'another racist lawsuit threat'

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. Among the winners: China. 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, which was founded by former Trump administration officials. Layoffs are happening in real time. This summer, after receiving over $500 million in government grants to make batteries and electric vehicles, Stellantis announced job 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.

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.

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.

Aides Say Cuomo 'Edited' NY Nursing Home Death Report, a 'Debacle'

On Monday night, CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront had a devastating segment for the Kamala Harris campaign as KFILE editor Andrew Kaczynski revealed the details of a 2019 questionnaire then-Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) completed for the ACLU that included support for defunding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and providing taxpayer funding for transgender mutilation surgeries for illegal immigrants. For a deeply researched crucial act of journalism, one would think CNN would promote this more than a CNN.com story and a single TV segment? Well, turns out that’s exactly what CNN thought should happen to this as, unlike a piece critical of a Republican candidate’s history, they buried this with no additional segments (as of this blog’s publication) and only three direct mentions in passing by conservative panelists. Following two teases, Burnett began the lone segment by revealing “[a] KFILE investigation has uncovered meantime a 2019 questionnaire, and in this questionnaire, Harris laid out some much more liberal stances, among them on immigration.” ?So, remember that CNN segment from KFILE about Kamala Harris's radical views on a 2019 ACLU questionnaire where she said ICE should be defunded and taxpayer dollars should go to transgender surgies for illegal aliens? Turns out, this was the ONLY full segment on CNN about it. pic.twitter.com/pHLDcpLzxA — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) September 10, 2024 She shared more of Kaczynski’s findings: So, 2019 in what KFILE found, she said she would cut funding to ICE, writing, “our immigrant attention system is out of control and I believe we must end the unfair incarceration of thousands of individuals, families, and children. I was one of the first senators after President Trump was elected to advocate for a decrease in funding to ICE.” Well, now, of course, he’s touting the Biden administration’s executive order to crack down on the border. After Burnett called Kaczynski’s work “pretty incredible”, he chimed in and explained the answers on this form came at a time when she “was trying to get to the left of Bernie Sanders” and Elizabeth Warren. Kaczynski went point-by-point on her immigration answers, including that “she supported taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained migrants” as well as anyone in the federal prison system, “slash immigration detention by 50 percent, close all family and private facilities and decreased funding for ICE, and then the end ICE detainers with local law enforcement.” He moved to Harris’s answers on drugs, which included a “yes” answer to whether “all drug possession for personal use” should be “decriminaliz[ed]”. Prodded by Burnett, Kaczynski emphasized this would mean not only marijuana decriminalized, but drugs like cocaine and fentanyl. Asked finally how the campaign was responding to being presented with this information, Kaczynski noted they “didn’t answer any questions from CNN” or “elaborate”, but “[i]nstead...provided a statement from an unnamed Harris campaign adviser that just said, the vice president’s positions have been shaped by three years of effective governance as part of the Biden/Harris administration.” Since that report at the 7:44 p.m. Eastern mark Monday, only three mentions and two were from CNN conservative commentator David Urban. First, much to the chagrin of liberal commentator Keith Boykin, Urban noted on Monday’s CNN NewsNight that Harris will “have to engage in some real political gymnastics” at the debate, as evidence by “[o]ur own KFILE” reporting “her responses to an ACLU questionnaire that were written and — and for this last presidential election.” This, he explained, illustrated that “she is in so many different places and so many different positions”. Urban rolled up again Tuesday morning on CNN Newsroom (click “expand”): URBAN: I think the Harris campaign will go back and lament the fact that they weren’t out doing more interviews, that the current Vice President wasn’t out talking to people like Jackie and Jim yourself and others and informing everybody what she stands for because otherwise, we’re left to divine what she stands for from pieces like our own Andrew Kaczynski’s KFILE interview with — with Erin Burnett the other night where he goes through her ACLU report. There are all these other positions from 2019. We’re left to divine what she stands for rather than hear what she stands for and I think her being a holed up for all these days has not do in a campaign any good whatsoever. So, you know, people don’t know who she is. They’re left to go back and listen to what she said in her past campaigns — JIM ACOSTA: Yeah. Well, she didn’t beam past down from another planet. JACKIE KUCINICH: Right! ACOSTA: I mean, she has been the vice president for four years. URBAN: — yeah, but — ACOSTA: Yeah. Fast-forward to just after 3:00 p.m. Eastern and former Bergum campaign communications director Lance Trover noted Trump “cannot let her own this lane of trying to pretend that she's a moderate when clearly she's not been for