Posts Tagged ‘Amy Coney Barrett’

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

━━━━━━━━ ★ ★ ★ ━━━━━━━━

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.

━━━━━━━━ ★ ★ ★ ━━━━━━━━

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.

━━━━━━━━ ★ ★ ★ ━━━━━━━━

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.

━━━━━━━━ ★ ★ ★ ━━━━━━━━

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.

That’s “Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett” To You

Monday, October 26th, 2020

Amy Coney Barrett was just confirmed to the Supreme Court on a vote of 52-48.

Just one tweet:

LinkSwarm for October 23, 2020

Friday, October 23rd, 2020

The third and final presidential debate is in the books, Trump breaks 50% approval, and the hard left plans another riot and arson spree if they lose. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Consensus opinion seems to be that president Trump won last night’s debate with Joe Biden.

    That appeared to be one lesson from a Zoom focus group conducted after the debate by messaging expert Frank Luntz. Speaking to 15 undecided voters — and yes, they appeared to be really undecided — Luntz asked for a one- or two-word description of the candidates’ debate demeanor. For Biden, the words were mostly bad: among them were “vague,” “very vague,” “non-specific,” “cognitively impaired,” “old,” “uncomfortable,” “elusive,” “grandfatherly,” and “defensive.”

    For Trump, they were mostly much better: among them were “controlled,” “composed,” “constrained,” “reserved,” “poised,” “con artist,” “surprisingly presidential,” “calmer,” and “restrained.”

    There will be more coverage of the debate, of Biden’s promise to end the oil industry and, indeed, more about Mr. Luntz, in Monday’s BidenWatch.

  • President Trump just hit the “Holy Grail” of breaking the 50% approval rating, hitting 52% approval in Rasmussen polling. All the usual poll caveats apply.
  • The left is currently planning on how to peacefully protest if President Donald Trump wins. Ha, just kidding! They’re going to burn everything down:

    An activist group is planning large-scale and widespread ‘disruptive activity’ starting on the night of the election, in an attempt to stop what it predicts will be an “attempted coup” by President Trump in the form of a refusal to accept the election results.

    “Shut Down D.C.” is setting the stage for mass gatherings in D.C., noting that the “resistance” must begin during the “muddied” legal and political debate over the election outcome.

  • More on the same theme:

    “We need to show that we’re ungovernable under a continued Trump administration…That can mean blocking traffic at major intersections and bridges, shutting down government office buildings (why should ICE or the FBI be able to keep doing Trump’s bidding when he’s leading with a coup?!?), or blockading the White House.”

    The document bases its action plan upon the scenarios projected by the establishment leftist “Transition Integrity Project” for election night and sketches these activists’ response to each, explicitly rejecting the possibility that Trump could legitimately win. It continues:

    We’ll keep it going until Trump concedes. We could be in the streets throughout the fall and into the winter– maybe as lots of rolling waves of action or possibly as a few major tsunamis! In other parts of the country, as vote counts conclude, our focus will turn from protecting the vote counts to themselves being ungovernable.

    As it becomes clear that Trump’s coup is failing, institutions and the elites will start to abandon him – or we will approach them as part of the problem. Either Amazon will shut down AWS for the Trump loyalists in the government or we’ll shut down their fulfillment centers. Either governors will tell their national guards to stand down or we’ll shut down their state capitals as well. Over time, Trump will grow increasingly isolated and his empire will crumble down around him.

  • Victor Davis Hanson on the Progressive Medusa:

    The new-old leftist aim is not to operate within either the existing parameters of the Constitution as written or the customs and traditions of America—a 150-year-long nine-justice Supreme Court, the Electoral College, a 50-state nation, a Senate filibuster, two senators per state, and a secure border. All are obstructions to the drive for power.

    Given its redistributionist creed, socialism cannot afford to be patent and honest. If socialism were transparent, it never would gain majority support. Joe Biden cannot talk about the Electoral College or court packing, unequivocally condemn the violence in our urban centers, discuss the Green New Deal, name his likely Supreme Court appointments, be honest about his plans for fracking, or explain his views on the borders, because he is now owned lock, stock and barrel by the hard Left whose agendas were rejected even in his own Democratic primaries.

    The Left seeks to transform America into something never envisioned by the founders, a huge all-encompassing, panopticon state, one run by anointed Platonic guardians. Our elite watchmen will use their unlimited power to force upon us an equality of result society—with themselves properly exempted.

    The hard Left’s defense is that its mission is so critical, so morally superior, that all means can be justified to achieve its noble ends. And so almost every institution that the Left has in its line of vision is now petrifying.

    Large swaths of the downtowns of America’s large cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland—are becoming unhygienic, unsafe, and uninhabitable. Substantial corridors swarm with the homeless. Crime is increasing but commensurately redefined as a sort of cry of the heart, no-bail social activism. The cities are broke and yet demand more bailouts to spend more money that will ensure things get worse.

    Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination unanimously approved by Senate Judiciary Committee. Democrats failed to show up. The senate confirmation vote is expected Monday. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • The Great Southern Democratic Hope:

    Back in 2018, I wrote about the phenomenon of Great Southern Democratic Hopes — candidates with not-so-great chances of success running in a Republican-learning state who receive wildly optimistic coverage from national media organizations and reporters desperate to discover a Democrat who can win statewide races in the South and someday end up on a presidential ticket.

    Prime past specimens of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes include Harold Ford Jr. in Tennessee, Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky, and Michelle Nunn and Jon Ossoff in Georgia. But 2018 brought the modern king of the Great Southern Democratic Hopes, Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke.

    You notice none of those candidates actually won, although O’Rourke deserves some credit for performing better than any other Democrat in decades. Still, next spring, Ted Cruz will be in the third year of his second term, and O’Rourke, having completed a presidential bid that also didn’t live up to the initial hype, will be teaching at Texas State University.

    This cycle: Amy McGrath.

    after McGrath won the primary, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin declared, “Democrats serious about winning chose Amy McGrath.” The Frankfort State Journal concluded, “McGrath has the name recognition and financial backing to give McConnell, well, a run for his money.” Fueled by Democrats across the country who are itching to see McConnell defeated, McGrath’s fundraising has been off the charts — $37 million in the last quarter, more than $82 million overall.

    And yet it is mid October, and McConnell does not appear to be running for his money. The newest Mason-Dixon poll puts the Republican ahead, 51 percent to 42 percent. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives McConnell a 96 percent chance of winning. In a year when Democrats are finding themselves in surprisingly strong shape from Maine to Colorado and from Montana to Arizona, McGrath is an afterthought and on pace to turn out like the last Democrat who took on McConnell. In 2013, Politico wrote of Grimes, “The fresh Democratic face could give the Senate minority leader the fight of his political life.” Mitch McConnell won reelection in 2014, 56 percent to 40 percent, in what was not the fight of his political life.

