Ding Dong, the EV Tax Credit Is Dead

We still have 20 billion years to go if this is true!

“Sometimes, the simplest explanation is the best one," Professor Gupta said. "Maybe the universe’s biggest secrets are just tricks played by the evolving constants of nature."

It is not looking good for Democrats after they refused to compromise on a deal to fund the government in the upcoming months, but as per usual, their favorite fixer, Google, is on it.  On Tuesday, the search giant’s publishing arm, Google News, propped up a whole host of leftist sources, including NPR, Politico and The New York Times, which deflected Democrats’ role in forcing a likely government shutdown in Google’s Top stories. Not a single right-leaning news outlet appeared on the Google News home page. In its “Top Stories” section, Google included an NPR piece headlined “Government to shut down after midnight barring last minute breakthrough in Congress.” In the article, NPR arranged its framing to paint Democrats as caring and altruistic for attempting to extend funding for Obamacare — all the while smearing President Donald Trump as a bigot who won’t compromise.  The outlet specifically complained about a meme video Trump posted on Truth Social. “He posted a racist AI-generated video on social media,” the author wrote, adding: “This was accompanied by a vulgar, crudely deep-faked voiceover of Schumer denigrating Democrats.” Politico similarly led by noting the same AI meme video and subtly claiming it is Republicans who must compromise, even though Democrats are in the minority. “Democrats, following Monday’s meeting, remained steadfast in their opposition to keeping the government open without concessions from Republicans and the Trump administration,” the outlet noted. Politico revealed its true colors, however, when it objected to how Trump is portraying Democrats.  “Trump’s attack on Monday was more discreet than it has been in recent days when he accused Democrats of wanting taxpayers to subsidize transgender surgeries but its intent is the same: paint the other party as willing to shut the government down over a position that polls poorly,” Politico claimed.  Ironically, Republicans were literally called “villains” by Politico when Biden’s government nearly shut down in 2023 because Democrats refused to increase funding for border security, a top issue in the 2024 election. Google News also included in its top stories a  Times piece about Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s speech to U.S. generals and admirals at Quantico Marine Corps Base on Tuesday. In the story, The Times questioned why the men who direct military action around the world would want to speak and meet with military leadership:  “It was unclear why, with a shutdown of the federal government looming, Mr. Trump and his defense secretary needed to gather the country’s senior military leaders from overseas deployments to tell them face to face that they were straight out of ‘central casting,’ as Mr. Trump characterized the gathering.” Google’s promotion of leftist sources comes after Senate Democrats failed to pass all 12 appropriations bills and are now threatening not to pass a continuing resolution that would extend government funding through Nov. 21.  Methodology: MRC researchers examined the home page of news.google.com and the included aggregated outlets at 10 am on September 30. Researchers then analyzed the articles related to a potential government shutdown for political bias. MRC Free Speech America created an algorithm to automate this process in a clean environment. A “clean environment” allows for organic search to populate results without the influence of prior search history and tracking cookies.

Have you heard how young people suffer now? Scroll TikTok, Instagram, etc., you see the same message: “Young people today can’t get ahead!” One popular meme says when baby boomers like me were young, “A family could own a home, a car and send their kids to college, all on one income.” “That’s a fantasy,” says economist Norbert Michel. “We are much better off than we were.” My new video takes the meme’s claims one by one, starting with “a family could own a home.” On social media, many young people say things like, “Most people don’t live in houses because it’s too expensive.” Yes, homes cost more now, but census data show more Americans own their homes now than when I was a kid. And today’s homes are much bigger and twice as likely to have central air, dishwashers, garbage disposals, etc. We want more now. Also, young people can afford more now. Today, Americans actually spend a smaller percentage of our money on food, clothing and housing than we used to, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics survey data. “We have a lot more things and we don’t have to work as hard to get them,” says Michel. “Now it’s the norm to go out for dinner.” When I was young, few people did that. Few people flew places for vacation. They didn’t have the money, and flying cost much more. Adjusted for inflation, a cross-country flight cost $1,000. Now it’s about $300. “People did not just go on vacation,” says Michel, “did not fly all across the country.” But the popular narrative circulates. It’s part of progressives’ campaign for socialism. They tell young people: Not only does capitalism foster greed, inequality, etc., but it doesn’t even deliver the goods. Columbia Business School Professor Jeremy Ney tells me, “The game changed on the younger generations. Hard work alone is not enough because the deck is stacked against so many folks.” “The idea that nobody had to work hard, that everybody had job security,” replies Michel, “is absolutely ridiculous. My dad would’ve laughed at that and should have. Income is definitely higher, jobs are more plentiful, opportunities are more plentiful.” They sure are. Unemployment today is 4.3 percent. It was almost twice that when I was young. Gen Z, overall, is doing better than young people once did. A typical 25-year-old Gen Z-er has annual household income that’s 50 percent above Baby Boomers’. On to the meme’s claim that when I was young, “a family could afford to send their kids to college.” Well, yes, some could, because college was much cheaper then. Tuition in 1963 averaged $10,542 (adjusted for inflation) versus $39,307 now. Even so, “Most people didn’t go to college,” says Michel. “Roughly half of the labor force didn’t even finish high school.” Finally, yes, it’s true -- a family could own a car. But it wasn’t anything like today’s cars. It wasn’t as safe or comfortable, and it broke down sooner. Today’s cars last more than twice as long as cars did then. Why do people spread misinformation about today’s generations being worse off when they’re clearly so much better off? “Politically, it sells,” says Michel. “It makes it really easy for a politician to say, ‘I’m going to fix it.’” Maybe that’s why President Donald Trump campaigned saying, “We don’t have a great country anymore! We’re going back to the old days ... “ “We always have a tendency to believe in the things that are wrong and that are bad,” says Michel. “That’s unfortunate, because overall most people have been doing much, much better.” That internet meme should really say: “Once upon a time, a family who rarely ate out, or flew anywhere, could afford a smaller home, a lousy car, and they didn’t send their kids to college. All on one income.” Every Tuesday, Stossel posts a new video about the battle between government and freedom. He is the author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.

