Posts Tagged ‘oil industry’

Interview with TPPF’s Katie Tahuahua On The Texas Winter Storm Energy Crisis

Wednesday, February 17th, 2021

I reached out to the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s energy expert Katie Tahuahua about the dire energy problems brought about by the huge winter storm, here are her answers:


1. The Texas Interconnect Grid is a separate grid from the U.S. Eastern and Western Interconnect grids. What advantages and disadvantages does this provide for Texas energy consumers?

KT: The advantage of Texas having its own electric grid is that our communities aren’t affected by poor policy choices in other states we have no control or accountability over. However, it also means we must bear the full costs of our choices and feel the full brunt of crises like the blackouts across the state this week.

2. What role does ERCOT serve in managing the Texas Interconnect grid?

KT: The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) manages the Texas Interconnection Grid — although, unfortunately, the “Reliability” in its name has now been called into question.

3. The current wave of extreme cold was forecast in advance. Why were so many electricity-producing entities caught off-guard?

KT: There are two problems here. The first is that ERCOT waited too long to initiate conservation measures to meet increased demand as the weather turned colder. However, this delay wouldn’t have been a problem at all had Texas not put so many eggs in the renewable basket. Instead of adding more reliable fossil fuel generation to the grid over the last few years to keep up with our growing population and electricity demand, we’ve closed over 3,000MW in natural gas and clean coal and instead added 20,000MW of unreliable wind and solar to the grid. Unfortunately, all that wind and solar was barely generating when Texans needed it most. By Monday morning, half of Texas’ wind turbines were frozen solid and total wind generation bottomed out at 2% capacity by Monday night. Because of this massive gap in wind production and ERCOT’s delay, what should have been a series of brief rolling blackouts — inconvenient but manageable — instead turned into millions of Texans left in the cold and without answers.

4. What, if any, role has ERCOT’s demand pricing policies played in helping create the current crisis?

KT: ERCOT does not currently have demand pricing policies. While voluntary demand pricing programs could help prevent situations like this, any regulatory solution should place the cost of ensuring reliable electricity on the generators where it belongs, not on the customers.

5. A great number of Austin households are without power right now. Has Austin energy performed notably worse than other government power entities, and what policies have contributed to making the situation worse?

KT: Anecdotally, we know that there are communities in several areas of the state still without power. It does not appear that the blackouts are worse in Austin than anywhere else. However, Austin’s boisterous promotion of unreliable renewable energy — and their expensive failed efforts to use it — have reduced reliability for their customers and for the broader Texas grid. Unfortunately, San Antonio and CPS Energy are going down the same path that will put their ratepayers on the hook for $1 billion and further jeopardize the security of our grid.

6. How much, if any, has the push for “renewable” energy courses like wind and solar contributed to the current energy difficulties in Texas?

KT: It’s clear that policy decisions favoring unreliable wind and solar energy made blackouts such as this inevitable at some point. The severity of this blackout could have been reduced had ERCOT acted more swiftly — but it never would have been an issue had our grid not been so deeply penetrated by unreliable energy sources that contribute the least when they are needed the most, yet are propped up by billions in taxpayer-funded subsidies every year.

The Texas Legislature should end these subsidies and require all electric generators to guarantee a certain amount of “dispatchable,” or readily available, power to the grid at all times. The Texas Public Policy Foundation and our Life:Powered initiative will be working closely with the legislature to preserve Texans’ access to affordable, reliable electricity no matter the weather.


Thanks to Katie Tahuahua for taking the time to answer these questions.

Today is the first time in almost a week that the temperature is going to get above freezing…

TPPF’s Chuck DeVore on Reasons Behind The Texas Blackouts

Tuesday, February 16th, 2021

Some brief background on why so many Texas households suddenly seem to be without power:

Expect more on this subject in the near future.

It’s a Freaking Winter Wonderland in Austin This Morning

Monday, February 15th, 2021

7°F and a good four inches of snow on the ground (which probably feels like a foot to us).

There’s an official disaster declaration and the city has pretty much shut down:

The University of Texas at Austin is closed through 8 a.m. Wednesday.

Austin Energy is performing rolling blackouts to conserve power. The electricity provider, which has more than 500,000 customers, instituted the measure as a “last resort to preserve the reliability of the electric system as a whole,” the city said in a statement. The outages typically last 10 to 40 minutes but were lasting longer than expected as of early morning Dec. 15, Austin Energy tweeted. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas has asked utilities around the state to use rotating outages to lessen the strain on the state’s power grid.

Many flights are canceled. Austin-Bergstrom International Airport officials urged travelers to confirm their flight status if flying in the next 48 hours. The airport also announced that Security Checkpoint 1 is closed and all passengers will be screened through Security Checkpoint 2. According to FlightAware, 138 flights into or out of ABIA had been canceled as of 8 a.m. Feb. 15. In addition, many roads around the airport have been closed because of ice.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the Texas Interconnect Grid, reports that the grid is near capacity and rolling blackouts may last some time. My power hasn’t gone out here since it was restored Friday morning.

You don’t even need to tell Austin drivers to stay out of this stuff. If you look at the traffic cams, the roads are empty.

Yesterday HEB reported that it was running out of items and closing early, and even if it’s open today, it’s on a reduced schedule. The local HEB phone number just rings, so I wouldn’t count on any of them being open.

I imagine that almost all restaurants are closed (here’s an outdated list). No answer at the Jim’s and Denny’s locations I called. I even tried calling all three local Waffle Houses to see if any were open, and all three calls went to voicemail.

Truly the end times are upon us.

I’ll give you more first hand info when I walk the dogs later.

Stay warm…

Update: There are reportedly almost 2 million people without power across Texas this morning.

Update 2: A whole lot of power outages all across Austin. This isn’t an outage map, it’s a bad Picasso painting:

Update 3: Firefighters close East Parmer at Dessau due to too many stuck vehicles. (Hat tip: johnnyk20001.)

Update 4: No Capital metro today.

Update 5: It’s not just Austin. Houston-area households are suffering from a huge number of power outages.

Update 6: A commenter asked about Dallas, so here’s Oncor’s outage map. But it’s even less useful than the Houston or Austin maps…

Update 7: 4.4 million without power?

Update 8: Pflugerville is under a boil water notice:

Update 9: Lists of which Austin restaurants are open or closed.

LinkSwarm for February 12, 2021

Friday, February 12th, 2021

Greetings, and welcome to a Friday LinkSwarm! Bad weather and bad driving are themes, as the ice storm mentioned yesterday already slammed Texas hard. I was without power for over 10 hours last night and this morning, and every tree is heavy with frost.



  • Hit black ice at 95/They said I’m lucky to be alive…

  • Seriously, try to avoid driving on ice if it’s even remotely possible:

  • Bad news for law-abiding Austinites: Police Chief Brian Manley is retiring after 30 years on the force. I’m sure the City Council is eager to replace him with some social justice warrior approved tool. On the other hand, if he wants to run for mayor…
  • How crazy leftwing do you have to be for the French to call you lunatics?

    The threat is said to be existential. It fuels secessionism. Gnaws at national unity. Abets Islamism. Attacks France’s intellectual and cultural heritage.

    The threat? “Certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States,’’ said President Emmanuel Macron.

    French politicians, high-profile intellectuals and journalists are warning that progressive American ideas — specifically on race, gender, post-colonialism — are undermining their society. “There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned Mr. Macron’s education minister.

    Emboldened by these comments, prominent intellectuals have banded together against what they regard as contamination by the out-of-control woke leftism of American campuses and its attendant cancel culture.

    You can ding France (and French intellectuals) for a lot of sins, but “insufficient appreciation of western civilization and culture” is not one of them.

  • The bloom was off the Andrew Cuomo rose for anyone who had eyes to see last year, but now even the Democratic Media Complex is is being forced to admit what a giant pile of manure he is:

    America’s worst governor probably never thought he would miss America’s most obnoxious president.

    But that is the situation that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo likely finds himself in now that Donald Trump is no longer around to take all the heat for mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, now that the man who commanded nearly every minute of the media’s attention has shuffled off to Florida following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, Cuomo is at long last experiencing widespread criticism and scrutiny in the press for his grossly incompetent handling of the COVID-19 outbreak in the Empire State.

    The New York Times, for example, took the governor to task after he announced that indoor dining in the state can resume as soon as Feb. 14, arguing that the flip-flop makes no sense based on the available data and his past diktats. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York said on Friday that New York City could reopen indoor dining on Feb. 14,” the newspaper notes. “But by nearly every measure, the coronavirus outbreak in the city is worse than it was when he announced a ban on indoor dining in December.”

    The New York Times adds, “As the governor spoke on Friday, citing the ‘current trajectory’ of cases as his reasoning for reopening, average per-capita case counts in New York City were 64% higher than when he announced the ban in December.” The paper even published an article titled “N.Y.C.’s Covid Metrics Are Dire. Cuomo Is Reopening Restaurants Anyway,” laying into the governor for his about-face on indoor dining.

    Elsewhere, Cuomo is weathering blistering criticism over news reports that his administration dramatically undercounted the number of deaths connected to his order last year forcing infectious coronavirus patients into long-term care facilities. Criticism so bad, in fact, that the governor actually declined an invitation to appear on CNN, which has done more than any news network to boost his image amid the pandemic.

    The bad press, by the way, appears to be having an adverse effect on the governor, whose increasingly frenetic decrees suggest a man who is spiraling. Recall that Cuomo claimed recently that the effort to vaccinate restaurant workers was a “cheap, insincere discussion.” Now, he has expanded vaccine eligibility in New York to include — you guessed it — restaurant workers. It’s almost as if he has no idea what he is doing.

    Then, there is the sudden bout of unflattering news reports regarding the growing number of high-level resignations by New York health officials, including nine top state executives who have stepped down since last summer. Cuomo is also suffering embarrassing news coverage for his recent statement in response to the reports that his administration undercounted nursing home deaths: “But who cares? … Died in a hospital. Died in a nursing home. They died.” Add to it all the fact that the governor is catching heat for saying that he doesn’t trust health experts, and it seems clear we are witnessing the end of the love affair between the news media and the man who won an Emmy recently for his supposedly savvy COVID-19 management.

    It is good that the news industry as a whole is finally scrutinizing the Cuomo administration for its ineptitude, but where was this critical look last year? It’s not as if Cuomo flipped a switch. He didn’t become an incompetent, callous, flailing bureaucrat overnight. This is who he is. This is how he has behaved for the entirety of the pandemic. Many newsrooms either did not notice or did not care. After all, there was a bad man in the White House.

    The Cuomo who is getting badly beaten up today in the press is the same Cuomo who in April 2020 said glibly of out-of-work, anti-lockdown protesters that if they want to provide for themselves and their families, they should “take a job as an essential worker.”

    This is the same man who targeted the state’s Jewish communities over social distancing violations, all while giving a free pass to the thousands of anti-police demonstrators and other political activists who clogged New York’s streets last year, gathering cheek to cheek in both protest and celebration. At a press conference in October of last year, Cuomo even dredged up a 14-year-old photo showing Jewish mourners gathered to mark the death of Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum, claiming falsely that it was proof of those people’s refusal to follow his COVID-19 restrictions.

    This is the same man whose administration flip-flopped constantly on the timeline for when COVID-19-positive front-line workers should return to work.

    This is the same man who, during a press conference in September, attempted to absolve himself of responsibility for his state’s deadly mismanagement of the coronavirus by claiming, “Donald Trump caused the COVID outbreak in New York. That is a fact. It’s a fact that he admitted and the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] admitted and [Dr. Anthony Fauci] admitted.” No one “admitted” any such thing.

    Cuomo actually wrote an entire book praising his response to the pandemic. He even hawked a stupid poster boasting of New York’s alleged victory over the outbreak. The poster, which bears more captions than a Herblock cartoon, is careful to highlight infection increases in Arizona, Texas, and Florida. Because nothing says responsible, caring leadership quite like cheering case increases in fellow states, which, by the way, likely got the virus from New York.

    Yet, amid all of these missteps, many in the press claimed last year that New York’s governor led one of the best, if not the best, coronavirus responses in the country. The way certain journalists and commentators told it, Cuomo’s wisdom and steady hand safely guided the state through one of the most dangerous and deadly episodes in its history.

  • “Cuomo aide admits they hid nursing home data so feds wouldn’t find out.” I strongly suspect that falsifying data reported to the federal government for federal grant programs is a felony…
  • Speaking of coronavirus, previous timelines had pegged “Patient Zero” as being infected in November of 2019, but new evidence suggests the first cases showed up October 2019. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Let them have their Impeachment 2: Electric Boogaloo. It won’t result in a conviction. It won’t affect Donald Trump’s standing with his supporters or his detractors. But it will delay the Senate from action on Joe Xiden’s initial legislative goals and confirmation of His Fraudulency’s nominees.”
  • More on the same subject:

    Democrats may end up paying a higher political price than they anticipate. The trial won’t only delay Mr. Biden’s program. It will tarnish his image as a “unifier” eager to work across party lines. That identity will be much harder to sustain after Democratic senators vote in lockstep to convict Mr. Trump and push through a mammoth Covid relief bill without any Republican votes.

    I see they misspelled “trillions in pork graft for politically connected cronies” as “Covid relief.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “14 State Attorney Generals Tell Biden They’re Reviewing Legal Options Regarding Keystone XL.”
  • Texas intermediate crude is now up above pre-coronavirus drop levels.
  • The Social Justice Warrior Thunderdome at The New York Times has reached the point where you get fired for using the N-word in the process of talking about the N-word.
  • Related: “New York Times Has Used the N-Word 6,481 Times.”
  • Teen Vogue publisher Conde Nast can’t pay its rent. Oh no! Where else will teenage girls be encouraged to try anal sex?
  • More on the great ammo shortage:

    During a media presentation at Virtual SHOT Show 2021, Winchester said that if they stopped taking orders for .22 LR right now, it would take 2 years to fill all the back-orders. In December, the Vista family of companies, which comprises Federal, CCI, Speer, and Remington, announced they had a $1 billion backlog in orders. In the first 3 months of the COVID-19 lockdown, Winchester experienced a 17-percent surge in orders, which hasn’t tapered off.

  • Superbowl ratings show it was the leas watched since 2006. How is that wokeness working out for you, NFL? (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • How painfully ignorant of literature do you have to be to not recognize the tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow soliloquy from Macbeth? Evidently Andrea Mitchell ignorant…
  • Rancher believes Biden wants to hurt border security to undo President Trump’s legacy. True, but incomplete. The entire Democratic Party sees every illegal alien as a potential Democrat voter.
  • Heh:

  • Most shocking update:

    Got to admit, 140 MPH is hauling ass. One problem with Most Shocking is that they would intone “…with speeds hitting 90 miles and hour!” and I wanted to ask “Dude, have you never driven on a Texas highway before? That’s pretty much the prevailing speed…”

  • Bruce Springsteen arrested for DWI. I’m pretty sure he makes enough to hire an Uber. Or a full-time chauffeur.
    

  • This one was is from up in Milwaukee:

  • Just no:

  • Shipping container homes are not all they’re cracked up to be.
  • “Today’s Youth Simply Don’t Have The Work Ethic To Build The Gulags Needed For Their Communist Ideals.”
  • Jill Biden Decorates Migrant Cages With Valentine’s Day Message Hearts.”
  • “I’m not a cat.”

  • Dribble:

  • By the way, the current forecast is for it to hit 1°F here on Monday, which would only be 3 degrees above the coldest temperature ever recorded in Austin…

    

    LinkSwarm for February 5, 2020

    Friday, February 5th, 2021

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! The Biden Administration is moving full speed ahead hard left:

  • Kurt Schlichter: The Matrix has you:

    There’s nothing more tiresome than hackneyed references to The Matrix, except for the constant propaganda we’re hosed down with by the Establishment and its media lackeys about how everything is groovy in our totally free, free enterprise paradise of freedom and happiness and more freedom. Some of us have been woke for a while, having realized the undeniable truth that the system is rigged for the benefit of a garbage ruling class, whose sole accomplishment is to perpetuate a paradigm in which they maintain power and prestige by controlling institutions they didn’t create or build. Instead, they are cultural trust fund babies, the equivalent of third generation Kennedy brats with substance issues who got into power by getting into the right schools and modeling the right SJW attitudes. These oligarch overseers rely on us to toil in their figurative fields while they sit on their figurative porches, sipping locally-sourced figurative mint juleps.

    I say burn it all down and rebuild America into what it is supposed to be, that is, what they tell us it is when they lie to us.

    I’m not alone. We’re primed for some conservative anarchy. The normals’ resistance cannot be quelled; the revolution will be Telegrammed. Everyone’s gobbling up red pills, the one medication our incompetent Establishment is fully capable of distributing efficiently and effectively. You drop one and you see the Matrix. You see the lie. You see that it’s all rigged.

    Snip.

    I mentioned GameStop and these ladies not only knew what it was, but they cheered the armchair day trader anarchists. And they booed the hedge funders.

    Rich Orange County Republicans booed the hedge funders.

    And they booed Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney, with one exception, Nikki! Haley too. The ones who had heard of the Bulwark booed it as well, so there were like three of those.

    Populists in pearls, fully red pilled and woke as hell. They saw how the Establishment has been lying to them. They realized that they were never really members of the ruling caste despite their sweet rides and bank accounts. They were allowed its material trappings, but they were excluded from the real power, the power to govern themselves.

    They have more in common with the Keystone pipeline worker John Kerry wants to go make solar panels – which seems unrealistic, since his Chi Com collaborators make them all – than with the rich and truly powerful elite.

    People are getting woke – the red pill is socio-political anti-Ambien because it keeps you from falling back asleep and not seeing that everything is rigged.

    They see how the ruling caste allows you this little band of autonomy, and how you are allowed some leeway to improve your material life, but the instant you try to assert power that threatens the status quo, the Matrix kicks in and its immune system reacts to snuff you out.

    That was the revelation of the GameStop Revolution. You’re allowed to put your money into Wall Street and they might let you take some pennies out, but if you try to go big and play at the same level as the anointed, oh no. You don’t get to. The system shuts you down – literally. You can’t buy the hot stock. Does that apply to the hedge fund guys? You think they can’t play after you’ve been sidelined? Come on. It’s blatant market manipulation, but Wall Street owns the Asterisk Administration – Treasury Secretary & Lord High Protector of the Masters of the Universe Janet Yellin took nearly a million bucks to “speak” to the lever-pullers behind the RobinHood app – and the Administration owns the SEC, and do you think it will investigate the hedge funders who changed the rules? No, but look for FBI SWAT teams to be hitting the basements where the Reddit rebels live. That is, right after they bust more conservative meme guys for illegal memes.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Are Democrats trying to infect the military with Social Justice?

    Now, in perhaps the most chilling move yet from the new administration, the newly minted Defense Secretary [Lloyd Austin] plans to direct a military-wide stand down, reportedly to address “extremism” within the ranks.

    Austin wants all military units to take an operational pause to discuss extremism as he works to grasp the full scope of the issue and better address the longstanding problem, John Kirby, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, told reporters Wednesday. The pauses are expected to occur within the next 60 days, but Austin has yet to determine how the stand downs are to be completed, Kirby said.

    “The intent is to reinforce the [Pentagon’s] policies and values with respect to this sort of behavior and to have a dialogue with the men and women of the force and to get their views on what they are seeing at their level,” Kirby said. “He wants commands to take the necessary time to … speak with troops about the scope of this problem. It’s a two-way conversation.”

    Austin spoke frankly with the acting service secretaries and uniformed service chiefs about his concerns about extremism in the military, including white supremacism, said Kirby, who attended the meeting. The new defense secretary, who is the first Black leader of the Defense Department, wants the service leaders to better grasp how pervasive the issue is within their formations and work with leaders to stamp it out, Kirby said.

    We have gone in a few short months from President Donald Trump preventing “critical race theory” dogma from being imposed on federal employees to the possibility that the armed services will have to apologize for their privilege.

  • Will fake moderate Biden get pushback for his hard left turn?

    it seems that Biden is intent on provoking just such a pushback by his record number of early and often radical executive orders — a tactic candidate Biden condemned.

    On almost every issue — open borders, blanket amnesties, canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, promoting the Green New Deal, and hard-left appointees — Biden is touting positions that likely do not earn 50 percent public support.

    When Biden made a Faustian bargain with his party’s hard-left wing of Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to win the election, he took on the commitment to absorb some of their agenda and to appoint their ideologues.

    But he also soon became either unwilling or unable to stand up to them.

    Now they — and the country — are in a revolutionary frenzy. The San Francisco Board of Education has voted to rename more than 40 schools honoring the nation’s best — Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln — largely on racist grounds that they are dead, mostly white males.

    Statues continue to fall. Names change.

    The iconic dates, origins and nature of America itself continue to be attacked to meet leftist demands. And still, it is not enough for the new McCarthyites.

    Social media are banning tens of thousands. Silicon Valley and Wall Street monopolies go after smaller upstart opponents.

    A wrong word destroys a lifelong career. Formerly sane pundits now call for curtailing the First Amendment. Thousands of federal troops blanket a now-militarized Washington, D.C.

