It was 23 years ago Wednesday that terrorists hijacked four U.S. commercial airline flights, turned the planes into weapons, crashed them into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania, and in the process killed nearly 3,000 people. Today, America is at risk of another equally as deadly terrorist attack, a national security expert says.

The threat of another 9/11-type terrorist attack on America “is higher now than it was in the months and years preceding 9/11 for a couple of reasons,” says Robert Greenway, director of the Allison Center for National Security at The Heritage Foundation. 

First, Greenway says the terrorist threat level against the U.S. is high because of “our posture abroad, our approach to our adversaries, … [and] our neglected military capacity and capability and focus.” 

But America’s greatest vulnerability to another terrorist attack, he says, is “the fact that we’ve invited terrorist organizations to exploit our open borders, and now they are really hiding within our own population and enjoying the benefits and concealing themselves in their activities inside of our own borders.” 

Greenway deployed in support of Operation Relentless Pursuit and Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001 in the war on terrorism. He also served as a senior intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and then on the National Security Council. 

Listen to our interview with Greenway marking the anniversary of 9/11 on today’s edition of “The Daily Signal Podcast.”

The post Threat of Another Terrorist Attack ‘Is Higher Now’ Than in Months Before 9/11, Expert Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.

ABC’s debate moderators’ performance in Tuesday night’s presidential debate made CNN’s performance in June look like a master class in fairness, objectivity, and balance.

It was exactly the kind of debate moderation left-wing commentators on X have been demanding for months—years, really.

They don’t want anything approaching objectivity. They wanted moderators to “fact-check” former President Donald Trump every step of the way while allowing his opponent to pontificate on questions they think will be beneficial to Democratic Party fortunes.

And that’s essentially what happened.

ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis continually “fact-checked” Trump in real time, arguing with him after nearly every answer. That makes for a horrible debate format.

ABC debate moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis pose for pictures with ABC News crew members at the end of Tuesday night’s presidential faceoff in Philadelphia. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

Were the Lincoln-Douglas debates fact-checked by interjecting moderators? Of course not. The debate was between the two men and their ideas.

But in Tuesday night’s debate, the moderators didn’t even bother to create the mirage of objectivity. They hounded Trump every step of the way while stepping aside to allow Harris to make her points. They weren’t fact-checking on behalf of the American people, they were interjecting on behalf of their partisan interest.

The fact-checks weren’t even particularly accurate, not that that really seemed to matter to the moderators. For instance, when Trump said that Democrats in some states support after-birth abortion, Davis interjected that “there is no state in this country where it is legal to kill a baby after birth.”

As The Daily Signal has reported, there are many states—including Minnesota, the home state of Harris’ running mate Gov. Tim Walz—that allow babies who survive abortions to die.

Harris didn’t get this treatment at all. Moderators politely allowed Harris to say whatever she wanted.

Even in the most obvious case of Harris going with the tired fabrication about Trump calling white supremacists “very fine people” in Charlottesville, Va.—fact-checked as false by even the reliably left-wing Snopes—Muir and Davis said nothing.

The fix was in.

To a certain extent, left-wing journalists demanding this kind of rigging is understandable. They know that the ABCs and the CNNs of the world are in the tank for their candidates. Why not use their power of control over these debates to direct it in a way that benefits Democrats, who are so clearly on the right side of history?

That mentality won out on Tuesday night and lefty commentators were giddy on social media.

“I will say it ABC moderators have exceeded expectations. They are fact-checking and confronting, Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin posted on X. “Shows how abysmal CNN was.”

That mirrors how the Left generally thinks all our society’s institutions should work. Alternatives to the narratives the Left peddles should be carefully managed and massaged so the people are led to only one point of view.

That’s why the Left had a full-blown meltdown when entrepreneur Elon Musk bought the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. It meant that they would no longer have the power to put the finger on the lever of amplifying the messages they like while suppressing the ones they don’t.

But this sort of bias comes at a cost. Institutions that ply on their objectivity as their main selling point risk surrendering the power of that credibility when they blatantly put their finger on the scale for a particular ideology.

The public’s attitude toward ABC and their cohorts and the media has followed the same course as public health institutions in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdowns. When after months of telling everyone to lock down for everyone else’s safety, they largely came out in favor of Black Lives Matter protests because “racism is the real pandemic,” they lost an enormous number of American who will never trust them again.

ABC’s moderators’ performance Tuesday night is a perfect example of why we have “populism.”

Did Trump fall into the traps ABC and the Harris campaign set in this 3-on-1 debate? Yes, probably. They will now pat themselves on the back and think of it as a job well done until Election Day.

With some Americans, that’s all good and well. Trump is too dangerous to be given a fair shake. With a fair debate, the people may choose poorly.

But the stacked deck highlighted the theme that Trump has always used to great success with his supporters since he became the Republican presidential nominee the first time way back in 2015. The system is rigged against you. The system hates Trump because it hates his supporters. The system hates Trump because it hates his supporters.

That message was driven home on Tuesday night. Maybe this was mission accomplished for ABC, but Muir and Davis did a disservice to the American people and certainly discredited themselves.

The post 3 on 1: Trump Clashes With Harris—and the Debate ‘Moderators’ appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump face off Tuesday night for their first, and possibly only, debate before the Nov. 5 presidential election. 

The matchup is being hosted by ABC News and will be moderated by ABC News anchors David Muir and Linsey Davis. The debate is taking place at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia and is set to run for 90 minutes.

This is the second debate for Trump during the 2024 campaign. The first time around he faced off against President Joe Biden on June 27. Biden struggled to answer questions and finish sentences, and dropped out of the race July 21.

The rules in this debate will be the same as the June debate. Candidates’ microphones will be silenced while the opponent is answering questions.

The Daily Signal will be fact-checking this debate live as it happens.

Trump: We had no inflation

Trump repeatedly said he “had no inflation” during his tenure in the White House. While inflation grew much faster under Biden and Harris, prices also rose under Trump. 

Prices overall rose 19% over the first 42 months of Biden’s term compared with 6% during Trump’s first 42 months, according to Forbes. Year-over-year inflation peaked under Biden at a four-decade hgh of 9% in 2022.

Opportunity economy

Harris said she is the only candidate promoting an opportunity economy, but Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act gave the 82% of middle-income earners a tax cut that averaged about $1,050, according to FactCheck.org.

“I was raised in a middle-class home,” Harris said, “And I am actually the only person on the stage who has a plan to lift up the middle class and the working people, and when you look at his economic plan, it’s all about tax breaks for the richest people.” 

But even the Biden-Harris administration’s Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, acknowledged that Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cut taxes for all. 

The year following the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, new job openings surged, and about 83,000 more Americans voluntarily left their jobs for better opportunities at the end of 2019, compared with the trend before the reform.

Trump: Harris’ father Is a Marxist professor

The claim that Harris’ father is a Marxist was fact-checked by Snopes as “true” after a viral X post from political economist Maxine Fowé. 

Donald Harris, a now-retired professor of economics at Stanford University, was the author of a 1978 book, “Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution.” It features ideas on Karl Marx’s theory of capital. “His book, ‘Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution’, published in 1978 and dedicated to Kamala and her sister, examines the pitfalls of relying on profit-seeking capitalists to direct an economy,” writes The Economist. The New Yorker wrote of Donald Harris being “a renowned Marxist economist from Jamaica who taught at Stanford University for decades.”

‘Trump Abortion Bans’

Harris branded state laws on abortion “Trump abortion bans,” because Trump appointed the Supreme Court justices who created the majority that overturned the 1973 abortion precedent, Roe v. Wade. 

The justices Trump nominated did indeed overturn Roe in the 2022 case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

“Donald Trump hand-selected three justices of the Supreme Court with the intention that they would overturn Roe,” Harris said. 

When Trump said he supports exceptions to abortion restrictions in the cases of rape, incest, and a threat to the life of the mother, Harris said, “in over 20 states, there are Trump abortion bans which make it criminal for a doctor or nurse to provide health care,” a reference to abortion. 

She noted that many of these laws “make no exception for rape or incest.”

Yet Trump claimed that after Dobbs, states can make their own laws on abortion, so a federal ban is unnecessary.

“Look, this is an issue that’s torn our country apart for 52 years,” the former president said. “Each individual state is voting. It’s the vote of the people now. It’s not tied up in the federal government.”

Trump does not bear responsibility for each of the abortion laws passed after Dobbs; the states themselves do. All Trump’s Supreme Court justices did was enable the states to make their own laws.

Harris: No Women Getting Late-Term Abortions

Harris said no women are carrying their babies to the ninth month of pregnancy, then getting abortions. 

She said this after answering a question about whether she supported any limitations on abortions by saying she would restore Roe v. Wade. 

In saying this, Harris admitted that she would allow abortions in the ninth month. She just denies that they are happening. 

But as of June 28, six states and Washington, D.C., impose no term restrictions on abortion. And 11 states have ballot measures that would permit abortion up until birth if a “health care professional” determines the mother needs it. 

In 2019, Harris voted to block a bill that would have required medical care for babies born alive in botched abortions.

‘Tax Cut for Billionaires and Big Corporations’

Harris touted her own plan for a $6,000 child tax credit and a $50,000 tax deduction for startup small businesses. But she accused Trump of wanting to give a tax cut only for the wealthy. 

“My opponent on the other hand, his plan, is to do what he has done before, which is to provide a tax cut for billionaires and big corporations, which will result in $5 trillion to America’s deficit,” Harris said.

She also attacked what she called a “Trump sales tax.” 

Trump has not supported a direct sales tax, but has supported tariffs, which critics say would increase prices and would function effectively as a tax. 

Harris’ reference to “what he has done before,” on taxes was an apparent reference to the 2017 tax reform legislation, known as the $1.5 trillion Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. 

The tax cuts benefited middle-class workers, as wage growth increased by about $1,400 in the years following the corporate tax cuts. Job openings also increased in 2018.

About 83,000 more Americans voluntarily left their jobs for better opportunities at the end of 2019 compared with the trend before the reform, while Census Bureau data has shown real household income reached an all-time high in 2019, growing by $4,400 (a one-year increase of 6.8%).

Meanwhile, IRS data shows average effective tax rates declined by 9.3% in 2018. Tax cuts as a percentage of taxes paid in 2017 were largest for the lowest-income Americans and lowest for the top 1%, as The Daily Signal previously reported.

Trump Thanked Xi During COVID-19

While discussing tariffs on goods from China, Harris said that Trump thanks China’s leader, Xi Jinping, for his actions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What Donald Trump did with COVID, he actually thanked President Xi for what he did during COVID. Look at his tweet, ‘Thank you, President Xi, exclamation point.’”

Harris was likely referring to a X post by Trump that he posted on Jan. 24, 2020.

