few examples:
Predicting the 2008 Financial Crisis: In the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis, Krugman was skeptical of the severity of the housing bubble and the potential consequences of a housing market crash. He argued that such a scenario was unlikely and that the economy would continue to grow. However, the crisis ultimately occurred, causing a major recession and exposing the flaws in Krugman’s predictions.
Arguing against austerity: Following the 2008 financial crisis, Krugman advocated against austerity measures and argued that governments should focus on boosting spending to stimulate the economy. However, many countries that implemented expansionary fiscal policies saw mixed results, and some economists argued that a more balanced approach to austerity and stimulus was necessary.
Predicting a “double-dip” recession: In 2010, Krugman predicted that the U.S. economy would experience a “double-dip” recession, with a second downturn occurring after an initial recovery. However, the economy continued to grow steadily, and the double-dip recession never materialized.
Arguing against the effectiveness of Quantitative Easing: Krugman has been critical of the Federal Reserve’s use of quantitative easing, arguing that it was not an effective tool for stimulating the economy. Some economists, however, have attributed the recovery of the U.S. economy in part to the Fed’s aggressive monetary policies.
Here’s what a second engine said:
Paul Krugman, despite his reputation as a prominent economist, has made several predictions that did not materialize as he expected. Here are some specific predictions by Krugman that didn’t come true:
Economic Predictions
2008 Financial Crisis: Krugman failed to anticipate the severity of the 2008 financial crisis1.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: In July 2008, Krugman predicted that concerns about a possible collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were “overblown.” Months later, both institutions required massive government bailouts1.
Unemployment Rate: Krugman supported the Obama administration’s stimulus package, which was predicted to keep unemployment below 8%. However, unemployment surpassed 10% despite the stimulus1.
Interest Rates and Fiscal Policy
Zero Lower Bound: Krugman believed that nominal interest rates couldn’t go below 0%. This proved incorrect as some countries experienced negative interest rates2.
Fiscal Austerity: In 2013, Krugman predicted that U.S. budget cuts (the “sequester”) would lead to severe economic damage and possibly a double-dip recession. Instead, the U.S. economy continued to recover2.
Inflation and Deflation
Accelerating Deflation: Krugman’s model predicted accelerating deflation in the face of a prolonged economic slump. In reality, consumer prices rose modestly even as unemployment remained high2.
Price Deflation: In February 2010, Krugman warned of potential price deflation in the near future, comparing the U.S. situation to Japan’s. This did not occur; instead, his preferred measures of CPI turned around sharply within months2.
Oil Prices and Production
Permanent High Oil Prices: In June 2008, with oil at $137 per barrel, Krugman predicted that oil prices were on a permanently higher trajectory. The price of oil collapsed mere months later3.
U.S. Oil Production: Krugman failed to foresee the surge in U.S. crude oil output. He had expressed skepticism about significant increases in oil production, but U.S. field production of crude nearly doubled in the following decade
I’ve never trusted the NYT other than to be on the liberal side of anything, even if it means they were wrong. That he got an award for his economic writings is analogous to Obama getting a Nobel before he did anything other than lie to get elected.
Go away and stop ruining our lives like the rest of the Coastal elites that misunderestimate (Bush-ism) what the real America and real Americans who live in flyover country believe. It’s why most of the country just voted red instead of blue.
My wife’s idiot niece Marian posted on Facebook that Elizabeth Warren is the bomb. I can pretty much count on her being on the wrong side of everything good for America. Here’s proof.
President Biden has overseen nearly four years of a two-tiered justice system, as his pardoning of Hunter Biden and the political persecutions of then-candidate Donald Trump make all too clear.
But there have been quieter attacks on justice, like “debanking” — and few people realize they could be the next victims because they are a “politically exposed person,” that is someone who disagrees with the liberal status quo.
Debanking is a kind of financial blackballing that has appeared within just the last 20 years.
It started under then-President Barack Obama as a war to punish those seen as political enemies, like firearm manufacturers. Government documents unsealed at the end of 2020 proved that the federal government used its regulatory authority over financial markets to attack political opponents.
Government regulators essentially make it impossible for certain people or businesses to make online transactions, or to have a bank account or a credit card.
…
The debanking scourge under President Biden has hit the crypto world particularly hard. The Securities and Exchange Commission has unleashed a plague of investigations, some real and some merely threatened, to force innovators and investors out of that space.
Dozens of tech and crypto founders have been debanked under Biden, and their inventions smothered.
On Joe Rogan‘s podcast, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen blamed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a group set up at the behest of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to go after crypto firms in particular.
“Basically every crypto founder, every crypto startup, either got debanked personally and forced out of the industry, or their company got debanked,” Andreessen said.
In the autumn of 2019 a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, began to circulate widely but at a low level. In March 2020, as the influenza season in the Northern Hemisphere subsided, due to a drop in viral interference SARS-CoV-2 surged and became the dominant respiratory virus. COVID-19 spread from China around the world, suppressing influenza, whilst leaving the other human-infecting coronaviruses undisturbed. The vast majority of countries reacted to COVID-19 by imposing non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as lockdowns and facemask policies and, later, vaccination programmes.
It was a big effing hoax, all of it from the virus to the jab. Politicians and Pharma should fry for this. It was murder, perjury, money laundering, RICO and many other crimes
If you’re looking for the sharpest takes on just about everything—especially the chaotic mess of US politics—look no further than Revolver’s own Darren Beattie. It’s no secret that Darren has a unique knack for cutting through all the noise and revealing what’s really happening behind the scenes and beyond the propaganda. After all, this is a guy who worked in President Trump’s White House. He’s deeply connected, with a sharp eye for the nuances slithering through the DC Swamp and beyond. It’s that same insight that helped him blow the lid off the January 6 “Fedsurrection.”
Now, as the Biden regime inches us closer to World War 3 and the Deep State fights tooth and nail to survive, Darren is pulling back the curtain on what’s really happening in Ukraine and beyond. For Ukraine, Darren paints a picture of a lawless wasteland—basically, a modern-day Afghanistan, ruled by ruthless warlords where anything goes. It’s no wonder our politicians are so desperate to do business there; it’s a place where they can literally and figuratively get away with murder.
NBC Hails a Shift: ‘Journalists Flock to Bluesky as X Becomes Increasingly ‘Toxic’
Kat Tenbarge, tech and culture reporter for NBC News, filed an online story Saturday, “Journalists flock to Bluesky as X becomes increasingly ‘toxic’ — Journalists are finding more readers and less hate on Bluesky than on the platform they used to know as Twitter.”
As long as you follow the liberal line, that is.
Tenbarge opened with a journalist and Bluesky fan:
When Ashton Pittman, an award-winning news editor and reporter, first joined the app Bluesky, he said, he was the only Mississippi journalist he knew to be using it. Until about five weeks ago, he said, that was the case. But now, Pittman said, there are at least 15 Mississippi journalists on Bluesky as it becomes a preferred platform for reporters, writers, activists and other groups who have become increasingly alienated by X.
The same outlets who refused to see the clear evidence before their eyes of conservatives being throttled on Jack Dorsey-led Twitter are muttering about supposed suppression by Musk.
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, has turned the platform into an increasingly difficult place for journalists, and many had come to suspect that the platform had begun to suppress the reach of posts that include links to external websites. On Sunday, Musk confirmed the platform has deprioritized posts including links, which was how journalists and other creators historically shared their work. But four journalists told NBC News that after millions of users migrated to Bluesky, an alternative that resembles a pared-back version of X, after the election, they are rebuilding their audiences there, too.
Surprise! Liberal media outlets are finding life more congenial in the BlueSky echo chamber, where there’s little conservative pushback or disagreement.
Story
Birds of a feather flock together. This time it’s in the cesspool. Bluesky will never be X or Truth Social. That is the relevant place to be. Just look at the views and downloads. Just because they are butt-hurt by the election and no one trusts them anymore, they go to a safe place.
That shields the rest of the world from their lies and misreporting during their Trump-hating rants against the USA. We are all better off with them gone.
There is a new paradigm in the media and the alphabet networks and NY Times have been left behind, they just don’t know it yet
Jaguar’s design boss has dismissed critics laughing at his new creation, declaring Monday the car brand has shown “fearless creativity” in delivering an electric vehicle on the back of a divisive marketing campaign.
Gerry McGovern, who is in charge of design for Jaguar’s parent company, told a launch event on Monday in Miami: “Some may love it now, some may love it later and some may never love it. That’s what fearless creativity does.”
The British brand revealed the new concept car, the Type 00 (pronounced “zero zero”), to a mixed reaction, as Breitbart News reported, with an advertising campaign that failed to showcase even one single vehicle from the legendary British car company.
For the first time in history, a Chinese president has openly delivered clear red lines to an American president, delineating Beijing’s non-negotiable core interests. When Chinese President Xi Jinping met with President Joe Biden at the 31st APEC Economic Leaders’ Meeting in Lima, Peru, the world’s attention was drawn to Xi’s blunt articulation of China’s “four red lines.” Unlike previous APEC meetings, which often emphasized cooperative economic growth, this meeting was starkly different in tone, as Xi chose to lay down firm boundaries. Xi delivered these red lines with a strategic calculation: he saw Biden as weak—a perfect target for asserting China’s boundaries—preferring to establish these limits before Donald Trump, a leader with a much stronger and more combative stance on China, takes office again in January. These red lines were issued as a stark warning to Washington: do not cross boundaries concerning Taiwan, democracy and human rights, China’s path and system, and its rights to economic development. Xi’s delivery of these red lines marks a critical turning point in global power dynamics, reflective of an increasingly confident China testing the resolve of a U.S. president they perceived as pliable.
Taiwan: Beijing sees Taiwan as an inalienable part of its territory. Xi emphasized that any U.S. support for Taiwanese independence or actions that embolden the island’s efforts to solidify its separation from China would be unacceptable. The language was a firm reminder that Washington’s increased engagements with Taiwan would be seen as a direct challenge to China’s national unity.
Democracy and Human Rights: China demanded an end to external interference concerning human rights and democracy, both of which Beijing deems to be domestic matters. U.S. criticism over China’s treatment of Uyghurs and actions in Hong Kong has been seen by China as interference designed to undermine the ruling Communist Party.
China’s Path and System: Xi underscored that the United States must respect China’s governance and its chosen socialist path. Any attempts to influence or undermine the authority of the Communist Party would be viewed as an existential threat.
Rights to Development: Finally, China asserted its right to pursue economic development and technological advancement without external obstruction. Restrictions on trade, technology transfers, or economic development would be seen as direct infringements on China’s core rights.
First, the U.S. already is in a Cold War. It was started by the CCP, and it is high time that the U.S. joined the fight against it. The many tens of thousands of Americans killed by the CCP’s fentanyl alone shows that the CCP is at war with the United States and has no qualms about killing Americans.
