Europe may be fading from global relevance, but its influence is expanding within the US Democratic Party. Today, the party’s core beliefs echo those espoused by the European Union and much of the British establishment – an embrace of censorship, a draconian approach to climate change, support for trans ideology, the championing of race-based politics and, increasingly, hostility towards Israel and Jews.
Ranchers are furious after an armed federal agent stormed the land of a South Dakota couple, who are now facing 10 years in prison over a fence if convicted as charged.
Charles and Heather Maude, both 39, of Caputa, were separately served grand jury indictments of alleged theft of government property on June 24 by Forest Service Special Agent Travis Lunders, who showed up at their door unannounced, armed, and full tactical gear, according to Cowboy State Daily.
‘It’s is stressful, financially and mentally,’ Charles told the outlet. ‘It’s something nobody should have to go through.’
When 21-year-old Indiana University philosophy student Craig Sautter drove to Chicago for the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he had an “inkling” that he would be in for a “wild day”.
There had been a series of riots after the back-to-back assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy just months before, and he could tell that simmering tensions were ready to boil over when thousands of protesters, police, politicians and delegates gathered in Chicago in August 1968 to pick who would be the next Democratic candidate for president.
Yet the young anti-Vietnam War activist was still shocked by what he saw: National Guardsmen with bayonets, protesters ripped from cars or beaten with police batons, and thick clouds of tear gas wafting through crowds of thousands.
The DNC Convention comes to Chicago in 7 days. Word on the street has it that 100,000 protesters and 25,000 migrants are being bused in to greet VP Kamala Harris and DNC bigwigs. If it sounds like the perfect storm, it is! $75 million in federal funds has been spent to ensure the… pic.twitter.com/UDT1xA7NwH
— Reporter William J. Kelly #thatreporter (@Williamjkelly) August 12, 2024
h/t Mauser
In this presidential election year, it is time to do the math.
Not the traditional math of counting electors, calculating swing states voters, or debating polling data. No. It’s time to do the math regarding the profound and stunning increase in the number of new citizens who will be eligible to vote in this year’s exercise in democracy.
According to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) the fiscal year 2022 saw one million new citizens sworn in, citing it as the highest number of naturalizations in nearly 15 years. The government agency says this number reflects the Biden Administration’s effort to address the backlog of applications that had grown during the COVID pandemic
Last week, Donald Trump announced that he agreed to have three debates with Kamala Harris, with the first on Fox News on September 4, the second on ABC on September 10, and the final one on NBC on September 25.
Our society has been sapped of meaning
I set off last Wednesday on a three-week road trip around the United States. I had high expectations drizzled in nostalgia, since I was repeating a project I’d done exactly nine years before: the idea, then and now, was to talk to people about the American Dream. I was hoping to get a sense of the mood of America ahead of the November election.
In that spirit, my first stop was Scranton, a city in northeast Pennsylvania. The downtown nearing dinner time was empty except for professionals dashing from cubicles to cars, and the destitute hiding in nooks from the lingering heat, emerging only to ask for money, either via long lies or by pleas to my empathy.
My motel, a run-down, squalid place that at $45 a night was still extortionate, was at least social, with the buzz of a long-term residency, which was what it was for everyone there but me. My fellow guests were outside smoking and drinking in the only fresh air and view they had.
Like counterparts around the world, Canada’s youth are struggling, victims of a weak economy and a rising cost of living crisis. Whereas boomers rode an unprecedented wave of prosperity and higher living standards, younger Canadians, particularly those under 30, are now more pessimistic about the future than older generations.
These realities suggest severe consequences for the rest of us, and for our future. Younger voters were once seen as the driver of a progressive takeover of all institutions. But today younger voters are, if anything, headed in different directions, with some, notably single women, headed to the left while men, in almost all countries, moving decisively to the right.
About four months after a notorious hacking group claimed to have stolen an extraordinary amount of sensitive personal information from a major data broker, a member of the group has reportedly released most of it for free on an online marketplace for stolen personal data.
The breach, which includes Social Security numbers and other sensitive data, could power a raft of identity theft, fraud and other crimes, said Teresa Murray, consumer watchdog director for the U.S. Public Information Research Group.