“China has been working very hard to contain the coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American people, I want to thank President Xi!”

The first cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. began in late January 2020.

Trump later was highly critical of China, pointing to the Asian nation as the origin site of the disease.
“In the earliest days of the virus, China locked down travel domestically while allowing flights to leave China and infect the world,” Trump said in a U.N. speech in September 2020. “China condemned my travel ban on their country, even as they canceled domestic flights and locked citizens in their homes.”

Presidential Immunity

“The United States Supreme Court recently ruled that the former president would essentially be immune from any misconduct if he were to enter the White House again,” Harris claimed.

This misrepresents the Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. United States. 

“The president enjoys no immunity for his unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official. The President is not above the law,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 6-3 majority opinion in July. “But under our system of separated powers, the president may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity from prosecution for his official acts. That immunity applies equally to all occupants of the Oval Office.”

The immunity only applies to constitutional powers and partially to official acts. The immunity also extends to every occupant of the Oval Office, not just Trump.

Harris: Trump Would ‘Terminate the Constitution’

“Understand that this is someone who has openly said he would terminate the Constitution of the United States,” Harris said.

Trump has not said he wants to terminate America’s founding document. 

That claim likely comes from a 2022 Truth Social post about the 2020 election, in which Trump wrote, “A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” 

“Our great ‘Founder’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!” Trump continued. 

A month later, Trump said, “The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution. This is simply more DISINFORMATION & LIES.”

This article will be updated throughout the night.

The post Fact-Checking Claims Made in Trump-Harris Debate appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Tens of thousands of noncitizens are registered to vote and have voted, House members and testifying experts asserted Tuesday. 

A House subcommittee held a hearing Tuesday, titled “The  Biden-Harris Border Crisis: Noncitizen Voting,” that examined noncitizen voting and the nation’s porous border. 

The hearing comes as House Republicans push to include safeguards to ensure that only U.S. citizens vote as part of a continuing resolution to keep funding the government. 

The Justice Department announced Sept. 5 that an illegal immigrant from Guatemala would plead guilty after being charged with falsely assuming the identity of a U.S. citizen in 2011 and illegally voting in multiple Alabama elections over the years. 

My book “The Myth of Suppression” details past instances where noncitizen voting affected the outcome of local elections. 

Here are four big moments from the hearing held by the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution and limited government. 

1. ‘What If It’s Your Vote?’

The 1993 National Voter Registration Act and the 2002 Help America Vote Act make it “virtually impossible to prevent noncitizens from registering to vote either accidentally or intentionally,” testified Rosemary Jenks, policy director of the Immigration Accountability Project.

“Neither a driver’s license nor a Social Security number provides proof of U.S. citizenship,” Jenks said. “All 50 states and the District of Columbia issue driver’s licenses—including Real IDs—to lawfully present noncitizens, while 19 states also issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens. Every alien authorized to work in the United States is eligible for an SSN. The Biden-Harris administration has been handing out work authorizations like candy to inadmissible aliens, with SSN issuances following close behind.”

Noting the ease with which illegal immigrants may register to vote, she turned the questions to the House panel.

“Why is it OK if even one American citizen’s vote is canceled by an illegal vote? What if it’s your vote?” Jenks asked lawmakers. 

 2. ‘Stoke Anti-Immigrant Fear’

Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, insisted that noncitizen voting isn’t a “widespread” problem.

“Republicans rely on the false premise that there is widespread noncitizen voting in order to advance dangerous legislation like the SAVE Act and other burdensome, unnecessary measures requiring proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections,” Nadler said. 

The SAVE Act is short for the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. If enacted and signed into law, the Republican-sponsored bill would amend the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, also known as the “motor voter law,” to require that states obtain documentary proof of U.S. citizenship before anyone can register to vote.

Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., accused Republican lawmakers of a “propaganda campaign.”

“Bills combating noncitizen voting are really about politics, not policy,” Scanlon said. “These bills are not rooted in reality, but are widely used to stoke anti-immigrant fear.”

House Republicans’ proposed amendment to the spending bill would accomplish the same objective as the measure that passed that GOP-controlled chamber in July. Senate Democrats, who control the upper chamber, opposed the bill. 

If the two sides can’t agree now, it could lead to a partial shutdown of the government. 

Election lawyer Cleta Mitchell, founder and chair of the Foundation for Accountability and Integrity in Elections Fund, questioned Democrats’ continued rationale for opposing the SAVE Act. 

“Democrats oppose the SAVE Act, ostensibly because it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote in a federal election,” Mitchell testified. “And it is illegal for millions of people to swarm across our borders without documentation, but nonetheless, this administration under border czar Kamala Harris has adopted just such a policy of opening the door and letting anyone and everyone into the country. Illegally. Already against federal law.”

She added that Democrats’ goal is to “change the electorate.”

“If they can’t persuade the American people to want their Marxist policies for America, just import voters who don’t speak the language, don’t have a shared commitment to our country and our national principles, get them into the very porous voter registration system, and collect their votes,” Mitchell said. 

3. ‘Only Take a Few Thousand’

Subcommittee Chairman Chip Roy, R-Texas, referred to a 2014 study by Old Dominion University and George Mason University. It estimated that 6.4% of noncitizens—or 1.2 million at the time—illegally voted in the 2008 election. That number might have tipped a U.S. Senate race in Minnesota that year, as well as the presidential vote in North Carolina. 

“It would only take a few thousand noncitizens voting—much less than the 1.2 million estimated—to impact the outcome of razor thin elections,” Roy said.

In the 2020 election, Joe Biden carried Arizona over Donald Trump by 10,000 votes, Georgia by 12,000 votes, Wisconsin by 20,000 votes, and Pennsylvania by 81,000 votes. 

“The other side likes to point out it is already illegal for noncitizens to vote. That is technically true. They fail to mention that the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 literally prohibits states from verifying citizenship during the voter registration process,” Roy said. “This means it is impossible to enforce the law on the front end. Consequently, the primary defense against noncitizens registering to vote is a literal box-checking exercise on a voter registration form.”

The Texas Republican noted that since 2021 Texas has removed about 6,500 noncitizens from voter rolls, 1,900 of whom had voting histories. Since 2022, Virginia has removed 6,300 noncitizens from its rolls, Alabama removed 3,251 noncitizens, and Ohio 597, Roy added. 

4. Federal Government ‘Only Impediment’ 

Florida Secretary of State Cord Byrd reminded the House subcommittee of the close 2000 presidential election decided in Florida by just 537 votes. 

“Miami-Dade County alone, Florida’s largest county, has over 715 precincts. A single illegal noncitizen vote in each precinct can change the outcome of a presidential election,” Byrd said.

Byrd, a Republican, cited the 2006 bipartisan election reform report led by former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, and former Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican, that called for preventing noncitizen voting. 

“Every illegitimate vote of a noncitizen negates the legitimate vote of a citizen,” Byrd said. “Nationally, preventing noncitizens from registering to vote and voting is the number one priority of states committed to election integrity.”

He said Florida has prosecuted noncitizens who attempt to fraudulently vote in an election. 

“Floridians have changed our state Constiution. We have strengthened our laws. We have engaged in litigation. And we have an office dedicated to investigating election crimes,” Byrd said. “The only impediment to doing more is the federal government. That’s why states need action from our congressional leaders.”

Mitchell, head of the Foundation for Accountability and Integrity in Elections Fund, added that Republicans’ SAVE Act would be important in the 22 states that allow same-day voter registration.

“This requirement will interrupt one of the biggest threats to the integrity of the 2024 election: the organized roundup by left-wing advocacy groups of scores of illegals to register and vote them on the same day, before anyone can determine if the individuals were eligible to vote in the election,” Mitchell said. 

The post 4 Takeaways From House Hearing on Noncitizen Voting appeared first on The Daily Signal.

The United States’ federal debt has soared to $35.3 trillion. In less than a year, the federal government has increased that debt by $1.9 trillion. That occurred during years of record tax revenues and acceptable economic growth.

If the current administration remains in power, the Treasury’s own estimates predict an additional $16 trillion increase in debt by 2034, without accounting for any recession or slowdown in tax receipts. According to the Congressional Budget Office, Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic plan would add another $1.9 trillion to $2.2 trillion to the national debt.

The Harris campaign has not even bothered to discuss a plan to balance the budget. She just said that “efficiency” and the old fallacy of higher taxes on the rich would pay for the increase in spending—two things that have proven to do nothing to the ballooning debt and that do not even start to scratch the already unsustainable $2 trillion annual deficit.

This reckless increase in debt is happening in an economic growth period. However, if we adjust for government debt accumulation, 2021 to 2024 were the worst years of growth, adjusted for debt, since the 1930s.

In a recent article, economist Claudia Sahm stated that we shouldn’t worry about debt. “Debt is neither inherently good nor bad,” she wrote in an opinion column for Bloomberg back in January. “As such, the question is not what’s the right level of borrowing, but rather what’s the economic return on the borrowing or the societal goals it advances.”

She went on to say that “the government can easily service its debt because of its unlimited taxing authority and ability to issue more U.S. Treasury securities to repay maturing securities.”

Now you must worry. A lot.

Unproductive Borrowing ‘Inherently’ Bad

Let us start with the benign idea of “economic return on borrowing and societal goals.” The evidence from the United States indicates that the economic return is extremely low. Entitlement spending has not strengthened the economic growth path, and debt continues to rise faster than gross domestic product.

It’s true that debt is not inherently bad, but unproductive borrowing is. It’s a massive transfer of wealth from the productive sector to the bloated bureaucratic state.

Furthermore, the societal goals cannot be unlimited. The government must administer and not just add expenditures to previous expenditures, particularly when there is no realistic analysis of the success or failure of government programs.

The idea that a particular government program is beneficial is not enough to add it to the budget without reducing other expenses. Not even a benign view of government spending as Sahm’s can justify that every government expenditure item today is essential.

Furthermore, we must always understand that governments do not give money for free. They tax the productive sector and borrow, which means printing a currency that is constantly losing purchasing power. Therefore, the government is not advancing societal goals by borrowing without control. It is implementing a profoundly regressive policy that creates a dependent subclass and makes it increasingly difficult for the middle class to thrive.

Economic, Fiscal, and Inflationary Limits

It’s false that the government has “unlimited” taxing authority and the ability to issue more debt, i.e., print money.

The government has economic, fiscal, and inflationary limits: Economic, because constantly increasing taxation leads to stagnation and more debt; fiscal, because expenditures are consolidated and annualized, while tax receipts are cyclical; and inflationary, because the constant issuance of new currency, which is what happens when more debt is issued, leads to the loss of confidence in the currency and the erosion of its purchasing power.

