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Scalise: Biden Hiding From Border Crisis He Created

President Joe Biden knows there is an immigration crisis at the nation’s border but “thinks by staying away from it, by hiding out, that the problem will go away,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La.,  said Tuesday.

“It’s getting worse because of President Biden’s policies,” Scalise said on Fox Business’ “Mornings With Maria.” “What President [Donald] Trump was doing was working. Biden may not like President Trump, but if his policy was working, at least continue on with that.”

Biden can still reverse his own policies by executive order, and stop the humanitarian crisis that is happening with children arriving unaccompanied at the nation’s border. 

“They’re overwhelming communities along the border, and it seems like he doesn’t care about their plight because he’s carrying out socialist agenda that the left wants,” Scalise said. “This isn’t some social experiment. This is having a devastating impact on these young children coming across without parents in many cases, left to just be fending for themselves after being exploited in many cases along the journey, the 20-plus-day journey for some of them.”

Even though the Biden administration continues to refuse to call the border situation a crisis, Scalise said that’s exactly what it is due to the president. 

“He went on day one, stopped building the wall, ordered that they stop construction on the wall that was going on and it actually costs more money to stop executing those contracts,” Scalise said. “That wall that President Trump had put in place had been successful at securing our border.

“What President Biden did is put the open sign at America’s border and they’re coming in by the thousands every day.”

Scalise noted that Jeh Johnson, who was Department of Homeland Security secretary under former President Barack Obama, said if he saw more than 1,000 crossings in one day illegally, it was a “serious problem.” Now, between 3,000 and 4,000 immigrants are coming daily.

“This is a major humanitarian crisis,” Scalise said. “The young kids that are pulled across the border, many are brought across by cartels, by these coyotes who are paid money, many sexually exploiting the young women coming across.” 

After the young immigrants arrive, they’re not being kept in proper places, as the system is “completely overwhelmed” – something Scalise said was Biden’s fault. 

The president, however, refuses to visit the border, and instead is touring the nation to tout the $1.9 trillion COVID bill, Scalise said. 

The administration also is reportedly making plans for the first major federal tax hike since 1993 to pay for the long-term economic program following the pandemic bill, and Scalise said the United States “needs to be rescued” from the “socialist agenda that’s being rammed through Congress.”

“Look at the [COVID] bill,” Scalise said. “Over 90% of this $1.9 trillion bill has nothing to do with health needs. We tried to put money in to double the number of vaccines and they rejected it. In this bill, they have $1,400 checks going to felons in federal prison. Does anybody really think that’s a COVID-related item?

“They banned states from cutting taxes in the bill, The money is being borrowed from our children and they’ll raise taxes on hard-working families to pay for this.”

Germany, France, Italy Suspend Use of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 Vaccine

Countries join others in pausing shots after a small number of cases of blood clotting on the continent

Germany, Italy, France and Spain joined the ranks of European countries that have temporarily halted use of the Covid-19 shot made by AstraZeneca AZN 0.72% PLC over blood-clot concerns, dealing another blow to the continent’s sluggish vaccination rollout and threatening the credibility of the vaccine itself.

A cascade of cautionary pauses that started last week picked up Monday. Denmark was the first to suspend the shots. Ireland, Norway, the Netherlands and Iceland have also said they would wait for Europe’s bloc-wide medicines regulator to investigate a small number of serious blood-clotting issues among people who had received the AstraZeneca shot.

That regulator, the European Medicines Agency, is expected by Thursday to give its verdict on safety and potential risks from a review of the reported cases.

The Associated Press reports:

A cascading number of European countries — including Germany, France, Italy and Spain — suspended use of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine Monday over reports of dangerous blood clots in some recipients, though the company and international regulators say there is no evidence the shot is to blame.

AstraZeneca’s formula is one of three vaccines in use on the continent. But the escalating concern is another setback for the European Union’s vaccination drive, which has been plagued by shortages and other hurdles and is lagging well behind the campaigns in Britain and the U.S.

The EU’s drug regulatory agency called a meeting for Thursday to review experts’ findings on the AstraZeneca shot and decide whether action needs to be taken.