Police across the U.S. fear a long period of mayhem and bloodshed. The magnitude of recent unstoppable campus riots and urban protests while we await the fall semester and the outcome of the 2024 presidential election in November, has reminded Americans that we are likely one BLM-type scenario from another explosion of race-fueled violence and chaos.
For starters, Congress still has no answers for why the Capitol Police had no standby reaction force on Jan. 6, despite significant intelligence that various radical groups would congregate that day in Washington D.C. The Capitol Police and trained military police units with riot control tear gas should have been prepared to disperse any crowd approaching the Capitol steps.
An unnamed source in Iran’s Supreme National Security Council told Kuwaiti newspaper al Jarida that a high-ranking American security delegation, mediated by Oman, secretly traveled to Tehran, the Kuwaiti paper wrote on Wednesday.
Fox News reported that the delegation allegedly sought to deliver messages to Tehran in order to de-escalate the tensions in the region between Iran and Israel, al Jarida noted in their reporting of the story.
h/t Patti Jo
MINNEAPOLIS — Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, one of the liberal Democratic House members known as the “Squad” and a sharp critic of how Israel has conducted the war in Gaza, has won her primary race in Minnesota.
Meanwhile, a conservative populist and former NBA player, Royce White, defeated Navy veteran Joe Fraser in Minnesota’s primary election for the Republican nomination to challenge the incumbent Democrat, Senator Klobuchar, in November.
This is Walz country.
U.S. speeding up asylum claim processing along the Canadian border
The U.S. government is moving to speed up asylum claim processing at its northern border in an attempt to deter migrants from illegally crossing over from Canada.
Washington is making two changes that fall under the Safe Third Country Agreement (STCA), which calls for asylum seekers to apply for refugee status in the first of two countries they enter.
First, migrants looking to prove that they’re exempt from the STCA will have to provide their documents to U.S. border officials at the time of their screening. Migrants previously were allowed to postpone screenings to gather necessary documentation.
Germany has issued a European arrest warrant against a Ukrainian diving instructor who allegedly was part of a team that blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines, according to a report by three German media outlets published on Wednesday.
German investigators believe that the man, last known to have lived in Poland, was one of the divers who planted explosive devices on pipelines running from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea in September 2022, the SZ and Die Zeit newspapers reported alongside the ARD broadcaster, citing unnamed sources.
The German prosecutor general’s office declined to comment on the report, which said that Germany had asked Poland in June to arrest the man.
Hardly Hot Take – Zelensky and Biden were behind this. It was done to hurt Russia but also wavering NATO members (Hello Germany!) who loved Russia’s cheap gas.
Hunter and Joe’s Ukraine scam may also have played a role in seeing the sabotage plan move forward.
The U.S. Navy isn’t just for fighting overseas or protecting the homeland. It’s also a basic tool of force projection, diplomacy, and protecting and regulating international trade. But today’s Navy is too small to meet the demands placed on it. As a result, traditional Navy tasks, such as enforcing sanctions, are far down the priority list. But this capability gap could be filled if we had the boldness to bring back privateers.
During the long response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the delusion of the peaceful rise of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the U.S. Navy was allowed to atrophy. One tangible consequence: Today, America reportedly has no aircraft carriers dedicated to deterring an increasingly bellicose China — they’re all either in the Middle East, headed to the Middle East, or in various stages of training or repair.
Regardless of political affiliation, recent American presidents commonly say that the nation needs to win back manufacturing jobs lost to overseas relocation. “Where is it inscribed that America cannot reclaim its position as the world’s manufacturing hub?” queried President Biden recently. He has pushed for policies that penalize corporations for moving jobs abroad and that incentivize job repatriation. Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump pursued a similar objective with different means, modifying the tax code to encourage companies to bring back profits earned internationally and imposing tariffs to protect domestically produced goods. Despite their ideological differences, both presidents share a similar view on infrastructure and its capacity to create jobs in construction and related sectors. Trump proposed a $1 trillion infrastructure initiative to get Americans back to work as the Covid pandemic waned; Biden enacted a program allocating approximately $550 billion toward local infrastructure projects.