The current Cold War with the CCP is multifaceted and fought, thus far short of kinetic war, but in all other domains—including the economic, diplomatic, and political. It is important to understand the similarities between this Cold War and the one with the Soviet Union. The most salient is that the motivation for aggression remains the same, the Communist ideology of the Soviet Union in the past and of the CCP today. The impact of the ideology of Communism and its role in driving the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) aggression is essential to comprehend. Communism is a Western ideology imported into China and is not a part of Chinese civilization, political culture, or political history.
But its effect on China has been profound and created a swath of destruction through that country. It has intentionally destroyed the traditional pillars of Chinese culture, society and civilization and killed many scores of millions of Chinese. Understanding the CCP’s ideology provides major insights into the People’s Republic of China’s behavior. It allows Americans to comprehend why the PRC is inherently aggressive. Communism seeks to force societies like China’s into an ideological Procrustean Bed defined by Marxism-Leninism. In addition, Communism requires aggression, including unrestricted warfare, against non-Communist states. The effect on U.S. national security interests could not be more significant as this explains the CCP’s aggression against the U.S. In the CCP’s worldview, the U.S. is the fundamental enemy to be destroyed.
Third, the right response to the “Four Red Lines” is total rejection. In essence, the affirmation of whatever Xi tells Americans they cannot do.
First, the U.S., not Xi, sets its policy toward Taiwan. U.S. must revisit its policy over Taiwan to reflect the strategic realities of the 21st Century.
Second, while Communist dictatorships abuse the human rights of their captive populations, which perforce all do, the rest of the world must not accept this. The Chinese diaspora, people of goodwill around the world, and the U.S. will speak for those oppressed.
Third, Xi knows that his government is illegitimate and tyrannical, and so the incoming Trump administration might revisit every aspect of its policies towards that regime. It is certainly appropriate for the world’s population to ask whether the CCP is a legitimate government and should continue to oppress the Chinese people.
Fourth, Xi is asking that the U.S. not impede the PRC’s power and accept its position while it seeks to supplant the U.S. without an adequate U.S. response. For too long, the U.S. elite have gone along with supporting the CCP because it has profited them. It was only the first Trump administration that turned the rudder and challenged the CCP. Xi’s effort to define the boundaries of PRC-U.S. relations with the new Trump administration is bound to fail.
Xi’s free ride is over. There is a new sheriff in town as of January 20th. This sheriff is unlike the previous one. He might have some demands of his own.
Look at the money being waisted on salaries for worse race relations. This has got to go.
The University of Michigan’s (UM) multi-million dollar diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) program may soon be dismantled.
The university’s board of regents has reportedly asked UM president Santa Ono “to defund or restructure” the DEI office amid growing criticism and public pressure, according to emails shared on X. The board is expected to vote on the matter on Dec. 5.
Despite UM investing $250 million into DEI since 2016, students and faculty have reported a deteriorating campus climate since the program began and are less likely to interact with people of a different race, religion or political ideology, though these are “the exact kind of engagement[s] D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster,” the article stated. Attempts to create a more diverse campus also fell flat, with black enrollment at the university remaining a steady 5%.
The program also created a “culture of grievance,” with the office’s conception coinciding with an “explosion” of complaints on campus involving race, gender and religion, the NYT reported. Meanwhile, nearly 250 university employees were engaged in some form of DEI efforts on campus.
DEI staff cost the university approximately $30.68 million annually, with the average salary reaching $96,400, according to Mark Perry, an American Enterprise Institute scholar. Several DEI employees are paid more than $200,000 a year, while the department’s head makes upwards of $400,000.
As Jaguar cuts its’ own throat by being woke, the world looks on in disbelief.
Formula One racing legend Johnny Herbert has commented on Jaguar’s bizarre rebranding of itself into some sort of LGBTQ activist campaign, calling it ‘confusing’ and revealing that no one he’s spoken to in the auto world understands what the company is doing.
As we’ve highlighted, the move appears to be an astoundingly stupid one, yet the company has doubled down, even appearing to threaten critics.
Now, in comments made to to Prime Casino, former Jaguar team driver Herbert remarked “Oh my Lord, what have they done?!”
“You look at it and wonder what it is trying to achieve,” he continued, adding “Where is it pitching itself at? Who is it trying to appeal to? I am confused.”
Yes Johnny, the whole world is wondering the same thing. Look at a post below to find that everyone is getting tired of the woke shit being forced on us by 2% of the population.
This essay was first published on Daily Pundit in 2017. More applicable now than then, I think.
——
I have one. You have one. We all have a tard in our family circle. If you’re lucky it’s not a blood relative, just a boyfriend or in-law, but they’ll be showing up at the big family get-together for Thanksgiving.
Not just any tard, either. A Progtard.
They’re sort of like the Terminator: They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. And they absolutely will not stop, ever.
Unlike the Terminator, progtards aren’t dangerous except in large groups or if they’re in the position to ambush you from behind or to file a bogus complaint with your employer. Progtards are mostly pathetic, and they’re even more amusingly pathetic when they’re angry and self-righteous.
Herewith, a guide for dealing with the tard at the table. This will be most useful if you have someone to work with, someone contemptuous of sloppy thinking, of feeeewings, and of self-entitlement.
(If you’re the sole hard thinker at the table and you’re surrounded by progtards, you can still use these suggestions, but I wouldn’t bother. I’d just grab the carving knife and lay into everyone at the table. But that’s just me.)
College Mockery
Mocking modern education — indoctrination, rather — is a good place to start. Many progtards are in college or have recently gotten out. (I’m not saying “graduated” because so many don’t, especially not within the old normal of four years.) This is in large part due to many people being soft-headed progs before they grow up and get the stupid knocked out of them. College is for most a prolonged childhood that allows them to avoid growing up. It certainly doesn’t educate them in any meaningful sense. And it costs an arm and a leg.
Thus, our first line of attack.
(Remember, we’re not trying to enlighten the progtards. That’s hopeless. All we’re doing is entertaining ourselves by getting them all riled up.)
“So, how much does your college cost per year? That much? Wow. How can you afford that?”
This can lead to criticism about mooching off of parents or taxpayers. That’s unlikely to impact the progtard directly, on account of an inflated sense of entitlement, but might help to get others on your side.
“How much are you having to borrow every year? Ouch. So you’ll be a hundred grand in debt. Oh, it’s taking you six years to graduate? A hundred fifty grand. Wow. That going to be, what, a grand a month for twenty years?”
“So, how are you going to make a living so you can pay that off and still have a place to live and get a car and stuff?”
“That’s a good goal, but how are you going to get there from here? How do you get your foot in the door to get started? Is your BA in Music History going to get you a job at all? Will it let you pay your school loans? ”
“Wouldn’t you have been better off not going to college? You could have lived at home, interned for minimum wage or even for free for a working musician, gotten some real experience, and not had any debt when you were done.”
“Does anyone really think that degree is worth anything? Why did you even bother getting it?”
“My nephew did two years of electrical tech in community college, lived at home, and worked part time to pay for it. He got a job with the power company straight out of school. He didn’t have any debt and he just bought his first house. He’s twenty-three years old.”
There’s meat left on those bones, but that’s enough to start the poo flying.
Communism, Socialism, and Progressivism
Don’t miss the chance to bring up the repeated failures of socialism and its inbred kin. You can’t quite say that every progtard truly believes that socialism et al would make the world a better place, but if you did say that you’d be off by only a few. Note the comment above about getting the stupid knocked out of you — socialism and such are stupid ideas that sound like they should work, and they sure do appeal to the lazy and untalented and envious, and you don’t realize they don’t work until you’ve had the stupid knocked out of you by the real world. Students, educators, bureaucrats, and some other so-called adults who have lived their lives as hothouse flowers never quite learn that a lot of nice-sounding ideas don’t actually work.
“You know the amazing thing about socialism? It’s so good at destroying wealth that it doesn’t matter if everyone’s equal. They’re poorer than even the poor people in the oh-so-unequal capitalist countries.”
“No, I take that back. The most amazing thing about socialism and communism is the number of people they’ve killed.”
“Tell me, how many more times does socialism need to be tried before it’s ‘real’?”
“Have you ever noticed how often socialist countries have to be bailed out by capitalist countries after natural disasters? Why doesn’t it ever go the other way?”
“Socialized medicine. What a cute idea! Too bad it never works for long. Back in the 1980s, American socialists pointed at England’s national health system as the best example of how nationalized medicine would work for everyone. Then when that started to show problems, they started pointing to Canada. Canada’s socialized medicine had just started and looked good … until rationing and problems became obvious a few years later. Now anyone wanting to show an example of socialized medicine done right has to just lie about all the problems it has everywhere. But next time for sure, right?”
Keeping the Poo Flying
There are a few miscellaneous poo bombs you can throw if the conversation and acrimony are slowing down.
Che really was a cowardly murderer, you know.
Wouldn’t it be neat if the global warming scientists would show their data and algorithms so it could be peer reviewed?
Yes, that short, blue hair does make a statement. It says, I’m going to be a lonely cat lady before I’m forty.
Aw, competition isn’t fair because it means that not everyone will be a winner? Aw, let me call you a wambulance.
You’re right, things are different than when I was young. When I was your age, it was almost impossible to make a living unless you worked for someone. Going into business for yourself took a lot of money to open a store front or you had to be in a big city or be willing to travel all the time. Now you can write software or books or make videos or do odd jobs all over the world for basically no money down. You have it so much easier now.
I wish that women only were paid 79 cents on the dollar. I’d fire all my male employees, hire all women, and save big bucks on payroll.
Why is it cultural appropriation for me to eat tacos, but it’s ok for Mexicans to wear blue jeans and use cell phones?
And lots and lots more, but we’re up to 1200 words, and that’s plenty enough.
I’m stuck at a family dinner that I thought I’d get out of, but no, I have to be there.
