Bad Bunny isn’t all that bad. After all, the rapper and singer’s concert residency in Puerto Rico added over $200 million to the economy. That said, the announcement that he would headline the halftime show at the next Super Bowl engendered no end of controversy with the kickoff still over three months away.   Over 50,000 fans have already signed a petition demanding Bad Bunny step aside for country western icon George Strait. While hosting an episode of “Saturday Night Live,” the performer told all his critics to just learn Spanish before the big game.   Bad Bunny’s detractors, however, are less concerned that he sings in Spanish than upset that his politics are too woke for all-American halftime show. Since on average 127 million people around the world watch the Super Bowl—some just for the commercials and the halftime show, this is kind of a big deal.   There is an argument that the NFL cares more about the Benjamins than family values—relishing controversy that might bring more eyeballs to the big game, like Jimmy Kimmel getting a bump in viewership after being kicked off the air for being a jerk. That said, Kimmel lost more than half his audience after his brief ratings spike and in the end is likely going to be canceled for his dismal viewership, suggesting that for him this battle in the culture wars ended like the British at Yorktown.   So, what’s up for the NFL?  We are about to see the most audacious counterprograming since Trump trolled the Republican primary debates. The conservative group Turning Point USA declared it is producing its own halftime show. There have been rumors of major donations for the production—which may or may not be true. That matters not. Likely, the show will go on.    This will be one of the most titanic engagements in the culture wars since Greg Gutfeld disarmed Jimmy Fallon—delivering Fallon’s “Tonight Show,” by the way, its highest ratings in two years. What happens if tens of millions tune out the bunny for Turning Point? That may not be as heavy a lift as it might seem. Turning Point has over 900 chapters nationwide. In the wake of founder Charlie Kirk’s murder, the organization reported over 100,000 queries for starting new chapters. If the show just attracts members, friends, and families, that is a sizable audience—and Turning Points’ big show could draw many more.  In all likelihood, this battle for America’s attention will tell us what we already know. Americans are increasingly over woke, which is starting to smell like leftovers left in the back of the refrigerator too long.   Recent reports indicate a dramatic decline in young people identifying as transgendered. The No King’s Rally didn’t attract near as many no kings as advertised. Supporters even had to circulate a photo on social media from a much larger 2017 march to trump-up how anti-Trump they are. More women everyday are speaking out against men in women’s sports. No wonder why the Left is so angry. Woke seems to be peaking before their eyes and crashing at their rainbow-colored toenails.  Meanwhile, many fans are disappointed to see one of America’s favorite pastimes become a cultural combat zone, yearning for the days when the Right and Left cheered for their favorite team rather than jeering at each other. Remembering when serious Super Bowl controversies involved costume malfunctions and atrocious ads. Those days are long ago, but don’t blame the fans and viewers.   Professional sports were among the first to take sides in the culture wars—and it looks more and more like they picked the wrong side. The angst of fans may not necessarily be reflected in the ratings. American football is still wildly popular, thanks in part to Taylor Swift drawing new fans to the sport. That, however, doesn’t mean fans are happy having the politics of cultural combat competing with play-by-play coverage. Rather, the more overt and shrill the woke cultural assault is on everyday Americans the more quickly they seem to be turning away.    Bad Bunny may rock the Super Bowl, but he is more likely to lose the Left more at the ballot box—particularly if he pays more attention to headlining his politics than his music.   We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.  The post Is the Super Bowl a Turning Point? appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Department of Homeland Security has introduced a new rule that will greatly expand biometric tracking at US borders, establishing a system to photograph and identify every non-citizen who enters or leaves the country. Although the regulation applies to non-citizens, the cameras do not distinguish citizens from others in real time. CBP says US citizens may opt out by presenting their passports manually, and that photos of citizens are deleted within twelve hours once nationality is confirmed. However, that’s after the fact. Starting December 26, Customs and Border Protection will have authority to take photographs of “all aliens” not only at airports and land crossings but at “any other point of departure” the agency designates. We obtained a copy of the rule for you here. DHS describes the change as “operational modernization.” Privacy and civil-liberties organizations see it differently, warning that it formalizes a broad surveillance network that has been years in development. The policy completes the long-promised “biometric entry-exit” system that Congress first ordered in the 1990s and that gained renewed political momentum after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. Related: TSA Fast Track Programs Are a Deal With The Devil Earlier restrictions, such as pilot site caps and age-based exemptions, have been removed. The result is a regulation that opens the way for a connected web of facial-recognition systems across airports, seaports, vehicle lanes, and pedestrian crossings. Until now, CBP’s use of biometrics has been uneven. The “Simplified Arrival” program already photographs nearly all foreign travelers entering the country at major airports, comparing the images to visa and passport records. Departures, however, were rarely monitored except at a few test sites. The new rule changes that by requiring biometric collection for every non-citizen departure, by air, land, or sea. Officials claim the expansion will make travel faster and safer. DHS says “photographing travelers at entry and exit allows CBP to verify identities within seconds, reducing document fraud and streamlining inspections.” Each image is sent to the Traveler Verification Service, a cloud-based matching system that connects with other government databases. When the software confirms a match, it notifies a CBP officer. For non-citizens, the photos and related data can be retained for as long as seventy-five years in the central biometric database known as IDENT. The rule gives DHS wide flexibility to decide where and when to take photographs, allowing cameras anywhere CBP operates, including boarding gates, border checkpoints, cruise terminals, and even private airfields or marinas. Related: Quiet Skies Turns Dark as Senate Exposes Secret Surveillance of Americans Officials justify the scope as a way to prevent travelers from leaving unverified, while privacy advocates argue it effectively enables biometric surveillance at almost any international departure point and impacts citizens, too. False matches remain a concern. CBP testing found error rates of up to three percent, which could mean thousands of travelers are misidentified each day once the system reaches nationwide scale. Such errors make voluntary participation questionable, since a mistake can result in data being retained beyond the promised deletion window. The traveler verification system connects with other DHS databases, including the Automated Targeting System, the Arrival and Departure Information System, and Enhanced Passenger Processing. Data ultimately feeds into IDENT, which stores fingerprints, facial scans, and iris data. Non-immigrant records can be held for seventy-five years, permanent resident data for fifteen, and US citizen records only in short-term logs. Privacy and technology groups have warned that the program’s long retention periods and interagency data sharing could turn it into a persistent tracking tool for millions of lawful residents and visa holders. The problem is that convenience and automation can create coercive conditions over time. When facial recognition lanes move passengers through in seconds while manual verification takes several minutes, those who opt out will find themselves in slower, longer, less-staffed lines. Airports, pressured to maintain throughput, will likely allocate fewer agents to manual document checks, effectively penalizing those who choose not to participate in biometric programs. This subtly transforms a “voluntary” system into a de facto mandatory one. The slow erosion of choice doesn’t come from a formal mandate but from bureaucratic efficiency pressures and traveler frustration. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post DHS Expands Nationwide Airport Biometric Tracking appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