  • President Trump is not having any of Leslie Stahl’s bias. I’m so old I remember when 60 Minutes was a revered journalistic institution…
  • “Meet NBC News’ Brandy Zadrozny — The Woman In Charge of Doxxing and Destroying Trump Supporters.” Bonus: “While Zadrozny is passionately committed to doxing and silencing her political foes, there’s another group she is more sympathetic toward: Pedophiles.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Even Obama Administration officials were not believing the Steele dossier’s Russian collusion bullschiff
  • How Facebook uses Chinese nationals to work on technology to censor Americans:

    China is one of the most censorious societies on Earth. So what better place for ­Facebook to recruit social media censors?

    There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’”

    The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy website DeepAI.org puts it.

    When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.”

    Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty’s dealings with Chinese companies.

    To illustrate the mechanics, the insider took me as his typical Facebook user: “They take what Sohrab sees, and then they throw the newsfeed list into a machine-learning algorithm and neural networks that determine the ranking of the items.”

    Facebook engineers test hundreds of different iterations of the rankings to shape an optimal outcome — and root out what bosses call “borderline content.”

    It all makes for perhaps the most chillingly sophisticated censorship mechanism in human history. “What they don’t do is ban a specific pro-Trump hashtag,” says the ex-insider. Instead, “content that is a little too conservative, they will down-rank. You can’t tell it’s censored.”

    (Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)

  • Texas joins DOJ antitrust lawsuit against Google. Oh, and the DOJ filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. I probably should have led with that. I blame this Topsy Turvey year.
  • Intel to sell it’s NAND business to South Korea’s Hynix. It’s a weird deal:

    In a joint press release issued early this morning, SK Hynix and Intel have announced that Intel will be selling the entirety of its NAND memory business to SK Hynix. The deal, which values Intel’s NAND holdings at $9 billion, will see the company transfer over the NAND business in two parts, with SK Hynix eventually acquiring all IP, facilities, and personnel related to Intel’s NAND efforts. Notably, however, Intel is not selling their overarching Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group; instead the company will be holding on to their Optane memory technology as they continue to develop and sell that technology.

    Per the terms of the unusual agreement, SK Hynix will be acquiring Intel’s NAND memory business in two parts, with the deal not expected to completely close until March of 2025. Under the first phase, which will take place in 2021 once all relevant regulatory bodies have approved the seal, SK Hynix will pay Intel the first $7 billion for their SSD business and Intel’s sole NAND fab in Dalian, China. This will see Intel’s consumer and enterprise SSD businesses transferred to SK Hynix, along with the relevant IP and employees for the SSD business, but not any NAND IP or employees. Similarly, while SK Hynix will get the Dalian fab, the first phase does not come with the employees that operate it.

    Following the first phase, Intel will continue to develop and manufacture NAND out of the Dalian fab for roughly the next four years. This period is set to last until the rest of the deal fully closes in March of 2025. At that point, SK Hynix will pay Intel $2 billion for the rest of their NAND business. This will finally transfer all of Intel’s NAND IP and related employees over to SK Hynix, along with the Dalian fab employees.

    NAND = Flash memory, and it’s a very profitable business to be in most times, but not part of Intel’s core microprocessor business. In Intel’s case, NAND is what you run once your fab is too old to crank out Microprocessors, and Fab 68 in Dalian was built in 2010 as a 65 nanometer fab. With Intel’s cutting edge currently at 7nm, you can see how it would be easy for them to part with, especially since the flash division was losing money despite record revenue in 2019. What Hynix gets out of the deal is harder to fathom. They’re buying a revenue stream in a sector that should be profitable, add another fab to their stable, and maintain parity with DRAM rivals Samsung and Micron. But that’s an awful lot to pay for a small revenue stream bump, a ten year old fab and no NAND IP until 2024.

  • Twitter backs down after Hunter Biden brouhaha.
  • Rapper 50 Cent endorses President Trump, says Biden’s tax hikes are too high.
  • Colorado Democratic Party committee member calls for killing political opponents on camera.
  • “U.S. Sanctions Have Caused ‘Serious’ Damage to Iran, Tehran Says.” Good. Maybe they could stop being jihadist scumbags who oppress your people with a brutal theocracy? Just a thought…
  • Armenia-Azerbaijan truce breaks down within hours.
  • Poland signs $18 billion nuclear power deal with the U.S.
  • Chairman of the Georgetown County (South Carolina) Board of Voter Registration and Elections resignes after stealing Trump signs. Note: Repeatedly stealing the signs of political opponents isn’t a “lapse of judgement.”
  • Detailed, even-handed analysis of the charges leveled at Ken Paxton.

    The Nate Paul scandal has, at its heart, allegations that federal and state law enforcement officials abused the rights of an American citizen. The facts from all sides seem to indicate an unwillingness by the OAG staff to investigate Paul’s complaint; their unwillingness to do so must be explored.

    If the 2019 raid was properly conducted, why has that not been confirmed? Why delay an investigation into the raid? If the raids were legitimate, why, after more than 13 months, has Nate Paul not been charged with a crime?

    On the other hand, Nate Paul might—indeed—be a notorious villain. But in the current environment, shouldn’t state investigators be willing to double-check that the actions of law enforcement officials are conducted properly? Even accused criminals have constitutional rights.

    Just as important, what if Mr. Paul is not a villain and merely a businessman targeted for less than honorable reasons? Is it merely a coincidence that U.S. Attorney Bash resigned from office three days after Mateer tendered his own resignation?

    Likewise, it is possible—as the seven OAG employees allege—that Paxton was acting “under duress” in pushing for this investigation into the complaint made by his friend Mr. Paul. Whether or not Nate Paul’s allegations have merit, Texans need to be certain their elected officials are not acting improperly or unethically in the course of their jobs. Was Mr. Paxton simply pursuing justice for a Texan, or was he acting under undue influence?

  • Bill Burr’s Saturday Night Live monologue.
  • Bret Weinstein kicked off Facebook, presumably for daring to voice anti-Social Justice Warrior thoughts.

  • Max Boot manages to dig past the next level of the Hollow Earth in talking about just how swell China has handled the Wuhan coronavirus. Time to dig this out again:

    

  • Half Of Europe’s Small Businesses Face Bankruptcy.” I bet a number of Eurocrats overseeing their Wuhan coronavirus lockdowns see that as a feature rather than a bug.
  • Dwight has an interesting link up on the Quebec Biker War.
  • Phil Collins ex-wife took over his mansion with her new boyfriend and armed guards. He should su-su-sue them all.
  • Johnny Rotten on the antifa Borg. “This collectivism wrapped up in the ideology and dogma of communism is the exact opposite [of punk rock].”
  • Today’s Hollywood star dragged by the left for not bowing to their wokeness: Chris Pratt

    Since Starlord is an integral lead in two blockbuster franchises, I would say the chances of this costing him work are pretty much nil…

  • Australia bans all hentai. This doesn’t seem like a winning strategy in the Internet era…
  • Burning Zambonis give you so much more.
  • Happy Halloween!

