More than half of the individuals seeking life-saving monoclonal antibody treatment are “fully vaccinated” individuals — news that comes as the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Biden administration cut the supply of the treatment to Southern states.
“Florida is above average in vaccination rate. More than half of the patients in south Florida getting monoclonal antibody treatment are vaccinated and have breakthrough infections. Vaccinated or unvaccinated -Denying treatment to Covid patients is wrong,” DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw said on Thursday following the governor’s press conference, where he vowed to “work like hell” to get people the antibody treatment they need, regardless of the Biden administration’s actions.
On Friday, responding to critics, Pushaw reiterated that “[m]ore than half the patients getting the monoclonal antibody treatment in south Florida are fully vaccinated,” debunking the left-wing narrative that it is unvaccinated individuals, primarily, in the Sunshine State who are the primary reason for the demand:
Florida is above average in vaccination rate. More than half of the patients in south Florida getting monoclonal antibody treatment are vaccinated and have breakthrough infections. Vaccinated or unvaccinated -Denying treatment to Covid patients is wrong. https://t.co/NDA42jxbIL
This week, the Biden administration and HHS announced plans to slash the supply of the lifesaving treatment, citing the need for “equitable distribution.” Yet, last week, President Joe Biden promised to “increase the average pace of shipment across the country of free monoclonal antibody treatments by another 50 percent.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) addressed the administration’s “very, very problematic” decision during a press conference on Thursday, warning it will hurt patients. He ultimately said his administration will “work like hell” to make sure people get the treatment they need, despite Biden’s cuts. He also told reporters that he already spoke to GlaxoSmithKline executives, expressing hope the state will be able to order treatments directly from the company.
“The clinical data on that was even better than the clinical data on Regeneron – 85 percent reduction in hospitalizations,” DeSantis said.
“It is not approved for subcutaneous injections, so if we get it, and we use it at our sites, we have to expand the amount of IV treatments that are available, which we are going to be willing to do,” he said, noting it does not have a purchasing agreement with the federal government, as Regeneron does.
“The federal government has bought all the Regeneron. They just upped it for another shipment. We are not able to buy it directly from Regeneron,” DeSantis added.
Biden, however, has continued to complain about Republican governors such as DeSantis and Greg Abbott (R-TX), asserting they are “doing everything they can to undermine the life-saving requirements that I have proposed.” Yet, it is his administration slashing lifesaving treatments from Southern states. In fact, his administration sent less than half the needed doses to Florida this week alone.
The move follows Biden’s divisive coronavirus speech this month, where he vowed to use his power as president to get certain governors opposing his edicts “out of the way.”
House Democrats have unveiled a litany of new tax proposals to fund President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion federal spending bill, but a new report suggests the spending plan would shrink the economy.
The University of Pennsylvania’s business school, Penn Wharton, released a new budget model based on the Democrats’ plan that projects a major decrease in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the coming years if the plan were to pass.
“Drafting a budget from the August 2021 Senate reconciliation framework that satisfies the Senate rules of reconciliation (“Byrd Rule”) will require a decrease in new outlays or a large increase in revenues (or both) after the standard 10-year budget window,” the report said. “One such potential reduction in spending would allow the new non-healthcare-related discretionary spending provisions to expire after 2031. With this reduced spending in 2031, we project that the reconciliation package will decrease GDP by 4.0 percent in 2050. Without this spending decrease (and where the Byrd Rule is not satisfied), we project a 4.8 percent fall in GDP in 2050.”
House Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee released a series of tax hikes that would fund the spending plan, including a new tax on tobacco and an increase in capital gains taxes.
The plan would include a 25% tax on dividends and capital gains for single people making more than $400,000 annually or married couples making $450,000. Republicans have argued this violates Biden’s pledge, since it will be taxing one or two spouses making less than $400,000.
Democrats also proposed raising the top income tax rate to 39.6%, up from 37%, which would hit the same incomes as the capital gains tax.
Republicans lambasted the tax increases, which would fund a long list of “human infrastructure” projects they say are unnecessary.
