Jonathan Turley
·
Dec 28, 2024 @JonathanTurley
·
The media is still struggling to ignore the corruption of the Biden scandal by insisting that there is no evidence Joe Biden directly received money: ABBY PHILLIP: “I’m still waiting to see the proof of Joe Biden enriching himself. I take his brother and his son, perhaps.”...

Jonathan Turley @JonathanTurley
·
...It is not only factually wrong but legally irrelevant. As I stated in my testimony in the Biden impeachment hearing, enriching your family is treated the same under corruption statutes...
jonathanturley.org. https://t.co/1lCpLXuo6p
The Three Myths of the Biden Impeachment Defense
8:55 AM · Dec 28, 2024. //

."Phillip appears willing to accept that Hunter and his uncle enriched themselves with influence peddling but somehow believes that that does not implicate the subject of the influence peddling, Joe Biden," Turley continued.

"Putting aside the fact that millions flowed to the Biden family, Phillip ignores how Joe Biden repeatedly lied about not meeting these clients or knowing anything about Hunter's dealings," Turley said, finishing her and Joe Biden off. //

justpaul
23 minutes ago
It wasn't Hunter or Jim doing the "influence peddling"; they were just the salesmen. There was only one guy in the equation who could actually provide the product being offered for sale. And that is Joe Biden. Unless he had a reputation for selling access, information, and policy, Jim and Hunter had nothing to offer anyone.

THAT is the truth of the Biden Crime Family. Joe IS known around the world for being for sale. //

GreenLanternMD
an hour ago edited
To paraphrase Ben Shapiro, “Their feelings don’t care about your facts.” They agree with Biden on political and policy things, so they simply DON’T CARE care if he breaks the law.

Q: “Are you simply ignorant or just indifferent?”
A: “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

Look, I think what’s happening with Joe Biden, nobody thinks he even knows about these clemencies or these pardons. This is the radical left staff that has been running this administration for the last four years. And so I agree with President Trump in what he said about these 37 individuals who have been granted clemency. //

This is outrageous. They should not have a Merry Christmas, to be perfectly blunt with you. But this is because we have the radical left doing all the things they’ve been wanting to do for a very long time on their way out the door while Joe Biden is at the beach or taking a nap or whatever it is he’s doing. This is a travesty. We are a country that doesn't have a president right now.

The situation can be complicated and hard to follow, but if you read the above excerpts provided by Jerry Dunleavy, it boils down to this: There was a rabid, seemingly inexplicable desire by most of the federal government under Joe Biden to rebuff any suggestion COVID-19 leaked from a lab.

Much of that effort centers on an April 2021 assessment that was presented to Biden and would become the backbone of his administration's response to the origins of the virus. As is revealed above, the FBI had ascertained a lab leak from Wuhan was the most likely explanation, placing a "moderate confidence" in their findings. Notably, that was the highest level of confidence applied by any of the other intelligence arms despite the rest of them backing the "zoonotic theory" of natural origins. Yet, no one from the FBI was even present at the briefing with Biden to present the counter. //

It wasn't just the FBI either. Scientists from the National Center for Medical Intelligence also backed the lab leak theory. They even specifically cited evidence that "gain of function" research was taking place in Wuhan despite that being dismissed as a conspiracy theory by Fauci and others.

The findings of those scientists were scuttled altogether, though, because the Defense Intelligence Agency had come to a different conclusion and seemed to have no stomach for entertaining the lab leak theory. Are you starting to see how this web of intelligence agencies can be manipulated to present a certain narrative regardless of the truth? //

It is impossible to ignore what appears to be a disturbing level of Chinese influence in the Biden administration. Whether that was being dictated from abroad or simply Biden officials being so entangled with the CCP that they felt the need to dismiss the lab leak theory on their own isn't that relevant. What's relevant is that a presidential administration was and remains inundated with people operating as Chinese proxies. That they were willing to manipulate national intelligence on an issue as important as COVID-19 should leave people questioning everything asserted by the federal government. //

Musicman
10 hours ago
I suspect the coverup was less about protecting China and more about protecting Fauci and the NIH. Who do you think funded the “gain of function research that wasn’t really gain of function” at Wuhan? We did. Likely because it would have illegal for us to do that kind of research that makes a virus more virulent and more easily transmitted (but for some technical reason doesn’t meet Fauci’s definition of gain of function).

