'Frivolous lawsuit'

A post shared on X claims political activist Laura Loomer wore a shirt that reads, “Hitler Did Nothing Wrong!” This is Loomer. pic.twitter.com/KsIiTBwTpb — Robert Westbrook, Aircraft & Accordion Repair (@Swampfeet) September 30, 2024 Verdict: False The original image depicts Loomer with a shirt that reads, “Donald Trump Did Nothing Wrong!” Fact Check: A post made on […]

'We must do better by the kids'

'I was telling him, 'If you go, I'm coming right behind ya''

'I don't think he's garbage'

A post shared to X claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has declared war on Iran and North Korea. BREAKING: Zelensky declared WAR on Iran and North Korea: “Ukraine is at war with three countries, Russia, Iran and North Korea” – Zelensky ???????? pic.twitter.com/C734rVWpGc — Megatron (@Megatron_ron) October 16, 2024 Verdict: Misleading There is no […]

On October 15th, the NHL season dropped with the Tampa Bay Lighting claiming a 4-1 win over the Vancouver Canucks, giving hockey fans in the twice-battered city something to cheer about. But as sport often does, the occasion helped to channel the best of human potential, as the match was marked by a food drive, […] The post At Tampa Bay’s 4-1 Home Win, Loudest Cheer Went to Traveling Fans Who Came Down to Help Fix the Power Lines appeared first on Good News Network.

