When President Joe Biden leaves the White House on Jan. 20, he will be entitled to an annual presidential pension equivalent to a sitting cabinet secretary’s salary: $246,400. That’s already generous but, thanks to a quirk in the law, taxpayers will be on the hook for even more. Because of his 36 years in the U.S. Senate and eight years as vice president, Biden will also receive a congressional pension worth $166,374 per year. Biden’s ability to double-dip highlights how pensions once designed to provide retired elected officials with financial security now far exceed what is necessary to achieve that goal. Most former presidents enjoy significant wealth, but none have this extraordinary arrangement — the total $413,000 annual pension exceeds even a sitting president’s salary of $400,000. Thankfully, Senator Joni Ernst has introduced legislation to reform these excessive perks and bring much-needed fiscal responsibility to the system. The federal government’s support for former presidents is rooted in the Former Presidents Act (FPA) of 1958, which was originally designed to prevent financial hardship for former commanders-in-chief. The FPA was passed after President Truman reportedly faced financial struggles upon leaving office — though it later turned out that Truman was in better financial shape than he let on at the time. Despite this, pension benefits for retired presidents have grown increasingly generous, even as modern presidents have amassed substantial personal wealth after leaving office. Consider the net worths of recent former presidents: Donald Trump, who is returning to office, is estimated to be worth $2 billion, while Barack Obama and George W. Bush each hold assets in the tens of millions. Biden, heading into retirement, has an estimated net worth of $9 million. Despite this significant wealth, taxpayers continue to cover generous pensions, as well as the cost of perks such as office rent, expenses, supplies, and staff salaries — expenses that collectively amount to millions of dollars annually. For example, Bill Clinton’s New York City office costs $661,000 per year, a figure that exceeds the rent many Americans will pay in a lifetime. Additionally, the colocation of these offices with the presidents’ private foundations raises questions about blurred lines between public and private spending. Taxpayers deserve better accountability and transparency in how their money is used to support former presidents, especially when these individuals are already financially well-positioned. Ernst’s Presidential Allowance Modernization Act would address these excessive costs and bring much-needed accountability to post-presidency benefits. This reform would cap taxpayer-funded pensions for former presidents at $200,000 annually (indexed to inflation) and limit office expenses, staff salaries, and other perks to $200,000 per year. Additionally, the bill includes a provision that reduces these benefits dollar-for-dollar for any income a former president earns above $400,000 annually. This ensures that wealthy former presidents will no longer receive taxpayer subsidies that they don’t need. The Presidential Allowance Modernization Act isn’t a new idea. A version of the bill passed with bipartisan support in 2016 but was vetoed by then-President Obama just before the end of his final year in office. At the time, the national debt stood at $19.6 trillion. Today, with the debt exceeding $36 trillion, the case for reform is even more urgent. With Congress entering a lame-duck session and Biden’s departure imminent, lawmakers have a unique opportunity to act. Reducing the costly perks provided to former presidents is about more than just saving money — it’s about fairness and transparency. Taxpayers should not be expected to subsidize individuals who are already financially secure, particularly as the national debt continues to climb. By passing Ernst’s Presidential Allowance Modernization Act, Congress can establish a fairer system that prioritizes fiscal discipline, restores public trust, and ensures taxpayer money is used responsibly. Demian Brady is Vice President of Research at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. READ MORE: Biden Visits Africa Too Little and Much Too Late The Biden Corruption Biden Desperately Tries to Save His Legacy The post Biden’s Gold-Plated Retirement Package Shows It’s Time to End Excessive Perks appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

When I was a kid in the 1960s and 1970s, almost everybody was familiar with the prime-time schedules of the major networks. In those long-ago days before cable TV, the Internet, home video recording, and DVDs, broadcast TV was the only game in town. TV Guide was the bestselling magazine in the country. All TV was appointment TV. And, certain shows became “watercooler programs” that pretty much everybody would watch and then, the next day, discuss eagerly with their colleagues at work. Nowadays I sometimes forget that the broadcast networks still exist. And having lived abroad for a quarter of a century, I’ve long since lost track of what’s on in prime time across the pond. Perusing the current schedule on Wikipedia, I see that certain warhorses — 60 Minutes, The Simpsons — have hung in there. Reality competitions like Survivor and The Voice and The Bachelor and Dancing with the Stars are also still around. There are reboots of old standbys like Matlock and Night Court. There are even new versions of vintage game shows, such as Jeopardy, Hollywood