  • LinkSwarm for October 16, 2020

    Friday, October 16th, 2020

    I couldn’t post to Twitter yesterday, and briefly thought they’d finally banned me for spreading Disapproved Hunter Biden News. Sadly, it was down for everyone, not just me.

    Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:

  • “Twitter, Facebook Go Full Tilt Protecting Biden Just Weeks After Execs Join Transition Team.”

    Perhaps the selective enforcement of content which is politically harmful to Democrats can be explained by recent hires by the Biden transition team.

    According to Breitbart, Twitter Public Policy Director Carlos Monje left the social media giant to join Biden’s transition team in September. He will reportedly serve as co-chair of Biden’s infrastructure policy committee, and helped organize a fundraiser for the former VP this week, according to an invitation from Politico.

    Meanwhile in October, Biden’s transition team hired Facebook executive Jessica Hertz to its general counsel to deal with ‘ethics’ issues. Notably, Facebook was the first platform to ban the Post article – with former Democrat staffer and Facebook communications team member Andy Stone tweeting that the company would be ‘reducing its distribution.’

  • Kurt Schlichter says that Trump’s momentum is back:

    Trump is back and this is a real race. I think we will win it.

    Except all the polls are telling us Grandpa Badfinger is up +37, right? Weird how four years ago right now, we were hearing the exact same thing. Ignore the spinners who are solemnly informing you that your lying eyes are lying again and the 2016 polls were akshually very accurate. Baloney. A key component of effective gaslighting is plausibility, and I was there. You were there. All we heard in 2016 was how Trump was going down to a landslide defeat. Instead, everyone in the smart set got blindsided by the Trump Train.

    And it can happen again.

    Now, it doesn’t have to happen again. Nothing is written, and we have to fight for our victory. There are a lot of stupid people around – my district regularly re-e-elects Ted Lieu – and Oldfinger could build a Coalition of the Drooling to put him in the White House. But I think the Trump lightning will strike again.

    Remember, the polls are the only data point in Biden’s favor. The only one. And as we have seen they screwed up last time and their proponents have an interest in them being bad for Trump.

    But Kurt, the libs say, “You must hate science because the science of polling cannot be wrong! It’s science.” Yeah, but so is phrenology. The fact is that not only do the polls have a track record of failure with regard to populists like Trump – remember that they also missed a number of Senate seats that were supposed to spin down the drain with The Donald – but many of the pollsters are retained by media outlets with an anti-Trump agenda. If these very fine people in the media lie about everything, like the “very fine people” quote, why would you buy the notion that there’s some line they won’t cross when it comes to faking polls?

    Am I saying they will push bullSchiff poll results to try to demoralize patriots? Yes, yes I am. You don’t have to just make up numbers – though I would not put it past them. You just tweak the turnout model and fiddle with the cross-tabs and voila! – CNN has its narrative. After all, it’s not like in the editorial offices they are saying “Sure, we’ll lie about Trump/ Russia, Trump/COVID, and Trump/Nickelback, and hey, there’s no way we’ll fake a poll! We have scruples.” They would sacrifice their babies to Baal if A) they hadn’t hit Planned Parenthood, and B) they thought it would ensure Trump loses.

    Also: “Biden rallies look like the shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead, which is apt since the guy handling his media events is apparently George Romero. Only the flesh-eating zombies had more pep than the Delaware Dementite’s fans.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Democrats Were Awful Filth Questioning ACB.” Kamala Harris looked sad, but Mazie Hirono of Hawaii was probably the biggest loon.
  • Hmmmm: “Pelosi takes a big stake in CrowdStrike.”
  • Trump has broken their minds.
  • Democrats want to pack the courts:

    Why do Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refuse to give a straightforward yes or no answer when asked whether they intend to “pack the Court” and expand it to a number larger than the nine justices that have been on the Court for the past 150 years?

    Because a considerable portion of the Democratic Party wants to expand the Court beyond nine. In a recent YouGov survey, 47 percent of registered voters opposed expanding the size of the Supreme Court, 34 percent supported it, and 19 percent responded they didn’t know how they felt. But self-identified Democrats were much more supportive: 60 percent wanted to expand the Court, 18 percent opposed the idea, and 22 percent didn’t know.

  • “Democrat Proposing To His Girlfriend Says He Won’t Reveal Position On Adultery Until After The Wedding.”
  • Kansas Democratic senate candidate Barbara Bollier comes out in favor of Australian-style gun confiscation.
  • More examples of that voting fraud that Democrats swear doesn’t exist. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Twitter discovers the Streisand Effect:

    It quickly became clear that in their attempts to strangle the Hunter Biden story, two social media giants left themselves gasping for air.

    Twitter and Facebook took major steps to squelch the New York Post piece, but wound up giving it far more attention than if they had done nothing and let their millions of users share it freely.

    For Twitter in particular, if you had to come up with a plan to reinforce conservative complaints about its liberal bias, you could hardly do better than for the tech giant to lock the Trump campaign’s account. Not to mention that of press secretary Kayleigh McEnany as well.

    Hashtag: #Fail

    In fact, Twitter chief Jack Dorsey admitted in a tweet that the company’s conduct–censoring stories and locking accounts with little public explanation–was “unacceptable.” You got that right, Jack. But then he didn’t do anything to fix it, apparently viewing the self-inflicted wound as just a PR problem. Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans plan to subpoena Dorsey next week.

    (Hat tup: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “A Poor Farrier’s Journey to Political Sanity.”

    After a few years of shoeing horses, briefly interrupted by a temporary job mining silver, I ran a brush-clearing and landscaping company as a side hustle. During this scramble for meaningful independence, the leftist tendencies I’d absorbed at college dropped off bit by bit. Life as a capitalist entrepreneur brought out the best in me, even when I was flirting with homelessness. Moreover, being in the real working world pushed me into contact with people, ideas, and situations that challenged me in all sorts of ways. After a few near-fatal incidents with horses (one of which left my skull and jaw shattered), I began pursuing my own business full time in 2016.

    Now in my early 20s, I still had a soft spot for socialist ideas, including a lingering resentment toward the wealthy. And so, from a progressive politician’s perspective, I was hardly a lost cause. But I also was becoming aware that the Left didn’t really have much interest in the challenges I was facing, being far more concerned with issues of race and gender identity. As a straight white male, I was supposedly luxuriating in a life of privilege—a stereotype that had nothing to do with my experience as a blue-collar worker who’d faced debilitating family traumas.

    Plus Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson.