It shouldn’t be considered incredibly brave for Vice President Kamala Harris to consent to an interview with Bret Baier on Fox News. JD Vance has been doing hostile Sunday shows for months while Harris resorted to the basement strategy. Then, once Team Kamala booked a “media blitz,” they bizarrely went on offense. Mediaite posted this headline: “Kamala Harris Hammers Trump Avoiding Debate and Tough Interviews: He’d ‘Rather Cocoon Himself in Safe Spaces’ of Conservative Media.” This was after she appeared in a cavalcade of cocoon interviews with Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert, and the unanimous Democrats on “The View.” On the Oct. 16 “Special Report,” Bret Baier brought facts and numbers on tough subjects like immigration, and she didn’t want to deal with the substance. She wanted to repeat her usual pat answers about how everything that’s gone wrong is somehow still former President Donald Trump’s fault. Democrats and their media enablers quickly denounced Baier as “rude,” as if they’ve never watched a hostile “mainstream media” interview with Trump or Vance or any Trump-backing Republican. He tried to be respectful, but not let her uncork her usual five-minute nonanswers. This was “rude” because you’re supposed to let her blather on and avoid the question. While Fox News prime-time hosts painted the interview as a disaster, CBS reporter Robert Costa comically relayed, “Democrats are feeling very good about” how she did. Earth to Costa: They would say that no matter how they thought she did. The most revealing comment came from Alyssa Farah Griffin on “The View,” who slammed Baier for asking “the questions Fox News viewers want answers to.” Others have said the questions were “Trump talking points.” So, when Baier asked about young American women and even 12-year-old girls who were raped and/or killed by illegal immigrants, only Fox viewers care about that? Any negative news about crime by illegal immigrants has been buried by the media, with the “Trump talking point” excuse. The relatives mourning their losses have been dismissed. Their pain doesn’t matter. They’re just talking points. Nobody needs to know. Then there is the obvious point that Farah Griffin & Co. asked Harris the soft-serve questions their audience wanted to hear on Oct. 8. Farah Griffin asked about the “perception among voters that the Biden administration dragged its feet and waited too long to act to address the border crisis. Can you speak to why voters may feel that way?” A massive wave of illegal immigration is downgraded to a “perception”? Another “Trump talking point” was Baier asking about free government benefits for illegal immigrants. As a presidential candidate in 2019, Harris favored illegal immigrants getting driver’s licenses, free tuition at universities and free health care: “Do you still support those things?” “That was five years ago,” she said. Then Baier followed up by noting her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, “signed those very things into state law. So do you support that?” She kept repeating she would follow “the law.” My favorite Baier question was about President Joe Biden’s mental decline, which no one else has asked. “You told many interviewers that Joe Biden was on his game, that he ran around circles [sic] on his staff. When did you first notice that President Biden’s mental faculties appeared diminished?” She failed to acknowledge Biden is currently deficient in any way. CNN’s Brian Stelter summarized the event: Never mind her answers, “normies will just hear that she went into enemy territory and survived/thrived.” If you think she thrived in this interview, you’re definitely not a “normie.” They want to give her extra credit just for showing up. COPYRIGHT 2024 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post Fox’s Bret Baier Pressed Kamala Harris for Answers. The Powder-Puff Press Hated It. appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Immigration is a top issue for voters. Unfortunately, the real picture is obscured by several zombie lies—false narratives that are kept alive for political value. One is that the terrible “bipartisan” Lankford-Sinema Senate immigration bill that failed earlier this year would have done more good than harm. Another is that there is any serious “vetting” done on most illegal aliens released and paroled in the United States—as DHS had to recently admit regarding an Afghan who plotted an Election Day terrorist attack in the U.S. But the mother of all zombie lies is that mysterious “root causes” in the world (poverty, weak governments, crime, etc.) are responsible for the record flows of inadmissible aliens to our southern border rather than the loud and clear come-one, come-all message from the Biden administration. The convenient corollary to the “root causes” canard is that there is nothing the U.S. can do to stem the flow of illegal migrants to our southern border. Far from it. Look at the map: Mexico’s border with the U.S. is 1,800 miles long. But its border with Guatemala is just 541 miles long, and with Belize, it’s only 160 miles long. Before Mexico, Guatemala is the major gateway through which South and Central Americans must travel to get to the United States. The U.S. has huge leverage with Guatemala, from billions of dollars in remittances their people in the U.S. send back home to family, to trade, to aid. Map of Mexico and Central America. (PytyCzech/iStock via Getty Images) Convincing Guatemala to tighten its borders with El Salvador and Honduras would reduce the flow of people coming to America from not only those two nations but also from Nicaragua, whose dictator, Daniel Ortega, is letting people from all over the world fly into his country without visas, well aware they are merely stopping there on their way to the U.S. A hardened Guatemalan border would also reduce incentives for people to cross the Darién Gap. The Darién Gap was until recently a nearly impenetrable jungle, with maybe 10,000 people crossing it a year. During Joe Biden’s presidency, it has turned into what Todd Bensman of the Center for Immigration Studies calls a “raging superhighway” for migrants. There are now well-trodden paths that can be traversed in a few days. In 2023, 520,000 people crossed the Gap, most headed to the U.S. In May 2024, José Raúl Mulino was elected president of Panama, partly on the promise to crack down on illegal migrants from South America moving through his country as they headed north. Mulino’s new government worked out a plan and asked for U.S. help. Under former President Ricardo Martinelli, Panama’s policy was to move migrants as quickly as possible from its southern border to the next country on their northward journey—neighboring Costa Rica. In turn, Costa Rica and the other countries along the journey between Panama and Mexico did the same. This pass-the-parcel operation eventually fed millions into the waiting arms of the U.S. migration machine at our southern border. Under Mulino, Panama installed barriers in the Darién where smugglers and migrants had blazed trails through the jungle. The idea was to “channel” migrants through “humanitarian corridors” so they could more easily be screened. Those who were clearly economic migrants just looking for better standard of living (rather than seeking asylum from violence and oppression in their home countries) who failed to win asylum in Panama could then be sent home rapidly. The United States agreed to help Panama by financing the flights to return such migrants from whence they came. Panama could not carry out an operation of this scale without us. But as Bensman reports after spending weeks in Colombia, Mexico, and Panama, the U.S. didn’t follow through—Biden gave Panama jack squat. As of September, there had only been a few flights supported by the U.S., and they went to Colombia, Ecuador, and India. Most of the migrants removed from Panama were single men with criminal records. For the vast majority of migrants pouring through the Gap, Panama had to revert to their bus-them-beyond to Costa Rica tactic. The Panamanian strategy relied on turning off the giant magnet that draws people up through Latin America into the U.S. Economic migrants make a risk-reward calculation before they spend thousands of dollars on the trip from Africa, China, India, or Venezuela. When the chance of getting into the U.S. falls below a certain level, fewer come. Raising that risk, by ramping up deportation flights, was the supposed aim of the U.S.