“This isn’t about corporations or the wealthy, it’s about workers,” U.S. Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, said during the House Committee meeting on the legislation earlier this week. “It’s about families and customers, retirees, and communities that our businesses invest in. They bear the burden. They always bear the burden.”
Republicans also pointed to the Penn Wharton report, arguing the deficit spending and tax hikes violate Biden’s promises on the campaign trail.
“President Biden pledged not to deficit spend, citing a need to protect the economy – but this reconciliation package leads to an 8.9 percent increase in government debt,” Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee said in a statement.
Penn Wharton identified the major spending items that require a significant increase in federal revenue or a cut in spending elsewhere to offset the new expenses.
“Health expenditures are the largest spending category and capture 32.4 percent of the new spending within the budget window,” the report said. “Health expenditures include the expansion of Medicare benefits, lowering of the Medicare eligibility age, expansion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), and enactment of prescription drug price controls. Approximately 31.0 percent of the proposed spending enters the model through transfers and tax expenditures, which includes policies such as public housing investments, energy subsidies, and the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit extensions. Spending that boosts labor productivity, which includes human capital investment policies such as preschool and childcare, is the next largest input category, receiving 13.2 percent of the $3.5 trillion of new spending over the 10-year budget window.”
One tax that has drawn the attention of critics is a major tax increase on vapes, tobacco, cigars and cigarettes. Opponents argue this tax violates Biden’s pledge to increase taxes only on the wealthy because it will affect millions of Americans making well below his $400,000 a year promise.
“This provision doubles the current rate of excise taxes on cigarettes, small cigars, and roll-your own tobacco,” the Democrats’ tax proposal document said. “The provision changes the tax on large cigars from an ad valorem basis to a weight basis at the rate of $49.56 per pound, but not less than 10.06 cents per cigar. The provision provides larger increases in tax on smokeless tobacco (i.e., snuff, chewing tobacco, and pipe tobacco) and a new tax on discrete single-use units at the rate of $100 per thousand. Finally, the provision imposes excise taxes on ‘taxable nicotine’, which is any nicotine (other than nicotine used in listed tobacco products) that has been extracted, concentrated, or synthesized.”
Let’s get this right: global warming caused the record cold in Texas last winter. And the climate will be even colder for decades to come because the climate is warming, so let’s spend trillions to make it colder. Global warming is making us cold, so we need to make it colder, or else the Earth will burn up.
That’s the conclusion of climate scientists in a new report.
Now that the climate appears to be cooling, at least in many heavily populated regions, environmentalists are desperate to salvage their theory of global warming since that theory is the only way that government will be able to take control of the energy industry, which constitutes 8% of the U.S. economy.
If greens really believed that carbon emissions were a threat to the planet, they would focus on Asia, not on the U.S., where we have already cut carbon emissions to 1990 levels. But little is said about China, India, Indonesia, and other carbon emitters — and nothing in the Paris climate agreement addresses the vastly greater emissions of those countries. The U.S. share of global emissions is only 14%, the same as it was in 1866! Meanwhile, China’s share of global CO2 emissions is 27.32% (2017 number). Yet the Paris agreement includes no enforceable plan to reduce Chinese emissions.
The real prize for the environmental movement is the U.S. energy industry, one of the last bastions of true capitalism in America. For radical environmentalists, the problem with companies like ExxonMobil isn’t emissions — it’s that it supplies the free market for oil and gas, or did, until the election of board members from Engine No. 1 this year, a recently created group that appears determined to shift American oil and gas companies from fossil toward alternative fuels.
Even the United Nations’ IPCC admits that reducing carbon emissions in the U.S. will have an extremely limited impact on climate, yet the focus of environmentalists and liberal media is on a small set of companies within the United States. That focus on Big Oil will not change global temperatures, but it may help environmental groups raise money. It changes nothing except to raise the cost and reduce the availability of reliable fossil fuel — and to kill tens of thousands of good jobs for American workers and endanger those who are still working.