MASSIVE news: Walmart is ending their woke policies. I can now exclusively tell you what’s changing and how it happened. Last week I told execs at
@Walmart that I was doing a story on wokeness there. Instead we had productive conversations to find solutions. Below are the changes Walmart committed to. I have to give their executives major credit because this will send shockwaves throughout corporate America. This is the biggest win yet for our movement to end wokeness in corporate America. Here are the changes Walmart committed to: • Surveys: Walmart will no longer participate in the HRC’s woke Corporate Equality Index. • Products: Monitor the Walmart marketplace to identify and remove inappropriate sexual and / or transgender products marketed to children. • Funding of Grants: Review all funding of Pride, and other events, to avoid funding inappropriate sexualized content targeting kids. • Equity: We will not extend the Racial Equity Center which was established in 2020 as a special five-year initiative. • Supplier Diversity: We will evaluate supplier diversity programs and ensure they do not provide preferential treatment and benefits to suppliers based on diversity. We don’t have quotas and won’t going forward. Financing eligibility will no longer be predicated on providing certain demographic data. • LatinX: Walmart will no longer use the term in official communications. • Trainings: Walmart will discontinue racial equity training through the Racial Equity Institute. • DEI: Walmart will discontinue the use of DEI as a term while ensuring a respectful and supportive environment. Our focus is on Belonging for ALL associates and customers. Remember, Walmart is the #1 employer in America with over 1.6 Million Employees and they have a market cap of nearly $800B. This won’t just have a massive effect for their employees who will have a neutral workplace without feeling that divisive issues are being injected but it will also extend to their many suppliers. We’ve now changed policy at companies worth over $2 Trillion dollars, with many millions of employees who have better workplace environments as a result. I’m happy to have secured these changes before Christmas when shoppers have very few large retail brands they can spend money with who aren’t pushing woke policies. Companies like Amazon and Target should be very nervous that their top competitor dropped woke policies first. I think Target specifically will suffer serious sales problems as a result and Walmart will benefit.
there is more at the link above, but Walmart has been a bad actor in a lot of places, like China and this.
No Republican has ever done what Donald J. Trump has done. Not even close.
Simply because no Republican has ever won three presidential elections, just to officially win two!
Yes, Trump won the presidency three times.
And he did it up against the entire world! Trump had to beat the entire Democratic Party, the entire deep state and D.C. swamp, globalists, communists, fascists, pretty much every corporate CEO and billionaire on earth, the mainstream media, social media, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street, the entire judicial system, the entire education system (from teachers unions, to public schools, to colleges), even the RINOS in his own party, and at times, even Fox News.
Holy cannoli!
Wait, it gets better. Superhuman Trump single-handedly defeated, knocked out of power and forced into early retirement the Clinton Crime Family, Biden Crime Family, Obama Crime Family, Harris Crime Family, Bush Crime Family, Cheney Crime Family, Romney Crime Family and McCain Crime Family.
Not to mention the humiliating beatings he’s given to Nancy Pelosi, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.
Holy crap!
These political brand names dominated and ruled America like royalty for decades. They ruled the Democratic Party and Republican Party. They took turns running the government. They dominated media headlines. They amassed power and wealth. Everyone bowed and genuflected in their presence.
And then along came Trump.
Trump vanquished every one of them. He slayed them like child’s play. He sent them packing. He left the most powerful, connected, vicious and cunning establishment “insiders” in history, sitting dumbfounded and speechless, on the outside looking in.
He made them so impotent, even Viagra couldn’t save this group from humiliation.
Now back to my contention that Trump won the presidency three times. Let’s actually look at what Trump accomplished in his three runs for president, because it’s crazy, wild and unimaginable! This guy is the G.O.A.T. (greatest of all time).
First, in 2016, Trump ran a long-shot campaign, with very little money or staff, against the most powerful, well-funded and famous brand name in U.S. political history – Hillary Clinton.
They lost to a convicted felon they ridiculed as a racist, misogynistic fascist — and an existential threat to democracy.
And they didn’t just lose to President-elect Trump. They lost the Senate … likely the House … many Hispanic men … all three Blue Wall states … both Southern swing states … even substantial support in the bluest of states and cities.
Why it matters: Top Democrats, including Harris advisers, tell us they feel like a lost party. Come January, they’ll have scant power in the federal government, and shriveling clout in the courts and states.
The traditional media structure sympathetic to their views, and hostile to Trump’s, was shattered.
The big picture: In our volatile, 50-50 America, where voters seem to swing fast and hard against the ruling party, resurrection and resurgence are often an off-year election away.
But the road to the Democrats’ Damascus requires deep, honest self-reflection — and, many party insiders tell us, entirely new leadership.
President Biden, 81,has faded even before his job is done. Harris’ team didn’t even want him to campaign. Impossible to imagine Democrats turning to him for sage advice on what’s next.
Harris just lost what Democrats considered an eminently winnable race, despite relatively light scrutiny and more money than any candidate in U.S. history. Hard to see her guiding Democrats out of the wilderness.
The party’s two most popular figures — Barack Obama and Michelle Obama — are happy to help in the waning moments of elections but aren’t going to lead a revival.
Look to the states, Democrats will say: Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania … Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan … Andy Beshear in Kentucky … newly elected Josh Stein in North Carolina.
Other Democratic future faces: Senator-elect Elissa Slotkin in Michigan, and Ruben Gallego, who leads in the race for U.S. senator in Arizona.
All are from states Trump just won. They’re certainly politically smarter than the Washington crew. The evidence: They didn’t lose.
Democrats will now start the predictable cycle of blame-casting and bellyaching. Every losing party does it. Then, they’ll turn to a more serious autopsy: why they’re bleeding support virtually everywhere.
The Biggest Loser? After Tuesday, it’s not just the title of the long-running reality TV weight-loss show anymore.
The biggest loser of the Nov. 5 elections, undeniably, was Vice President Kamala Harris. Despite raising and spending a staggering $1 billion in campaign cash and having the sycophantic support of the Hollywood glitterati, the now-lame-duck vice president was decisively defeated in her bid for promotion to the presidency.
Voters ensured she wouldn’t become the latest example of 1970s bestselling author Lawrence Peter’s “Peter Principle” theorem that people get promoted in a hierarchy until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent. Voters on Tuesday apparently concluded Harris had reached that point four years ago and resoundingly voted not to make that mistake again.
Harris demonstrated “Peter Principle”-level incompetence with her very first independent executive decision; namely, the choice of loopy leftist Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her vice presidential running mate.
Walz, a self-described “knucklehead,” brought to the Democratic ticket the frumpiness of George Costanza combined with the charisma of Elmer Fudd.
But while Harris and Walz were the biggest losers, they were far from the only big losers Tuesday night.
In no particular order, here are some of the many others who lost bigly:
Sen. Chuck Schumer: Voters demoted the New York Democrat from Senate majority leader to minority leader by kicking (at least) three longtime liberal Democratic senators—in Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania—to the curb. (Republicans also picked up an open Senate seat in West Virginia.)
Once and future President Donald Trump makes a joke about Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., (right) at the annual Alfred E. Smith Foundation charity fundraising dinner on Oct. 17 in New York City. Schumer was not amused. (Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
Suddenly, but not surprisingly, abolishing the Senate filibuster is no longer a Democratic talking point. Talk of also abolishing the Electoral College has likewise gone away postelection, after the once and future President Donald Trump also won the popular vote in a nearly 5 million-vote landslide.
Liz Cheney: The Trump-hating former Republican congresswoman—resoundingly repudiated by Wyoming voters in 2022 after she cast her lot with Democrats on the kangaroo court Jan. 6 committee—campaigned extensively for Harris. Cheney’s dream of being tapped as defense secretary in a Harris administration is now kaput.
The “Blue Wall”: Even Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin couldn’t save Harris’ train wreck of a candidacy.
Political lawfare: Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith; New York state Attorney General Letitia James; Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis; and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg will now have to find someone not named Trump to prosecute.
Hollywood: Cher and Barbra Streisand, Alec Baldwin and Robert De Niro, Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar, et al., your flight to Canada is now boarding at Gate 3. Make them one-way tickets, please.
How long can you talk shit about half the country before they get fed up? How long can you brag about the stock market while many Americans struggle at the grocery store and gas pump? How about hurricane victims getting ignored while illegals are put up in luxury hotels? I guess we found out.
Former NBC journo Brian Williams appeared on the Seth Meyers show this week and suggested that Democrats have completely lost the working class, which is true, and that it happened because Democrats kept gaslighting the public which was insulting.
He points to the way Democrats kept insisting that the economy was great while prices kept rising to ridiculous levels. He mentions the fact that the border was completely overrun while Democrats insisted that it was under control.
He cites other examples, but it’s all the same theme.
Seth Meyers Goes Quiet as Ex-NBC Anchor Torches Democrats for ‘Insulting’ the Working Class
“It is tough love time for the Democratic Party. I think it needs to be stripped down and rebuilt.”
Here’s how they alienated working-class voters, according to Brian Williams:
1. Ignoring Rising Costs: “A 12-pack of Bounty [paper towels] is $40. Rich folks don’t feel that. Poor folks already switched to Sparkle during the COVID lockdown.”
2. Touting Stock Market Success While Ignoring Economic Hardship for Regular People: “I think telling them that the Nasdaq is gangbusters is further insulting. It’s insulting.”
3. Downplaying Border Issues: “I think the biggest unforced error of the Biden administration by far was the border…. To tell people it’s not a problem is insulting.”
4. Providing Benefits to Migrants While Ignoring Citizens: “For the working class to see incoming migrants getting welcome bags, debit cards, and motel rooms is probably insulting as well.”
5. Failing to Address Biden’s Cognitive Decline: “I want to know who thought it was a good idea that Joe Biden stand for another four years at 80 years of age and 37% popularity.”
Screw the old people who need help. Kick the Medicare can down the road, but make sure to fund a climate scam that launders money to politicians.
When Democrats rammed through the Inflation Reduction Act during the days they controlled all of Washington, D.C., it ignited a chain reaction that led to higher Medicare costs for America’s senior citizens.
“Nearly two years after its passage, the IRA has diverted nearly $260 billion from the projected Medicare ‘savings’ to pay for special interest handouts like large tax credits for costly electric vehicles, enormous subsidies paid to big health insurer-PBM corporations, and funding health care programs for illegal immigrants,” Ron Fitzwater, Chief Executive Officer of the Missouri Pharmacy Association, wrote in an Op-Ed in the Missouri Times.
“The Biden-Harris administration is not protecting Medicare; they’re stealing from it,” he wrote.
According to Politico, the chain reaction began when the act shifted the burden of paying for prescription medicine from seniors to insurance companies.
Then came what could have been predicted: Insurance companies hiked their premiums for 2025.
Fitwater, in his Op-Ed, said increases were coming in at 179 percent.
But since that was going to hit right before the election, there was one more step – a federal bailout that has the taxpayer-funded federal treasury taking the hit for what the IRA caused.
It is a stressful time of the year for me as there is too much going on. People are overdoing Christmas and everyone is a Griswald now.
The displays were out in September and my neighborhood is covered in Christmas trees and lights. Thanksgiving is still 2 weeks away.
When I go into the stores, I hear the same songs over and over.
It’s the commercialization of the holiday, not the meaning. I’m for celebrating the true meaning of Christmas, not a bunch of people acting happy and different, and then giving you the finger on the highway. I can’t take the lying.
It’s not the most wonderful time of the year for me.
As an introvert, it is overwhelming and I want to hide. By the 26th, no one cares anymore, and are back to their real selves. Don’t lie to me.
So when January comes, I know the next holidays are supposed to be 12 months away, but are really 8-9 at best.
Tuesday’s defeat for the Democrats is raising a lot of questions in that party.
