Abortions of unborn babies fell 2% the year the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC’s annual abortion surveillance report, published on Wednesday, found that a total of 613,383 unborn babies were legally aborted within 48 reporting areas in the United States in 2022, the year the High Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe. Out of the 47 areas that were consistently reporting data between 2021 and 2022, there was a 2% decrease from the 622,108 unborn babies who were legally aborted in 2021, to 609,360 in 2022. The report states: “From 2021 to 2022, the total number of abortions decreased 2% (from 622,108 total abortions), the abortion rate decreased 3% (from 11.6 abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years), and the abortion ratio decreased 2% (from 204 abortions per 1,000 live births).”   (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images) Women in their 20s accounted for more than half (56%) of the abortions performed in 2022, according to the CDC data. Women between the ages of 20-24 (28.3%) and 25 to 29 (28.2%) accounted for the highest percentages of abortions and had the highest abortion rates. “By contrast,” the report stated, “adolescents aged <15 years and women aged ≥40 years accounted for the lowest percentages of abortions (0.2% and 3.6%, respectively) and had the lowest abortion rates (0.4 and 2.5 abortions per 1,000 women aged <15 and ≥40 years, respectively).” The majority of unborn babies were aborted at less than nine weeks gestation during 2022, the report found, and nearly all of the unborn babies who were aborted and tracked by the CDC (92.8%) were aborted at less than 13 weeks gestation. Around 9% of abortions were performed on unborn babies older than 13 weeks, the report said. The highest percentage of abortions were performed using abortion drugs at less than 9 weeks (53%) followed by surgical abortions at less than 13 weeks (35%), then surgical abortions at older than 13 weeks (6.9%), and then medication abortion drugs after 9 weeks. The report says that “all other methods were uncommon.” And it notes that five women died during this time period from abortions: “In 2021, the most recent year for which PMSS data were reviewed for pregnancy-related deaths, five women died as a result of complications from legal induced abortions.” The 6-3 decision in Dobbs followed the May 2022 leak of a draft opinion indicating which way the justices would rule. That leak prompted protesting across the nation, particularly in Washington, D.C., as well as dozens of attacks and vandalism of pro-life organizations, centers, and churches. The decision leaves it to states to impose restrictions on abortion.

Milton Friedman once said that inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon. But there are a lot of people who are suggesting today that inflation is going to be a result — not of printing money or spending too much money — but of Donald Trump’s economic policy. This is wish-casting. President-elect Trump is currently riding high. His approval ratings are in the high 50s, low 60s. People generally approve of his transition team’s plans. They like what they are seeing.  So, of course, the media are trying to crush his economic dreams. The idea being promulgated by the media is that inflation, which ate up the Biden administration, is now going to plague the Trump administration. This is ironic, since we were told by the exact same media that inflation was not going to be a factor for Biden when he took office. We were told that modern monetary theory — Elizabeth Warren’s bizarre and strange theory about economics, that you could endlessly spend money without ever inflating prices, without ever inflating away people’s savings — was possibly true, and we could just keep spending money until the end of time, and inflation would not result. Inflation resulted. Oops. So now, the media claim that Trump’s economic policies are going to produce Trump inflation: Trump inflation is coming. WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show Their pitch is that Trump is pursuing a series of policies that are going to lead to price increases. Those policies would be, in order: tariffs, tax cuts, and deportations. Alan Blinder, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton who was also a member of the Federal Reserve from 1994 to 1996, wrote in The Wall Street Journal: Three such policies received the most attention during the campaign: tariffs, tax cuts, and the mass deportation of illegal immigrants. I’ll take those up first, before turning to what poses the biggest inflationary danger: the threat to the Federal Reserve’s independence.  No matter how many times Mr. Trump denies it, tariffs are (discriminatory) sales taxes. Discriminating against imported goods is their purpose. Sales taxes, of course, raise prices for consumers. This is true. It is true that tariffs raise prices to consumers. That’s what they’re designed to do. Tariffs protect particular domestic industries against foreign competition. They raise prices on consumers in order to benefit one particular class of producers.  Let’s say you are a steel producer in the United States, and China is exporting steel at a rate that is much lower. If tariffs are put on Chinese steel, it then becomes cheaper for Americans to buy American steel than Chinese steel. But  — at a price that is higher than they otherwise would have paid. So the domestic steel manufacturers are very happy, but the consumers of steel are very unhappy. The thing about tariffs is that, like most government policies, they have a set of very specific beneficiaries and a set of extremely diffuse victims. That’s a lot of government policy; the damage done to the broader public is mild to moderate, and the benefit to a very, very selective class is quite high.  