Environmental policies, especially under special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry and energy secretary Jennifer Granholm, politicians with no experience in producing energy, are moving in the wrong direction. More than half of Americans heat their homes with natural gas, but Kerry and Granholm are doing all they can to curb U.S. natural gas production. Only 4% of cars sold in 2020 were electric, but Kerry and Granholm have allowed gas prices to rise by 50%, pressuring the 96% of Americans who purchased gas-powered cars last year and the nearly 100% who owned them before then. In other words, their policies are not market-based — they are driven by ideology. Just as climate scientists can say the climate is warming when it’s cooling, Biden officials think that Americans want wind and solar when they don’t. What Americans really want is cheap and reliable fuel, and that doesn’t come from windmills.
Kerry and his billionaire wife Teresa Heinz, by the way, own multiple homes, multiple cars, and a $5-million Gulfstream private jet. So far as I can determine, those vehicles include or have included at least one large black SUV and two large Chryslers. In a 2015 disclosure, the Kerry-Heinz family trust was invested in 94 fossil fuel companies and 56 other companies tied to fossil fuels — and only one electric vehicle company. So much for Kerry’s 2016 statement at the Paris Agreement on Climate Change that “we will live up to our responsibility … to save our planet from ourselves.”
Kerry’s boss is even less consistent and more hypocritical. Biden’s thinking, if one can call it that, is that there is a long-term forecast for colder temperatures, and the way to address this new Ice Age is to eliminate the cheap and reliable energy we’ve used in the past and replace it with wind and solar, which don’t seem to work in extreme conditions. Moreover, we should spend trillions of dollars attempting to make the climate cooler at the very moment in history when the world’s leading climate scientists say much of the U.S. is going to get colder — much colder. And, at the same time, phone Saudi Arabia and beg them to produce more oil and gas.
That prediction of colder temperatures, by the way, is backed up by the Old Farmer’s Almanac, which has a way of being right more often than not. The Almanac states that the coming winter will be perfectly horrible, at least in the eastern half of the country, with frigid temperatures and plenty of ice and snow. Even Florida will be cold — just the sort of weather environmentalists seem to love. Maybe John Kerry will be able to ski his way through the winter at expensive mountain resorts, but for most of us, it’s just miserable.
What’s the advice from those scientists who are predicting much coldertemperatures? According to the report’s lead author, Dr. Judah Cohen, it’s to shelter in place when the electrical system shuts down, as may well happen. As Cohen put it, “In Texas … some people froze to death in their homes and perhaps they could have gone to seek shelter.”
Yes, probably best to seek shelter rather than freezing to death, but where and how does one “seek shelter” when the roads are iced over, trees are down, gas stations can’t pump, and there may be no power even in the designated shelters? Just like in Afghanistan, liberals talk in nebulous terms about “having a plan,” but when the plan doesn’t work, lives are lost. Then liberals want to “move on” and not talk about it.
“Don’t worry if we’re entering a new Ice Age — just grab a pillow and head for the nearest shelter. Spend your winter on a cot with hundreds of other COVID-infected refugees from the cold. That’s better than sitting in a warm, comfortable home heated by natural gas because oil and gas are evil.”
Obama’s health czar once said the best plan for the elderly is to provide them with painkillers and just let them die. That same callous cruelty is apparent in much the Biden administration has been doing, from Afghanistan to the southern border to climate change. When politics is driven by ideology, there’s not much room for human beings. When the windmills freeze up this winter, you can thank Joe Biden and his climate advisers. And think about how warm you’d be with natural gas.
The long-awaited impacts of the “Durham report” – a deep dive by special counsel John H. Durham into the origins of the Russia collusion hoax – appear to have finally yielded a result.
Durham, the former U.S. Attorney for the state of Connecticut, is believed to be calling on a grand jury to indict Michael Sussmann, a partner at the left-wing Perkins Coie law firm which represented the Democratic National Committee.
The case against Mr. Sussmann centers on the question of who his client was when he conveyed certain suspicions about Mr. Trump and Russia to the F.B.I. in September 2016. Among other things, investigators have examined whether Mr. Sussmann was secretly working for the Clinton campaign — which he denies.