Then Vice President Joe Biden met his son Hunter’s foreign business partners during a 2013 overseas trip to China, newly released photographs show. The unearthed records also document Hunter meeting Chinese dictator Xi Jinping.

Obtained by America First Legal (AFL) via open records request, the photographs from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) appear to show Hunter introducing his father to several Chinese members of BHR Partners, a Chinese investment firm with ties to the country’s Communist government.

As the New York Post previously reported, Hunter “cofounded BHR Partners in 2013 within weeks of joining then-Vice President Joe Biden aboard Air Force Two on an official trip to Beijing.” The First Son reportedly “held a 10% stake in BHR Partners at least through part of his father’s first year as president and the terms of his divestment remain murky,” according to the outlet.

The pictures obtained by AFL appear to show Joe meeting BHR Partners CEO Jonathan Li and Director and Managing Partner Ming Xue. The released records also show Hunter meeting Xi and then Chinese Vice President Li Yuanchao.

For those unacquainted with Li, he and the Bidens helped arrange the transfer of stealth technology to a blacklisted Chinese military manufacturer. No, that's not the plot line of a movie. That actually happened, and there has been zero accountability in the aftermath of those revelations. With Joe Biden's recent pardoning of his son, that's unlikely to change.

RedState's Jennifer Van Laar exposed the aforementioned deal through her original reporting back in 2020. In 2023, Devon Archer, one of Hunter Biden's business associates, confirmed her reporting surrounding Li and the Bidens while testifying before Congress. These newly released pictures provide the final piece of evidence that the meetings did take place. //

Notably, lawyers representing Joe Biden and Barack Obama worked with the National Archives to stop these photos from being released before the 2024 election. That alone would be treated as a major news story if we were talking about a Republican. The size of the cover-up here is immense, spanning former and current presidents along with US federal agencies.

Unfortunately, as is to be expected, mainstream "news" outlets have no interest in digging deeper into what is legitimately the biggest presidential scandal in modern history. You've got pictures of a vice president using taxpayer money to introduce his son to Chinese officials, some of which the Bidens would become entangled with professionally, including the reception of large sums of money. Then once Joe Biden became president, he weaponized the National Archives (just as he did against Donald Trump) to stop the release of damaging evidence to protect himself and his party politically. //

Republicans don't need to let this go. While legal accountability may be off the table, exposing the rank corruption and criminal activity of the Biden family is an important endeavor. The American people deserve the truth, and the Democratic Party needs to pay a high political price for this.

In its characteristic stonewalling, the Biden administration has only fueled speculations and occasional conspiracy theories when it could have at least reviewed logical theories and welcomed legitimate questions.

Is a controversial government agency—perhaps the CIA or the Environmental Protection Agency—surveilling installations, areas, or people that would either be too embarrassing to be revealed or otherwise might set off panic? And for the public good or consistent with this administration’s weaponization of government?

Or are these drones the work of foreign surveillance in the mode of the 2023 Chinese spy balloon?

A government that long ago lost all its credibility could not reassure the people of the truth even if it wished to.

For nearly four years, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas assured the American people almost weekly that “the border is secure”—even as a reported 12 million illegal entrants easily crossed it.

White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre asserted weekly that President Joe Biden was vigorous, in full control of his faculties, and always “sharp.”

In fact, she knew that the American people grimaced as their president slurred his speech, suddenly went mute, tripped, fell, and wandered aimlessly.

In late January and early February 2023, a huge Chinese surveillance balloon traversed across the United States. Public outrage grew as the administration changed its excuses by the day.

It variously assured the public that it was a mere weather balloon, that it would be too dangerous to shoot it down, that it did not transmit any of its photographic capability to China, or that its trajectory did not cross key military installations.

All those excuses were either half-lies or untrue. //

So, the American public understandably no longer believes much of anything the waning Biden administration says—not after its other chronic lies about denying the role of the Wuhan lab in the COVID-19 pandemic, only “moderate” inflation, and assurances that Hunter Biden would never be pardoned by his father.