    If Trump’s pushback tried to return to traditions ignored during the Obama years, Biden’s reset promises to become far more radical than Obama’s entire eight years.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Looking at Slow Joe The Unpopular’s approval rating sure as hell doesn’t look like a mandate for radical change:

    Biden has not been above water a single time in the Approval Index rating. This index is the difference between how many likely voters strongly approve and how many strongly disapprove. Total approval has hit 50% once so far…

    This result is astonishing when you think about it. President Biden has the full weight of nearly every corporate media outlet, tech company, and cultural institution behind him. They have been drooling all over themselves to convince us this is a return to unifying normalcy. After all, his favorite ice cream is chocolate chip, and his two German Shepherds just love their new digs. So normal. So unifying.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Florida Governor Ron DeSantis declares war on Big Tech:

    While other Republican legislators complain and pontificate about Twitter, Facebook and Google’s interference in our elections and censoring of conservative voices, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has declared war on the tech giants.

    DeSantis is proposing legislation that asks the Florida state legislature to impose stiff fines – up to $100,000 per day – on tech companies that “deplatform” political candidates running for office in his state. Candidates like, for instance, Donald Trump.

    Calling the tech giants “enforcers of preferred narratives” whose interests are “not in the public interest,” DeSantis, a Republican, wants to “ensure the protection of the people and their rights.” His proposed bill would allow individuals and the Florida attorney general to sue firms that violate newly established safeguards against privacy violations and censorship.

    DeSantis also suggested that other activities, such as colluding to ban people or companies from payment platforms or from cloud services, could also be outlawed.

    Presuming that the popular governor can get his measure passed by the Republican-controlled state legislature, it could become a template for the other 23 GOP-led states. It could, in effect, be the beginning of a revolt against the unacceptable dominance and manipulation of our nation’s discourse by Big Tech.

    It’s a start.

    (Hat tip: Real Clear Politics.)

  • The Trump comeback begins:

    Here’s my game plan for how Trump can make Trump and America great again.

    First, Trump must become the kingmaker of the GOP. The Trump Army is 74 million strong. The Republican Party belongs to Trump. He should remake the party in his image.

    In some ways, his defeat was empowering. As president, Trump couldn’t get rid of RINOS and never-Trumpers, because he needed their votes. But from the outside, he can remake the party, elect allies and end the careers of the GOP traitors who stabbed him in the back. Are you listening, Rep. Liz Cheney?

    Trump should recruit, endorse and campaign for Trump Republicans in each GOP primary where they’re running against RINOS, never-Trumpers and backstabbers. Seventy-four million Trump voters will vote for his chosen candidates in GOP primaries. By 2022, the GOP will be 100% remade in Trump’s image.

    Secondly, Trump should spend the next four years fixing voter fraud at the state level. Trump should recruit his billionaire buddies to put up hundreds of millions to attack this problem. Trump’s goal should be to reform election law in just the handful of states that cost him the election: Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona.

    If Trump spends his time, money and focus on reforming election laws in those six states, the GOP will be back in business in 2022 and 2024.

    Thirdly, Trump needs to raise billions from his billionaire backers to build TMN: Trump Media Network. That should include a national cable TV network; a national talk radio network; a new version of Drudge Report (called Trump Report); and conservative versions of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Conservatives will never again have to depend on the mainstream media or Silicon Valley to broadcast their news and opinions.

    Only Trump has the money, brand and fundraising ability to change the media and social media landscape like this. And think of the amazing bonus: Not only will 74 million Trump voters have permanent places to communicate but if we all move away from mainstream media and social media, they will collapse. Trump will cripple his enemies and put many of them out of business.

    However, I’m not a fan of Root and others idea of Trump running for the House.

  • Bryan Proffitt, “the Vice President of North Carolina’s largest teachers’ association is a self-avowed Marxist activist linked to Liberation Road – a ‘revolutionary socialist‘ group that follows the teachings of Karl Marx and Mao Zedong.” Sounds like a good reason to put your children in a private school. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • There’s now a website to fight critical race training in education. You might want to bookmark that site. (Hat tip: Kemberlee Kaye.)
  • The Biden Administration hates private space ventures and pulled permission from Elon Musk’s SpaceX to fly. Punishment for Musk supporting the GameStop squeeze? Either way, it’s blow to American space capabilities and a boon for Chinese domination of space. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Speaking of which: Chicom rocket goes boom.
  • “Joe Biden put me out of business by suspending new oil and gas leases and drilling permits. I am a petroleum geologist and generate drilling prospects in the Rocky Mountains on federal lands. I worked six years to get a prospect ready to drill and Biden just illegally broke the terms of the lease, killing the deal.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Police dismantle world’s ‘most dangerous’ criminal hacking network.”

    International law enforcement agencies said on Wednesday they had dismantled a criminal hacking scheme used to steal billions of dollars from businesses and private citizens worldwide.

    Police in six European countries, as well as Canada and the United States, completed a joint operation to take control of Internet servers used to run and control a malware network known as “Emotet,” authorities said in a statement.

    “Emotet is currently seen as the most dangerous malware globally,” Germany’s BKA federal police agency said in a statement. “The smashing of the Emotet infrastructure is a significant blow against international organised Internet crime.”

  • “Cornyn, Crenshaw, Cruz Lead Fundraising in Final Quarter of 2020.”
  • Blackpool, UK, is preparing to seize land to make into a Chariots of the Gods theme park.

  • “Number of Texans with at least one vaccine dose surpasses number of confirmed COVID-19 cases.” Faster, please. (Hat tip: Texas Governor Greg Abbott.)
  • CEO: “We tried paying everyone the same salary. It failed.”
  • Good news! Gay Patriot blog relaunched. (Hat tip: Instapundit.) Also see this Twitter account, which may look familiar…
  • Once again social justice warriors fail to cancel Chris Pratt.

  • 21st century headlines: “Scientists have now taught spinach to send emails warning of landmines.”

  • “Snopes Rates AOC’s Account Of Capitol Attack As ‘Factually Inaccurate But Morally True.'”

  • “AOC Recalls How She Barely Survived Terrorists Seizing Nakatomi Plaza.”
  • “Hey Strongbear, do you like techno?”
  • What it was like to see Star Wars in 1977.
  • Heh:

  • Funny dog tweet:

  • LinkSwarm for January 29, 2020

    Friday, January 29th, 2021

    I was up late doing yesterday’s GameStop post, so today’s LinkSwarm may be a bit briefer than you’re used to. Nope! Still huge!

  • How the elites are trying to crush the GameStop retail investor uprising.

    At one point, it was estimated that the losses accumulated by GameStop short-sellers approached $5 billion. Melvin Capital, the now-notorious hedge fund with the huge GameStop short position, eventually required an infusion of $2.75 billion in cash from an even larger hedge fund to cover its possession and remain solvent.

    And that’s when the Wall Street empire struck back. Suddenly, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, which purports to be a Wall Street regulator but instead operates as little more than a Wall and Broad soothsayer to a public skeptical of Wall Street’s power, weighed in and intimated that it might investigate or even shut down the trading of GameStop stock to prevent the price from getting even higher.

    Then the Wall Street-backed trading apps and the Wall Street brokerages joined in, announcing they would no longer allow their users and retail investors to buy GameStop stock. The result? When you can no longer buy a stock, its price can only go in one direction: down.

    The whole saga has spawned a mini-industry of commentary on trading, markets, Wall Street, hedge funds, regulation, efficient markets theory, and who knows what else. Hedge funds are bad! No, hedge funds are good! Markets are efficient vehicles for asset price discovery! No, we need strict regulation to prevent mob-incited runs on banks!

    They all miss the point. What’s happening right now has nothing to do with hedge funds or free markets or pricing theory or any of that. What’s happening right now is another front in the major war taking place in institutions and countries across the world: It’s the elite versus the populists.

    Wall Street has a long, storied history of viciously crushing short-sellers. It’s something of a local pastime. Just ask David Einhorn, who wrote an entire book on the industry’s efforts to destroy him for the crime of shorting the stock of a bank that was covering up the fact that a huge chunk of its loans were garbage and would never be paid back. The GameStop saga isn’t about the benefits, or evils, of short-sellers.

    The real story is how “retail investors” — the industry term for regular people who day trade now and then or have a small brokerage account for retirement or to buy stocks every now and again for fun — figured out how to take down a financial leviathan. It’s not that Wall Street dislikes retail investors, it’s that Wall Street views them as little more than commission factories for the big brokerage houses.

    Those rubes don’t know anything. They’re not sophisticated. They don’t have the credentials or pedigrees of the geniuses who simultaneously destroyed the housing market and economy in 2008. And they certainly don’t have the power to move markets.

    It’s Wall Street’s job to move markets. It’s Wall Street’s job to tell people which stocks and bonds to buy, which conveniently just happen to be the same assets that the mega-banks are desperate to get off their balance sheets.

    A bunch of trash, mortgage-backed securities based on mortgages that will clearly never get paid back? Just put them all in the same garbage bag, claim they couldn’t all possibly start to rot at once, and then demand that the ratings agencies whose salaries you pay stamp them not as trash, but as pure gold. Then, when magically all those bags of garbage start to stink to high heaven, why, then it’s time to demand that the federal government — funded by those retail investor rubes who will probably lose their jobs and homes and savings because of those bags of Wall Street’s garbage — bail every last one of them out.

    See, retail investors don’t move markets. Until they do. Which, in the case of the Redditors bidding up GameStop stock, they did. And that cannot be tolerated. The whole GameStop saga isn’t about finance or politics. It’s David vs. Goliath, the have-nots vs. the haves, the underdog vs. the heavy favorite with the best talent and training and equipment money can buy. It is a perfect microcosm of the war between the populists and the elites, the individuals vs. the institutions, the people vs. the powerful.

    A bunch of internet randos found a way to take financial advantage of a company that had backed itself into a corner. They banded together, executed the strategy, and made bank. They used the exact same rules and systems that Wall Street has used for decades to screw individual investors out of their money.

    That was the Redditors’ real crime. Because that’s not allowed. You are not allowed to use the same set of rules for your own advantage.

    The rules here are simple: Heads Wall Street wins, tails you lose. The institutions set the rules, not you. The elite, not the populace, will determine what is allowed and what isn’t.

  • Former President Donald Trump is not interested in forming a third party and pledges to remain involved in Republican politics. Suck it, Lincoln Project. (And by “it” I mean “your complete irrelevance” and not “the genitalia of teenage boys”…)
  • Donald Trump and the failure of our elites:

    The great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a century from now, was the failure of America’s expert class. The people who were supposed to know what they were talking about, didn’t.

    The failure began with the country’s top consultants and pollsters. Candidate Trump did almost everything lavishly paid political consultants would have told him, and did tell him, not to do — ­and he won. The most respected pollsters, meanwhile, predicted a landslide for Hillary Clinton. America’s best and brightest political adepts turned out to know very little about the elections they claim to understand.

    Also during the 2016 campaign, an assemblage of top-tier academics, intellectuals and journalists warned that Mr. Trump’s candidacy signified a fascist threat. Timothy Snyder, a historian of Nazism at Yale, was among the most strident of these prophets. “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” he warned in a Facebook post shortly after the election. “When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authorities at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire.” Many experts stuck with the fascism theme after Mr. Trump’s election and throughout his presidency. That these cultured authorities couldn’t tell the difference between a populist protest against elite contempt and a coup carried out by powerful ideologues will go down as one of the great fiascoes of American intellectual history.

    The fascism charge was only the most acute form of the claim that Mr. Trump was carrying out an “assault on democracy.” Some semantic clarification is in order here. When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials. For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.”

    Mr. Trump assaulted democracy in the ordinary sense of the word, but he did so only after the 2020 election. That effort was discreditable and disruptive, but it was also delusional and ineffective. It was not the assault the president’s expert-class critics had foreseen.

    Perhaps those critics failed to understand Mr. Trump’s assault on democracy because they had carried out a similar sort of assault in 2016-18, with the support of the federal bureaucracy and the nation’s political and cultural elite. I’m referring to the Russia scare: the belief that Mr. Trump won only because his campaign “colluded” with agents of Moscow, and that his election in 2016 was therefore illegitimate. The theory made sense only if you couldn’t grasp the obvious reasons for Mr. Trump’s victory, namely that Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate and that Obama-era progressivism had become sufficiently unpopular in the Midwest to throw the election to the nationalist candidate. Somehow it was easier for smart and accomplished people to believe that a TV celebrity and political neophyte with attention-deficit issues had entered into a diabolically ingenious pact with a foreign dictator in which the dictator helped him pick up just enough votes in the states he needed to win.

    It took a 22-month investigation by a special counsel to establish an absence of evidence that Mr. Trump’s campaign had conspired with the Russians. America’s best minds and most influential leaders had spent more than two years obsessing over an idiotic conspiracy theory.

    This spectacular failure of the expert class would have been impossible without the willing support of a credulous news media. That Mr. Trump won the presidency largely by denouncing the media should have suggested to leading journalists and media executives that something in their industry had gone badly wrong. Instead most of them took his rise as license to indulge their worst instincts.

    Reporters treated every turn of events as evidence of Mr. Trump’s unique evil. They regarded every preposterous accusation put forward by his political foes as reasonable and likely true. The repeal of “net neutrality,” an Obama-era regulation on internet service providers, heralded the end of the open internet (it didn’t). The administration built “cages” in which to cram children of illegal border crossers (it didn’t). The president praised neo-Nazis as “very fine people” (he didn’t). His postmaster general was removing mailboxes to steal the election (an obvious lie). In retrospect, it was hardly surprising that so many Americans believed Mr. Trump’s fictitious claims about the election. Reports of his defeat, accurate though they were, meant little coming from news organizations that cared so much about discrediting him and so little about factual truth.

    America’s foreign-policy elite didn’t perform appreciably better. For decades, they had insisted that peace between Israel and the Arab world was impossible without a long-term solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem. It was an axiom, no longer up for debate. Mr. Trump followed through on a promise long made but not kept by the U.S. government to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Foreign-policy experts the world over predicted hellish payback from the Arab world, but the recognition went forward, the U.S. Embassy moved, and the payback consisted of a day’s worth of inconsequential protests.

    Meanwhile the administration pressed ahead with a diplomatic push to strike commercial and diplomatic deals between Israel and Arab states. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco announced they would establish formal relations with Israel, and Saudi Arabia may do the same. The foreign-policy clerisy, having been wrong about the central question of global diplomacy for the past four decades, predictably ignored these achievements.

  • “An Ascendant Left Silences and Excludes Its Enemies“:

    In the few short days following the collapse of President Donald Trump’s attempts to bring evidence of electoral fraud to the attention of the state legislatures and the courts—not to mention the calamitous events of Jan. 6—the ascendant left has moved swiftly to capitalize on what has proved a stunning propaganda victory for them and neutralize their enemies on the right.

    Forget the looting, burning, and general civil unrest at the hands of BLM and Antifa in cities across America last summer—for which next to no one has yet been punished, and which was widely cheered by both the mainstream media and Democrat politicians up to and including Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. That’s all ancient history now, replaced by the “insurrection,” the “armed riot” at the Capitol, the “worst attack on Washington” since the War of 1812, when the British burned the capital and the White House.

    Of course, it was not. Unrecalled by the born-yesterday media, for example, is the 1954 attack by four Puerto Rican separatists on the House of Representatives, during which some 30 shots were fired and five congressmen were wounded; the terrorists were later pardoned by Jimmy Carter in 1979. Also forgotten: the bombings of the Capitol building and the Pentagon in the 1970s by the radical leftists of the Weather Underground, led by Barack Obama’s buddy William Ayers.

    

  • Slow Joe The Unpopular.
  • Hunter Biden Continues To Hold Stake In Chinese Private Equity Firm, Records Show, Despite Reports That He Was Planning To Divest.” There aren’t enough shocked faces in the world… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Rand Paul schools George Stephanopoulos:

    George, where you make a mistake is that people coming from the liberal side like you, you immediately say everything’s a lie instead of saying there are two sides to everything. Historically what would happen is if said that I thought that there was fraud, you would interview someone else who said there wasn’t. But now you insert yourself in the middle and say that the absolute… fact is that everything that I’m saying is a lie…. Let’s talk about the specifics of it. In Wisconsin, tens of thousands of absentee votes had only the name on them and no address. Historically those were thrown out, this time they weren’t. They made special accommodations because they said, oh, it’s a pandemic and people forgot what their address was. So they changed the law after the fact. That is wrong, that’s unconstitutional. And I plan on spending the next two years going around state to state and fixing these problems and I won’t be cowed by liberals in the media who say, there’s no evidence here and you’re a liar if you talk about election fraud. No, let’s have an open debate. It’s a free country.

  • Speak of Rand Paul, 45 Republican senators vote on his motion that the out-of-office impeachment of former President Trump is unconstitutional.
  • The global semiconductor shortage is still slamming the auto industry. Tempted to do a separate “explainer” post about how the cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry and how hard it is to add capacity.
  • “Gov. Abbott Signs Oil and Gas Executive Order Targeting Federal Overreach“:

    The order, which is the first the governor has signed since October and the first non-coronavirus related order since the pandemic began last year, directs agencies “to use all lawful powers and tools to challenge any federal action that threatens the continued strength, vitality, and independence of the energy industry.”

    “Each state agency should work to identify potential litigation, notice-and-comment opportunities, and any other means of preventing federal overreach within the law,” it states.

    “And when they do that,” added Abbott during the press conference, “that will arm Texas to be prepared to fight back.”

    The governor called the order “a homework assignment for every state agency in Texas.”

  • Failed senate and presidential candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke is considering running for governor of Texas.

    It will be swell to see democrats squander tens of millions of dollars on a race they can’t win yet again…

  • “State Rep. Bryan Slaton filed an amendment saying that the Legislature should bring a vote to the floor to abolish abortion before it votes to ceremonially change the names of highways or bridges.”
  • Huawei phone sales are tanking. Good. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Netflix goes full social justice warrior, inks deal with Ibram X. Kendi. If you didn’t cancel your subscription over Cuties, now would be a good time to do so. (Hat tip: Blog reader David Rainwater.)
  • Proof that letting biological men compete in women’s sports is a bad idea. Top male high school athletes routinely beat female Olympians.
  • When it comes to Biden, MSM fact-chckers don’t.
  • “Lord of the Rings” pub to close after 450 years.

    The Lamb and Flag, once frequented by the likes of Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien and his friend C.S. Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, has suffered a disastrous loss of revenues since the start of the pandemic.

    It first opened in 1566 and moved to its present location on St Giles, a broad thoroughfare in the city centre, in 1613. It is owned by St John’s College, one of 45 colleges and private halls that make up the University of Oxford.

  • “Until the San Francisco Unified School District board stripped Dianne Feinstein’s name from one of its public schools, we were unaware of the Senator’s service to the Confederacy.”
  • ◯←:

  • The Babylon Bee explains the GameStop short squeeze:

    On one side of the fight are the hedge fund managers. These guys are good-hearted regular folks living out the American dream by manipulating markets so that companies will fail and they can buy another desperately needed yacht.

    On the other side are a bunch of Cheeto-stained Redditors who are dangerously manipulating markets to try to make money. These guys obviously weren’t informed that the stock market was only for rich people to make money. They’re probably Nazis and alt-righters too.

  • “Biden All-Female Communications Team Won’t Tell Nation What’s Wrong, Nation Should Already Know.” “It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Nothing’s wrong, OK!?” said Jen Psaki in her first press conference as a part of Biden’s team. “Why would you think I’m not fine? Ugh… if you have to ask, I’m not going to tell you.”
  • Heh:

  • Cookie! (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Funny dog tweet:

  • Since I joked about putting money into Dogecoin, it’s up over 800%.
  • Joe Biden vs. American Oil Industry Jobs

    Monday, January 25th, 2021

    The Biden Administration is wasting no time in declaring war on America’s oil and gas industry:

  • Biden revoked permits for the Keystone XL pipeline, killing thousands of jobs.
  • He rejoined the job-killing Paris Climate Accord. The Paris Climate Accord has never been submitted to the senate for ratification, so how could it be constitutionally binding?
  • Despite protestations to the contrary, he wants to end fracking.
  • Biden has suspended oil and gas permitting on federal land for 60 days. Presumably some will be allowed to proceed once it’s made clear which Democrats will need to be bribed for the privilege…
  • New Mexico official says they’re shocked by Biden’s actions on federal land permits.

    Some New Mexico officials are now trying to defend themselves by saying they didn’t anticipate the new President would issue such a ban, but such protests ring rather hollow given that they most assuredly did understand that Biden plans to move ahead with his fracking ban, which would for all intents and purposes have the same effect. After all, virtually 100% of the drilling activity in southeast New Mexico targets the various shale formations in the Delaware Basin, and all shale wells require a frac job in order to be productive. Thus, a ban on fracking is the same thing as a ban on leasing and drilling.

  • Total job losses for all of Biden’s anti-energy policies could add up to 1 million jobs. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • And many of those job losses will be in Texas:

    in Texas, where small, independent operators play a significant role in oil production, Biden’s policies could pack more of a punch.

    Among Biden’s policy proposals:

    • Required disclosure of climate risks from public companies.
    • A commitment to end new drilling permits for federal lands.
    • A pledge to eliminate tax subsidies for the oil and gas industry.

    “To the extent that there will be effects, those effects would be felt primarily by smaller producers,” said Sheila Olmstead, professor of public affairs at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. She served as the senior economist for energy and the environment at the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama.

