There are new details about the man who tried to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2022 from The Washington Post. His attorneys say his statements to the police were not properly obtained. “At the time, Mr. Roske was acutely suicidal, visibly exhausted, and had repeatedly expressed his need for psychiatric care,” his attorneys, Assistant Federal […] The post New Details About the Man Who Tried to Kill Justice Kavanaugh appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

Aspiring teachers in New Jersey are no longer required to pass basic skills to be certified. The test was easy to begin with. It was truly a basic skills test. New Jersey Democratic Governor Phil Murphy passed Act 1669 as part of the state’s 2025 budget in June to address a teacher shortage, Read Lion […] The post Teachers In NY, NJ, CA, AZ Don’t Need Basic Skills: Dumb & Diverse? appeared first on www.independentsentinel.com.

MSNBC host Symone Sanders-Townsend claimed during a panel discussion that President Joe Biden was “unequivocally” more mentally fit than President-elect Donald Trump — over the objections of at least two of her fellow panelists. Sanders-Townsend, who worked on Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign and then worked for Vice President Kamala Harris before leaving the administration to go to MSNBC, made the comments on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday morning. “I was very surprised when you asked the question about mental acuity he didn’t more forcefully push back. The question on the table is: Is the president all the way there? And the answer is: unequivocally yes!” Sanders-Townsend began, adding, “Now, people can say that you feel as though President Biden might be a little too old to do the job. But he is doing the job, and his mental acuity is there.” “So I think that there’s a conflation of two things here. It’s his mental capacity, and serving another four years as old as he is,” Sanders-Townsend continued, arguing that people were seeing Biden’s age and assuming that meant he wasn’t all there. “But those are two separate things in my opinion. And look, these people, they have known Joe Biden their entire political lives. I know Joe Biden is like, ‘Can y’all just please defend me a little more?’” Politico’s Jonathan Martin weighed in then, suggesting that Biden’s behavior — particularly in recent weeks — had been very obviously self-serving and hadn’t really inspired even those who might be so inclined to continue running defense for him. “Well, it’s not worth defending him, though, because at every turn the last year and a half, he has taken the path of the most indulgent turn for himself out than the good of the party by running again, by pardoning his son, and now, frankly, by some of these choices for the Medal of Freedom, going to Rome for one last trip,” Martin said. “He’s not exiting in a way that I think reflects well on his party. And Democrats are deeply, deeply unhappy about it. And they should be frankly.” “It hurt Democrats in November to try to tell the American people something they could see with their own eyes wasn’t true,” Marc Short, who served as chief of staff to former Vice President Mike Pence, noted. “But it’s not true that the president doesn’t have the mental acuity,” Sanders-Townsend objected. Short was not convinced: “Of course it is Symone! The American people saw that for themselves in the debate.” “What are you saying? He can at least put a sentence together,” Sanders-Townsend claimed, turning the attack on Trump. “The president-elect is the one I’m concerned about.” WATCH: .@marctshort:  What hurt Democrats in November to try to tell the American people something they could see with their own eyes wasn't true. Symone Sanders: But it's not true that Biden doesn't have the mental acuity. Short: Of course it is, Symone! Imagine people saw that for… pic.twitter.com/ymsn6PJ6Ns — Bobby LaValley (@Bobby_LaVallley) January 5, 2025

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) said during an interview over the weekend that Republicans were united to deliver President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda now that they have full control of the U.S. government. Thune made the remarks during an interview that aired Sunday on CBS News’ “Face The Nation” with Margaret Brennan. “We have unified control. We have the majorities in the House, the Senate, the White House, but the majority in the House is incredibly narrow, which creates some unique management challenges,” he said. “But they’ve worked around them, and we will work around them and work with the Trump administration, the President and his team, on an agenda that he campaigned on, and that many of our colleagues here in the Senate and the House campaigned on, and so we’re excited about the opportunity.” He said that Republican leaders “expect to deliver on what the American people asked us to do.” “I think when it comes to the big issues, securing the border, rebuilding the military, strengthening the economy, you know, generating energy dominance for this country, those are all things on which we agree,” he said. “And so I think as we proceed forward, you know, with respect to even narrow margins, I think we’re going to have hopefully a very unified effort when it comes to those core issues. We’ll disagree on the margins and the process and all that sort of thing, but when it comes to the things we need to get done for the American people, that we think move the country in the right direction, those are all things I think we agree on.” Thune said that Republicans are going to use the budget reconciliation process to pass a historic investment in border security and immigration enforcement. WATCH:

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) falsely suggested during an interview over the weekend that President-elect Donald Trump’s rhetoric was the reason for the 2022 attack on her husband, Paul Pelosi. Pelosi made the unsubstantiated claim during an interview that aired Sunday on CBS News’ “Face The Nation” with Margaret Brennan, while talking about how Trump may pardon some January 6 defendants who are serving sentences for their roles in the riot. Pelosi claimed that those who used violent words on that day had “intention” to carry out actual violence. “Now it didn’t end that day,” she claimed. “As you know, he called out to these people to continue their violence, my husband being a victim of all of that, and he still has injuries from that attack. So it just goes on and on. It isn’t something that happens and then it’s over. No, once you are attacked, you have consequences that continue.” “It’s really a strange person who’s going to be President of the United States, who thinks that it’s okay to pardon people who are engaged in an attack,” she continued, claiming that Trump had “conned” the American people about the January 6 riot. “The President said he would go on a case-by-case basis,” she said. “So I assume that some of those people may not have engaged in the violent activities that some of the others did.” She again doubled down on falsely suggesting that Trump had offered “encouragement” to those who were “looking for me and finding my husband.” WATCH: On President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to pardon Jan. 6 defendants, @SpeakerPelosi says, “It’s really a strange person who’s going to be President of the United States, who thinks that it’s okay to pardon people who are engaged in an attack.” When asked if she would be… pic.twitter.com/mvD4RrxNux — Face The Nation (@FaceTheNation) January 5, 2025

Toward the end of “A Complete Unknown,” a good biopic about Bob Dylan that opened on Christmas, there is a key scene in which Dylan manager Albert Grossman barks at folk music legend Pete Seeger, “You’re pushing candles, and he’s selling lightbulbs,” to which Seeger retorts, “You’re the only one selling anything here, Albert!” The scene portrays the eve of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and it is pregnant with innuendo. They are all sitting in a hotel room, and Seeger is all but begging Dylan to play protest folk music at the festival the next day. Dylan’s music is so powerful that it might tip things societally—help end the Vietnam War, end segregation, bring social justice, etc. Or so says Seeger. As we find out in the following scenes, Dylan does what he wants, and performs three songs on his electric guitar: “Maggie’s Farm,” “Like A Rolling Stone,” and “Phantom Engineer.” It was groundbreaking, but the crowd of 17,000, who had been waiting for Dylan to string out political deliverance, did not react well, some throwing projectiles at the stage. Seeger himself was despondent. Amid the chaos, he tried in vain to cut off the music, only to be stopped by his own wife. Some people have called it “the night the ’60s died.” The movie itself, directed by James Mangold, is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book “Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties,” which focuses on the 35-minute concert. Others have seen it as a personal betrayal of Seeger, who had been Dylan’s mentor. David Ehrlich in “IndieWire” writes scathingly that “the Dylan this movie gives us seems less interested in being a disruptor than he does in being an a–hole.” Dorian Lynskey, writing in “Mojo,” equally tells us that Alan Lomax, who founded the Newport Folk Festival, complained that Dylan “more or less killed the festival.” Lynskey despairs that it was not the electric sound, but Dylan’s attitude. “Here is the final victory of I over we; individual liberty over the greater good; the singer over the song,” Lynskey groans. Er, not so fast. Many things split the ’60s. Katharine Gorka and I argue in our book, “NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It,” that the biggest split came when some protesters took up arms against the United States and created terrorist groups including the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. Oh, and we also argue that—alas!