If what Sahm states were true, the euro area and Japan would be examples of high growth and economic strength, but they are examples of stagnation, high debt, and rising social discontent.

The government does not set taxes to fund its incessant spending habits. Taxes should be set according to the economic reality of an economy. The fallacy of taxes on the rich and corporations does not even address the ballooning deficit and erodes economic growth and productive investment.

When someone tells you not to worry about record debt, you should be extremely concerned. When they say that the government has unlimited resources, they mean that you will pay by becoming poorer with more taxes, more inflation, lower growth, or all three at the same time.

When they tell you that $35 trillion of debt is peanuts compared with $142 trillion of American wealth, they are saying that the government will be pleased to absorb the wealth of the economy. You will pay.

Private Sector Isn’t an ATM

When they tell you that tax cuts are the problem, it comes from the perspective that the private sector is an ATM at the disposal of governments.

Tax cuts do not reduce revenues, just as tax hikes do not raise them forever. Tax cuts adjust the taxable base to the real economy in order to encourage more investment and growth.

Tax cuts are not a loss for the government. They are a win for the economy. It is simply a return of funds to those who have earned them. The idea that funds are better in the hands of the government than in the pockets of those who earned them is confiscatory.

It’s ludicrous to think that the government knows better than the private sector where and how to spend money. Additionally, it’s insane to believe that the government will not squander the funds and bloat the administrative costs.

Furthermore, it’s foolish to assume that corporations and the affluent will hoard unused funds. There’s no such thing as idle money. Capital markets and the private banking sector invest all of their earnings in a productive economy.

If Sahm is concerned about economic returns and social advancements, she should advocate for the private sector to retain a larger portion of the earned money, as it will allocate it to the most advantageous investments.

Inflation Is Regressive Form of Taxation

Inflation is a form of default, in which the government transfers its imbalances to those who receive their salaries in currency. This is the most regressive form of taxation, primarily affecting the poorest. When governments ignore the real demand for the money they issue, confidence in the currency disappears.

Developing countries do not issue debt in foreign currency because they are stupid, but because there is no international demand for their local currency.

Economists such as Sahm assume that the U.S. dollar will have eternal and unlimited demand, and, as such, the US government can export inflation to the rest of the world through the loss of the purchasing power of the currency it issues.

However, global central banks are reducing their holdings of U.S. dollars (U.S. treasuries). International demand is declining, and the limits I mentioned before are already evident.

The U.S. is showing its economic limits, as evidenced by the significant slowdown despite a record deficit and government so-called stimulus. The U.S. is also demonstrating its fiscal limits as the government persists in raising taxes, resulting in significantly lower tax receipts than anticipated and an interest expense bill that has escalated to $3 billion daily.

Declining Purchasing Power of Dollar

Furthermore, the inflationary limit is evident due to a 20% increase in inflation over the past four years, a 30% increase in the cost of basic groceries, and persistent inflation, which is exemplified by the constant decline in the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar.

What Harris is doing as vice president and intends to continue doing if she becomes president is to continuously test the patience of the world and U.S. citizens when it comes to accepting a constantly depreciated purchasing power of the currency.

Saying that nothing will happen if debt continues to rise and deficits continue to drive government policy is, literally, like saying that an alcoholic should drink more vodka because cirrhosis has not killed him yet.

The dollar is the credit of the U.S. economy. If the U.S. government loses its credibility, domestic agents will begin to reduce their use of the dollar, while international agents will decline the currency due to its constant fiscal excess and its tendency to push the limits of global patience.

Thinking that the U.S. dollar will never lose its reserve currency status is simply reckless and ignores history.

Harris is threatening the dollar, and you should be very concerned when someone says that the government has unlimited taxation and printing resources. That means it has unlimited ways of making you poorer.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Why America’s Soaring Debt Is Biggest Threat to US Dollar appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A new report by America First Policy Institute concludes that 123,000 autoworkers could lose their jobs due to the Biden-Harris administration’s regulations requiring 70% of new cars sold to be electric by 2032.

Banning all sales of gasoline-powered cars, as California and 15 other states have proposed, would result in almost 200,000 lost automaker jobs—primarily in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio, the report concludes.

Other estimates show greater job losses. Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Farley said at a conference in Detroit in 2022 that “it takes 40% less labor to make an electric car.” With over a million workers now employed in auto and parts manufacturing, that’s a loss of 400,000 jobs, twice the estimate of America First Policy Institute.

Layoffs are happening in real time. This summer, after receiving over $500 million in government grants to make batteries and electric vehicles, Stellantis announced jobs losses for 2,500 workers in Michigan who make popular Ram trucks.

Americans are losing jobs because of a product they don’t even want to buy. This year, over 5,000 car dealers wrote to President Joe Biden, saying: “Electric vehicle sales are not remotely on trend to meet those [Environmental Protection Agency] requirements. Indeed, the day supply of electric vehicles on dealer lots today is nearly twice the supply of conventional vehicles. … We now ask that you hit the brakes.”

The 400,000 lost jobs forecast by Ford’s Farley are only in auto manufacturing. The number doesn’t account for job losses among mechanics at dealerships and local garages who now repair gasoline-powered vehicles.

A million American workers are employed in car repair and maintenance; electric vehicles need less maintenance. (The AFPI report specifically excludes them from its job loss calculations.)

But repair jobs are vital for American workers. No oil changes or tuneups are needed for electric vehicles, but when drivers need to replace their $15,000 EV batteries, they buy new ones. If one quarter of the million mechanics lost their jobs due to the Biden-Harris EV mandate, that’s a loss of another 250,000 jobs.

Similarly, a 2020 report from Germany’s National Platform Future of Mobility concluded that 400,000 German autoworkers would lose their jobs due to electrification. China exported 5 million vehicles around the world in 2023. The Chinese auto giant BYD will sell its Seagull EV in Germany in 2025 for $12,500, undercutting German automakers.

As China expands in EVs, Jeep has left China. Sales of GM and Ford vehicles in China are half of what they were in 2017.

And here’s the dirty little secret: The hundreds of thousands of jobs lost to Americans and Europeans are going to Chinese workers.  

China produces 66% of global EVs and 85% of batteries. These sales are driven by subsidies from the Chinese Communist Party, including tax credits, forced labor, unregulated coal-fired power plants, and low-interest loans.

While China has an unfair advantage in EVs, U.S. companies dominate in larger vehicles such as pickup trucks and SUVs. But American companies are being required—through final rules promulgated by the Biden-Harris administration’s Environmental Protection Agency and Transportation Department—to produce electric vehicles rather than the cars their customers want to buy. 

Besides transferring jobs to China, Chinese electric vehicles have the potential to send data back to China as a way to spy on Americans. EVs would be far more effective than spy balloons at collecting important data, and at far lower cost, because Americans would purchase these vehicles. For similar security reasons, the Federal Communications Commission banned Huawei and ZTE technology in 2022.

Chinese EVs also would allow the ruling Chinese Communist Party to assemble an unprecedented trove of Americans’ personal data. When consumers buy cars, they provide information on addresses, driver’s licenses, credit cards, and insurance. When drivers get loans, auto companies can access credit history, including mortgages, other loans, and additional credit cards. America should not give this to the CCP.

Further, just as General Motors’ Onstar program advertises that it can stop or disable stolen vehicles, America should not give the Chinese Communist Party power to stop or disable EVs driven in America. If Onstar can do this, Chinese car companies undoubtedly have the technology—as well as potentially disabling braking and navigation systems.

With the recent Supreme Court decision in Loper Bright v. Raimondo, requiring agencies to follow congressional statutes, the Biden-Harris regulations on electric vehicles will face strong legal challenges. Americans deserve their choice of vehicles, and the Biden-Harris administration should not use regulations to ship American jobs offshore.  

The post Biden-Harris Admin Ships Auto Jobs to China appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Rep. Colin Allred, the Texas Democrat challenging Sen. Ted Cruz in November, said he would support “fixing” the filibuster in part so that a hypothetical Democratic-majority Senate could pass an abortion bill that he claims would codify the Supreme Court’s 1971 Roe v. Wade abortion decision.

Tim Miller, a former Republican and podcast host for The Bulwark, interviewed Allred, a former NFL linebacker and member of the House of Representatives, at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin on Saturday. Miller asked a softball question, suggesting that Allred (along with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris) is not as liberal as his critics suggest, but Allred took the opportunity to pledge to “fix” the filibuster.

“If Kamala Harris gets in there, and if the Democrats hold on to the Senate, if Colin Allred gets in there and there’s 50 Democratic senators, they’re going to kill the filibuster, they’re going to pass the Green New Deal, they’re going to socialize health care, they’re going to expand the Supreme Court to 19 people … is that realistic?” Miller asked, suggesting that anyone who predicts these radical moves from Allred would be mistaken.

Rather than taking the bait, Allred pledged to change the filibuster, a Senate rule that currently requires a 60-vote majority to pass certain forms of legislation.

“The filibuster has to change because it’s broken,” the Democrat replied. “The history of the filibuster, as many Senate observers will know, is that it was used almost exclusively to block civil rights legislation, to block anti-lynching legislation. I’m a civil rights lawyer by training. This is personal for me.”

(While opponents of civil rights legislation did use the filibuster, many others have employed the filibuster, as well, to kill countless other bills. It is no more than a legislative mechanism that can be used for good or bad purposes.)

Allred noted that a previous version of the filibuster would hold up Senate business, while the new version of the filibuster applies “to every single bill, and you have a dual track,” where the Senate can pass other legislation while senators block specific bills through the filibuster.

“It has contributed to hyperpartisanship and has actually made the Senate less functional,” he argued.

Supporters of the current filibuster, such as outgoing Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., and Joe Manchin, I-W.Va., argue that the 60-vote threshold prevents radical bills from passing the chamber and contributes to friendliness in the upper body of the legislature.

“The whole point of the filibuster, like the whole point of the Senate itself, is to provide for a place where we can have considered, deliberative debate, and can forge compromise and consensus among our diverse and currently divided populace,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, said in 2021.

Allred noted that in the House of Representatives, where he currently serves, the majority rules. “If you’re not in the majority, you have nothing,” he said. “The Senate doesn’t operate that way, and I don’t want to see it become like the House, but the current filibuster doesn’t work.”

The Texas Democrat insisted, “I want to maintain the bipartisan nature of the Senate,” but he called for altering the filibuster in a way that would enable Democrats to “codify Roe v. Wade.”

“And so, to me, we do have to reform it. We have to fix it. We have to go back to the original formulation for it,” he said. “That is also why we will codify Roe v. Wade and make it the law of the land.”

But the Democrat did not explain how “fixing” the filibuster would help Democrats pass legislation to “codify Roe v. Wade.”