the for her entire career” as documented by “the KFILE...story just yesterday about some of the position she took on an ACLU position, like talking about his taxpayer funding of sexual changes for migrants and — and decriminalizing things like heroin.” During The Lead, host Jake Tapper took the wimpy way out which we won’t even count as he predicted Harris “has a challenge” of “trying to present herself as more centrist than some of the positions she took, for instance, in 2019.” Kaczynski has respect across the aisle for stories that hit both sides. But the question is: Does CNN act that way when it comes to stories going after liberals? To see the relevant transcript from September 9, click “expand.” CNN’s Erin Burnett OutFront September 9, 2024 7:01 p.m. Eastern [TEASE] [ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: OutFront Next; KFILE Investigation] ERIN BURNETT: And a KFILE investigation revealing Harris wrote in a 2019 questionnaire about taking funding away from ICE and ending migrant detention. It is not, of course, what Harris is saying today and there’s a lot more where that came from. (....) 7:44 p.m. Eastern [TEASE] [ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: OutFront Next] BURNETT: All right. And next, a KFILE investigation into a questionnaire that Vice President Harris filled out during the last election. It was a questionnaire where she supported defunding ICE. And there’s more. (....) 7:48 p.m. Eastern [ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: KFILE Investigation; Harris Shares Policy Details as She’s Forced to Face Past Positions] BURNETT: Tonight, Kamala Harris releasing details of her policy positions for the first time on her campaign website. A KFILE investigation has uncovered meantime a 2019 questionnaire, and in this questionnaire, Harris laid out some much more liberal stances, among them on immigration. So, 2019 in what KFILE found, she said she would cut funding to ICE, writing, quote, our immigrant attention system is out of control and I believe we must end the unfair incarceration of thousands of individuals, families, and children. I was one of the first senators after President Trump was elected to advocate for a decrease in funding to ICE. Well, now, of course, he’s touting the Biden administration’s executive order to crack down on the border. KFILE’s Andrew Kaczynski joins me now. Andrew, that’s pretty incredible on its own when you’re talking about what you found here on ICE. What else did you find? [ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: KFILE Investigation; Harris Pivots to Center, But Faces Questions About More Liberal Past] ANDREW KACZYNSKI: Yeah. And this was a questionnaire that she filled out for the ACLU, and this questionnaire is really an interesting snap shot in time of that 2019 Democratic primary. Kamala Harris was trying to get to the left of Bernie Sanders. She was trying to get to the left of Elizabeth Warren and you really see that in a lot of these answers and I want to walk our viewers through a little bit of what she said. Let’s just take immigration and look at what she said here. She said on immigration, she made this open ended pledge the end immigrant detention. She said she supported taxpayer funded gender transition surgeries for detained migrants. She also said — [ON-SCREEN HEADLINE: KFILE Investigation; 2019 Harris Questionnaire Sheds Light on More Liberal Past] BURNETT: Taxpayer-funded gender transition surgeries for detained migrants, she actually said she supported that. KACZYNSKI: — she wrote — both wrote and answered in the affirmative when she was asked this. And she said she also supported it for federal prisoners. Now, she also pledged to slash immigration detention by 50 percent, close all family and private facilities and decreased funding for ICE, and then the end ICE detainers with local law enforcement. BURNETT: I mean, these are — these are things that it would be hard to think that you would come up with taxpayer funding gender transitions for detained migrants. And yet, as you say, written and verbally. KACZYNSKI: Uh-huh. BURNETT: You know, what else did you find? KACZYNSKI: Well, let’s also — let’s take a look at her answer her on drugs. She got asked about this question from the ACLU was since drug use is better addressed as a public health issue through treatment and other programming, will you support the decriminalization at the federal level of all drug possession for personal use? And Harris answers, yes. Now, what would that mean? Will it mean the federal — all drug possession that’s not just marijuana, which she alluded to in her answer to this question, but it also would mean — BURNETT: Yes, federal level all drug — KACZYNSKI: Fentanyl, crack, you know, cocaine. BURNETT: Yes. KACZYNSKI: Things like that, yeah. BURNETT: Have they responded to you on her changes on these issues? KACZYNSKI: So we did put this question to the Harris campaign about the entire ACLU questionnaire, and the Harris campaign didn’t answer any questions from CNN. Instead, they just provided a statement from an unnamed Harris campaign adviser that just said, the vice president’s positions have been shaped by three years of effective governance as part of the Biden/Harris administration. Now, they declined to CNN to elaborate on what those positions were. Then they also provided this statement which they attributed to his spokesperson saying, as president, she will take that same pragmatic approach, focusing on common sense solutions for the sake of progress. So where does she stand on this all, all this questioner today, we don’t know and they won’t say. BURNETT: It’s pretty incredible stuff and thank you very much, Andrew, KFILE for this reporting.