This administration knows that anytime there is a scandal or embarrassment on Team Biden’s watch, it wheels out megaphones that ignore inquiries, gaslights critics by claiming they are hallucinatory, defames them as conspiratorial, or simply flat-out lies and stonewalls.

No one yet knows what, if anything, these drones are, what they are doing in our skies—and much less whether they pose any threat at all.

But almost everyone assumes the Biden administration knows and yet expects that it will likely deceive us that it doesn’t.

Imagine for a moment that Donald Trump attempted to grant clemency to mass murderers motivated by racial hatred. Yet here we have the left openly cheering for these people to get a second chance at life, spitting on the graves of their victims.

It should be noted that the Wall Street Journal just issued a damning report with countless sources who indicate President Biden has been mentally incompetent from day one, essentially serving as a puppet to his handlers.

Whoever is forcing Biden's hand on this matter - whether it's Garland, the 'Squad,' or some fresh-faced college progressive interns - it is definitively evil.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) excoriated the idea of commuting the sentences of those on death row during remarks on the Senate floor earlier this week.

"Let’s be clear what commuting these sentences would mean," he said. "It would mean that the laws passed by Congress and applied by our judges and juries have no value."

"It would mean that progressive politics is more important to the President than the lives taken by these murderers," added McConnell. "It would mean that society’s most forceful condemnation of white supremacy and antisemitism must give way to legal mumbo jumbo."

According to polling from Gallup in October 2024, approximately 53 percent of Americans still support the death penalty. //

OrneryCoot
2 hours ago
I thought that I realized just how utterly evil, despicable, and without morals Biden and his fellow Democrats were. I, apparently, was wrong.

Hammer, meet nail. For Democrats to now fear-monger about "unelected" people running the government is to ignore that's precisely what has happened throughout President Joe Biden's term. //

How does that compare to Musk making a post online? It doesn't. What he did was public and out in the open. People were able to decide whether to agree with him or not, and in the end, it was elected officials who chose to come up with another deal. That's democracy in action. What's not democracy in action is a bunch of nameless figures running the government behind the scenes while lying to everyone about the president's senility. //

Hang on just a second because, as Jennings will go on to note, that's a serious allegation. Did Musk oppose the 1,500-page CR because it didn't "directly benefit" him? That should be pretty easy to figure out. What is in the 105-page CR that passed that wasn't in the original deal? If Roginsky can't define that, then her claim is baseless.

I'll go ahead and spoil it for you. She didn't provide any evidence for her allegation. //

anon-eoij
2 hours ago edited
George Soros
Alex Soros
Bill Gates
Michael Bloomberg
Mark Zuckerberg
Jeff Bezos
….

Shall we go on about “rich folks influencing politics”?

'(Biden) made us wait an extra three hours to receive the bodies of our dead family members because he couldn't pull it together,' Roice McCollum told DailyMail.com.

Roice said she and others were waiting for Biden to appear when a military officer told her he was napping on his plane.

Christy Shamblin, the mother-in-law of Marine Sgt. Nicole Gee, and Darin Hoover, the father of Staff Sgt. Taylor Hoover, who were also killed in the Kabul blast, told DailyMail.com that their families were also left waiting on the tarmac. //

anon-qwge
an hour ago
How can all of his last minute actions be considered irreversible when the news is spewing reports of his cognitive incapacity? We’ve been shouted down for 4 years for stating the obvious. To have unelected minions shove last minute edicts for his signature has to be fraud & invalid. Instead we’re told “Yeah, well, it’s all hard to prove.” What kind of world is this where evidence of the National coup is now in our faces & nothing happens?

The Department of Education had previously sought a Title IX rule that would essentially make "gender identity" a protected class, making it illegal for states or local districts to stop boys who claim to be girls from competing against actual girls in athletics. On Friday, though, that attempt was finally dropped. //

OrneryCoot
8 hours ago
I think you hit the right of it when you stated that they didn't want to give Trump an obvious win when he gets in and would reverse the rule, Bonchie. They can see the writing on the wall, even when they didn't believe it until it was too big to ignore. I think that Trump's ad against Kamala with the pronouns in it made them wake up. I just hope they keep screaming about it so that we can continue to thrash them in suburbia, where parents don't want their teenage daughter showering in the locker room with an unstable dude who has unhealthy ideas about sexuality.