The furor comes as much of Europe is tightening restrictions on schools and businesses amid surging cases of COVID-19.

Germany’s health minister said the decision to suspend AstraZeneca shots was taken on the advice of the country’s vaccine regulator, the Paul Ehrlich Institute, which called for further investigation into seven cases of clots in the brains of people who had been vaccinated.

“Today’s decision is a purely precautionary measure,” Jens Spahn said.

French President Emmanuel Macron said his country will likewise stop dispensing the vaccine until at least Tuesday afternoon. Italy also announced a temporary ban, as did Spain, Portugal and Slovenia.

Other countries that have done so over the past few days include Denmark, which was the first, as well as Ireland, Thailand, the Netherlands, Norway, Iceland, Congo and Bulgaria. Canada and Britain are standing by the vaccine for now.

In the coming weeks, AstraZeneca is expected to apply for U.S. authorization of its vaccine. The U.S. now relies on Pfizer’s, Moderna’s and Johnson & Johnson’s shots.

Biden Tax Hike Plan Faces GOP Fight: ‘This Is About Their Social Agenda’

President Joe Biden’s plan for the first major tax hike in nearly 30 years is facing stiff opposition from Republicans who say the proposal is carved from the ideology of wealth redistribution and would seriously stunt any post-COVID economic recovery.

Biden and congressional Democrats intend to push a new major bill that could potentially be aimed at infrastructure, jobs, or climate, the Hill reported. News of the legislation comes on the heels of the passage last week of the $1.9 trillion COVID -19 package that ensured stimulus checks for many Americans and funding for a host of other non-pandemic Democrat priorities.

Rep. Mike Turner, R-Ohio, told Newsmax TV’s ‘Spicer & Co.’ on Monday that Biden’s coming tax plan is all about Democrats’ social agenda.

“This is not about revenue,” Turner said. “This is about their social agenda. You know, when you look at our economy, where we’re just recovering, and we may be coming out of the COVID lockdown, this is not the time to raise taxes. You don’t stimulate the economy then take money from the economy … That’s because this is not about revenue. This is about their philosophy that companies have too much money.”

As part of the coming bill, Biden is planning the first major tax hike since 1993, a boost that could include an increase in the corporate tax rate and the individual rate for individuals earning over $400,000 per year. 

The changes would likely include the repeal of parts of former President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut legislation and could include a 7-point percentage increase in the corporate tax rate, from 21% to 28%, an expansion of the estate tax, and a raise in the capital gains tax for people earning more than $1 million per year.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that Biden is committed to his campaign pledge to not raise taxes on people making under $400,000 annually. She maintained that Biden’s eventual tax plan would focus on ensuring that wealthy people and corporations pay their “fair share.”

“That remains his overarching approach, but there isn’t a package yet where we’re talking about pay-fors yet,” she said. “I expect we can have more conversations about that down the road.”

Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, told CNBC that “in the next package, we’re going to see real serious tax increases on the corporate side, certainly which will drive us to the least competitive tax rate in the world.”

The tax increases would “have an impact on the economy, jobs, and wages,” Brady said.

The Hill reported that Grover Norquist, the president of Americans for Tax Reform, predicted “there will be no Republican votes for the president’s tax increases.”

Norquist said Biden’s campaign tax proposals could end up affecting 401(k) retirement accounts, which could develop into a political problem for Democrats.

“You can’t talk to suburban moms and dads by raising their taxes and raising taxes on the companies they invest in,” he said.

Still, some Democrats are holding out hope an infrastructure and jobs bill can attract bipartisan support.

“Building on the popularity of the American Rescue Plan, it is my sincere hope that our Republican colleagues will join us at the negotiating table, so together, we can deliver a package that benefits all our constituents,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal, D-Mass., said in a statement Friday.

Poll: Americans View China as Greatest Enemy, Doubling 2020 Rate

Americans now view China as the nation’s greatest enemy, more than doubling the rate from last year, when Americans were “equally as likely to say either China or Russia was the U.S.’s greatest enemy.”