Will John Brennan Go to Jail?

House Oversight: Biden's Autopen Pardons 'Void,' Urge Bondi to Act

We can now study atmospheric variations on worlds light-years away.

New Yorker magazine has an amusing analysis by art writer Adam Gopnik as to why President Donald Trump tore down the East Wing in order to build a new ballroom next to the White House. The supposed reason gives us insight into just how much corrosive TDS has eaten away at anything resembling rational thought at that periodical.  You can descend into the New Yorker rabbit hole in their bizarre screed published on Saturday in "Why Trump Tore Down the East Wing." The subtitle lays out the dopey thesis: "The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat." And now the details of Gopnik's sanity-challenged premise: The surprise and shock that so many people have registered at the photographs of Donald Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House—soon to be replaced by his own ostentatious and overscaled ballroom—is itself, in a way, surprising and shocking. On the long list of Trumpian depredations, the rushed demolition might seem a relatively minor offense. After months marked by corruption, violence, and the open perversion of law, to gasp in outrage at the loss of a few tons of masonry and mortar might seem oddly misjudged. And yet it isn’t. We are creatures of symbols, and our architecture tells us who we are. John Ruskin, the greatest of architectural critics, observed that a nation writes its history in many books, but that the book of its buildings is the most enduring. The faith in order and proportion embodied in the Alhambra, the romance of modernity caught in the Eiffel Tower’s lattice of iron—these are not ideas imposed on buildings but ideals that the buildings themselves express, more lastingly than words can. Among them, not least, is the modest, egoless ideal of democratic tradition captured so perfectly in such American monuments as the Lincoln Memorial, which shows not a hero but a man, seated, in grave contemplation. You would think that the East Wing is some iconic architectural marvel marvel ranking right up there with the Alhambra, Eiffel Tower, and the Lincoln Memorial. However, even Gopnik soon admits that the East Wing has been somewhat unimpressive in its relatively brief life which amounts to less than a third of the age of the nation: The East Wing has never been a place of grandeur. The structure as we knew it was built in the anxious years of the Second World War. It was Franklin Roosevelt’s attempt to regularize a jumble of service spaces and, not incidentally, to carve out a secure refuge beneath them. But it quickly became a center of quiet power. Eleanor Roosevelt hosted women journalists there. Two decades later, Jacqueline Kennedy presided over a different kind of transformation from the same offices, founding the White House Historical Association. The wing’s very plainness came to symbolize the functional modesty of democratic government: a space for staff, not spectacle; for the sustaining rituals of civic life, not the exhibition of personal glory. Yeah, so a building constructed to "regularize a jumble of service spaces" as well as to serve as a cover for an underground bunker hardly sounds like the stuff of the Alhambra, Eiffel Tower, and the Lincoln Memorial by Gopnik's own admission. All of that is now gone. The act of destruction is precisely the point: a kind of performance piece meant to display Trump’s arbitrary power over the Presidency, including its physical seat. He asks permission of no one, destroys what he wants, when he wants. Sniff! An aging building which long ago lost its usefulness is now gone. And all because, according to Gopnik, so Trump could do his performance art of exercising "arbitrary power over the Presidency." Earlier alterations were made incrementally, and only after much deliberation. When Harry Truman added a not very grand balcony to the Executive Residence, the move was controversial, but the construction was overseen by a bipartisan commission. By contrast, the new project—bankrolled by Big Tech firms and crypto moguls—is one of excess and self-advertisement. The difference between the Truman balcony and the Trump ballroom is all the difference in the world. It is a difference of process and procedure—two words so essential to the rule of law and equality, yet doomed always to seem feeble beside the orgiastic showcase of power. Gopnik seems to think that Trump should have patiently waited for the long Byzantine process of bureaucratic review to play itself out. A process which in this era could take many, many years -- long after Trump's "arbitrary power" is gone. 