  • Why settle for low-cost, reliable energy sources that provide high-paying, blue collar American jobs when there’s so much virtue signaling and graft to be had in Green New Deal pork?

    The Trump White House’s List Of Trump’s Accomplishments

    Sunday, January 24th, 2021

    I wanted to compile a list of the Trump Administration’s pluses and minuses (and, indeed, still might). One source I was going to draw from was the WhiteHouse.gov list of Trump Accomplishments. However, the Biden Administration took that down. As a service, and for the Historical Record, I’ve fished that list out of the Wayback Machine and am posting it below. (Plus you never know when the Biden Administration might ask the Wayback Machine to remove it from their records.) I’ve even tried to replicate the formatting.


    As of January 2021

    Trump Administration Accomplishments

    ━━━━━━━━ ★ ★ ★ ━━━━━━━━

    Unprecedented Economic Boom

    Before the China Virus invaded our shores, we built the world’s most prosperous economy.

    • America gained 7 million new jobs – more than three times government experts’ projections.
    • Middle-Class family income increased nearly $6,000 – more than five times the gains during the entire previous administration.
    • The unemployment rate reached 3.5 percent, the lowest in a half-century.
    • Achieved 40 months in a row with more job openings than job-hirings.
    • More Americans reported being employed than ever before – nearly 160 million.
    • Jobless claims hit a nearly 50-year low.
    • The number of people claiming unemployment insurance as a share of the population hit its lowest on record.
    • Incomes rose in every single metro area in the United States for the first time in nearly 3 decades.

    Delivered a future of greater promise and opportunity for citizens of all backgrounds.

    • Unemployment rates for African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, veterans, individuals with disabilities, and those without a high school diploma all reached record lows.
    • Unemployment for women hit its lowest rate in nearly 70 years.
    • Lifted nearly 7 million people off of food stamps.
    • Poverty rates for African Americans and Hispanic Americans reached record lows.
    • Income inequality fell for two straight years, and by the largest amount in over a decade.
    • The bottom 50 percent of American households saw a 40 percent increase in net worth.
    • Wages rose fastest for low-income and blue collar workers – a 16 percent pay increase.
    • African American homeownership increased from 41.7 percent to 46.4 percent.

    Brought jobs, factories, and industries back to the USA.

    • Created more than 1.2 million manufacturing and construction jobs.
    • Put in place policies to bring back supply chains from overseas.
    • Small business optimism broke a 35-year old record in 2018.

    Hit record stock market numbers and record 401ks.

    • The DOW closed above 20,000 for the first time in 2017 and topped 30,000 in 2020.
    • The S&P 500 and NASDAQ have repeatedly notched record highs.

    Rebuilding and investing in rural America.

    • Signed an Executive Order on Modernizing the Regulatory Framework for Agricultural Biotechnology Products, which is bringing innovative new technologies to market in American farming and agriculture.
    • Strengthened America’s rural economy by investing over $1.3 billion through the Agriculture Department’s ReConnect Program to bring high-speed broadband infrastructure to rural America.

    Achieved a record-setting economic comeback by rejecting blanket lockdowns.

    • An October 2020 Gallup survey found 56 percent of Americans said they were better off during a pandemic than four years prior.
    • During the third quarter of 2020, the economy grew at a rate of 33.1 percent – the most rapid GDP growth ever recorded.
    • Since coronavirus lockdowns ended, the economy has added back over 12 million jobs, more than half the jobs lost.
    • Jobs have been recovered 23 times faster than the previous administration’s recovery.
    • Unemployment fell to 6.7 percent in December, from a pandemic peak of 14.7 percent in April – beating expectations of well over 10 percent unemployment through the end of 2020.
    • Under the previous administration, it took 49 months for the unemployment rate to fall from 10 percent to under 7 percent compared to just 3 months for the Trump Administration.
    • Since April, the Hispanic unemployment rate has fallen by 9.6 percent, Asian-American unemployment by 8.6 percent, and Black American unemployment by 6.8 percent.
    • 80 percent of small businesses are now open, up from just 53 percent in April.
    • Small business confidence hit a new high.
    • Homebuilder confidence reached an all-time high, and home sales hit their highest reading since December 2006.
    • Manufacturing optimism nearly doubled.
    • Household net worth rose $7.4 trillion in Q2 2020 to $112 trillion, an all-time high.
    • Home prices hit an all-time record high.
    • The United States rejected crippling lockdowns that crush the economy and inflict countless public health harms and instead safely reopened its economy.
    • Business confidence is higher in America than in any other G7 or European Union country.
    • Stabilized America’s financial markets with the establishment of a number of Treasury Department supported facilities at the Federal Reserve.

    ━━━━━━━━ ★ ★ ★ ━━━━━━━━

    Tax Relief for the Middle Class

    Passed $3.2 trillion in historic tax relief and reformed the tax code.

    • Signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act – the largest tax reform package in history.
    • More than 6 million American workers received wage increases, bonuses, and increased benefits thanks to the tax cuts.
    • A typical family of four earning $75,000 received an income tax cut of more than $2,000 – slashing their tax bill in half.
    • Doubled the standard deduction – making the first $24,000 earned by a married couple completely tax-free.
    • Doubled the child tax credit.
    • Virtually eliminated the unfair Estate Tax, or Death Tax.
    • Cut the business tax rate from 35 percent – the highest in the developed world – all the way down to 21 percent.
    • Small businesses can now deduct 20 percent of their business income.
    • Businesses can now deduct 100 percent of the cost of their capital investments in the year the investment is made.
    • Since the passage of tax cuts, the share of total wealth held by the bottom half of households has increased, while the share held by the top 1 percent has decreased.
    • Over 400 companies have announced bonuses, wage increases, new hires, or new investments in the United States.
    • Over $1.5 trillion was repatriated into the United States from overseas.
    • Lower investment cost and higher capital returns led to faster growth in the middle class, real wages, and international competitiveness.

    Jobs and investments are pouring into Opportunity Zones.

    • Created nearly 9,000 Opportunity Zones where capital gains on long-term investments are taxed at zero.
    • Opportunity Zone designations have increased property values within them by 1.1 percent, creating an estimated $11 billion in wealth for the nearly half of Opportunity Zone residents who own their own home.
    • Opportunity Zones have attracted $75 billion in funds and driven $52 billion of new investment in economically distressed communities, creating at least 500,000 new jobs.
    • Approximately 1 million Americans will be lifted from poverty as a result of these new investments.
    • Private equity investments into businesses in Opportunity Zones were nearly 30 percent higher than investments into businesses in similar areas that were not designated Opportunity Zones.

    ━━━━━━━━ ★ ★ ★ ━━━━━━━━

    Massive Deregulation

    Ended the regulatory assault on American Businesses and Workers.

    • Instead of 2-for-1, we eliminated 8 old regulations for every 1 new regulation adopted.
    • Provided the average American household an extra $3,100 every year.
    • Reduced the direct cost of regulatory compliance by $50 billion, and will reduce costs by an additional $50 billion in FY 2020 alone.
    • Removed nearly 25,000 pages from the Federal Register – more than any other president. The previous administration added over 16,000 pages.
    • Established the Governors’ Initiative on Regulatory Innovation to reduce outdated regulations at the state, local, and tribal levels.
    • Signed an executive order to make it easier for businesses to offer retirement plans.
    • Signed two executive orders to increase transparency in Federal agencies and protect Americans and their small businesses from administrative abuse.
    • Modernized the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for the first time in over 40 years.
    • Reduced approval times for major infrastructure projects from 10 or more years down to 2 years or less.
    • Helped community banks by signing legislation that rolled back costly provisions of Dodd-Frank.
    • Established the White House Council on Eliminating Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing to bring down housing costs.
    • Removed regulations that threatened the development of a strong and stable internet.
    • Eased and simplified restrictions on rocket launches, helping to spur commercial investment in space projects.
    • Published a whole-of-government strategy focused on ensuring American leadership in automated vehicle technology.
    • Streamlined energy efficiency regulations for American families and businesses, including preserving affordable lightbulbs, enhancing the utility of showerheads, and enabling greater time savings with dishwashers.
    • Removed unnecessary regulations that restrict the seafood industry and impede job creation.
    • Modernized the Department of Agriculture’s biotechnology regulations to put America in the lead to develop new technologies.
    • Took action to suspend regulations that would have slowed our response to COVID-19, including lifting restrictions on manufacturers to more quickly produce ventilators.

    Successfully rolled back burdensome regulatory overreach.

    • Rescinded the previous administration’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, which would have abolished zoning for single-family housing to build low-income, federally subsidized apartments.
    • Issued a final rule on the Fair Housing Act’s disparate impact standard.
    • Eliminated the Waters of the United States Rule and replaced it with the Navigable Waters Protection Rule, providing relief and certainty for farmers and property owners.
    • Repealed the previous administration’s costly fuel economy regulations by finalizing the Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles rule, which will make cars more affordable, and lower the price of new vehicles by an estimated $2,200.

    Americans now have more money in their pockets.

    • Deregulation had an especially beneficial impact on low-income Americans who pay a much higher share of their incomes for overregulation.
    • Cut red tape in the healthcare industry, providing Americans with more affordable healthcare and saving Americans nearly 10 percent on prescription drugs.
    • Deregulatory efforts yielded savings to the medical community an estimated $6.6 billion – with a reduction of 42 million hours of regulatory compliance work through 2021.
    • Removed government barriers to personal freedom and consumer choice in healthcare.
    • Once fully in effect, 20 major deregulatory actions undertaken by the Trump Administration are expected to save American consumers and businesses over $220 billion per year.
    • Signed 16 pieces of deregulatory legislation that will result in a $40 billion increase in annual real incomes.

    ━━━━━━━━ ★ ★ ★ ━━━━━━━━

    Fair and Reciprocal Trade

    Secured historic trade deals to defend American workers.

    • Immediately withdrew from the job-killing Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
    • Ended the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and replaced it with the brand new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
    • The USMCA contains powerful new protections for American manufacturers, auto-makers, farmers, dairy producers, and workers.
    • The USMCA is expected to generate over $68 billion in economic activity and potentially create over 550,000 new jobs over ten years.
    • Signed an executive order making it government policy to Buy American and Hire American, and took action to stop the outsourcing of jobs overseas.
    • Negotiated with Japan to slash tariffs and open its market to $7 billion in American agricultural products and ended its ban on potatoes and lamb.
    • Over 90 percent of American agricultural exports to Japan now receive preferential treatment, and most are duty-free.
    • Negotiated another deal with Japan to boost $40 billion worth of digital trade.
    • Renegotiated the United States-Korea Free Trade Agreement, doubling the cap on imports of American vehicles and extending the American light truck tariff.
    • Reached a written, fully-enforceable Phase One trade agreement with China on confronting pirated and counterfeit goods, and the protection of American ideas, trade secrets, patents, and trademarks.
    • China agreed to purchase an additional $200 billion worth of United States exports and opened market access for over 4,000 American facilities to exports while all tariffs remained in effect.
    • Achieved a mutual agreement with the European Union (EU) that addresses unfair trade practices and increases duty-free exports by 180 percent to $420 million.
    • Secured a pledge from the EU to eliminate tariffs on American lobster – the first United States-European Union negotiated tariff reduction in over 20 years.
    • Scored a historic victory by overhauling the Universal Postal Union, whose outdated policies were undermining American workers and interests.
    • Engaged extensively with trade partners like the EU and Japan to advance reforms to the World Trade Organization (WTO).
    • Issued a first-ever comprehensive report on the WTO Appellate Body’s failures to comply with WTO rules and interpret WTO agreements as written.
    • Blocked nominees to the WTO’s Appellate Body until WTO Members recognize and address longstanding issues with Appellate Body activism.
    • Submitted 5 papers to the WTO Committee on Agriculture to improve Members’ understanding of how trade policies are implemented, highlight areas for improved transparency, and encourage members to maintain up-to-date notifications on market access and domestic support.

    Took strong actions to confront unfair trade practices and put America First.

    • Imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions worth of Chinese goods to protect American jobs and stop China’s abuses under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.
    • Directed an all-of-government effort to halt and punish efforts by the Communist Party of China to steal and profit from American innovations and intellectual property.
    • Imposed tariffs on foreign aluminum and foreign steel to protect our vital industries and support our national security.
    • Approved tariffs on $1.8 billion in imports of washing machines and $8.5 billion in imports of solar panels.
    • Blocked illegal timber imports from Peru.
    • Took action against France for its digital services tax that unfairly targets American technology companies.
    • `Launched investigations into digital services taxes that have been proposed or adopted by 10 other countries.

    Historic support for American farmers.

    • Successfully negotiated more than 50 agreements with countries around the world to increase foreign market access and boost exports of American agriculture products, supporting more than 1 million American jobs.
    • Authorized $28 billion in aid for farmers who have been subjected to unfair trade practices – fully funded by the tariffs paid by China.
    • China lifted its ban on poultry, opened its market to beef, and agreed to purchase at least $80 billion of American agricultural products in the next two years.
    • The European Union agreed to increase beef imports by 180 percent and opened up its market to more imports of soybeans.
    • South Korea lifted its ban on American poultry and eggs, and agreed to provide market access for record exports of American rice.
    • Argentina lifted its ban on American pork.
    • Brazil agreed to increase wheat imports by $180 million a year and raised its quotas for purchases of United States ethanol.
    • Guatemala and Tunisia opened up their markets to American eggs.
    • Won tariff exemptions in Ecuador for wheat and soybeans.
    • Suspended $817 million in trade preferences for Thailand under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program due to its failure to adequately provide reasonable market access for American pork products.
    • The amount of food stamps redeemed at farmers markets increased from $1.4 million in May 2020 to $1.75 million in September 2020 – a 50 percent increase over last year.
    • Rapidly deployed the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, which provided $30 billion in support to farmers and ranchers facing decreased prices and market disruption when COVID-19 impacted the food supply chain.
    • Authorized more than $6 billion for the Farmers to Families Food Box program, which delivered over 128 million boxes of locally sourced, produce, meat, and dairy products to charity and faith-based organizations nationwide.
    • Delegated authorities via the Defense Production Act to protect breaks in the American food supply chain as a result of COVID-19.

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    American Energy Independence

    Unleashed America’s oil and natural gas potential.

    • For the first time in nearly 70 years, the United States has become a net energy exporter.
    • The United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world.
    • Natural gas production reached a record-high of 34.9 quads in 2019, following record high production in 2018 and in 2017.
    • The United States has been a net natural gas exporter for three consecutive years and has an export capacity of nearly 10 billion cubic feet per day.
    • Withdrew from the unfair, one-sided Paris Climate Agreement.
    • Canceled the previous administration’s Clean Power Plan, and replaced it with the new Affordable Clean Energy rule.
    • Approved the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines.
    • Opened up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska to oil and gas leasing.
    • Repealed the last administration’s Federal Coal Leasing Moratorium, which prohibited coal leasing on Federal lands.
    • Reformed permitting rules to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy and speed approval for mines.
    • Fixed the New Source Review permitting program, which punished companies for upgrading or repairing coal power plants.
    • Fixed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) steam electric and coal ash rules.
    • The average American family saved $2,500 a year in lower electric bills and lower prices at the gas pump.
    • Signed legislation repealing the harmful Stream Protection Rule.
    • Reduced the time to approve drilling permits on public lands by half, increasing permit applications to drill on public lands by 300 percent.
    • Expedited approval of the NuStar’s New Burgos pipeline to export American gasoline to Mexico.
    • Streamlined Liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal permitting and allowed long-term LNG export authorizations to be extended through 2050.
    • The United States is now among the top three LNG exporters in the world.
    • Increased LNG exports five-fold since January 2017, reaching an all-time high in January 2020.
    • LNG exports are expected to reduce the American trade deficit by over $10 billion.
    • Granted more than 20 new long-term approvals for LNG exports to non-free trade agreement countries.
    • The development of natural gas and LNG infrastructure in the United States is providing tens of thousands of jobs, and has led to the investment of tens of billions of dollars in infrastructure.
    • There are now 6 LNG export facilities operating in the United States, with 2 additional export projects under construction.
    • The amount of nuclear energy production in 2019 was the highest on record, through a combination of increased capacity from power plant upgrades and shorter refueling and maintenance cycles.
    • Prevented Russian energy coercion across Europe through various lines of effort, including the Partnership for Transatlantic Energy Cooperation, civil nuclear deals with Romania and Poland, and opposition to Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
    • Issued the Presidential Permit for the A2A railroad between Canada and Alaska, providing energy resources to emerging markets.

    Increased access to our country’s abundant natural resources in order to achieve energy independence.

    • Renewable energy production and consumption both reached record highs in 2019.
    • Enacted policies that helped double the amount of electricity generated by solar and helped increase the amount of wind generation by 32 percent from 2016 through 2019.
    • Accelerated construction of energy infrastructure to ensure American energy producers can deliver their products to the market.
    • Cut red tape holding back the construction of new energy infrastructure.
    • Authorized ethanol producers to sell E15 year-round and allowed higher-ethanol gasoline to be distributed from existing pumps at filling stations.
    • Ensured greater transparency and certainty in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) program.
    • Negotiated leasing capacity in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to Australia, providing American taxpayers a return on this infrastructure investment.
    • Signed an executive order directing Federal agencies to work together to diminish the capability of foreign adversaries to target our critical electric infrastructure.
    • Reformed Section 401 of the Clean Water Act regulation to allow for the curation of interstate infrastructure.
    • Resolved the OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) oil crisis during COVID-19 by getting OPEC, Russia, and others to cut nearly 10 million barrels of production a day, stabilizing world oil prices.
    • Directed the Department of Energy to use the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to mitigate market volatility caused by COVID-19.

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    Investing in America’s Workers and Families

    Affordable and high-quality Child Care for American workers and their families.

    • Doubled the Child Tax Credit from $1,000 to $2,000 per child and expanded the eligibility for receiving the credit.
    • Nearly 40 million families benefitted from the child tax credit (CTC), receiving an average benefit of $2,200 – totaling credits of approximately $88 billion.
    • Signed the largest-ever increase in Child Care and Development Block Grants – expanding access to quality, affordable child care for more than 800,000 low-income families.
    • Secured an additional $3.5 billion in the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act to help families and first responders with child care needs.
    • Created the first-ever paid family leave tax credit for employees earning $72,000 or less.
    • Signed into law 12-weeks of paid parental leave for Federal workers.
    • Signed into law a provision that enables new parents to withdraw up to $5,000 from their retirement accounts without penalty when they give birth to or adopt a child.

    Advanced apprenticeship career pathways to good-paying jobs.

    • Expanded apprenticeships to more than 850,000 and established the new Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship programs in new and emerging fields.
    • Established the National Council for the American Worker and the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board.
    • Over 460 companies have signed the Pledge to America’s Workers, committing to provide more than 16 million job and training opportunities.
    • Signed an executive order that directs the Federal government to replace outdated degree-based hiring with skills-based hiring.

    Advanced women’s economic empowerment.

    • Included women’s empowerment for the first time in the President’s 2017 National Security Strategy.
    • Signed into law key pieces of legislation, including the Women, Peace, and Security Act and the Women Entrepreneurship and Economic Empowerment Act.
    • Launched the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) Initiative – the first-ever whole-of-government approach to women’s economic empowerment that has reached 24 million women worldwide.
    • Established an innovative new W-GDP Fund at USAID.
    • Launched the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative (We-Fi) with 13 other nations.
    • Announced a $50 million donation on behalf of the United States to We-Fi providing more capital to women-owned businesses around the world.
    • Released the first-ever Strategy on Women, Peace, and Security, which focused on increasing women’s participation to prevent and resolve conflicts.
    • Launched the W-GDP 2x Global Women’s Initiative with the Development Finance Corporation, which has mobilized more than $3 billion in private sector investments over three years.

    Ensured American leadership in technology and innovation.

    • First administration to name artificial intelligence, quantum information science, and 5G communications as national research and development priorities.
    • Launched the American Broadband Initiative to promote the rapid deployment of broadband internet across rural America.
    • Made 100 megahertz of crucial mid-band spectrum available for commercial operations, a key factor to driving widespread 5G access across rural America.
    • Launched the American AI Initiative to ensure American leadership in artificial intelligence (AI), and established the National AI Initiative Office at the White House.
    • Established the first-ever principles for Federal agency adoption of AI to improve services for the American people.
    • Signed the National Quantum Initiative Act establishing the National Quantum Coordination Office at the White House to drive breakthroughs in quantum information science.
    • Signed the Secure 5G and Beyond Act to ensure America leads the world in 5G.
    • Launched a groundbreaking program to test safe and innovative commercial drone operations nationwide.
    • Issued new rulemaking to accelerate the return of American civil supersonic aviation.
    • Committed to doubling investments in AI and quantum information science (QIS) research and development.
    • Announced the establishment of $1 billion AI and quantum research institutes across America.
    • Established the largest dual-use 5G test sites in the world to advance 5G commercial and military innovation.
    • Signed landmark Prague Principles with America’s allies to advance the deployment of secure 5G telecommunications networks.
    • Signed first-ever bilateral AI cooperation agreement with the United Kingdom.
    • Built collation among allies to ban Chinese Telecom Company Huawei from their 5G infrastructure.

    Preserved American jobs for American workers and rejected the importation of cheap foreign labor.