According to a Gallup poll released Tuesday, 46 percent of Americans believe China is the greatest enemy, followed by Russia at 26 percent and North Korea at 9 percent. Iran ranked fourth, down 15 points to four percent.

China is up 23 percent from 2020, while Russia’s yearly adjustment is only up three.

“Over the past several years, there have been noticeable fluctuations between the country perceived as the nation’s greatest adversary; China last ranked No. 1 in 2014, Russia topped the list in 2020, 2019 and 2014, and North Korea ranked highest in 2018 and 2016,” the poll noted.

Moreover, the perception of China as the greatest threat is partisan. Seventy-six percent of Republicans view China as the greatest threat, while 22 percent of Democrats said the same. Conversely, only six percent of Republicans name Russia in contrast to Democrats, who set the mark at 47 percent.

Independents notably believe China is the greatest threat at 43 percent, placing Russia below at 24 percent.

“While Americans perceive China as the country’s top enemy, half also believe that China is the world’s leading economic power,” the poll found. Indeed, this change in perception may be based upon the slump in the U.S. economy due to coronavirus amid a period when China has experienced overall GDP growth.

In turn, the poll also found 63 percent of Americans believe “the economic power of China is a critical threat to the vital interests of the U.S. in the next 10 years. An additional 30% describe it as an important, but not critical, threat.”

Facebook exec says Zuckerberg is TOO POWERFUL and Facebook should be BROKEN UP, in undercover interview

Benny Thomas, Facebook’s Global Planning Lead, told a reporter from Project Veritas that his company is as powerful as a country, and needs to be broken up. “No king in history” is as powerful as Mark Zuckerberg, he claimed.

“No king in the history of the world has been the ruler of two billion people, but Mark Zuckerberg is,” Thomas told a Project Veritas reporter, in an interview published by Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe on Monday. Thomas claimed that Facebook is “doing a lot of damage in the world,” citing CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s forays beyond social networking and into healthcare and even gene editing.

“The government needs to step in and break up Google and Facebook,” he said, adding that to do so would be “a better thing for the world.”

Thomas is not the first person to demand greater government regulation of the Silicon Valley tech giants. Republicans have long accused these companies of discriminating against conservatives, and former president Trump repeatedly called for Congress to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which gives social media platforms immunity from being sued over the content posted on their sites, and allows them to decide what content to host and what to remove from their sites at will.

On the other side of the aisle, Massachusetts senator and failed presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren revealed plans in 2019 to break up tech monopolies like Amazon and Facebook. Multiple US states launched their own investigations into Facebook’s alleged anti-competitive behavior, but the firm has not yet suffered any consequences.

Thomas’ beef with Facebook did not involve its business practices, however. In the snippets of speech included in the Project Veritas video, he lent weight to the conservative argument that Facebook’s algorithms are biased. “There’s always built-in [algorithmic] bias,” he said. “Guess what? Human beings wrote that code,” he added, according to Project Veritas.

Thomas also stated that by gathering so much data on its users, Facebook can profile them with ease. He told Project Veritas’ reporter that he can identify “racist people” from their data, and can take “five things” about a user and “pretty much figure out everything else” from that. Mark Zuckeberg told a Congressional hearing in 2018 that he was “not sure” how many data points Facebook gathers on its users, but a 2016 ProPublica investigation“collected more than 52,000 unique attributes that Facebook has used to classify users.”

Monday’s video is not the first Project Veritas sting targeting Facebook. The conservative watchdog group published internal videos last month in which Facebook staff lamented the firm’s excessive power, and last year released an interview with a Facebook whistleblower, who claimed that the company designed censorship algorithms to deliberately target “Republicans and conservatives.”

Much of Thomas’ interview is lacking context, and is edited into a series of soundbites. Project Veritas has been accused before of selective editing and bias, most notably in the runup to the 2020 election when a man portrayed as committing ballot fraud for Democrats in Minnesota came forward and said he was offered money by Project Veritas to say he was breaking the law. O’Keefe denied ever offering the man any money.