Emma-Jo Morris was the first on the scene. She had the real October Surprise for the 2020 election: Hunter Biden’s laptop. While loaded with images of drug use and sexually explicit images from the exploits of the cracked-out son of Joe Biden, it was also a roadmap into the Biden Family’s allegedly illegal government access deal from which they were the beneficiaries of millions of dollars in bribes. This family set up multiple shell corporations run by Biden clan members to funnel the proceeds from the Romanian government. Right now, the meat and potatoes allegation stems from Hunter’s time in Ukraine, where Joe, then serving as vice president, forced the firing a prosecutor looking into Burisma in exchange for foreign aid.

The release of the FD-1023 report from the FBI’s confidential human source on Biden’s Burisma deal is damning, arguably impeachable for Joe Biden. It shows that the company only hired Hunter to protect them and that Mykola Zlochevsky, co-founder of Burisma Holdings, felt coerced into paying Joe and Hunter $5 million each. Zlochevsky has a ledger of the payments and recordings of their conversations. The source reported this intelligence to the FBI about the Bidens’ sordid deal with the Ukrainians in 2018.

All of this would have been disregarded as Russian disinformation three years ago. Mr. Morris delivered testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on July 20, where her opening remarks took a flamethrower to the FBI, intelligence community, and social media. Morris was then a New York Post editor/reporter at the time.

She revealed how The New York Post was locked out of their social media accounts for days, users could not share their links on the platform, and the intelligence community did not go through proper channels and released a letter claiming this laptop and its contents to be a disinformation operation. //

Morris, now the politics editor for Breitbart, also went into the censorship operation between the FBI, Silicon Valley, and the intelligence community. Social media companies are stacking their top positions with these former spooks who ooze political bias. //

“On October 19, five days after the Post first began publishing, Politico ran a story headlined, ‘Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” Morris continued while breaking down laughing.

“God, I can’t even say that with a straight face,” she said.

And for good reason: every aspect of her reporting was confirmed to be accurate years later. From The New York Times to The Washington Post, the story of the laptop, the shady Biden deals, and how this was not a Russian disinformation scheme were proven true. The laptop is genuine, and it’s not going away.

The FBI and the Justice Department are under heavy scrutiny now that there’s credible evidence that the DOJ ran interference pervasively on any Hunter Biden investigation, with the wrongdoing seemingly reaching Attorney General Merrick Garland’s office. //

Glenn Greenwald @ggreenwald
·
This is the NY Post reporter who used authentic docs to report on Joe Biden's role in Hunter's business deals in Ukraine and China before the 2020 vote.

CIA and @NatashaBertrand smeared her with lies that it was "Russian disinformation," then Big Tech censored her reporting.

Simon Ateba @simonateba
BREAKING: Journalist Emma-Jo Morris (@EmmaJoNYC), who broke the Hunter Biden laptop story for @NYPost but was immediately censored by the state on social media in an attempt to influence the 2020 election, just delivered a mind-boggling testimony on the extent of censorship in…
Embedded video
2:52 PM · Jul 20, 2023

Sheinbaum Pardo called Mexican migrants in America “heroes” in part because they sent $63 billion back home to relatives in 2023. //

Remittances now surpass almost all other sources of the country’s foreign income, including tourism, oil exports and most manufacturing exports.

While the report doesn't differentiate between illegal aliens and legal migrants, it doesn't take a proverbial rocket scientist to figure out that given the more than 10 million illegals who have crossed the southern border during four years of the Biden-Harris Border Crisis™, the amount of cash continuing to leave America for Mexico has continued to increase. //

Lourde Mike
5 hours ago
So the solution here is to tax wire transfers to Mexico at 100% if sent by a non-us citizen. //

Bearsblow
4 hours ago
She laid out the best argument in the world for mass deportations.

They won't change their loyalty and they send their money back to their home country.

That's a 1-2 ticket punch back to that country, imo. //

anon-stbc Grogger
2 hours ago
Absolutely.

If they are taking money out of our economy, then tax it.

