'Many 'green' subsidies are designed to reward political allies'

"Squatter's rights has been around for many, many years"

'She doesn't have very strong convictions'

The new season starts on Oct. 27

Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz conducted their first joint interview with CNN host Dana Bash Aug. 29

He's not a real person. He's a modern day minstrel show in reverse. 

How many times have you heard a song for the first time and said to yourself or to a friend “holy smokes, that sounds like so and so singing backing vocals.” That moment is always enhanced even further when you find out you’re correct. It’s usually a mind-blowing moment to hear someone famous singing Back In vocals. From the unmistakable harmonies of rock giants like Elton John and David Bowie to the raw, soulful blends that only artists like Stevie Nicks or John Lennon could deliver, these tracks go beyond the ordinary. It’s more than just a familiar voice tucked The post 10 Classic Rock Songs Featuring Famous Singers on Backing Vocals appeared first on ClassicRockHistory.com.

Nothing illustrates the grave price of the Biden-Harris administration’s immigration policy like the preventable crimes that occur with dismaying frequency across the country. At the border, Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security has for nearly four years been catching, then almost immediately releasing into the U.S. interior, thousands of young illegal alien men weekly. It has also let in a million more using immigration “parole,” under the pretext that they are all fleeing persecution in their home countries and will apply for asylum. Yet the vast majority are economic migrants who likely will not qualify for asylum. Some of these men have violent criminal histories and affiliations. But which ones? And what did they do? Because the U.S. government has no regular access to the criminal records of the countries they come from, no one knows. On top of the adult releases and parolees, over half a million unaccompanied alien children have been allowed in on Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas’ watch. According to Judicial Watch, “the overwhelming majority … are not really children but rather young adults in their teens, and some have criminal histories.” Nearly three-quarters of them are over 14, and two-thirds are male. The latest example of what all that can lead to comes from Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver—which is for immigration purposes a “sanctuary” city in a “sanctuary” state and thus an ideal environment for foreign criminals to thrive. Venezuelans make up about 40% of the migrant arrivals to Denver. The almost 20,000 Venezuelan newcomers since December 2022 give plenty of cover for a few dozen or a few hundred thugs to blend in. In Aurora, members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have reportedly taken over an apartment complex called The Edge at Lowry. According to apartments.com, The Edge is “perfectly situated for work or play.” They might want to revise that. The Edge was the site of a shootout a few weeks ago, and this clip from local news channel KDVR shows armed men—not law enforcement—walking around the complex this week. Colorado allows “open carry” of firearms for people over 18 unless they are convicted felons. But under federal law, it is illegal for an alien “illegally or unlawfully in the United States” to possess “any firearm or ammunition.” That prohibition applies to the millions of illegal aliens DHS has released at the border and the roughly 2 million “gotaways” who sneaked in without being caught. However, it is uncertain whether the prohibition would apply to the million more let in under Biden’s made-up, legally dubious mass-parole programs. Paroled aliens are in a sort of legal limbo. They are not “admitted” under immigration law, but the Biden administration has given them the patina of being here “lawfully,” until their parole is revoked or their asylum has been approved or denied by the immigration court. But I doubt these legal niceties matter much to the boys of Tren de Aragua. They seem to have acquired a critical mass at The Edge that allows them control, and they do what they want. Meanwhile, some of the complex’s hapless other residents are desperately trying to leave. A report in June estimated that Denver has spent up to $340 million so far in costs for shelter, education, health care, and other support for the 42,000 released, paroled, or other inadmissible aliens who’ve arrived since 2022. There was $48 million in uncompensated care for 16,000 emergency room visits by uninsured illegal aliens. There was $14,000 for each of the 15,725 new students in Denver schools. There were millions more to provide free housing, job training, food, and other services through the Denver Asylum Seekers Program. Denver had to cut millions from other programs to pay for it all, including from the fire and police departments. With a population of 713,000, Denver has taken in about one inadmissible migrant per 16 residents. In New York, by comparison, it’s more like one in 45. Denver Mayor Mike Johnston has blamed his city’s problem on Texas and geography. “We are the closest, cheapest bus ticket from El Paso. It’s the cheapest ticket for [Texas] Gov. [Greg] Abbott and anyone else to buy, so they just come to Denver,” he told a Denver news outlet in January. But it’s more likely the city’s known sanctuary policy, generous benefits, and lax law enforcement that are attracting so many people. Word gets around. But Denver is not alone. In New York City, organized gang robberies, shootings, intramigrant violence, and assaults on police all undermine local safety while Mayor Eric Adams doles out millions in shady, no-bid contracts for housing, catering, security, and other services for his city’s extra-legal migrant population. In Philadelphia, which has seen 183 homicides so far in 2024, an MS-13 gang member from El Salvador named Fredy Antonio Amaya-Marin recently started