'America First values are winning'

An eyewitness said the pilot 'wasn't flying straight to the ground' ahead of the crash

Lively's team celebrated this as a 'total victory and a complete vindication'

Leftist billionaire George Soros is in pursuit of the long-sought political “white whale” for Democrats: finally turning Texas blue. Soros is pouring millions into a super PAC called Texas Majority PAC to flip the state in the 2026 midterms and beyond. He donated $1 million this past April and $2.1 million in 2024.  Texas is the second-most populous state in the union with more than 30 million residents. Democrats have long suspected it could shift blue due to a rise in Democrat-supporting minority groups in the state, although President Donald Trump has raised a hurdle to that hope with his record support among minorities.  Soros’ move comes as the Republicans are in the midst of a heated primary challenge for one of Texas’ Senate seats between incumbent Republican Sen. John Cornyn and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a fellow Republican. Paxton is currently leading in several polls in the GOP primary race while simultaneously trailing Cornyn in hypothetical matchups against prominent Texas Democrats.  In 2018, Democrats shelled out more than $70 million in an attempt to unseat incumbent Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, by then-Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas. Meanwhile, Cruz marshaled more than $33 million in his defense. The flood of Democrat cash nearly succeeded, with Cruz winning by just 2.6 percentage points, or fewer than 215,000 votes. The election was the closest Senate race in Texas since 1978. Democrats have not won a statewide elective office in Texas since 1994.  In a hypothetical race against O’Rourke, who has not totally ruled out running again, Cornyn leads him 48% to 43%, while Paxton bests the Democrat 49% to 45%. For his part, Cruz has said he will not endorse a candidate in the primary, and Trump has yet to weigh in on the race. Cruz did endorse Cornyn back in 2020. Some Democrat strategists see making Texas a battleground state as essential in their comeback strategy for both the presidency and reclaiming majorities in both houses of Congress.  Katherine Fischer, the deputy executive director of Texas Majority PAC, told the Wall Street Journal, “If a win is on the table in 2026, we don’t want to leave it there by not being organized.” “There is no choice for Texas or for anyone else in the country who wants to see a Democrat in the White House after 2032 but to find a pathway through Texas,” Fischer continued. That’s because congressional reapportionment will occur after the decennial census in 2030. It will be an uphill battle, however, because Trump won Texas by more than 13 points. Texas is just one red state that has benefited from emigration of Republicans from blue states who could no longer take COVID-19 restrictions, high taxes, and a breakdown in law and order. Traditional Republican states in the southern U.S. including North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida have also seen a rapid increase in population moving from liberal states like California, New York, and New Jersey. A recent data analysis by the liberal Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found that Democrats could lose as many as 12 congressional seats after the 2030 census as a result of changes in voting and Republicans migrating to Sunbelt states. The post Soros-Backed Group Again Aiming to Turn Texas Blue appeared first on The Daily Signal.

As Los Angeles rioters engaged in violence against law enforcement, while others blocked traffic or burned cars, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., focused her attention on taunting the deployed National Guard troops in the city. “What are you all going to do? Are you going to shoot some kids?” Waters, 86, who has represented part of Los Angeles in Congress since 1991, shouted at the troops in a video widely circulated on social media.  “Are you going to shoot an elected official?” the firebrand Democrat asked. “If you shoot me, you better shoot straight.” She also said state and city officials “should be on the streets” in Los Angeles to protest President Donald Trump and the detention of illegal aliens by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Los Angeles Police Chief Jim McDonnell said protests against enforcement actions by ICE turned violent and resulted in 27 people being arrested on charges that included throwing Molotov cocktails and rocks, and shooting fireworks at police officers. Some also set a self-driving car on fire.  Waters, a longtime critic of President Donald Trump, directed her ire at the National Guard troops that Trump deployed.  “I don’t know why you are in my city. The governor was not contacted,” Waters shouted. “This is Trump and his outrageous attempt to not only target our sanctuary city, but to frighten us and intimidate us.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, objected to Trump sending National Guard troops to the state without consulting him.  Waters urged the guard troops to defy Trump.  “This is wrong, and I hope that none of you will use those guns to shoot anybody. There is no reason to shoot anybody,” Waters shouted. “Don’t allow them to make your service a service where you are killing people. Don’t do it. Defy them. Don’t shoot those guns.” After shouting at the troops, she spoke to reporters, saying, “I’m sure they have orders to shoot and kill.” “My message to Donald Trump is that you are a cruel human being, abusing the poorest people in the land, the most vulnerable people in the land to promote your policy,” the congresswoman said in the press gaggle. Waters said illegal immigrants should be “given consideration for citizenship.” “They should be given the opportunity to tell their story, who they are, and why they are here and ask the United States to please do what the Constitution allows us to do, and that is, give them consideration for having citizenship here,” she said. The longtime lawmaker also said that all elected officials in Los Angeles and California should be in Los Angeles in solidarity with the anti-ICE protests. “All of the elected officials in this city should be on the street, the mayor should be on the street, the City Council should be on the street. Everybody should be on the street,” Waters said. “All of the state elected officials should be on the streets. All of us in Congress” The post ‘If You Shoot Me, You Better Shoot Straight’: Maxine Waters Taunts National Guard in L.A. appeared first on The Daily Signal.