An indictment is not a certainty: On rare occasions, grand juries decline prosecutors’ requests. But Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers, Sean M. Berkowitz and Michael S. Bosworth of Latham & Watkins, acknowledged on Wednesday that they expected him to be indicted, while denying he made any false statement.
“Mr. Sussmann has committed no crime,” they said. “Any prosecution here would be baseless, unprecedented and an unwarranted deviation from the apolitical and principled way in which the Department of Justice is supposed to do its work. We are confident that if Mr. Sussmann is charged, he will prevail at trial and vindicate his good name.”
A spokesman for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who has the authority to overrule Mr. Durham but is said to have declined to, did not comment. Nor did a spokesman for Mr. Durham.
The accusation against Mr. Sussmann focuses on a meeting he had on Sept. 19, 2016, with James A. Baker, who was the F.B.I.’s top lawyer at the time, according to the people familiar with the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity.
Because of a five-year statute of limitations for such cases, Mr. Durham has a deadline of this weekend to bring a charge over activity from that date.
At the meeting, Mr. Sussmann relayed data and analysis from cybersecurity researchers who thought that odd internet data might be evidence of a covert communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and with Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked Russian financial institution.
The F.B.I. eventually decided those concerns had no merit. The special counsel who later took over the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the matter in his final report.
Claimed they were mainly centered around the use of “spray paint.”
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, tried to downplay the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots in an effort to prevent Donald Trump from invoking the Insurrection Act, arguing that they were mainly centered around the use of “spray paint.”
That’s according to the new book, ‘Peril’, written by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
Despite the violent demonstrations quickly spreading across the country, Milley continued to insist that they had only impacted two cities and were relatively sedate, echoing CNN’s ludicrous “fiery, but most peaceful” description of the riots.
“They used spray paint, Mr President, that’s not an insurrection. […] We’re a country of 330 million people. You’ve got these penny packet protests,” Milley allegedly told Trump.
Milley apparently told Trump that most of the riots only involved around 300 people and that they paled in significance to the 1968 Washington riots caused by the assassination of MLK and the Battle of Fort Sumter in 1861, which started the Civil War.
The riots took mere days to spread to virtually every major city in the country, with looting, arson and violent attacks becoming commonplace, eventually causing around $2 billion dollars in property damage as well as at least 19 deaths and over 17,000 arrests.
At one point, demonstrators took over an entire area of downtown Seattle, completely obliterating official law and order for a number of weeks.
Trump’s failure to act strongly and decisively led to him looking weak, derailing a lot of momentum he would have had going into the election.
According to other reports, Trump wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act and put Milley in charge of National Guard troops to end the unrest, leading the two to have a shouting match where Milley refused to take charge.
Back in June, Milley appeared to side with the kind of ‘woke’ rhetoric spewed by far-left groups like BLM when he told the House Armed Services Committee that he was concerned about “white rage” in the United States.
As we highlighted earlier this week, Milley was also accused of treason by Trump after it emerged that he had promised to warn China ahead of any military operations.
Fox News host Tucker Carlson labeled the revelation, “One of the scariest things that has ever happened in this country.”
Illegal border crossings, sparking a new humanitarian crisis just inside the Texas-Mexico line, are set to break the all-time record as President Joe Biden and his administration continue to turn a blind eye to the migrant chaos.
The latest projection is 1.85 million illegal border apprehensions for 2021, busting the previous record of 1.643 million in 2000.
“It won’t be close, and the previous record is likely to be smashed by 200,000 or more,” said analyst Steven Kopits in a new Princeton Policy Advisors report shared with Secrets.
In a double whammy, he also projected that the fiscal year (October to October) record is on the verge of being crushed.
A new analysis from Princeton Policy Advisors shows a record projection of illegal border crossings.
“With only September left in the fiscal year, the Biden administration is perilously close to setting the all-time record for southwest border apprehensions in a fiscal year. Our current forecast anticipates 1.640 million apprehensions for fiscal year 2021, with the record from 2000 standing at 1.643 million. That is, a swing of only 3,000 apprehensions would set the record for the fiscal year,” read the analysis from Kopits.
