President turns down invitation to testify.
By Zachary Stieber-4/16/2024-EPOCH TIMES—PRINTED OFF 4/30/24
President Joe Biden will not be testifying to U.S. House of Representatives members who are engaged in an impeachment inquiry against him, the White House said on April 15.
Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president, told House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) that the president would not testify in the “partisan charade.”
“Your committee’s purported ‘impeachment inquiry’ has succeeded only in turning up abundant evidence that, in fact, the president has done nothing wrong,” Mr. Sauber said in a letter to Mr. Comer.
“Your insistence on peddling these false and unsupported allegations despite ample evidence to the contrary makes one thing about your investigation abundantly clear: The facts do not matter to you,” he added.
Republicans in their investigation have found that millions of dollars flowed from businesses and individuals, including foreigners, to members of the Biden family while President Biden was vice president.
They’ve also identified payments from H****r B***n’s business to the president, and from the president’s brother to him, as well as emails between President Biden and an associate of H****r B***n. Several witnesses, meanwhile, testified that President Biden would get on the phone with H****r B***n’s associates and that he attended multiple meals with them.
Mr. Comer wrote to the president in March, saying the evidence “wholly contradicts your position.”
“In light of the yawning gap between your public statements and the evidence assembled by the committee, as well as the White House’s obstruction, it is in the best interest of the American people for you to answer questions from members of Congress directly, and I hereby invite you to do so,” Mr. Comer wrote at the time.
“The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in the Biden family. Like his son, H****r B***n, President Biden is refusing to testify in public about the Bidens’ corrupt influence peddling,” Mr. Comer said Monday.
“This comes as no surprise since President Biden continues to lie about his relationships with his son’s business partners, even denying they exist when his son said under oath during a deposition that they did,” he said. “It is unfortunate President Biden is unwilling to answer questions before the American people and refuses to answer the very simple, straightforward questions we included in the invitation. Why is it so difficult for the White House to answer those questions? The American people deserve t***sparency from President Biden, not more lies.”
It’s not clear whether lawmakers are considering subpoenaing the president, and the White House did not respond when asked whether the president would comply with a subpoena.
Mr. Comer and other members have said they want answers to questions, including those about the source of the money for the payment from his brother.
They’re also wondering whether President Biden ever interacted with H****r B***n’s associates, such as Chinese businessmen Jonathan Li, Ye Jianming, and Henry Zhao.
Lawmakers also want more details about the work done by Eric Schwerin, one of the associates, for President Biden. Mr. Schwerin told lawmakers that he often met with President Biden and provided him with free services, including tax pr********n.
Lawmakers have yet to outline the next steps in the inquiry. The November e******n is looming and, if President Biden loses his re-e******n bid, he would exit the presidency regardless in January 2025.
Mr. Sauber, the special adviser to the president, is leaving the White House early next month. He was brought on in 2022 to oversee the White House’s response to congressional investigations as Democrats braced to lose their majorities on Capitol Hill that year.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Lawmakers have criticized the 100 percent withholding policy as being a burden to vulnerable Americans dependent on their benefits.
By Naveen Athrappully--Updated:-4/1/2024-PRINTED OFF 4/30/24-EPOCH TIMES
The Social Security Administration (SSA) announced a new measure on Friday, slashing the amount that social security beneficiaries must pay to the agency from their monthly benefits to repay overpayments.
“When a person has been overpaid, the law requires the agency to seek repayment, which can create financial difficulties for beneficiaries,” the SSA said in a March 29 blog post. Earlier, if the agency overpaid a beneficiary, it would withhold 100 percent of their monthly benefits until the overpaid amount was recovered. But beginning March 25, “the agency will collect ten percent (or $10, whichever is greater) of the total monthly Social Security benefit to recover an overpayment, rather than collecting 100 percent as was previous procedure. There will be limited exceptions to this change, such as when an overpayment resulted from fraud.”
There will be a t***sition period during which beneficiaries will continue with the older policy. Those who are placed in the 100 percent withholding category can contact Social Security’s National 800 Number at 1-800-772-1213.
The change only applies to new overpayments. If social security beneficiaries already have an overpayment with a withholding rate greater than 10 percent and want a lower recovery rate, SSA advised them to contact the agency. Alternatively, they can get in touch with their local Social Security office.
“If a beneficiary requests a rate lower than ten percent, a representative will approve the request if it allows recovery of the overpayment within 60 months—a recent increase to improve how the agency serves its customers from the previous policy of only 36 months,” SSA said.
“If the beneficiary’s proposed rate would extend recovery of the overpayment beyond 60 months, the Social Security representative will gather income, resource, and expense information from the beneficiary to make a determination.”

The SSA noted that beneficiaries have the right to appeal the agency’s overpayment decision or the amount. In case beneficiaries are not in a financial position to pay it back, they can ask the SSA to waive the collection of the overpaid amount. While the appeal or waiver is pending, the agency will not pursue recoveries.
“Social Security is taking a critically important step towards our goal of ensuring our overpayment policies are fair, equitable, and do not unduly harm anyone,” said Martin O’Malley, commissioner of Social Security.
“It’s unconscionable that someone would find themselves facing homelessness or unable to pay bills, because Social Security withheld their entire payment for recovery of an overpayment.”
According to the SSA’s fiscal year 2023 financial report, the agency paid approximately $1.26 trillion in social security benefits in fiscal year 2022, which includes the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance (DI) programs.
Out of this, the agency estimates it made $6.5 billion in overpayments, accounting for 0.51 percent of the $1.26 trillion disbursal.
Burden on Americans
Social security overpayments have come under severe criticism from lawmakers. During a Social Security Subcommittee hearing in October last year, Chairman Drew Ferguson (R-Ga.) said that “way too many Americans now have the burden of having to deal with an overpayment.”
“With a program this size, which pays out more than $1.2 trillion a year, even a small percentage of errors can have a big impact.”
“Every error can affect beneficiaries, livelihood. Let’s all agree that we shouldn’t be going after beneficiaries who receive payments improperly. Let’s focus first on stopping the improper payments. Whether we’re talking about an overpayment, or whether we’re talking about an underpayment, we have to get this right,” he said.
In November, U.S. Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), members of the Senate Finance Committee, urged the the SSA to cut down on overpayments and prevent harm to vulnerable recipients of the program.
“We have been deeply concerned by stories from our constituents and recent reports of the extreme financial hardship placed upon beneficiaries who are asked to quickly repay in full or whose payments are halted, reduced, or reclaimed as the agency attempts to correct improper payments, many of which occurred due to agency error,” they wrote in a letter to the SSA.
A report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) last year also found that overpayments can impose burdens on DI beneficiaries.
“GAO and past research have consistently found that the majority of DI beneficiaries who have earnings sufficient to affect their benefits will receive an overpayment. The financial burden of these overpayments can amount to thousands of dollars, which beneficiaries may have to repay.”
“In 2015, we reported that more than one-half of all DI overpayments were paid to beneficiaries earning above program limits. Further, a 2019 study conducted by Mathematica and SSA estimated that 71 percent of DI beneficiaries with earnings sufficient to affect their benefits receive overpayments, which often accumulate to thousands of dollars.”
The GAO said that the SSA was facing “ongoing challenges” when it comes to reducing overpayments. Though the SSA has made efforts to deal with the overpayment issues, “more remains to be done,” the report stated.
In October, the SSA launched a review of its overpayment policies as well as procedures to ensure payment accuracy. On Friday, the agency said that the new rule reducing overpayment recovery to 10 percent is a “direct result of the ongoing review.”
The SSA said it was establishing information exchanges with payroll data providers aimed at “significantly” reducing the number of improper payments.