    • Pressured the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to reverse their decision to lay off over 200 American workers and replace them with cheaper foreign workers.
    • Removed the TVA Chairman of the Board and a TVA Board Member.

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    Life-Saving Response to the China Virus

    Restricted travel to the United States from infected regions of the world.

    • Suspended all travel from China, saving thousands of lives.
    • Required all American citizens returning home from designated outbreak countries to return through designated airports with enhanced screening measures, and to undergo a self-quarantine.
    • Announced further travel restrictions on Iran, the Schengen Area of Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Brazil.
    • Issued travel advisory warnings recommending that American citizens avoid all international travel.
    • Reached bilateral agreements with Mexico and Canada to suspend non-essential travel and expeditiously return illegal aliens.
    • Repatriated over 100,000 American citizens stranded abroad on more than 1,140 flights from 136 countries and territories.
    • Safely transported, evacuated, treated, and returned home trapped passengers on cruise ships.
    • Took action to authorize visa sanctions on foreign governments who impede our efforts to protect American citizens by refusing or unreasonably delaying the return of their own citizens, subjects, or residents from the United States.

    Acted early to combat the China Virus in the United States.

    • Established the White House Coronavirus Task Force, with leading experts on infectious diseases, to manage the Administration’s efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 and to keep workplaces safe.
    • Pledged in the State of the Union address to “take all necessary steps to safeguard our citizens from the Virus,” while the Democrats’ response made not a single mention of COVID-19 or even the threat of China.
    • Declared COVID-19 a National Emergency under the Stafford Act.
    • Established the 24/7 FEMA National Response Coordination Center.
    • Released guidance recommending containment measures critical to slowing the spread of the Virus, decompressing peak burden on hospitals and infrastructure, and diminishing health impacts.
    • Implemented strong community mitigation strategies to sharply reduce the number of lives lost in the United States down from experts’ projection of up to 2.2 million deaths in the United States without mitigation.
    • Halted American funding to the World Health Organization to counter its egregious bias towards China that jeopardized the safety of Americans.
    • Announced plans for withdrawal from the World Health Organization and redirected contribution funds to help meet global public health needs.
    • Called on the United Nations to hold China accountable for their handling of the virus, including refusing to be transparent and failing to contain the virus before it spread.

    Re-purposed domestic manufacturing facilities to ensure frontline workers had critical supplies.

    • Distributed billions of pieces of Personal Protective Equipment, including gloves, masks, gowns, and face shields.
    • Invoked the Defense Production Act over 100 times to accelerate the development and manufacturing of essential material in the USA.
    • Made historic investments of more than $3 billion into the industrial base.
    • Contracted with companies such as Ford, General Motors, Philips, and General Electric to produce ventilators.
    • Contracted with Honeywell, 3M, O&M Halyard, Moldex, and Lydall to increase our Nation’s production of N-95 masks.
    • The Army Corps of Engineers built 11,000 beds, distributed 10,000 ventilators, and surged personnel to hospitals.
    • Converted the Javits Center in New York into a 3,000-bed hospital, and opened medical facilities in Seattle and New Orleans.
    • Dispatched the USNS Comfort to New York City, and the USNS Mercy to Los Angeles.
    • Deployed thousands of FEMA employees, National Guard members, and military forces to help in the response.
    • Provided support to states facing new emergences of the virus, including surging testing sites, deploying medical personnel, and advising on mitigation strategies.
    • Announced Federal support to governors for use of the National Guard with 100 percent cost-share.
    • Established the Supply Chain Task Force as a “control tower” to strategically allocate high-demand medical supplies and PPE to areas of greatest need.
    • Requested critical data elements from states about the status of hospital capacity, ventilators, and PPE.
    • Executed nearly 250 flights through Project Air Bridge to transport hundreds of millions of surgical masks, N95 respirators, gloves, and gowns from around the world to hospitals and facilities throughout the United States.
    • Signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to ensure that Americans have a reliable supply of products like beef, pork, and poultry.
    • Stabilized the food supply chain restoring the Nation’s protein processing capacity through a collaborative approach with Federal, state, and local officials and industry partners.
    • The continued movement of food and other critical items of daily life distributed to stores and to American homes went unaffected.

    Replenished the depleted Strategic National Stockpile.

    • Increased the number of ventilators nearly ten-fold to more than 153,000.
    • Despite the grim projections from the media and governors, no American who has needed a ventilator has been denied a ventilator.
    • Increased the number of N95 masks fourteen-fold to more than 176 million.
    • Issued an executive order ensuring critical medical supplies are produced in the United States.

    Created the largest, most advanced, and most innovative testing system in the world.

    • Built the world’s leading testing system from scratch, conducting over 200 million tests – more than all of the European Union combined.
    • Engaged more than 400 test developers to increase testing capacity from less than 100 tests per day to more than 2 million tests per day.
    • Slashed red tape and approved Emergency Use Authorizations for more than 300 different tests, including 235 molecular tests, 63 antibody tests, and 11 antigen tests.
    • Delivered state-of-the-art testing devices and millions of tests to every certified nursing home in the country.
    • Announced more flexibility to Medicare Advantage and Part D plans to waive cost-sharing for tests.
    • Over 2,000 retail pharmacy stores, including CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens, are providing testing using new regulatory and reimbursement options.
    • Deployed tens of millions of tests to nursing homes, assisted living facilities, historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), tribes, disaster relief operations, Home Health/Hospice organizations, and the Veterans Health Administration.
    • Began shipping 150 million BinaxNOW rapid tests to states, long-term care facilities, the IHS, HBCUs, and other key partners.

    Pioneered groundbreaking treatments and therapies that reduced the mortality rate by 85 percent, saving over 2 million lives.

    • The United States has among the lowest case fatality rates in the entire world.
    • The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched the Coronavirus Treatment Acceleration Program to expedite the regulatory review process for therapeutics in clinical trials, accelerate the development and publication of industry guidance on developing treatments, and utilize regulatory flexibility to help facilitate the scaling-up of manufacturing capacity.
    • More than 370 therapies are in clinical trials and another 560 are in the planning stages.
    • Announced $450 million in available funds to support the manufacturing of Regeneron’s antibody cocktail.
    • Shipped tens of thousands of doses of the Regeneron drug.
    • Authorized an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for convalescent plasma.
    • Treated around 100,000 patients with convalescent plasma, which may reduce mortality by 50 percent.
    • Provided $48 million to fund the Mayo Clinic study that tested the efficacy of convalescent plasma for patients with COVID-19.
    • Made an agreement to support the large-scale manufacturing of AstraZeneca’s cocktail of two monoclonal antibodies.
    • Approved Remdesivir as the first COVID-19 treatment, which could reduce hospitalization time by nearly a third.
    • Secured more than 90 percent of the world’s supply of Remdesivir, enough to treat over 850,000 high-risk patients.
    • Granted an EUA to Eli Lilly for its anti-body treatments.
    • Finalized an agreement with Eli Lilly to purchase the first doses of the company’s investigational antibody therapeutic.
    • Provided up to $270 million to the American Red Cross and America’s Blood Centers to support the collection of up to 360,000 units of plasma.
    • Launched a nationwide campaign to ask patients who have recovered from COVID-19 to donate plasma.
    • Announced Phase 3 clinical trials for varying types of blood thinners to treat adults diagnosed with COVID-19.
    • Issued an EUA for the monoclonal antibody therapy bamlanivimab.
    • FDA issued an EUA for casirivimab and imdevimab to be administered together.
    • Launched the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium with private sector and academic leaders unleashing America’s supercomputers to accelerate coronavirus research.

    Brought the full power of American medicine and government to produce a safe and effective vaccine in record time.

    • Launched Operation Warp Speed to initiate an unprecedented drive to develop and make available an effective vaccine by January 2021.
    • Pfizer and Moderna developed two vaccines in just nine months, five times faster than the fastest prior vaccine development in American history.
    • Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines are approximately 95 effective – far exceeding all expectations.
    • AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson also both have promising candidates in the final stage of clinical trials.
    • The vaccines will be administered within 24 hours of FDA-approval.
    • Made millions of vaccine doses available before the end of 2020, with hundreds of millions more to quickly follow.
    • FedEx and UPS will ship doses from warehouses directly to local pharmacies, hospitals, and healthcare providers.
    • Finalized a partnership with CVS and Walgreens to deliver vaccines directly to residents of nursing homes and long-term care facilities as soon as a state requests it, at no cost to America’s seniors.
    • Signed an executive order to ensure that the United States government prioritizes getting the vaccine to American citizens before sending it to other nations.
    • Provided approximately $13 billion to accelerate vaccine development and to manufacture all of the top candidates in advance.
    • Provided critical investments of $4.1 billion to Moderna to support the development, manufacturing, and distribution of their vaccines.
    • Moderna announced its vaccine is 95 percent effective and is pending FDA approval.
    • Provided Pfizer up to $1.95 billion to support the mass-manufacturing and nationwide distribution of their vaccine candidate.
    • Pfizer announced its vaccine is 95 percent effective and is pending FDA approval.
    • Provided approximately $1 billion to support the manufacturing and distribution of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine candidate.
    • Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine candidate reached the final stage of clinical trials.
    • Made up to $1.2 billion available to support AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate.
    • AstraZeneca’s vaccine candidate reached the final stage of clinical trials.
    • Made an agreement to support the large-scale manufacturing of Novavax’s vaccine candidate with 100 million doses expected.
    • Partnered with Sanofi and GSK to support large-scale manufacturing of a COVID-19 investigational vaccine.
    • Awarded $200 million in funding to support vaccine preparedness and plans for the immediate distribution and administration of vaccines.
    • Provided $31 million to Cytvia for vaccine-related consumable products.
    • Under the PREP Act, issued guidance authorizing qualified pharmacy technicians to administer vaccines.
    • Announced that McKesson Corporation will produce store, and distribute vaccine ancillary supply kits on behalf of the Strategic National Stockpile to help healthcare workers who will administer vaccines.
    • Announced partnership with large-chain, independent, and regional pharmacies to deliver vaccines.

    Prioritized resources for the most vulnerable Americans, including nursing home residents.

    • Quickly established guidelines for nursing homes and expanded telehealth opportunities to protect vulnerable seniors.
    • Increased surveillance, oversight, and transparency of all 15,417 Medicare and Medicaid nursing homes by requiring them to report cases of COVID-19 to all residents, their families, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
    • Required that all nursing homes test staff regularly.
    • Launched an unprecedented national nursing home training curriculum to equip nursing home staff with the knowledge they need to stop the spread of COVID-19.
    • Delivered $81 million for increased inspections and funded 35,000 members of the Nation Guard to deliver critical supplies to every Medicare-certified nursing homes.
    • Deployed Federal Task Force Strike Teams to provide onsite technical assistance and education to nursing homes experiencing outbreaks.
    • Distributed tens of billions of dollars in Provider Relief Funds to protect nursing homes, long-term care facilities, safety-net hospitals, rural hospitals, and communities hardest hit by the virus.
    • Released 1.5 million N95 respirators from the Strategic National Stockpile for distribution to over 3,000 nursing home facilities.
    • Directed the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council to refocus on underserved communities impacted by the coronavirus.
    • Required that testing results reported include data on race, gender, ethnicity, and ZIP code, to ensure that resources were directed to communities disproportionately harmed by the virus.
    • Ensured testing was offered at 95 percent of Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC), which serve over 29 million patients in 12,000 communities across the Nation.
    • Invested an unprecedented $8 billion in tribal communities.
    • Maintained safe access for Veterans to VA healthcare throughout the COVID-19 Pandemic and supported non-VA hospital systems and private and state-run nursing homes with VA clinical teams.
    • Signed legislation ensuring no reduction of VA education benefits under the GI Bill for online distance learning.

    Supported Americans as they safely return to school and work.

    • Issued the Guidelines for Opening Up America Again, a detailed blueprint to help governors as they began reopening the country. Focused on protecting the most vulnerable and mitigating the risk of any resurgence, while restarting the economy and allowing Americans to safely return to their jobs.
    • Helped Americans return to work by providing extensive guidance on workplace-safety measures to protect against COVID-19, and investigating over 10,000 coronavirus-related complaints and referrals.
    • Provided over $31 billion to support elementary and secondary schools.
    • Distributed 125 million face masks to school districts.
    • Provided comprehensive guidelines to schools on how to protect and identify high-risk individuals, prevent the spread of COVID-19, and conduct safe in-person teaching.
    • Brought back the safe return of college athletics, including Big Ten and Pac-12 football.

    Rescued the American economy with nearly $3.4 trillion in relief, the largest financial aid package in history.

    • Secured an initial $8.3 billion Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Act, supporting the development of treatments and vaccines, and to procure critical medical supplies and equipment.
    • Signed the $100 billion Families First Coronavirus Relief Act, guaranteeing free coronavirus testing, emergency paid sick leave and family leave, Medicaid funding, and food assistance.
    • Signed the $2.3 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, providing unprecedented and immediate relief to American families, workers, and businesses.
    • Signed additional legislation providing nearly $900 billion in support for coronavirus emergency response and relief, including critically needed funds to continue the Paycheck Protection Program.
    • Signed the Paycheck Protection Program and Healthcare Enhancement Act, adding an additional $310 billion to replenish the program.
    • Delivered approximately 160 million relief payments to hardworking Americans.
    • Through the Paycheck Protection Program, approved over $525 billion in forgivable loans to more than 5.2 million small businesses, supporting more than 51 million American jobs.
    • The Treasury Department approved the establishment of the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility to provide liquidity to the financial system.
    • The Treasury Department, working with the Federal Reserve, was able to leverage approximately $4 trillion in emergency lending facilities.
    • Signed an executive order extending expanded unemployment benefits.
    • Signed an executive order to temporarily suspend student loan payments, evictions, and collection of payroll taxes.
    • Small Business Administration expanded access to emergency economic assistance for small businesses, faith-based, and religious entities.
    • Protected jobs for American workers impacted by COVID-19 by temporarily suspending several job-related nonimmigrant visas, including H-1B’s, H-2B’s without a nexus to the food-supply chain, certain H-4’s, as well as L’s and certain J’s.

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    Great Healthcare for Americans

    Empowered American patients by greatly expanding healthcare choice, transparency, and affordability.

    • Eliminated the Obamacare individual mandate – a financial relief to low and middle-income households that made up nearly 80 percent of the families who paid the penalty for not wanting to purchase health insurance.
    • Increased choice for consumers by promoting competition in the individual health insurance market leading to lower premiums for three years in a row.
    • Under the Trump Administration, more than 90 percent of the counties have multiple options on the individual insurance market to choose from.
    • Offered Association Health Plans, which allow employers to pool together and offer more affordable, quality health coverage to their employees at up to 30 percent lower cost.
    • Increased availability of short-term, limited-duration health plans, which can cost up to 60 percent less than traditional plans, giving Americans more flexibility to choose plans that suit their needs.
    • Expanded Health Reimbursement Arrangements, allowing millions of Americans to be able to shop for a plan of their choice on the individual market, and then have their employer cover the cost.
    • Added 2,100 new Medicare Advantage plan options since 2017, a 76 percent increase.
    • Lowered Medicare Advantage premiums by 34 percent nationwide to the lowest level in 14 years. Medicare health plan premium savings for beneficiaries have totaled $nearly 1.5 billion since 2017.
    • Improved access to tax-free health savings accounts for individuals with chronic conditions.
    • Eliminated costly Obamacare taxes, including the health insurance tax, the medical device tax, and the “Cadillac tax.”
    • Worked with states to create more flexibility and relief from oppressive Obamacare regulations, including reinsurance waivers to help lower premiums.
    • Released legislative principles to end surprise medical billing.
    • Finalized requirements for unprecedented price transparency from hospitals and insurance companies so patients know what the cost is before they receive care.
    • Took action to require that hospitals make the prices they negotiate with insurers publicly available and easily accessible online.
    • Improved patients access to their health data by penalizing hospitals and causing clinicians to lose their incentive payments if they do not comply.
    • Expanded access to telehealth, especially in rural and underserved communities.
    • Increased Medicare payments to rural hospitals to stem a decade of rising closures and deliver enhanced access to care in rural areas.

    Issued unprecedented reforms that dramatically lowered the price of prescription drugs.

    • Lowered drug prices for the first time in 51 years.
    • Launched an initiative to stop global freeloading in the drug market.
    • Finalized a rule to allow the importation of prescription drugs from Canada.
    • Finalized the Most Favored Nation Rule to ensure that pharmaceutical companies offer the same discounts to the United States as they do to other nations, resulting in an estimated $85 billion in savings over seven years and $30 billion in out-of-pocket costs alone.
    • Proposed a rule requiring federally funded health centers to pass drug company discounts on insulin and Epi-Pens directly to patients.
    • Ended the gag clauses that prevented pharmacists from informing patients about the best prices for the medications they need.
    • Ended the costly kickbacks to middlemen and ensured that patients directly benefit from available discounts at the pharmacy counter, saving Americans up to 30 percent on brand name pharmaceuticals.
    • Enhanced Part D plans to provide many seniors with Medicare access to a broad set of insulins at a maximum $35 copay for a month’s supply of each type of insulin.
    • Reduced Medicare Part D prescription drug premiums, saving beneficiaries nearly $2 billion in premium costs since 2017.
    • Ended the Unapproved Drugs Initiative, which provided market exclusivity to generic drugs.

    Promoted research and innovation in healthcare to ensure that American patients have access to the best treatment in the world.

    • Signed first-ever executive order to affirm that it is the official policy of the United States Government to protect patients with pre-existing conditions.
    • Passed Right To Try to give terminally ill patients access to lifesaving cures.
    • Signed an executive order to fight kidney disease with more transplants and better treatment.
    • Signed into law a $1 billion increase in funding for critical Alzheimer’s research.
    • Accelerated medical breakthroughs in genetic treatments for Sickle Cell disease.
    • Finalized the interoperability rules that will give American patients access to their electronic health records on their phones.
    • Initiated an effort to provide $500 million over the next decade to improve pediatric cancer research.
    • Launched a campaign to end the HIV/AIDS epidemic in America in the next decade.
    • Started a program to provide the HIV prevention drug PrEP to uninsured patients for free.
    • Signed an executive order and awarded new development contracts to modernize the influenza vaccine.

    Protected our Nation’s seniors by safeguarding and strengthening Medicare.

    • Updated the way Medicare pays for innovative medical products to ensure beneficiaries have access to the latest innovation and treatment.
    • Reduced improper payments for Medicare an estimated $15 billion since 2016 protecting taxpayer dollars and leading to less fraud, waste, and abuse.
    • Took rapid action to combat antimicrobial resistance and secure access to life-saving new antibiotic drugs for American seniors, by removing several financial disincentives and setting policies to reduce inappropriate use.
    • Launched new online tools, including eMedicare, Blue Button 2.0, and Care Compare, to help seniors see what is covered, compare costs, streamline data, and compare tools available on Medicare.gov.
    • Provided new Medicare Advantage supplemental benefits, including modifications to help keep seniors safe in their homes, respite care for caregivers, non-opioid pain management alternatives like therapeutic massages, transportation, and more in-home support services and assistance.
    • Protected Medicare beneficiaries by removing Social Security numbers from all Medicare cards, a project completed ahead of schedule.
    • Unleashed unprecedented transparency in Medicare and Medicaid data to spur research and innovation.

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    Remaking the Federal Judiciary

    Appointed a historic number of Federal judges who will interpret the Constitution as written.

    • Nominated and confirmed over 230 Federal judges.
    • Confirmed 54 judges to the United States Courts of Appeals, making up nearly a third of the entire appellate bench.
    • Filled all Court of Appeals vacancies for the first time in four decades.
    • Flipped the Second, Third, and Eleventh Circuits from Democrat-appointed majorities to Republican-appointed majorities. And dramatically reshaped the long-liberal Ninth Circuit.

    Appointed three Supreme Court justices, expanding its conservative-appointed majority to 6-3.

    • Appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.
    • Appointed Justice Brett Kavanaugh to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy.
    • Appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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    Achieving a Secure Border

    Secured the Southern Border of the United States.

    • Built over 400 miles of the world’s most robust and advanced border wall.
    • Illegal crossings have plummeted over 87 percent where the wall has been constructed.
    • Deployed nearly 5,000 troops to the Southern border. In addition, Mexico deployed tens of thousands of their own soldiers and national guardsmen to secure their side of the US-Mexico border.
    • Ended the dangerous practice of Catch-and-Release, which means that instead of aliens getting released into the United States pending future hearings never to be seen again, they are detained pending removal, and then ultimately returned to their home countries.
    • Entered into three historic asylum cooperation agreements with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala to stop asylum fraud and resettle illegal migrants in third-party nations pending their asylum applications.
    • Entered into a historic partnership with Mexico, referred to as the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” to safely return asylum-seekers to Mexico while awaiting hearings in the United States.

    Fully enforced the immigration laws of the United States.

    • Signed an executive order to strip discretionary Federal grant funding from deadly sanctuary cities.
    • Fully enforced and implemented statutorily authorized “expedited removal” of illegal aliens.
    • The Department of Justice prosecuted a record-breaking number of immigration-related crimes.
    • Used Section 243(d) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to reduce the number of aliens coming from countries whose governments refuse to accept their nationals who were ordered removed from the United States.

    Ended asylum fraud, shut down human smuggling traffickers, and solved the humanitarian crisis across the Western Hemisphere.