There are a bunch of "studies" that talk about how much money the illegals pump back into our economy. Hmmm...none of those studies mention that $50 Billion is getting drained out of our economy.

A lot of that money isn't getting taxed because it is being paid under the table...then they send it right over the border to help Mexico's economy.

Shut down the transfers, or tax it to the max, and see how quickly those folks go back home.

The Democrats are trying to play this ridiculous game of attacking Elon Musk for objecting to the pork-filled continuing resolution that was initially put forth this week. They all were up in arms, asking who is he to weigh in?

The answer was a simple one: an American citizen — a citizen that the Democratic politicians are supposed to be serving. But imagine they all were chastising him because he wasn't an "elected" official, as though he couldn't offer his opinion. That was a sign of what they think of all of us in general, they don't think they work for us, they think they rule over us and don't have to respond. But Musk proved them wrong, and they were mad. //

They wanted to anger Trump by calling Musk the "shadow president," as Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) did when she asked, "Who's the president now?" about the situation. That's pretty desperate and just shows how empty they are.

That's when CNN commentator Scott Jennings skewered them with an extremely important point.

Jennings turned that around on Jayapal as he spoke with Erin Burnett. "She [Jayapal] let the mask slip right at the end when she said, 'Who is the president right now...I mean, who is the President-elect?' She asked the right question first — who is the president right now?" //

Catturd ™ @catturd2
·
No one voted for Kamala in the primary and you didn't have a problem with that.

Nina Turner @ninaturner
No one voted for Elon Musk.
1:10 PM · Dec 19, 2024

During the first Trump administration, Democrats accused Republicans of abusing the Senate process in order to confirm nominees. //

The House just passed the JUDGES Act, which would create the first new positions on the U.S. District Court since 2003. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., allowed the Senate to pass it on Aug. 1, when he thought Kamala Harris would win the White House. Now that Donald Trump has won, and the House has passed the bill, President Joe Biden says he will veto it to prevent Trump from having more vacancies to fill.

Democrats controlled the Senate side of the process during Biden’s term and ran a highly partisan operation — with tactics they once criticized Republicans for using — to steer the judiciary sharply to the left.

Biden will appoint a total of 235 judges to the four courts with life-tenured judges: 187 to the U.S. District Court, 45 to the U.S. Court of Appeals, two to the U.S. Court of International Trade, and one to the U.S. Supreme Court. He will exceed President Donald Trump’s first-term total by one and take the second spot on the list of most single-term appointments in American history. Only President Jimmy Carter, after Congress created 152 new judicial positions in 1978, appointed more.

Biden’s total is even more impressive because the confirmation process is more cumbersome than ever. //

While Democrats created a new process in 2017 in order to routinely challenge Trump’s nominees, a determined Republican leadership in the Judiciary Committee and full Senate kept the confirmation process trains running. Democrats have done the same for the past four years. Today, according to the Federal Judicial Center, appeals court judges in active service are evenly split between Republican and Democrat appointees, while 60 percent of active district court judges were named by Democrats.

The campaign to mislead the American people about Biden's ailing condition was the biggest disinformation campaign in modern presidential history. The sheer length of it combined with the breadth of those parroting it, including at the highest levels of government and in the press is unmatched. Those who participated have no credibility. They don't get to claim it was "obvious" all along when they were saying the opposite five months ago. No one should forget how far they were willing to go, up to and including putting an invalid back in the Oval Office, to remain in power.

The Biden Admin paid Reuters over $300 million in government contracts. 11 different Biden government agencies targeted Elon's businesses. All 11 agencies paid millions to Reuters. Reuters then won the Pulitzer Prize for "their work on Elon Musk and misconduct at his businesses" pic.twitter.com/3IGGtuHv7L

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) December 17, 2024. //

To be clear, this is the weaponizations that Democrats said Trump would bring about if he were elected. The Biden Administration has made little to no effort to hide its willingness to attack people who disagree with the left's agenda, whether they be parents pushing back against CRT or the transgender agenda or January 6 protesters.

But here we see the government actually paying corporate media millions of dollars to attack its enemies as well. This isn't just ideological alignment resulting in friendly reporting. This is a President paying a media company that touts to be an unbiased source of news to go after one of his political enemies. This discovery is going to be another nail in the coffin for the already dying reputation of the corporate media.