Tax refunds boosted by 3 percent.
By Tom Ozimek-Updated:--4/20/2024—PRINTED OFF 4/30/24—EPOCH TIMES
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has disclosed that it raked in nearly $5 trillion in taxes from Americans in the last fiscal year, while boosting the amount it paid out in refunds by nearly 3 percent and boasting that it kept its pledge not to increase audit rates for those earning less than $400,000 per year.
After a record $4.9 trillion haul in the 2022 fiscal year, the IRS collected a slightly lower but still substantial $4.7 trillion last year, according to the IRS’s annual Data Book for fiscal year 2023.
The eye-catching tax-intake amount was made possible in part due to a significant funding boost of $78 billion that the IRS used in part to hire more enforcers and deploy advanced technologies like artificial intelligence to squeeze more dollars from non-compliant taxpayers.
“Initial investments of Inflation Reduction Act funding in compliance operations, including hiring additional staff to more adequately address areas of noncompliance, began in fiscal year 2023,” IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel wrote in the report. “We continued to make progress developing and using innovative approaches to better understand, detect and resolve potential noncompliance, such as leveraging new technology and data analytics to fairly enforce tax laws.”
The IRS got roughly $79.4 billion in supplemental funding when President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 into law, though Congress later clawed back around $1.4 billion.
At the time, many Republicans opposed the funding boost, warning that a large portion of the money would be used to hire an “army of 87,000” tax enforcers who would come down hard on ordinary Americans and squeeze them for “every last penny.”
As claims of the “army of 87,000” enforcers captured the spotlight, the IRS went to great pains to push back on this notion, including by pledging repeatedly that audit rates wouldn’t rise for Americans making less than $400,000 per year.
Critics panned the promise as empty, while the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), the watchdog overseeing the IRS, warned that this pledge could be hard to keep because the IRS uses outdated income thresholds and has no way to identify the complete population of taxpayers that meet the $400,000 criterion.
The IRS insists its $400,000 pledge was a promise it managed to keep.
“In fiscal year 2023, there was no increase in audits of tax returns for taxpayers making under $400,000 per year,” the IRS said in a statement.
Enforcement, Refunds
The IRS expanded its workforce by around 5 percent last year, according to the report. The agency added roughly 5,800 new employees, many of them to work on compliance and bring in more tax dollars.
Forty percent of the the IRS’s 82,990 full-time staff in 2023 were dedicated to enforcement activity, which includes the examination of tax returns, collection of balances due, and administrative and judicial settlement of taxpayer appeals of examination findings.
The agency ramped up spending on enforcement last year, from around $5.41 million in 2022 to $5.62 million in 2023, with most of the increased spending in the area of examinations and collections.
“The IRS has increased its enforcement and collections efforts on high wealth non-filers and those who underreport their tax liability through complex schemes,” the IRS said in a statement.
Thanks in part to the added hiring and funding boost, the IRS its staff processed 271.4 million tax returns and other forms last year, including more than 163.1 million individual income tax returns.
The agency said it paid out $659 million in refunds, a 2.7 percent increase over the 2022 fiscal year.
“The effects of this IRA funding—to hire more IRS employees and modernize the agency’s technology and systems to provide better service to the American people—started showing up in the 2023 tax season,“ Mr. Werfel said in a statement. ”And that progress has accelerated into 2024.”
More Tax Enforcers Hiring
A recent report from the TIGTA shows that the IRS is hiring thousands more tax enforcers in 2024 as the agency looks to boost its tax revenues going forward.
The watchdog report reveals that the IRS is on track to hire a total of 5,582 tax enforcers across three staffing categories: revenue officers, revenue agents, and special agents.
The bulk of the new hiring will be revenue agents, who are employees in the “examination” function that carry out face-to-face tax audits of more complex returns. The IRS plans to hire 4,663 revenue agents in the 2024 fiscal year, which will bring their number up to 12,358.
Some of the hiring will involve onboarding another 517 staff members in the IRS’s “collection” function, whereby employees collect delinquent taxes and secure delinquent returns. This will bring the total by the end of the 2024 fiscal year to 3,470.
The smallest number of new hires is armed special agents in the criminal division. The IRS plans to hire 402 of them this year, bringing the total by the end of the current fiscal year to 2,500.
Given the spotlight on claims of an “army of 87,000” tax enforcers, the watchdog also weighed in on this in its report.
“There has been widespread reporting that the IRS will be hiring 87,000-armed enforcement agents,” the watchdog wrote, adding that “this claim is unfounded.”
“The only enforcement personnel employed by the IRS who are armed are Criminal Investigation Division special agents,” the TIGTA added, noting also that special agents have the lowest number of staff of all the IRS’s enforcement personnel.

‘Deficits which basically aren’t going to go away as far as the eye can see,’ JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said, while warning of stagflation.
By Tom Ozimek--4/25/2024-printed off 4/30/24—epoch times
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has issued a grim warning for the direction of the U.S. economy, saying he sees the odds of a “soft landing” as far lower than markets are pricing in while sounding the alarm on a possible bout of 1970s’ style stagflation fueled in part by the Biden administration’s massive deficit spending.
Mr. Dimon made the remarks in an April 25 interview with The Wall Street Journal, in which he warned about Americans being lulled into a false sense of confidence because the U.S. consumer appears to be in “pretty good shape” right now, stock markets are up, jobs are plentiful, and unemployment is low at 3.8 percent.
“Don’t get lulled into a false sense of security because today looks okay, tomorrow is going to be okay,” he said. “So just try to separate the two.”
While various economic metrics have held up quite well, new data released on April 25 indicate that the U.S. economy showed signs of slowing in the first quarter as inflation pressures and higher borrowing costs associated with the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes weighed on the country.
The U.S. economy expanded by 1.6 percent in the first three months of the year, down from 3.4 percent in the fourth quarter, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).
The reading fell short of the consensus estimate of 2.5 percent, with the downside surprise sending U.S. stocks into a tailspin, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunging more than 600 points after opening bell, though it later pared those losses to around 425 points down, as of the time of reporting.
Smells Like Stagflation
Mr. Dimon said he sees the current economic setup as increasingly reminiscent of the 1970s, when a mix of high inflation and sluggish growth led to stagflation, an economically toxic condition characterized by high unemployment and elevated price pressures.
“It looks a little bit more like the 1970s to me, and I point out to a lot of people, things looked pretty rosy in 1972. They were not rosy in 1973,” he said.
He said the issues that amplify the inflation risks in the stagflationary equation include “huge” fiscal deficits and monetary stimulus in the form of quantitative easing (QE), massive spending on the green economy, and a jump in military expenditures around the world at a time of geopolitical strife.
“Deficits which basically aren’t going to go away as far as the eye can see,” Mr. Dimon said. “All that puts me on the side of caution that things may not go as well as people expect. The odds of a soft landing—the market kind of prices in 70 percent—I think it’s half of that.”
Mr. Dimon’s cautionary note about the inflationary aspects of massive government spending come amid numerous warnings about America’s ballooning public debt.
Deficit spending in the United States hit $1.7 trillion in 2023, or 6.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), according to a recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The agency warned that deficit spending that adds to a growing pile of public debt would slow economic growth and drive up interest payments to foreign holders of U.S. debt.
Over the next 30 years, U.S. deficit spending is expected to grow to 8.5 percent of GDP by 2054, according to CBO estimates. The agency also projects that America’s debt-to-GDP ratio, which in the 1980s was around 35 percent of GDP, will balloon to 166 percent by 2054, posing “significant risks” to America’s fiscal and economic outlook.
Treasury Department data released earlier in April show that the U.S. budget deficit topped $1 trillion in the first six months of fiscal year 2024, putting the federal government on track to notch its fifth consecutive trillion-dollar-plus budget gap.
Looming Debt Cliff?
Mr. Dimon earlier warned that America’s debt-to-GDP ratio would “hockey stick” upward at some point, meaning rise sharply after a period of relatively gradual increase. He described this moment as a market “r*******n”-type reckoning that could involve a sudden deepening of the debt crisis as investors lose confidence in the government’s ability to service its debts and sell off U.S. Treasurys.
The point at which America’s public debt becomes unsustainable is fast approaching, Mr. Dimon warned.
“It is a cliff. We see the cliff. It’s about 10 years out. We’re going 60 miles an hour,” he said, speaking on a panel at the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington at the end of January 2024.
Republicans have repeatedly expressed opposition to the Biden administration’s high deficit spending, issuing similar warnings about debt sustainability and a catastrophic market reckoning.
President Joe Biden has defended his spending plans while criticizing the GOP for pushing budget cuts and trying to pin the blame for catapulting the public debt to over $34 trillion on President Donald Trump’s tax cuts.
During his April 25 interview with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Dimon was asked for his thoughts on whether “Bidenomics” was working.
“Partially,” he replied. “When you spend that kind of money, you’re going to have growth,” he continued, adding that he supports some of the administration’s moves on industrial policy and infrastructure.
However, he said that many Americans might not experience the benefits, while cautioning that massive government spending is inflationary.
In a similar vein, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently sounded the alarm on the Biden administration’s high deficit spending, warning that America’s ballooning public debt threaten to stoke inflation and even trigger financial chaos.
Analysts at the University of Pennsylvania estimate that when America’s debt-to-GDP ratio hits around 200 percent, it will hit the point of no return—when no amount of future tax increases or spending cuts could prevent the government from defaulting on its debt.