    • Suspended, via regulation, asylum for aliens who had skipped previous countries where they were eligible for asylum but opted to “forum shop” and continue to the United States.
    • Safeguarded migrant families, and protected migrant safety, by promulgating new regulations under the Flores Settlement Agreement.
    • Proposed regulations to end the practice of giving free work permits to illegal aliens lodging meritless asylum claims.
    • Issued “internal relocation” guidance.
    • Cross-trained United States Border Patrol agents to conduct credible fear screenings alongside USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) adjudication personnel to reduce massive backlogs.
    • Streamlined and expedited the asylum hearing process through both the Prompt Asylum Claim Review (PACR) and the Humanitarian Asylum Review Process (HARP).
    • Launched the Family Fraud Initiative to identify hundreds of individuals who were fraudulently presenting themselves as family units at the border, oftentimes with trafficking children, in order to ensure child welfare.
    • Improved screening in countries with high overstay rates and reduced visa overstay rates in many of these countries.
    • Removed bureaucratic constraints on United States consular officers that reduced their ability to appropriately vet visa applicants.
    • Worked with Mexico and other regional partners to dismantle the human smuggling networks in our hemisphere that profit from human misery and fuel the border crisis by exploiting vulnerable populations.

    Secured our Nation’s immigration system against criminals and terrorists.

    • Instituted national security travel bans to keep out terrorists, jihadists, and violent extremists, and implemented a uniform security and information-sharing baseline all nations must meet in order for their nationals to be able to travel to, and emigrate to, the United States.
    • Suspended refugee resettlement from the world’s most dangerous and terror-afflicted regions.
    • Rebalanced refugee assistance to focus on overseas resettlement and burden-sharing.
    • 85 percent reduction in refugee resettlement.
    • Overhauled badly-broken refugee security screening process.
    • Required the Department of State to consult with states and localities as part of the Federal government’s refugee resettlement process.
    • Issued strict sanctions on countries that have failed to take back their own nationals.
    • Established the National Vetting Center, which is the most advanced and comprehensive visa screening system anywhere in the world.

    Protected American workers and taxpayers.

    • Issued a comprehensive “public charge” regulation to ensure newcomers to the United States are financially self-sufficient and not reliant on welfare.
    • Created an enforcement mechanism for sponsor repayment and deeming, to ensure that people who are presenting themselves as sponsors are actually responsible for sponsor obligations.
    • Issued regulations to combat the horrendous practice of “birth tourism.”
    • Issued a rule with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to make illegal aliens ineligible for public housing.
    • Issued directives requiring Federal agencies to hire United States workers first and prioritizing the hiring of United States workers wherever possible.
    • Suspended the entry of low-wage workers that threaten American jobs.
    • Finalized new H-1B regulations to permanently end the displacement of United States workers and modify the administrative tools that are required for H-1B visa issuance.
    • Defended United States sovereignty by withdrawing from the United Nations’ Global Compact on Migration.
    • Suspended Employment Authorization Documents for aliens who arrive illegally between ports of entry and are ordered removed from the United States.
    • Restored integrity to the use of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) by strictly adhering to the statutory conditions required for TPS.

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    Restoring American Leadership Abroad

    Restored America’s leadership in the world and successfully negotiated to ensure our allies pay their fair share for our military protection.

    • Secured a $400 billion increase in defense spending from NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) allies by 2024, and the number of members meeting their minimum obligations more than doubled.
    • Credited by Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg for strengthening NATO.
    • Worked to reform and streamline the United Nations (UN) and reduced spending by $1.3 billion.
    • Allies, including Japan and the Republic of Korea, committed to increase burden-sharing.
    • Protected our Second Amendment rights by announcing the United States will never ratify the UN Arms Trade Treaty.
    • Returned 56 hostages and detainees from more than 24 countries.
    • Worked to advance a free and open Indo-Pacific region, promoting new investments and expanding American partnerships.

    Advanced peace through strength.

    • Withdrew from the horrible, one-sided Iran Nuclear Deal and imposed crippling sanctions on the Iranian Regime.
    • Conducted vigorous enforcement on all sanctions to bring Iran’s oil exports to zero and deny the regime its principal source of revenue.
    • First president to meet with a leader of North Korea and the first sitting president to cross the demilitarized zone into North Korea.
    • Maintained a maximum pressure campaign and enforced tough sanctions on North Korea while negotiating de-nuclearization, the release of American hostages, and the return of the remains of American heroes.
    • Brokered economic normalization between Serbia and Kosovo, bolstering peace in the Balkans.
    • Signed the Honk Kong Autonomy Act and ended the United States’ preferential treatment with Hong Kong to hold China accountable for its infringement on the autonomy of Hong Kong.
    • Led allied efforts to defeat the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to control the international telecommunications system.

    Renewed our cherished friendship and alliance with Israel and took historic action to promote peace in the Middle East.

    • Recognized Jerusalem as the true capital of Israel and quickly moved the American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
    • Acknowledged Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights and declared that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are not inconsistent with international law.
    • Removed the United States from the United Nations Human Rights Council due to the group’s blatant anti-Israel bias.
    • Brokered historic peace agreements between Israel and Arab-Muslim countries, including the United Arab Emirates, the Kingdom of Bahrain, and Sudan.
    • In addition, the United States negotiated a normalization agreement between Israel and Morocco, and recognized Moroccan Sovereignty over the entire Western Sahara, a position with long standing bipartisan support.
    • Brokered a deal for Kosovo to normalize ties and establish diplomatic relations with Israel.
    • Announced that Serbia would move its embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
    • First American president to address an assembly of leaders from more than 50 Muslim nations, and reach an agreement to fight terrorism in all its forms.
    • Established the Etidal Center to combat terrorism in the Middle East in conjunction with the Saudi Arabian Government.
    • Announced the Vision for Peace Political Plan – a two-state solution that resolves the risks of Palestinian statehood to Israel’s security, and the first time Israel has agreed to a map and a Palestinian state.
    • Released an economic plan to empower the Palestinian people and enhance Palestinian governance through historic private investment.

    Stood up against Communism and Socialism in the Western Hemisphere.

    • Reversed the previous Administration’s disastrous Cuba policy, canceling the sellout deal with the Communist Castro dictatorship.
    • Pledged not to lift sanctions until all political prisoners are freed; freedoms of assembly and expression are respected; all political parties are legalized; and free elections are scheduled.
    • Enacted a new policy aimed at preventing American dollars from funding the Cuban regime, including stricter travel restrictions and restrictions on the importation of Cuban alcohol and tobacco.
    • Implemented a cap on remittances to Cuba.
    • Enabled Americans to file lawsuits against persons and entities that traffic in property confiscated by the Cuban regime.
    • First world leader to recognize Juan Guaido as the Interim President of Venezuela and led a diplomatic coalition against the Socialist Dictator of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro.
    • Blocked all property of the Venezuelan Government in the jurisdiction of the United States.
    • Cut off the financial resources of the Maduro regime and sanctioned key sectors of the Venezuelan economy exploited by the regime.
    • Brought criminal charges against Nicolas Maduro for his narco-terrorism.
    • Imposed stiff sanctions on the Ortega regime in Nicaragua.
    • Joined together with Mexico and Canada in a successful bid to host the 2026 FIFA World Cup, with 60 matches to be held in the United States.
    • Won bid to host the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, California.

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    Colossal Rebuilding of the Military

    Rebuilt the military and created the Sixth Branch, the United States Space Force.

    • Completely rebuilt the United States military with over $2.2 trillion in defense spending, including $738 billion for 2020.
    • Secured three pay raises for our service members and their families, including the largest raise in a decade.
    • Established the Space Force, the first new branch of the United States Armed Forces since 1947.
    • Modernized and recapitalized our nuclear forces and missile defenses to ensure they continue to serve as a strong deterrent.
    • Upgraded our cyber defenses by elevating the Cyber Command into a major warfighting command and by reducing burdensome procedural restrictions on cyber operations.
    • Vetoed the FY21 National Defense Authorization Act, which failed to protect our national security, disrespected the history of our veterans and military, and contradicted our efforts to put America first.

    Defeated terrorists, held leaders accountable for malign actions, and bolstered peace around the world.

    • Defeated 100 percent of ISIS’ territorial caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
    • Freed nearly 8 million civilians from ISIS’ bloodthirsty control, and liberated Mosul, Raqqa, and the final ISIS foothold of Baghuz.
    • Killed the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and eliminated the world’s top terrorist, Qasem Soleimani.
    • Created the Terrorist Financing Targeting Center (TFTC) in partnership between the United States and its Gulf partners to combat extremist ideology and threats, and target terrorist financial networks, including over 60 terrorist individuals and entities spanning the globe.
    • Twice took decisive military action against the Assad regime in Syria for the barbaric use of chemical weapons against innocent civilians, including a successful 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles strike.
    • Authorized sanctions against bad actors tied to Syria’s chemical weapons program.
    • Negotiated an extended ceasefire with Turkey in northeast Syria.

    Addressed gaps in American’s defense-industrial base, providing much-needed updates to improve the safety of our country.

    • Protected America’s defense-industrial base, directing the first whole-of-government assessment of our manufacturing and defense supply chains since the 1950s.
    • Took decisive steps to secure our information and communications technology and services supply chain, including unsafe mobile applications.
    • Completed several multi-year nuclear material removal campaigns, securing over 1,000 kilograms of highly enriched uranium and significantly reducing global nuclear threats.
    • Signed an executive order directing Federal agencies to work together to diminish the capability of foreign adversaries to target our critical electric infrastructure.
    • Established a whole-of-government strategy addressing the threat posed by China’s malign efforts targeting the United States taxpayer-funded research and development ecosystem.
    • Advanced missile defense capabilities and regional alliances.
    • Bolstered the ability of our allies and partners to defend themselves through the sale of aid and military equipment.
    • Signed the largest arms deal ever, worth nearly $110 billion, with Saudi Arabia.

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    Serving and Protecting Our Veterans

    Reformed the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to improve care, choice, and employee accountability.

    • Signed and implemented the VA Mission Act, which made permanent Veterans CHOICE, revolutionized the VA community care system, and delivered quality care closer to home for Veterans.
    • The number of Veterans who say they trust VA services has increased 19 percent to a record 91 percent, an all-time high.
    • Offered same-day emergency mental health care at every VA medical facility, and secured $9.5 billion for mental health services in 2020.
    • Signed the VA Choice and Quality Employment Act of 2017, which ensured that veterans could continue to see the doctor of their choice and wouldn’t have to wait for care.
    • During the Trump Administration, millions of veterans have been able to choose a private doctor in their communities.
    • Expanded Veterans’ ability to access telehealth services, including through the “Anywhere to Anywhere” VA healthcare initiative leading to a 1000 percent increase in usage during COVID-19.
    • Signed the Veterans Affairs Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act and removed thousands of VA workers who failed to give our Vets the care they have so richly deserve.
    • Signed the Veterans Appeals Improvement and Modernization Act of 2017 and improved the efficiency of the VA, setting record numbers of appeals decisions.
    • Modernized medical records to begin a seamless transition from the Department of Defense to the VA.
    • Launched a new tool that provides Veterans with online access to average wait times and quality-of-care data.
    • The promised White House VA Hotline has fielded hundreds of thousands of calls.
    • Formed the PREVENTS Task Force to fight the tragedy of Veteran suicide.

    Decreased veteran homelessness, improved education benefits, and achieved record-low veteran unemployment.

    • Signed and implemented the Forever GI Bill, allowing Veterans to use their benefits to get an education at any point in their lives.
    • Eliminated every penny of Federal student loan debt owed by American veterans who are completely and permanently disabled.
    • Compared to 2009, 49 percent fewer veterans experienced homelessness nationwide during 2019.
    • Signed and implemented the HAVEN Act to ensure that Veterans who’ve declared bankruptcy don’t lose their disability payments.
    • Helped hundreds of thousands of military service members make the transition from the military to the civilian workforce, and developed programs to support the employment of military spouses.
    • Placed nearly 40,000 homeless veterans into employment through the Homeless Veterans Reintegration Program.
    • Placed over 600,000 veterans into employment through American Job Center services.
    • Enrolled over 500,000 transitioning service members in over 20,000 Department of Labor employment workshops.
    • Signed an executive order to help Veterans transition seamlessly into the United States Merchant Marine.

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    Making Communities Safer

    Signed into law landmark criminal justice reform.

    • Signed the bipartisan First Step Act into law, the first landmark criminal justice reform legislation ever passed to reduce recidivism and help former inmates successfully rejoin society.
    • Promoted second chance hiring to give former inmates the opportunity to live crime-free lives and find meaningful employment.
    • Launched a new “Ready to Work” initiative to help connect employers directly with former prisoners.
    • Awarded $2.2 million to states to expand the use of fidelity bonds, which underwrite companies that hire former prisoners.
    • Reversed decades-old ban on Second Chance Pell programs to provide postsecondary education to individuals who are incarcerated expand their skills and better succeed in the workforce upon re-entry.
    • Awarded over $333 million in Department of Labor grants to nonprofits and local and state governments for reentry projects focused on career development services for justice-involved youth and adults who were formerly incarcerated.

    Unprecedented support for law-enforcement.

    • In 2019, violent crime fell for the third consecutive year.
    • Since 2016, the violent crime rate has declined over 5 percent and the murder rate has decreased by over 7 percent.
    • Launched Operation Legend to combat a surge of violent crime in cities, resulting in more than 5,500 arrests.
    • Deployed the National Guard and Federal law enforcement to Kenosha to stop violence and restore public safety.
    • Provided $1 million to Kenosha law enforcement, nearly $4 million to support small businesses in Kenosha, and provided over $41 million to support law enforcement to the state of Wisconsin.
    • Deployed Federal agents to save the courthouse in Portland from rioters.
    • Signed an executive order outlining ten-year prison sentences for destroying Federal property and monuments.
    • Directed the Department of Justice (DOJ) to investigate and prosecute Federal offenses related to ongoing violence.
    • DOJ provided nearly $400 million for new law enforcement hiring.
    • Endorsed by the 355,000 members of the Fraternal Order of Police.
    • Revitalized Project Safe Neighborhoods, which brings together Federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement officials to develop solutions to violent crime.
    • Improved first-responder communications by deploying the FirstNet National Public Safety Broadband Network, which serves more than 12,000 public safety agencies across the Nation.
    • Established a new commission to evaluate best practices for recruiting, training, and supporting law enforcement officers.
    • Signed the Safe Policing for Safe Communities executive order to incentive local police department reforms in line with law and order.
    • Made hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of surplus military equipment available to local law enforcement.
    • Signed an executive order to help prevent violence against law enforcement officers.
    • Secured permanent funding for the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund for first responders.

    Implemented strong measures to stem hate crimes, gun violence, and human trafficking.

    • Signed an executive order making clear that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 applies to discrimination rooted in anti-Semitism.
    • Launched a centralized website to educate the public about hate crimes and encourage reporting.
    • Signed the Fix NICS Act to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous criminals.
    • Signed the STOP School Violence Act and created a Commission on School Safety to examine ways to make our schools safer.
    • Launched the Foster Youth to Independence initiative to prevent and end homelessness among young adults under the age of 25 who are in, or have recently left, the foster care system.
    • Signed the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which tightened criteria for whether countries are meeting standards for eliminating trafficking.
    • Established a task force to help combat the tragedy of missing or murdered Native American women and girls.
    • Prioritized fighting for the voiceless and ending the scourge of human trafficking across the Nation, through a whole of government back by legislation, executive action, and engagement with key industries.
    • Created the first-ever White House position focused solely on combating human trafficking.

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    Cherishing Life and Religious Liberty

    Steadfastly supported the sanctity of every human life and worked tirelessly to prevent government funding of abortion.

    • Reinstated and expanded the Mexico City Policy, ensuring that taxpayer money is not used to fund abortion globally.
    • Issued a rule preventing Title X taxpayer funding from subsiding the abortion industry.
    • Supported legislation to end late-term abortions.
    • Cut all funding to the United Nations population fund due to the fund’s support for coercive abortion and forced sterilization.
    • Signed legislation overturning the previous administration’s regulation that prohibited states from defunding abortion facilities as part of their family planning programs.
    • Fully enforced the requirement that taxpayer dollars do not support abortion coverage in Obamacare exchange plans.
    • Stopped the Federal funding of fetal tissue research.
    • Worked to protect healthcare entities and individuals’ conscience rights – ensuring that no medical professional is forced to participate in an abortion in violation of their beliefs.
    • Issued an executive order reinforcing requirement that all hospitals in the United States provide medical treatment or an emergency transfer for infants who are in need of emergency medical care—regardless of prematurity or disability.
    • Led a coalition of countries to sign the Geneva Consensus Declaration, declaring that there is no international right to abortion and committing to protecting women’s health.
    • First president in history to attend the March for Life.

    Stood up for religious liberty in the United States and around the world.

    • Protected the conscience rights of doctors, nurses, teachers, and groups like the Little Sisters of the Poor.
    • First president to convene a meeting at the United Nations to end religious persecution.
    • Established the White House Faith and Opportunity Initiative.
    • Stopped the Johnson Amendment from interfering with pastors’ right to speak their minds.
    • Reversed the previous administration’s policy that prevented the government from providing disaster relief to religious organizations.
    • Protected faith-based adoption and foster care providers, ensuring they can continue to serve their communities while following the teachings of their faith.
    • Reduced burdensome barriers to ensure Native Americans are free to keep spiritually and culturally significant eagle feathers found on their tribal lands.
    • Took action to ensure Federal employees can take paid time off work to observe religious holy days.
    • Signed legislation to assist religious and ethnic groups targeted by ISIS for mass murder and genocide in Syria and Iraq.
    • Directed American assistance toward persecuted communities, including through faith-based programs.
    • Launched the International Religious Freedom Alliance – the first-ever alliance devoted to confronting religious persecution around the world.
    • Appointed a Special Envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism.
    • Imposed restrictions on certain Chinese officials, internal security units, and companies for their complicity in the persecution of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang.
    • Issued an executive order to protect and promote religious freedom around the world.

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    Safeguarding the Environment

    Took strong action to protect the environment and ensure clean air and clean water.

    • Took action to protect vulnerable Americans from being exposed to lead and copper in drinking water and finalized a rule protecting children from lead-based paint hazards.
    • Invested over $38 billion in clean water infrastructure.
    • In 2019, America achieved the largest decline in carbon emissions of any country on earth. Since withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord, the United States has reduced carbon emissions more than any nation.
    • American levels of particulate matter – one of the main measures of air pollution – are approximately five times lower than the global average.
    • Between 2017 and 2019, the air became 7 percent cleaner – indicated by a steep drop in the combined emissions of criteria pollutants.
    • Led the world in greenhouse gas emissions reductions, having cut energy-related CO2 emissions by 12 percent from 2005 to 2018 while the rest of the world increased emissions by 24 percent.
    • In FY 2019 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cleaned up more major pollution sites than any year in nearly two decades.
    • The EPA delivered $300 million in Brownfields grants directly to communities most in need including investment in 118 Opportunity Zones.
    • Placed a moratorium on offshore drilling off the coasts of Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida.
    • Restored public access to Federal land at Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
    • Recovered more endangered or threatened species than any other administration in its first term.

    Secured agreements and signed legislation to protect the environment and preserve our Nation’s abundant national resources.

    • The USMCA guarantees the strongest environmental protections of any trade agreement in history.
    • Signed the Save Our Seas Act to protect our environment from foreign nations that litter our oceans with debris and developed the first-ever Federal strategic plan to address marine litter.
    • Signed the Great American Outdoors Act, securing the single largest investment in America’s National Parks and public lands in history.
    • Signed the largest public lands legislation in a decade, designating 1.3 million new acres of wilderness.
    • Signed a historic executive order promoting much more active forest management to prevent catastrophic wildfires.
    • Opened and expanded access to over 4 million acres of public lands for hunting and fishing.
    • Joined the One Trillion Trees Initiative to plant, conserve, and restore trees in America and around the world.
    • Delivered infrastructure upgrades and investments for numerous projects, including over half a billion dollars to fix the Herbert Hoover Dike and expanding funding for Everglades restoration by 55 percent.

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    Expanding Educational Opportunity

    Fought tirelessly to give every American access to the best possible education.

    • The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expanded School Choice, allowing parents to use up to $10,000 from a 529 education savings account to cover K-12 tuition costs at the public, private, or religious school of their choice.
    • Launched a new pro-American lesson plan for students called the 1776 Commission to promote patriotic education.
    • Prohibited the teaching of Critical Race Theory in the Federal government.
    • Established the National Garden of American Heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.
    • Called on Congress to pass the Education Freedom Scholarships and Opportunity Act to expand education options for 1 million students of all economic backgrounds.
    • Signed legislation reauthorizing the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program.
    • Issued updated guidance making clear that the First Amendment right to Free Exercise of Religion does not end at the door to a public school.

    Took action to promote technical education.

    • Signed into law the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, which provides over 13 million students with high-quality vocational education and extends more than $1.3 billion each year to states for critical workforce development programs.
    • Signed the INSPIRE Act which encouraged NASA to have more women and girls participate in STEM and seek careers in aerospace.
    • Allocated no less than $200 million each year in grants to prioritize women and minorities in STEM and computer science education.