“Put another way, if apprehensions exceed 170,000 for September, the Biden administration will hold the record for worst-ever fiscal year. Apprehensions have held consistently above 170,000/month since April. A new high is within sight,” Kopits said.
This week, officials from the Department of Homeland Security said they encountered 208,887 people illegally crossing the border in August, four times more than the previous year.
Many of those were Haitians trying to escape the political crisis and natural disasters on the island.
“The numbers appear to be growing by the hour with no end in sight, ballooning from some 2,000 on Sunday to 6,000 by Wednesday, to 8,000 by Thursday morning and then to 10,000 by that evening,” he wrote.
And Bensman quoted a border officer telling him, “In my 20-year career, I have never seen anything this out of control.”
His video showed scenes similar to refugee camps in Africa and piles of garbage.
Back home, there continues to be no urgency to quell the crisis by the Biden administration, although two top officials have quit DHS recently.
Dave Mustaine, the frontman for heavy metal band Megadeth, blasted mask mandates in a tirade to fans during a concert in Camden, New Jersey.
“I just wanna tell you how great it is. Look around you, guys. Look to your right, look to your left, and look how wonderful this is,” said Mustaine to his fans Wednesday.
“We’re all here together. We’re not in f***ing bags. We’re not freaking out, and we’re not yelling at people, ‘Wear your f***ing mask,'” he added, according to Loudwire.
“Listen, it starts with this kind of a sensation that we build right now. We feel together, we feel strength in numbers. We feel like we are invincible. People will not be able to stop us,” he continued.
“Right now, what’s going on is tyranny,” Mustaine said. “This is called tyranny. Look it up when you get home. And tyranny isn’t only in government. Tyranny right now is in the schools and tyranny is in the medical business. We have the power, especially us heavy metal fans, we have the power to change things.”
This is far from the first time Mustaine has spoken out about his political beliefs.
In 2012 during a concert in Singapore, he said the United States was turning into “Nazi America” and accused then-President Barack Obama of staging mass gun murder incidents so that he could push gun control.
“Back in my country, my president is trying to pass a gun ban so he’s staging all these murders like the ‘Fast and Furious’ thing down at the border and Aurora, Colo., all the people that were killed there,” said Mustaine at the time.
Mustaine also endorsed Republican Rick Santorum for president in the same year.
Here’s the video of Mustaine’s comments on gun control:
“You know, Jared’s more loyal to Israel than to the United States”
According to a new book released by the Watergate reporters, former president Donald Trump pointed out that his son-in-law and former top advisor Jared Kushner acted in a way that led Trump to believe that Kushner was “more loyal to Israel than the United States.”
“You know, Jared’s more loyal to Israel than to the United States,” Trump reportedly joked according to the new book, “Peril.” The already-strained relationship between Trump and Kushner deteriorated rapidly following the 2020 presidential election.
National File reported in July of 2020 on reports of sources inside the White House stating that Trump wants “no more of Jared’s woke sh*t,” after several weeks of abysmal polling for the administration that indicated an uphill battle in the 2020 election, and no net increase in black voters. Trump reportedly realized that going along with Kushner’s “police reform” and “criminal justice reform” initiatives had hurt him politically.
Additionally, in June 2021 another book quoted Trump as saying “I’ve done all this stuff for the blacks – it’s always Jared telling me to do this. And they all f**king hate me, and none of them are going to vote for me.” Kushner’s push to appease violent Black Lives Matter rioters in the wake of the George Floyd death in Minnesota, coupled with his bungling of Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, reportedly led Trump to avoid Kushner and complain about him in private during the summer of 2020.
Kushner also reportedly played a key role in keeping Trump from joining the free speech social media platform Gab, because the website did not meet the son-in-law’s demands to censor speech critical of Israel:
Gab CEO and founder Andrew Torba explained that President Trump is being blocked from joining the vibrant platform by his advisors. [President Trump] is and always has been a mirror archive of POTUS’ tweets and statements that we’ve run for years,” wrote Torba. “We’ve always been transparent about this and would obviously let people know if the President starts using it.”