The questions they’re asking most are the most obvious ones: What went wrong? Where did the message fall short in mobilizing voters against President-elect Donald Trump?
An X user named HVAC1 — a self-described HVAC master and business owner — responded to a clip from MSNBC in which panelists were asking these questions. He gave the “simple answer” as “a former union democrat.”
“I’ll make it real simple for ya from a former union democrat… Easy fix. [Y]ou s**t on and insult working people from your mansions and gated communities. [Y]ou steal from us to give to your pet constituents. [Y]ou call us enemies and garbage, deplorable, and nazis…” he wrote.
He went on to make over a dozen additional points about Democrats ramping up inflation, threatening to pack the courts, lying constantly, forcing “sexual perversions and fetishes on us,” and so much more.
The Kamala Harris campaign raised an eye-popping billion dollars over the summer and into the fall, but it still wasn’t enough to beat Trump. It’s a good thing Americans didn’t trust her with the economy and the budget. Oh wait, they did the last 4 years and now we are $35 Trillion in debt
The more astounding part of the story however, is that despite having such a huge war chest of cash, the Harris campaign is ending with $20 million in debt.
Is there a more perfect metaphor for Democratic governance than this?
Harris’s Billion Dollar Campaign is Soliciting Donations and Selling Email List To Cover $20 Million Debt: Report
Vice President Kamala Harris’s billion-dollar campaign is reportedly soliciting donations from supporters and selling its email list to cover its $20 million debt.
Harris, who conceded the presidential race to Donald Trump Wednesday afternoon, ended her campaign with a debt of at least $20 million, sources told Politico’s California bureau chief Christopher Cadelago. The campaign is “selling their email list to make up for the losses,” according to Puck’s senior political correspondent Tara Palmeri.
The Harris campaign in an email Wednesday, well after voting ended, asked supporters to “donate to the Harris Fight Fund today to ensure we have the resources to elect Democrats down the ticket to hold the Trump administration accountable.”
A lot of this money went to concerts in swing states that did nothing to help Kamala’s campaign in the end.
In the end, the Kamala Harris campaign staged seven swing-state concerts on election eve, including performances by Jon Bon Jovi in Detroit, Christina Aguilera in Las Vegas, Katy Perry in Pittsburgh, and Lady Gaga in Philadelphia.
All of those swing states ended up in President-elect Donald Trump’s win column on Election Day.
While the pop stars reportedly waived their fees for Kamala, the campaign still had to pay for the staging, sound, security, and other costs associate with putting on a big rock concert.
Former senior Obama advisor-turned-senior Kamala Harris advisor David Plouffe hasdeleted his X account after suggesting on Wednesday that Harris’ landslide defeat was Joe Biden’s fault for not dropping out soon enough, and right as a massive campaign debt scandal erupts.
“We dug out of a deep hole but not enough. A devastating loss,” Plouffe posted to X – in what many interpreted as a dig at Biden.
Boyle’s post in its entirety:
Ok so this just got very explosive. A Kamala campaign staffer who saw these posts called me just now and said there is a massive scandal here worthy of an audit.
The $20 million debt thing is real.Rob Flaherty, this staffer said, is currently shopping around the Kamala fundraising email list to anyone who wants it to try to raise the money back. This includes other campaigns and outside groups.
Flaherty is the deputy campaign manager and reports to Jen O’Malley Dillon.
“Jen blew through a billion dollars in a few months and it was all Jen’s idea to do all the concerts.” — Kamala campaign adviser told me
This source added that O’Malley Dillon did these “concerts,” like Katy Perry, Lizzo, Eminem, Bruce Springsteen et cetera at the expense of “prioritizing and spending money on social media and other campaign priorities.”
Apparently a group in Georgia had to lay off 100 people because they couldn’t pay them.
It’s unclear at this time if the campaign PAID the talent to perform but the cost of production for the events was “immense.”
What’s more, this Kamala campaign staffer said several people who were working for the Kamala Harris for President campaign are still awaiting several overdue payments they were promised for their work. IE, they didn’t pay the staff.
This Kamala campaign staffer said to me of @jomalleydillon
“People didn’t like working with her. Many people on the campaign felt like we lost because Kamala wasn’t allowed to run her campaign. They were running Joe Biden’s campaign instead of a Kamala campaign. Obnoxious and very much a gate keeper and interfering with the vice president’s people who were trying to do their job.”
The discussion is below, but from my point of view, it is having a terrible candidate, calling half of the voters names like Nazis and fascists, not using new media (X and Podcasts) that people listen to, and having an incompetent staff running things. Oh, let’s not forget that the 2 prior democratic regimes were Marxists who hated America. Letting in illegals that made the country unsafe and destroying a good economy didn’t help either.
They could have listened to the people and we would have told them, but the media don’t listen to anyone, to the point of irrelevance.
Being woke and bowing to the trannies being in the girls’ locker rooms and sports teams was a line voters drew in the sand.
Anyway, here is the analysis from those smarter than me.
In the wake of Donald Trump’s crushing presidential victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, the major media are indicting all the usual suspects, beginning with claimed “disinformation” from conservative sources. But these targets, though falsely accused, do point to the true culprits.
Morning Joe’s Scarborough, for example, blamed the failure to elect Kamala Harris on misogynistic black and Hispanic males. Other commentators claimed that it was the uneducated females who were not true to the cause. Sunny Hostin of The View noted that Trump’s victory was one of “cultural resentment,” because America could not elect a mixed-race female married to a Jewish man. David Axelrod said that racial bias and misogyny could not be ignored in this election.
The media have projected a dark turn for the country. The New York Times editorial board called the election result a “perilous choice,” with America on the “precipice” of an “authoritarian style of governance.” Historian John Meacham cited the treasonous attempted “coup” of January 6 as proving a fascist victory.
Now to more specific finger-pointing from the media. Many media commentators are criticizing Harris, citing her failure to name Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro as her running mate. Of course, Joe Biden hampered Harris, they write, by waiting so long to drop out, after stubbornly staying in a race he should not have entered to begin with. And don’t forget the awful performance of Tim Walz, an attractive target for many in the media.
In all of these discussions, the media do not point to a prominent element common to each of the perceived problems: the media themselves. Of course, the media were too compromised by partisan motives to report what they had known for most of Biden’s term: he clearly suffered from advanced dementia. As Axios political reporter Hans Nichols recently noted on Fox’s America’s Newsroom, the media came down hard on any reporter who proposed a well sourced story on Biden’s lack of acuity, because that would help Trump.
Publicizing this infirmity would have had several salutary results. Obviously, as all disappointed Democrats now appear to admit, Biden should have dropped out of the race earlier. But the same media relaying this judgment do not point a finger at themselves for aiding and abetting his clueless clinging to power.
Perhaps more significantly, there was no media voice questioning the president’s fitness for office per the 25th Amendment. This amendment was explicitly meant for the exact situation this country faced these past four years: presidential senility. This issue is important in a world exploding into war, from Ukraine to the Middle East to the Taiwan Straits. But the media put partisan politics above world peace and national security.
After Biden was forced to drop out of the race when Nancy Pelosi finally brandished the 25th Amendment, were the media truthful about their past dereliction? Of course not. A typical reaction is from MSNBC’s vaunted media guru, Brian Stelter. His apologia’s headline says it all: “Did the media botch the Biden age story? Asleep at the wheel? Complicit in a cover-up? The real story is more complicated — and more interesting.” Clearly, the media could not be honest even when their dishonesty was apparent to all.
When vaunted reporter Bob Woodward received undeniable evidence of Biden’s disturbing mental deficits in June 2023, clearly not a recent development, he refrained from publicizing his sources’ observations (which would have helped our country) so that he could instead monetize them in a bestseller, published only after Biden withdrew from the race.
The media did far more than hide Biden’s condition and thwart the Democrat primary process. They themselves became a big motive for the electorate to rebel against the conventional wisdom promulgated regarding Donald Trump. There can be no doubt that the partisan lawfare campaign against Trump, criminalizing political differences, can have caused its resonating backlash only if voters believed that the media were attempting to thereby “Watergate” Trump unfairly. Indeed, the Biden forces behind these charges would have made them only if they knew that the media would jump to magnify this thin gruel of questionable claims.
When the media rambled incessantly about Trump’s alleged criminality, they certainly provided talking points that cemented the opposition already disfavoring Trump. But to citizens of common sense, who do not wish to be told what to think, the media simply were revealing their true partisan colors. Most citizens are not so dumb as to fail to see through these weak charges, quickly realizing that snake oil was being sold to them. No one likes to be defrauded. No one wants to be insulted. And citizens who feel insulted and defrauded are highly motivated to vote.
The media could not be content with smearing Trump. Rather, they went so far as to shame his supporters. Not satisfied with Hillary Clinton’s slurring Trump-supporters as “deplorable,” the media in 2024 ratcheted up the defamation by comparing Trump and his supporters with Hitler and his Nazis. Three major left-leaning publications displayed covers with Trump’s countenance morphing into Hitler’s. Those attending a raucous, joyful Madison Square Garden rally were compared to Nazi enthusiasts at Nuremburg. As the New York Times put it, melodramatically, the voters gave “a permission slip” to an “authoritarian.”
The understandable gloating of Trump-supporters did not, interestingly, strongly focus on Kamala Harris or Joe Biden. There were numerous Trump voters, however, who delighted in the tearful recriminations of the televised media talking heads. Numerous Trump voters tuned in to The View just to watch the meltdown.
The media kept Biden on stage far beyond his shelf life. The media ridiculed Trump as Hitler. They falsely assured the country that Harris’s vacuous campaign was excellent, which served to convince her advisers that it needed no course correction. The Democrats, wishing future victories, will engage sincerely in soul-searching in hopes of improvement. But so long as the media do not act similarly, the Democrats will continue to deceive themselves in this postmortem.
The Harris campaign raked in over a whopping $1 billion in contributions by October, just three months after Joe Biden bowed out of the race in July. Despite the glittering figure, Harris lost in a landslide. And to add insult to injury, the campaign made some pretty stupid financial decisions that include millions to an influencer recruitment agency and splashy private jets, according to a new report Friday from the Washington Examiner.
Most embarrassing, however, is the reported amount of money the campaign spent recreating Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” set in a Washington, D.C., hotel room for her sit-down interview with the vice president: $100,000.
story
And this is part of how you waste $1 billion and get nothing for your money. Mismanagement of the campaign would have lead to mismanagement of the Government. We got lucky to only have 4 years of the Biden/Harris losers
A massive slap-fight has broken out between Joe Biden’s and Kamala Harris’s camps – with each blaming the other for Harris’ historic loss to Donald Trump.
According to Axios, “In response to Trump’s decisive victory, aides in both camps are blaming the other for being more responsible, according to interviews with more than a dozen people in the White House and Harris’ campaign.”