Reuters should have no right to call itself a news outlet, but a propaganda wing of the Democrat Party. //

I have a feeling that in a matter of weeks, we'll start uncovering some shocking truths about how far the corruption went under the Biden Admin, and that more than just Reuters benefited from a fascist government willing to pay them to damage their political opponents. //

Mongoose
3 hours ago
I'd be careful about this story. There may be less here than the headline implies. It looks like most if not all of the contracts went to Thomson Reuters Special Services LLC. They're huge, providing lots of legal, tax, and accounting support services around the world. They do WestLaw and other legal research tools, among other things. I know the DOJ pays a massive amount for access to WestLaw - it's on every Assistant US Attorney's computer. They do anti-money laundering software for business and government, that stuff is probably in every bank in the world and the Treasury Department contracts for it. DOD spends a ton for the various Thomson Reuters services and IRS spends a bunch for their tax and accounting services. CBP uses Thomson Reuters trade and import/export stuff - and pays for it.
The Reuters news wire service - Reuters Agency - is a relatively small part of Thomson Reuters and I'm not sure that the connection between the parent company and any Reuters Agency "targeting" exists. It's certainly not clear in this report.
The Biden Admin paid Reuters over $300 million in government contracts. 11 different Biden government agencies targeted Elon's businesses. All 11 agencies paid millions to Reuters. Reuters then won the Pulitzer Prize for "their work on Elon Musk and misconduct at his businesses."
Yes, the government paid (Thomson) Reuters over $300 million in government contracts. And perhaps eleven different agencies did "target" Musk's businesses. I'm not seeing the connection, however. Just because the Justice Department spent $60 million with Thomson Reuters for WestLaw etc., doesn't mean the government was paying Reuters to target Musk.
Caution is warranted.

“Joe Biden is, like, dead. Not literally. Like, he, like, can’t say a sentence,” admits Henry Appel, advisor at the National Security Council (NSC), about the current state of the President’s health. Appel, who works in the Intelligence Programs Directorate, noted his team’s responsibility for providing senior policymakers with top secrets, stating, “We give all of the senior policymakers all of the secrets.”

He went on to describe Biden’s deteriorating communication skills as a concern, adding, “[Biden] can’t say a sentence.” Recalling a phone call in which the President struggled to understand the simple phrase, “novel phenomenon,” Appel shared “He [Biden] was just like, ‘What do you mean, like a book?’ when my boss [Jake Sullivan] used the word ‘novel.’” //

Appel didn’t stop there; he also recounted an exchange from a call with Biden, revealing, “I picked up the phone and said, ‘Hello, Mr. President’… and he asked for Jake [Sullivan]. After a brief exchange, Biden called me back 10 seconds later asking again, ‘Is Jake there?’” Appel told Biden, “No, he’s traveling with you,” adding, “He’s on the same trip that you are.” //

This situation should never again happen with a sitting president. Heads should roll for it happening at this time, and legislation or a constitutional amendment should be passed to ensure that it doesn't. //

Belle Contraire The word of Joe..
12 hours ago edited
The Democrat leadership liked the power structure dynamics exactly as it played out in the Biden administration.

Everyone was a winner except the American people.

Jake Schneider @jacobkschneider
·
🚨 BIDEN: "We've run a campaign that's basically scandal free. That's hard to do in American politics."

(Except covering up his obvious cognitive decline, peddling his family's influence, hiding classified documents, etc etc etc)

6:39 PM · Dec 15, 2024

It goes without saying that all such claims by the enfeebled president are demonstrably false. Consider: Bidenflation. Botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. Pardon-palooza. Mishandling of classified documents. Weaponizing his Justice Department. Failing to secure the release of the hostages in Gaza.

All of that barely scratches the surface of just how bad of a president Biden has been. The fact is that Joe Biden will go down in history as one of our country's worst, with a recent poll showing his abysmal performance over the past four years has earned him the bottom-most position.