In September 2021, Allred voted with most of his fellow Democrats to pass HR 3755, the Women’s Health Protection Act. He has co-sponsored the legislation, claiming that it “would codify Roe v. Wade into federal law.”

Yet the bill goes further than Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision in which the Supreme Court reinterpreted the 14th Amendment of the Constitution to include a right to abortion. The court ruled that states could not ban abortion before the term of “fetal viability,” the point at which an infant can survive outside the womb. The court overturned that decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), returning the issue of abortion to the states.

While some states have restricted abortion to early in pregnancy before babies can feel pain, others have extended abortion up until the moment of birth.

The Women’s Health Protection Act specifically states that the right to abortion “shall not be limited or otherwise infringed.” It would have allowed abortion providers to determine whether a pregnancy is considered “viable” or not, effectively enabling abortions at any point.

“Make no mistake. It is not Roe v. Wade codification,” Manchin, who broke from his party and voted against the legislation, said in 2022. “It wipes 500 state laws off the books. It expands abortion.”

Allred went on to suggest that banning abortion involves forbidding the removal of a nonviable fetus in an ectopic pregnancy (where the embryo lodges outside the uterus, usually in a fallopian tube). He noted that two Texas women sued hospitals, claiming the hospitals refused to treat their ectopic pregnancies for fear of Texas’ abortion law, yet he did not note that Texas law does not forbid treating ectopic pregnancy and that those procedures are not abortions.

Allred did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment by press time.

The post ‘We Will Codify Roe v. Wade’ by ‘Fixing’ the Filibuster, Cruz’s Democratic Rival Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Donald Trump will square off Tuesday night against Kamala Harris in Philadelphia in what could be the only debate between the two major parties’ presidential nominees.

The stakes of the Harris-Trump debate couldn’t be higher.

For Harris, the current vice president, it could be her best chance to put the Trump era in the rearview mirror.

For Trump, the former president, it could be his only chance to personally and effectively brand the elusive Harris on key issues and point out where Harris has flip-flopped.

Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., seems to believe it shouldn’t be all that difficult, given Harris is President Joe Biden’s sitting vice president.

“Any opportunity President Trump has to contrast secure borders, the Trump economy, and $2 gas with Kamala Harris’ disastrous record is going to help him on Election Day,” Banks told The Daily Signal. “The more voters are reminded of the Harris-Biden administration, the less they like it, which is why the vice president has only given one softball CNN interview since she announced her campaign.”

Harris spent the five days leading up to the debate with Trump in rigorous preparation inside a hotel in Pittsburgh. Her campaign brought in a full stage and TV lighting to give the vice president a feel for what being on stage at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the debate venue, would be like.

Harris was accompanied in her lockdown by lawyer and Democratic debate whisperer Karen Dunn, political consultant Sean Clegg, domestic policy adviser Rohini Kosoglu, Democratic National Convention chair Minyon Moore, and her campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond. The group worked around the clock, attempting to help Harris hone answers to follow ABC News’ debate guidelines.

That’s not all: Harris had a sparring partner. Philippe Reines, former deputy assistant secretary of state, reportedly was in full method-actor mode while playing Trump—even to the point of dressing like the former president.

Trump prepared a little differently. As he did before meeting Biden in June on the debate stage, Trump hosted policy roundtables with allies to prepare for the debate with Harris.

These roundtables featured commonplace figures in the Trump campaign such as campaign co-manager Susie Wiles, senior advisor Jason Miller, and policy adviser Stephen Miller. This time around, however, Trump was joined by former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii (who made a splash in the 2020 Democratic primary by attacking Harris) and Rep. Matt Gaetz, R.-Fla., who is peppered the former president with tough questions.

Last time Trump was onstage in a presidential debate he was opposite Biden, whose performance was so abysmal it triggered a chain reaction that ultimately ended with him dropping out of the race. Now Trump faces Biden’s current understudy and chosen successor.

Nevertheless, Harris isn’t to be underestimated. In less than a decade, she has gone from being the attorney general of California to spitting distance of the presidency. Since entering the race July 21, Harris has enjoyed what election observers called a “honeymoon” phase—high poll numbers and enthusiasm in response to her unpopular boss’ unceremoniously exiting the race.

The honeymoon, however, could be at an end. Harris surged ahead of Trump in the weeks after she took the top spot on the Democratic ticket. However, polls now have Trump and Harris in a dead heat, with some predictive models giving Trump a substantial edge in the Electoral College.

Harris’s regression in the polls could be because her campaign seems to have bungled aspects of its launch. It took nearly 40 days for Harris to sit down for an interview with a major news outlet. It took nearly 50 days for her to put an “issues” page on her campaign website.

Media figures on the Right and Left, much less the Trump campaign, were starting to make a stink about Harris’ evasiveness.

Alternatively, Harris’s honeymoon could be at an end precisely because American voters are catching wind of her policy proposals and aren’t impressed.

On the Harris campaign website’s new policy page, the Democratic nominee claims that she will be the candidate to enact “tough, smart solutions to secure the border, keep communities safe, and reform our broken immigration system.”

The question, then, is why she has not done so as Biden’s vice president and appointed border czar. Nevertheless, Harris’ website adds, “as president, she will bring back the bipartisan border security bill and sign it into law.”

“At the same time,” the campaign website adds, “she knows that our immigration system is broken and needs comprehensive reform that includes strong border security and an earned pathway to citizenship.”

Lora Ries, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, says she isn’t buying Harris’ about-face on border security.

“No one believes Kamala Harris suddenly supports a secure border or wants to keep communities safe because, as vice president (really, as the acting president, given Joe Biden’s incapacity), she could change policies today to secure the border and keep criminals off the street. But she doesn’t,” Ries told The Daily Signal. “Remember, Harris repeatedly said during her CNN joint interview that her ‘values have not changed.’ With that, she was telling her base: ‘Don’t worry, I still believe what I did and said before July 2024.’”

“The failed Senate border bill,” Ries continued, “failed for a reason.”

The reason being that it wouldn’t have closed the southern border to illegal aliens.

Instead, “it would expand and codify the very open border tools the Biden-Harris administration has used to implement its mass migration agenda,” Ries told The Daily Signal. “The House-passed bill, HR 2, the Secure the Border Act, would, in fact, secure the border. The campaign’s final words are the buried lede–mass amnesty is Harris’ ultimate goal.”

Another key issue is the economy and inflation. Although inflation has slowed from its 9.1% peak in June 2022, it remains far above the 1.9% average during the Trump years.

The Harris-Walz campaign website claims that as president Harris would beat back inflation by “crack[ing] down on anti-competitive practices that let big corporations jack up prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers” and instituting “the first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries.”

American Compass’ Duncan Braid told The Daily Signal that Harris’ proposed ban on price gouging is “a price control premised on gouging that isn’t happening.”

“Harris is targeting one of the lowest margin, most competitive markets out there,” Braid said. “Maybe instead she could propose some controls on Washington’s out-of-control spending.”

It seems like it was a catch-22 for Harris and her campaign: Either get attacked Tuesday night for not having a list of policies on her website, or list her policies and get attacked for those.

The campaign seems to have opted for the latter, but the risk Harris runs by releasing these policy proposals so close to the debate is having an incomplete mastery of her proposals when she goes onstage and contradicting herself yet again.

“We’re curious which Kamala Harris is going to show up to the debate,” Sen. Rick Scott, R. Fla., told The Daily Signal.

“Will it be the one who was the most liberal senator, more liberal than Bernie Sanders? Will it be Comrade Kamala who supported the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and amnesty and citizenship for illegal aliens? Or will it be the Kamala who has flipped on everything she believes via quotes from anonymous staffers?”

Whichever Harris shows up Tuesday night, the continuing positive media coverage likely will give Harris a tailwind.

“The media is trying to help package Kamala as new and the future,” Scott said. “She is not the future, she represents one of the oldest failed ideas in human history: socialism. That’s why she’s doing what most politicians like her do … lying about it.”

Scott said he believes—like Banks—that if Trump can keep it to the two candidates’ records and priors, Trump will be in the driver’s seat.

“The American people know Trump; they know how great our economy was and how safe our communities were when he was president,” Scott said. “Kamala is going to focus on viral gotcha moments, Trump is going to focus on real solutions to make our country great again. The American people want nothing to do with California socialism. That’s why he’s going to win the debate and on Nov. 5.”

The post Trump, Harris Prepare to Square Off in High-Stakes Debate appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Attending church services may open the door to eternal life—but it will also extend your life on Earth more than diet or exercise, according to the foremost expert on global longevity.

Dan Buettner, who won three Emmy Awards for his groundbreaking 2023 documentary “Live to 100: Secrets of the Blue Zones,” revealed the deep benefits that faith in God renders to those who want to live a long and prosperous life. Although America faces an epidemic of chronic diseases, “only about 20% of how long you live is dictated by your genes,” he told “Mornings with Maria” on Aug. 30. A healthy lifestyle incorporating diet, exercise, and stress management means the average person can live “12 more years in good health.”

But the statistics he shared proved that an active faith in God, including weekly church attendance, had potentially the biggest impact on extending earthly life.

Buettner’s documentary investigated regions in the world known for having the longest average lifespan. Researchers interviewed 263 centenarians—people who had lived to the age of 100—and found all but five “belonged to some faith-based community.”

The healthiest elderly had a common characteristic: “having a faith. We know people who go to church—or temple, or even mosque—and show up four times per month are living four to 14 years longer than people who aren’t.” The figure may come from a study finding regular church attendance lengthened the average American’s life by seven years—and 14 years for African Americans.

That number dwarfed other, more intuitive lifehacks, including regular exercise and diet. “For a 20-year-old, if you move away from the standard American diet towards a Blue Zone diet—which is to say whole food, plant-based—it’s worth about 10 years of extra life expectancy, and for a 60-year-old, it’s still worth about six years,” he said.

One food, particularly, stood out above others: beans. “If you’re eating a cup of beans a day, it’s worth about four extra years of life expectancy over getting your protein from less healthy sources,” Buettner said, as he raved about minestrone soup. “Every time that you mix a grain with a bean, they come together, they make a whole protein. … These are cheap foods, they’re shelf stable, and every American can afford them.”

Those in the healthiest lifestyle moved organically, about every 20 minutes, without sitting for long periods of time. But anyone can benefit from simple exercise, such as walking. “If you have zero physical activity in your life, you can raise your life expectancy three years if you just walk 20 minutes a day,” Buettner told Bartiromo.

Strong family relationships also put years in your life. Centenaries agree on “putting family first, keeping your aging parents nearby, investing in your partner, investing in your children,” he continued. “People who are in a committed relationship are living anywhere from two to six years longer than people who are alone in life.”