Wealthy Americans, corporations about to learn Biden’s definition of ‘fair share’ of taxes

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday that President Biden is focused on making wealthy individuals and corporations pay their “fair share” in taxes as talks heat up on Capitol Hill about how to pay for new spending priorities in areas like infrastructure and climate change.

“His priority and focus has always been on people paying their fair share and also focusing on corporations that may not be paying their fair share, either,” Ms. Psaki told reporters at the White House. “So that remains his overarching approach, but there isn’t a package yet where we’re talking about pay-fors yet.”

Ms. Psaki reiterated Mr. Biden‘s pledge from the campaign trail that people earning less than $400,000 per year won’t see their taxes increase under his tax proposals.

She said Mr. Biden is generally aligned with the attitude of Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts that wealthier people are not “doing their part” on paying taxes.

Ms. Warren recently introduced a “wealth tax” proposal she had pushed during the 2020 campaign that would impose a 2% tax on households’ net worth of more than $50 million and an additional 1% tax on net worth of above $1 billion.

Ms. Psaki said Mr. Biden laid out his own tax proposals during the campaign but that he shares Ms. Warren’s general sentiment on taxing the rich.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen signaled over the weekend that the administration is eyeing ways to try to tame federal deficits like hiking taxes on corporations and wealthier individuals. Those items could potentially come as part of an infrastructure package congressional Democrats are eyeing.

Mr. Biden had campaigned on increasing the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%, raising the top individual tax rate from 37% to 39.6%, and increasing capital gains taxes on people who earn more than $1 million per year.

Republicans have long signaled that they will oppose any efforts to roll back parts of the 2017 tax-cut law, which decreased the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% and cut individual tax rates across the board.

The GOP says now is the last time to be talking about tax increases, as many businesses and families struggle to recover from coronavirus-related lockdowns.

U.S. to house up to 3,000 migrant teens at Dallas convention center

The U.S. will begin using the downtown Dallas convention center as a “decompression center,” to house up to 3,000 migrant teenagers, specifically boys ages 15 to 17, according to a memo obtained by the AP.

Why it matters: The convention center’s conversion comes amid a rise in border crossings that has strained sheltering capacities along the U.S.-Mexico border. The Department of Health and Human Services is moving to open new facilities to house the children.

Flashback: The CDC had allowed shelters housing children to expand to full capacity in spite of a previous COVID-19 safety protocol, a change that highlighted the extent of the housing capacity crisis, Axios previously reported.

What’s more: The surge at the border has already prompted the creation of new shelters for children, including a tent facility in Donna, Texas that is housing “more than 1,000 children and teenagers, some as young as 4,” according to AP.

  • The government is also considering housing unaccompanied minors in a military base in Virginia, Reuters reports.

Reuters reports:

A Pentagon spokesman confirmed that Fort Lee, a U.S. Army facility about 30 miles (48 km) south of Richmond, was under consideration.

The number of migrant children arriving at the southwestern border has increased in recent months, putting pressure on HHS-run shelters that house the children before they are released to parents or other sponsors in the United States.

In the notice, HHS said it urgently needs to find more shelter space for unaccompanied minors. The department said it must “aggressively” find solutions for the rising number of children entering the country amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

The number of migrants caught crossing the border and allowed to enter the United States has increased in recent weeks, as U.S. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, has pledged to reverse many of the hardline policies of former President Donald Trump, a Republican.

WaPo blasted after admitting Trump never said ‘find the fraud’ to Georgia elections investigator as it reported

The Post said in a correction that a ‘source’ provided information about the quotes falsely attributed to the former president

The Washington Post is getting hammered on social media over its recent correction admitting that former President Donald Trump never urged a Georgia elections investigator to “find the fraud” in a phone call over general election ballot impropriety allegations in the state.

What are the details?

The Post placed the following correction above its story, originally published in early January:

Correction: Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source. Trump did not tell the investigator to “find the fraud” or say she would be “a national hero” if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find “dishonesty” there. He also told her that she had “the most important job in the country right now.” A story about the recording can be found here. The headline and text of this story have been corrected to remove quotes misattributed to Trump.

The Wall Street Journal reported last week on audio of the Dec. 23 call between Trump and investigator Frances Watson, noting that the Post reported on the call in January but that this was the first time the recording had been released.