A former top deputy to Lois Lerner, the former director of the IRS Exempt Organizations division and central figure in the 2013 IRS targeting scandal, now runs one of the primary operating divisions of the IRS, according to a report from the American Accountability Foundation.  The report alleges that Holly Paz, “seems to have been rewarded by the Biden Administration for her partisan loyalty with one of the IRS’ most powerful positions.” Though Paz was placed on administrative leave for her involvement in the 2013 targeting scandal, she is now the agency’s commissioner of the Large Business & International Division (LB&I), according to the IRS website and a publicly available IRS organization chart.  American Accountability Foundation (AAF) President Thomas Jones previously wrote a letter to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that called for Paz’s termination in March. “Paz has proved undeserving of the honor to serve the American public,” Jones wrote, adding that the organization “implores the Trump administration to root out any anti-conservative partisan bias at the IRS.” Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the former chairman of House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that oversaw the House investigation of the scandal, told The Daily Signal, “I’m calling on President Trump to finish the job of cleaning house at yet another government agency and ensuring that it serves the American people first and always.” “Individuals like this have no business holding positions of trust, particularly at the IRS, where the Obama and Biden administrations weaponized the agency and abused its power,” Issa added. “Our investigations revealed that literally thousands of innocent Americans were targeted by the Lerner/Paz IRS and denied their fair access to our nonprofit laws and even our democracy.” AAF’s Jones also said in the March letter that the organization’s “first finding of this investigation is that the former top deputy to Louis Lerner — Holly Paz — regained a high-ranking position within the IRS during the Biden Administration,” and promised to “continue to investigate IRS leadership.” The results of that investigation into Paz, obtained by The Daily Signal, found that, despite her controversial past as a high-ranking IRS official, which included targeting “tea party” nonprofits, contradictory testimony to Congress, and administrative leave, Paz remains LB&I commissioner even under the Trump administration.  The exact date of Paz’s appointment to the position remains unclear because the IRS did not reply to The Daily Signal’s request for clarification; however, Paz identifies herself as the acting commissioner of LB&I in a January 2023 blog post on the IRS website. The Daily Signal also attempted to contact Paz through the IRS for comment. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration released a report on May 14, 2013 that suggested the IRS inappropriately reviewed and delayed applications from conservative nonprofit organizations for tax exempt status, especially groups that had “Tea Party,” “Patriots” or “9/12” in their names and focused on issues of government debt and government spending.  “The IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions instead of indications of potential political campaign intervention,” the report said. The practice started in 2010, but the public increasingly became aware of controversial actions undertaken by the IRS from late 2011 and throughout 2012. Attempting to preempt the bombshell report, Lerner publicly acknowledged, at a conference hosted by the American Bar Association, that the IRS had engaged in this activity during the 2012 election cycle—information that she had previously failed to divulge to Congress.  Paz served as the IRS liaison with the Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration probe in 2012 and was one of the IRS officials who executed IRS directives to delay these applications. Paz told Issa that she “reviewed… between 20 or 30” cases involving these conservative groups flagged for further scrutiny.  During their investigation, the oversight committee found that Paz ordered IRS officials working out of the Cincinnati branch to “hold” cases involving tea party groups. Holds placed on processing dozens of these cases lasted more than a year.  Nevertheless, Paz maintained in her May 21, 2013 testimony that IRS officials used “tea party” as shorthand for any group engaged in extensive political activity. “It was really just an efficient way to refer to this issue; that [the officers] all understood the real issue was campaign intervention,” Paz told the committee. “It’s like calling soda ‘Coke’ or, you know, tissue ‘Kleenex.’ They knew what they meant, and the issue was campaign intervention,” Paz later added.  Paz also told the committee that the officials might not be aware their actions could be read as political “because [the officers] are so apolitical.”  “They are not as sensitive as we would like them to be as to how things might appear,” Paz said.  The oversight committee, however, later pressed Paz on statements that appeared to contradict what the committee found in its investigation. “Since your transcribed interview with Committee staff on May 21, 2013, the Committee has uncovered additional information that appears to contradict your testimony in several areas relevant to the Committee’s investigation,” Issa and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, then an oversight subcommittee chairman, wrote in an August 2013 letter to Paz. The committee claimed, for example, that multiple Cincinnati employees claimed to understand ”Tea Party” not as a generic term, but a term that targeted conservative groups.  After Paz was placed on administrative leave, her attorney Roel Campos claimed she was “the hero” of the targeting controversy. “Holly Paz did nothing wrong and in fact she was an ideal employee, an ideal public servant,” Campos told The Wall Street Journal. In later legal proceedings, Paz’s remarks seem to suggest there would not be a legal basis to deny these groups tax exempt status. During a 2017 deposition that was unsealed in 2022, Paz was asked by an attorney if the law “would warrant the recognition of [tax] exemption,” despite their political activity. “At the time, my thinking was that the majority of the (c)(4) applications, while they may have indicated some amount of political activity, that we would not have enough basis to make a determination that that would be their primary activity and deny them exempt status,” Paz replied.  To which the attorney asked, “And, therefore, they would receive an approval or recognition of exemption?”  “Correct,” Paz asserted.  Paz’s deposition, as well as a deposition of Lerner, were sealed by a judge in 2017 after the pair claimed to have received death threats.  Furthermore, in NorCal Tea Party Patriots, et al. v. The Internal Revenue Service, et al., the NorCal Tea Party Patriots discovered that Lerner and Paz were involved in email correspondence about right-wing groups applying for tax-exempt status after the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which held that corporate spending on political messaging cannot be limited under the First Amendment. Lerner emailed Paz and others the following:  Tea Party Matter very dangerous…This could be the vehicle to go to court on the issue of whether Citizen’s United [sic] overturning the ban on corporate spending applies to tax exempt rules. Counsel and Judy Kindell need to be in on this one please needs to be in this. Cincy should probably NOT have these cases—Holly please see what exactly they have please.  Lerner also encouraged IRS officials to try and find reasons beyond political activity to deny the Tea Party applicants’ desired tax-exempt status. “Even if we go with a [501(c)(4)] on the Tea Party cases, they may want to argue they should be [501(c)(3)s] so it would be great if we can get there without saying the only reason they don’t get [501(c)(3) status] is political activity,” a 2011 email from Lerner to her deputies said. The post Former Lois Lerner Deputy Involved in Obama Era IRS Scandal That Targeted Conservatives Leads Major IRS Division Under Trump appeared first on The Daily Signal.