What's a washed up politician to do to save his legacy with scant little time to do it? Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) thinks she has the perfect solution: Make the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) a Constitutional amendment. //

The Sunday version of The New York Times published a grotesque leftist wish list of things a weird assortment of people — Rick Steves and weed? — want Biden to do before he's booted from The White House. The premise? Biden couldn't debase himself anymore than he did by pardoning his own son, so he might as well do all sorts of additional shameful things. //

Gillibrand is running with the idea, writing:

With Republicans set to take unified control of government, Americans are facing the further degradation of reproductive freedom.

Fortunately, Mr. Biden has the power to enshrine reproductive rights in the Constitution right now. He can direct the national archivist to certify and publish the Equal Rights Amendment. This would mean that the amendment has been officially ratified and that the archivist has declared it part of the Constitution.

She thinks she's got it all figured out, saying “I’ve never done more legal analysis and work since I was a lawyer.” Here's the gist of it:

Both houses of Congress approved the amendment in 1972, but it was not ratified by the states in time to be added to the Constitution. Ms. Gillibrand has been pushing a legal theory that the deadline for ratification is irrelevant and unconstitutional. All that remains, she argues, is for Mr. Biden to direct the national archivist, who is responsible for the certification and publication of constitutional amendments, to publish the E.R.A. as the 28th Amendment. //

The late Phyllis Schlafly wrote her seminal "What’s Wrong with ‘Equal Rights’ for Women?" essay back in 1972, and every one of her points from then holds true today.

Why should we trade in our special privileges and honored status for the alleged advantage of working in an office or assembly line? Most women would rather cuddle a baby than a typewriter or factory machine. Most women find that it is easier to get along with a husband than a foreman or office manager. Offices and factories require many more menial and repetitious chores than washing dishes and ironing shirts. Women’s libbers do not speak for the majority of American women. American women do not want to be liberated from husbands and children.

Schlafly circa 1972 is pure gold: "The 'women’s lib' movement is not an honest effort to secure better jobs for women who want or need to work outside the home. This is just the superficial sweet-talk to win broad support for a radical 'movement.' Women’s lib is a total assault on the role of the American woman as wife and mother, and on the family as the basic unit of society." //

Devin
10 minutes ago
The deadline the states missed is completely relevant - it was in the amendment itself. So since they didn't meet the deadline, it failed. To pass it, it has to be re-introduced and voted on again

The Biden-Harris administration waived sanctions on Iran three days after the November election, providing Tehran access upward of $10 billion in once-frozen funds, according to a copy of the non-public order transmitted to Congress and reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken determined on November 8 that "it is in the national security interest of the United States" to waive mandatory economic sanctions that bar Iraq from transferring upward of $10 billion to Iran in electricity import payments. //

Though the first Trump administration did green-light the same waiver—causing tension with some congressional Republicans—it narrowly tailored the waiver to restrict Iranian access to the cash. The Biden State Department tweaked the waiver last year to allow Tehran to convert the funds from Iraqi dinars to euros, then hold those euros in bank accounts based in Oman. Access to a widely traded currency like the euro enables Iran to more easily spend the cash in international markets. Under the first Trump administration, Iran had to keep the cash in an escrow account in Baghdad, making it more difficult to access.

According to the DOJ, Gonzalez helped smuggle “dozens of migrants” from South America to the United States illegally so he could profit from their labor. He faces a maximum of 120 years in prison and will be sentenced March 18. //

Once in Philadelphia, Gonzalez and his co-conspirators picked them up at the airport, and took them to a residence in Chester used to house aliens.

Gonzalez told the five they owed him “substantial debts for his assistance” and that they should remain in one of the homes he owned and work at jobs he arranged to pay off the debts. The debt was much more than the cost of transporting and housing them, although the indictment did not say how much he demanded. //

Most illegal immigrants do not understand they are getting involved in a trafficking scheme, Arthur said. //

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated his former Director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Tom Homan, to lead border enforcement. Arthur says detaining people who have entered the U.S. illegally until it is determined if they should be allowed into the country would be a “gut punch” to trafficking. And although he has not heard Trump or Homan speak to this yet, Arthur recommends ending the CHNV program due to its exploitation by traffickers.

“This is new age slavery; 159 years after the 14th Amendment, we are still faced with this scourge. And unfortunately, the immigration policies of the current administration facilitate trafficking,” Arthur said.