A little more than a month after President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced an official statement suggesting a link between Tylenol and autism, drug manufacturers are facing some heat. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue for allegedly concealing the link between prenatal use of acetaminophen and autism spectrum disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Acetaminophen is the active ingredient in Tylenol.'By holding Big Pharma accountable for poisoning our people, we will help Make America Healthy Again.'Dated October 27, the lawsuit lodges two main complaints against Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiaries Kenvue Inc. and Kenvue Brands LLC.First, the lawsuit alleges that "defendants have paid no heed to the scientific facts" by downplaying or concealing the known link between acetaminophen and ADS and ADHD. If the defendants had been more forthcoming on their labels, pregnant mothers may have chosen to avoid the drug, the lawsuit posits.RELATED: Trump administration claims link between autism and Tylenol, greenlights remedy Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesIt cites 26 epidemiological studies that showed "positive associations" between prenatal use of acetaminophen and ASD and ADHD. Other studies showed a dose-response relationship, according to the lawsuit.The second part of the lawsuit alleges that Johnson & Johnson, aware of the legal risk of its product, attempted to "shed its liability" by transferring its liabilities associated with Tylenol to Kenvue without transferring the necessary assets to the subsidiary company. Asked about the lawsuit, a Johnson & Johnson spokesperson told Blaze News, “Johnson & Johnson divested its consumer health business years ago, and all rights and liabilities associated with the sale of its over-the-counter products, including Tylenol (acetaminophen), are owned by Kenvue.”“Big Pharma betrayed America by profiting off of pain and pushing pills regardless of the risks. These corporations lied for decades, knowingly endangering millions to line their pockets,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a news release. “Additionally, seeing that the day of reckoning was coming, Johnson & Johnson attempted to escape responsibility by illegally offloading their liability onto a different company. By holding Big Pharma accountable for poisoning our people, we will help Make America Healthy Again.” On its website, Kenvue issued the following statement regarding the supposed link between acetaminophen and autism: "Nothing is more important to us than the health and safety of the people who use our products. We believe independent, sound science clearly shows that taking acetaminophen does not cause autism. We strongly disagree with allegations that it does and are deeply concerned about the health risks and confusion this poses for expecting mothers and parents.""We will vigorously defend ourselves against these claims and respond per the legal process. We stand firmly with the global medical community that acknowledges the safety of acetaminophen and believe we will continue to be successful in litigation as these claims lack legal merit and scientific support," a Kenvue spokesperson told Blaze News.Blaze News contacted Attorney General Ken Paxton's office for comment but did not receive a response. Editor's note: This article was edited after publication to include a comment from Kenvue.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Democratic Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas made a claim so egregious about the ongoing East Wing renovations at the White House that even CNN had to fact-check the lawmaker. Crockett was accusing President Donald Trump of neglecting Americans during the government shutdown, falsely claiming that the construction of the new East Wing ballroom was his "main priority." Crockett was quickly corrected by CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, who clarified the original context of press secretary Karoline Leavitt's response. Crockett is not the only high-profile Democrat who has misled about the White House ballroom."I have no idea," Crockett said in response to Collins. "I mean, you started off talking about how the president is in Japan. The president has time to do everything but what he needs to focus on.""In fact, we heard the press secretary say that his main priority is the ballroom," Crockett added. "The ballroom that no one asked for. The ballroom that requires him to destroy historic pieces of the White House."RELATED: White House trolls Democrats with highlights of prior administrations' scandals amid liberal furor over East Wing renovation Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty ImagesCollins responded to Crockett's wildly out-of-context claim, noting that Leavitt was responding to a question about additional White House renovations and not about the president's general list of priorities. "That context of the comment from Karoline Leavitt, she was asked if the president was working on any other renovations when it came to the White House, and she was saying his focus was the ballroom," Collins replied. RELATED: 'These people are sick': Trump admin slams top Dem for justifying shutdown suffering Photo by Eric Lee/Getty ImagesCrockett is not the only high-profile Democrat who has misled about the White House ballroom. Former vice presidential candidate and current Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) also echoed the claim that the ballroom is Trump's top priority, insinuating that the project is taxpayer-funded.As Leavitt pointed out the week prior, Trump's ballroom is entirely funded by private donors, with the president himself even pitching in to finance the project. "He's a builder at heart, clearly," Leavitt replied when asked if Trump was weighing any additional construction projects. "His heart and his mind is always churning about how to improve things here on the White House grounds. But at this moment in time, of course, the ballroom really is the president's main priority." Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