If you’re keeping track, you can add three years to your life with exercise, four years by eating beans, six years by being in a committed relationship, six to 10 years by eating a whole foods and plant-based diet, and seven to 14 years by going to church every week.

Another aspect of church life that may lengthen your life is stress management. A key factor in living to 100 is “downshifting: either through prayer, meditation, simply expressing gratitude before a meal.” Regular prayer incorporates “making sure our day has certain times where we lower the stress of the human condition, lower inflammation,” said Buettner, a 2011 fellow at National Geographic and muti-time grant awardee.

Environmental factors—including the people and businesses around you—also play a role. “If you live in a neighborhood with more than five fast food restaurants within half a mile of your home, you’re about 35% more likely to be obese than if there are fewer than three,” Buettner added. “If your three best friends are obese and unhealthy, you are 150% more likely to be overweight yourself.”

The study is but one of many that have found physical, mental, and psychological benefits of faith, Bible reading, and church attendance:

• Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a report in March 2023 stating that an epidemic of loneliness has produced health impacts “even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity.” Americans’ “health may be undermined” by their declining participation in “[r]eligious or faith-based groups.”

• Regular “religious practice has significant effects” in reducing the faithful’s odds of dying from suicides, drug poisonings, and alcoholic liver disease, according to a 2023 study.
• The Blue Zones commend cultures that promote a sense of purpose. “[R]eligious Americans tend to believe their life is meaningful more often than do those who are not religious,” found a 2023 study.
• Americans who believe in God and value marriage are more likely to be “very happy” than isolated secularists, according to a Wall Street Journal-NORC poll taken last March. While only a thin sliver of Americans (12%) consider themselves “very happy,” 68% of the happiest people surveyed say they believe in God.

• An overwhelming 82% of Christians describe their outlook as optimistic and take pride in their church, according to a 2023 study.
• Christians who regularly read the Bible report a higher score on the Human Flourishing Index—which measures “happiness & life satisfaction,” “mental & physical health,” “meaning & purpose,” “character & virtue,” “close societal relationships” and “financial & material stability”—than nonpracticing Christians or the Nones/religiously unaffiliated, a 2023 study found.
• “Young-adult Gen-Xers in the strongly religious class across the three measurements generally reported better mental health when they reached established adulthood than those in the nonreligious class,” reported a 2022 Syracuse University study.

• Women who attend church at least once a week had a 68% lower chance of dying a death of despair than non-churchgoers; men who go to church frequently lower their risk by one-third, according to a 2020 Harvard study.
• Americans who attended religious services regularly were 44% more likely to say they were “very happy” than the religiously inactive, concluded a 2019 Pew Research Center survey.
• A 2019 study found “robust effects of religiosity on depression that are stronger for the most depressed.”
• Even if they leave behind religious practices, “people who attended weekly religious services or practiced daily prayer or meditation in their youth reported greater life satisfaction and positivity in their 20s—and were less likely to subsequently have depressive symptoms, smoke, use illicit drugs, or have a sexually transmitted infection—than people raised with less regular spiritual habits,” discovered a 2018 study from Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
• A 2017 study found church attendance significantly lowers the body’s reaction to stress and cuts the worshiper’s chance of dying in half. “More frequent churchgoers (more than once a week) had a 55% reduction of all-cause mortality risk compared with non-churchgoers,” reported the study.
• Attending church more than once a week reduced a woman’s likelihood of dying by 33%, a 2016 Harvard study concluded.

Originally published by The Washington Stand

The post Attending Church Regularly Will Lengthen Your Life More Than Diet, Exercise, Longevity Expert Says appeared first on The Daily Signal.

No corner of hell is fiery enough to give former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo the roasting he deserves. Engineering thousands of deaths from COVID-19 was not enough. Now the disgraced Democrat deceptively blames his lethal sins on someone who offered help: President Donald J. Trump.

Cuomo, who resigned in August 2021 after sexually harassing 13 women, slithered out of his well-earned oblivion with an op-ed in Sunday’s New York Daily News.

“The United States lost 1.2 million people” to COVID, Cuomo writes.

Why?

“Trump recklessly and negligently politicized COVID,” Cuomo claims. “It was a complete failure of Trump’s leadership.”

The COVID-19 deaths of nearly 13,000 residents of Empire State nursing homes were the predictable consequences of Cuomo’s decisions as governor, not Trump’s as president.

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives should grill Cuomo about the following epic fails when he testifies at 2 p.m. Tuesday before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.

On March 25, 2020, Cuomo’s Health Department ordered: “No resident shall be denied re-admission or admission to the [nursing home] solely based on a confirmed or suspected diagnosis of COVID-19.”

Cuomo forbade evaluating seniors for COVID-19.

His directive went on to state that nursing homes “are prohibited from requiring a hospitalized resident who is determined medically stable to be tested for COVID-19 prior to admission or readmission.”

Physicians immediately warned that Cuomo’s imperative would kill New York residents.

The American Medical Directors Association declared March 26, 2020: “Unsafe transfers will increase the risk of transmission in post-acute and long-term care facilities which will ultimately only serve to increase the return flow back to hospitals, overwhelming capacity, endangering more health care personnel, and escalating the death rate.”

Team Cuomo replied: “Obey!”

The New York Post detailed the aftermath: Local hospitals steered 70 COVID-19 sufferers into Harlem’s Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center in April 2020. By May 8, COVID-19 had killed 32 tenants. Hospitals delivered 19 COVID-19 survivors to Staten Island’s Carmel Richmond nursing home. By May 8, the virus had killed 56 inhabitants.

“The state forced us to bring in these sick people,” a nurse at Long Island’s Luxor Nursing and Rehabilitation told the Post. “We had no choice, but we’re not happy about it here.”

Cuomo denied rest homes’ requests for protective gear. “Not our job,” the governor snapped.

Until April 30—Day 48 of the crisis—Cuomo allowed staffers who had tested positive for COVID-19 to work inside elder centers.

By Jan. 19, 2021—coincidentally, Trump’s last full day in the White House—Cuomo’s edicts had killed 12,743 assisted-living dwellers. This amounted to 46.3% more fatalities than the 8,711 reported to have perished in the New York Health Department’s cooked books.

In contrast to Cuomo’s stupid, unnecessary, and fatal judgments, Trump had offered the governor three lifesaving options:

First, Trump sped the 1,000-bed floating hospital USNS Comfort to Manhattan’s Pier 90 on March 30, 2020—five days after Cuomo’s decree. Cuomo could have quarantined COVID-positive seniors in Comfort’s 500 pandemic-grade berths until they tested negative, and then sent them to elder institutions.

Alas, Cuomo neglected the vessel. Only 182 checked in before Comfortsteamed back to Norfolk, Virginia, that April 30.

Second, 12 blocks south, Trump transformed the Javits Center into a 3,000-bed pop-up hospital. Only 1,094 people arrived before it closed that May 1.

Donny Tuchman, CEO of Cobble Hill Health Center, begged to send COVID-positive individuals to Comfort or the Javits Center that April 9. Cuomo’s Health Department said, “Nyet.”

“I was told those facilities were only for hospitals” to refer patients, Tuchman told the Post. Never mind that only 62 of Comfort’s berths were full that day, as were just 134 of Javits’ 1,000 COVID-ready beds.

Third, Trump’s close coordination with private industry yielded much of the masks, gowns, gloves, and other protective gear that Cuomo complained it was “not our job” to supply.

Cuomo should beg forgiveness for his toxic boneheadedness. Instead, he takes zero responsibility for policy blunders that killed the elderly.

Now, as Election Day looms, Cuomo slams Trump, the man who tried to avoid this mayhem and keep older Americans alive long enough to enjoy another Christmas or Hanukkah. Conversely, Cuomo bullied seniors into premature graves.

Andrew Cuomo should beg the families of his victims for forgiveness and hope that this spares him from an eternity of damnation.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Cuomo Should Pay—Big League—for His Trump-Hating COVID-19 Lies appeared first on The Daily Signal.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The attorney helping Vice President Kamala Harris with debate preparation is also defending Google from the antitrust lawsuit brought by the Biden-Harris Department of Justice, which government transparency advocates say presents a conflict of interest.

Karen Dunn, who is helping Harris prepare for today’s debate against former President Donald Trump, gave the opening statement Monday during Google’s trial. While there is nothing explicitly preventing Dunn from taking on both roles, experts say the campaign’s decision to work with her should raise concern.

“Somebody in the Harris Campaign should google ‘conflict of interest,’” Protect the Public’s Trust Director Michael Chamberlain told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Imagine being a DOJ attorney, working on this case in good faith. Your potential future boss is entrusting her campaign to someone who is working for one of DOJ’s most formidable opponent litigants—against you. That’s disheartening.”

Chamberlain noted there is “tremendous potential for abuse with the overlap of the Vice President’s political world and an executive branch agency.”

“Relationships like these ignite howls of outrage when they involve other campaigns,” he said.

The DOJ’s lawsuit threatens to break up the tech giant. Last month, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee, held in a 277-page ruling that Google has an illegal monopoly on its search engine.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called the ruling a “victory for the American people.”

Biden-Harris Cabinet Secretary Claims 'Punishing Schedule' Makes It Impossible For Kamala To Answer Questions pic.twitter.com/CvOExXOsg8

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) September 9, 2024

“If this is a preview of how a future Harris Administration would handle potential conflicts of interest, it could be great news for progressive special interests,” Pete McGinnis, communications director for the Functional Government Initiative, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The big losers would be the American public who expect their government to act objectively and without bias from conflicted decision-makers.”

Dunn has helped Democratic candidates in every presidential election since 2008 prepare for debates, according to The New York Times.

Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, told The New York Times that “you can’t serve both sides.”

“If these were legal cases, she would be ethically barred from doing what she’s doing,” Stoller said.

Stoller told the Daily Caller News Foundation that there’s no formal ethics rule restricting Dunn because “the Harris campaign is a political campaign, not a lawsuit.”

While Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, told the Daily Caller News Foundation he sees the “theoretical conflict,” he also explained that “helping with debate prep is a way of volunteering for a campaign.”

“Lots of people and organizations both volunteer for campaigns and provide financial backing to campaigns that have business before the federal government,” Painter said.

The Trump campaign called Harris out over the potential conflict in August.

“Kamala Harris will never stand up to Big Tech because she’s being coached on what to say in the debates by Google’s top lawyer,” Trump campaign senior adviser Tim Murtaugh told Fox News. “Think about how outrageous it is—their administration is suing Google, but Harris is taking political advice from the defendant’s lawyer.”

The debate between Harris and Trump, which will take place at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia is scheduled for 9 p.m. tonight on ABC News.