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With conservative opposition, House Speaker Mike Johnson relied on Democrats’ help to pass the foreign aid bills that includes a measure that could ban TikTok.
By Jackson Richman and Joseph Lord—EPOCH TIMES
Updated:--4/23/2024—printed off 4/30/24
The House of Representatives has passed legislation that would give financial assistance to U.S. partners in the Indo-Pacific, Ukraine, and Israel, as well as a bill that includes measures such as forcing Chinese divestment of TikTok. This comes as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) faces growing discontent among conservatives over the package, particularly the billions of dollars in funding for Ukraine and a lack of border security measures.
The House passed the $61 billion aid package for Ukraine in a 311–112 v**e. The measure providing for Indo-Pacific and Taiwanese security passed in a 385–34 v**e. Another bill funding Israel passed 366–58. The bill containing the TikTok measure and allowing for the seizure of Russian assets passed in a 360–58 v**e. Democrats cheered on the floor after Ukraine assistance passed, waving Ukrainian f**gs and chanting “Ukraine, Ukraine,” at which point they were chastised by Mr. Johnson for violating House rules on decorum.
Now that it’s been passed by the House, the legislation will go to the Senate as a single package, where it’s expected to easily pass. President Joe Biden has expressed support for the package and urged the Senate to swiftly send it to his desk.
President Biden said of the legislation that members of both parties “came together to answer history’s call, passing urgently needed national security legislation” that he has “fought for months to secure.” Just before authorizing passage of the four-part foreign aid and geopolitical security package, the House blocked a bill that would have strengthened border security amid an unprecedented crisis along the southern border.
On April 19, Democrats stepped in to help advance the package on the House floor in a 316–94 v**e. These so-called rules v**es typically advance along party lines, but Republicans have increasingly used them to protest against leadership. Fifty-five Republicans v**ed against the rule. Democrat help was needed again to pass all the bills, which will be merged into a single package before being sent to the Senate.
Mr. Johnson said after the April 19 v**e that although it wasn’t “perfect legislation,” it was the “best possible product” that Republicans could get given their thin majority in the House. Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.), who opposed the advancement of the rule yesterday, argued that it was wrong for the United States to be securing the borders of other nations amid the ongoing crisis at the southern border with Mexico.
“We’re sending $300 million for the state border guard services of Ukraine ... yet won’t spend the same kind of money here to secure our own border,” Ms. Hageman said. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) argued that Mr. Johnson should have put a clean Israel bill on the floor and attached a “Remain in Mexico” policy requirement to Ukraine legislation.
“Instead what we have is something that’s going to further divide the Republican conference and ... just make it harder as we go forward,” Mr. Ogles said. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has spoken in favor of the legislation, blaming “MAGA extremists like Marjorie Taylor Greene” for “[placing] ... the American people’s national security interests on hold.”
“It’s long past time we support our democratic allies in Israel, Ukraine, and the Indo-Pacific,” Mr. Jeffries said, praising his party for “[clearing] the way” for the rule to pass, which all but guaranteed passage of the final bill. The Ukraine bill would give $60.84 billion to Ukraine, which has come under attack by Russia since February 2022. The bill would include $23.2 billion to renew both defense articles and services provided to Ukraine and $13.8 billion in assistance for Kyiv to purchase U.S. weapons and both defense services and articles.
The Israel bill would give $26.3 billion to the Jewish state amid its war with terror group Hamas, which carried out its most recent attack on the Middle East country on Oct. 7, 2023; it was the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. The bill would include $4 billion for the country’s missile defense systems, such as the Iron Dome, David’s Sling, and the Iron Beam.
The bill will be v**ed on just days after Israel’s reported retaliatory strikes on Iran that included attacks next to a nuclear facility and a military base. Iran had earlier launched strikes on Israel, nearly all of which were shot down by Israel, the United States, and allies, in retaliation for Israel’s suspected bombing of a diplomatic building in Syria.
The Indo-Pacific bill would give Taiwan and other regional allies $3.9 billion in direct military aid. This comes amid the Chinese regime’s growing aggression in the region.
A fourth bill includes numerous measures, including one that would ban TikTok unless its parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, divests the app over national security concerns—a revised version of a bill that the House overwhelmingly passed last month. ByteDance has ties to the Chinese C*******t Party, and its leadership has previously affirmed a commitment to creating products that align with the regime’s c*******t values.
It would also allow for frozen Russian assets to go toward Ukraine.
Pressure on Johnson
The rare Saturday v**e on the foreign aid package came as Mr. Johnson faces escalating pressure from the Republican conference that threatens his job. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) in March put forth a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair after the House passed a $1.2 trillion bill that Mr. Johnson put forth to fund most of the government.
She has since been joined by two Republicans: Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.). Mr. Massie said he told this to Mr. Johnson’s face during the House GOP’s weekly conference on April 16. He’s called on the speaker to resign rather than face a motion to vacate.
Mr. Massie’s switch on the issue comes one day after Mr. Johnson announced that the House would take up those four bills. Mr. Johnson succeeded former Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in October 2023 after Mr. McCarthy was ousted through a motion to vacate—the first time a speaker has been ousted that way.
In an April 19 statement obtained by The Epoch Times, Mr. Gosar lamented that Mr. Johnson is ceding the border issue in order to pass foreign aid after Mr. Johnson initially said he would force Democrats to accept border policies in exchange for Ukraine aid.
“Rather than spending the resources to secure our southern border and combating the invasion of 11 million i******s and despite repeated promises there would be no additional money going to Ukraine without first securing our border, the United States House of Representatives, under the direction of the speaker, is on the verge of sending another $61 billion to further draw America into an endless and purposeless war in Ukraine,” Mr. Gosar said.
“Our border cannot be an afterthought. We need a speaker who puts America first rather than bending to the reckless demands of the warmongers, neo-cons, and the military-industrial complex making billions from a costly and endless war half a world away.”
Other Republicans are also growing increasingly frustrated with the embattled speaker.
Asked whether she would support a motion to vacate, Ms. Hageman didn’t rule it out.
“I don’t know the answer to that right now,” the Wyoming Republican said. “But I’m pretty angry.”
These public statements of opposition to Mr. Johnson’s remaining in the position of speaker suggest that he’s in the most precarious situation he’s been in since taking the gavel in October 2023.
However, there are Democrats—including Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Tom Suozzi (D-N.Y.), and Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.)— who have said that they would come to Mr. Johnson’s rescue if the motion were brought to the House floor.
Mr. Jeffries has also indicated that “there are a reasonable number of Democrats who would not want to see the speaker fall for doing the right thing.”
Still, the odds are higher than they’ve ever been that Mr. Johnson will face a motion to vacate as the issue of Ukraine aid continues to divide the conference.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Ford’s EV sales face losses, but are offset by traditional vehicle sales. UAW still threatens to strike.
By Bryan Jung-7/28/2023-Updated: 7/30/2023—epoch times
Ford Motor Co.’s electric vehicle (EV) business is taking losses, although earnings from its traditional internal combustion engine vehicles have offset the decline in profit.
Like other legacy automakers attempting the t***sition to EVs from combustion engine vehicles, Ford is currently losing money.
The company’s EV sales have dropped by 2.8 percent from earlier this year.
The U.S. automaker gained 72 cents per share in the second quarter on an adjusted basis, up from 68 cents, and beat Wall Street expectations by exceeding the 55 cents per share forecast by analysts surveyed by Refinitiv.
Vehicle sales revenue rose by 12 percent to $42.4 billion, $2 billion more than expected.
The Detroit-based company stated that it beat its estimates even as losses from its Model e, or EV division, before interest and taxes (EBIT), grew to $1.1 billion, up from the $722 million in EBIT losses in the previous quarter.
Losses are expected to rise, at least in the short term, according to the automaker.
Ford’s Model e division expects an EBIT loss of $4.5 billion for all of 2023, up from its earlier forecast of a $3 billion loss for the year.
The goal of producing 600,000 EVs per year was also pushed back to some time in 2024, rather than by the end of this year.
Sales Hit by EV Trade War, High Production Prices
The automaker blamed an electric vehicle trade war as one of the primary reasons for Ford’s new loss estimate.
EV manufacturers such as Ford have followed industry leader Tesla’s move to cut prices at the beginning of the year. Tesla’s price cuts have undercut legacy automakers, causing the competitors’ EV inventories to pile up.
Ford CEO Jim Farley said that “pricing pressure [for EVs] has dramatically increased in the last 60 days.”
“EV price premiums over internal combustion vehicles fell more than $3,000 in the second quarter and nearly $5,000 in first half,” Mr. Farley said.
“We expect the EV market to remain volatile until the winners and losers shake out.”
He confidently predicted that Ford “will be one of the winners.”
The basic Pro variant of Ford’s f**gship all-electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck now carries a suggested retail price of $49,995 because of the recent price cuts, compared with the earlier $59,974 price tag.
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The higher-end Platinum model now costs about 6.2 percent less, at $91,995.
Ford was able to slash the prices because of lower battery costs, following improvements in scale and a decline in battery raw material costs.
Raw material prices for batteries had earlier pushed up EV prices, but better sourcing options and supply deals have eased the cost of cobalt and lithium, which are crucial for EV batteries.
Ramping up production for the Lightning and other electric vehicles has also been an issue for Ford. The firm was only able to make 4,466 Lightnings in the second quarter, after a truck fire caused a temporary shutdown in production for several weeks, CNBC reported.
Ford also temporarily closed its Rouge Electric Vehicle Center in Michigan in order to upgrade the plant to triple its annual production rate to 150,000 Lightnings by the fall.
Lightning Sales Not Doing Well as Expected
The automaker raised its full-year adjusted EBIT target of $11 billion to $12 billion, up from its earlier guidance of $9 billion to $11 billion.
It appears that many drivers still prefer internal combustion engines over battery-powered vehicles, which is leading to lower EV sales.
Ford’s Blue Division, which makes most of its classic gas-powered consumer vehicles, posted $2.3 billion in EBIT profit, while Ford Pro, the commercial vehicle division that sells its traditional internal combustion vehicles, contributed $2.4 billion.
The automaker lost $32,000 per EV sold in the second quarter, compared to a profit of $3,200 per vehicle sold by the company’s Blue Division.
Ford still expects to hit its target of 8 percent profits on its EVs business by 2026, Chief Financial Officer John Lawler says.
Mr. Farley said Ford’s next generation of EVs, which are still under development, will be far more profitable than its current EV inventory.
The F-150 Lighting is also encountering criticism from some commentators, who say the truck performs poorly at pulling or carrying cargo compared to Ford’s combustion-powered version.
“If a truck towing 3,500 pounds can’t even go 100 miles ... that is ridiculously stupid,” Tyler Hoover, host of the popular automotive YouTube channel Hoovie’s Garage, said in a video this year.
“This truck can’t do normal truck things.”
He also noted that his experience with the Lightning was a “complete and total disaster” because of the range of the towing capacity.
“You would be stopping every hour to recharge, which would take about 45 minutes a pop,” Mr. Hoover said, “and that is absolutely not practical.”
Labor Negotiations
The current contract between the United Auto Workers (UAW) and the “Big Three” U.S. automakers—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, formerly known as Fiat Chrysler—expires on Sept. 14. New UAW President Shawn Fain has vowed to be aggressive, at a time of an emboldened labor movement across the country.
Ford hasn’t faced a UAW strike since 1976, unlike its two main rivals, while Mr. Farley told investors he thinks a deal can be reached without a work stoppage.
“When it comes to building in America and partnering with UAW, Ford stands out from all the other automakers and most other major industrial companies,” he said.
“So although these negotiations promise to be challenging, our goal is to build a bridge to the future with our employees based on mutual trust and a spirit of problem-solving with the UAW leadership, and of course, our incredible workforce.”
Still, Mr. Fain has said that the union is prepared to go on strike against all three companies.
He declined the traditional handshake across the bargaining table while posing for a photo op with each of the automaker CEOs at the start of negotiations; the union is opting for a “members’ handshake” between international UAW leaders and plant workers.
Mr. Fain has been highly critical of the automaker’s plans to shift to EVs in coming decades, which he fears will threaten jobs and ruin the industry.
UAW Demands Boost to Battery Workers’ Wages
EVs take about one-third fewer hours of work to assemble because of fewer moving parts; most of the time is spent building the large battery packs that power the vehicles.
However, the battery plants are mostly owned by joint ventures between the auto companies and battery makers, not the automakers themselves.
The factories pay workers roughly half the wages that UAW members receive at the Big Three’s existing auto plants.
The UAW criticized the $9.2 billion loan from the Biden administration that Ford and Korean battery maker SK received to finance the construction of three battery plants.
Mr. Fain pointed to strong earnings and profit outlook at Ford, GM, and Stellantis, which show that they could afford to meet UAW demands and pay workers at EV battery plants the same amount as those at auto plants.
“Like every Big Three automaker, Ford is thriving. These eye-popping numbers come on top of a decade of massive profits,” he said.
“The Big Three made a quarter-trillion dollars in North American profits over the last decade, but they denied UAW members our fair share. No Ford worker should wonder if the Blue Oval battery plants opening across the country will start a race to the bottom that undermines standards for all autoworkers.
“Seeing the billions that Ford is making, we know they can and must make things right for our workers and our communities.”
Ford officials didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.