Glenn Beck spent last weekend with Tucker Carlson. Among the many subjects the friends discussed was the question that’s plaguing all of our minds: Who is going to win the election — Donald Trump or Kamala Harris? Glenn thinks that the majority of Americans have had enough of the Biden-Harris administration’s policies. People are sick of being financially spread thin due to inflation, sick of their cities being overrun with crime and homelessness, sick of their tax dollars funding illegal immigrants, and the list goes on. But despite Americans being fed up with radical leftist policies, Kamala Harris — the most radically left candidate to date — could still win the presidency if people don’t show up at the polls come November. - YouTube www.youtube.com “Things could change for the better that fast,” says Glenn, snapping his fingers. “But we have to get out and vote.” Glenn points to recently released polling analyses from American statistician Nate Silver that suggested that Donald Trump has a 64% chance of beating Harris. “Tucker said he's seen some polls from both sides, and he said Kamala is starting to crater,” he adds. Perhaps her backsliding is due to more incidents of masses of illegal immigrants overwhelming cities — the most recent example being in Springfield Ohio, where an estimated 15,000 Haitian migrants have engulfed the city, allegedly committing crimes such as eating people’s pets. Glenn plays a clip of one Springfield resident begging city council to do something. “It is so unsafe in my neighborhood. ... I have the homeless that were trying to camp out, and I have made concessions with them, and I try to help them the best I can to keep them from trying to squat on my property, but it is so unsafe. I have men that cannot speak English in my front yard screaming at me, throwing mattresses in my front yard, throwing trash in my front yard, and I can't — look at me, I weigh 95 pounds — I couldn't defend myself if I had to,” she lamented. “I don't understand what you expect of us as citizens. I mean, I understand they're here under temporary protected status and you're protecting them, and I understand that our city services are overwhelmed and understaffed, but who's protecting us? If we're protecting them, who's protecting me? I want out of this town,” she concluded. Glenn is moved by the woman’s words, but he also notices something telling: These words are coming from someone who is clearly not against protecting illegal immigrants and sees herself “as a servant of the government,” which shows just how severe the problem has become. “If you're a right-thinking American, you understand you're not here to serve them. The leaders in our communities are put there to serve us — to protect and defend us,” says Glenn. What’s happening in Ohio is just one example though. Countless other incidents of left-wing policies failing permeate the nation. “You're going to see people do one of two things,” says Glenn. “Stay at home because they can't vote for Trump but they can't vote for this anymore, or two, they're going to go out and vote for Trump.” Let’s hope for the latter. To hear more of Glenn’s commentary, watch the clip above. Want more from Glenn Beck?To enjoy more of Glenn’s masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis, and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution, and live the American dream.

When is a work of art not a work of art? When it’s made by a machine, perhaps? Until recently, this was an all but academic question. Society was not gripped with fear at the prospect of photography destroying the art of painting. Film theorists observed calmly that the motion picture camera was its own agent in the moviemaking process, recording and “noticing” things that no one person involved, even the director or cinematographer, might have picked up at the time of shooting. But because the camera didn’t do its own scripting, acting, editing, color correction, and whatnot, nobody worried that mechanical films would compete with or surpass the normal, human-produced kind. The agonized debate over whether AI art is an oxymoron reveals what, consciously or otherwise, it tries to conceal: a great personal and social agony over the consequences of our individual and collective retreat from making art spiritually, as beings created by God with souls and bodies who must be prepared both for earthly death and, God willing, life eternal. Now, with Hollywood crews historically idle and studios and talent scrambling to survive the streaming revolution, we seem to be in a much different place. The ground truth of the problem — the accelerating substitution of people in arts and entertainment with digital machinery — has trickled all the way up to the New Yorker, which late last month ran a searching, near-viral essay on the topic by sci-fi author Ted Chiang. The thrust of Chiang’s case for “why AI isn’t going to make art” is that each of us is singular — and so our human singularity, when applied to the demands of making the many choices required by artistic undertakings, produces a freshness and novelty unattainable by any machine-induced singularity. “What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable,” he concludes. “The fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.” Hard to argue! And yet, something about Chiang’s logic is a bit too evasive to hold up under the increasing pressure of the theoretically infinite imagery our gargantuan computers can produce. First, the good stuff: Chiang is right to underscore the centrality of the relationship between artist and audience in defining the meaning and purpose of art. He’s spot-on in insisting that, to take one of his key examples, “the significance of a child’s fan letter — both to the child who writes it and to the athlete who receives it — comes from its being heartfelt rather than from its being eloquent.” And, crucially, he intuits that our ease with language makes us “fall prey to mimicry” by computational models trained on our words at scale — giving in to the diabolical temptation of the so-called “Turing test” to think that superintelligence is defined by the ability to seem superintelligent. It’s some "Princess Bride"-tier foolishness to say a computer is truly smart if it tricks us into thinking it’s truly smart. But today we live under the cultural and spiritual sway of people who really think that it’s better to have the simulation of a thing than to lack the thing itself — an idea that swiftly leads on to believing the simulation is “even better than the real thing,” to quote the old U2 hit, because real is hard, real is costly, real is vulnerable, real is fleeting, real starts fights, real limits us and makes demands, and simulations might not do or be any of those things, or be them a lot less. Just think of the way virtual or artificial sex is presented socially as a great leap forward from the real thing. More and more of our shared human world is being hived off and sold for parts in this fashion, trading away the real for the virtual, simulated, or out-and-out fake. The virtual has become the height of virtue. Chiang’s defense of human art falters in the face of virtualization, collapsing back on a kind of solipsistic sentimentalism. He wants to insist that human beings are intrinsically good, but the evidence he musters is slippery, appealing to our sense of sympathy, cuteness, pity, or even our selfish desire to feel meaningful. This is where, in spite of itself, the evasiveness appears.Listen to the directness with which the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky answers the question of art and its justification. “The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good. Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act.” How similar, on the surface, to what Chiang is trying to say. But how much deeper! And why? Because Tarkovsky understood that even purely human art, with no robots, algorithms, or code involved whatsoever, will still be fruitless — pointless — in the absence of religion. “An artist who has no faith,” he wrote, “is like a painter who was born blind. … Only faith interlocks the system of images” that makes up the “system of life” itself. “The meaning of religious truth is hope.” To Tarkovsky, art is an ordeal of suffering and joy, one through which the artist and the audience co-create the particulars of hope in one another’s lives. Here is where our singularity and unity are to be found, not in the fact that this or that collection of events, to this degree a jumble, to that degree a narrative, unfolded in this or that human life and not any other. The agonized debate over whether AI art is an oxymoron reveals what, consciously or otherwise, it tries to conceal: a great personal and social agony over the consequences of our individual and collective retreat from making art spiritually, as beings created by God with souls and bodies who must be prepared both for earthly death and, God willing, life eternal. This retreat leaves a heart-shaped hole into which an infinity of artifice and simulation may rush, but which an infinity can never fill. The pressing issue is not whether a machine might one day artfully trick us by simulating a soul but whether we will, today, put our real souls to work, without which real art will forever elude us.