One person in Harris’ camp told the outlet, “The 107-day Harris campaign was nearly flawless. The Biden campaign that preceded it was the opposite.”
Another Harris person told them, “We did what we could. I think the odds against us were insurmountable,” referring to Biden’s horrendous approval ratings and late exit from the race following his disastrous debate performance in June that revealed his brain is mush.
Former top Obama-turned-Harris aide David Plouffe posted on X that the Harris campaign had “dug out of a deep hole.” He later deleted his account.
Biden Team Strikes Back!
Responding to criticism of Biden top political aides Mike Donilon and Steve Ricchetti’s decision to run Biden “for re-election at 80 years old,” the Biden camp fire back – with one former staffer saying Harris’ team is making excuses.
“How did you spend $1 billion and not win? What the fuck?“
Another personfamiliar with the dynamics said that some on Biden’s team resent Harris for not using the president more during the campaign, even though he is unpopular and prone to gaffes.
mismanagement in the first degree. Money used to win elections. They forgot to put up a good candidate with a strategy and some values and tactics. They were losers all around.
Gov. Kathy Hochul on Saturday called New Yorkers who vote for Republican House candidates “anti-American” and “anti-women” — a smear that sparked furor across the Empire State and beyond.
“If you’re voting for these Republicans in New York, you are voting for someone who supports Donald Trump and you’re anti-women, you’re anti-abortion and basically you’re anti-American,” Hochul said on MSNBC.
“You just trashed American values and what our country is all about — over and over.”
But Republicans said it was Hochul doing the trashing — and even Democratic strategists said demonizing a large segment of voters as anti-American was not helpful to their candidates.
“This is about as helpful as a severe migraine. It’s never a good thing to identify a large segment of voters as un-American,” said ex-Democratic Rep. Max Rose, who is aiding Democrats in House races.
“Kathy Hochul doesn’t represent a majority of Democrats — anywhere,” said Rose, who served one-term representing Staten Island and parts of southern Brooklyn.
State Republican Party chairman Ed Cox fumed, “She’s smearing at least one half of American voters and all Trump voters.”
Rep. Mike Lawler (R-Hudson Valley) told The Post, “Governor Hochul has once again disgraced herself and the state of New York by calling supporters
Actually, I’m so old that it’s not going to affect me as much as it will younger generations. They will either have a chance to prosper or know what socialism is. That is what is on the table today.
I’ve slayed most of the dragons that I will in life already. I’m hoping that the nation can continue as the greatest, like the one I grew up in. We are setting up the next generation for prospering or suffering depending on who gets elected
We’ll see when they sort out the cheating and the legal stuff. A lot is on the line in this election.
More Woke and DEI failure. How many planes are suspect though because of this going on for the last few years. It’s not like you can pull over on the side of the road. It’s why I don’t want to get on another Boeing plane.
Top airline manufacturer Boeing dissolved its global diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) division amid significant financial losses, union strikes and scrutiny over safety and production issues, Bloomberg reported Thursday.
The reorganization, which reassigned its DEI staff to Boeing’s employee experience division, reflects CEO Kelly Ortberg’s focus on consolidating operations as the company grapples with a number of problems, according to Bloomberg.
Sara Liang Bowen, who previously helmed Boeing’s DEI department, announced her departure on Thursday, Bloomberg reported. In a LinkedIn post, Bowen expressed pride in her team’s work, acknowledging both its challenges and accomplishments.
“The team achieved so much — sometimes imperfectly, never easily — and dreamed of doing much more still,” Bowen wrote in a farewell post on LinkedIn.
Critics argue such policies encourage discrimination by favoring certain demographics, and this scrutiny is part of a larger trend, with activists targeting corporations and calling for a shift away from DEI priorities, the outlet stated.
It’s no secret that the vast majority of the so-called elites are advocates of climate alarmism and are taken in by the Green New Scam.
Whether this preference is based on ignorance of the science, ideological zeal, a willful desire to hurt American growth or simple greed because of their investments in Green New Scam infrastructure varies case by case.
The typical upper-income supporter of the climate cult including academics, media figures and celebrities is probably ignorant of the fact that there is no evidence that CO2 emissions cause climate change and that the real causes are solar cycles, volcanoes, ocean currents and atmospheric moisture not caused by humans.
Climate Alarmists Have It Backward
The historical record actually demonstrates that warming periods produce higher CO2 levels — not the other way around. CO2 doesn’t cause warming. It’s caused by natural warming.
In other words, climate alarmists have causation completely backward.
Climate alarmism is based almost entirely on computer models, which depend on the inputs the modelers themselves build into them. A model is only as good as the inputs and assumptions programmed into it.
Virtually every one of these models has overestimated warming, sometimes by orders of magnitude, because it’s based on faulty assumptions that overestimate the impact of CO2 on climate.
In other words, it’s junk science. But they keep relying on these models because their political agenda requires it.
Climate: The New Communism
There’s no doubt that a fair number of neo-Marxists embrace the climate scam because they know it damages U.S. industry, raises costs to U.S. consumers and helps to undermine the U.S. economy.
Following the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, anti-capitalistic collectivists admitted that they needed to promote the climate agenda because the only way to combat global warming is through collective action. It requires a coordinated global effort that limits national sovereignty.
The neo-Marxists are impervious to evidence; they just want to hurt America and wasting money on windmills instead of building new refineries is a good way to do it. That leaves the greed crowd.
Publisher and columnist Adam Kelly is in the West Virginia journalism hall of fame despite being the most conservative man I ever met. He asked me once if I knew what the purpose of a newspaper is.
His answer: To make money for its owner.
What was true in 1982 is true today. The Pulitzer-laden staffs of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post discovered this over the weekend when their owners vetoed endorsements of her majesty, Queen Kamala.Likewise, the Hill reported, “Over 200 American outlets under USA Today parent company Gannett will not back candidates in presidential or national races,” according to USA Today.”
This sudden attempt to restore their virginity by newspapers may be because of the dumb-as-the-B-in-dumb Democrat candidate. But it could be the fact that all these rags have failed Newspaper Rule No. 1, which is to make money for the owner.
I hope that the latter is true because that gives me hope that the problem can be fixed. AM radio was once hopelessly obsolete until Rush Limbaugh revived it as a source of clean information untainted by liberalism.
Jeff Bezos lost $77 million last year as the owner of the Post. He decided to reintroduce objective journalism to the paper on the Potomac that flushed its reputation down the Porta-Potty long ago. He decided to return to the pre-Watergate era when the Post did not endorse in presidential races.
The press coverage of this decision is as expected.
Besides the fact that it was a scam from the beginning based on a lie, it’s not surprising to hear this.
The original leaders bought homes and cars and got out with millions. The rest went……where?
The only black lives that got improved were those at the top of BLM, who were wearing their paycheck.
Black Lives Matter, the official network foundation, is running out of money as donors have stopped handing over piles of cash to the shady operation. The Gateway Pundit reported back in May of 2023 that they were still paying some people very high salaries even as the cash was starting to dry up.
To make matters worse, despite raising tens of millions of dollars at its height, no one seems to know where all the money went. The most high profile figures associated with the group seemed to cash in and move on, leaving the organization in shambles.
It’s a far cry from where the organization was just a few short years ago.
Black Lives Matter Global circling the drain as it runs out of cash: report
Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation is running out of cash and nearing its end “unless something changes dramatically,” according to a new report.
The Free Press, an independent news organization founded by former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss, on Tuesday published a scathing deep dive into the “scrappy start-up that struck gold in 2020” headlined “BLM Collected Over $90 Million in Donations. Where Did It Go?”
“Capitalizing on the lucrative opportunities afforded to them as high-profile progressives, the three celebrity founders moved on, leaving the operation to wither in the hands of deputies who, sadly, turned on each other. A remarkable spate of legal trouble, brushes with law enforcement, and tangles with the Internal Revenue Service have all but spelled the death of the enterprise that you probably know best as Black Lives Matter,” Free Press reporter Sean Patrick Cooper wrote.
“The spectacular rise and fall of BLM has surprisingly little in common with earlier civil rights campaigns, other than, perhaps, good intentions,” he continued. “How BLM’s leaders exploited George Floyd’s murder to raise millions that they then put into their own pockets more closely resembles the stories of famous grifters like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos or Sam Bankman-Fried’s foray into ‘effective altruism.’”
One of the main criticisms of BLM from all sides is that they failed to improve the lives of black people, with the exception of a handful of people at the top of the organization.
This is not only an Election lie, it purposely screws the people suffering in Appalachia. There is plenty of money for Haitians and Lebanon, just not people that might vote Republican.
It was reported by CBS News tonight that the Small Business Administration, which works hand in hand with FEMA, has officially run out of disaster aid for small businesses. And, of course, they are blaming Congress.
It was reported by CBS News tonight that the Small Business Administration, which works hand in hand with FEMA, has officially run out of disaster aid for small businesses. And, of course, they are blaming Congress.
Harvard donations plunge 15% as alumni cut ties over weak response to campus antisemitism
Harvard University warned that donations to its endowment have nosedived as outraged alumni cut ties with the school over its feeble response to on-campus antisemitism.
Cash gifts to the Ivy League school fell about 15% to less than $1.2 billion during the fiscal year ended June 30, according to a Harvard financial report released Thursday.
Harvard was mired in controversy after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel. Like other elite colleges across the US, pro-Palestinian students protested and set up encampments on Harvard’s campus.
Tensions boiled over when Harvard’s then-president Claudine Gay refused to condemn student groups that held Israel “entirely responsible” for the Oct. 7 attacks.
Soon after, deep-pocketed donors – including billionaire investor Len Blavatnik and hedge fund titan Ken Griffin – suspended giving to the university. Less-wealthy alumni also abandoned their contributions.
Also known as lying or bullshit. I worked in the industry and saw just how much it was just that.
“’I’m a businessman. I’ll take the [government green] money, that’s all I care about… I will move heaven and earth to get projects done over here’.” – James Quigley, quoted in Politico ‘s “Power Switch” (below)
Government is the great fiction through which everyone endeavors to live at the expense of everyone else. Every one is, more or less, for profiting by the labors of others. No one would dare to express such a sentiment; he even hides it from himself.
The Frenchman added:
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Correct. Government does not create wealth; it redistributes it (after a large cut). Who wins and loses? The winners are government, the lobbyists, and the rent-seekers, with concentrated benefits to them and diffused costs for the rest of us. Plunder, Bastiat would say.
—————-
I was reminded of this by a news item reported in Politico‘s “Power Switch” newsletter (August 16, 2023).
“Not all Republicans want to repeal the climate law that turns 1 today,” reported Josh Siegel. “In fact, my colleague Kelsey Tamborrino and I spoke to dozens of people from all corners of the country and discovered that many GOP officials in rural areas are welcoming the billions of dollars in clean energy incentives coming from President Joe Biden’s signature legislation.”