-Panama deal. If the U.S. had held up its end of the deal, illegal immigration through the Darién would not have stopped, but we would have lowered the flow. This would have given governments across the Americas time to figure out effective, permanent measures to discourage mass illegal migration. But that’s not the Biden-Harris immigration agenda, which was succinctly described by U.S. Ambassador to Panama Mari Carmen Aponte. She said, “Immigration has to be orderly, safe, and legal. And what we are doing is trying to offer legal, safe, and orderly routes but at the same time, [en]forcing the law.” The U.S. never came through on its end of the deal with Panama because the Biden-Harris administration does not want to make it harder for economic migrants to come here under the guise of seeking asylum. In fact, creating “orderly” pathways for them to come to the U.S. is core of its policy. The administration built Safe Mobility Offices in Central America staffed by the State Department to advise migrants how to get into the U.S. It has ramped up parole programs beyond the wildest dreams of activists. It has moved as many asylum decisions as possible from experienced immigration judges to hand-picked U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers, who are more likely to grant asylum claims and let aliens permanently stay in the U.S. Even without U.S. cooperation, Panama’s efforts somewhat reduced Darién Gap crossings—the nation expects to see around 320,000 migrant crossers in 2024, which would be down from the historical record in 2023. But it won’t last. According to Panamanian authorities, the majority of those crossing the Gap are from Venezuela, with Colombia, Ecuador, and—incredibly—China rounding out the top four countries of origin. And there are plenty more where they came from. The U.S. has bought into the United Nations’ “Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration.” Guided by this, the Biden-Harris agenda is to reframe mass illegal migration to the United States as legal. Using euphemisms like “safe, orderly, humane,” and “lawful pathways,” they cover up their true intent, which is apparently to allow virtually unlimited entry to the U.S. using asylum as the pretext. The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more. Read Other BorderLine Columns: What I Saw on My Visit to Springfield, Ohio ‘The BorderLine’ Anniversary Column: Revisiting Biden’s Border by the Numbers One Year Later That Bipartisan Border Bill Harris Blames Trump for Killing Would Codify Illegal Immigration Crisis Into Law The Stunning Costs of Biden-Harris’ ‘America-Last’ Border Policies—Part 2 The Stunning Costs of Biden-Harris’ ‘America-Last’ Border Policies—Part 1 The post How Panama Could Stem Illegal Immigration Flow to US but Biden Broke the Deal: The BorderLine appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The EU and Brazil are sharpening their regulatory knives, and who better to test their shiny new powers on than Elon Musk, the guy who seems to have made annoying pro-censorship bureaucrats his full-time hobby? Musk’s social media platform, X has become the latest target for both the European Union and Brazil — but they’re not just going after X anymore. The powers-that-be have decided that since X isn’t worth much these days, maybe they should slap fines on Musk’s other companies—SpaceX, Neuralink, xAI, and even the Boring Company—just because they can. It’s the ultimate power move by regulators who seem to be more interested in flexing their muscles than addressing real issues. Why settle for a measly 6% fine on a struggling social media platform when you can drag in rockets, to pad the bill? The EU’s Latest Power Trip: Digital Services Act as a Blank Check Enter the Digital Services Act (DSA), the EU’s newest favorite tool for cracking down on “disinformation” and “hate speech” on major digital platforms. It’s got all the right buzzwords—”transparency,” “safety,” and “accountability”—but underneath the noble-sounding veneer, it’s starting to look more like a blank check for the EU to assert control over Big Tech. The law allows for fines of up to 6% of annual revenue for platforms that don’t comply. But when it comes to X, with its plummeting value—now at a measly $9.4 billion, according to Fidelity—the EU seems to be thinking, “Why stop at X when we can go after Musk’s entire empire?” Think about it: SpaceX, Neuralink, the Boring Company—what do they have to do with social media disinformation? Nothing, really. But the EU’s got a grudge, and they’re not about to let a little thing like fairness or logic get in their way. Musk’s decision to pull X out of the EU’s voluntary Code of Practice against disinformation in 2023 certainly didn’t help matters. Sure, he had initially played nice back in 2022, but when Musk realized that the EU’s idea of “voluntary” meant “you’ll comply, or else,” he bailed. Now, Brussels is retaliating by threatening to fine Musk’s companies that have nothing to do with social media, all while pretending this is about “protecting democracy.” If it sounds more like a personal vendetta than a reasoned policy decision, that’s because it probably is. Brazil Freezes Musk’s Assets: Free Speech or Free for All? Not to be outdone by their European counterparts, Brazil has decided to take its regulatory saber-rattling to new heights. The country’s highest court recently froze the assets of Starlink, Musk’s satellite internet venture, in an effort to squeeze a $3 million fine out of X for failing to censor content. That’s right—Brazil couldn’t get X to bend to their will, so they decided to take Musk’s satellites hostage. All in the name of combating “misinformation,” of course. What’s particularly galling about Brazil’s move is how blatantly it ignores the principles of free speech and open communication. The accusation that X “facilitated the spread of misinformation and hate speech” sounds noble on paper, but the way Brazil went about enforcing their demands—by freezing assets of an entirely separate company—looks more like strong-arm tactics than legitimate regulation. At this point, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that these governments are less concerned with disinformation and more interested in exerting control over tech companies that refuse to play by their increasingly arbitrary rules. Musk, who’s spent years promoting free speech as one of X’s core principles, is now facing a global game of whack-a-mole, with each country seemingly more eager than the last to punish him for refusing to fall in line. Personal Accountability or Public Power Play? One of the more interesting twists in the EU’s regulatory circus is the suggestion that they might hold Musk personally accountable under the DSA. Why? Because, according to the EU’s interpretation, “the entity exercising decisive influence” over a platform—whether that’s a company or an individual—can be on the hook for any wrongdoing. In other words, if Musk’s platform doesn’t comply, they’re coming for him directly. This is about using Musk as a punching bag to show the world that the EU is still in charge. Thomas Regnier, a spokesperson for the European Commission, helpfully clarified to Bloomberg, that the DSA’s rules apply “irrespective of whether the entity… is a natural or legal person,” which is bureaucrat-speak for, “We’re gunning for Elon.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post From X to SpaceX: EU Regulators Could Fine Musk Companies For Free Speech Push appeared first on Reclaim The Net.