But that’s not what Trump is doing with regard to tariffs. What Trump does with regard to tariffs is something different. To understand what he’s doing with regard to tariffs, understanding Trump’s past is required. Trump, for example, threatened incredibly high tariffs on both Canada and Mexico in the middle of his first administration. He was ripping on NAFTA, and suggested he was going to scrap NAFTA entirely. He was going to increase trade barriers against Mexico and Canada. What was he actually doing?  He was actually rewriting NAFTA in favor of the United States. The result of the threat of tariffs was the USMCA, the U.S. Mexico-Canada Agreement; the changes to NAFTA were somewhat moderate. For example, the USMCA required that 75% of a vehicle’s parts be made in Mexico, Canada, or the United States. That was an increase from 62.5% in order to remain free from tariffs. It helped the American economy slightly; it also meant that labor laws had to be strengthened in Mexico, so Mexico couldn’t use its lax labor laws, like child labor, in order to undercut American prices. It gave dairy farmers more market access. There used to be a plethora of tariffs on American dairy farmers going into Mexican and Canadian markets, and those went away. The USMCA kept tariffs at zero and opened the Canadian markets for U.S. dairy, poultry, and eggs. Trump used the threat of tariffs to leverage benefits away from the Canadians and the Mexicans. And this is historically what he has done with regard to tariffs. We can tell this by how people are looking at Trump’s tariff policy because the markets have responded quite well to his actual economic proposals. What Trump is attempting to do with tariffs is to leverage wins out of a wide variety of American enemies. That is the goal. As far as tax cuts, there were a lot of people who suggested that the 2017 Trump tax cuts were going to lead to inflation. That didn’t actually happen. Why? Because it turns out that allowing people to keep their own money is not the same thing as simply pumping government money into the system. Allowing people to keep their own money means American consumers and investors act with actual rationality with regard to their own spending and investment, which means they don’t just blow money into the economy willy-nilly. If there is a tax cut, people tend to use that money not only to pay off their bills in responsible fashion, but also make economic decisions that help them and their families as opposed to the government, because the way the government spends money by finding particular constituencies that it likes and then throwing money at those constituencies (i.e., special projects that the government wants that do not have to be profitable). It can be absolutely profit-neutral or negative, and the government just tosses money at them. And that creates artificial inflation in areas where there is no concomitant productivity. The reality is that new products and innovations initially mean that people spend money on those innovations at a higher rate. Then as competition increases, the prices come down. That’s what happens when people are allowed to keep their own money. But that entire incentive structure is broken by government spending. So tax cuts and government spending are not remotely the same thing. And only a person who believes that all money basically comes from the government equates those two notions. Me allowing you to keep your own money is not the same thing as me cutting you a check or me cutting a check to anyone else. Not the same thing remotely. Finally, there’s the idea that mass deportation is going to create inflation as well, but it’s completely unclear what exactly that’s going to look like. Alan Blinder suggests that, together, all of this means the new Trump policies might add 2% to 3% to total inflation over two to three years, a percentage point a year.  The real problem here is not going to be that; the real problem is going to be if there’s an attempt to push the Federal Reserve to continue to lower the interest rates. That would be the real problem, because it turns out the Federal Reserve is generally the biggest driver of the national inflation rate. That and massive government spending. CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE So at the same time Trump is pushing all this, he is also pushing the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Now, there’s only so much that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy can actually do in terms of cutting. That doesn’t mean they can’t do anything. It just means cutting will be a lot tougher than people think it will. A breakdown of the American spending initiatives shows the spending as a share of gross domestic product; 14.7% of our GDP is spent on mandatory programs that are already embedded in law that Trump has said he will not touch, like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. When it comes to non-defense discretionary spending, that has remained fairly consistent in terms of its spending levels since the 1960s. And defense actually represents significantly less of the American GDP spent than it did back in the 1960s. We were spending about 9% of our GDP on defense in 1960. Today, we spend about 3% on our defense spending. So this bizarre notion that defense spending is what’s eating up the budget is not true at all. So what exactly can they touch? The list is relatively small. What remains is discretionary spending. According to The Wall Street Journal, that breaks down into two main categories. The first is defense. So, presumably, get rid of some of the golden toilets at the Pentagon. The second is non-defense discretionary spending, which includes everything else, such as funding for NASA, farm programs, housing assistance, and on and on — about $950 billion. Unless they are willing to touch some of the actual mandatory programs, it’s unlikely they’re going to be able to cut all that much. But in the end, Trump’s overall economic plans are to cut in particular areas to allow people to keep their own money and to use tariffs as leverage. And the media will have to watch as the economy starts to roar.