An illegal immigrant who is charged with child rape on the affluent island of Martha's Vineyard had just been released from prison for other violent crimes. 24-year-old Warley Neto of Brazil was arrested after being indicted for five counts of child rape and 5 counts of enticing a minor under 16 years old. 'Too often local jurisdictions refuse to honor immigration detainers and release dangerous offenders back into the community to reoffend.' Neto had entered into the U.S. illegally in 2018 and was released with a notice to appear before an immigration judge, officials said. Instead, he was arrested five years later for strangulation, assault and battery, and threat to commit a crime. He was convicted and sentenced to a year in prison on June 2023, but was released after only serving 90 days. Months later, he was arrested for the child rape charges. Public details about the new charges are limited because of the age of the victim. ICE officials said that local law enforcement officials were cooperating with their detainer request. “Warley Neto allegedly repeatedly assaulted a Massachusetts child and represents a significant threat to the safety of our neighborhoods,” read a statement from ICE’s Boston field office director, Todd M. Lyons. Martha's Vineyard is famous as the site where asylum-seekers were sent in 2022 by Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to pressure Democrats who ostensibly supported "sanctuary state" policies. It is unclear whether Neto was one of those people sent to the ritzy island. “We are grateful for the cooperation of the Dukes County Sheriff’s Office for prioritizing public safety and allowing Neto’s safe transfer of custody to [Enforcement and Removal Operations]," Lyons continued. "Too often local jurisdictions refuse to honor immigration detainers and release dangerous offenders back into the community to reoffend. ERO Boston will continue to apprehend and remove the most egregious noncitizen offenders from New England.” Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

A California woman was found locked inside a hot car with her 3-year-old daughter, who later died, according to Anaheim police. Police said they were called to a medical emergency at about 4:20 p.m. on Friday after a family member found 41-year-old Sandra Hernandez inside of Ford Expedition with her daughter. They were unsure how long they had been in the car, but temperatures that day reached up to 104 degrees outside. 'He's broken. He's just devastated.' The girl was rushed to a hospital by paramedics, but she later died of complications from heat stroke, according to Anaheim police. An autopsy has not yet been completed. Police said they found several alcohol bottles in the vehicle. Hernandez was also transported to a hospital. Anaheim police Sgt. Matt Sutter said Hernandez was booked on suspicion of involuntary manslaughter and child neglect after she was released from the hospital.A GoFundMe donation page is raising funds for the victim's father and her brother. A family member said the father, Juan Ruiz, had previously suffered a similar tragedy when his two sons were killed in 2012 by a drunk driver who drove through their tent during a camping trip. "To know that he's reliving this all over again, we're just hurting for him," his cousin Nancy Salamanca said. "He's broken. He's just devastated."Southern California has suffered from a historic heatwave in recent weeks. A news video from KABC-TV showed video of the victim before the horrible incident. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!