The Harris campaign and Dunn did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation

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Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will confront one another in person for the first time Tuesday evening as they face off during the presidential debate on ABC. 

Though the second presidential debate of the season for Trump, this will be Harris’ first time going toe-to-toe with Trump after President Joe Biden withdrew from the race following his disastrous debate performance on June 27. 

The Trump-Harris debate, which begins at 9 p.m. EDT, is being held at Philadelphia’s National Constitution Center. 

The candidates have made their dislike for one another abundantly clear in the weeks leading up to the debate; so, will they be able to maintain a sense of decorum and remain focused on policy issues? How will Harris address the high inflation rate under the Biden administration? And will Trump clarify his position on abortion? 

Tune into today’s bonus episode of the “Problematic Women” podcast with guest Emily Jashinsky, UnHerd’s Washington, D.C., correspondent and host of “Undercurrents,” as we discuss what to watch for during tonight’s debate. 

Watch the show above or listen to the audio only below.

The post What to Watch for During Trump-Harris Debate Showdown appeared first on The Daily Signal.

As summer ends, students across the country are making their way back to school and into classrooms. Some parents and students find this time of year to be an exciting prospect. For many others, however, it has become concerning. And rightfully so.

During COVID-19, many people witnessed firsthand what students were being exposed to in school. Among the materials being taught, or made easily available, are critical race theory, age-inappropriate content (such as sexually explicit picture books in elementary schools), anti-American revisionist history, environmental extremism and climate fearmongering, and other left-wing propaganda.

If a silver lining may be gleaned from COVID-19, it’s that many parents came to grips with just how radical some of our schools have become.

What was uncovered is what many of us suspected, but maybe not the extent of its prevalence. For many decades, our educational institutions haven’t been educating young Americans; they’ve been indoctrinating them instead.

I spent 40 years in education. I worked with many fine men and women who dedicated their lives to equipping students with the tools needed for success. But unfortunately, bad actors—emboldened by corrupt teachers unions—have prioritized preaching woke political ideology over ensuring a quality education.

These bad actors have no interest in teaching students the truth about our country and our founding principles. Many of our students are being taught to hate America—and the results speak for themselves.

More and more, high school students today can tell you everything you want to know about the made-up “gender spectrum,” but struggle to read at grade level or do basic math. Our progressive education system, controlled by teachers unions, has led the United States into a literacy crisis and made us rank 26th in the world in math.

It’s embarrassing. The teachers unions try to silence parents and cover for incompetence while our children are suffering.

Attempting to capture and mold the minds of young people to achieve desired political ends is nothing new. It’s been employed by the Left in many countries for many years. We saw this during the communist takeovers of educational institutions in China and Russia in the 20th century.

The Democrat Party, now run by the far Left, began a similar march through our institutions in the second half of the 20th century. The 1960s were a liberal decade, with the sexual revolution, progressive feminism, and the drug and hippie movements all taking root.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz both were born in this revolutionary decade. Kamala has said she’s “a proud product of public education.” And it shows today, as both Harris and Walz are vocal proponents of left-wing ideology in our schools.

During a University of Miami visit in 2023, Harris chided Republicans for trying to keep gender ideology out of classrooms. In her failed 2020 bid for president, Harris said in an “educational” video on Twitter (now X) that “equitable treatment means that we all end up in the same place” and that “there’s a big difference between equality and equity”—echoing Marxist talking points.

Before becoming governor of Minnesota, Walz was the faculty adviser to his high school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, an organization with chapters across the country that promotes drag queen shows, chest binders, and transgender surgeries for minor children.

As recently as May, Walz released a letter stating: “My administration remains committed to constructing generations of systemic racism and inequities in our state.” In other words, Walz is fluent in critical race theory.

Throughout their careers, Kamala Harris and Tim Walz have supported two things simultaneously: unwavering commitment to left-wing ideology and expanding access to public “education.”

When you combine these two things, you get a conveyor belt producing left-wing ideologues who go on to work in higher education, the federal bureaucracy, and corporate America. The goal is to pump as many students out of the indoctrination factory as possible.

This is one reason why the Biden-Harris administration has attempted, multiple times now, to pay for students’ college loan debt by printing more money. Colleges and universities get a blank check, and in return, the Democrat Party receives a consistent stream of new voters and foot soldiers.

This has put many parents and students in a bind. They recognize that receiving diplomas and degrees are important for career success. But they also recognize this process for what it is: credentialism, not education.

Today, our educational institutions are focused on credentialing young Americans with a left-wing seal of approval.

This is why former President Donald Trump and other Republicans have been fighting to give parents and students the freedom from forced indoctrination that they desperately need.

School choice is at the top of our list of solutions. This and many other Republican policies will help Americans avoid the left-wing indoctrination system.

Education, not indoctrination, is the bedrock of the American republic. When equipped with the right tools, our students will help make America great again. When our young people are provided with this firm foundation, America can and will achieve greatness for years to come.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

The post Hey, Kamala: Leave Them Kids Alone appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Reps. Ralph Norman, R-S.C., and Chip Roy, R-Texas, said they will only vote for the continuing resolution to fund the federal government beyond the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30 if it includes the SAVE Act, which would require proof of citizenship for voting.

“It’s not enough to say it’s illegal,” Roy told The Daily Signal, referring to illegal immigration. “We’ve got to be able to stop it.” Roy and Norman are two members of the House Freedom Caucus, which comprises about 40 conservative members of the House.

Norman and Roy spoke to “The Daily Signal Podcast” at the State Freedom Caucus Summit in Dallas on Saturday.

The House of Representatives, controlled narrowly by Republicans, will vote on the spending package Wednesday, reports say.

Listen to the episode below:

The post These 2 Freedom Caucus Lawmakers Say They Won’t Support Spending Package Without SAVE Act appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Vice President Kamala Harris, Democrats’ nominee for president, finally released her policy platform Monday, a little over 24 hours before her first debate with former President Donald Trump. 

The Harris platform makes various claims about the root causes of issues faced by America and the way Harris plans to address those issues. The claims underlying her policy promises are false, however.

Here is a look at what the Harris campaign released under the title “A New Way Forward.”

Harris Vows to ‘Secure Border’ After 4 Years of Open Borders 

Harris’ policy platform says that, if elected, she will “secure our border and fix our broken immigration system.” The Biden-Harris administration, however, abruptly shifted the nation’s border policies on Day One, enabling a massive influx of illegal immigrants since 2021. 

The platform focuses on “the bipartisan border bill” that failed to pass the House of Representatives in 2023 and suggests the legislation would solve illegal immigration.

The platform blames Trump for “killing the bipartisan border bill” although out of office and thereby failing to solve the border crisis. The platform states that Harris would sign the legislation, suggesting that nothing more is needed to solve the underlying issues.

Congressional Republicans, however, said the border bill was political posturing and not a true effort to secure the border.  

The bill “spends $20 billion to not secure the border, but to more efficiently encounter, process, and disperse illegal migrants,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told reporters.   

Harris arguably shares responsibility for the border crisis with President Joe Biden, who tasked her in March 2021 with solving the “root causes” of illegal immigration from three Central American nations. That’s when both supporters and critics began referring to Harris as Biden’s “border czar.”

Harris Says Equality Act Will ‘Protect Civil Rights and Freedoms’

Harris now promises to “protect civil rights and freedoms” by passing the Equality Act to “enshrine anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ Americans in health care, housing, education, and more into law.” 

But critics say the Equality Act would undermine women’s civil rights in order to help a minority of men who claim to be women. 

The bill would add sexual orientation and gender identity as protected classes in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. 

It would force schools and other programs to allow biological males who “identify” as females to compete against girls and women in sports and use private female facilities such as bathrooms and locker rooms.

Harris Blames Inflation on Price Gouging, Not Government Spending

Harris’ policy statement on inflation suggests again that price gouging, not government spending, is the central driver of rising prices. 

“As president, she will direct her administration to crack down on anti-competitive practices that let big corporations jack up prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers,” the campaign website states. 

However, as Heritage Foundation budget expert EJ Antoni pointed out, there is a far more obvious culprit: government spending.

Antoni, an economist, noted: “One of the functions of money is that of a measuring tool. If a yardstick were to shrink from 36 inches down to just 30, it would take 120 of these shortened yardsticks to cover the distance of a football field, instead of 100. As the dollar has lost value, it takes more dollars to measure the value of the things we buy.”

If price gouging caused 40-year record-high inflation, Antoni asked, did businessmen “magically” become greedy when Biden and Harris took office? 

“Were corporations never greedy in the 40 years leading up to Biden’s inflationary expansion of government?” he asked. “Businesses haven’t even passed all their higher costs on to consumers; if they’re trying to be greedy, they’re doing it all wrong.”

Harris’ policy platform also tacitly admits that it is implausible that price gouging is responsible for increases in prices. The platform notes that her “first-ever federal ban on corporate price gouging on food and groceries” would “build on the anti-price gouging statutes already in place in 37 states.”

If bans on price gouging were the solution to inflation, wouldn’t these bans have prevented the problem in those 37 states?

Harris Promises Crackdown on Iran, Though Biden-Harris Admin’s Loose Sanctions Netted Regime Billions

Harris’ platform talks a tough game on Iran, the world’s top sponsor of radical Islamist terrorism. 

A section on keeping America safe proclaims: “Vice President Harris will never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to protect U.S. forces and interests from Iran and Iran-backed terrorist groups.”

Tehran is the top financial sponsor of the terrorist group Hamas, which infamously slaughtered 1,139 Israelis—including women and children—on Oct. 7 in southern Israel.

Harris’ new policy pronouncements overlook the fact that the Biden-Harris administration loosened U.S. economic sanctions on Iran, netting the Islamist regime $71 billion more before Oct. 7 than under Trump-Pence administration policies.

If Harris would “never hesitate” to protect U.S. interests from Iran, did she object to the administration’s move to loosen sanctions?

Harris Repeats Widely Debunked Claim That Trump Campaign Created Project 2025 

The Harris policy platform includes several tabs contrasting the vice president’s positions with what it calls “Trump’s Project 2025 Agenda,” although Trump repeatedly has distanced himself from The Heritage Foundation-led Presidential Transition Project. 

In fact, a campaign official for Harris already has acknowledged that the vice president has deliberately misled voters about Project 2025.

Harris and her campaign repeatedly have tried to link Project 2025 to Trump, despite the former president’s pushback.

In a particularly ironic claim, Harris said Trump would implement his Project 2025 agenda to consolidate power, bring the Department of Justice and the FBI under his direct control so he can give himself unchecked legal power, go after opponents, and “rule as a dictator on ‘Day One.’” 