  • Seattle’s far-left city council is busy taxing the golden goose to death. (Hat tip: johnnyk20001.)
  • Speaking of crazy leftwing city councils, thanks to the SUPERgenius police defunding policies of Mayor Adler and the Austin City Council, some 911 calls have waits of between 2-6 hours.
  • Austin Police is searching four four different suspects in a string of 7-11 robberies.
  • More Austin restaurant closures.
  • Some Wuhan Coronavirus perspective:

  • If you newly sign up for Twitter, they only recommend leftwing politicians to you.
  • Would-be second debate moderator Steve Scully lied about his account being hacked.
  • U.S. Cybercommand clobbers botnet.
  • “China Conducts Test Of Massive Suicide Drone Swarm Launched From A Box On A Truck.” I hope we’re working on similar or more advanced technology.
  • How malls die. Slowly, then all at once.
  • Daryl Morey steps down as Houston Rockets GM. He had everything on his resume (including the NBA trade of the century so far) but a championship.
  • “Twitter Shuts Down Entire Network To Slow Spread Of Negative Biden News.”
  • “Donald The Orange Returns Triumphantly As Donald The White.”
  • LinkSwarm for October 2, 2020

    Friday, October 2nd, 2020

    Welcome to the October country, one of my favorite months! It being 2020, things lean rather more heavily on tricks than treats…

  • Two important points from Tuesday’s debate:

    (1) If he wins, Biden will almost certainly sign off on ending the filibuster to pack the courts and add two new states for a permanent Democrat majority that will leave the Constitution behind.

    (2) Trump may have announced that he’s about to reveal that the Democrats, from Obama on down, engaged in a coup against an American president.

    (Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)

  • Is CIA Director Gina Haspel personally blocking the release of Russiagate documents?
  • New documents show that the goal of the Flynn investigation wasn’t a search for truth, it was to get him fired.
  • So, who had “Armenian Azerbaijani War Over Nagorno Karabakh” on their 2020 bingo card? Here’s a map I swiped from Wikipedia:

    And here’s the Livemap.

  • France has accused Turkey of sending Syrian jihadists there to fight for Muslim Azerbaijan. Remember that Turkey killed over 1.5 million Armenians during the rise of the Young Turks as part of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, so the bad blood there goes back a long ways.
  • Virginia passes law decreeing that Christians have no right to that pesky First Amendment and must align their theology with the tranny mafia or face fines. Is your Church government approved, comrade? (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Top Obama FBI official wants a commission to rule out any presidential candidates who threaten to bust their scams. Of course, he uses different language… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Has a member of Mueller’s team flipped for Durham?
  • Australian blogger examines Wuhan coronavirus data:

    Quick conclusion: Relative to the number of infections fewer people have died in the US than in Australia. So for all the talk about not letting us have a US style health system, it has performed relatively better than ours did. True, Australian base levels of health are higher than US levels. Relatively fewer people got infected here than in the US. (We can argue about why that happened in the comments – probably policy errors in themselves at the State level in the US). Once infected, however, it looks like the chances of survival was higher in the US.

  • Kuwait’s ruler Emir Sheikh Sabah dead at 91.
  • “Clare Bronfman Becomes First NXIVM Sex-Slave Trafficker to Get Jail Time.” Namely six years and nine months. You know it’s a crazy year when you don’t have time to pay attention rich, powerful weirdos being tried for running a sex cult…
  • Coinbase SJW babies: We have to be woke! Coinbase CEO: There’s the door.
  • Hopefully Spotify will do the same to staffers demanding the right to censor Joe Rogan.
  • What things irritate the left the most during a nomination fight? Republicans nominating blacks, women, or Hispanics. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Things generating irrational hatred in Trump Derangement Syndrome suffers this week is (rolls dice)…bales of hay in Rappahannock County, Virginia, population 7,252.
  • The Texas House District 148 battle features a fight between a Hispanic Republican against a Democratic candidate with even more ties than usual to communism. “During a July 2018 presentation, “The Art and Science of Building the Communist Party,” Chairman of the Houston chapter of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) Bernard Sampson boasted that his club had placed four communist party members on the Texas ballot, including Morales-Shaw who he specifically identified as a member of his group.”
  • NBA conference finals down 40% since last year, despite involving the Lakers.

    I think the explanation for plummeting viewership is fairly obvious, even if Strauss would rather not talk about it. Conservative America is disgusted with the NBA, and therefore is tuning it out. We’re disgusted with the way the league kowtows to China and even more disgusted with the embrace of the radical BLM movement by the league and its players.

    I didn’t watch a minute of the playoffs this year and rarely even checked the scores. Not because of what many of the players think about the police and about America, in general, as slanderous as those views are. And not even because players made pro-BLM gestures before the games began.

    My problem was what was allowed, indeed encouraged, during the games. I will not watch any sports event during which the preaching of politics or ideology occurs.

    I guess I’m not alone.

    Conservative America’s divorce from the NBA is a sign, I think, of things to come. Unless corporate America steps back from its embrace of woke leftism, we are going to have to divorce ourselves from large swathes of it. To the extent feasible, we may have to divorce ourselves from many of America’s public schools. And so forth.

  • New South Korean mini nuclear reactor that can’t melt down approved for use in the United States. First plant is scheduled to come online in Utah, but not until 2029. Faster, please.
  • How to disable the nightmarish bullshit that is the WordPress “Block” Editor.
  • And here’s the post I was tempted to write: “Fuck You WordPress, Yet Again (Block Editor).”
  • Ireland’s Supreme Court rules that Subway bread isn’t. You would think that if it used that much sugar it would taste better. Then again, I’m not sure I’ve bought a Subway sandwich since the heyday of the $5 Footlong era…
  • “See Inside a 1926 Rolls-Royce Phantom, the Most Expensive Rolls-Royce Ever Made.”
  • There would be an amusing Tweet here about a guy riding a wall of death with a lion, but some bastard hacked Iowahawk’s account.
  • The good news is that he’s back, the bad news is that right now he’s lacking all tweets after May 22. I hope they get that fixed soon.
  • Enjoy a movie review of The Abominable Dr. Phibes.
  • “Amy Coney Barrett Holds Press Conference In Handmaid’s Tale Costume Just To Mess With Liberals.”
  • “Democrats Prepare To Give Republicans Free Ad Footage Of Them Attacking Successful, Religious Mother Of 7.”
  • “Ninth Circuit Court Overturns Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green.)
  • “‘Coexist’ Molotov Cocktails Now Available.”
  • Looks like someone is worried about the competition:

  • Trump Nominates Barrett To Supreme Court, And Democrats Are Already Melting Down

    Sunday, September 27th, 2020

    As expected, President Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court:

    “Today it is my honor to nominate one of our nation’s most brilliant and gifted legal minds to the Supreme Court. She is a woman of unparalleled achievement, towering intellect, sterling credentials, and unyielding loyalty to the Constitution, Judge Amy Coney Barrett,” Trump said at a press conference at the White House announcing Barrett’s nomination.