Bless Paul Krugman’s little birdbrain. The disgruntled propagandist disguising himself as an economist is once again departing from his normal economic mudslinging schtick to kvetch over the climate change boondoogle.  Krugman’s latest move was to sling sludge at those who dared defend the utility of fossil fuels in an economy that’s being jawboned into an eco-friendly future. “Fossil Fuels and Fossilized Minds,” read Krugman’s hilarious September 30 Substack headline, ironic given that this is the same person who told President Joe Biden before his term in office, “Don’t worry about inflation.” Who exactly has a “fossilized” mind again, Krugman? After cringeworthy praises of “Wind power” and how he “likes” the eyesore “sight of wind turbines,” Krugman proceeded to attack President Donald Trump because he “hates wind power and loves coal. Both passions are deeply irrational. Yet they are shaping policy.” Krugman’s new beef was that Trump was trying to revive a dying coal industry that he argued was just phased out by typical market shifts towards natural gas and renewables. “The truth, however, is that coal is a dying industry for very good reasons, and anti-wokeism is unlikely to revive it. Coal stopped being a significant source of jobs decades ago.” But as Climate Depot founder Marc Morano told MRC Business: “Krugman needs to examine how energy is produced to understand why coal is a crucial component in reviving American energy dominance.” It's unclear why he considers himself any kind of authority on this matter when he had just finished nuking his own credibility on economics during the Biden administration, but whatever. Then again, this is the same Krugman who stupidly advocated that Americans should “politicize the weather.” Firstly, said Morano, “a healthy coal industry is crucial for any nation's national security. Domestic coal production is a strategic asset that does not depend on importation. Coal helps achieve economic stability and supply chain resilience.” But in Krugman’s ignorant world, trying to maintain a thriving coal sector is just about a “culture war. Trying to bring back coal is all about owning the libs. And if it damages the environment, well, from MAGA’s point of view that’s a plus.” Morano slammed Krugman’s take as completely false. One of the biggest boo-boos Krugman made was when he asserted that “Wind power is, in fact, far cleaner and safer than burning fossil fuels.” Morano took that narrative to the cleaners: Not even close: the documentary Juice explained: ‘Just to produce one turbine, we have to extract 900 tons of steel, 2,500 tons of concrete, and 45 tons of non-renewable plastic. Then we’ve got to transport that and burn fuel, getting it all carried across the world and put up. And none of these things that go into a turbine are renewable.’ Krugman also bleated that it was supposedly a “simple fact that coal is no longer cost-competitive, while wind and solar are…Trying to keep coal alive will make energy more expensive, not less.” But Morano pointed out that Krugman’s argument hinges on a red herring: The goal of America’s energy sector isn’t to create as many jobs as possible (as Krugman would apparently have us believe), especially the politically-favored and heavily-subsidized renewable energy jobs. Instead, the goal is to produce as much electric power as possible at the lowest possible cost, and that means we want to choose the most productive energy like coal, which requires fewer energy workers. If that wasn’t clear enough, economist Mark Perry concluded in a 2017 analysis for the American Enterprise Institute that it takes 79 solar workers to produce the same amount of electric power as one coal worker. See the issue with Krugman’s argument yet?  While natural gas and technological advances in fracking have certainly contributed to the market shift away from fossil fuels, Morano argued that “there was also a deadly effective ‘war on coal’ unleashed by the Obama administration and continued by the Biden administration.”  Last year, energy journalist Robert Bryce also undercut the “Western conceit” of a phony energy transition that Krugman made the centerpiece of his thesis: “[D]espite massive federal subsidies and numerous mandates at the local and state levels, wind and solar energy aren’t keeping pace with the growth in natural gas.” Bryce further wrote that “The U.S. and Western European countries are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on programs like the Inflation Reduction Act and the [German] Energiewende to fund buildouts of solar, wind, batteries, and tutti-fruity-colored hydrogen, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world will do the same.”  Kind of hard to argue that it was just market forces phasing out coal when one sector was getting pumped with hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies while another was being stymied by intentional overregulation, eh Krugman?

