Liberals and their favorite media have given up on Biden as he plummets in the polls ahead of next year’s election. On November 5th the New York Times announced that Trump leads Biden in 5 of the 6 swing states, sending a signal to all liberals that Biden must be replaced as the Democrats’ nominee for president.
The filing deadline for the New Hampshire primary has already passed, and Democrat insiders have little time left before their South Carolina primary on February 3 to coalesce behind a replacement. Meanwhile, “the world is falling apart under Biden,” as 53-year-old Spencer Weiss, a Pennsylvania voter who has switched his support from Biden to Trump, told the NYT.
Biden has mishandled foreign crises from Ukraine to Israel, while letting in 10 million unemployed illegal aliens, more than the entire population of overcrowded Los Angeles County. He turns 81 years in November and plainly lacks the mental acuity to still be president.
Biden and his supporters have pushed transgender access to girls’ restrooms and locker rooms in schools, which sparked a walkout by students in Loudoun County, Virginia recently. In April, Biden proposed a federal rule under Title IX that would prohibit schools from categorically banning transgender students from invading girls’ sports.
Trump has led in stopping illegal immigration, which could include foreign terrorists hateful of the United States. He has also been strong against allowing male-bodied athletes to invade girls’ sports.
Michelle Obama and California Gov. Gavin Newsom are mentioned as possible last-minute replacements of Biden. Other potential candidates powerful with the insiders include Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and the same-sex married Pete Buttigieg, the Transportation Secretary who has bungled the electric car issue.
Democrat political insiders have compared their dilemma to a “five-alarm fire,” but Biden and his determined wife Jill refuse to step aside. Many Democrats who disapprove of funding foreign wars instead of domestic priorities are jumping ship: Biden’s advantage over Trump has eroded among black voters from a 78-point advantage to only 49 points.
A new poll was released by ABC News/Ipsos on November 5th, announcing that 76% of American adults feel our country is headed in the wrong direction, while only 23% see us going in the right direction. On the key issues of crime, inflation, and immigration, voters trust Republicans more than Democrats.
We are only a year from the presidential election, and barely ten months before early voting begins in some states. Worsening foreign crises and deepening economic problems, combined with an inevitable further decline in his mental capacity, mean there is no plausible way for Biden to reverse his slide.
Biden failed to file paperwork to be on the ballot in New Hampshire, while an obscure Minnesota congressman did file there, reminiscent of how Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy chased the Democrat incumbent PresidentLyndonB.Johnsonfromtheracein1968.Biden is counting on support by black primary voters in South Carolina to renominate him, but a deal between Obama and an alternative could force Biden to withdraw.
Much of the angst by Democrats over Biden is due to how well Trump is surviving the onslaught of politically motivated prosecutions. None of federal prosecutor Jack Smith’s attacks on Trump has worked, while many of them have backfired.
The federal judge in the Florida Mar-a-Lago case rebuked Biden’s henchmen for wasting her time with their antics, and she has suspended the schedule in that case. It is widely expected now that a trial in that ill-advised prosecution will not occur before the election, which removes it as an obstacle to Trump’s reelection.
Federal prosecutors indicted two of Trump’s low- level aides who have not turned against Trump as Biden’s henchmen hoped. The premise of that prosecution is that Trump was endangering national security at Mar-a-Lago, an absurd allegation unsupported by the evidence.
That leaves the federal prosecution of Trump in the anti- Trump venue of D.C. as Biden’s last remaining card to play against his opponent. But that case, which was supposed to be smooth sailing for the Trump-haters, has hit rocky waters too.
Special prosecutor Jack Smith demanded and obtained a severely improper gag order to prohibit Trump from disparaging Biden’s hired guns. Trump echoed the views of many by calling Jack “deranged” and a “thug,” who then persuaded the Obama-appointed judge to censor Trump despite strong objections by the ACLU to this infringement on the First Amendment.