    Drastically reformed and modernized our educational system to restore local control and promote fairness.

    • Restored state and local control of education by faithfully implementing the Every Student Succeeds Act.
    • Signed an executive order that ensures public universities protect First Amendment rights or they will risk losing funding, addresses student debt by requiring colleges to share a portion of the financial risk, and increases transparency by requiring universities to disclose information about the value of potential educational programs.
    • Issued a rule strengthening Title IX protections for survivors of sexual misconduct in schools, and that – for the first time in history – codifies that sexual harassment is prohibited under Title IX.
    • Negotiated historic bipartisan agreement on new higher education rules to increase innovation and lower costs by reforming accreditation, state authorization, distance education, competency-based education, credit hour, religious liberty, and TEACH Grants.

    Prioritized support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

    • Moved the Federal Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) Initiative back to the White House.
    • Signed into law the FUTURE Act, making permanent $255 million in annual funding for HBCUs and increasing funding for the Federal Pell Grant program.
    • Signed legislation that included more than $100 million for scholarships, research, and centers of excellence at HBCU land-grant institutions.
    • Fully forgave $322 million in disaster loans to four HBCUs in 2018, so they could fully focus on educating their students.
    • Enabled faith-based HBCUs to enjoy equal access to Federal support.

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    Combatting the Opioid Crisis

    Brought unprecedented attention and support to combat the opioid crisis.

    • Declared the opioid crisis a nationwide public health emergency.
    • Secured a record $6 billion in new funding to combat the opioid epidemic.
    • Signed the SUPPORT for Patients and Communities Act, the largest-ever legislative effort to address a drug crisis in our Nation’s history.
    • Launched the Initiative to Stop Opioid Abuse and Reduce Drug Supply and Demand in order to confront the many causes fueling the drug crisis.
    • The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded a record $9 billion in grants to expand access to prevention, treatment, and recovery services to States and local communities.
    • Passed the CRIB Act, allowing Medicaid to help mothers and their babies who are born physically dependent on opioids by covering their care in residential pediatric recovery facilities.
    • Distributed $1 billion in grants for addiction prevention and treatment.
    • Announced a Safer Prescriber Plan that seeks to decrease the amount of opioids prescriptions filled in America by one third within three years.
    • Reduced the total amount of opioids prescriptions filled in America.
    • Expanded access to medication-assisted treatment and life-saving Naloxone.
    • Launched FindTreatment.gov, a tool to find help for substance abuse.
    • Drug overdose deaths fell nationwide in 2018 for the first time in nearly three decades.
    • Launched the Drug-Impaired Driving Initiative to work with local law enforcement and the driving public at large to increase awareness.
    • Launched a nationwide public ad campaign on youth opioid abuse that reached 58 percent of young adults in America.
    • Since 2016, there has been a nearly 40 percent increase in the number of Americans receiving medication-assisted treatment.
    • Approved 29 state Medicaid demonstrations to improve access to opioid use disorder treatment, including new flexibility to cover inpatient and residential treatment.
    • Approved nearly $200 million in grants to address the opioid crisis in severely affected communities and to reintegrate workers in recovery back into the workforce.

    Took action to seize illegal drugs and punish those preying on innocent Americans.

    • In FY 2019, ICE HSI seized 12,466 pounds of opioids including 3,688 pounds of fentanyl, an increase of 35 percent from FY 2018.
    • Seized tens of thousands of kilograms of heroin and thousands of kilograms of fentanyl since 2017.
    • The Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecuted more fentanyl traffickers than ever before, dismantled 3,000 drug trafficking organizations, and seized enough fentanyl to kill 105,000 Americans.
    • DOJ charged more than 65 defendants collectively responsible for distributing over 45 million opioid pills.
    • Brought kingpin designations against traffickers operating in China, India, Mexico, and more who have played a role in the epidemic in America.
    • Indicted major Chinese drug traffickers for distributing fentanyl in the U.S for the first time ever, and convinced China to enact strict regulations to control the production and sale of fentanyl.

    If I have time, I’d like to go through this list to touch on the highlights of what the Trump Administration got right or wrong, what he accomplished that a Democratic Administration wou8ldn’t have, and what he accomplished that another Republican presidential admistration would or wouldn’t have.

    BidenWatch for October 26, 2020

    Monday, October 26th, 2020

    Eight days out from election day! The Crooked Joe revelations from Hunter’s laptop are coming so fast and heavy that I’m hard-pressed to corral them all! It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • “The Complete History Of Hunter Biden’s Crony-Connected Jobs.” There are a whole lot of them:

    That the 50-year-old Hunter has been trading on his Democratic father’s political influence his entire adult life raises legal questions about possible influence-peddling, government watchdogs and former federal investigators say. In addition, the more than two-decades-long pattern of nepotism casts fresh doubt on Joe Biden’s recent statements that he “never discussed” business with his son, and that his activities posed “no conflicts of interest.”

    Snip.

    1996-1998: MBNA Corp.

    Fresh out of college, credit-card giant MBNA put him on its payroll as “senior vice president” earning more than $100,000 a year, plus an undisclosed signing bonus. Delaware-based MBNA at the time was Biden’s largest donor and lobbying the Delaware senator for bankruptcy reforms that would make it harder for consumers to declare bankruptcy and write off credit-card debt.

    Fresh out of college I was working retail sales jobs while sharing an apartment and writing in my spare time.

    Besides a job for Hunter, bank executives and employees gave generously to Joe Biden’s campaigns – $214,000 total, federal records show – and one top executive even bought Biden’s Wilmington, Del., home for more than $200,000 above the market value, real estate records show. The exec paid top dollar – $1.2 million – for the old house even though it lacked central air conditioning. MBNA also flew Biden and his wife to events and covered their travel costs, disclosure forms show.

    Sen. Biden eventually came through for MBNA by sponsoring and whipping votes in the Senate to pass the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention Act.

    When NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw asked Biden during the 2008 presidential campaign whether it was wrong “for someone like you in the middle of all this to have your son collecting money from this big credit-card company while you were on the (Senate) floor protecting its interests,” Biden gave an answer he would repeat many times in the future: “Absolutely not,” he snapped, arguing it was completely appropriate and that Hunter deserved the position and generous salary because he graduated from Yale.

    Remember, people who graduated from Yale are automatically better than deplorables who graduated from a non-Ivy college, no matter how much cocaine they snort.

    1998-2001: Commerce Department

    Hunter also capitalized on the family name in 1998 when he joined President Clinton’s agency. In spite of having no experience in the dot-com industry, he was appointed “executive director of e-commerce policy coordination,” pulling down another six-figure salary plus bonuses.

    He landed the job after his father’s longtime campaign manager and lawyer William Oldaker called then-Commerce Secretary William Daley, who’d also worked on Biden’s campaigns, and put in a good word for his son, according to public records.

    2001-2009: Oldaker, Biden & Belair

    After Republican President George W. Bush took over the Commerce Department, Hunter left the government and joined Oldaker to open a lobbying shop in Washington, just blocks from Congress, where he gained access to exclusive business and political deals.

    Federal disclosure forms show Hunter Biden and his firm billed millions of dollars while lobbying on behalf of a host of hospitals and private colleges and universities, among other clients. In a 2006 disclosure statement submitted to the Senate, Hunter said his clients were “seeking federal appropriations dollars.”

    Hunter won the contract to represent St. Joseph’s University from an old Biden family friend who worked in government relations at the university and proposed he solicit earmarks for one of its programs in Philadelphia. The friend, Robert Skomorucha, remarked in a press interview that Hunter had “a very strong last name that really paid off in terms of our lobbying efforts.”

    “A really strong last name.” There’s the problem with the swamp in a nutshell.,

    These clients, like MBNA, also favored bankruptcy reforms to make it harder for patients and students to discharge debt in bankruptcy filings. At the same time Hunter was operating as a Beltway lobbyist, he was receiving “consulting payments” from his old employer MBNA, which was still courting his father over the bankruptcy reforms.

    In 2007, Hunter also dined with a private prison lobbyist who had business before a Senate Judiciary subcommittee Joe Biden chaired, according to published reports. Senate rules bar members or their staff from having contact with family members who are lobbyists seeking to influence legislation.

    Hunter’s lawyer-lobbyist firm was embroiled in a conflict-of-interest controversy in 2006 when it was criticized for representing a lobbyist under investigation by the House ethics committee. The lobbyist was still taking payments from his old K street firm while working as a top aide on the House Appropriations Committee. Hunter at the time was lobbying that same committee for earmarks for his clients.

    William Oldaker did not just make Hunter a rich lobbyist. Oldaker also secured a $1 million loan for him through a bank he co-founded, WashingtonFirst, that Hunter sought for an investment scheme, which later went sour.

    Joe Biden deposited hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign and political action committee donations at WashingtonFirst, while funneling hundreds of thousands in campaign and PAC expenditures to Oldaker, Biden & Belair. Joe Biden’s payments to Hunter’s lobbying firm, including more than $143,000 in 2007 alone, were listed as “legal services” in Federal Election Commission filings.

    Oldaker did not respond to a request for comment left at his office.

    But wait! Hunter had three other sinecures while working at Oldaker, Biden & Belair:

    2003-2005: National Group LLP

    While serving as a partner at Oldaker, Biden & Belair, Hunter also registered as a lobbyist for National Group, a lobbying-only subsidiary which shared offices with OB&B and specialized in targeted spending items inserted into legislation known as “earmarks.”

    Hunter represented his father’s alma mater, the University of Delaware, and other Biden constituents and submitted requests to Biden’s office for earmarks benefiting these clients in appropriations bills.

    2006-2007: Paradigm Companies LLC

    In 2005, when Joe Biden was thinking about making another run at the White House, after a 1987 bid that ended in plagiarism charges, his lobbyist son was looking for a new line of work too.

    In early 2006, Wall Street executive and Biden family friend Anthony Lotito said, Biden’s younger brother, Jim, phoned him on behalf of the senator. He said Biden wanted his youngest son – whom he still called “Honey” – to get out of the lobbying business to avoid allegations of conflicts of interest that might dog Biden’s presidential bid.

    “Biden was concerned with the impact that Hunter’s lobbying activities might have on his expected campaign [and asked his brother to] seek Lotito’s assistance in finding employment for Hunter in a non-lobbying capacity,” according to a January 2007 complaint that Lotito filed in New York state court against Hunter over alleged breach of contract in a related venture. (Jim and Hunter Biden denied such a phone call took place as described.)

    Lotito told the court he agreed to help Hunter as a favor to the senator, who had served on the powerful banking committee. He figured “the financial community might be a good starting place in which to seek out employment on Hunter’s behalf,” the court documents state. But he quickly found that Wall Street had “no interest” in hiring Biden.

    So the Bidens hatched a scheme to buy a hedge fund, “whereby Hunter would then assume a senior executive position with the company.” And Lotito helped broker the deal. Despite having no Wall Street experience, Biden was appointed interim CEO and president of the Paradigm investment fund and given a $1.2 million salary, according to SEC filings. Lotito joined the enterprise as a partner, and agreed to shepherd Hunter, still in his mid-thirties, through his new role in high-finance.

    “Given Hunter Biden’s inexperience in the securities industry,” the complaint states, it was agreed that Lotito would maintain an office at the new holding company’s New York headquarters “in order to assist Biden in discharging his duties as president.”

    After the venture failed, Lotito sued the Bidens for fraud. The Bidens countersued and the two parties settled in 2008.

    2006-2009: Amtrak

    During this same period, Hunter was appointed vice chairman of the taxpayer-subsidized rail line, thanks to the sponsorship of powerful Democratic Sen. Harry Reid, a political ally of his father.

    After that Rosemont Seneca Partners shows up, and we start to see the Hunter jobs BattleSwarm readers are already familiar with. Read the whole thing.

  • “Reported Biden Emails: Burisma Exec Said Hunter Biden’s Role Was To Halt Investigations.”
  • “Blockbuster Report Reveals How Biden Family Was Compromised By China“:

    Hunter Biden is partnered with the Chinese state. Entire investment partnership is Chinese state money from social security fund to China Development Bank. It is actually a subsidiary of the Bank of China. This is not remotely anything less than a Chinese state funded play.

    Though the entire size of the fund cannot be reconstructed, the Taiwanese cofounder who is now detained in China, reports it to be NOT $1-1.5 billion but $6.5 billion. This would make Hunters stake worth at a minimum at least $50 million if he was to sell it.

    Disturbingly, everyone on the Chinese side are clearly linked with influence and intelligence organizations. China uses very innocuous sounding organization names to hide PLA, United Front, or Ministry of Foreign Affairs influence/intelligence operations. This report cannot say Hunter was the target of such an operation or that China even targeted him. However, based upon the clear pattern of individuals and organizations surrounding him it is an entirely reasonable conclusion.

    Finally, the believed Godfather in arranging everything is a gentleman named Yang Jiechi. He is currently the CCP Director of Foreign Affairs leading strategist for America, Politburo member one of the most powerful men in China, and Xi confidant. Why does this matter?

    He met regularly with Joe Biden during his stint as Chinese ambassador the US when Biden chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Later he was Minister of Foreign Affairs when the investment partnership was made official in 2013. Importantly, the Taiwanese national listed MOFA institutions as the key clients in helping to arrange everything. Yang would clearly have known the importance of Hunter Biden and undoubtedly would have been informed of any dealings. Given that he is now the point person in China for dealing with the US this raises major concerns about a Biden administration dealing impartially with an individual in this capacity. These are documented facts from Chinese corporate records like IPO prospectuses and media. They raise very valid concerns about Biden linkages to China.

    Snip.

    Joe Biden’s compromising partnership with the Communist Party of China runs via Yang Jiechi (CPC’s Central Foreign Affairs Commission). YANG met frequently with BIDEN during his tenure at the Chinese embassy in Washington.

    Hunter Biden’s 2013 Bohai Harvest Rosemont investment partnership was set-up by Ministry of Foreign Affairs institutions who are tasked with garnering influence with foreign leaders during YANG’s tenure as Foreign Minister.

    HUNTER has a direct line to the Politburo, according to SOURCE A, a senior finance professional in China.

    Michael Lin, a Taiwanese national now detained in China, brokered the BHR partnership and partners with MOFA foreign influence organizations.

    LIN is a POI for his work on behalf of China, as confirmed by SOURCE B and SOURCE C (at two separate national intelligence agencies).

    BHR is a state managed operation. Leading shareholder in BHR is a Bank of China which lists BHR as a subsidiary and BHR’s partners are SOEs that funnel revenue/assets to BHR.

    HUNTER continues to hold 10% in BHR. He visited China in 2010 and met with major Chinese government financial companies that would later back BHR.

    HUNTER’s BHR stake (purchased for $400,000) is now likely be worth approx. $50 million (fees and capital appreciation based on BHR’s $6.5 billion AUM as stated by Michael Lin).
    HUNTER also did business with Chinese tycoons linked with the Chinese military and against the interests of US national security.

    BIDEN’s foreign policy stance towards China (formerly hawkish), turned positive despite China’s country’s rising geopolitical assertiveness.

    Plus this handy chart:

  • And did we mention the $5 million non-secured, forgivable Chinese loan to the Biden family? (Hat tip: Jack Posobiec.)
  • Wonder why elected Democrats are so loyal to the “Biden is as pure as the driven snow” narrative? They’re all in it together. “Report: Hunter Biden, Associates Wanted to Bring in Gov. Cuomo, Sen. Schumer for Chinese Deals.”

    Fox News released an email containing a list of “domestic contacts/projects,” which includes Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris, for Hunter Biden and his associates to lure into Chinese deals.

    The New York Post has more details on these contacts with explanations on why they should bring in people like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York Sen. Chuck Schumer. Uncle Jim Biden also wanted to know about any foreign friends they could drag into the deals.

    Fox News said the email with the list of contacts is not connected to Hunter’s laptop.

    Jim Biden sent the list of contacts to those in the May 13 email, which was all about a Chinese venture with now-defunct CEFC China Energy Co.

    Biden’s list named “Harris, D-Calif.; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.; Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo; New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio; former Virginia Gov. Terry McCauliffe.”

    From The New York Post:

    A May 15, 2017, memo naming potential contacts was sent by Joe Biden’s brother Jim to his nephew and three other men who all formed a limited liability company to partner with another firm on “global and/or domestic” projects involving “infrastructure, energy, financial services and other strategic sectors,” the documents show.

    The other company was backed by a since-vanished Chinese energy tycoon and was to “be primarily responsible for arranging financing and execution” of the projects, according to the documents released by Tony Bobulinksi, who was CEO of the joint venture.

    The memo, titled “Key domestic contacts for phase one target projects,” noted that Cuomo “is moving forward with major infrastructure projects such as the long-stalled Tappan Zee Bridge replacement and the much-needed redevelopment of LaGuardia Airport.”

    “His administration has invested nearly $4 billion through the Regional Council and Upstate Revitalization initiatives to jumpstart the economy and support local priorities for development,” it added.

  • Secret Service Travel Logs Match Details in Alleged Hunter Biden Emails.”

    Secret Service logs obtained earlier this year by Senate investigators include dates and locations matching those discussed in the emails allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

    The alignment of the dates in the emails and the Secret Service protective detail logs is significant because the authenticity of the emails, first published by the New York Post last week, is the subject of heated debate. The FBI, which purportedly obtained Hunter Biden’s laptop in December last year, has not yet officially confirmed that it is in possession of the device and whether the emails are genuine.

    In one alleged email, written after midnight on April 13, 2014, Hunter Biden wrote to Devon Archer, his business partner, that he will be traveling to Houston the next day. Secret Service logs obtained by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs show a trip by Biden on April 13-14, 2014.

    In another alleged email, Vadim Pozharskyi, a top executive from Ukrainian gas firm Burisma, wrote to Biden and Archer on May 12, 2014: “Following our talks during the visit to the Como Lake and our further discussions, I would like to bring the following situation to your attention.” While the email doesn’t cite a date for the trip, Secret Service logs include a travel entry for Biden on April 3-6, 2014.

    In another alleged email, Archer wrote on May 12, 2014, that he is with Biden in Doha, Qatar. Secret Service records include a trip by Biden to Doha, Qatar, on May 11-14, 2014.

  • Related: Did the Secret Service hide Hunter Biden documents from congress? “If Hunter Biden was receiving Secret Service protection after the date the Secret Service represented to the senators the detail had ended, it implies the Secret Service may have withheld relevant documents about its travels with Hunter Biden from the senators.”
  • “Hunter biz partner confirms email, details Joe Biden’s push to make millions from China“:

    Now we learn that Biden has secretly been playing footsie with China.

    The statement Wednesday night asserting that the former vice president was a willing and eager participant in a family scheme to make millions of dollars by partnering with a shady Chinese Communist firm is a singular event in a presidential race already overflowing with drama and intrigue.

    The dynamite assertion, believable because it aligns with earlier information we know to be true, came in a statement by Tony Bobulinski, who describes himself as a former partner of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden and Joe’s brother Jim in the China scheme. Bobulinski unloads his bill of accusations in blunt but precise language and detail.

    He confirms that he was one of the recipients of the May 13, 2017, email published by The Post eight days ago. That email, from another partner in the group, laid out cash and equity positions and mysteriously included a 10 percent set-aside for “the big guy.”

    Sources have said the “big guy” was Joe Biden. In a matter-of-fact manner, Bobulinski states that the “email is genuine” and that the former vice president and the man leading in the 2020 race is indeed “the big guy.”

  • “Long-standing claims of Biden corruption all but confirmed with Hunter’s emails.”

    Thanks to three brave Americans, we now know that Joe Biden has long misled the public about his involvement with his family’s foreign business entanglements while he served as vice president.

    At considerable personal risk, former Biden family business partners Tony Bobulinski and Bevan Cooney, and computer shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac, have come forward with tens of thousands of primary-source documents — internal corporate records, emails, and text messages — detailing years of business dealings that centered on trading on the Biden name. This material suggests that, despite Joe Biden’s insistence that he knew nothing about his family’s business deals, he was well aware of his son Hunter Biden’s business ventures in China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere.

    These new troves constitute hard evidence of Biden family corruption, and confirm our reporting dating back to our 2018 book “Secret Empires.”

  • “Photo shows Joe Biden meeting Hunter’s alleged business partner from Kazakhstan.” As long as it didn’t involve snorting or screwing, Joe Biden seemed to be involve in every single one of his son’s crooked deals.

  • The dog that isn’t barking: “‘I don’t think anybody is saying they are inauthentic,’ Biden campaigner Jenna Arnold admitted on Fox News after repeatedly trying to steer the conversation to other topics.”
  • Worth mentioning again: The Bidens even grifted off cancer research:

    A few days before the 2016 presidential election, outgoing Vice President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, announced the formation of the Biden Foundation. “The Biden Foundation is an educational foundation dedicated to exploring the ways that everyone—no matter their income level, race, gender, age, or sexuality—can expect to be treated with dignity and to receive a fair shot at achieving the American Dream,” read the nonprofit’s press release dated November 5, 2016.

    In the span of several weeks, the nonprofit quickly was seeded with millions of dollars in donations. A year-end disclosure report for 2016 showed $3.4 million in contributions; the group spent a few hundred thousand on expenses but awarded no grants that first year.