—the ’60s haven’t died and their destructive counterculture is still with us dressed up as wokeism, though there is some hope that the right policies will be introduced in the next few years to counteract it. No, something else is at play. An exchange between Dylan and his paramour, Joan Baez, a believer in the counterculture movement (and a driver of it), is telling. After the debacle at the festival, they face each other. Baez: Well, you finally got it. Dylan: Got what? Baez: Freedom from us and all our s—. Isn’t that what you wanted? And that’s just it. Seeger is portrayed, as ever, as an idealistic easy-going free spirit. But Seeger lies in the exchange with Grossman at the opening of his column. Grossman was indeed selling Dylan, and, as his manager, that was his job. But Seeger was also selling something, and it wasn’t candles. Seeger was selling communism. Yes, the Soviet-style variety, fangs and all, the communism of the Gulags, the mass trials, the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. That’s the “s—” that Baez reproves Dylan for liberating himself from—not out of conviction, but because Dylan wanted to do his own thing. “Given his decisive influence on the political direction of popular music, Seeger may have been the most effective American communist ever,” Howard Husock, now at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in the City Journal in 2005. In fact, the entire folk protest song movement was hardly the down-to-earth, organically grown American phenomenon, as it has always been portrayed. It “grew out of a patient leftist political strategy that began in the mid-1930s with the Communist Party’s ‘Popular Front’ effort to use popular culture to advance its cause,” Husock wrote. Husock is hardly alone in observing that Seeger was the master creator, subliminally getting out his message in homespun sounds and lyrics. Peter Stone writes that Wald himself “details how what was eventually called ‘the folk movement’ was pretty much [Seeger’s] creation and ultimately filtered through his political worldview.” Seeger would even “simplify his banjo and guitar parts because he didn’t want his instrumental prowess to interfere with the message”—probably why he hated Dylan’s electric energy. That strategy was made in Moscow. “Adopted at the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935, the Popular Front tasked communists in the West with building ‘progressive’ coalitions,” Husock wrote. “The Popular Front sought to enlist Western artists and intellectuals, some of them not party members but ‘fellow travelers,’ to use art, literature, and music to insinuate the Marxist worldview into the broader culture. … It took a while for the Popular Front’s strategy to get results in popular music—and Pete Seeger was the catalyst.” Seeger joined the Communist Party in 1942 and, in time, learned to make his appeals to communism with subtlety. After the U.S. became a global stalwart in the fight against totalitarianism, “that pushed Seeger toward a more refined style.” Seeger himself recalled that “as the labor movement kicked out the radicals, I settled for ‘Let’s get America singing’.” Husock doesn’t let Dylan off the hook, writing a decade before Wald’s book and two decades before this year’s biopic that his “Blowin’ in the Wind,” has “unmistakable, though implicit, references” to America being “no more just, and probably less so, than other nations.” But Dylan wasn’t selling communism, Seeger was. None of this is evident in “A Complete Unknown.” But now that you’ve read this, it’s worth going to see it. The post Another Complete Unknown Is Pete Seeger’s Communism appeared first on The Daily Signal.