April 29, 2024-printed off 4/29/24
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Do not believe the White House/mainstream media-concocted narrative that the four criminal court cases—prosecuted by Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, Jack Smith, and Fani Willis—were not in part coordinated, synchronized, and timed to reach their courtroom psychodramatic finales right during the 2024 campaign season.
These local, state, and federal Lilliputian agendas were designed to tie down, gag, confine, bankrupt, and destroy Trump psychologically and physically. They are the final lawfare denouement to years of extra-legal efforts to emasculate him.
Indeed, the nation is by now worn out by these serial assaults on constitutional norms: the Hillary-funded Steele dossier subterfuge; the pre-e******n Russian laptop disinformation campaign; the two impeachments without special counsel reports; the impeachment Senate trial of a private citizen; the effort to remove Trump’s name from state b****ts; the ongoing attempt to emasculate the E*******l College; or the radical opportune changes in state e******n laws to ensure massive mail-in b****ting.
Recently, Andrew McCarthy has reviewed in depth this coordination between White House personnel and prosecutors, long known and long denied by the left. Biden, for example, had complained to aides about Attorney General Merrick Garland’s tardiness in getting special federal prosecutor Smith appointed—and thus apparently ensuring Trump was convicted before the e******n.
Nathan Wade, Fani Willis’s now-fired paramour prosecutor, visited and consulted with the White House counsel’s office when he was acting supposedly as a purely local county prosecutor. The J****** 6th left-wing-dominated congressional committee consulted with the Biden administration in sending forth its criminal referrals about Trump’s purported role in the protests. And to handle his pseudo-indictment against Trump, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg hired Biden Justice Department official Vincent Colangeio.
Two, the prosecutors’ delayed criminal indictments and E. Jean Carroll’s civil suit were predicated only on Donald Trump running for ree******n. After his 2020 defeat, the loss of the two Republican senate seats in Georgia, and the J****** 6 demonstrations/r**t, Trump was written off by pundits as politically toxic.
Then his historic comeback in the subsequent year terrified the left. The reboot prompted the subsequent indictments and suits years after the purported crimes. It was left unsaid that had Trump not been a conservative Republican and leading p**********l candidate, he would have never been indicted.
Three, most of the indictments either had no prior precedent in criminal law or will likely never be used again, at least against anyone left-wing. Moreover, many of the writs relied on manipulation of statutes of limitations.
Neither Bragg nor any other local prosecutor had previously t***sformed a supposedly local affidavit misdemeanor into a supposed federal campaign finance violation, a gambit so preposterous that it had been passed on by federal attorneys.
Letitia James was the first New York Attorney General to indict a state resident for the supposed crime of overvaluing real estate to obtain a loan, which was paid back timely and in full, to the profit of lending institutions. No bank, after auditing Trump’s assets and viability to pay back loans, was unhappy to loan to him. But all were quite happy to profit from the hefty interest—and would likely be happy to loan to him again.
James sought to make Trump a criminal without ever finding a crime, much less a victim. Nor, until the checkered and unethical career of Fani Willis, had any local prosecutor ever indicted an ex-president for a supposedly improper phone call questioning whether all the state’s v**es had been fully counted.
Alvin Bragg’s case was nonexistent given the statute of limitations on supposed misdemeanors committed over six years prior—until Bragg t***smogrified the accusations of minor crimes into felonies and, with them, extensions granted supposedly due to the C***D lockdowns.
In Carroll’s case, her unsubstantiated accusations of a sexual assault were also well past the statute of limitations until a left-wing New York legislator and unapologetic Trump h**er passed a special law—a veritable bill of attainder aimed at Trump—waiving the statute of limitations for a year in cases of accusations of long-past sexual assault in the state of New York.
Four, all the indictments and suits took place in either blue cities, counties, or states. And most of the jury pools in or near New York, Atlanta, or Miami were or will be heavily Democrat. So far, the New York judges who have overseen Trump’s civil and criminal trials—Justices Engoron, Kaplan, and Merchan—were all liberals, appointed by Democrat or liberal politicians, and some have donated to Democrat causes. They were not shy about expressing disdain for defendant Trump. No changes in venues were ever allowed.
Five, all the prosecutors, Bragg, James, Smith, and Willis, are likewise either Democrats or associated with liberal causes. In the case of Bragg, James, and Willis, all three ran for office and raised money on promises and boasts of getting Donald Trump. And all three have now set the precedent that local and state prosecutors can warp the law and use it to go after an ex-president and leading p**********l candidate of the opposite party for naked political purposes.
Six, all these cases were equally applicable to high-profile Democrat politicos. E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit was the most laughable of all the court dramas, but its outline and protocols just as easily could have applied to Tara Reade. She came forward to accuse candidate Biden of having sexually assaulted her years earlier—roughly about the same period’s as Carroll’s fluid timelines. Her story is about as believable or unbelievable as Carroll’s. But the difference was that whereas the media canonized the delusional and self-contradictory Carroll as a useful anti-Trump tool, it demonized Reade as a crazy loon and liar—and a potential impediment to Biden’s 2019-20 primary campaign.
Bragg had to torture the law to fabricate a federal campaign finance indictment against Trump. But Hillary Clinton clearly violated federal campaign statutes—and was variously fined—when she tried to hide her “opposition research” payments to Christopher Steele as “legal expenses.” In t***h, Steele was hired and paid to concoct a f**e anti-Trump dossier and likely should have been barred from working for a p**********l campaign given he was not a U.S. citizen.
In the case of Smith, simultaneously with his case against Trump, his twin special prosecutor, Robert Hur, found that Joe Biden had unlawfully removed classified files for much longer than Trump (30 years plus), in a much less secure location (his rickety garage), and without a president’s authority to declassify his documents. Moreover, he had disclosed their contents to his ghostwriter, who destroyed evidence under subpoena by Hur. Yet unlike Trump, Biden was not charged, given that Hur claimed that Biden, in his opinion, was so old and amnesiac that he might win sympathy rather than a conviction from a jury.
Willis indicted Trump for supposedly trying to pressure officials to “find” missing Trump b****ts, thus supposedly violating “racketeering” statutes, as he oversaw an attempt to find troves of b****ts he thought had been cast for him. Of course, in the same state, Stacy Abrams, after losing the gubernatorial race of 2018, claimed she had actually won, despite losing by over 50,000 v**es. She sued to overturn the e******n and then made a celebrity-political career touring the nation, falsely claiming she was the real governor and her victorious opponent was an illegitimate governor.
For that matter, in 2016, left-wing organizations, celebrities, and thousands of political operatives sought to overturn the Trump victory by appealing to the e*****rs to renounce their states’ popular v**e tallies and thus become “faithless e*****rs.” In sum, there was a true conspiracy, or, better, a “racketeering” scheme, to use Willis’s parlance, to coordinate various groups to overturn the constitutional duties of e*****rs to throw the e******n to Hillary Clinton. Clinton, along with the likes of ex-president Jimmy Carter and soon-to-be House Minority Leader Hakim Jeffries, would continue to deny that Trump was the legitimately elected president.
In sum, the number of suits against and indictments against Trump grew in correlation to his political fortunes. They were designed in the e******n year 2024 to do what Democrat v**ers likely cannot. They are ridiculous and sui generis, and will never be used against anyone other than Trump. They have done more damage to democracy, the rule of law, and equal justice to the law than all of the antics that Trump is accused of.
Moreover, they will set in motion a dangerous tit-for-tat cycle of weaponization that threatens the very constitutional order of the United States.
If Trump is elected to restore the rule of equal justice, will a Republican special counsel revisit Robert Hur’s work and find ex-President Biden quite capable of standing trial for the crimes Hur has already investigated and confirmed?
Will then a new Republican-appointed FBI director order a SWAT-like raid, with Fox News forewarned and Newsmax reporters on the scene, to descend into the Biden beach house?
Will county and state prosecutors in Utah, Montana, and Oklahoma feel that to stop this cycle of illegality, they must charge the Biden family members by bootstrapping local indictments onto federal crimes?
Will conservative women in the future come forward in Arkansas, Idaho, and Alabama to claim that in their past, they now suddenly remember that decades ago a prominent Democrat candidate harassed them? Will their right-wing lawyers cherry-pick the proper red-state judge?
Will conservative district attorneys find ways to indict Joe Biden on the various imaginative bookkeeping and “loan repayments” used to disguise the fact his corrupt family received well over $20 million from illiberal foreign interests, much if not all of it camouf**ged to avoid income taxes?
Will some South Carolina legislator get a bill of attainder passed in the legislature, ending the statute of limitations for a year for all those in 2016 who sought to undermine the e*****rs and flip them to Hillary Clinton?
In August or September, will a right-wing state prosecutor and a conservative judge find that Joe Biden’s creative bookkeeping warrants a $450 million fine, payable before appeal?
And will Republican officials and judges in purple states move to get Biden’s name off the b****t?
Such scenarios are endless and, given the current precedents, could all be justified as desperate deterrent measures to shock the left into ceasing their efforts to sabotage our constitutional system and rule of law.
A final note. There is a divine order of balance in the world, one known variously by particular civilizations as kismet, nemesis, karma, or what goes around, comes around payback. We’ve already seen such forces at work: Sen. Schumer at the head of a mob at the doors of the Supreme Court, calling out threats to justices by name, only now finding pro-Hamas thugs circling his own home. Or Democrats during the Trump years straining to find ways to invoke the 25th Amendment, now humiliated into claiming a non-compos-mentis Joe Biden is “sharp as a knife.”
Tragically for the country, to stop this left-wing madness, the Trump travesties may not be the end, but the beginning of precisely what the Founders feared.