    Barrett has served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit since she was appointed by Trump in 2017. The 48-year-old Notre Dame law professor clerked for late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and is a conservative Catholic mother of seven, including two adopted children from Haiti.

    When she was nominated to be a judge on the Seventh Circuit, three Democratic senators supported Barrett’s confirmation, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and former senator Joe Donnelly of Indiana. Over the past week, Senate Democrats have expressed vehement opposition to her nomination to the Supreme Court.

    You don’t say.

    Here’s the video of the announcement.

    Here’s the transcript. Barrett: “I love the United States and I love the United States constitution. I am truly humbled by the prospect of serving on the supreme court.”

    Also:

    I was lucky enough to clerk for Justice Scalia and given his incalculable influence on my life. I am very moved to have members of the Scalia family here today, including his dear wife, Maureen. I clerked for justice Scalia more 20 years ago, but the lessons I learned still resonate.

    His judicial philosophy is mine too, a judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers and they must be resolute and setting aside any policy views they might hold.

    Democrats are already melting down, now that their desperate attempts to somehow guilt-trip Trump into not nominating a Supreme Court justice have failed. (And this is why we have Trump: it’s very easy to imagine McCain or Romney caving. As Abraham Lincoln said of Ulysses S. Grant, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”) The fact that Barrett is a believing Catholic woman, thus threatening the Democratic Party’s central holy sacrament of abortion, is driving them extra crazy. Democratic senators are already announcing that they won’t even meet with Barrett.

    As with Kavanaugh, expect Democrats to ignore all limits of human decency, even though some are already admitting that they don’t have the votes to stop her confirmation:

    More tweets:

    LinkSwarm for September 25, 2020

    Friday, September 25th, 2020

    Greetings, and welcome to the first LinkSwarm of fall! Strangely enough, we’re already getting some fall in our fall in Texas, as opposed to our usual Ever So Slightly Less Hot Late Summer. This week: Still more riots, Supreme Court pick news, more ugly truths about Crossfire Hurricane, and Lebanon goes boom again. Plus a bit of news that goes to eleven.

  • Yet another rash of Antifa/#BlackLivesMatter riots, this one ostensibly over the return of a single non-murder charge in the Breonna Taylor killing case.
  • Speaking of those idiots:

  • “Why Amy Coney Barrett is hands-down best pick to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

    Amy represents an opportunity to showcase a generationally brilliant, special intellect — who also is a mom,” says O. Carter Snead, Barrett’s longtime faculty colleague at the Notre Dame law school, where Barrett also received her law degree.

    Her rare combination of hyper-intelligence and humility is a matter of bipartisan consensus. “The smartest person in the room and also the most humble” was how Snead and two other sources intimately familiar with Barrett described her, echoing each other almost verbatim.

    Harvard Law School prof Noah Feldman — a liberal who testified before Congress in favor of ­impeaching the president — hailed her as “a truly brilliant lawyer” in a 2018 column. Feldman should know. He and Barrett were members of the same class of Supreme Court clerks in 1998.

    “She was one of the two best lawyers” of the 40 clerks “and arguably the single best.” Feldman concluded: “She was legally prepared enough to go on the court 20 years ago.”

    When Trump nominated Barrett to the Seventh Circuit, every single one of those 40 fellow clerks endorsed her as a “first-rate” thinker, ­including such vehemently anti-Trump figures as Neal Katyal, solicitor general under Team Obama. The entire Notre Dame law faculty likewise endorsed her, “and that includes people who identify as liberal,” as Snead was quick to note.

    She is recognized as an expert on how judges are supposed to interpret statutes — a crucial role, as demonstrated by Justice Neil Gorsuch’s bizarre recent reading of “gender identity” into a civil rights statute enacted in the 1960s. She has also thought deeply about the relationship among the branches of government, a gnarly and seriously important area of law.

    To these achievements Barrett marries a vibrant Christian faith. For the evangelicals and Catholics the president needs to turn out in November, her pro-life bona fides are on display not just in her activities and statements, but also in her own family: She is a mother of seven, including one biological child with intellectual disabilities and two adopted from Haiti.

    Yes, Democrats and their ­media allies will attack and demonize her — viciously. But that’s no reason to nominate other candidates who have no record on life issues. As one conservative activist told me, “the left is going to burn everything down no matter whom we pick, so we might as well get the right person on the court.”

  • And why she’s the odds-on favorite.
  • Democrats worry that Dianne Feinstein, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, is too old and senile to handle a Supreme Court nomination fight. Of course, they put it in slightly more delicate terms:

    Feinstein sometimes gets confused by reporters’ questions, or will offer different answers to the same question depending on where or when she’s asked. Her appearance is frail. And Feinstein’s genteel demeanor, which seems like it belongs to a bygone Senate era, can lead to trouble with an increasingly hard-line Democratic base uninterested in collegiality or bipartisan platitudes.

    Just this week, Feinstein infuriated progressives after declaring her opposition to ending the Senate’s legislative filibuster — a top goal of party activists if Democrats win full control of the Congress and White House in November. Some on the left called on her to resign over the comments, although other Democratic moderates have expressed similar views.

    It’s hard to pick which is the more interesting angle here: The hard-left planning to push for their suicidal court-packing/filibuster ending agenda, or the old guard of elderly Democrats hanging on to power ghastly Ringwraiths. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Democrats: “We have the following list of demands for this Suprem-” Republicans: “Sorry, we remember your outrageous smear job on Kavanaugh. Suck it!” Also, remember this:

    There were electoral consequences, with every “incumbent Senate Democrat in battleground states who opposed the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination” losing his or her re-election bid. Sens. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, and Bill Nelson of Florida were all replaced by their Republican opponents, while Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia saved his seat by backing Kavanaugh. That fall-out handed Republicans the votes they now need to push through a new nominee to the Supreme Court before Nov. 3, 2020.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Trump wants the Supreme Court at full strength to thwart any Democratic attempts to steal the election. Foresight. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “The ‘primary sub-source’ for the Steele dossier was suspected of being a possible Russian agent and a ‘threat to national security,’ according to newly declassified FBI documents.”
  • The goal of the Michael Flynn investigation wasn’t enhancing national security, but to get Flynn fired. “The explosive new documents support Flynn’s latest claims that Obama-era Department of Justice (DOJ) and FBI officials had conspired to set him up from the beginning and that they never had any legitimate basis for investigating him.”
  • “Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents tasked by fired former Director James Comey to take down Donald Trump during and after the 2016 election were so concerned about the agency’s potentially illegal behavior that they purchased liability insurance to protect themselves less than two weeks before Trump was inaugurated president, previously hidden FBI text messages show.”
  • More on the same subject. I get the impression that there’s so much information coming out about malfeasance during Crossfire Hurricane/FISAgate that I can’t keep up with it all…
  • “Gov. Abbott proposes increased penalty, mandatory jail time for 6 riot-related offenses.”
  • It’s not just Texas: Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis just proposed similar anti-riot legislation. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • For construction workers, not just a V-shaped recovery, but a Super-V.