However, the Biden-Harris Justice Department targeted pro-lifers and other Americans with dissenting political and religious views, particularly after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade and abortion on demand in June 2022.

For instance, a Michigan jury recently found seven pro-life activists guilty of engaging in a conspiracy against rights and violations of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or FACE Act, for peacefully protesting outside an abortion clinic.

The charges against the pro-life activists were brought by DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, led by Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke.

Launched two years ago by The Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 has grown to a coalition of 110 conservative organizations that developed a transition plan for the next presidential administration. The Heritage-led coalition considers its work to be nonpartisan and offers it to whoever occupies the White House in January 2025.

The post FACT CHECK: Kamala Harris Campaign Platform Makes Promises Based on False Assumptions appeared first on The Daily Signal.

At 3:40 a.m. Monday morning, The Daily Signal received an email from YouTube alerting it that the trailer for a mini-documentary on a victim of gender ideology in California was flagged for mentioning “suicide or self-harm topics.”  

The video, “California Stole My Rights,” now displays a warning screen that would-be viewers must manually bypass to watch the full trailer. According to YouTube’s guidelines, the video might also be restricted. 

The Daily Signal asked YouTube what it meant by “restricted,” and why YouTube placed this restriction on the trailer, but it did not respond by the time of publication of this article. 

In the 44-second trailer, a California mother merely says the word “suicidal” when quoting what her then-14-year-old-daughter told her when pleading her case for transitioning from girl to boy.  

The mother says: 

“It came out of nowhere that, all of a sudden, [my daughter said] ‘I want to be a boy. I feel suicidal.’” 

That’s it. 

Despite the fact that the mother was directly quoting her daughter, and the idea of suicide was never expanded upon, YouTube flagged the video for sensitive content anyway. 

In an email to The Daily Signal, YouTube said: 

“We’re reaching out because members of the YouTube Community, including fellow creators, viewers, or staff, have expressed concern for your safety or well-being after coming across content you posted with topics related to suicide or self-harm.” 

According to YouTube’s suicide, self-harm, and eating disorders policy, these are the kinds of content that may be “restricted rather than removed”:

• Content that is meant to be educational, documentary, scientific, or artistic 

• Content that is of public interest 

• Graphic content that is sufficiently blurred 

• Dramatizations or scripted content, which includes but is not limited to animations, video games, music videos, and clips from movies and shows 

• Detailed discussion of suicide or self-harm methods, locations and hotspots 

• Graphic descriptions of self-harm or suicide 

However, in one YouTube video, “Turning To Self-Surgery: A Transgender Woman’s Journey — Through Their Eyes,” a male-to-female transgender person explains the details of self-castration due to gender dysphoria. While the original video itself warns viewers at the start of the video, YouTube does not place any warning on it, despite the video’s graphic narration and visuals depicting this act of self-harm. 

Meanwhile, The Daily Signal’s trailer gets a warning for quoting the word “suicidal” once and nothing more.  

Earlier this year, the trailer for the forthcoming film “Joker: Folie à Deux” was also slapped with the same restriction before the warning was eventually removed. Presumably, the warning came for a depiction of Lady Gaga’s character pointing a finger gun at her head and “pulling the trigger.” 

Where The Daily Signal trailer and “Joker: Folie à Deux’s” were censored, a video of the now-deceased actor-comedian Robin Williams titled “Robin Williams, In His Own Words About Suicide,” in which he exclusively detailed his battle with suicidal ideation, can be played with no such warning. 

The post TRIGGER WARNING: YouTube Slaps Suicide-Risk Warning on Daily Signal Video  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Just one battleground state was set to mail out absentee ballots before the presidential debate—but that timeline has been pushed back because of litigation surrounding Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s ballot status. 

In North Carolina, ballots can be mailed up to 60 days before the election. It was the lone state where voting was set to begin six days before the scheduled faceoff between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump on Tuesday night in Philadelphia.

Election officials in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Wisconsin will be mailing out absentee ballots in the coming days, while other swing states, such as Arizona and Georgia, mail ballots less than a month before the election. 

Courts sided with Kennedy’s efforts to get his name off the ballot in North Carolina and Michigan last week. The independent candidate suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump. The North Carolina State Board of Elections has appealed the decision to the state Supreme Court.

North Carolina Elections Director Karen Brinson Bell asked county election officials to ensure ballots will be ready to go out to absentee voters no later than Sept. 21, which is the federal deadline to send absentee ballots in a presidential election, according to a North Carolina State Elections Board news release Friday. She told county officials not to send ballots until the case is settled and the state knows what date to send the ballots. The news release touted: “That would have made North Carolina the first state to send ballots to voters for the Nov. 5 general election.” 

There are 56 days between the first presidential debate Tuesday night and the Nov. 5 election. 

In 10 states, mail-in or absentee ballots are shipped out more than 45 days before the election, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.  

President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware, which has been solidly Democratic in presidential races since 1992, sends ballots out up to 60 days prior to an election, according to the NCSL, and is now the only state mailing ballots before the debate.

Pennsylvania mails out ballots 50 days before the election. Wisconsin will send ballots out up to 47 days beforehand. So, voters there will have the chance to compare the two candidates on the stage Tuesday night.

Another swing state, Michigan, is among 11 states that mail ballots up to 45 days before the election, according to the NCSL. 

Battleground states Arizona and Georgia send ballots out fewer than 30 days before the election.

“We have 17 days of early voting, and we have Election Day voting, but all with photo ID,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told The Daily Signal in an interview last week. “We think that it is a great gold standard to have a photo ID, no matter how you vote.”

He added that election results should be known sooner as well. 

“We also think about pre-processing so we get the early votes and the absentee voting up no later than 8 p.m. on election night. Florida has theirs at 7:30. Ours is at 8. That’s good,” Raffensperger said. “It gives voters confidence in the process and keeps the lines short.”

“Early voting doesn’t start until the middle of October. People are requesting their absentee ballots now,” he added. 

In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, 43% of all votes nationally were cast by mail, according to the Washington-based nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center earlier this year, while 31% voted by mail in 2022. In 2016, just 21% of votes were cast by mail. Early in-person voting and Election Day voting were about evenly split in the 2020 presidential election. 

Election-security advocates have long contended that too much mail-in voting can lead to problems, such as ballot harvesting, voter intimidation, and fraud. 

“Election Day needs to mean Election Day, and not an election two weeks,” J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, an elections watchdog group, told The Daily Signal. 

Adams anticipates 2024 will go more smoothly than 2020. 

“Courts cannot suspend election laws as easily as in 2020,” Adams said. “We don’t have a nationwide mail-in voting campaign the way we did in 2020. That’s a big deal.”

Election integrity advocates have also raised questions about how absentee and mail-in ballots have to be time-stamped and how existing laws will be enforced. 

Two states split up the awarding of electoral votes by congressional districts. Both Maine and Nebraska begin mailing out ballots between 30 and 45 days before Election Day. 

Now less than two months before Election Day, states are litigating about when mail ballots have to be postmarked, and whether ballots arriving after Election Day must be counted. 

The most common deadline for delivery of mail ballots is by the close of Election Day, whether by-mail or hand-delivered. However, the battleground state of Nevada—with all-mail voting—is among the 17 states that will count ballots that arrive after Election Day, according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation. 

These jurisdictions still require ballots to be postmarked by Election Day. However, some jurisdictions accept an intelligent mail bar code or means other than a U.S. Postal Service postmark to date a ballot, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.  

While Nevada requires a postmark on Election Day or earlier, the NCSL says, “unclear postmarks received by the third day following the election are deemed to have been postmarked on or before Election Day.”

While dark-red Mississippi is far from a battleground state, it is the subject of a federal lawsuit now in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals contesting the state law that allows ballots arriving up to five days after Election Day. The state and national Republican and Libertarian parties have sued Mississippi. 

“Multiple states allow ballots to keep rolling in after the election,” said Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which filed a friend of the court brief in the Mississippi case. 

In 2020, among the most controversial states was Pennsylvania. State law there says absentee ballots must be postmarked and received no later than 8 p.m. on Election Day. But then-Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf wanted to allow ballots to be counted as long as they arrived by Nov. 6—three days after the election, and used the COVID-19 pandemic as a rationale. Republican legislators challenged that policy in court. 

The Democratic majority on the partisan, elected state Supreme Court decided in a 4-3 ruling to allow mail-in votes to be counted that arrived by Nov. 6, and declared that if postmarks or dates are missing or illegible, the ballots would be “presumed to have been mailed by Election Day” unless evidence shows otherwise.

The Wolf extension was still expected to be an emergency measure that would not affect future elections, and the deadline has returned to the close of polls. However, last week, a Pennsylvania state appeals court ruled that ballots must be counted even if a voter puts the wrong date on the return envelope. 

North Carolina previously counted ballots that arrived up to three days after the election. In 2023, it passed a measure requiring mail-in ballots must be received by 7:30 p.m. on election night. 

Blue-leaning Virginia, closer this year than in recent past presidential contests, has previously counted ballots that arrive up to three days after the election. 

The Public Interest Legal Foundation “has blocked Virginia from accepting ballots with postmarks after the election,” Adams said, referring to a 2020 lawsuit. 

Virginia entered into a consent decree in early 2021 to permanently prevent the State Board of Elections from accepting absentee ballots up to three days after Election Day if the postmarks are not clear. 

Honest Elections Project Executive Director Jason Snead supports ballots being received no later than the close of polls on Election Day. 

“It’s best to have results on election night,” Snead said. “The concept of extending the ballot deadline as long as you have a postmark by the deadline is a problem. Many states are doing prepaid postage, so fewer envelopes are going to have postmarks on the envelopes at all.”

The post When These Battleground States Are Mailing Out Ballots and How That Could Affect Election Results  appeared first on The Daily Signal.

DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION—The House Foreign Affairs Committee released a report on Sunday detailing the Biden-Harris administration’s failures that led to the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021.

The Biden-Harris administration failed to properly coordinate and adhere to recommendations from NATO and senior military officials regarding the withdrawal, endangering American troops and resulting in the Abbey Gate suicide bombing that left 13 service members dead, according to the 354-page report.

The administration also ignored conditions in the Doha Agreement, bypassed pleas from the Afghani government, and “directly lied to the American people” about the process of the withdrawal, according to the report.

The report includes testimonies from 18 administration officials, including former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, former acting Ambassador to Afghanistan Ross Wilson, and Gen. Austin Miller.

“Our investigation reveals the Biden-Harris administration had the information and opportunity to take necessary steps to plan for the inevitable collapse of the Afghan government, so we could safely evacuate U.S. personnel, American citizens, green card holders, and our brave Afghan allies,” Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, who serves as chair to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement Sunday. “At each step of the way, however, the administration picked optics over security.”