After hitting a record low last year, Americans’ trust in the nation’s legacy media has now sunk even lower, Gallup reported Thursday, releasing results of its annual survey of U.S. adults. When Gallup began the survey in 1972, 7 in 10 adults had either a “fair amount” (50%) or “great deal” (18%) of trust in newspapers, television and radio to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. Today, 7- 10 have either “not very much” confidence (36%) or “none at all” (34%). This year’s survey marks the first time that fewer than 3 in 10 U.S. adults have expressed trust in the news they’re being fed by the media. Confidence fell below 50% level in 2004, and hasn’t returned to that level since then. Today, 28% say they have at least a fair amount of trust in the media, down from 31% last year and 40% five years ago. All political affiliation groups registered record-low confidence this year, though the legacy media’s well-documented liberal bias continues to buoy Democrats’ trust. Even so, barely half (51%) of Democrats have confidence in the news media today. Although older adults have “significantly more faith” in the media than do younger Americans, trust in media is steadily declining among all age groups, Gallup reports: “In the early 2000s, Americans in all four age groups expressed relatively similar levels of confidence in the media, at just above 50%. Since then, confidence among all four groups has gradually declined — but less so among Americans aged 65 and older.” The annual Gallup survey was conducted September 2-16, polling adults, ages 18+, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. It has a margin of sampling error of ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level.

In a striking speech this week, Secretary Pete Hegseth — now head of the newly renamed Department of War — addressed a rare gathering of top military officials in Quantico, Virginia. He laid out his vision for reform and announced directives aimed at restoring the fighting spirit of the U.S. armed forces.Hegseth began by explaining why the Department of Defense has once again become the Department of War. “To ensure peace, we must prepare for war,” he said, reviving the older and more honest title abandoned in 1948.Circumstances change, and tactics must adapt. But adaptation should always sharpen lethality, not serve social experiments.That explanation drew from the Roman writer Vegetius, who coined the maxim si vis pacem, para bellum — if you want peace, prepare for war. But Hegseth’s reasoning also echoes St. Augustine, the Christian bishop whose writings helped shape just war theory.In a letter written in 418 A.D. to the Roman general Boniface, Augustine commended the nobility of military service. He reminded him — and us — that the proper object of war is peace.“Peace should be the object of your desire,” Augustine wrote. “War should be waged only as a necessity, and waged only that God may by it deliver men from the necessity and preserve them in peace. For peace is not sought in order to the kindling of war, but war is waged in order that peace may be obtained.”He concluded with a hard truth for every soldier: “Let necessity, therefore, and not your will, slay the enemy who fights against you.”Peace through strengthThough peace may be war’s ultimate goal, necessity requires militaries to pursue their purpose without hesitation: engage and destroy the enemy. Only with that assurance can a nation’s people live free and fully.That is the mission Hegseth intends to restore. “From this moment forward, the only mission of the newly restored Department of War is this: warfighting, preparing for war, and preparing to win,” he said Tuesday.In practice, that means reversing the U.S. military’s long drift toward an agenda of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” This ideology, a hybrid of HR jargon and academic postmodernism, demands that “marginalized” groups be elevated into power regardless of merit.Corporate America and universities may tolerate such illusions. The military cannot. A fighting force depends on unity and unflinching standards, not favoritism. When leaders promote based on identity instead of ability, when they lower fitness thresholds or soften training to accommodate politics, they weaken the institution tasked with defending the nation.Even basic training, once the crucible that broke down civilians and forged soldiers, has been watered down. Risk aversion replaces rigor. Cosmetic rules are relaxed. Officers signal more concern with optics than with readiness. None of this produces warriors.If the United States wants to remain the premier fighting force in the world, those trends must end. The alternative is a military built for press releases and photo ops, not for victory.Two north starsTo begin reversing these trends, Hegseth offered two simple tests for every new policy: the “1990 test” and the “E-6 test.”The 1990 test asks: What were the military standards in 1990, and if they changed, why? That baseline matters. Since then — arguably even earlier — political agendas crept in and steadily displaced common-sense practices. Policies that once kept the force lethal and focused have been diluted or discarded.Hegseth acknowledged that modern battlefields evolve. Circumstances change, and tactics must adapt. But adaptation should always sharpen lethality, not serve social experiments. Policies that weaken cohesion or cater to fashionable causes betray the mission.By holding today’s standards up against those of 1990, the military can begin identifying what was lost — and whether those losses made the force deadlier or merely more compliant with political fashions. The answer, in most cases, is obvious.RELATED: Hegseth declares war on woke military policies: ‘We are done with that s**t’ Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty ImageThe E-6 test asks a blunt question: Will this policy make the job of an E-6 easier or harder?In the Army, an E-6 is a staff sergeant. In the infantry, that usually means a squad leader. A squad is the smallest real tactical unit — second only to the four-man fire team. It’s the squad leader who carries the burden of leadership where it matters most: training, maintenance, discipline, and, in combat, life-or-death decisions under fire.So the E-6 test forces policymakers to think from the ground up. Will a new directive help the staff sergeant lead his squad more effectively, hold his soldiers accountable, and keep them lethal? Or will it mire him in distractions, paperwork, and politically driven nonsense?In other words, the test measures policy by its effect on the sharp end of the spear. If it makes the staff sergeant’s mission harder, the policy has failed before it begins.Long-overdue changeFor too long, Washington has imposed policies without regard for the men who actually lead soldiers in the field. Often those policies made their jobs harder, not easier. The simple discipline of asking whether a change helps or hinders an E-6 restores the right focus: The military exists to fight and win wars. Nothing else.War will never be pleasant, but it remains necessary. Peace and human flourishing require strength — an armed force capable of deterring aggressors and defeating enemies who would sow chaos and fear. That is the first duty of government: to ensure the military is as lethal and effective as possible in defense of the people.Hegseth understands this. His reforms strip away the distractions of ideology and return attention to standards, readiness, and the hard truths of combat. As he reminded his audience, paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton, true soldiers fight not because they hate what is in front of them, but because they love what’s behind them.That truth, often forgotten in recent decades, is the cornerstone of a warrior ethos worth rebuilding — an ethos that can win wars, safeguard peace, and keep the republic secure.