  • Hezbollah arms depot in Lebanese town of Ayn Qana blows up real good.
  • Follow-up: Wirecard’s business was “almost entirely fraudulent.”
  • Arkansas Kroger’s fires Christian employees for refusing to wear a gay rights pin.
  • Ratings for NBA conference finals way down.
  • “‘This Is Spinal Tap’ Creators Reach Settlement On Long-Running Court Battle Over Rights And Income.” Good. Studios shouldn’t screw creators out of rightfully owed money, even if it is Meathead.
  • Today’s market to be hit by crazy high valuations is…(spins wheel)…rare plants? Now if only it would hit science fiction first editions I would be set!

  • Microsoft buys Bethesda.
  • Boom:

  • Child brought down by wild pack! Oh the humanity!

  • Your Obligatory RBG Post

    Saturday, September 19th, 2020

    Liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has died at age 87 “from complications related to metastatic pancreatic cancer.” Appointed to the Supreme Court by Bill Clinton in 1993, Ginsburg famously maintained a strong friendship with fellow Justice Antonin Scalia despite fierce ideological differences. She is survived by her daughter Jane Ginsburg, a law professor at Columbia, and James Ginsburg, founder and president of classical music label Cedille Records.

    BattleSwarm Blog sends condolences to her friends and family.

    President Donald Trump issued condolences as well:

    A fighter to the end, Justice Ginsburg defeated cancer and the odds numerous times — all while continuing to serve on the Court. Her commitment to the law and her fearlessness in the face of death inspired countless “RBG” fans, and she continues to serve as a role model to countless women lawyers. Her legacy and contribution to American history will never be forgotten.

    He also ordered flags on federal buildings to be flown at half-staff.

    Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution gives the President authority to nominate Judges of the Supreme Court with the “Advise and Consent” of the Senate. President Trump has announced that Senate Republicans have an “obligation” to fill the vacancy “without delay,” and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has announced that he will hold a floor vote on any nominee.

    “The Senate and the nation mourn the sudden passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the conclusion of her extraordinary American life,” McConnell said in a statement.

    “In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia’s death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s second term. We kept our promise,” McConnell continued. “Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year.”

    McConell added that “by contrast, Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his agenda, particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary.”

    “Once again, we will keep our promise,” he said. “President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”

    Democrats are, of course, screaming that the vacancy should be held over for the next Administration to nominate a replacement. History is not on their side:

    History supports Republicans filling the seat. Doing so would not be in any way inconsistent with Senate Republicans’ holding open the seat vacated by Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. The reason is simple, and was explained by Mitch McConnell at the time. Historically, throughout American history, when their party controls the Senate, presidents get to fill Supreme Court vacancies at any time — even in a presidential election year, even in a lame-duck session after the election, even after defeat. Historically, when the opposite party controls the Senate, the Senate gets to block Supreme Court nominees sent up in a presidential election year, and hold the seat open for the winner. Both of those precedents are settled by experience as old as the republic. Republicans should not create a brand-new precedent to deviate from them.

    There are two types of rules in Washington: laws that allocate power, and norms that reflect how power has traditionally, historically been used. Laws that allocate power are paramount, and particularly dangerous to violate, but there is no such law at issue here. A president can always make a nomination for a Supreme Court vacancy, no matter how late in his term or how many times he has been turned down; the only thing in his way is the Senate.

    Twenty-nine times in American history there has been an open Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential election year, or in a lame-duck session before the next presidential inauguration. (This counts vacancies created by new seats on the Court, but not vacancies for which there was a nomination already pending when the year began, such as happened in 1835–36 and 1987–88.) The president made a nomination in all twenty-nine cases. George Washington did it three times. John Adams did it. Thomas Jefferson did it. Abraham Lincoln did it. Ulysses S. Grant did it. Franklin D. Roosevelt did it. Dwight Eisenhower did it. Barack Obama, of course, did it. Twenty-two of the 44 men to hold the office faced this situation, and all twenty-two made the decision to send up a nomination, whether or not they had the votes in the Senate.

    Snip.

    So what does history say about this situation, where a president is in his last year in office, his party controls the Senate, and the branches are not in conflict? Once again, historical practice and tradition provides a clear and definitive answer: In the absence of divided government, election-year nominees get confirmed.

    This is a Dan McLaughlin piece, so you get one of his dense, colorful spreadsheet charts:

    Ted Cruz has pointed out how disasterous it might be if there’s a crisis during the 2020 Presidential Election and the court is split 4-4.

    Out in the wilds of Twitter, there were two very different reactions to Ginsburg’s death: Conservatives offered praise for her abilities and extended condolences on her death:

    Meanwhile, liberals threatened to burn everything down if President Trump fulfills his constitutional duty and appoints a successor:

    Conservatives have noted Ginsberg’s ill health many times in the last few years, and were yelled at for “gas-lighting” or “being ghoulish.” And here we are.

    One of the leading contenders to be Trump’s nominee is 48-year old judge Amy Coney Barrett. If Barrett were confirmed to the court and stayed in office until she was Ginsburg’s age, she would be on the court through 2059.

    LinkSwarm for July 5, 2019

    Friday, July 5th, 2019

    I hope everyone had fun blowing things up on July 4th. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm

  • How President Donald Trump is kicking Iran’s ass without war:

    Iran’s official press has recently bragged about its military prowess when downing a US drone worth about $130 million, touting it as a nasty black eye for the world’s military superpower.

    But a recent Reuters report said Iran’s oil exports are down to a scant 300,000 barrels per day. In April 2018, before Trump exited the Iran deal, which provided the country with sanctions relief in exchange for its commitment to not build nuclear weapons or their key components, Iran was exporting 2.5 million barrels a day.

    At today’s rate per barrel, the Trump-induced decline in exports has probably cost Iran $120 million a day from oil alone — almost the cost of the US’s pricey drone.

    For the US, losing a drone is costly and destabilizing [?-LP] but not really a big deal for a country with a $718 billion annual defense budget. In Iran, the currency has crashed, and the country has become gripped by protests and strikes. And it has felt a crackdown on the financial freedom for all of its citizens.

  • Speaking of sanctioning Iran: “British Marines Seize Oil Tanker Headed For Syria.”
  • Martin Peretz reflects on the two towering achievements brought about by the Oslo Accords since 1993, namely “jack” and “squat”:

    For years even after the failure of Oslo and of the 2000 summit at Camp David, D.C. notables and even some prominent Zionists had photos with Arafat displayed on their credenzas.