As the media switch from Regime to Resistance, so switches the way legislation is framed and reported to the American public. Viewers of CNN State of the Union witnessed such an example in real time, when host Jake Tapper and Senator Jim Banks (R-IN) discussed the renewal of portions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act: more commonly known as the Trump tax cuts.  Watch as Tapper tries to frame the renewal of the law’s income tax provisions, which will soon sunset, as tax cuts for the rich, only to get stuffed by Banks (click "expand" to view transcript): WATCH: Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) stuffs Jake Tapper's attempt at framing the renewal of the 2017 Taxes and Jobs Act with the "tax cuts for the wealthy" talking point. Denial of the premise is essential to engaging an adversarial Regime Media pic.twitter.com/g378MJwDqL — Jorge Bonilla (@BonillaJL) January 5, 2025 JAKE TAPPER: But you talked about the Trump tax cuts on working class Americans, but you're not…but the Trump tax cuts are not only for working class Americans. They're for everybody. Right? Anybody who pays taxes, including people in higher income brackets like you or me, theoretically. Right? I mean, so so is it- you're not only talking about having the ones for working class people in that bill. It's for all of them. JIM BANKS: It’s for everybody. Go back to 2017. I was a freshman member of the House and we passed the Trump tax cuts, making the corporate rates permanent.  TAPPER: Right.  BANKS: But not the not the rates on working class families and the individual rates, the pass through rates. That's small businesses. TAPPER: But that’s all people. That's all incomes. BANKS: Small businesses. I mean, that's what the reconciliation package has to include to make those tax cuts permanent. Otherwise, working class families are going to take a massive hit, a tax, they're going to have their taxes raised if we don't make those tax cuts… TAPPER: I'm not advocating one way or the other. BANKS: But I can't-  But it's an important point because I can't imagine that Democrats would vote against that. TAPPER: Well, I'm just- but my only point is that it's- it's all of the income tax cuts, not just the ones for working class people. BANKS: I don't think Democrats want to vote against… TAPPER: Okay. BANKS: …making tax cuts permanent on working class families. TAPPER: You take my…you take my… BANKS:  But I get your point. TAPPER: Okay. The interview opened with discussion of a possible reconciliation package to address President Donald Trump’s legislative priorities. Per NBC News: At a closed-door House Republican retreat Saturday morning, newly re-elected House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said President-elect Donald Trump was in favor of passing a single reconciliation bill that would address his priorities, including border security, energy and an extension of his signature 2017 tax law, two sources with direct knowledge told NBC News. Since the November election, when Republicans took back control of the White House and the Senate and retained control of the House, GOP lawmakers have publicly debated whether to attempt to pass one or two reconciliation bills to advance their agenda. Reconciliation allows Congress to pass party-line policies related to taxes and spending with simple majority votes, suspending the Senate’s usual 60-vote threshold needed to pass legislation. Reconciliation was the meat-and-potatoes of what Tapper discussed with Banks, but “tax cuts for the rich” was the frame. What often gets left out of discussion of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is that the income tax provisions were made to sunset in order to garner Democrat votes for passage, unlike the corporate rates which were permanent once the bill passed. Tapper took a couple of passes at the class warfare route, but was quickly shut down by Banks. In this exchange, Banks demonstrates that the best way to stuff these narratives is to reject the question’s initial premise. This won’t be the last time the media tries to inject a class warfare narrative when discussing the renewal of the Trump tax cuts, which benefited taxpayers across the entire income spectrum. But as Senator Banks demonstrates, there is no need to accept narrative as fact. Click “expand” to view the full relevant transcript as aired on CNN State of the Union on Sunday, January 5th, 2025: JAKE TAPPER: So in the past you have been critical, a bit, of the reconciliation process, which is- requires only 51 votes in the Senate instead of the 60 vote threshold. You have said that you've criticized Democrats for passing legislation, quote, “on entirely partisan lines”, unquote, and trying to, quote, “ram a partisan spending bill down the throats of the American people”, not talking about the substance of the bills, but the process. How is this different? JIM BANKS: Well, it's very different. If you go back to what the Democrats did with the Inflation Control Act, which actually increased inflation, and the American Rescue Plan, which was the Green New Deal on steroids, the biggest expansion of the federal government since LBJ that happened through the reconciliation process. Jake, I actually expect that there will be Democrats who will come on board to support these efforts to secure the border, to make the Trump tax cuts on working class families permanent, which is what we're talking about in the reconciliation bill. I expect after this last election, a historic mandate for President Trump winning the popular vote. Working class voters like my dad, a retired union factory worker that used to vote Democrat, who's now a Trump Republican- the Democrats lost voters like my dad because they're not focused on the issues that Donald Trump is. I expect there could be a number of Democrats who come on board with the reconciliation process and help- help pass it, because the American- that's what the American people want us to do. And if the Democrats ever want to be competitive again, I expect they'll focus on those issues. TAPPER: But you talked about the Trump tax cuts on working class Americans, but you're not…but the Trump tax cuts are not only for working class Americans. They're for everybody. Right? Anybody who pays taxes, including people in higher income brackets like you or me, theoretically. Right? I mean, so so is it- you're not only talking about having the ones for working class people in that bill. It's for all of them. BANKS: It’s for everybody. Go back to 2017. I was a freshman member of the House and we passed the Trump tax cuts, making the corporate rates permanent.  TAPPER: Right.  BANKS: But not the not the rates on working class families and the individual rates, the pass through rates. That's small businesses. TAPPER: But that’s all people. That's all incomes. BANKS: Small businesses. I mean, that's what the reconciliation package has to include to make those tax cuts permanent. Otherwise, working class families are going to take a massive hit, a tax, they're going to have their taxes raised if we don't make those tax cuts… TAPPER: I'm not advocating one way or the other. BANKS: But I can't-  But it's an important point because I can't imagine that Democrats would vote against that. TAPPER: Well, I'm just- but my only point is that it's- it's all of the income tax cuts, not just the ones for working class people. BANKS: I don't think Democrats want to vote against… TAPPER: Okay. BANKS: …making tax cuts permanent on working class families. TAPPER: You take my…you take my… BANKS:  But I get your point. TAPPER: Okay.  

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