So do you think they found Republicans that feared “climate change” and welcomed “green” energy as cheaper and better? No, the interviewed were financially captured rent-seekers, enjoying a wealth transfer from taxpayers (via Biden) to their pockets. Here is the rest of the story.
In Rogers County, Okla., Republican Commissioner Ron Burrows looks at the Inflation Reduction Act and sees jobs — 1,000 of them to be exact. At least once the Italian giant Enel opens its $1 billion solar manufacturing plant there in 2025.
Burrows is not alone. Other political and economic leaders in Oklahoma, including Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt, are glad to receive the major investments they say they’d never have attracted without the climate law.
“You can imagine being in a small rural community and trying to get economic development to come — it’s a challenge,” said Rosalie Griffith, a board member of the Rural Economic Development of Inola. “But unless you develop, you’re going to die.”
Burrows said Enel’s decision to locate in his tiny town east of Tulsa — population 1,500 — would not have happened without local buy-in. “I just don’t see a company making that sort of investment without some level of comfort that it’s not adversarial, it’s not split,” he said.
By contrast, his local member of Congress — GOP Rep. Josh Brecheen — views the Inflation Reduction Act through the prism of most national Republicans. Brecheen told me he opposes the use of “taxpayer subsidization” to bolster Democrats’ favored green industries and is seeking to repeal the law.
Kelsey and I found that same disconnect between state and local GOP officials in rural areas and their federal representatives across the country.
There’s even a similar, but less dramatic, dynamic unfolding in upstate New York. GOP Rep. Marc Molinaro voted to repeal the Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy incentives, and that’s made him a top target of Democrats in the 2024 election. His district is one of 18 that voted for Biden but are held by Republicans.
Inflation Reduction Act money catalyzed Canadian company Zinc8 Energy Solutions’ decision to locate a planned battery factory in Molinaro’s purple district. The project is expected to bring up to 500 new jobs to a Hudson Valley region still suffering from the loss of its manufacturing base in the 1990s. That’s exciting James Quigley, a Republican who drives a Tesla and is the supervisor for the town of Ulster, where Zinc8 plans to locate.
“I’m a businessman. I’ll take the money, that’s all I care about,” Quigley said. “I will move heaven and earth to get projects done over here.”
Final Comment
Gosh Josh, what did you really find our here? Are you proud of this? Did you and Kelsey Tamborrino ask the same parties if they liked the federal deficit and inflation? The present level of taxation? The wisdom of the few over the energy verdicts of the masses?
Money for these subsidies has to come from somewhere, and that means the private economy in higher taxes and more government borrowing…. The IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] is the heart of Bidenomics, which is about creating a new political-subsidy economy. Perhaps all of this will effloresce into a brilliant green future. More likely hundreds of billions in misallocated investment will reduce future productivity gains and translate into slower economic and income growth. Let’s hope President Biden’s subsidies don’t boomerang like pandemic transfer payments, leaving all Americans poorer.
What a waste, what a shame. The next President needs to issue an emergency declaration that the U.S. is out of money and cease all subsidies of the Inflation Reduction Act in order to pause wind, solar, and battery subsidies. Ratepayers and taxpayers will be thankful.
The electric vehicle (EV) is heralded as a cornerstone of the fight against climate change, with promises of a cleaner, greener future. As recently as July, the Biden-Harris administration announced billions of dollars of government support for EV manufacturing.
However, a growing concern lies beneath the shiny surface of electric cars and bikes: the safety risks of lithium-ion batteries, particularly their propensity to catch fire.
The rosy image of EVs as environmental saviors doesn’t align with their increasing reputation as flammable hazards.
Lithium batteries are designed to store a significant amount of energy in a compact space, which increases not only their efficiency but also their risk profile. When these batteries overheat, short-circuit or suffer physical damage, they can ignite and burn with alarming intensity.
New York is particularly notorious for the large number of E-bike fires. Entire shipments of cars on cargo ships have been burnt up in the middle of the ocean due to fires from EV batteries.
Recently, containers holding 33,000 pounds of lithium batteries at Canada’s port of Montreal caught fire, prompting city authorities to warn residents to remain indoors. The fire, which occurred around 2:45 p.m. on September 23, was not extinguished until 3 a.m. the next day!
“Due to the amount of energy that these batteries store, it took us quite a while to extinguish the fire,” said the fire department chief.
With the entire Media propaganda machine working against him, here’s the other side of the coin for fairness’ sake. Ackman is a heavyweight investor, worth listening to whether you agree with him or not.
Prominent hedge fund manager Bill Ackman provided one of the best lists of reasons to vote for Donald Trump. What would you do differently if you wanted to destroy the United States?
While the 33 actions I describe below are those of the Democratic Party and the Biden/Harris administration, they are also the actions and policies that, unfortunately, our most aggressive adversaries would likely implement if they wanted to destroy America from within and had the ability to take control of our leadership.
These are the 33:
(1) open the borders to millions of immigrants who were not screened for their risk to the country, dumping them into communities where the new immigrants overwhelm existing communities and the infrastructure to support the new entrants, at the expense of the historic residents,
(2) introduce economic policies and massively increase spending without regard to their impact on inflation and the consequences for low-income Americans and the increase in our deficit and national debt,
(3) withdraw from Afghanistan, abandoning our local partners and the civilians who worked alongside us in an unprepared, overnight withdrawal that led to American casualties and destroyed the lives of Afghani women and girls for generations, against the strong advice of our military leadership, and thereafter not showing appropriate respect for their loss at a memorial ceremony in their honor,
(4) introduce thousands of new and unnecessary regulations in light of the existing regulatory regime that interferes with our businesses’ ability to compete, restraining the development of desperately needed housing, infrastructure, and energy production with the associated inflationary effects,
(5) modify the bail system so that violent criminals are released without bail,
6) destroy our street retailers and communities and promote lawlessness by making shoplifting (except above large thresholds) no longer a criminal offense,
(7) limit and/or attempt to limit or ban fracking and LNG so that U.S. energy costs increase substantially and the U.S. loses its energy independence,
(8) promote DEI ideologies that award jobs, awards, and university admissions on the basis of race, sexual identity and gender criteria, and teach our students and citizens that the world can only be understood as an unfair battle between oppressors and the oppressed, where the oppressors are only successful due to structural racism or a rigged system and the oppressed are simply victims of an unfair system and world,
(9) educate our elementary children that gender is fluid, something to be chosen by a child, and promote hormone blockers and gender reassignment surgeries to our youth without regard to the longer-term consequences to their mental and physical health, and allow biological boys and men to compete in girls and women’s sports, depriving girls and women of scholarships, awards, and other opportunities that they would have rightly earned otherwise,
(10) encourage and celebrate massive protests and riots that lead to the burning and destruction of local retail and business establishments while at the same time requiring schools to be shuttered because of the risk of Covid-19 spreading during large gatherings,
(11) encourage and celebrate anti-American and anti-Israel protests and flag burning on campuses around the country with no consequences for the protesters who violate laws or university codes and policies,
(12) allow antisemitism to explode with no serious efforts from the administration to quell this hatred,
(13) mandate vaccines that have not been adequately tested nor have their risks been properly considered compared with the potential benefits adjusted for the age and health of the individual, censoring the contrary advice of top scientists around the world,
(14) shut down free speech in media and on social media platforms that is inconsistent with government policies and objectives,
(15) use the U.S., state, and local legal systems to attack and attempt to jail, take off the campaign trail, and/or massively fine candidates for the presidency without regard to the merits or precedential issues of the case,
(16) seek to defund the police and promote anti-police rhetoric causing a loss of confidence in those who are charged with protecting us,
(17) use government funds to subsidize auto companies and internet providers with vastly more expensive, dated and/or lower-quality technology when greatly superior and cheaper alternatives are available from companies that are owned and/or managed by individuals not favored by the current administration,
(18) mandate in legislation and otherwise government solutions to problems when the private sector can do a vastly better, faster, and cheaper job,
(19) seek to ban gas-powered cars and stoves without regard to the economic and practical consequences of doing so,
(20) take no serious actions when 45 American citizens are killed by terrorists and 12 are taken hostage,
(21) hold back armaments and weaponry from our most important ally in the Middle East in the midst of their hostage negotiations, hostages who include American citizens who have now been held for more than one year,
(22) eliminate sanctions on one of our most dangerous enemies enabling them to generate $150 billion+ of cash reserves from oil sales, which they can then use to fund terrorist proxy organizations who attack us and our allies. Exchange five American hostages held by Iran for five Iranians plus $6 billion of cash in the worst hostage negotiation in history setting a disastrous and dangerous precedent,
(23) remove known terrorist organizations from the terrorist list so we can provide aid to their people, and allow them to shoot rockets at U.S. assets and military bases with little if any military response from us,
(24) lie to the American people about the cognitive health of the president and accuse those who provide video evidence of his decline of sharing doctored videos and being right wing conspirators,
(25) do nothing about the deteriorating health of our citizens driven by the food industrial complex, the fraudulent USDA food pyramid, and the inclusion of ingredients in our food that are banned by other countries around the world which are more protective of their citizens,
(26) do nothing about the proliferation of new vaccines that are not properly analyzed for their risk versus the potential benefit for healthy children who are mandated to receive them,
(27) do nothing about the continued exemption from liability for the pharma industry that has led to a proliferation of mandatory vaccines for children without considering the potential cumulative effects of the now mandated 72-shot regime,
(28) convince our minority youth that they are victims of a rigged system and that the American dream is not available to them,
(29) fail to provide adequate Secret Service protection for alternative presidential candidates,
(30) litigate to prevent alternative candidates from getting on the ballot, and take other anti-competitive steps including threatening political consultants who wish to work for alternative candidates for the presidency, and limit the potential media access for other candidates by threatening the networks’ future access to the administration and access to ‘scoops’ if they platform an alternative candidate,
(31) select the Democratic nominee for president in a backroom process by undisclosed party leaders without allowing Americans to choose between candidates in an open primary,
(32) choose an inferior candidate for the presidency when other much more qualified candidates are available and interested to serve,
(33) litigate to make it illegal for states to require proof of citizenship, voter ID, and/or residence in order to vote at a time when many Americans have lost confidence in the accuracy and trustworthiness of our voting system.
As soon as money became the issue, see how little the climate scam mattered?
I got to work with Schmidt when I was with IBM. He told me that the do no evil was a lie back when Google stood behind it as a corporate mission. He basically said don’t trust him or Google and I don’t. This is more evidence that they (the climatards) were lying the whole time about the climate scam. They were just trying to get people to act the way they wanted to, also known as socialism. See the recycling story below on that.
… any moves to curtail the expanding amounts of energy consumed in developing … ever more advanced AI models are futile…
Google’s former chief Eric Schmidt thinks we shouldn’t let AI’s ballooning power consumption worry us, because putting AI to work on climate change issues will be our best shot at solving them.