    The practice of spending most of its money on salaries and expenses while directing little or nothing toward the Biden Foundation’s stated mission followed a pattern. During its brief three-year history, the Biden Foundation raised nearly $10 million but less than ten percent was awarded to other charities—and half of that meager sum was donated to another Biden-run nonprofit.

    Although the Biden Foundation pledged to focus on the couple’s pet projects, a very small portion of the Bidens’ largess directly benefited any of those causes. Instead, the charity appears to have funded the Bidens’ pre-primary campaigning for president—most of the charity’s activities involved public speeches by Joe and Jill—while reaching out to key constituencies such as military families and gay rights activists.

    Snip.

    But despite all the spin, the Biden Foundation only gave two grants totalling a little more than $400,000 to the YMCA that year. It would mark the nonprofit’s only direct donation to the initiative.

    In fact, even though the Biden Foundation raised $3.2 million in 2018, it donated just $55,000 more to three other nonprofits. The Military Child Education Coalition, a charity based in Texas that assists the families of U.S. servicemen, received a paltry $20,000 from the fund.

    Politically connected lawyers, however, fared much better. Perkins Coie, best known for acting as the pass-through between Fusion GPS and the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016 to produce the infamous Steele dossier, was paid more than $230,000.

    Aside from a handful of minor grants, the Biden Foundation made only one other major contribution in its three-year history; the charity donated $495,323 to the Biden Cancer Initiative, a separate nonprofit created in 2017, two years after Beau Biden died of brain cancer. In 2017 and 2018, the Biden Cancer Initiative raised another $4.8 million in donations; it did not award any grants. Instead, the nonprofit spent $3 million on the salaries and benefits of a four-person staff.

  • Swing voters give debate to Trump.
  • A Bribe Too Far:

    It appears that the Hunter Biden’s hard drive is the real McCoy. Neither Joe nor Hunter Biden deny it. It’s clear from the emails and other files on the drive that Hunter Biden was the family bag man and that Ukrainians were paying him for access to his father while Joe Biden was Vice President. It also appears that individuals—and possibly governments—from other countries were paying for similar access.

    The Democrats impeached Donald Trump for asking the President of the Ukraine to pursue an investigation related to the bribery verified by the evidence on Hunter’s hard drive.

    Let that sink in for a moment.

    The Bidens acted as they did believing that they had an airtight level of protection. As the bribes rolled in, it seems they became increasingly arrogant. Hunter Biden’s arrogance compounded with his addictions and other character defects led him to be careless. He never should have let someone who wasn’t fully vetted to have access to any of his electronic devices, but he did.

    (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)

  • “Joe Biden Debate Pledge To Transition Away From Fossil Fuels Could Cost Him Pennsylvania and Other Energy States.”

    Saying the United States should transition away from fossil fuels is a popular idea on the left. It’s not workable in real life, however. Millions of people depend on fossil fuels not only to heat and light their homes, but for their jobs.

    During the final debate last night, Joe Biden said the United States should transition away from the oil industry. This was red meat for his base and the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, but it won’t play with millions of voters who live in the real world.

    It’s easy to say you support the idea of abandoning fossil fuels, but if you want to know how that works out, look no further than California, where their green energy policy has led to rolling blackouts.

    You can tell Biden’s comments were damaging, because the media has already moved to the ‘conservatives pounce’ stage of the issue.

  • “Biden’s $2 Trillion Clean Energy Plans Could Mark The Beginning Of The End For The Natural Gas Industry.”

    While Joe Biden has been busy speaking out of both sides of his mouth about what his position on fracking would be, if elected, another revelation has come to light: regardless of his position on fracking, his $2 trillion clean energy plan could be devastating to natural gas.

    As Bloomberg points out in a recent article, natural gas is not only a crucial part of the nation’s energy supply, but it directly effects votes in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where Biden is seeking to turn the state that leaned Trump in 2016.

    Biden’s energy plan could speed up natural gas becoming “economically and environmentally untenable within the power sector,” Bloomberg notes. Biden’s plan for a carbon neutral grid would all but assure natural gas is phased out in favor of renewable energy.

    Kevin Book, managing director of ClearView Energy Partners, put it bluntly: “Decarbonization isn’t a debate — it’s a fossil-fuel death sentence. It means a resource is going off the grid. That is the inevitable implication.”

  • Here’s a poll that should be keep Democratic strategists up at night: “Donald Trump Down One Point Among Black Voters in Battleground Michigan.”

    The time and resources President Trump’s campaign has been pouring into the battleground state of Michigan appear to be paying off, according to two new polls.

    Zia Poll surveyed “2851 likely voters and newly registered voters who have never voted in an election” and found Trump leading Joe Biden, 49 percent to 45 percent, for a four-point lead.

    The poll found 85 percent of Trump supporters were “very excited” about their candidate, while only 70 percent of Biden supporters are so.

    Regarding the economy, 55 percent of respondents said Trump would provide a “better” one. Forty-five percent of those surveyed said Biden would.

    Respondents “were almost evenly split” about whether Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) or Trump better handled the coronavirus pandemic response.

    The poll also found Biden with a “slight” lead among black and Hispanic voters.

    Painter Communications analyzed the poll and told Breitbart News Biden had the support of 46.8 percent of black respondents, while Trump was at 45.7 percent, a difference of just 1.1 percent.

    To put that in perspective, Trump won Michigan by a mere 11,000 votes in 2016 while Hillary Clinton racked up almost 300,000 more votes in urban Wayne County. Any significant defection of black voters to Trump probably puts Michigan out of reach for Biden.

  • This seems part of a trend: “President Trump’s Approval with Black Voters Soars to 46% After Debate.”
  • Still more on that theme:

  • Chelsea Handler tells ex-boyfriend 50 Cent that black people aren’t allowed to vote for Trump:

  • Trump-hostile Washington Monthly notes that Biden polls worse than than Hillary did and Trump could win even if you do believe the phony baloney polls.

    If Biden blows it in the sunbelt and Iowa, it will come down once again to the rust belt battlegrounds: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Remember: if Biden loses all of the above-mentioned states that he wants to flip from red to blue (which is quite possible) – then he has to sweep the Great Lakes battlegrounds. Not 2 of 3. 3 of 3.

    Right now (as of 10/20), those three states are looking pretty good for Biden, especially Michigan and even Wisconsin, which once seemed like it might be the hardest of the three to get back in the blue column where it resided from 1988 to 2012. Somewhat surprisingly, Pennsylvania is still a dogfight for Biden despite nearly 50 years in politics in neighboring Delaware and multiple visits to the Keystone State this year:

    Pennsylvania — +3.8
    Wisconsin — +6.2
    Michigan — +6.8

    So, remembering that Biden might need to sweep all three of those, my main cautionary note is to look at the Real Clear Politics polling averages for those states way back on October 19, 2016:

    Pennsylvania: Clinton +6.2
    Wisconsin: Clinton +7
    Michigan: Clinton +11.6

    As you can see, Joe Biden is doing worse in those state polls than Hillary was. And she, of course, lost them all.

  • More on that theme:

  • Glenn Greenwald points out the “obvious to anyone who isn’t a Biden partisan”: Biden refuses to say whether the emails are authentic or not, and members of the Democrat-loving press refuse to ask him.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • How Biden’s tax-and-spend proposals will damage the economy. “Experts project that the policy agenda would, by 2030, lead to 4.9 million fewer jobs and the economy shrinking by $2.6 trillion. So, too, the study projects that consumption would be $1.5 trillion lower in 2030 and families would see a $6,500 drop in median household income compared to a neutral scenario.”
  • Complete with sky-high taxes:

  • Stephen Green is not impressed with Joe Biden’s fathering skills:

    I’ve seen serious addiction up close. The kind of addiction that first leads to absences, then to sudden re-appearances to beg for forgiveness — and money. The kind of addiction that destroys relationships through lies, through theft, through neglect, and worse.

    When addiction reaches that stage, there are usually only two possible outcomes: The addict either hits bottom and cleans up their act, or they die.

    There is no doubt in my mind, having seen such behavior from much too close, that Hunter is on that path.

    The only way to help a fellow human being — in this case, a sole surviving son — is to stop enabling them.

    It isn’t easy, cutting a parent or a child off from everything but your love. But it’s either that or they die.

    Joe Biden, having stood over the graves of two of his children, let — or forced? — his remaining son to become his bagman.

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going easy on Hunter: I believe he belongs in prison every bit as much as he belongs in a 12-step program.

    The millions Hunter has raked in on his own and his father’s behalf have made them rich while enabling his addictions.

    A father with any kind of concern for his child’s welfare would have cut Hunter off from “family business,” as they say in The Godfather, and stuck him in rehab.

    Instead, Père Biden seems content to watch Hunter commit slow-motion suicide, so long as the easy money keeps coming in.

  • For those of you who always wanted to see Hunter Biden smoke crack naked while being serviced by a prostitute, the videos are out there.
  • How the media is deluding itself about this election. After “Hunter Biden isn’t a thing” and “Nobody spied on trump,” we get this:

    “AMERICA IS A RACIST COUNTRY AND IT’S TIME FOR A RECKONING!”

    Everything we see on television, right down to the riots and “burning down of our cities,” is staged for the media’s social engineering. Antifa and BLM are nothing but props rolled out by the media and left when and how they choose. They can set their movements ablaze or send them all home to their shame closets with the flip of a social switch. Obviously the damage these mobs do is real. The damage to property and brutality against people — the death — it’s obviously all very, very real. But it’s also anecdotal and not nearly as pervasive as the media wants people to believe. It’s not actually what’s real in America and it’s not what people are thinking about or focused on or worried about in their every day lives. And honest people know that. Honest people know the media are working hard to stoke racial tensions and division, and to make us believe our nation is fraught with division and detriment.

    It’s not. And the vast majority of honest observers, even those who don’t watch politics real closely, know that.

  • Biden falsely claims that the intelligence community has cleared his family of wrongdoing. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Ann Althouse on that “gooiest ever” Sam Elliott ad:

    Yes, whoever made that ad, sure had the “broader audience in mind.” I can picture clever fellows laughing at their own work, comparing it to a “South Park” parody, and joking about how dumb Americans are.

    Watching that ad, a few seconds in, Meade said “Tegridy Farms,” and toward the end, I said, “This is for the dumb people” and “Actually, this is very effective.” I could feel the emotion they were trying to put over. Joe will bring us together — no reason why and don’t you worry your head about what he’ll actually do while you’re in a hypnotic fog of phony-baloney togetherness.

    I’m looking for the right “Tegridy Farms” ad to convey Meade’s point. There’s this, but as Meade said, “It doesn’t have enough of that voice — you know, like that guy… that guy in ‘The Big Lebowski.'” I say: “Sam Elliott! You do realize the voice in the Biden ad isSam Elliott.” Meade thought it was just some guy doing his damnedest to sound like Sam Elliott. No, that’s actually Sam Elliott. You might think Sam Elliott is such an extreme that he’d be reserved for the comic exaggeration of the voice of a narrator…

    And then she links to the South Park Tegridy ad, which gives me an excuse to embed it here (NSFW because, you know, South Park):

  • You know Biden lost the debate when he checked his watch.
  • Our media is refusing to even consider whether laptop emails are genuine or not. “Is there any basis for these claims of fraud and disinformation? None, so far.”
  • “The Media Will Drag Joe Biden Across the Finish Line if It’s the Last Thing They Do.”

    Every four years, I assume that our moral, ethical, and intellectual betters in the press have stooped as low as they can possibly stoop. Then another election rolls around and they prove me wrong. It happens every time. I don’t know what I expected.

    The NY Post‘s story about Hunter Biden’s allegedly abandoned laptop has forced journalists and other Democrats to cast aside their thin veil of impartiality. Wherever the evidence may lead, they can’t allow themselves to follow. Because if they do, it might bring about four more years of Bad Orange Man.

    I already wrote in my candidate and I don’t care who wins on November 3. I’ve resigned myself to the result either way. But these @$$holes sure haven’t. They’re doing everything they can to drag Joe’s decrepit old carcass across the finish line, and they’re shouting down or silencing anybody who doesn’t like it. I’ve had my differences with Trump supporters over the years, but they’re not the ones censoring me, locking me out of my social media accounts, and trying to shut me up.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Here’s a Never Trumper who has come to the reluctant conclusion that she has to vote for Trump after all. “The reason I am feeling pushed towards Trump, and at such a late date, and despite my strong inclinations otherwise, is that I no longer feel this is a Kang v. Kodos scenario. From the right, I continue to see the usual callous indifference to the lives of ordinary people, but it’s just indifference. The message I am getting from the left is that I am a target they mean to destroy.” The last sentence is true, but it was no less true four years ago. She trots out the litany of Social justice Warrior targeting, Democratic hostility to religion, rioting and looting, and gross media bias. All true, but all (save the scale of the looting and changes wrought by the Wuhan coronavirus) were all true four years ago. “I am feeling pushed towards voting for Trump because on so many different levels it seems that my inalienable rights and my personal well-being are actively targeted by the ruling powers among the left.” True. What took you so damn long to realize it? (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • What should disqualify Biden: He says that America has never lived up to it’s ideas. Those portions of western Europe not currently speaking German or Russian might disagree…
  • “Biden Campaigns Funneled Over $70,000 To Hunter Biden, Nearly $150,000 To Entire Family.” (Hat tip: The Daily Gator.)
  • You know who else got mentioned in the Biden emails? Frank Luntz.
  • A tale of two campaigns continued:

  • Feel the excitement:

  • Leaked Biden Ukraine phone-call?

    Damning if true.

  • Biden confuses Trump for Bush:

  • Happy Halloween!

  • I laughed:

  • Thread that suggests Biden is sufering from Parkinson’s disease. I would take a diagnosis made from videos like this with several grains of salt, though if you want to research it the website is here.
  • “Why I don’t believe in the polls, and you shouldn’t either.”

    Over the past two months, I took it upon myself to travel flyover country and the north, spanning Kentucky, Ohio, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Texas and North Dakota. Throughout my journey I spoke with residents and business owners about the election, who they’re voting for and where they see things going in the 2020 election. What came of two conversations in particular will bring a little bit of perspective to those polls.

    The first conversation that stood out to me was at a barbershop in Excelsior, Minnesota — a town with the population of about 2,500 about 30 minutes outside of Minneapolis. While getting my hair cut, I struck up a conversation with the barber and patrons. Of the residents there, three had been polled about the presidential election, and the barber said that both he and his wife had received separate phone calls. All — every one of them — told me that they told the pollster that they were voting for Joe Biden, when they are voting for Mr. Trump. Why would they do this? According to all of them, for the safety of their family.

    Each person in the barbershop stated that they knew the George Floyd riots were caused by the left and each said they were afraid that if they said that they were Trump voters, violence or being canceled could happen to them. The barbershop owner in particular stated that he was, “well aware of cancel culture …” and worried he would be slammed on online ratings, and people would try to destroy his decades-old business based on his support of the president — so he lied to protect his livelihood.

    The second conversation that stood out to me was with my Uber driver just outside of Dallas, Texas. My driver was an immigrant from Nigeria to America nearly 20 years ago and an immigrant from New York City to a suburb of Dallas just last month. I asked the father of four what he thought about the election and he said that, where he once was a Democrat, he would never vote Democratic again because of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio’s shutting down of the state and city. He used his stimulus money and extra unemployment from the federal government to uproot his family and move across the country for “… half the rent, no state income tax, and the ability to work.”

  • Bring it!

  • Truth:

  • “Don’t mention Joe’s name”:


    

  • Joe Biden repeats the lie of the year, saying no one lost their coverage under ObamaCare. Oh, and he promises the same for BidenCare.
  • “COVER-UP! ABC/CBS/NBC Bury Hunter Biden Scandals (14 Minutes in 51 Hours).”
  • Democratic Governor Gretchen “The Witch” Whitmer: “Votre for biden if you ever want to go to church again.”
  • Zing!

  • Heh:

  • Ouch!

  • Sad trombone:

  • Boom:

  • The Bablyon Bee obtains Joe Biden’s debate notes. “Reminder: you are JOE BIDEN and you are running for PRESIDENT.”
  • “According to sources, Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett has adopted her 8th child, a troubled local youngster named Hunter.”
  • Biden offers anyone who votes for him a seat in the Supreme Court.
  • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    BidenWatch for October 19, 2020

    Monday, October 19th, 2020

    Hunter Biden revelations continue to explode, Kazakhstan joins China and Ukraine in the Biden Payola Sweepstakes, inside Biden’s Malarkey Factory, and the revolving door between social media giants and Team Biden. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

    Just two more BidenWatchs until election day!

  • If you haven’t been following last week’s Hunter Biden revelations, click here and here.
  • Latest Hunter Biden revelations: Crooked dealings with Kazakhstan:

    Hunter Biden is facing fresh questions over business dealing in yet another nation — Kazakhstan.

    Between 2012 and 2014 — when his father Joe Biden served as Vice President — Hunter Biden worked as a go-between to Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakh oligarch with close ties to the country’s longtime kleptocratic leader Nursultan Nazarbayev, The Daily Mail reported.

    The British tabloid said they obtained emails from “anti-corruption campaigners” in Kazakhstan showing Hunter making contact with Rakishev and attempting to facilitate investment for his cash in New York, Washington DC and a Nevada mining company.

    Through his connections, emails show Hunter Biden successfully engineered a $1 million investment from Rakishev to filmmaker Alexandra Forbes Kerry — the daughter of ex-Sen. and former Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, the report said.

    Hunter Biden also traveled to the country’s capital of Astana for business talks.

    Rakishev, however, repeatedly ran into problems finding western business partners due to the murky origins of his wealth. The respected International Finance Corp. pulled out a planned deal with him over “liabilities” stemming from his connections to the country’s rulers.

    As in other nations like Ukraine and China where Hunter plied his trade, Joe Biden may not have been far behind. The Mail published a photo they obtained from the “Kazakhstani Initiative on Asset Recovery” showing Hunter Biden with his beaming father alongside Rakishev.

  • Has another Hunter Biden laptop been seized in Ukraine? “A Ukrainian lawmaker has claimed a second laptop belonging to Hunter Biden’s business contacts in the country has been seized by law enforcement there. Andrii Derkach posted to Facebook on Friday to say there is a ‘second laptop’ involving evidence of corruption and connected to the Bidens.” As with all foreign sources, some caution is probably in order.
  • “Has the FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop material for ten months?”

    A whistleblower says that many months ago, he provided the FBI contents of a laptop computer once used by Hunter Biden.

    That’s according to a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray sent today by Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.). The letter states that an unnamed whistleblower contacted Sen. Johnson’s committee on September 24, a day after the committee released its investigation into alleged Biden conflicts of interest.

    The whistleblower reported he had turned over the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop December 9, 2019 in response to a grand jury subpoena issued by the FBI from the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware. Delaware is the Bidens’ home state.

    In the letter today, Sen. Johnson says that he and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked the FBI about facts alleged by the whistleblower but the FBI stonewalled. That despite the fact that Johnson says several of their questions were not related to confidential information regarding “the possible existence of an ongoing grand jury investigation.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • More from Rudy Giuliani on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Including the fact that Biden’s lawyer tried to get the laptop back after the story broke. Plus: “It’s got him [Hunter Biden] there with crack pipes, it’s got him there doing an imitation of Anthony Weiner about 50 times.” Also:

    He went on to say that there would be more communications that would describe how Joe Biden was being compensated.

    “In fact, he was getting a large portion of this money,” Giuliani said, adding that the information would explain how Joe Biden, who has never made that much money as a politician, “has two or three luxurious homes.”

    “Because he didn’t pay for anything, Hunter did,” he explained.

    “This is a long term bribery scheme that started low level in Delaware with his brother James—selling his office,” Giuliani told Crowder.

    “When they got to the big time, they shook down Iraq for … I think about 500 million, Ukraine for about 20 [million], China—I don’t know—30, 40 million?” he said.

    Giuliani added that he almost forgot Russia. “The 3.5 million from the mayor’s wife,” who he noted is a good friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “That woman is a close ally of Putin,” Giuliani said, pointing out the irony of the president being accused of colluding with Russia, when “Biden actually got paid by Russia!”

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • “Hunter Biden demanded Chinese billionaire pay $10 million for ‘introductions alone,’ emails show.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Here’s a New York Times piece that attempts to debunk the Hunter Biden story by taking every Team Biden pronouncement at face value, but which nonetheless provides an awful lot of damning context for his China dealings:

    The $1.5 billion figure to which Mr. Trump referred on Thursday appears to be the amount of money that a Shanghai-based private-equity company, BHR Equity Investment Fund Management Co., aimed to raise in 2014. The company, which says its biggest shareholder is the state-controlled Bank of China, pools money and invests in companies, many of which are also state owned.

    Hunter Biden has been a member of the board of BHR since it was formed in late 2013. In October 2017, after his father had left the vice presidency, he bought 10 percent of the firm, investing the equivalent of $420,000.

    But his lawyer, George Mesires, said on Thursday that he has never been paid for his role on the board, and has not profited financially since he began as a part-owner.

    “He has not been compensated for being on the board of directors, nor has he received any return on his investment to date,” Mr. Mesires said. Although BHR has been involved in a number of business deals, he said, “there have been no distributions to the shareholders since Hunter has been an equity owner.”

    Translation: “Sure, he’s part owner of a company with several Communist Chinese officials, but you have top trust us when we say he hasn’t made any money off the deal!”