Squares, and The $100,000 Pyramid, that used to be staples of daytime and early evening syndication. And then there are the police procedurals that seem as if they’ll never go away: NCIS, Criminal Minds, and the Big Daddy of them all, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, now in its 26th season. Now, I’ve seen a few episodes of SVU over the years. As you surely know, it’s about an “elite squad” of the NYPD that investigates sex crimes. Since its outset, it has starred Mariska Hargitay as Detective Olivia Benson. Christopher Meloni, who plays Detective Elliot Stabler, has also been around from the beginning, although he took a ten-year hiatus along the way. Dann Florek played Captain Donald Cregan from season one until 2021. For many years B.D. Wong played George Huang, the psychiatrist attached to the team. Other actors, including the rapper Ice-T and comedian Richard Belzer, have served long stretches on the series. Like millions of other viewers, I’ve found SVU to be highly watchable; but I’ve also been put off by its none-too-subtle politics. The other day, noticing that several seasons of SVU are available on Netflix, I decided to sample a few episodes in order to get a clearer sense of the mentality that has shaped this immensely popular series over the course of its more than quarter-century run. Take the 2005 episode “Raw” (Season 7, Episode 6), in which our heroes’ investigation of a school shooting leads them to a gun store where there’s a huge Nazi flag hanging in the basement and where the proprietor’s homeschooled son Kyle (Cody Kash) and friend Star Morrison (Marcia Gay Harden) rant cartoonishly about “killer spics,” “coons,” “coloreds,” “Jew lawyers,” “porch monkeys,” “sambos,” and so on. Message: gun ownership and homeschooling equal obsessive bigotry. Ultimately, we learn that the white couple whose adopted black kid died in the school shooting actually arranged to have him killed for the insurance. At one point Mariska tells Kyle that his dad has “completely brainwashed” him. But the episode itself is nothing but a heavy-handed attempt to brainwash viewers into believing that murderous white supremacists are a major problem in today’s America — even in New York City. In the very next episode, “Name” (Season 7, Episode 7), the remains of four Puerto Rican boys murdered by a white man in the 1970s are discovered, prompting someone to comment: “You think if it was four white boys missing the case would still be open?” Yes, it’s yet another left-wing fantasy of right-wing racism. (Black gang crime? Never heard of it.) In “Unorthodox” (Season 9, Episode 13), the rape of a pubescent boy leads the team to the Hasidic Jewish community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which gives Detective Munch (Belzer) an opportunity to say things about Hasidic superstitiousness and self-segregation that none of our SVU heroes would ever say about Islam. In “Rockabye” (Season 7, Episode 9), the villain is a doctor who opposes abortion — an issue that also figures in “Hammered” (Season 11, Episode 4), which depicts pro-life activists as dangerous psychopaths. And “Disabled” (Season 11, Episode 17) holds up for admiration a prosecutor who quits her job to work for the execrable International Criminal Court. The episode entitled “Transitions” (Season 10, Episode 14), originally aired on Feb. 16, 2009, was very much ahead of its time, although not in a good way. It’s about a violence-prone pubescent boy, Henry, who’s convinced that he’s a girl — he calls himself Hayley — and who may or may not have tried to kill his father. His mother supports Henry’s delusion about his gender identity and wants Henry to take puberty blockers; his father, Mark, doesn’t. Huang, parroting trans ideology, explains to the cops that “Hayley’s anatomy is irrelevant” because “her brain is female.” Buying instantly into this nonsense, our heroes immediately start calling Henry “she.” In the end, it turns out that Mark’s attempted murderer was Hayley’s apparently female guidance counselor, Jackie Blaine, whose lawyer smears Mark for preferring to have “a dead son” rather than “a beautiful, sensitive, loving daughter.” After Jackie admits on the stand to having been born male, Mark, rather than recognizing that this “trans woman” has twisted his son’s mind, “realizes” that Henry’s puberty blockers are indeed “a matter of life and death” and that “none of this would have happened if I’d just listened to my daughter.” By opposing Henry’s wish for puberty blockers, says Mark, “I was just thinking of myself.” Hargitay and Meloni agree readily. Mind you, this was fifteen years ago before trans madness had conquered our culture. How much of a role, one wonders, did propaganda like this play in making clueless TV viewers accept the dangerous lies of gender ideology? Finally, in “Anchor” (Season 11, Episode 10), three children, all of them “anchor babies” for illegal immigrants, are killed. Dropping in on an agency that helps illegals, the cops learn that the agency is frequently subjected to bomb threats and the like. (Other episodes tell us the same thing about abortion clinics.) The episode leads us into an underworld of jingoists who scream things like “Dirty immigrants!” One of the murder suspects, a white male, talks about nonwhites in a way that sounds (again) right out of a cartoon, addressing Ice-T, for example, as a “coon.” The cast even includes a TV host named Garrison, obviously based on Alex Jones, who encourages another character to kill