shooting at passing cars. He was deported back home in 2007. We don’t know when he came back, but sneaking across the U.S. border as a “gotaway” has never been easier than in the last few years. In Chicago, the Standard Club migrant shelter houses Carlos Mavarez Viloria, who has been arrested 10 times since arriving in the U.S. a year ago for theft, drug possession, attempted robbery, trespassing, assaulting the police, and more. The Standard is also home to Pedro Izquiel Omana, who was charged with shoplifting from three local stores. But maybe Chicago’s homegrown gang violence is so bad that illegal alien crime is barely noticed. Sen. Chris Murphy and other Biden administration allies maintain that illegal aliens commit crimes at lower rates than natives. This claim is based on intellectual sand. First, it conflates legal and illegal immigrants, which are not the same. For one thing, legal immigrants have to provide a police report from their home country showing whether they have a criminal record to get a visa, but released and paroled aliens don’t. Second, the myth cites FBI crime trackers to which a third of American cities don’t even report their crime statistics. Third, no state other than Texas records the immigration status of all accused perpetrators in the criminal process, so any conclusions for the rest are guesswork. In any case, the American people can see with their own eyes that releasing hundreds of thousands of unvetted young men into the country is a high-risk gamble. It’s important to remember that when you hear about the supposedly great bipartisan border bill that the Senate voted down this year. Democrats continue to tout this bill when talking about wanting to get tough on the border, now that it’s getting close to November. The Senate bill was nothing like HR 2, which passed the House in 2023 and would have bolstered border security and shut down the administration’s ability to release and parole inadmissible aliens. But the unacceptably weak Senate bill would have permanently institutionalized that practice, both through release at the border and parole, allowing even more inadmissible aliens with unknown pasts into the United States every year—almost two million more. The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more. Read Other BorderLine Columns: Biden Administration’s Latest Illegal Immigration Scam How Ruling Elites Continue to Stifle Debate Over Immigration Policy NJ Town Prioritizes Protecting Illegal Aliens From ICE Over Public Safety A Successful US Immigration Policy Would Send Venezuelans Home to Rebuild Here’s the Chart on Illegal Immigration That Trump Was Talking About When Shot The post Despite Tough Talk, Biden-Harris Admin Rolls Out Red Carpet for Illegal Alien Gangs: The BorderLine appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A Christian infantry officer is now being punished by the Idaho Army National Guard for using his First Amendment right to speak out against the LGBT ideology that he believes is harming children. In 2023, the officer posted about some of his deeply held beliefs on his private social media account while running for political office in his “private capacity.” According to Liberty Counsel, the legal group defending him, his posts included statements “against graphic, obscene children’s books in a library and the promotion of a ‘drag kids’ event and drag queens in schools.” He also posted statements such as ‘No child is born in the wrong body,’ males should not be competing in female sports, and against the medical mutilation of gender-confused children. His concern over LGBT indoctrination resulted in “a subordinate senior enlisted man who claims to be homosexual” filing “a formal discrimination military complaint against the officer” for sharing his beliefs. The complaint accused the infantry officer’s posts of showing “just how much [the officer] truly hates the LGBTQ community.” His complaint continued: I feel like I have been discriminated against because of my sexual orientation, [which] has caused a hostile work environment. … I am deeply concerned about the hostile and prejudiced behavior I have experienced, which has adversely affected my well-being, work performance, and overall sense of belonging within the workplace/organization. I must emphasize that this has created an uncomfortable, unsafe, and a hostile work environment, making it increasingly challenging for me to perform my duties effectively. With the active ties to the extremist/hate group, it makes me feel threatened and unsafe. All the posts on his social media and how public he is about his hate toward individuals like me and my family. Not just for me, but for my husband and my child. As a result of this complaint, the infantry officer was removed from command by the Idaho Army National Guard, “then illegally pressured … to resign without benefit of any counsel or notice.” However, he chose to rescind his notice shortly after he sought help from Liberty Counsel. As they summarized, “[A]s a Christian, the officer believes all people are made in God’s image and have inherent dignity and are worthy of respect. He is committed to serving those under his command, regardless of political or religious disagreements, and would give his life in defense of his state and nation.” Additionally, Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver stated: [Idaho] Gov. Brad Little must ensure that the Idaho Army National Guard upholds federal and state law and protects the free speech of enlisted personnel. This discrimination against an officer based on a frivolous complaint must be addressed and his record cleared and career restored. To provide further detail, Liberty Counsel’s Associate Vice President of Legal Affairs Daniel Schmid joined Wednesday’s episode of “Washington Watch.” According to Schmid, “[I]mmediately upon receiving the complaint, some of the superiors in [the officer’s] chain of command brought him in and said, ‘You will resign, or we’ll make this ugly.’ Those were the words to him. They forced him to resign without counsel, without the presence of counsel, and without advice of counsel.” Schmid went on to explain how “the complaint was not based on anything he did as a commanding officer.” It was about “a speech that he made outside of the military context, in the context of a political campaign. … He was making statements on various issues in the culture today, from a religious perspective, [and] the First Amendment affords him that right.” And yet, his statements are now “the subject of an investigation that’s ongoing even to this day.” According to Schmid, this case is about making “sure that the individuals who sign up to defend our liberties, our constitutional rights, are [also] entitled to those same rights”—specifically, he clarified, the First Amendment. “You don’t surrender your constitutional rights or your statutory rights under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and others just because you sign up for military service.” In the case of this officer, Schmid contended that he “was entitled to political speech.” He was entitled to hold religious values and to espouse those values in life and in his speech. He didn’t surrender those. He’s entitled to the same Constitution that he swore an oath to defend, and we ought to stand up and defend him. But it’s also a fight for all Americans, guest host and former Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., emphasized, since this case demonstrates a clear “disregard for the law.” Not to mention, he added, this isn’t the first time an instance such as this has occurred. Schmid agreed. “That’s the sad part,” he sighed. “Because we’ve seen this before,” referring to how the military dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic with “the attempted purge of religious adherents for the COVID vaccine mandates. … [T]here was just a blatant disregard for the law in that realm as well.” He continued, “disturbingly, in the current administration, we see an open disregard for people of faith, for those who espouse conservative views.” In this “particular complaint,” the concerns that people of faith are being targeted become further justified because, as Schmid explained, there was “a reference in the investigation to a Department of Defense instruction, which … we termed … as an attempt to purge conservatives from the ranks of the military.” As Schmid went on to argue, the instruction that claimed to “root out extremism … was written so broadly” that it can easily be applied to anyone who chooses to espouse their views in response to the current political climate—specifically, views that are Christian and conservative. Schmid contended, “[U]nder the current administration, it seems [they] don’t want those guys in the military service. [They’ll] purge them by virtue of vaccine mandates, or [they’ll] purge them by virtue of … their social media. … It’s astounding what’s taking place in the military right now.” He added, “[T]hese are our heroes. These are the ones who signed up to defend us. And they’re entitled to the same protections that you and I are. And we should make sure that they receive them.” As Hice concluded, “[S]tanding for this infantry officer” is “standing on behalf of every one of us.” Originally published at WashingtonStand.com The post ‘You Will Resign, or We’ll Make This Ugly’: Idaho National Guardsman Punished for Biblical Values appeared first on The Daily Signal.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. “Non-crime hate incident” (NCHI) recording is about to come back with a vengeance in the UK. The recently-elected Labour government has decided to reverse the previous cabinet’s decision to stop wasting police time by having them report such huge numbers of these, often in reality trivial events. However, even before this policy u-turn engineered by Labour, there were already 12,340 NCHI reports in the first half of the year, rights group Big Brother Watch revealed. The now former Conservative government hardly put its foot down against such a “granular” (and some would say, absurd) way of policing people’s behavior, that wouldn’t sit oddly with an Orwell novel. The Conservatives’ solution was to tell the police to report only what they viewed as real risks that could escalate into significant harm – a definition already clear as mud, one might say. Now, Labour is happy to announce that they are reversing even that attempt at toning down the practice, and the spin to justify this latest decision is that it is needed to “monitor” antisemitic and anti-Islamic “non crime incidents.” Other communities are not mentioned. This appears to be one of the “band-aid solutions” applied to recent serious rioting in the country, and the UK government didn’t forget to reassure citizens that the right to free speech will – somehow – be preserved in the process. Just to illustrate what type of “events” the police include in their NCHI reporting – the UK press mentions a case where “a woman said children had used chalk on the pavement outside her home, claiming she was targeted as she was not from the UK.” In another case, somebody’s “emotional distress” because they were removed from a WhatsApp group was also reported as a “non-crime hate incident.” However, trying to whittle down this type of “HCHI spamming” to what could reasonably be treated as a threat has now failed. Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the new approach would be that of “zero tolerance.” And – likely of thousands upon thousands of reports, including distinctly dubious ones, every month. Big Brother Watch noted that in addition to children playing with chalk on sidewalks, “sticking flags on poles” also featured among NCHI reports in the past period. “Police should protect free speech and privacy by only putting details on file only when necessary,” the group recommended. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Free Speech Is on the Line As UK Revives Controversial Non Crime Hate Reports appeared first on Reclaim The Net.