Led by Angry Anderson, Rose Tattoo formed in Sydney in 1976

The US signed a minerals and reconstruction deal with Ukraine. The US will send weapons, and it will provide implicit security. The US-Ukraine minerals deal aims to grant the U.S. access to Ukraine’s reserves of rare earth minerals. The United States and Ukraine created a new reconstruction and investment fund. The economic agreement between the […] The post US Signs Ukraine Minerals & Reconstruction Deal appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

A teacher in Maine repeatedly called for the killing of President Trump and his supporters on social media. She admitted her Superintendent “will have to fire me” over the call to violence. JoAnna St. Germain, an English teacher at Waterville Senior High School, took to Facebook to ask the Secret Service to “take out” the president. […] The post Maine Teacher Calls for Trump & MAGAs to Be Killed appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

'Let the White House play this thing out'

I know who I'm NOT betting on Saturday

'Kowtowing to climate activists'

Before freshman Rep. Pat Harrigan, R-N.C., came to Washington in January, no one seemed to notice that a Chinese Communist Party-linked company had stores that sold health products to our troops. Though it was once an American-owned company, the vitamin store GNC was purchased by the CCP-linked Harbin Pharmaceuticals in 2020 after GNC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Even prior to the sale, the CCP-linked company held a 40% stake in GNC. Harrigan, 37, joined “The Signal Sitdown” to discuss his legislation to kick CCP-linked entities off military bases as well as the great power competition between China and the United States. Shortly after being sworn in, Harrigan introduced the Military Installation Retail Security Act, or MIRSA for short. “It’s like MRSA,” Harrigan told me, “it’s like this infectious disease we just have to rid ourselves of, which is the Chinese Communist Party or other adversarial nations owning companies that are operating on our military bases.” (MRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, a strain of bacteria responsible for several difficult-to-treat infections in humans.) The legislation “requires the Department of Defense to do a broad investigation into all of the federal contractors that are working on our military bases and make sure that they aren’t owned by our foreign adversaries,” Harrigan said. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran all make the list. “When a military base or installation wants to have private contractors come in and actually operate on the base, they sign what’s called a concession contract, and these are contracts that are really not very well vetted, which is a problem in and of itself, but it forces a broad-based review of all of that,” Harrigan explained. But the “teeth” of the legislation, Harrigan told me, is “to kick any private contractor that has lied … to the federal government.”  The North Carolina congressman added that GNC already has a record of downplaying its ties to Harbin or the CCP in their previous government disclosures. The risk of GNC stores on military bases is simply “too high to tolerate,” Harrigan contended. “We have risks associated with the potential information that they could collect from our service members.” The CCP could “know what products they’re purchasing, they know what physical ailments they might be having or trying to correct. GNC even offers free supplement consultations so that they can kind of do a deep dive into your health,” Harrigan explained. “We don’t need foreign-owned cash registers taking the credit cards of our military servicemen and servicewomen, having access to their data.” The problem is larger than you’d think. GNC has “83 different facilities on our military installations across the country, and they’re wholly owned by the Chinese Communist Party,” Harrigan said. On a previous visit to Fort Bragg, Harrigan found four GNC stores. Fort Bragg is the largest Army base in the country, home to about 55,000 Army troops, which represents about 10% of the Army. Add their families and civilians employed by the bases, and more than 250,000 people have access to Bragg and its four GNCs. I asked Harrigan if he thought something more nefarious was afoot or if this issue had been simply overlooked by Congress. “It was just overlooked,” he replied. GNC was “initially a U.S.-owned—wholly owned—company. And through a multiyear transition process and a bankruptcy, they became wholly owned by Harbin Pharmaceuticals, aka the Chinese Communist Party.” That’s a familiar story in the era of America’s growing trade deficit with China: U.S. capital funds the inflow of inexpensive Chinese goods, only to return when Chinese firms acquire American businesses. But the concern becomes especially stark when those firms establish operations on or near U.S. military bases. The post CCP-Linked Stores on Military Bases? This Congressman Is Trying to Close Them Down appeared first on The Daily Signal.