Israel’s ceasefire agreement with the terror group Hezbollah is mainly about biding time for Israel until U.S. President Joe Biden leaves office, according to Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro. Israel and Hezbollah have agreed to a 60-day ceasefire that went into effect on Wednesday morning, the day after Israeli lawmakers approved its terms. Negotiators from France and the United States brokered the deal, which Biden said on Tuesday was “designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities.” Under the terms of the ceasefire, Hezbollah has agreed to pull its forces out of southern Lebanon and north of the Litani River. Israel will slowly withdraw its own forces from southern Lebanon, while Lebanese and United Nations forces are to occupy a buffer zone, according to The New York Times. The deal is similar to an agreement struck in 2006, Resolution 1701, that failed after Hezbollah entrenched itself in southern Lebanon despite the presence of U.N. Peacekeeping forces in the region. Shapiro was less optimistic than Biden about the durability of the current ceasefire. “If Hezbollah abides by the terms, so much the better: Israelis go home and live in security in the north,” Shapiro said in a post on X on Wednesday. “But Israel is working under the likely correct assumption that Hezbollah will not abide by the terms, and that the agreement as interpreted by the Trump administration will actually allow Israel freedom of action (a freedom of action denied by Biden under his spurious and ugly interpretation of the same agreement).” Shapiro said that Israel, though it has been successful in its war against Hezbollah, agreed to the ceasefire because of three main reasons. CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE First, “Joe Biden has been slow-walking aid to Israel. That slow-walking has gotten Israeli troops killed,” according to Shapiro. The ceasefire gives Israel time to re-arm and wait for President-elect Donald Trump, who is much more supportive of Israel, to take office. Second, the ceasefire relieves international pressure to end the conflict in Hezbollah that Israel has been under from the U.S. and France. And third, “Even under these conditions, Israel has an interest in taking Hezbollah off the board as a chess piece with regard to Hamas. Hamas has attempted throughout the October 7 war to rope in other powers to save it,” according to Shapiro. “It is a 60 day ceasefire. Joe Biden leaves office in 54 days. That is not a coincidence,” Shapiro said. One of the major aims of Israel’s war against Hezbollah is the return of about 70,000 Israelis to their homes in northern Israel. They were forced to flee the region because of the threat posed by Hezbollah rockets. Even with the ceasefire, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not yet called for those Israelis to return home. Netanyahu’s silence suggests that Israel is not confident in the ceasefire and is likely waiting out Biden’s final days in the presidency, Shapiro said. “The durability of the ceasefire is completely dependent on Hezbollah and Lebanon abiding by it. If they don’t, and January 20 comes, Israel will do what it must,” he added. Let’s be clear about why Israel signed onto this ceasefire. There are three reasons. 1. Joe Biden has been slow-walking aid to Israel. That slow-walking has gotten Israeli troops killed. The ceasefire is designed to allow Biden to leave and Israel to be re-armed by the incoming… — Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) November 27, 2024

Peanut the Squirrel and his pal Fred the raccoon’s owners have filed their intent to sue to the State of New York after they said their beloved pets “were executed, not euthanized” when they were seized in a raid by officials to be “tested for rabies.” In the official notice against the state, the guardians of the two animals, Mark Longo and his partner Daniela Bittner, accused the state of unlawful search and seizure, violation of freedom of speech, and other violations, TMZ reported. They are also suing for emotional distress, as well as lost wages. The animals were seized from Longo’s home in upstate New York on October 30 by officials with the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and then euthanized. At the time of the raid, the Associated Press reported that the DEC took both animals from the Longos’ home. The agency reportedly said it received complaints that wildlife was potentially at risk and being kept illegally. The Longos told TMZ that they have had Peanut for seven years, after rescuing the squirrel when its mother was killed. The DEC also said in a statement that Peanut bit an investigator on the hand while the squirrel was being confiscated, sparking the need to test for rabies, and “both animals were euthanized…” according to WETM. JUST IN: Peanut the Squirrel’s owners to sue the state of New York for executing Peanut and their pet raccoon, Fred. Mark Longo says justice is coming and he is ready to take on the state of New York. Longo and his partner Daniela Bittner filed a notice, stating their… pic.twitter.com/zaDzrzdjw9 — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) November 27, 2024 In the notice to the state from their attorney, Nora Constance Marino, the couple claim, “It is submitted that the notion that a DEC agent and/or other respondents’ agent was ‘bitten’ by Peanut may be false and/or manufactured,” the New York Post reported. “It is further submitted that even if an agent was in fact bitten, killing Peanut would still be unnecessary, unjustified, improper, and illegal, it is further submitted that there is no claim that Fred the raccoon bit anyone, and thus, the killing of Fred was unnecessary, unjustified, improper, and illegal,” the notice added, claiming that the animals were not wild, but legal companions, and thus there was no reason they had to be killed. CHECK OUT THE DAILY WIRE HOLIDAY GIFT GUIDE As previously reported, a timeline for euthanasia of the animals doesn’t match up and the Post reported that both animals were advised to be euthanized by state officials a week before the raid. “DEC is aware of an individual in Chemung County who is known to illegally possess an adult gray squirrel and at least 4 young raccoons. They may also be in possession of other illegal wildlife species,” the DEC said in a message to the county on October 22. “We would like to know if the Health Department would recommend these animals be tested for rabies as a precaution for human safety.” The State Department of Health letter to the county on October 23 then read,  “Wildlife cannot be confined like domestic animals, and if there was an exposure, the animals would need to be tested for rabies,” WBNG reported. Days later, officials took steps for their raid — but the Post noted that the DEC was already coordinating the animals’ euthanasia with Elmira Animal Control. Related: Peanut The Squirrel’s Story Gets Shoutout From Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch

Joey Graziadei and Jenna Johnson walked away with the Mirrorball Trophy after the dazzling Season 33 DWTS finale, and it was thanks to their last dance. As host Alfonso Ribeiro shared before announcing the winners on November 26th, this year’s results were some of the closest in Dancing with the Stars history. The five couples who made it to the grand finale had been neck and neck for weeks. But Joey and Jenna managed to inch ahead of their competitors with their impressive Cha Cha performance. The couple’s first dance of the night earned 29 out of 30 points from the judges, but their second scored a perfect 30. That brought them to 117 points for the season, which was only 1 point lower than Chandler Kinney and Brandon Armstrong. Ilona Maher and Alan Bersten Earned A Close Second On Season 33 “DWTS” Of course, fans also vote for the DWTS winners each season. During the live finale, people were able to call in and vote for their favorite dancers. Those votes were added to the judges’ totals, and they pushed Joey Graziadei and Jenna Johnson to the top. “We put in so much work … everyone did,” Joey told GMA. “But it meant the world to obviously get this, and, you know, end it with an exclamation point.” Ilona Maher and Alan Bersten were the runner-up winners of DWTS Season 33. Chandler Kinney and Brandon Armstrong earned third place, Stephen Nedoroscik and Rylee Arnold came in fourth, and Danny Amendola and Witney Carson were the fifth-place winners. You can find the source of this story’s featured image here. The post “DWTS”: Watch The Performance That Sealed The Season 33 Win appeared first on InspireMore.

'I believed that the detectives were doing a very good job'

It was announced Wednesday that Medrick Burnett Jr. has died.