Schmidt was speaking at a recent AI summit in Washington DC, and his comments echo those of Microsoft founder Bill Gates who expressed very similar sentiments at an event in London earlier this year.
…
“All of that will be swamped by the enormous needs of this new technology,” he said, adding that “we may make mistakes with respect to how it’s used, but I can assure you that we’re not going to get there through conservation.”
Schmidt further stated that he believes that “we’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it,” and that he would rather bet on AI solving the problems than constraining the development of the tech and still having the problems anyway.
This rather optimistic view of the Earth-saving potential of AI can perhaps be explained by the fact that Schmidt has his own investments in the technology. According to Business Insider, he is the founder of White Stork, a defense company that develops AI-powered drones.
Health-benefit costs are expected to exceed salary increases despite the Biden-Harris administration claiming to have helped redress the issue, a study from advisory firm Mercer found.
Employer-provided health insurance expenses rose 7% in 2024 and are expected to rise 5.8% in 2025, with over half of the 1,800 employers surveyed telling Mercer they plan to cut insurance plan costs in the new year, often through increasing out-of-pocket costs for employees. The increase in healthcare expenses is expected to outpace salary growth, with performance-based raises and total salary budgets predicted to rise just 3.3% and 3.6% next year, respectively.
Prescription drug spending is the fastest-growing component of the surge in health-benefit costs, rising 7.2% in 2024 and expected to continue increasing in 2025 due to new high-cost gene and cellular therapies, according to Mercer. Rising healthcare costs are also largely driven by a growing disparity between the supply of healthcare workers and a rising demand for medical services as older Americans become an increasingly large segment of the population.
The Biden-Harris administration claimed it would address rising healthcare costs, vowing in March to reduce premiums by an average of $800 a year for millions of Americans by expanding Affordable Care Act tax credits. The White House also capped prescription drug costs at $2,000 per year for Medicare beneficiaries starting in 2025 — a move that experts told the Daily Caller News Foundation would have caused a spike in Medicare premiums if not for the administration providing billions in subsidies for insurers in a ploy to buy votes.
The greatest moral hazard in American life is politics.
Many of you probably remember 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney being secretly recorded by a Democratic operative telling donors that “47% of the people who will vote for the president no matter what” because they are “dependent upon government … believe that they are victims … believe the government has a responsibility to care for them … these are people who pay no income tax.”
Even I could have told you that accusing half the electorate of being a bunch of moochers was a bad idea. Coming from a fat cat like Romney, it reeked of snobbery.
Also, Romney happened to be correct.
And what he said then is even truer today. But in contemporary politics, asking citizens to pay for their own life is an act of self-immolation.
In a recent Gallup poll, an amazing 9 in 10 young women support socialized medicine, paired with higher taxes on the wealthy. What is the risk in backing pricey utopian experiments when there’s no bill coming in the mail? Now, if we flattened federal taxes and compelled everyone to pay their “fair share,” or even one-tenth of their share, for that matter, 9 in 10 young women would be hoisting Gadsden flags on their lawns and sticking “taxation is theft” bumper stickers on their cars.
That’s never going to happen, because the incentives of contemporary politics are dangerously distorted. The more the government spends, the less Americans expect to pay. The more dependency it creates, the less self-reliance it expects.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported on a new study that found a mind-boggling spike in government dependency. In 1970, safety-net funding accounted for the significant income in fewer than 1% of all counties in the country. By 2000, 10% of counties were getting a significant share of their income from federal and state safety-net and social programs. Today? More than half of all U.S. counties drew at least a quarter of their income from government aid.
While people on the Left like to grouse about “income inequality,” they never mention that every year, nearly $2 trillion, about the gross domestic product of a midsized European country, is transferred to low-income Americans through hundreds of programs, from Medicaid to food stamps to refundable tax credits. Right now, there are 42 million people on food stamps.
It would be one thing if the state were lifting citizens from poverty, but it is creating a permanent underclass.
Topline: The Biden-Harris administration is eclipsing the $1 trillion mark in improper payments, a new record for wasted money in a four-year term, according to a recent report from OpenTheBooks.com.
Key facts: Improper payments — money sent by the federal government to the wrong person, for the wrong reason or in the wrong amount — totaled over $800 billion from 2021 to 2023, adjusted for inflation.
That’s $450,000 every minute. In the roughly five seconds it takes to read this very sentence, the government will have wasted $37,500 on mistaken payments.
Medicaid and Medicare accounted for 43% of improper payments last year, but problems were found across the board. Dead people received $295 million, mostly from pension benefits the Office of Personnel Management sent to former federal workers who had passed away. Prisoners were paid $171 million.
The Internal Revenue Service spent $25 billion doling out fraudulent and mistaken tax credits, with some IRS programs reporting mistake rates above 30%.
The issue is not new, but it is getting progressively worse. Barack Obama wasted roughly 4% of his spending on improper payments in his second term. Donald Trump wasted roughly 5%, and Biden is approaching 6%.
A "wealth tax" of a different mold is what destroyed Britain, turning it from the preeminent nation on top of Olympus to a socialist backwater rotting in the depths of Tartarus in just a generation
Anywhere that does the same thing will follow in its footsteps
Second richest man in world is given as example of why UK wealth tax won’t work
‘If you want to grow taxes on the wealth side we have got a lot of wealth taxes already, like inheritance tax, capital gains tax, stamp duty. Sort out those taxes is the first way you officially start taxing wealth’ – Torsten Bell, head of the Resolution Foundation think tank
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves
One of Labour’s rising stars has jumped to the defense of Chancellor Rachel Reeves for dismissing a wealth tax on the richest people.
Torsten Bell, a former Treasury aide and chief executive of the Resolution Foundation think tank, argues that such a tax wouldn’t raise significant revenues. Despite Ms. Reeves’ highlighting a £22bn hole in public finances, she has shrugged off calls for taxing the nation’s wealthiest.
Supporting the Chancellor’s position, Mr Bell said it was not helpful in the wealth tax debate to compare the UK with the US, as the US has far more billionaires. “On the tax side it is very fashionable on the left to say ‘let’s just have a wealth tax’,” he explained. “For some of us who have spent 20 years working on tax policy, I think that is something that is exciting for them to write in books and not very useful in terms of helping govern the country. There are two reasons why that is.”
“The short reason why that doesn’t work in the UK is two words, Jeff Bezos. He does not live in the UK. And, yes, we do have some very rich people. But our wealth is nowhere near … we don’t have the globally rich people that the US, particularly, has lots of.”
Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, is the richest person and the richest man in the world with a net worth estimated at $269bn. After Musk is Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. with a net worth in the region of $208bn.
He added: “You will have a brand new wealth tax and you are not going to bring in really significant revenues in the UK. Secondly, doing it is really hard. I am fed up of people saying the Government should do this then not getting remotely interested in the hard job of getting homes built… taxes that actually raise money.”
attack the rich never works. Get evenism is just a childish political ploy to divide people against each other. Rich people make other people rich. Give them the chance and watch free markets work
The moonbats at Phys.org had almost caught up to Scientific American when it comes to subordinating science to wokeness. Then they went and admitted that EV owners sin against their own godless religion by having larger carbon footprints:
A pair of psychologists and an economist at the University of Turku, in Finland, have found that because the average electric vehicle (EV) owner is wealthier than the average person, they still have a bigger than average carbon footprint.
So it is not transportation that offends the weather but wealth. Don’t worry, leftist politicians have a cure for that.
Despite EV owners being wealthy enough to waste money on expensive green posturing, their playthings are heavily subsidized by those of us who do not. EV manufacturers naturally raise their prices to match the subsidies.
The letter doesn’t provide many specifics. I doubt Mayorkas will give any answers soon.
“FEMA has wasted taxpayer funds, misappropriated funds, and left other federal, state, and local responders without deployment orders on the ground,” wrote Gaetz. “As reported and further confirmed by my office, hundreds, if not thousands of service members were deployed by the Department of Defense to North Carolina and have sat idle, waiting for FEMA.”
Gaetz continued: “We have confirmed FEMA employees deployed, on the clock, awaiting orders in the hotel. FEMA pre-disaster aid was withheld, exacerbating the emergency. It is also public that NGOs have purchased airline tickets for migrants through the use of FEMA funds.”
Gaetz wants Mayorkas to answer these questions by October 11:
(1) What policies and regulations of the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA prevent emergency funds from being wasted on illegal immigrants, including what conditions are placed on grantees of the agency?; and
(2) Of FEMA’s total budget for FY 2024, what portion of funds can be guaranteed to have been spent solely on American citizens, and what portion of funds was or may have been spent on noncitizens?; and
(3) In FY 2024, what portion of funds in the Disaster Relief Fund have been spent on non-disaster-relief programs, such as providing services to illegal aliens or providing routine training to FEMA employees authorized out of general appropriations?
The last sentence below is Angel Reese got one vote. What’s not said is that ratings and ticket sales are only a third of when she and the Indiana Fever are playing. This includes the playoffs which stopped being interesting to the country when the Fever were eliminated.
She is the show that people for the first time want to watch in the WNBA. She was cheap shot fouled all year and was trashed racially and sexually for being a straight white girl. The top racist was Dawn Staley, coach of U of South Carolina.
She played through it and got the reward, along with many records set. I hope the WNBA stops cutting its’ own throat and promotes her for the league’s sake, even if she doesn’t fit the mold and likes guys.
Indiana Fever’s Caitlin Clark was named the WNBA Rookie of the Year, the league said on Thursday, receiving 66 of 67 votes from a U.S. panel of sportswriters and broadcasters.
Television viewership records were smashed as sharpshooter Clark beat the all-time collegiate scoring record in her final year at Iowa, turning the sport of basketball on its head.
She kept the momentum going in a breakout debut year in the WNBA, setting the single-season record with 337 assists and the all-time rookie records of 769 points and 122 three pointers made.
Clark helped lead the Fever to their first playoffs appearance since 2016, where they lost 2-0 in the best-of-three first round to the Connecticut Sun.
“Thank you to the many people who have supported me as I’ve been able to live my childhood dream,” Clark said in an Instagram post on Wednesday. “I’m filled with gratitude as I reflect on this past year of my life.”
It was the second year in a row that a Fever player brought home the Rookie of the Year honor after Aliyah Boston won in 2023.
Angel Reese, a forward for the Chicago Sky, received one vote.
Whole cities in NC are being wiped out and forgotten by the Harris/Biden administration. Not only do they not care, they aren’t even pretending to care. Other than a photo op meeting and some token supplies, the only salvage and hurricane recovery being done is by churches and Samaritan’s Purse. North Carolina is flyover country and most likely will go red so they don’t care.
The one entirely liberal city in trouble, Asheville, is so blue it won’t matter what they do as nothing will change that area from blue to red.