But on November 3rd the D.C. Circuit suspended the gag order, thereby enabling Trump to speak freely again. Meanwhile, Trump’s attorneys have filed a compelling motion to toss the entire case out based on the presidential immunity that protects Trump against the allegations concerning actions he took on January 6, 2021, when he was still the president.
Unplug the Green Boondoggle
Many groups and countries are lining up for new handouts by Congress, now that it is functioning again with a new Speaker. Among those with their hats in their hands for billions of dollars is the green energy industry of windmills and battery-powered cars.
Fortunately, newly inducted House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is fully supported by conservative lawmakers in the House who want separate votes on spending-neutral bills. First out of the gate is a $14.3 billion aid package to Israel that is funded by repealing part of Biden’s $80 billion IRS expansion.
On October 30, Biden’s Treasury Department announced that it will borrow the most ever for a fourth quarter: $776 billion. The multi-billion-dollar cost of the Leftist green agenda is not something we can afford to ignore anymore.
Ask Ford Motor Company. Since the afternoon of October 26, Ford’s stock fell by 14% in three business days on news of its losing a more-than-expected $1.33 billion in its electric vehicle (EV) unit for the third quarter, which translates into an average loss of $36,000 on every EV it sold.
Once a preeminent American corporation, Ford’s value has fallen to only $38 billion in market capitalization, and it cannot survive annual losses of $5 billion on EVs. A sharp increase in costs for raw materials needed by the batteries in EVs has cast doubt on if and when electric cars would ever be profitable to sell, despite mandates by Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
As found by a new study released by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, “the average EV accrues $48,698 in subsidies and $4,569 in extra charging and electricity costs over a 10-year period, for a total cost of $53,267.” When converted into an equivalent subsidy per gallon of gasoline, it’s as though the government paid an extra $16.12 per gallon for a conventional internal combustion engine vehicle.
Hertz took a hit in its latest earnings report due to unexpected losses from operating the largest EV fleet in the rental car industry. Hertz announced a pause in its acquisition of more EVs.
Another green energy money pit is the wasteful spending on wind power, as illustrated by the often-idle giant wind turbines visible from many highways. Despite decades of effort and billions of dollars in spending, wind power is still unable to pay for itself.
Record cold temperatures across the United States this Halloween included October snow showers in eight midwestern states. The 20 and 30-degree drops in temperature being felt from Dallas to the East Coast require affordable energy or else there will be another jolt to inflation.
In August 2000, General Electric was the most valuable company in the world, having a market capitalization of $601 billion. Today, as it loses $1 billion annually on its offshore wind farms that blight the ocean view for many Americans, the value of the company founded by Thomas Edison has fallen by more than 80%, to just $116 billion.
Wind turbines fail to produce power when it’s needed most, such as on very hot or very cold days, and their maintenance expenses are exorbitant. The inconsistent supply of energy from wind turbines causes spikes that harm the energy grid.
Rising interest rates have laid bare the billions of dollars in operating losses generated by the noisy and ugly windmills. Since low-interest loans are no longer available, green energy companies will be forced to seek billions more in subsidies from the federal government to offset mounting losses.
As the funding of the federal government expires on November 17, the liberal wastefulness of green energy will be one of many senseless entitlements seeking new handouts in the next fiscal year. “Government is too invested to let these companies go bust, and taxpayers will be charged for the repair job,” the Wall Street Journal warned the last weekend of October.
The real federal deficit has doubled from $1 trillion (not just billion) to $2 trillion in merely one year, while Biden demands another $100 billion to spend on no-win foreign wars. House Speaker Johnson wisely separates a vote on emergency aid to Israel from a vote on the much larger spending package demanded by Zelensky in Ukraine with the support of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) despite rising conservative opposition.
A financial collapse, typically unpredictable in its timing, becomes increasingly likely under the weight of this crushing debt. Ending subsidies for green energy and foreign wars is a great place to start to save our economy.
Due to inflation caused by the wasteful government spending, the interest costs alone on the mountain of debt run up by Biden will soon exceed our total spending on our national defense. With a new Speaker, conservatives in the House have a golden opportunity to realign our nation’s priorities.