    That sociology stuck in my mind. It testified to the tenaciousness in certain left-liberal circles of an idealizing impulse—one that altered the judgments of normally lucid people, leading them to make heroes of figures like Arafat who didn’t fit the bill. They justified this impulse with the old progressive belief in rational political improvement—a respectable belief when it’s applied in context, a misleading one when the context is altered to fit the wish. Their willed naiveté struck me, and not just on Oslo, as the place where effective progressivism goes to die.

    Snip.

    The counterpoint to this accommodation of Iran was the marginalization of Israel—the cutting-down-by-proxy of the country to what Obama saw as its physical and psychological size. True, it wasn’t a financial marginalization—as his defenders have said ad nauseam, Obama allowed Israel to buy more weapons than any other president before him. But by centering his policy on compromising with Iran, the one major Mideast power that had yet to reach some détente with Israel, and allowing Israel’s other enemy Assad to murder unimpeded, Obama shifted the strategic ground under Israel’s feet. Rhetorically, he did even more: He used the president’s bully pulpit to dramatically change the terms on which conversations about Israel would be conducted among Democrats and the world.

    You can draw a line from his tepid 2009 justification of Israel to the speech he sent his towering shikying’l John Kerry to give to the United Nations in 2016: a refusal to block a U.N. resolution condemning Israel for its support of right-wing settlements in the West Bank. A lot of people—myself included—oppose some of the outlier settlements, without seeing them as a major cause of the current impasse. But Kerry’s speech made them equal—or greater than equal—problems to the Palestinian leadership’s endemic corruption, its weakness in the face of Hamas and refusal to accept peace offers made by four Israeli prime ministers from 1993 to 2009. (Actually, the Palestinians haven’t made a territorial compromise in 52 years—that is long enough for the Israelis to grow impatient.) Kerry’s speech, itself an instance of sacrificing the reality to the ideal through the principle of making Israeli and Palestinian histories equivalent, shifted the terms of the debate.

    That rhetorical shift, coupled with Obama’s highly publicized, ultimately corrosive enmity towards Bibi Netanyahu—a partisan leader with a surer grasp of regional realities than the American president had—helped create the Democrats’ current political condition, which is not just counterproductively idealizing but supportive of the party’s most destructive foreign policy impulses. A party that defines itself by the chances it gives to marginalized groups always has, on its edges, radicals pushing in toward the center who define their politics by the principle of marginalization: the boiled-down Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed. When the center of the party shows weakness, the radicals naturally move in, and that’s what Obama’s rationalists allowed them to do: By shifting the party from its center and creating a rhetoric of false equivalence, they gave the hard leftists an opportunity they were only too happy to take.

  • “Netanyahu: Israel preparing for wide-scale campaign in Gaza.”
  • The Trump Administration is treating illegal aliens horribly. And by “horribly,” I mean “demonstrably better than the Obama Administration.”
  • Eastern Europe doesn’t have an immigration problem, it has an emigration problem.

    In essence, the EU’s freedom of movement guarantees an absence of barriers for anyone looking for a job within the 28 countries and makes discrimination based on nationality in work or employment illegal. For many of the EU’s new entrants in the East—including Poland, Hungary and Romania—a future where capital and people could move more freely between themselves and France, the UK, or Germany looked like a fast-track to the top-tier of developed nations. But somewhat ironically, it has only accelerated the departure of those who are crucial to getting there.

    In the last century, Eastern Europe has suffered the most dramatic population decline in recent history. According to one study, between 2013 and 2016, approximately 230,000 people left Croatia—a country with a population of only four million—for the 11 “core EU countries” of Western Europe. In the United States, this would be the equivalent of a city the size of Chicago leaving every year. This mass exodus of people is not lost on the country’s politicians; last year the Croatian President called the freedom of movement the “biggest drawback” of the EU. “Mobility is good, as long as people come back. But Croatia is now recording strong negative demographic trends,” she said during a visit to Brussels.

    Since Latvia joined the EU, it has lost one-fifth of its population. Romania, a country that according to one organisation is due to see the most drastic population decline, has seen over three million leave the country since it joined the EU in 2007. It lost half of its doctors between 2009 and 2015, the vast majority to better-paid employ in the richer hospitals and surgeries of Western Europe, leaving its health service poorly staffed and on the brink of collapse. High mortality (including infant mortality) and low birthrates are only accelerating the decline.

    Large-scale migration of healthcare workers from East to West has been an uncomfortable reality for over a decade, and the young needn’t travel long distances to drastically increase their standard of living. One Estonian doctor who graduated from medical school in 2001 was able to quadruple his salary by moving only 200 kilometres to Finland. In 2018, Denmark enjoyed the EU’s highest average gross annual pay at nine times that of the continent’s lowest in Bulgaria. Who can blame those who head for the greener pastures on the other side?

    It’s not just highly skilled labor. When I visited London, it seemed that at least half the workers in restaurants and hotels were from eastern Europe.

  • Dwight found an amazing story of corruption in the Honolulu DS’s office. (One guess as to which party controls Hawaii.) The list of sleazy crimes Katherine Kealoha engaged in is staggering.
  • Engineer convicted of smuggling military computer chips to China.

    Prosecutors alleged that Shih, alongside co-defendant Kiet Ahn Mai of Pasadena, California, conspired to gain access to a sensitive system belonging to an unnamed US firm which manufactured semiconductor chips and Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs).

    The victim company’s PC systems were accessed fraudulently after Mai posed as a potential customer, giving Shih the opportunity to obtain custom processors. While the firm in question believed the chips would only be used in the United States, Shih transferred the products to the Chengdu GaStone Technology Company (CGTC), a Chinese firm building an MMIC manufacturing plant.

    Last time I checked, finding electrical engineers with experience designing RF circuits for mixed signal ICs is hard. I bet finding those that can design MMICs is even harder…

  • Speaking of Chinese espionage, it turns out that Cisco inadvertently embedded Huawei signing certificates deep within some of their switches. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Amy Coney Barrett Strikes a Blow against Campus Kangaroo Courts:”

    Whenever I read a court opinion describing a campus sexual-assault proceeding, I routinely find myself shocked at the staggering unfairness and ridiculous bias of campus kangaroo courts. Driven by the need to find more men guilty — and rationalized by a #BelieveWomen ideology — campus administrators have systematically discarded every fundamental notion of due process in American law.

    Across the nation, courts on the right and on the left are saying no. They’re blocking biased sexual-assault adjudications, protecting basic fairness, and restoring a degree of sanity to colleges’ procedures. On Friday it was the turn of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals to protect the Fourteenth Amendment, and an all-woman panel, led by Judge Amy Coney Barrett, established a precedent that could be used against woke college administrators nationwide.