In a staggering admission that is sending shockwaves through social media, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Sec. Alejandro N. Mayorkas admitted that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) does not have enough funding to last through the remainder of the 2024 hurricane season.
The announcement comes as FEMA is conducting search-and rescue-operations in remote sections of Appalachia six days after Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida and moved north, causing widespread destruction and the deaths of at least 183 people across six states. President Biden has in recent days approved major-disaster declarations for the states affected by the storm.
“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have,” Mr. Mayorkas told reporters on Wednesday while en route to meet with officials in South Carolina. “We are expecting another hurricane hitting — we do not have the funds, FEMA does not have the funds, to make it through the season.”
The proposal to grant the agency more money may work, but it will require members of Congress to return to Washington, D.C., and provide the necessary legislative approval.
Nike (NKE.N) shares fell about 8% in early trading on Wednesday after the sportswear giant withdrew its annual revenue target, leaving investors guessing on the timeline for a turnaround under incoming CEO Elliott Hill.
The company on Tuesday also called off its investor day set for Nov. 19, while CFO Matthew Friend said pulling the outlook would give Hill “much-needed flexibility to evaluate Nike’s strategies and business trends”.
“Just how quickly a turnaround can happen is up in the air … There’s not anything really that I could say at this point gives us a definite timeline or early hints to what is in store for the future,” said Jessica Ramirez, senior analyst at Jane Hali & Associates.
Last month, Nike named veteran executive Hill as CEO in place of John Donahoe as demand dropped and rivals such as On Holding and Hoka gained market share, especially in high performance and innovative running shoes categories.
The company’s forward price-to-earnings ratio for the next 12 months, a benchmark for valuing stocks, was 27.98, compared with 27.08 for Deckers (DECK.N) and 35.14 for Adidas (ADSGn.DE).
Hill is set to take over on Oct. 14 and investors were pinning their hopes on the analyst day for clarity on Nike’s strategy until it canceled the Nov. 19 event. Nike did not provide a fresh date.
“These next few months as we go into year end, (Nike is) going to leave investors with a lot more questions than answers and we didn’t get any answers,” said Jay Woods, chief global strategist at investment banking firm Freedom Capital Markets.
Nike said on Tuesday it had to offer higher promotions to help drive sales in the quarter and signaled a weaker holiday quarter even as it expects a “slight second half improvement” in revenue from the launch of new premium models.
Most things in Portland are not like the rest of the country or world, and that is where they are headquartered. They are famous for being in bed with China as well as the most woke of athletes and causes.
They have billions to burn through before they have an issue, but there are a lot of people that are tired of their woke crap. I buy anything other than Nike just on their liberal woke principles. alone
If they are going to sponsor athletes who hate the rest of the country (Kaepernick, James, Rapinoe, etc) than you deserve your fate.
I’m glad that Tiger Woods is out of their grasp now.
United Sets New Diversity Goal: 50% of Students at New Pilot Training Academy To Be Women and People of Color
United Airlines is only major U.S. airline to own flight school: United Aviate Academy
United Aviate Academy plans to train 5,000 new pilots by 2030 – at least 50% women or people of color
Scholarship commitments from United and JPMorgan Chase ensure highly qualified, motivated, eligible applicants won’t be turned away for financial reasons
United Aviate Academy now accepting applications; and aims to enroll first 100 students this year
As if I needed another reason not to fly, I don’t want unqualified pilots or mechanics. I want to get there safely and not crash.
Of course, DEI and woke ruin everything they touch. Get woke, go broke
In reality, the hardest hit was Asheville, the San Francisco of the East. So reliably blue that they don’t have to worry about it switching. Everywhere around it is Red and like East Palestine, if it’s not a blue state or area, no help is going to be given there either.
What can help explain the apparent federal level indifference to the nightmare brought from Florida’s Big Bend up to Appalachia from hurricane Helene?
I have a theory, and it has to do with Idaho that I think @ComfortablySmug would appreciate.
The young men and women of this country want life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They are beginning to chart a new course that doesn’t include indoctrination programs from elite colleges and universities.
The authors, Phillip W. Magness (senior research faculty and director of research and education at the American Institute for Economic Research) and David Waugh (managing editor at the American Institute for Economic Research), assessed complex data obtained from surveys that evaluated the political views of higher education faculty [e.g., Carnegie Commission on Higher Education Faculty Survey (1969–1984), UCLA-Higher Education Research Institute Faculty Survey (1989–2016)]. The information confirms trends that Legal Insurrection has long noted: Since 2001, 2001 higher education faculty positions have taken a hard, and “professors on the political left are now approaching a supermajority.”
A hyperpoliticized academy does not bode well for students, faculty, or anyone interested in serious learning. For many students and for an increasing share of the general public, this has turned the educational experience from one of intellectual pursuit into pure activist sophistry. The only remaining question, then, is how long the public will continue to pay for a university system that no longer aligns with its values or educational priorities.
The answer is: Not much longer.
Unfortunately for the leftists dominating American higher education today, graduating students still have to earn a living. So, Gen Z is beginning to vote with its feet and is opting for 2-year trade schools free of hyped-up moral outrage and outrageous expenses.
Community colleges offering vocational programs witnessed one of the highest numbers of student enrollment in fall 2023, as students opting for higher education showed a slight improvement overall from declines seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Those community colleges with a focus on vocational programs saw registrations climb 16 percent, an increase of 112,000 students, substantially higher than the rate seen before COVID, when it rose 3.7 percent. Associate degree programs jumped more than 2.2 percent, to 96,000 students.
The interest in vocational education began to see increases in sign-ups going back to three years ago, Jennifer Causey, senior research associate at the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, told Newsweek.
“Since Fall 2021, vocational programs have started to see upticks in enrollments, and specific program families such as Mechanic Repair Technologies grew 11.2 percent this fall alone,” she said.
Legal Insurrection reported Sunday on the havoc wreaked by Helene across the southeast Friday and Saturday, particularly the devastation that unfolded in western North Carolina and their neighbors in eastern Tennessee by what remained of the hurricane once she hit those areas.
Some mistakenly believe that once a weather event stops being a hurricane or tropical storm, the cities that are still in the path of what’s left are, for the most part, in the clear.
But that is most certainly not the case, as Helene had been downgraded to a tropical depression before she reached the mountains and foothills of North Carolina. By the time she moved on, rain totals for some areas reached as high as nearly 30″, leaving historic flooding in her wake.
The images and videos, of course, are staggering. Heartbreaking. This is an area where it’s not uncommon to hear about mudslides/landslides simply from having a few hours of rain from a random storm that rolled through, causing temporary road closures. Unlike the NC coast, it’s simply not built to endure that much rain and high winds.
As far as national news outlets go, they’re covering it but much of what I’ve seen has been frustrating, as they’re treating it like it was merely a bad storm and not something that quite literally has changed the topography of a large swath of the western part of this state.
As for Biden and Harris, the POTUS was indeed at the beach this past weekend and Harris indeed was participating in swanky fundraisers out west, the optics of which were horrible and which would have been slammed by the Usual Suspects had our president been a Republican. Their insensitivity absolutely should be called out. Their rules and all.
But beyond that, Biden has pretty much done what he needed to do in an official capacity to pave the way for federal assistance. And both he and Harris have issued statements about the situation:
During a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, on Sunday, Trump accused President Joe Biden of “sleeping” at his beach house in Delaware and dragged Vice President Kamala Harris for holding fundraising events in California over the weekend “when big parts of our country have been devastated by that massive hurricane.”
[…]
Harris has been briefed by Criswell, according to the White House, and Biden has approved disaster declarations for numerous states and major disaster declarations for certain counties that will help provide temporary housing assistance, as well as grants and low-interest loans to help people with home repairs. Both urged the public to take the storm seriously ahead of landfall.
[…]
Biden was at his beach house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, over the weekend, where he received briefings about Helene’s devastation from Criswell and Homeland Security Adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall, according to the White House pool report. He urged the agencies to speed up the deployment of search and rescue teams into North Carolina, where people are stranded without cell service or electricity.
And thank the Lord for that. Nothing makes me happier than to get rid of this useless pile of crap that let certain groups of grifters exploit social mores and common sense laws to act the fool. Almost all of them did it for money or what I call get evenism. That of course is some perceived justice for their butt-hurt feelings of not getting their way, so they acted up. Almost all of what they based their activism on was or is wrong, factually, morally, or any other way.
It’s always about power and money
Let’s just get back to acting like human beings and not SJW or revenge-bots because of being ignorant.
Seriously, most of these tech companies, like most companies, were really just setting goals and saying they were doing “green” stuff but weren’t actually doing much of anything
It’s Climate Week in New York, and dominating the conversation has been the apparently insatiable appetite of artificial intelligence for power.
The subject has been much in the news. Just last week, we learned that the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania will be restarted to supply electricity to Microsoft Corp.’s data centers.
Then Tuesday, Bloomberg News reported that ChatGPT creator OpenAI had pitched the Biden administration on its vision for massive data centers that may each consume enough power to run an entire city.
Alarmingly for climate hawks, it’s become clear there’s not enough low-emission energy — nuclear or otherwise — to satisfy AI, and natural gas will be key.
Indeed, the country’s energy companies already plan a slew of new gas-fired power projects. That could complicate the energy transition and threaten President Joe Biden’s lofty goal of ridding emissions from the grid by 2035.
Full story at the link above, but the key is they weren’t doing anything anyway other than saying they were. This is about money and they would claim anything for EPS and profit.
College admissions expert sends shocking message about Ivy League prestige: ‘Is it worth the investment?’
What’s in a name like Harvard, Yale, Brown or Princeton? If you ask college admissions strategist Greg Kaplan, the answer might surprise you.
It’s an age-old question that resonates among a slew of ambitious soon-to-be college students and their aspirational parents caught in the fervor of the rankings race, pursuing the dream of “going Ivy” – or having some other elite university’s name stamped on their resume – with unrelenting zeal.
But Kaplan warns that such tunnel vision can obscure what truly matters in the search for success.
“We really have to ask ourselves, ‘what are our kids learning at these schools and is it worth the investment?’ Because if they’re going to be exposed to this groupthink where there’s no room for civil discourse, that is unacceptable because they’re not equipped to go into the real world. And what you see is our young people who are getting fired from tech companies because they’re using their jobs as a chance to do political protest, and then they’re complaining about it,” Kaplan said in a recent interview with Fox News Digital.
“We really have to ask ourselves, ‘what are we getting in return for this? And are they going to be able to do what they want to do?’ It’s okay to spend less on college because guess what? That allows you to invest more in their futures, so I think when someone says, ‘I’m going to community college, I’m going to transfer,’ that’s fantastic. You’re increasing the return on investment.”
The California-based expert works with families to help students gain admission to colleges of their choice – looking beyond recognizable names to help students get accepted to schools that are great matches for them.
Delusions of Adequacy 