The Post, in its story about the recording, said Georgia officials indicated they didn’t believe a recording existed. But the Post said officials found the recording on a trash folder on Watson’s device while responding to a public records request — and that tidbit came courtesy of “a person familiar with the situation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal process.”

The whip comes down

Alex Thompson, Politico’s White House reporter, characterized the Post’s errors as “real bad” and noted that “this quote was and still is everywhere”:

Thompson added that CNN issued “a sorta vague ‘editor’s note.’ The Wapo correction was much more comprehensive”:

The Daily Beast acknowledged that the Post “quietly” corrected its story, while a number of other media watchers were taken aback — to put it mildly — by the Post getting such crucial details wrong:

Significantly, Democrats used the two false quotes attributed to Trump in their impeachment proceedings:

David Shafer, chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, called out the Post’s “false reporting”:

Israeli-American Scholar Claims ‘Fake’ Bible Manuscript Is Actually Oldest-Known Copy

A 2019 closed-door seminar on the manuscript ended in fierce debate

An Israeli-American scholar in Germany has challenged a 140-year-old claim of fraud by arguing that not only was a supposedly ancient bible authentic, but it may, in fact, be the oldest biblical manuscript found so far, according to newly published findings.

The manuscript was the center of a sensational controversy at the time of its discovery: Found by antiques dealer Moses Wilhelm Shapira, the manuscript comprised 15 fragments he supposedly found in a cave near the Dead Sea.

Shapira claimed the manuscript contained the original Book of Deuteronomy, but some experts and collectors denounced the discovery as a fraud after examination, leading Shapira to flee and commit suicide, according to reports.

Idan Dershowitz, 38, now claims the manuscript is, indeed, real and far older than Shapira thought.

Dershowitz published his claims and arguments in a paper released earlier this month, “The Valediction of Moses: New Evidence on the Shapira Deuteronomy Fragments.”

The paper outlines a number of techniques, including linguistic and archival evidence, to argue that the text is actually an earlier, more primitive draft of Deuteronomy, dating to the period of the First Temple.

Proving the authenticity of the claims will be incredibly difficult. 

Experts have yet to subject Dershowitz’s claims and research to analysis, but a closed-door seminar at Harvard in 2019 resulted in fierce debate, according to The New York Times.

“Qumran was a massive shift,” Na’ama Pat-El, an expert in classical Semitic languages at the University of Texas in Austin, said, referring to the area where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. “What Idan is offering is something that’s at least equivalent, if not more. It’s pretty incredible if he’s right.”

Virologist: ‘We Are Going to Pay Huge Price’ for COVID Mass Vaccination Campaign (video)

In an open letter to WHO and in a follow-up video interview, Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, says that by vaccinating everyone with a vaccine that doesn’t prevent transmission, we are destroying people’s immune systems, and setting the stage for a global health disaster.

Geert Vanden Bossche, DMV, Ph.D., has nothing against vaccines. In fact, the independent virologist formerly worked for Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Bossche says the COVID vaccines approved so far have been developed by “just brilliant” people and he has no criticism of them  But, as he tells Dr. Phillip McMillan in an interview, “please use the right vaccine at the right place. And don’t use it in the heat of a pandemic on millions of millions of people.”

Bossche says that a mass vaccination campaign in the middle of a pandemic, with vaccines that don’t prevent transmission, is disastrous at an individual — and at a global — level:

“We are going to pay a huge price for this. And I’m becoming emotional because I’m thinking of my children, of the younger generation. I mean, it’s just impossible what we are doing. We don’t understand the pandemic.”

In an open letter to the World Health Organization (WHO), Bossche wrote that  “we are currently turning vaccinees into asymptomatic carriers shedding infectious variants.”

Bossche hasn’t heard back from WHO, which concerns him.

“It is about humanity … I mean, it’s about your children. It’s your family. It’s my family. It’s everyone. Right. And it’s simply for me, I put everything at stake because I’ve done my homework. And this is simply a moral obligation. A moral obligation.”

Watch the video:

Read the interview transcript here.

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