April 25, 2024—printed off 4/25/24—by VDH
Details of the recent limited Israeli retaliatory strike against Iranian anti-aircraft missile batteries at Isfahan are still sketchy. But nonetheless, we can draw some conclusions.
Israel’s small volley of missiles hit their intended targets, to the point of zeroing in on the very launchers designed to stop such incoming ordnance. The target was near the Natanz enrichment facility. That proximity was by design. Israel showed Iran it could take out the very anti-missile battery designed to thwart an attack on its nearby nuclear facility.
The larger message sent to the world was that Israel could send a retaliatory barrage at Iranian nuclear sites with reasonable assurances that the incoming attacks could not be stopped. By comparison, Iran’s earlier attack on Israel was much greater and more indiscriminate. It was also a huge flop, with an estimated 99 percent of the more than 320 drones, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles failing to hit their planned targets. Moreover, it was reported that more than 50 percent of Iran’s roughly 115-120 ballistic missiles failed at launch or malfunctioned in flight.
Collate these facts, and it presents a disturbing corrective to Iran’s non-stop boasts of soon possessing a nuclear arsenal that will obliterate the Jewish state. Consider further the following nightmarish scenarios: Were Iranian nuclear-tipped missiles ever launched at Israel, they could pass over, in addition to Syria and Iraq, either Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the West Bank, Gaza, or all four. In the cases of Jordan and Saudi Arabia, such trajectories would constitute an act of war, especially considering that some of Iran’s recent aerial barrages were intercepted and destroyed over Arab territory well before they reached Israel.
Iran’s strike prompted Arab nations, the US, the UK, and France to work in concert to destroy almost all of Iran’s drones. For Iran, that is a premonition of the sort of sophisticated aerial opposition it might face if it ever decided to stage a nuclear version. Even if half of Iran’s ballistic missiles did launch successfully, only a handful apparently neared their intended targets—in sharp contrast to Israel’s successful attack on Iranian missile batteries. Is it thus conceivable that any Iranian-nuclear-tipped missile launched toward Israel might pose as great a threat to Iran itself or its neighbors as to Israel?
And even if such missiles made it into the air and even if they successfully traversed Arab airspace, there is still an overwhelming chance they would be neutralized before detonating above Israel. Any such launch would warrant an immediate Israeli response. And the incoming bombs and missiles would likely have a 100 percent certainty of evading Iran’s countermeasures and hitting their targets.
Now that the soil of both Iran and Israel is no longer sacred and immune from attack, the mystique of the Iranian nuclear threat has dissipated. It should be harder for the theocracy to shake down Western governments for hostage bribes, sanctions relief, and Iran-deal giveaways on the implied threat of Iran successfully nuking the Jewish state.
The new reality is that Iran has goaded an Israel that has numerous nuclear weapons and dozens of nuclear-tipped missiles in hardened silos and on submarines. Tehran has zero ability to stop any of these missiles or sophisticated fifth-generation Israeli aircraft armed with nuclear bombs and missiles. Iran must now fear that if it launched 2-3 nuclear missiles, there would be overwhelming odds that they would either fail at launch, go awry in the air, implode inside Iran, be taken down over Arab territory by Israel’s allies, or be knocked down by the tripartite Israel anti-missile defense system.
Add it all up, and the Iranian attack on Israel seems a historic blunder. It showed the world the impotence of an Iranian aerial assault at the very time it threatens to go nuclear. It revealed that an incompetent Iran may be as much a threat to itself as to its enemies. It opened up a new chapter in which its own soil, thanks to its attack on Israel, is no longer off limits to any Western power.
Its failure to stop a much smaller Israel response, coupled with the overwhelming success of Israel and its allies in stopping a much larger Iranian attack, reminds the Iranian autocracy that its shrill rhetoric is designed to mask its impotence and to hide its own vulnerabilities from its enemies.
And the long-suffering Iranian people? The t***h will come out that its own theocracy hit the Israeli homeland with negligible results and earned a successful, though merely demonstrative, Israeli response in return. So Iranians will learn their homeland is now vulnerable and, for the future, no longer off limits. And they will conclude that Israel has more effective allies than Iran and that their own ballistic missiles may be more suicidal than homicidal.
As a result, they may conclude that the real enemies of the Iranian nation are not the Jewish people of Israel after all, but their own unhinged Islamist theocrats.