Leftist Math Doesn’t Compute
Kids are back in school now, but schools are not back to excellence. Our students lag far behind the rest of the world in basic learning, including a dismal ranking in the bottom third in math skills among industrialized nations with whom we compete.
Math is a casualty of the Leftist takeover of education, which makes diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) more important than teaching basic skills. When schools postpone algebra to the ninth grade, students never complete the basic math they need for a STEM-related job.
In their mindless push for greater diversity, New York Democrats recently dropped the words “math and science” from the name of their once-elite Math & Science Exploratory School in Brooklyn. Test scores at that middle school have plummeted from more than 95% of 7th-graders passing the math exams a half-decade ago to merely 69% passing last year.
The school used to select students based on academic performance, thereby giving families an incentive to compete for admission. But under the DEI approach imposed by New York’s Democrat politicians, the renamed Exploratory School now uses a lottery to select its students, and 52% of accepted students must come from unstable, impoverished, or non-English speaking families.
Math is one of the biggest casualties. The Left disliked how some groups do better at math, particularly advanced math, and this conflicts with the DEI political agenda.
Math competitions are usually won by boys, for example, so prizes and awards are not inclusive. The Leftist solution is to eliminate honors and awards, lumping all the kids together in one dumbed-down math program, and the end result is less achievement.
Studies showed that white and Asian students were enrolling in precalculus math classes at rates of two to four times the rates of black and Hispanic students. To conceal this uncomfortable discrepancy, the DEI ideologues ended the tracking that enables advancement by talented math students, and started requiring everyone to take low-level math classes in high school even though they are too easy for some.
School districts in Democrat-controlled cities, particularly in California, have imposed “de-tracking” to choke off opportunities for high-achieving math students.
The purported goal is to provide the same access to advanced math to all students, but the effect is to hold back talented students who have the aptitude to qualify for higher-level classes.
A Stanford study earlier this year showed that de- tracking causes smarter kids to be denied an opportunity for advancement, while yielding no measurable improvement for the kids who were left behind in regular classes. If anything, their progress got worse rather than better.
“Leveling,” another name for de-tracking, prevents students with greater math aptitude from progressing to more advanced material. Distraught parents in the ultra- Democratic enclaves of Silicon Valley and San Francisco filed lawsuits earlier this year to challenge this liberal ideology imposed on the schools.
An impressive total of 50 San Francisco parents filed their lawsuit in March to challenge the leveling or de-tracking policy. The parents want the public schools to restore an Algebra I class to middle school, and stop requiring talented students to retake the same class in ninth grade if they have previously passed it.
On Aug. 29, a Palo Alto school board meeting heard from two-dozen students complaining about the de- tracking. One pointed out how a math placement test appeared designed to block accelerated course enrollment.
There is not enough time for students to get to calculus in high school if they are held back by being forced to take Algebra I as freshmen. In Japan and other countries that are far ahead of us in math education, students learn algebra in middle school.
Recently our students’ math skills have fallen another half-year below where they are expected to be, according to a report. Some blame this on the Covid pandemic, during which many schools shut down for too long, but a bigger cause is liberals prioritizing equity over education in public schools.
The math achievement in our country has dropped to its lowest level in two decades among fourth-grade and eighth-grade students. Many pre-teens cannot even do basic subtraction with two-digit numbers.
For decades public colleges were forced to offer remedial math programs to help students catch up to where they should be, but recent studies show that approach to be a failure. Like reading, math is best learned at an early age and it becomes harder to learn basic skills as a student gets older.
Electing conservative school board members may help a bit, but not so much in deep blue states like California where the Democrat-controlled legislature imposes its leftwing ideology statewide. On September 25, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Assembly Bill 1078, which penalizes local school boards if they fail to teach the state-mandated DEI curriculum.
Gag Order Invites Reversal
Democrats’ goal of censoring Donald Trump was embraced by an Obama-appointed federal judge in D.C. on October 16th. She then imposed a sweeping gag order demanded by the politicized prosecutor, Jack Smith, to muzzle Trump as he campaigns for president.