Months after the high-profile deportation case of an alleged MS-13 associate began with a removal and then mandated return to the United States, a judge has denied the request to stay Kilmar Abrego Garcia's final deportation from the country.In a copy of the decision obtained by ABC News, Regional Deputy Chief Immigration Judge Philip Taylor denied an emergency request from Garcia's attorneys to reopen his case. The petition, filed in August, argued that Garcia's removal from the U.S. followed by his return subsequently made him eligible to apply for asylum in the U.S. 'This MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, domestic abuser, and child predator will never be loose on American streets.'However, Judge Taylor argued in his denial to stay the removal on Wednesday that Garcia's application for asylum would be "untimely," considering that Garcia's original immigration proceedings began nearly six years ago. A large part of the long-running deportation case hangs on the Trump administration's charge that Garcia is affiliated with the violent gang MS-13. His attorneys have delayed his deportation for fear of persecution tied to these accusations, which Garcia and his attorneys deny.RELATED: Judge 'absolutely' forbids Trump administration to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia — for now Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesThe prosecution has also indicated that the Department of Homeland Security "may" deport Garcia to another country such as Uganda or Eswatini.However, Judge Taylor argued that the defense's argument about possible persecution in these countries was ultimately insubstantial. "The word 'may' is permissive and indicates to the Court that in sending this notification to Respondent's counsel, the Department sought to convey that it reserved the right to remove him to Uganda, not necessarily that it intended to do so, that it had decided to do so, or that it would do so imminently," Judge Taylor said, according to ABC News."This MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, domestic abuser, and child predator will never be loose on American streets," the DHS said in an X post on Wednesday evening. "His lawyers tried to fight his removal from the U.S. but one thing is certain, this Salvadoran man is not going to be able to remain in our country. He will never be allowed to prey on innocent Americans again." The Kilmar Abrego Garcia saga has stretched to this day since he was deported in March. He was then brought back to the United States to face human-trafficking charges in June.The government shutdown, which began on the same day as this order, will delay deadlines for the case "by the total number of days of the lapse in appropriations," as noted by the DOJ in the court document. Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

The British band featured an evolving lineup that included three of classic rock's most acclaimed guitarists: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page. The post Chris Dreja, ‘Other’ Guitarist in the Yardbirds, Dies appeared first on Best Classic Bands.