April 22, 2024—PRINTED OFF 4/22/24
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
Why does Biden play Iranian poker with American and Israeli lives?
Answer? He envisions war sort of like affirmative action, in which the less accomplished belligerent is allowed all sorts of concessions for the sake of equity.
Israeli and American military capability, and particularly their missile defenses, are seen as unfair, almost like high achievers’ top SAT scores that are seen as unearned and used to privilege some over others and therefore must be countered or dropped.
Given Iran’s and its surrogates’ incompetence, the administration, then, must extend the theocracy some allowances “to level the playing field.” Biden believes in an e******y of opportunity in war, when an aggressor does its best to attack or indeed destroy a defender, who in turn does its own best to retaliate and achieve victory.
Instead, the Biden administration sees war leading to e******y of result as something to be waged “proportionally,” especially when the power attacked is stronger and Western while the attacking aggressor is weaker and non-Western. The method, then, is to restrain the western power and give repeated chances for the non-western aggressors to catch up.
As a result, the Biden administration’s strategic attitude toward Iran ignores Iranian intent and agendas. So it does not respond fully to its acts of aggression and thereby almost rewards the incompetence of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis without consideration of their murderous aims.
Americans are thus baffled that Biden has not responded to some 170 or more attacks on U.S. installations in the Middle East by Iranian-backed terrorists in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. But in his calculus, Americans “can take the hit” due to their superior defenses—appeasement that only assures more hits.
Thus, other than a few apparently acceptable wounded or dead, there is no need for disproportionate responses to reestablish deterrence and end such opportunistic attacks. Such calculus in the Biden team’s mind would be “over the top,” perhaps “unfair,” or even “medieval.” And yet, it certainly would stop all such aggression quickly and warn aggressors not to touch a single American.
After the successful but mostly demonstrative Israel April 19 retaliatory strike against the Iranian anti-aircraft missile batteries at Isfahan, Biden cautioned Israel “to take the win” and apparently not to rub in the fact of Iranian incompetence, much less stage a follow-up and much greater response.
But what if instead, Biden had warned the Iranians that Israel was not through. Rather, he would tell the Iranians that the restrained Israeli response was a one-off warning and demonstration to Iran that 1) Israel had the ability to strike and destroy the very protective shield of the nuclear installations at nearby Natanz, and thus Natanz itself and plants like it; 2) that unlike the 320 missile/drone Iranian attack on Israel, even Israel’s tiny response was entirely successful; 3) and that in any future Iranian-envisioned nuclear attack on Israel, Iran’s rockets would likely either fail at launch or in the air (half did so on April, 13), with the remnant having a 99 percent surety of being shot down, while earning a 100 percent surety of a devastating Israel counter-attack with the same sort of weapons that Iran claims it will shortly use.
Would such a warning have been more likely to end the current tit-for-tat, “de-escalatory escalation” than the Biden administration’s advice to Israel to “take the win”–in an endless cycle of supposedly managed violence as Iran and its terrorists seek to get it right and respond commensurately?
Similarly, recently, third-party communications with Iran were disclosed about its earlier April 13 attack on Israel. Apparently, the Turkish third-party emissaries claimed that “Iran informed us in advance of what would happen. Possible developments also came up during the meeting with (Secretary of State Antony) Blinken, and they (the U.S.) conveyed to Iran through us that this reaction must be within certain limits.”
T***slated, that meant that apparently launching over 320 cruise, ballistic missiles and drones were acceptable Iranian responses as long as they did not k**l too many Jews?
So what did Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan actually define as damage “within certain limits?” Something like the relatively small number of dead and wounded Americans who have fallen victim to Iranian-backed terrorist attacks from the Red Sea to Iraq and Jordan?
“Within certain limits” for Iran certainly could not mean the huge number of lethal projectiles Iran sent into Israel that were intended by Iran to k**l thousands, but apparently only how many Israelis were k**led by them?
So again, what would have been beyond “certain limits” for team Biden? One dead Israeli for each launched rocket, missile, or drone? 320 Jews or so in total? Did Biden and Blinken assume that some 300 or so projectiles would be mostly shot down or blown up, and thus they played poker with Israeli lives and assumed that the attack would probably fail?
But what might have happened had instead Biden t***smitted to Iran the following warning:
“Given your record of unleashing terror and death throughout the Middle East, I warn you not to send a single rocket into Israel. If you do, we will ensure that none get through, but we will not ensure that there will be any limits on what will likely be a devastating Israel response to your homeland.”
Would Iran have then sent the 320 missiles?
When Israel went into Gaza to end the medieval violence perpetrated by the Hamas cowardly terrorists, it had already been the target of some 7,000 Hamas rockets aimed at its civilian centers and bases. Did Biden see that failed Hamas effort to k**l thousands of additional Jews as a legitimate cause for Israel to go into Gaza and destroy the rocket-launching Hamas?
Or instead, did Biden consider Israel’s unique ability to conduct war—again, sort of like having high SAT scores and a straight A average as proof of unwarranted privilege in admissions—as a disproportionate (and likely “unfair”) advantage over Hamas that thus should be ignored or discounted rather than admired? But had Hamas k**led 1,000 Jews with its 7,000 rockets, would Biden have given Israel the green light to respond fully? Or would it have taken only 500 deaths? Or was the magic number 250 k**led?
What would have happened had Biden not specified certain restraints on the IDF but instead, on October 21, t***smitted the following message to Hamas: “You began this war with inhuman slaughter on October 7 and massive rocket attacks on Israeli cities, and Israel will now end the war with your destruction.”
Six months later, would the Middle East now be safer without Hamas?
In mid-October 2023, a failed Islamic jihad rocket hit Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital, prompting the blood libel that it was Israelis who supposedly were responsible and had k**led hospital patients. An upset Joe Biden was asked about the identification of the perpetrator.
He answered with a joke, but a jest nevertheless quite revealing: “And I’m not suggesting that Hamas deliberately did it either. It’s that old thing; gotta learn how to shoot straight.” Aside from the embarrassing fact that Biden seemed more wary about wrongly blaming the murderous Hamas for the Islamic Jihad rocket than his ally Israel, did he really mean that the global condemnation of Israel for the act of Islamic jihad—and the predicament it put Biden in—would have simply vanished had only Islamic Jihad shot “straight”?
And further t***slated, did Biden logically mean—if only the Islamic Jihad rocket had not fallen short on Gazans but instead had reached its intended target of civilians inside Israel, then there would have been no controversies, no melodramas, given the stronger power Israel could more easily have “taken the hit?”
Note that Biden did not really express much anger that Islamic Jihad was shooting rockets to k**l Jewish civilians. He was only lamenting that its incompetence had led to a blood libel, which required embarrassing explanations from Biden himself.
Biden, note, said something somewhat similar about a possible Putin invasion of Ukraine. He had predicted the U.S. response on whether it was a “minor” offensive or not. In other words, the American response was not predicated on the violation of national borders by an aggressor against an independent nation, but how effectively the aggressor attacked.
In the American Left’s vision of contemporary war, the West brings too many advantages in science, technology, and wealth, especially when fighting in the skies and not in the messy suburbs of Mosul, Fallujah, or Gaza City.
The result is disproportionate. Accordingly, it does not matter that Hamas only stopped butchering, raping, and mutilating Israelis at about 1,200 deaths because of an impending IDF arrival or k**led few despite 7,000 rocket launches into Israel, when their rocketeers had sought to k**l tens of thousands of Israelis.
Instead, by their very failures at the art of war, Iran and its surrogates are constructed as victims, not aggressors, at the moment when either their targets do not suffer too many causalities or their own losses vastly exceed those whom they sought to slaughter.
Third-party managed proportionality, accompanied by the banality of “both sides are at fault,” is not morality but pretentious amorality—as well as a sure prescription for endless war.
Or, in other words, what is unfolding now in the Middle East.

Date: November 24, 2020 -
To: undisclosed-recipients:;


Very Interesting!

Subject: Here are the last 10 years of total deaths in the US from all causes - raises a question at the end.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/death-rate
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm

2010
• Deaths: 2,468,435
• Population: 309,346,863

2011
• Deaths: 2,515,458
• Population: 311,718,857

2012
• Deaths: 2,543,279
• Population: 314,102,623

2013
• Deaths: 2,596,993
• Population: 316,427,395

2014
• Deaths: 2,626,418
• Population: 318,907,401

2015
• Deaths: 2,712,630
• Population: 321,418,820

2016
• Deaths: 2,744,248
• Population: 323,071,342

2017
• Deaths: 2,813,503
• Population: 325,147,121

2018
• Deaths: 2,839,205
• Population: 327,167,439

2019
• Deaths: 2,855,000
• Population: 329,110,439

2020
• As of September 24th there are 2,033,736 total deaths in the US. That is a daily average of 7,588 deaths.
7,588 X 365 days= 2,769,620 is the total deaths we could expect in 2020 based on the numbers so far.

So the question is this: How can we have less deaths in the US if there is a p******c going on? For the last 100 years there has never been a decrease in total deaths per year in the US.
If this were a normal year, with no p******c, we should have around 2,875,000 deaths. But this isn’t a normal year so we should end up with around 3,200,000 deaths when you add in the C****-** deaths. Someone isn’t telling us the t***h (media? or government?).