President Donald Trump's legal team has filed an appeal to reverse his New York criminal conviction, in which he was found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying business records.The case, brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), involved accusations that Trump improperly marked payments he made to his then-personal attorney Michael Cohen as legal expenses in an effort to conceal a $130,000 settlement payment that Cohen made to porn actress Stormy Daniels to keep her quiet about an alleged affair with Trump.'This case should never have seen the inside of a courtroom, let alone resulted in a conviction.'Trump secured a new legal team, attorneys with the Manhattan-based firm Sullivan & Cromwell, in January following his inauguration. He was previously represented in the case by Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, whom he has since appointed as U.S. deputy attorney general and U.S. principal deputy associate attorney general, respectively.Judge Juan Merchan sentenced the then-president elect just days before Inauguration Day with an "unconditional discharge," which allowed Trump to avoid jail time, fines, and probation supervision. While the sentence did not interfere with Trump's ability to return to the White House, it did brand him with a felony criminal conviction.On Monday, Trump's legal team filed a 96-page appeal, writing, "This case should never have seen the inside of a courtroom, let alone resulted in a conviction."RELATED: Trump's new lawyers move to appeal New York criminal conviction over 'misuse' of law Juan Merchan. Marc A. Hermann for New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images"The DA, a Democrat, brought those charges in the middle of a contentious presidential election in which President Trump was the leading Republican candidate," the court filing read.The president's attorneys claimed Bragg "concocted a purported felony by stacking time-barred misdemeanors under a convoluted legal theory."RELATED: Trump presses SCOTUS for 11th-hour intervention ahead of criminal sentencing in New York hush-money case Alvin Bragg. Photo by YUKI IWAMURA/POOL/AFP via Getty ImagesTrump's legal team told Fox News Digital, "President Trump's legal team filed a powerhouse appeal in the Manhattan DA's Witch Hunt, as the president continues his fight to put an end to the Radical Democrat Lawfare once and for all.""The Supreme Court's historic decision on Immunity, the Federal and New York State Constitutions, and other established legal precedent mandate that this meritless hoax be immediately overturned and dismissed," the spokesperson said. "President Trump will keep defeating Democrat weaponization at every turn as he [focuses] on his singular mission to Make America Great Again."Blaze News reached out to Bragg's office for comment.Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

The announcement comes after JBJ's much documented vocal cord surgery and rehab process. The post Bon Jovi Add Dates to 2026 Tour as Return to Stage is Met With ‘Overwhelming Demand’ appeared first on Best Classic Bands.