children, who uses terms like “wetback” and “camel jockey,” and whom a defense attorney equates with Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Bill O’Reilly. Just as SVU wants us to see New York as a city where most murders are white-on-non-white, it wants to teach us that it’s not illegal immigration that threatens law and order but its critics. Recall that, until not long ago, opposition to illegal immigration was the consensus position among both Republicans and Democrats. Would SVU ever run an episode inspired by the real-life story of any one of the many Americans — among them 22-year-old Laken Riley, 12-year-old Travis Wolfe, 10-year-old Alex Wise, and 11-year-old Aiden Clark — who’ve been killed in the last couple of years alone by illegal aliens? Does the question even need to be asked? READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Sandra Gilbert and Feminism’s Endless Rage Revolution at the LA Times ‘Pogrom’ in Amsterdam The post A Quarter Century of Entertainment — and Propaganda appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Guns N' Roses frontman Axl Rose was accused of assaulting former Penthouse model Sheila Kennedy in 1989

Just in case you missed this, Donald Trump has had enough of Justin Trudeau. Trudeau flew on down to Mar-a-Lago to discuss the 25% tariff and said they had an “excellent” conversation. However, the conversation might not have been excellent. The Canadian leader seems to think his economy can’t survive without unequal trade with the […] The post Justin Trudeau Made a Big Hit in Mar-a-Lago [Kidding, I’m Kidding] appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

Far-left MSNBC host Joy Reid complained Tuesday night on the network that President-elect Donald Trump was pressuring the Hamas terrorist organization to release the dozens of hostages that remain inside Gaza. Reid compared Trump to mob boss Tony Soprano from the hit HBO show “The Sopranos,” complaining that he was “muscling other countries” on social media, like threatening BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — with tariffs if they moved away from the U.S. dollar. Reid then complained that Trump was “demanding Hamas release all hostages being held in Gaza before his inauguration, or there will be, ‘all hell to pay in the Middle East.'” An estimated 63 hostages are still alive inside Gaza after they were kidnapped from their homes by Hamas during the Iranian-backed terrorist group’s unprecedented attack on October 7 last year. Several Americans are believed to still be alive. WATCH: HAHAHAHA Joy Reid is melting down over Trump joking about annexing Canada and threatening Hamas pic.twitter.com/T9Cbqfm7I6 — End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) December 4, 2024 Trump posted a statement on Truth Social after the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said this week that American-Israeli hostage Omer Neutra — who for months was thought to be alive in Hamas captivity — was killed on October 7, 2023, and his body has been held by the terrorists in the Gaza Strip. “Everybody is talking about the hostages who are being held so violently, inhumanely, and against the will of the entire World, in the Middle East – But it’s all talk, and no action!” he wrote. “Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that if the hostages are not released prior to January 20, 2025, the date that I proudly assume Office as President of the United States, there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against Humanity. Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!” Hamas murdered 1,200+ people during the attack, wounded thousands more, and took hundreds hostage. The attack ignited a multi-front war throughout the Middle East against Iranian-backed terrorist groups outside of Gaza, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and various groups in Iraq and Syria. The conflict has also erupted into a direct shooting war between Israel and Iran after Iran fired hundreds of missiles in response to Israel killing top terrorist leaders. Zach Jewell contributed to this report.

The Top 5 lucky singers who will be performing in The Voice Season 26 finale have been revealed. The live rounds kicked off on Monday, December 2, with the Top 8 performers battling for America’s votes. Those singers consisted of Reba McEntire’s Adam Bohanan and Danny Joseph, Snoop Dogg’s Jeremy Beloate and Christina Eagle, Michael Bublé’s Shye and Sofronio Vasquez, and Gwen Stefani’s Jan Dan and Sydney Sterlace. Fans were able to vote for their favorite singers and move them to the finale. They first chose their top 4, which included Jeremy Beloate, Shye, Sofronio Vasquez, and Sydney Sterlace. The remaining four then competed for the Instant Save. View this post on Instagram A post shared by snoopdogg (@snoopdogg) To earn the last spot in the Top 5, Adam Bohanan, Christina Eagle, Danny Joseph, and Jan Dan had to perform a new song while fans voted in real-time. In the end, it was Danny Joseph who landed the coveted fifth spot with his cover of House of the Rising Sun. To recap, the Season 26 Top 5 are Jeremy Beloate, Shye, Sofronio Vasquez, Sydney Sterlace, and Danny Joseph. The final two episodes of The Voice Season 26 air on NBC on Monday, December 9 at 8 PM ET for performances and Tuesday, December 10 at 8 PM ET for results. This story’s featured image is by Tyler Golden/NBC via Getty Images. The post “The Voice”: Here’s Who Made It To The Season 26 Finale appeared first on InspireMore.