By Mark Swanson—NEWSMAX--18 April 2024—printed off 4/18/24
A Denver finance committee has approved $14.6 million in cuts to the city's police and fire departments — a slice of $41 million in cuts overall — to help pay for "newcomer operations," the Democrat mayor's phrase for housing migrants. The $8.9 million in cuts to the city police department approved by Denver City Council's Finance and Governance Committee on Tuesday reportedly represent the largest ever in the city budget. The sheriff's office is also facing a $3.8 million cut and the fire department $2.4 million. The measure advances to the full city council on Monday. If approved, it goes into effect May 10, KDVR reported Wednesday. Denver is clawing back the $41 million in an effort to help offset its $89.9 million in costs associated with being a sanctuary city for i*****l m*****ts. "After more than a year of facing this crisis together, Denver finally has a sustainable plan for treating our newcomers with dignity while avoiding the worst cuts to city services," Denver Mayor Mike Johnston said last week at a press conference to pitch the "Newcomer Operations and 2024 Budget." The cuts to the police and fire departments represent the largest in terms of dollars. Denver has sheltered more than 41,000 migrants at a cost of $68 million, KDVR reported. There are currently 712 migrants in Denver's hotel shelter and 86 in "short-term shelter," according to the report. The bulk of the $89.9 million Denver plans to spend on migrants — $51.7 million — is to cover "shelter and housing." The city is setting aside another $19.5 million in "one time capital costs" and "contingency." Officials from Johnston's office earlier this month told migrants the city was offering 20,000 one-way tickets out of town. "The opportunities are over," city official Andres Carrera said in Spanish to new arrivals inside a migrant shelter, the Daily Mail reported. "New York gives you more. Chicago gives you more. So I suggest you go there where there is longer-term shelter. There are also more job opportunities there. "We can take you up to the Canadian border, wherever!" Carrera said, in an encounter that was recorded. The group Carrera was speaking to was exported to Denver from Texas by Gov. Greg Abbott on March 26, a city spokesperson said, according to the Daily Mail.
It's unclear how many migrants took the offer.

Patriot clash- March 27, 2024—printed off 4/18/24
In the latest twist of events that seems almost too absurd to be true, New York City has decided to roll out the red carpet for i*****l a***ns, offering them a benefits package that would make even the most pampered VIPs blush. Yes, people, you heard that right. While our veterans, the very men and women who have laid everything on the line for our freedom, are struggling to get the support they deserve, NYC is busy handing out prepaid debit cards to i*****l m*****ts.
Let’s break this down, shall we? As part of a $53 million pilot program, these migrant families are being given up to $350 per week to splurge on food and baby supplies. And just to add a cherry on top, this spending spree is happening in the city’s hotels, where these families are staying. I mean, why not, right? It’s not like the city has any other pressing issues to spend money on. Oh wait, what about that little thing called veteran services?
Fox News did the math, and it turns out that if this program expands to cover all migrants, it’ll cost the city a whopping $53 million. To put that into perspective, that’s more than double what New York State plans to spend on its Department of Veteran Services. Let that sink in for a moment. Double the budget for people who entered the country illegally compared to those who fought for it.
Brian Llenas from Fox News pointed out that each migrant will receive approximately $12.52 per day for food and baby supplies. That’s 40% more than what the average low-income American received in government food stamps in 2022. And let’s not forget the free healthcare for migrants, which is currently the city’s most expensive migrant-related expense, accounting for about half of the $4.7 billion spent on the migrant crisis last year.
It’s a scenario that leaves many scratching their heads in disbelief. How did we get to a point where i*****l a***ns receive more benefits than US veterans? Even a Democrat city council member admitted, “This is insane. It’s not good policy. Obviously, a sanctuary city should not mean protecting criminals.”
This situation highlights a glaring issue in our society’s priorities. It’s important to show compassion and provide support to those in need, but not at the expense of neglecting our own. Our veterans deserve better. They deserve more than just our gratitude; they deserve our unwavering support and commitment to ensuring they receive the benefits and care they’ve rightfully earned. It’s time for New York City, and indeed the entire country, to reassess where our loyalties lie and to remember who truly deserves the VIP treatment.

April 15, 2024—printed off 4/15/24
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
We have seen enough of the Biden-Trump race so far to predict what lies ahead over the next seven months of the campaign. Currently, the polls are about dead even. Trump, however, for now enjoys small leads in the majority of the fickle swing/purple states that will likely decide the e******n. So here is what we should expect:

Biden has three major vulnerabilities and three major assets. His fate will depend on how these criteria play out.
First, on the negative side of the ledger, Biden suffers continual mental and physical decline, which is accelerating exponentially. His work week is now more off than on. Aides pray that he can get through a teleprompter without complete incoherence. His speech is so slurred, his syntax so bizarre that he seems to speak a language that is mostly indecipherable. They rightly fear that any young attractive woman or even preteen might earn a trademark Biden weird call-out, a hair- or accustomed ear-blow, or even an attempted p**********l too-long hug or neck nibble. Steps pose an existential threat, given that the president is one trip away from oblivion. Biden is not even the diminished Biden of 2020, when, in his basement, he at least manipulated the C****-** lockdown to mask his infirmities and abbreviated schedules. The odds are 50/50 whether Biden will even make it over the next five months to the August Democratic Convention. And, assuming that he does, can he rein in efforts to push him off the ticket?
Second, the Biden family is corrupt. H****r still faces spring- and summer-long felony exposure in connection with his Biden-family brand of tax c***ting. Joe knows that his own documents, first-hand witnesses, bank statements, H****r’s emails, and testimonies from H****r’s associates reveal that the otherwise talentless but high-living Biden extended family was surviving only by the sale of Senator, Vice President, and future President Joe Biden’s name—and his known willingness to pay fast and loose with legal and ethical constraints. There is still some chance that, in the current impeachment investigations and trial, more incriminating evidence will emerge or turned witnesses will offer proof of Biden’s criminality. For now, Biden’s lawbreaking is completely dismissed by Attorney General Merrick Garland and by special counsel Robert Hur’s satirical-comedy-worthy argument that even overwhelming evidence pointing to Joe Biden’s criminal behavior cannot be prosecuted because of the president’s dementia.
Third, the hard-left Biden agenda is completely underwater. Not a single Biden administration issue or policy—the border, crime, inflation, energy, foreign policy, race relations, education—polls even 50 percent. Worse, Biden never addresses the inflation created by his massive spending program, the lawlessness in our streets since 2021, the spiking cost of gasoline, or the humiliation abroad, from Kabul to Kyiv to the Chinese balloon. His idea of how to combat inflation is akin to combating obesity by gaining 100 pounds, losing two, and—presto—announcing that obesity was abated. He spiked racial polarization, proved indifferent to an epidemic of anti-Semitism, and fueled the national debt (an additional $1 trillion every 100 days). Now Biden is warring on the Supreme Court—a dangerous precedent given that an assassin has already shown up at Justice Kavanaugh’s home, given that mobs have massed at various justices’ residences with impunity, given Sen. Schumer’s prior personal threats at the very doors of the court to Justices Kavanaugh and Gorsuch, and given left-wing rhetoric about packing the court. All candidate Biden can do is either deny an open border, inflation, crime, racial tensions, and the Kabul humiliation—or claim that the successful policies of Trump, out of power for nearly four years, were responsible for all that crashed on Biden’s watch.
Biden, however, enjoys some natural advantages, most notably incumbency.
(Note that this was not much of an advantage to Trump himself in 2020, given the wild cards of the C****-** p******c, the disastrous nationwide lockdown, and the mysterious workings of the Trump-hating administrative state. We remember the 11th-hour P****r declaration that there would be no pre-e******n announcement, as planned, of the success of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed v******tion initiative. Then, there was indeed an announcement—immediately after the e******n. And then there was the mysterious CIA/FBI arming of the Biden campaign, on the eve of the last debate and just days before E******n Day, with the f**e anti-Trump rebuttal of “Russian laptop disinformation.”
Biden will pull every lever of incumbency, working the office of the presidency in the most Machiavellian and cynical of ways:
1. a) hoping to lower gas prices by not filling up the strategic petroleum reserve, jawboning illiberal and “pariah” oil producers to pump what he claims he h**es, ordering Ukraine not to hit Russian refineries, and appeasing enemies like Iran to keep its oil flowing,
2. b) unconstitutionally sidestepping rulings of the Supreme Court to ensure more pre-e******n illegal student-loan-cancellation giveaways,
3. c) prodding the supposedly independent Federal Reserve to lower interest rates before November,
4. d) pressuring Mexico to tamp down illegal entries for a few months to serve their shared interests in defeating Trump.
A second asset is his army of satellites.
These include left-wing justices, weaponized federal, state, and local prosecutors, and Trump-biased jury pools. The left expects these to do what the effort to remove Trump’s name from the b****t did not: destroy the Republican candidate, financially and health-wise, and bind him with the Lilliputian ropes of Fani Willis, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, and Jack Smith, who are eager to convict him through weaponized judges, juries, and a venomous media. They also include c*********d e******n officials in urban counties in key swing states.
Biden cannot win unless 70-80 percent of v**ers in the key swing states do not v**e on E******n Day. Instead, their b****ts must be mailed in, harvested, and curated without accustomed audit and without verification of whether v**ers are registered US citizens or have v**ed only once and done so legally.
And—his third major asset—Biden will also have billions of dollars more than Trump to pound home these themes in endless ads, social media shenanigans, and news censorship and blackouts.
Biden feels that he nevertheless must make the e******n hinge on destroying a monstrous, demonic, and hideous Donald Trump through any means necessary. Biden’s is not a positive campaign but will be waged by despising Donald Trump and all who support him. Expect more of those “semi-f*****ts”/ “ultra-MAGA” Phantom-of-the-Opera Biden h**e speeches.
In the next seven months, the Biden effort will play out with three narratives: Trump is a J****** 6th i**********nist and dictator and will “destroy democracy,” though apparently without weaponizing the FBI or removing his opponents’ names from b****ts or siccing right-wing prosecutors on his enemies.
Trump purportedly will k**l women by banning all a******ns while relegating non-w****s to the pre-civil-rights era—despite leaving a******n up to the states, and likely gaining more Latino and Black v**ers than any prior Republican p**********l candidate. Then we will hear that Trump is a felon who belongs in jail.
All this is the message of the Biden campaign, period