The House Foreign Affairs Committee is getting to the bottom of the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. The decision to remove all troops regardless of conditions being met was reckless and deadly. People deserve to know what happened and will learn more in tomorrow’s report. pic.twitter.com/E0VrAvphje

— Congressman Mike Lawler (@RepMikeLawler) September 8, 2024

Approximately 170 civilians were killed in the bombing, leaving behind roughly $7 billion worth of military equipment that have since fallen into the hands of the Taliban. Matthew Miller, a spokesperson for the Biden-Harris State Department, called the withdrawal the “correct policy choice” just two days after the Gold Star families spoke out against the withdrawal in August of 2023.

“The Biden-Harris administration misled and, in some instances, directly lied to the American people at every stage of the withdrawal, from before the go-to-zero order until today,” the report reads. “This coverup included mid-level administration officials all the way up to the Oval Office. And as this investigation reveals, the National Security Council and NSA Jake Sullivan were of the source of the majority of that misinformation campaign.”

“In the aftermath of the withdrawal, U.S. national security was degraded as Afghanistan once again became a haven for terrorists, including al Qaeda and ISIS- K,” the report reads. “America’s credibility on the world stage was severely damaged after we abandoned Afghan allies to Taliban reprisal killings—the people of Afghanistan we had promised to protect. And the moral injury to America’s veterans and those still serving remains a stain on this administration’s legacy.”

Vice President Kamala Harris confirmed that she was the “last person in the room” when President Joe Biden decided to withdraw from Afghanistan and said she was “comfortable” with the decision during an interview with Dana Bash in April 2021.

The White House maintained that the withdrawal was the “right thing to do,” according to a statement given to CNN.

“Everything we have seen and heard of Chairman McCaul’s latest partisan report shows that it is based on cherry-picked facts, inaccurate characterizations, and preexisting biases that have plagued this investigation from the start,” Sharon Yang, a White House spokesperson for oversight investigations, said, according to CNN.

“This report paints an incriminating picture of an administration concerned with optics and public perception rather than accountability and the safety of American personnel,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said in a Monday post on X. “Because of this failed withdrawal, the Taliban once again controls Afghanistan, terrorists have been emboldened, billions of dollars of weapons and equipment were left behind, and America has lost the trust of our allies. And not a single administration official was fired over this catastrophe.”

Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation

The post ‘Optics Over Security’: House Committee Faults Biden-Harris Admin for Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal in New Report appeared first on The Daily Signal.

In 2019, Vice President Kamala Harris told CNN’s Jake Tapper that social media companies “are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation and it has to stop.” 

Does it? 

Every two-bit authoritarian in history has justified censoring its citizens as a way of protecting them from the menace of disinformation. 

But social media sites, contra the reliably illiberal Harris, aren’t “directly speaking” to anyone. Millions of individuals are interacting and speaking to millions of other individuals. Really, that’s what grinds the modern Left’s gears: unsupervised conversations. 

Take the Brazilian Supreme Court panel that unanimously upheld the decision by one of its justices to shut down Elon Musk’s X over alleged “misinformation” fears. 

We must assume that the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, who once promised to ban guns via an executive order, agrees with Justice Alexandre de Moraes’s decision to shut down a social media platform for refusing to bend to the state’s demands of censorship. 

The Associated Press reports that the Brazilian high court’s decision “undermines the effort by Musk and his supporters to cast Justice Alexandre de Moraes as an authoritarian renegade who is intent on censoring political speech in Brazil.” 

Really? Because it seems to me that the state shuttering one of the popular social media sites unmistakably qualifies as a ban on political speech, whether one person is responsible or an entire government. 

And make no mistake, it is politically motivated.

“Just because the guy has a lot of money doesn’t mean he can disrespect this (country),” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva argued. Well, the South American nation’s constitution, like ours, apparently protects free expression—making no distinction between the poor and rich: “Any and all censorship of a political, ideological, and artistic nature is prohibited.”

You can tell Brazil is super serious about the matter because the bullet point appears in Chapter V, Article 220, or page 148 in my translated copy. 

Let’s concede, however, that de Moraes isn’t any kind of renegade, merely a conventional Brazilian autocrat. In the same way, Musk isn’t merely another billionaire but a tech CEO who generally views free expression as a neutral principle. 

I suppose the best evidence for this claim is the fact that even as Brazil bans Musk’s site, he allows the far-left Lula to have an account on X with 9 million followers. 

In Europe, free expression is also ostensibly protected by the constitution. Well, the right is contingent on “national security,” “territorial disorder,” “crime,” “health,” and other highly malleable issues that ultimately allow police officers in the United Kingdom and Germany to show up at your door and throw you in prison for offensive posts. 

As the now-deceased Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once pointed out, “Every banana republic has a Bill of Rights.” The question is: How close are we to being one? 

Uncomfortably close is the answer. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently admitted that senior Biden-Harris administration officials “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to “censor” COVID-19 content, including “humor and satire,” during the pandemic. Zuckerberg vowed that he would never let his company be pushed around again. I’m sorry if we don’t take him at his word. 

Tech companies enjoy unencumbered free association rights and are free to keep or kick off anyone they desire from their platform, as they should. Before Musk’s purchase of Twitter, now known as X, contemporary left-wingers celebrated the independence of social media platforms. “If you don’t like it, build your own Twitter,” they would say. 

OK. But when corporations, which often spend tens of millions each year in Washington rent-seeking and lobbying for favorable regulations, take marching orders from state officials and giant federal bureaucracies on the contours of permissible speech, we have a big problem. 

If presidential candidates truly cared about “democracy,” they’d be advocating anti-cronyism laws and forbidding government officials from interfering with or pressuring private entities on speech. 

But, these days, many Americans no longer view free expression as a neutral, liberal virtue worth defending. Foremost among them, apparently, is the Democratic presidential ticket. 

COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM 

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here should be construed as the opinion of The Daily Signal.

The post Kamala Harris’ Banana Republic on Free Speech appeared first on The Daily Signal.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—A mother in California lost her daughter to the foster care system in 2016 after she wouldn’t support the then-14-year-old girl identifying as a boy. 

“I lost my husband, but this was worse than losing my husband, because I had my rights taken away,” the mother told The Daily Signal.

Years later, the daughter regrets attempting to transition, and her mother warns other parents against allowing minors to make irreversible changes to their bodies.

The mother of two, whose husband had died years earlier, was accused of emotional abuse for forbidding her teenage daughter from binding her chest and wearing male clothes. Her daughter was taken from the family and placed in a foster home for a few months.

“It was incredibly hard,” said the mom, who asked to remain anonymous to protect the privacy of her daughter. “I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”

The Daily Signal reviewed Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services documentation in which a social worker, referring to the then-14-year-old with he/him pronouns and a male name, details the daughter’s time in foster care, her accusations of emotional abuse against her mother, and her later renunciation of the claims.

The mother had to hire lawyers to regain custody of her daughter and clear her name of the abuse charges. The charges would have disqualified her from continuing to pursue a career as a Christian counselor.

After a few months in a packed foster home in a dangerous neighborhood, the daughter asked to come home. She admitted to lying about the abuse, saying that she got the idea to accuse her mother of abuse from people online who said that was the ticket to getting away from her family.

“The process of getting her back, it was pretty difficult,” the mother said.

“She even admitted it to me later that she was influenced by people online who said you need to get out of your house if she’s not going to let you do what you want to do,” she continued.

The mother hired two attorneys to get her teenager back and clear her name. She said she felt like Child Protective Services was looking for reasons to tear her family apart.

“It was not about reunification,” she said. “It was more about, what can we do to this family to destroy them?”

After the daughter returned home, she called social workers on her mother a few more times, accusing her mom of abuse for refusing to buy her male clothing. The mother received a California Child Abuse Central Index (CACI) violation for declining to take her daughter to a program at the Los Angeles LGBT Center for LGBTQ+ youths ages 2-25 called Rise.

“I wasn’t feeling like that was really helping her, going to that center, because even when she was going to the center, I found that she was connecting with other kids, and her demeanor was even worse, even more rebellious, even more defiant,” the mother said. “I made the call. I’m not going to drive you there. And that’s when the social worker wanted to interview me, and because I didn’t do that, I immediately got a second hit for emotional abuse.”

“I just found it really crazy that they could deem that as emotionally abusive, just trying to discipline your child,” she continued.

At age 17, the daughter admitted to getting a prescription for testosterone from a therapist behind her mom’s back. She took it for a few days, but she told her mom she felt God was telling her to stop.

The mom said she couldn’t have gotten through the difficult time without her faith community. She left California a few years ago, partially because of how her parental rights were disrespected there.

“Once this was all resolved, I thought I had to get out of California, as much as it was home to me, and still is, to some point,” she said. “I didn’t feel safe there raising my daughter anymore.”

This is not the first time the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services has taken a daughter away from her mother over transgender ideology. DCFS placed 16-year-old Yaeli Martinez in foster care after her devout Christian mother, Abby, expressed concerns over her daughter “transitioning” to a boy.

The government accused Abby Martinez of abuse and permitted her only brief meetings with her daughter weekly. Yaeli committed suicide three years later.

“My daughter was murdered by gender ideology,” Martinez said in a testimony before the California Senate Judiciary Committee in 2023.

The anonymous mother told The Daily Signal that in states like California and Minnesota, to which the family has since moved, “a parent does not have the rights to parent their kid or guide them from things that could be potentially harming.”

“It’s very concerning because parents’ role is to guide their children the best they can in a healthy manner,” she said, “and giving a 14-year-old those rights, it doesn’t make sense to me.”

The mother referred to a May 2023 bill signed by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—currently running as the Democratic vice presidential nominee—that allows kids to travel to Minnesota and receive medical interventions without parental knowledge or consent and to a 2013 California law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of “gender identity” in schools.

In mid-July, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, signed Assembly Bill 1955, which barred school districts from requiring that parents be informed of their child’s gender identity. 

The mother told The Daily Signal she was very concerned about the health risks of chest binding. She told her daughter it could permanently damage her body. Chest binding can cause tissue and rib damage, hormone imbalances, and breathing issues.

According to the mother, social media played a huge role in her daughter’s decision to identify as a boy.

“I think if there wasn’t social media, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” she said. “There’s just so many things that they can get into through social media and the internet.”

Although the road has not been easy, the mom and daughter—now 22 years old—have a good relationship now.

“She regrets it, what she put me through,” the mother said. “She’s sorry that she did.”

Now, the mother urges other parents in similar situations to limit their children’s phone usage, find support systems, and never give up on their families.

“Just keep fighting,” she said. “That’s what I did. I just kept fighting.”

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