    The facts of the case are extraordinary. After a female college student accused her ex-boyfriend of groping her in her sleep, Purdue University conducted an investigation and adjudication so amateurish and biased that it’s frankly difficult to imagine that human adults could believe it was fair or adequate. The plaintiff (John Doe) alleged that he was “not provided with any of the evidence on which decisionmakers relied in determining his guilt and punishment,” his ex-girlfriend didn’t even appear before the hearing committee, he had “no opportunity to cross-examine” his accuser, the committee found his accuser credible even though it did not talk to her in person, the accuser did not even write her own statement or provide a sworn allegation, and the committee did not allow the plaintiff “to present any evidence, including witnesses.”

    After that farce of a process, Purdue found the student guilty and suspended him for a year. The suspension meant the automatic loss of the student’s Navy ROTC scholarship and expulsion from the ROTC program. Incredibly, the lower court dismissed the student’s claims. He appealed to the Seventh Circuit, and a unanimous panel resurrected his lawsuit.

    The conclusion is that campuses are are blaming men as a class and this is a clear violation of Title IX. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “I have never met antisemitism in Britain…until now.”

    I generally come to Britain from my home in Portugal whenever a new work of mine is released to give talks at bookshops, libraries and literary festivals. My publisher’s attempts to interest event organisers in me aren’t always successful, of course. But this year, for the first time, I have been turned down for being Jewish. A little context. Peter Owen Publishers launched my new novel, The Gospel According to Lazarus, in mid-April. An old friend of mine who is a part-time book publicist began trying to set up events for me three months earlier.

    In early March, he called and confessed – in a distressed tone I’d never heard before – that he had just been turned down by two cultural organisations that had previously shown enthusiasm for hosting an event with me. “They asked me if you were Jewish, and the moment I said you were, they lost all interest,” he said. “They even stopped replying to my emails and returning my phone messages.”

    Snip.

    Has the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement played a role in deepening this atmosphere of fear? That’s what my friends in the UK tell me. They also speak bitterly of the unwillingness of the Labour party to take a firm stand against antisemitic discourse. If cultural organisations are afraid of hosting events for Jewish writers, then Britain has taken a big step backwards.

    Let’s not get sidetracked with references to Israel. Although it’s perfectly legitimate for those who oppose Netanyahu’s policies to protest against them, I have no connection with Israel. I have neither investments nor family there. And my most well-known books take place in Portugal and Poland. It’s true my new novel is set in the Holy Land, but it takes place 2,000 years before the foundation of the state of Israel.

    Of course, that piece is from that notorious bastion of right-wing belief, The Guardian

  • Broward Count Sheriffs office loses accreditation.
  • On the Betsy Ross Flag:

  • Guadalajara hit by several inches of golfball-sized global warming.
  • Mad magazine is shutting down.
  • Does the Navy have patents for UFO-like craft? Sure looks like it, but I suspect we’re just farking with the Chinese…
  • Think Progress is a money-losing rathole.
  • Invasion of the killer alien tick. (Hat tip: Woodpile Report.)
  • Attention everyone: Mess with our Blue Bell and we are coming for you. Signed, Texas.
  • Florida man find out the hard way that cocaine and fugu don’t mix. And they’re not great for you separately, either… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • “Hillary Proposes Reparations To Anyone Who Ever Lost A Presidential Election To Trump.”
  • Trump Supreme Court Pick Roundup

    Monday, July 9th, 2018

    In advance of President Donald Trump announcing his nominee to the Supreme Court to replace retiring justice Anthony Kennedy tonight, here are a few links of interest on the subject:

  • The Volokh Conspiracy’s Jonathan Adler looks at President Trump’s reported finalists:

    According to press reports, rollout packages have been prepared for four potential nominees, all of whom sit as judges on U.S. Courts of Appeals: Brett Kavanaugh (D.C. Circuit), Raymond Kethledge (6th Circuit), Amy Coney Barrett (7th Circuit), and Thomas Hardiman (3rd Circuit). All four potential nominees are on Trump’s list of 25 potential SCOTUS nominees, and all four are highly qualified jurists of the sort the President said he would appoint.

  • Jim Geraghty is hoping for Amy Comey Barrett, just to watch the left-wing anti-Catholic freakout:

    The way Senate Democrats treated Barrett last autumn — in particular, Senator Dianne Feinstein’s argument that Barrett was simply too religious and too devoutly Catholic to serve on the bench, declaring, “the dogma lives loudly within you,” revealed an argument this country needs to have: whether the country accepts deeply religious people in positions of legal authority.

    (It’s kind of amazing that a country that has freedom of religion, that was founded in part by Pilgrims, was a beacon for those seeking religious freedom for generations, and that has had George Washington, John Adams, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush as presidents would even need to have this debate. But it is illustrative of how different the modern Left is from previous generations.)

    Yes, there are plenty of progressive and Democratic Catholics in this country. But I don’t think you have to look too hard to find progressives who believe, more or less, that devout Catholics — perhaps devout Christians of any stripe — simply can’t be trusted to rule on the law and should be prevented from serving in the judiciary whenever possible. A Catholic judge can insist, loudly and often, that they believe their role as a judge is to rule on the law and the Constitution alone, and that while their faith no doubt shapes their values and their worldview — as much as any religion, philosophy, or atheism shapes the values and worldview of any other judge — and some progressives will insist it’s all a ruse. Some are determined to see any religiously active Christians as theocrats in black robes. (As this 2007 cartoon demonstrates, the arguments are sometimes not that subtle at all; merely an affiliation with a Catholic faith makes you an agent of the Pope.)

    You know that if Barrett is the nominee, someone on the Left will make an openly sexist criticism. You know her seven children will be discussed in depth. You know that someone will inevitably make an argument that amounts to, “Look, if we’re going to allow Catholics to be judges, they at least have to be lapsed Catholics.”

    Why do some progressives see Catholics and/or Christians as aspiring dictators from the bench, eager to toss away any established rights, established traditions, and impose an oppressive doctrine on the entire country and stifle dissent and differing points of view?

    Because that’s how some progressives see the role of the judiciary.

  • Contrasting Amy Comey Barrett with Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
  • Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois thinks other Democratic senators should be just fine and dandy with losing their own senate seats in order to defeat President trump’s Supreme Court pick, whoever it is. I wonder what that would accomplish, given that President Trump could just resubmit them to a more Republican senate for approval come January…
  • Via Adler comes news that there’s a FantasySCOTUS page where people can vote for their preferred pick. Barrett is leading there.
  • “Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) said Thursday the upcoming fight over President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee was about whether the country would ‘criminalize women.'” OK, you caught us! At our Secret Patriarchal Oppressor Tribunals (SPOT), we often opine “Hey, what if we just threw everyone with two X chromosomes into prison! That would solve all our problems!” Good times, good times…