We have seen enough of the Biden-Trump race so far to predict what lies ahead over the next seven months of the campaign. Currently, the polls are about dead even. Trump, however, for now enjoys small leads in the majority of the fickle swing/purple states that will likely decide the e******n. So here is what we should expect:
trump likewise has both assets and liabilities. His vulnerabilities are mirror images of Biden’s advantages: he lacks incumbency and the powers that come with it; he does not have an army of officials on his side; and he will have a financial disadvantage.
We have no idea how many gag orders remain. How many late-summer days will Trump spend stuck in court? How many hundreds of millions of his dollars will be expropriated by out-of-control anti-Trump left-wing judges? Can Trump—or any candidate—successfully run with a $1 billion overhead in legal fees and fines and with critical days on the campaign trail diverted to left-wing, media-frenzied, blue-city courtrooms?
In addition, Trump is sometimes his own worst enemy. Trump, one could say, is running mostly against Trump. He knows that if he sticks solely to the agenda, contrasting Biden’s failures with his own past stellar record and future contract with America, he can win. He realizes that he must take the high road and talk idealistically rather than going low and getting angry.
But who could be expected to do so after being the victim of two unfair impeachments, left-wing lies like Russian collusion and disinformation, efforts to railroad him into prison with outrageously politicized legal vendettas, and attempts to remove his name from the b****t?
Trump’s advantages are clear. First, his record: on foreign policy, inflation, and the economy. But most important for the e******n is his ability to connect with people. So far, the split-screen differences between candidate Trump and President Biden have proved overwhelmingly to Trump’s advantage: Biden in New York schmoozing at a black-tie night with celebrities and ex-presidents to haul in $26 million in campaign cash from the hyper-rich, while Trump is with middle-class NYPD rank-and-file at a rainy wake for a murdered cop—k**led by a repeat felon released without bail.
Or Trump buying fast food and milkshakes amid a mostly black Atlanta Chick-fil-A crowd, while Biden dines with the venomous Robert De Niro and the zillionaire Jeff Bezos at a White House dinner, with the celebrities’ trophy girls vying to get the most stares at their multi-thousand-dollar designer clothes—as if they were on the red carpet at the Oscars rather than in the people’s house.
What can Trump do to make the best use of all this? He must magnanimously reach out to former rivals such as Haley, even as she continues to demonize him, and to DeSantis as well. He must unite the House Republicans to keep their razor-thin majority at all costs. He must campaign nonstop among poor w****s, b****s, and Latinos, appealing to shared class concerns rather than the racial obsessions and psychodramas of the bicoastal elite.
He should skip the ad hominem invective, forget the past rivalries with his primary opponents, and assume a corrupt media does not deserve a minute of his time. If he does this, he can win.
But if he climbs down into the mud with his l*****t opponents, trades insults, wrestles with his opponents, and obsesses about f**e news and the crooked media, he will likely lose.
Aside from Trump’s temperament, we must always remember that the answers to two other fundamental questions will determine the outcome of the e******n:
Can the Republicans monitor the b****ting and return it to the environment of 2016 rather than 2020? Can Trump convince millions of minorities, independents, and former Biden v**ers that there are plenty of reasons to v**e for someone they may not like—including the very future of the United States as a free republic as envisioned by the Founders, rather than an increasingly weak, anemic, cranky socialist has-been?
Finally, we must also remember that, ultimately, the outcome of the e******n could be determined by unpredictable events. What happens if the Gaza War expands to Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, as Israel is attacked from all directions? Or the military of the United States is attacked in the Middle East, as in the past?
What will be the status of Ukraine by November—static, safer, or absorbed by Russia—and who will be praised or blamed for what ensues?
Will China risk attacking or blockading Taiwan on the theory that it will never be gifted a more ossified president than Biden?
Will the left unleash another late-season October surprise like the 2016 Access Hollywood tape or the 2020 “Russian disinformation” laptop farce? And will these desperate gambits resonate or boomerang?
And, lastly, will the candidates in October and November resemble the candidates of today? These are the two oldest candidates ever to run for president. Will Trump still be vibrant at 78? Will Biden still be upright at 81?
Will Biden’s feebleness still earn him sympathy, or at least respectful silence? Or will it devolve to the point that the public, worn out by his lapses, concludes that Joe Biden would not be able to keep any job in America—except the Presidency of the United States?

April 18, 2024—printed off 4/18/24
Victor Davis Hanson
American Greatness
The theocracy of Iran has been the world’s arch-embassy attacker over the last half century. So it has zero credibility in crying foul over Israel’s April 1 attacks on its “consulate” in Damascus and the k*****g of Iran’s kingpin terrorists of the Revolutionary Guard Corps there.
Remember, the world was first introduced to the Iranian ayatollahs by their violent takeover of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1980. Iranian surrogates next bombed the American embassy in Beirut and the Marine barracks in 1983. In fact, Iran has attacked US and Israeli diplomatic posts off-and-on for decades, most recently in 2023, when Iran helped plan an attack on the US embassy in Baghdad.
For this reason and several others, Iran’s justification for sending 170 drones, 30 cruise missiles, and 120 ballistic missiles into Israel on the grounds that Israel had bombed an Iranian diplomatic post is completely ridiculous. One, Iran has never honored diplomatic immunity. Instead, it habitually attacks and k**ls embassy personnel and blows up diplomatic facilities across the world.
Two, on April 1, the Israelis attacked a pseudo-“consulate” in Damascus which was hosting grandees of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps as they planned terrorist attacks on Israel. Without Iran, the Middle East might have had a chance to use its enormous oil and natural gas wealth to lift its 500 million people out of poverty rather than to be mired in constant tribal and religious anti-Israeli, anti-American, and anti-Western terrorism.
During the Iraq War, Iran’s Shiite terrorists and its massive supplies of deadly shaped-charge explosive devices k**led hundreds of Americans. It routinely hijacks container ships in the Straits of Hormuz and stages near collisions with American ships and planes. How does Iran get away with nonstop anti-Western terrorism, its constant harassment of Persian Gulf maritime traffic, its efforts to subvert Sunni moderate regimes, and its serial hostage-taking?
The theocrats operate on three general principles.
One, Iran is careful never to attack a major power directly. Until this week, it had never sent missiles and drones into Israel. Its economy is one-dimensionally dependent on oil exports. And its paranoid government distrusts its own people, who have no access to free e******ns.
So Iranian strategy over the last few decades has relied on surrogates—especially expendable Arab Shia terrorists in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen, along with the Sunni Arabs of Hamas—to do its dirty work of k*****g Israelis and Americans. It loudly egged all of them on and then cowardly denied responsibility once it feared Israeli or American retaliation.
Two, it has fooled Western governments and especially left-wing American administrations by posing as a persecuted victim. Iran claims it is the champion of aggrieved Shiite Arab and Persian minorities, unfairly exploited by Israel, moderate Arab regimes, and rich Sunni Gulf monarchies.
Three, Iran hopes its pseudo-diplomatic outreach to left-wing Western governments, coupled with its lunatic existential threats and unleashing terrorist attacks on its enemies, can coax or bully the West into granting it concessions—especially time to acquire a dozen or so nuclear weapons.
Yet for all its loud, creepy threats, Iran is incredibly weak and vulnerable. Israel and its allies shot down almost all its recent nocturnal missile and drone barrages. Lots of other missiles reportedly blew up on liftoff in Iran or crashed in t***sit. Before the Biden appeasement of Iran, the Trump administration had isolated and nearly bankrupted Tehran and its proxies. Its Revolutionary Guard terrorist planners proved to be easy targets once they operated outside Iran.
Iran’s only hope is to get a bomb and, with it, nuclear deterrence to prevent retaliation when it increases its terrorist surrogate attacks on Israel, the West, and international commerce. Yet now Iran may have jumped the shark by attacking the Israeli homeland for the first time. It is learning that it has almost no sympathetic allies.
Does even the Lebanese Hezbollah really want to take revenge against Israel on behalf of Persian Iran, only to see its Shia neighborhoods in Lebanon reduced to rubble? Do all the pro-Hamas protestors on American campuses and in the streets really want to show Americans they celebrate Iranian attacks and a potential Iranian war against the United States? Does Iran really believe 99 percent of any future Israel barrage against Iranian targets would fail to hit targets in the fashion that its own recent launches failed?
Does Iran really believe that its sheer incompetence in attacking Israel warrants them a pardon—as if they should be excused for trying, but not succeeding, to k**l thousands of Jews? In sum, by unleashing a terrorist war in the Middle East and targeting the Israeli homeland, Iran may wake up soon and learn Israel, or America, or both might retaliate for a half-century of its terrorist aggression—and mostly to the indifference or even the delight of most of the world.