Her gag order censors Trump from criticizing Jack Smith and his partisan prosecutors, any of the court’s staff who might later be viewed as including the judge, and “any reasonably foreseeable witness or the substance of their testimony.” The prosecutors can seek to hold Trump in contempt for anything he says that might be interpreted as a violation.
In layman’s terms, the gag order prevents Trump from being Trump. And that is unconstitutional for any court to do to the front-runner for president during his reelection campaign.
Nothing prevents Biden, the Democrats, and the media from exploiting the gag order by relentlessly ranting against Trump on the same topics that he is now prevented from addressing. Ads can be run by rivals while Trump is wrongfully prohibited from rebutting them, because the gag order further censors all who act under Trump’s direction.
Late-night Leftist talk show host Jimmy Kimmel quipped that the gag order shuts down Trump’s ability to criticize even him, because Kimmel is a potential witness. After all, Kimmel joked, “I don’t know about you — I saw the whole thing happen.”
A gag order is a type of prior restraint, which in other contexts would be “presumptively invalid” under Supreme Court precedents. Trump immediately vowed to appeal, correctly pointing out that this gag order interferes with democracy.
Judge Tanya Chutkan repeats the mantra that Trump will not be treated any differently from any other defendant, but no other defendant is constantly and unfairly vilified by the liberal media as Trump is. Judge Chutkan does not censor any of Trump’s critics, yet unconstitutionally prohibits Trump from defending himself as he campaigns.
The delusional Deep State thinks it can imprison Trump for supposedly violating an unlawful restraint on his speech. The gag order immediately harms all Americans by interfering with Trump’s campaign while he appeals.
Judge Chutkan took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and that includes protecting the First Amendment rights of Trump and all Americans. The weaponization of the federal government against Trump and others is an issue in the presidential campaign, and all Americans have a First Amendment right to hear what Trump has to say about it.
An impartial presiding judge is essential to due process. Yet at that hearing the Obama-appointed judge praised the prosecutors of Trump as “public servants who are simply doing their jobs,” displaying her bias in favor of a team of prosecutors who were just admonished by a different federal judge in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.
Judge Chutkan should not continue to preside over Trump’s case while praising and defending his prosecutors. Jack Smith, the taxpayer-funded biased prosecutor who has wasted many millions on interfering with the political process, may dislike being criticized but the First Amendment requires allowing it.
Yet in court the judge spoke like a CNN political host, taking umbrage at the use of the word “censorship” by Trump’s attorney despite how that is what the gag order is. At one point she reportedly leaned back in her chair and shook her head while Trump’s attorney, John Lauro, was speaking.
When Lauro stated that “President Trump firmly believes that these proceedings are brought by a politically motivated prosecutor,” the judge demanded that Lauro “tone down his language,” as delightfully recounted by CNN. There was no jury present and thus no justification for muzzling an attorney as he argued for his client.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene schooled the judge afterward about the double standard imposed. Judge Chutkan “said the case isn’t about the court of public opinion, yet she allows the media to sit in her courtroom, the very people who craft public opinion through their headlines and stories,” Rep. Greene pointed out.
Courtrooms in D.C. have become pockets of tyranny where judges seem to care more about the media, as when Judge Royce Lamberth lashed out at Tucker Carlson in a hearing about one of the over-prosecuted January 6 cases.
Judge Chutkan infringes not only on Trump’s First Amendment right to speak out, but also on the First Amendment right of every American to hear Trump’s rebuttal of media reporting about his case. Judge Chutkan ignores the clear constitutional right of Americans to learn Trump’s responses to the media’s negative spin about this politically motivated prosecution.
Judge Chutkan declared at the October 16 hearing that “this trial will not yield to the election cycle, and we will not revisit the trial date.” With her impertinent comments, the judge has amply demonstrated why an appellate court should remove her from Trump’s case.