    With his latest attacks on the Bidens, Mr. Trump is “desperately clutching for conspiracy theories that have been debunked and dismissed by independent, credible news organizations,” Kate Bedingfield, Mr. Biden’s deputy campaign manager, said in a statement.

    Still, the fact that Chinese state-owned firms were interested in linking arms with Hunter Biden while his father was vice president fits a long pattern of companies owned by or closely tied to foreign governments courting the families of high-ranking American officials. In 2002, for example, when George W. Bush was president, his brother Neil won a $400,000 consulting contract to advise a Chinese semiconductor company co-founded by the son of the man who was then China’s president.

    “Almost any senior name that I start researching, I run into practices like this. It is extraordinarily widespread,” Sarah Chayes, the author of the book “Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens Global Security,” said in an interview on National Public Radio on Thursday. “How did we all convince ourselves that this isn’t corrupt?”

    Asked if there was any conflict of interest, Mr. Mesires, said: “Hunter has been repeatedly clear on this point. Hunter has not and does not discuss his business interests with his father.”

    A spokesman for the Biden campaign also said that the former vice president never discussed the China venture with his son.

    The only known connection between the elder Mr. Biden and BHR came in early December 2013 in Beijing. Mr. Biden, who had traveled to China on official business as vice president, met and shook hands with his son’s business associate, Jonathan Li, in the lobby of the hotel where the American delegation was staying, according to an account in The New Yorker. The magazine said Hunter Biden had arranged the encounter with Mr. Li, who was headed for a post as BHR’s chief executive.

    Hunter Biden went along to Beijing, too, because his young daughter had been invited and needed to be chaperoned, according to Mr. Mesires. He said that his client and Mr. Li met for coffee on the trip but that it was only a social chat. “He conducted no business there,” the lawyer said.

    Several days after the trip, BHR won a business license from the Chinese government. Mr. Mesires said that the registration paperwork had already been submitted and that the timing of the approval was purely coincidental. Hunter Biden was not involved in the firm’s registration, and its approval “was not related in any way, shape or form to Hunter’s visit,” he said.

    To raise funds, BHR teamed up with some of China’s leading state-owned financial companies, including its biggest indirect shareholder, Bank of China, as well as China Development Bank and the country’s social security fund, according BHR’s website. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2014 that the firm was seeking to raise $1.5 billion.

    That figure was then cited by Peter Schweizer, a conservative author, in a 2018 book detailing the China business ties of some prominent American political families. Mr. Schweizer was also the author of the 2015 book “Clinton Cash.”

    Until October 2017, well after his father had stepped down from the vice presidency, Hunter Biden had no equity stake in BHR, Mr. Mesires said. He said Mr. Biden bought a stake in the firm in the name of a company named Skaneateles L.L.C. for the equivalent of about $420,000. That gave him about 10 percent of the company’s registered capital of 30 million renminbi, China’s currency. Skaneateles is the New York hometown of Hunter Biden’s mother, who died in 1972.

    BHR has invested in a number of state-owned Chinese companies, including a subsidiary of the oil refiner Sinopec and China General Nuclear Power Group. The business focus of some of them is at odds with American policy.

    For example, the company invested in Face++, a division of the Chinese company Megvii, which specializes in facial recognition technology that is promoted for use by China’s police, according to a report by Human Rights Watch. BHR also invested alongside AVIC, a major state-owned aerospace and defense company that builds fighter jets for the Chinese military.

    “Nothing to see here, folks! But that Ukrainian phonecall was an impeachable offense!”

  • “5 Ways Hunter Biden’s Business Deals Empowered China at America’s Expense:

    1. Military technology

    “In 2015, Hunter Biden’s Bohai Harvest joined forces with Chinese military contractor AVIC to buy American parts manufacturer Henniges,” Schweizer explains in the documentary. Henniges produces dual-use technology, which can be used for commercial and military purposes. The deal required Obama administration approval, and the Obama administration did approve it.

    AVIC, a company notorious for stealing U.S. military technology, bought 51 percent of Henniges while Bohai Harvest bought the other 49 percent.

    2. Military surveillance tech used on the Uyghurs

    “Hunter’s firm, Bohai Harvest, also invested in military surveillance technology that the Chinese government would use to monitor and control the population in their own country,” Schweizer says.

    The company, FACE++, developed technology the Chinese Communist Party used to identify potential terrorists, which helped result in the detention of over 1 million Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

    Plus helping China obtain nuclear secrets.

  • More on the Ukraine emails.
  • If you’re wondering what photos of Hunter Biden Twitter is trying to censor, here’s the NSFW one of him snorting cocaine off a woman’s ass. Some have asserted that the lady in question is underage, but that’s not in evidence from the pic.
  • Interestingly, nothing comes up when using “Hunter Biden cocaine ass” as the Twitter image search terms, but do come up if you remove “ass.” So: The usual twitter incompetence extends to their censorship as well…
  • Testy:

  • You know that Team Biden is none too pleased with the New York Post daring to report on the laptop scandal.
  • More of that all-in-the-family Biden corruption: “Biden’s son-in-law advises campaign on pandemic while investing in Covid-19 startups.” That’s Howard Krein for those of you playing along on the home game…
  • China and Iran want you to vote for Biden:

    It’s no secret the totalitarian governments of China and Iran favor Joe Biden in the presidential election.

    The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) would like nothing more than to go back to the status quo ante, the pre-Trump world when American politicians convinced themselves (or pretended to) China would turn democratic if we gave them favorable trade terms and shut up about their monstrous repressive policies, including the hundreds of thousands—or is it millions—languishing in “reeducation” camps while the rest of their population becomes subject to the pervasive Orwellian surveillance of the “social credit“ system.

    Then there’s the little matter of the as yet still mysterious provenance of the novel coronavirus, appropriately called the CCP virus hereabouts, that has wreaked such havoc across the globe. When we will know the truth about what really happened in the Wuhan virology lab? Would a Biden administration even want to know?

    And, yes, as most of us realize, there’s considerably more, but it was all okay in the view of Democrats like Biden and Sen. Dianne Feinstein—she of the Chinese chauffeur who, mirabile dictu, was suddenly exposed as a spy after twenty years of service to her—as long as there was money to be made.

    And there was, a lot, as Hunter Biden, not to mention Feinstein’s husband and Michael Bloomberg, can attest.

    Hunter’s father had to revise his initial praise of China, pooh-poohing the idea they might be an enemy, when things started to get a little obvious and handlers whispered in his ear this was not exactly the road to the White House.

    So it’s hard to feel reassured about how Joe would behave toward the communist regime once in office. There’s a great deal more reason, actual evidence of deals, to believe the Chinese have “special leverage” with Biden than there ever was that the Russians had something on Trump.

    And politicians like Biden and Feinstein are far from alone in their fealty to Beijing. They have plenty of support among American progressives. As is well known, many of our universities, from Harvard on down, have been bribed with huge sums by the CCP to regard them favorably, even have had spies on the faculty, with Confucius Institutes, essentially communist propaganda arms, installed on many campuses.

    Would a President Biden fight this network of corruption that actually justifies and teaches totalitarianism to our youth? Does he even think or know about it?

    We know Trump would because he already has. He does it.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • You know that whole “Biden Landslide” narrative the media is trying to sell? You shouldn’t be buying.

    Early voting data in battleground states shows Trump outpacing national polls giving Biden an edge

    The Republican Party is keeping pace in mail-in and early voting in three key swing states despite polls showing early voting should clearly favor Joe Biden.

    Data out of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio indicates that registered Republicans are returning ballots at about the same rate as registered Democrats in the battleground states.

    In Michigan as of Wednesday, just over 1 million ballots have been returned, 40% from registered Democrats, with the same from registered Republicans. In Wisconsin, 40% of the 711,855 returned ballots have been from Democrats, while 38% have come from Republicans. The GOP actually leads in Ohio, with 45% of 475,259 early ballot returns coming from Republicans, compared to 43% from registered Democrats. The preliminary data matches up with the requests by party affiliation for mail-in ballots.

    The data contradicts national polls showing Biden supporters overwhelmingly plan to vote by mail or early in person. According to a Pew Research poll released Friday, 55% of voters who plan to cast their ballot in person before Election Day support Biden, compared to 40% who support President Trump.

    For a few weeks now, there has been a massive divide between what the polls say and what you can see happening on the ground. Every poll shows Biden leading, yet public support for Trump remains huge and enthusiastic.

    One other thing that’s not showing up in the polls and that’s favoring Trump is voter registration.

  • Borepatch wonders how many fraudulent votes Biden will need to win.

    Breaking it down, we see the following minimum fraudulent ballots needed:

    Michigan +5%
    Pennsylvania: + 5%
    Wisconsin: +6%

    So I went and looked at what the percentages translated into in terms of actual ballots cast. Here’s what’s needed:

    Michigan: 113, 442
    Pennsylvania: 146,322
    Wisconsin: 82,952
    Total: 342,716

    Note that this is net new fraud, on top of whatever was done in 2016. And this is the best case scenario – there’s no margin of error at all for Team Biden here, and so it really needs to be 500,000.

    Plus that many again to keep Trump from flipping Blue states.

  • Hillary Auditions for SecDef in 5000-Word Pro-Biden Article Which Admits Massive Defense Jobs Cuts Plan.”
  • Biden was gassed an hour into his softball-tossing Town Hall. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Why a Biden Presidency will end the U.S. oil boom:

    To talk about a Biden-Harris administration let’s first talk about the Obama-Eric Holder/Loretta Lynch administration.

    Back in 2015 and 2016, when Holder and Lynch were President Obama’s Attorney Generals, my frack company was beset with an IRS audit, an International Fuel Tax (“IFTA”) audit and a Department of Labor investigation. Not to be excluded, I was also personally audited by the IRS. Fortunately, me and my company cleared the IRS audits without penalty (other than paying our accountant). The Department of Labor audit got us for something less than $250, based on some arcane back of the book calculation on arbitrarily given bonuses. But the IFTA audit did some damage with a $40,000 paperwork related fine even though all our taxes were paid at the pump. All three agencies and all four audits were federal, and all came at roughly the same time. When I asked the Department of Labor attorney how she even found our little basement office, she kept mum.

    There was no point in her answering – we both knew why she was there.

    Her 18,000-employee strong department, like the IRS and IFTA, had been weaponized to undermine the oil and gas industry. AGs Holder and Lynch, likely with President Obama’s blessing, were picking and choosing and me and my industry got picked.

    Snip.

    Now, we have Vice President Biden saying he supports fracking when he swings through natural gas rich Pennsylvania, but we all know that is just politicking. His previous anti-fracking statements, all of them inconveniently caught on imperishable video tape, suggest some double speak here.

    So where does Joe Biden truthfully stand on fracking?

    That depends on who he’s talking to. In the old days they called it “waffling” and it was a disqualifier. Not so any longer. If there is any sort of pushback, the 2020 method is to simply just deny that you have multiple positions on the same subject. When no one pushes back, why not?

    They call Joe a fair-minded moderate, a congenial and thoughtful friend to both sides of an argument. I’m sorry, I just don’t see it. A moderate doesn’t choose a San Francisco prosecutor with an anti-fossil fuel record as a running mate. A moderate also wouldn’t choose socialist New York Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez to co-chair his climate task force.

    During the recent Harris-Pence debate, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez Tweeted “Fracking is bad, actually”. So, I guess we at least know where she stands, a breath of fresh air given the chicanery of the Biden-Harris oil and gas platform. Now rumors of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo as a Biden administration Attorney General are being reported. True or not, it knocks the wind out of the rest of that moderate argument. Remember, Governor Cuomo was the guy who ordered his own state regulators to study the health and safety of fracking. When their study qualified fracking as environmentally safe, Mr. Cuomo outlawed it anyways. So much for open minded moderation, Mr. Biden. These aren’t “across the aisle” sorts of people that Biden’s handlers would want you to believe are open minded to US Energy Policy. Moderates simply don’t choose vehemently anti oil and gas lightning rods as successors, advisors and top cops.

    In a recent Rasmussen Reports poll, 59% of respondents didn’t think Joe Biden would serve-out a full four-year term due to health-related issues. That would leave us with Senator Harris as president. And where exactly would that leave us? I would argue, uncertain at best. When President Trump won the 2016 presidential election, the oil and gas industry immediately turned on after a punishing two-year downturn. Oil and gas prices didn’t rise as a result of his victory, but business confidence did. Operators teed up new drills and completions and service companies like mine were immediately called back to work. We finally had an administration that was supportive of extraction rather than vaguely duplicitous about it. Four years later, having a new Commander and Chief who is well known as anti-fracking isn’t going to do much for industry confidence. Investment will dwindle, jobs will be lost and the environment will suffer. Natural gas power plants are the reason for the considerable drop in CO2 emissions in US air over the last decade. Fueling these plants is the gas from fractured horizontal shale. Stop fracking and natural gas stops flowing—right away.

    Should a Biden presidency prevail in the upcoming elections, my own experience tells me that our oil and gas industry will be facing regulatory headwinds that will far exceed the blow back I personally faced during President Obama’s time in office.

  • “Biden Tries To Gloss Over His Long History of Supporting the Drug War and Draconian Criminal Penalties.”

    First, Biden did not merely “support” the 1994 law; he wrote the damned thing, which he has proudly called “the 1994 Biden Crime Bill.” Second, as much as Biden might like to disavow the law’s penalty enhancements now that public opinion on criminal justice has shifted, he was proud of them at the time. Third, the 1994 crime bill is just one piece of legislation in Biden’s long history of supporting mindlessly punitive responses to drugs and crime.

    Biden is trying to gloss over a major theme of his political career. “Every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress—every minor crime bill—has had the name of the Democratic senator from Delaware, Joe Biden,” he bragged in 1993. Now he wants us to believe his agenda was limited to domestic violence, community policing, and gun control.

    “Things have changed drastically” since 1994, Biden said last night, noting that “the Black Caucus voted” for the crime bill, and “every black mayor supported it.” In other words, now that black politicians and Democrats generally have rejected the idea that criminal penalties can never be too severe, Biden has shifted with the winds of opinion. But as Sen. Cory Booker (D–N.J.) noted during a Democratic presidential debate last year, that does not mean we should forget Biden’s leading role in the disastrous war on drugs and the draconian criminal justice policies that put more and more people in cages for longer and longer periods of time.

    “The crime bill itself did not have mandatory sentences except for two things,” Biden said. He mentioned the law’s “three strikes and you’re out” provision, which required a life sentence for anyone convicted of a violent crime after committing two other felonies, one of which can be a drug offense. He said he “voted against” that provision, which is not exactly true. While he did express concern that the provision was not focused narrowly enough on serious violent crimes, he voted for it as part of the broader bill.

    In any case, Biden did not just go along with the crime bill’s punitive provisions; he crowed about them. Like a crass car salesman hawking a new model with more of everything, he touted “70 additional enhancements of penalties” and “60 new death penalties—brand new—60.” He denounced as “poppycock” the notion, which would later be defensively deployed by Bill Clinton and Biden himself, that “somehow the Republicans tried to make the crime bill tougher.” Biden bragged that he had conferred with “the cops” instead of some namby-pamby “liberal confab” while writing the bill.

    As for “what the states did locally,” the law was designed to increase incarceration. It provided $10 billion in subsidies for state prison construction, contingent on passage of “truth in sentencing” laws that limited or abolished parole. “What I was against was giving states more money for prison systems,” Biden said last night. But that is simply not true. As FactCheck.org noted last year, “Biden did support $6 billion in funding for state prison construction, but not the $10 billion that was part of the final bill.”

    For all that people bitch about, that crime bill, incarcerating repeat offenders, and the “broken window policing” embracing by many big cities did help bring crime rates down. But the drug war incarcerated millions of users without putting a dent in the drug trade.

  • Indeed, President Donald Trump has a far more compelling pitch to Black Americans than Biden:

    Trump first lamented the horrific treatment of George Floyd, calling it “a terrible thing to watch.” He noted Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-S.C.) proposal, the JUSTICE Act. “He came up with a bill that should have been approved. It was great,” the president noted. “And the Democrats just wouldn’t go for it.”

    Indeed, Senate Democrats pre-emptively blasted the bill before Republicans had finished drafting it. Minutes after Scott, a black Republican senator, revealed the bill, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) called it a “token” effort. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) went so far as accusing Republicans of “trying to get away with murder, the murder of George Floyd,” because the JUSTICE Act’s provisions against chokeholds did not go far enough, in her view.

    Trump went on to repeat his rather grandiose claim, “I have done more for the African American community than any president. With the exception of Abraham Lincoln.”

    Yet the president mentioned specific accomplishments. “Criminal justice reform, prison reform, historically Black colleges and universities — I got them funded. They were on a year-to-year basis. … I got them 10-year funding and financing, and more than they even asked for,” Trump explained.

    The president also mentioned opportunity zones, his program to help black entrepreneurs. He claimed that President Barack Obama and then-Vice President Biden “never even tried” to do criminal justice reform. While Obama did suggest reform measures, he did not get them passed through Congress and signed into law, as Trump did.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Biden admission: “We stopped showing up at the Polish American Club and instead started hanging out with really smart people instead.”
  • Hey, remember when The New Yorker did a profile of Hunter Biden…and focused on his art? Good times, good times…
  • “Joe Biden is not a good person.” “He’s a man with a short temper and a history of lying.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Inside Biden’s Malarkey Factory:

    Joe Biden’s campaign has quietly built a multimillion-dollar operation over the past two months that’s largely designed to combat misinformation online, aiming to rebut President Trump while bracing for any information warfare that could take place in the aftermath of the election.

    The effort, internally called the “Malarkey Factory,” consists of dozens of people around the country monitoring what information is gaining traction digitally, whether it’s resonating with swing voters and, if so, how to fight back. The three most salient attacks the Malarkey Factory has confronted so far are claims that Biden is a socialist, that he is “creepy” and that he is “sleepy” or senile.

    In preparation for misinformation spreading as voters head to the polls, especially a stretch around Election Day when Facebook will not let campaigns buy new ads, the campaign has partnered with dozens of Facebook pages associated with liberal individuals or groups that have large followings. The campaign has also enlisted 5,000 surrogates with big social media platforms who can pump out campaign messages.

    The Malarkey Factory has already been at work. When Trump began attacking Biden as a socialist, for example, the Biden campaign saw that it was affecting Hispanic voters in Florida. So it developed counter-messaging that showed a different image of Biden, with him speaking of his love for America and being endorsed by former president Barack Obama, and the campaign blasted the messaging to Latinos in the state.

    Hunter’s name appears once, China and Ukraine not at all. One wonders if Post writer Matt Viser is himself an employee, given how fervently the piece regurgitates Biden campaign talking points…

  • “Anna Makanju, Facebook’s Public Policy Manager for Global Elections, was Joe Biden’s senior policy adviser…on Ukraine.”

    Here are some of the other areas of concern, especially when we consider the role she plays at Facebook should be filled by someone who is politically unbiased:

    • Senior Policy Advisor to Ambassador Samantha Power
    • Director for Russia at the National Security Council
    • Chief of Staff for the Office of European and NATO Policy
    • Professor at Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University
    • Field organizer for Obama for America in Wisconsin
    • Worked for the President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
    • Distinguished Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship recipient

    Caveat: I’m not familiar with noqreport.com, but there seems to be some supporting information out there.

  • More social media honchos walking through the revolving door to team Biden: Twitter public policy director Carlos Monje is joining Biden’s “transition team.” 1. Why does Twitter even have a “public policy director? (Don’t answer that: Obviously to help Democrats.) 2. Seems like he’s counting his chickens before they’re hatched, doesn’t it?
  • In case you hadn’t noticed yet, the Biden-Harris tax plan is to hike your taxes until your eyeballs bleed.

    Most households would face a tax increase under the Biden-Harris tax plan. In fact, as the chart shows, unless your household income is less than $45,600, there is more than a 90 percent chance that the Biden-Harris plan, if enacted, will raise your taxes. In the exact middle of the household income distribution, over 95 percent of households can expect a tax increase if the Biden-Harris plan becomes law. Overall, 82.6 percent of American households can expect a tax increase.

  • But you won’t just be taking home less money thanks to taxes, you’ll be taking home less money period. “A new study on Biden’s tax, health-care, energy and regulation proposals predicts $6,500 less in median household income by 2030.”
  • Evidently Joe Biden has seen his own shadow and will not be showing his face until Thursday:

    Does that sound like a hale, healthy man on his way to a landslide victory to you?

  • “Biden Endorses Transgender Activism for 8-Year-Old Children.”
  • Boom:

  • Slow Joe is even having problems reading a Teleprompter:

  • “WATCH: Joe Biden Attacks ‘Systemic Racism’; Forgets Name of ‘Proud Boys.'” He’s fighting against, you know, the thing…
  • How Biden is spending his ad money.
  • I think this very short flowchart is worth highlighting:

  • Supposedly Kamala Harris has tested positive for the Wuhan coronavirus, and so won’t be traveling anymore. Which is a lot more palatable to the press than saying she’s come down with the Dontwannatalkaboutmyrunningmatesobviouscorruptionproblemsvirus.
  • You’ll need to turn up your audio for this one:

  • Feel the enthusiasm:

  • Any day now…

  • “Trump Attempts To Catch Hunter Biden In Trap Labeled ‘Free Crack.'”
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