Elaborating on why President Trump is not using Gab, Torba added, “The only reason he’s not using it right now to contact his base is because dopey advisers like Jared Kushner, who lost him the election, are blocking him from using it.”
A freshman Republican congresswoman is taking aim at Democratic socialism-preaching Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Met Gala appearance by leading the charge on legislation that would require lawmakers to disclose their participation in charity events where the ticket value exceeds $1,000.
Progressive darling AOC has come under fire from Republicans and even her own far-left base for attending the $35,000-a-ticket gala while wearing a custom gown that said “Tax the Rich” across the back in big red lettering — with critics arguing her message was hypocritical given the event caters to the wealthy and high-profile celebrities.
Rep. Michelle Steel (R-Calif.) argues that the “Greater Accountability from Lawmakers for Americans Act,” or GALA Act, is necessary to provide “transparency” and accountability, changing rules to require members to explain how the event pertains to their official duties if the attendance requirements are above a certain price threshold.
“This is about transparency and holding officials accountable for the job they were elected to do. If Rep. Ocasio-Cortez was truly attending a multimillion-dollar event in her official capacity, she should have no problem sharing more details with the people she represents,” Steel said.
“Updating these House Ethics rules will require more accountability from your representatives, and that’s something we can all support.”
The proposed legislation would be similar to the disclosure required for members and staff when going on legislative trips and junkets.
Under House of Representatives rules, members are permitted to accept unsolicited invitations to charity events. The Met Gala raises funds for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, but conservatives have questioned whether the event is permissible since the guest list is extremely limited.
A conservative group is asking the Office of Congressional Ethics to launch an investigation of AOC for accepting the free tickets to Monday’s Met Gala.
Thomas Jones, founder of the American Accountability Foundation, wrote in an ethics complaint that he believes Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who represents parts of the Bronx and Queens, broke House rules by accepting “an impermissible gift” of free tickets to attend the annual gala, which also was attended by fellow New York Democratic Rep. Carolyn Maloney.
Durham Seeks Grand Jury Indictment of Perkins Coie, DNC Lawyer
Finally, something. But is it big enough?
The long-awaited impacts of the “Durham report” – a deep dive by special counsel John H. Durham into the origins of the Russia collusion hoax – appear to have finally yielded a result.
Durham, the former U.S. Attorney for the state of Connecticut, is believed to be calling on a grand jury to indict Michael Sussmann, a partner at the left-wing Perkins Coie law firm which represented the Democratic National Committee.
The New York Times reports:
The case against Mr. Sussmann centers on the question of who his client was when he conveyed certain suspicions about Mr. Trump and Russia to the F.B.I. in September 2016. Among other things, investigators have examined whether Mr. Sussmann was secretly working for the Clinton campaign — which he denies.
An indictment is not a certainty: On rare occasions, grand juries decline prosecutors’ requests. But Mr. Sussmann’s lawyers, Sean M. Berkowitz and Michael S. Bosworth of Latham & Watkins, acknowledged on Wednesday that they expected him to be indicted, while denying he made any false statement.
“Mr. Sussmann has committed no crime,” they said. “Any prosecution here would be baseless, unprecedented and an unwarranted deviation from the apolitical and principled way in which the Department of Justice is supposed to do its work. We are confident that if Mr. Sussmann is charged, he will prevail at trial and vindicate his good name.”
A spokesman for Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, who has the authority to overrule Mr. Durham but is said to have declined to, did not comment. Nor did a spokesman for Mr. Durham.
The accusation against Mr. Sussmann focuses on a meeting he had on Sept. 19, 2016, with James A. Baker, who was the F.B.I.’s top lawyer at the time, according to the people familiar with the matter. They spoke on condition of anonymity.
Because of a five-year statute of limitations for such cases, Mr. Durham has a deadline of this weekend to bring a charge over activity from that date.
At the meeting, Mr. Sussmann relayed data and analysis from cybersecurity researchers who thought that odd internet data might be evidence of a covert communications channel between computer servers associated with the Trump Organization and with Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked Russian financial institution.
The F.B.I. eventually decided those concerns had no merit. The special counsel who later took over the Russia investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, ignored the matter in his final report.