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. At the end of the 100 days of the Trump administration, let’s just review for a moment the opposition to it. And it’s actually, if you think about it, a tripartite, a threefold opposition: pollsters, the media, and the Democratic Party and the institutionalized Left. The pollsters have President Donald Trump down four or five points. But when you actually look at the Rasmussen poll or Mark Penn’s poll, a Democratic centrist, Trump is almost even. And then when you look with greater clarity at The New York Times poll that has him way down, you see that only 37% of the people polled voted for Donald Trump. But Donald Trump won by almost a point and a half. Don’t you think it should have been, I don’t know, 51%-49%? So, they were deliberately, in the case of The New York Times, under-polling Trump supporters. The same was true with The Washington Post. They polled over 2,000 people, but only 840 were identified as Trump voters. Shouldn’t that have been half? So, what am I getting at? We’re getting right back to what happened in 2016 when the polls were completely wrong. The same thing happened in 2020 when they overestimated former President Joe Biden’s strength by four or five points. And then, even in 2024, the NPR poll had—on the last day of the election—they had then-Vice President Kamala Harris winning by four points. The Des Moines Register had Iowa lost to Trump by three points. He won it by 12. So, what the pollsters are doing—not that Trump hasn’t lost some to the controversy over the trade wars—but the pollsters are trying to create momentum, fundraising, and jazz up opposition. Then we turn to the media. The media’s in a fight with the Democratic Left now because of the scandal of Joe Biden. The Democratic Left is saying, “Well, you were a journalist. If you thought he was demented or cognitively challenged, why didn’t you report it?” But the journalists are saying, “We couldn’t get close to him. He looked OK for us because you had him in such a guarded environment.” In truth, they’re both guilty. Do you remember those press conferences by then-White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre? Did anyone ever hear one question on those daily or three or four times a week press conferences? “Miss Jean-Pierre, is Joe Biden cognitively able to navigate himself to the podium? What is the nature of his cue cards? Have you had a Montreal Cognitive Assessment of him?” There was nothing. It was a combination of the Democratic Party, the Biden insiders, and the media. And here’s another point, very quickly. The media has gained a lot of influence and power in the opposition because there is no opposition on the Democratic Party. So, in lieu of an alternate agenda, the media has taken it upon themselves to use the only strategy that the Democratic Party can come up with. And that is to attack Donald Trump. Now, what do I mean by that? If you look at the Democratic Party and the Left in general, they have boxed themselves in. On the one hand, they have no institutional power; no ability to pass legislation, losing the House and the Senate; no presidency, White House; no executive orders. Ultimately, all of the cherry-picked district and circuit judges will be overturned by a largely conservative Supreme Court. In lieu of actual power, then you look at what is the alternative. Maybe the alternative is a 1994 Newt Gingrich Contract with America, an alternate agenda: Yes, we can do better on the border than you can. Yes, we have a better foreign policy with Iran. There’s nothing. There’s no shadow government. There’s not a young Bill Clinton ascendant. There’s no young Barack Obama. There’s nobody. There’s no leaders. There’s no agenda. Nothing. It’s nihilism. And so, let’s look at the third element. Do they have a good old days? Can they say, “Donald Trump ruined things”? “They were so good under Biden. The border was—we liked it open. Twelve million, we could have got 20 million illegal aliens. Let’s go back to that. We had a wonderful retreat from Afghanistan. Picture perfect. We can do it again. The Iran—the theater war in Ukraine and Iran, that wasn’t our fault. Maybe it was inevitable. We had a really good inflation—we had a little hyperinflation of 9%.” So, there is no alternative good old days. They can’t say Donald Trump wrecked something because they had wrecked the country. So, what are we left with? We’re left with Donald Trump wore a blue suit at the Vatican funeral. Donald Trump is a fascist. No. According to Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, he is a Nazi. No. According to former Vice President Al Gore, he is a Nazi. No. According to members of the Congress, is he deserving a polite conversation? You have to use the F-word. Or maybe it’s the S-word. It’s smutty mouth, potty mouth video. What is the one principle that ties them all together? We’re gonna talk about that in the next video. But it’s about fear that Donald Trump’s first 100 days are not as chaotic and bad as they tell us. But we might be on the cusp of something that will be very, very successful and will ensure Donald Trump has a successful presidency. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal. The post President Trump’s Threefold Opposition appeared first on The Daily Signal.