'Oh, Dear, Muffin! Whatever Shall We Do?' The Trauma Of Martha's Vineyard v Illegals Continues

The legacy media’s mean girls desperately hyped up the scuffle between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk all weekend, hoping they’ll be saved by the bell (or in this case, the feud).  They figured there couldn’t be a more perfect time to find a distraction that sticks for longer than five minutes, after being exposed for covering up President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline.  Even his former spokeswoman, Karine Jean Pierre is trying to distance herself from the dwindling Democrat party. Of course their media mouthpieces figured they could cheer on Republican infighting as a means to divide and conquer their opponents.  Unfortunately for them, their smokescreen did, in fact, only last for five minutes. The leftist media, as usual, shot themselves in the foot this weekend, hopelessly explaining away the violent Los Angeles riots committed by their loyal followers.  Tim Graham, the executive editor of MRC's NewsBusters and I joined The Chris Salcedo show on Newsmax to discuss.

A new academic paper defending PBS as trustworthy, “An island of trust: public broadcasting in the United States,” is making the public media rounds, and the three academics who authored it for the Journal of Communication penned a related explainer op-ed for Current, a sort of trade publication for public media: “Study shows Americans trust PBS precisely because it’s publicly funded.” The left-leaning Harvard-affiliated Nieman Journalism Lab found the piece so vital that it quickly reprinted it. with the tag “This opinion piece was first published at Current, a news site that covers the world of public media intensely. It’s essential reading for this season of attacks.” The Nieman Lab version is illustrated with Lego versions of Sesame Street characters, which is an ironic acknowledgement that such purported jewels in public television’s sacred crown can fund themselves via product licensing without having to dip into the public treasury. After noting Trump’s executive order defunding PBS and NPR, the authors claimed that the public media congressional hearings in March “followed in the footsteps of a longer history of Republican criticism of U.S. public media’s alleged left-leaning bias and “woke” agenda, the latter often illustrated through reference to children’s programming like Sesame Street.” While anti-PBS voices have “ideologically inspired beliefs,” normal Americans trust PBS “immensely.” Contrary to these ideologically inspired beliefs, our empirical research, recently published in the Journal of Communication -- the flagship journal of the communication studies discipline -- finds that Americans from across the political spectrum do not subscribe to the notion of a biased PBS. More than this, we found that those who watch PBS trust it immensely for several complementary reasons. So “those who watch PBS” trust it. Doesn’t that sound redundant? Liberals love using polls -- and NOT content analysis -- to make the case that PBS is somehow fair and balanced.  The paper found three reasons to trust PBS, including the fact that “viewers say PBS is an excellent value for public dollars" and that "viewers trust PBS because of its content, notably news and children’s programming." Included in that last point was the finding that “PBS audiences evaluate its news as unbiased.” Wouldn't you like to meet these people? The third point involved “nostalgia” around PBS’s educational programming. “Many other respondents noted that Mister Rogers was a major reason they trust PBS, a phenomenon that we dubbed ‘the Mister Rogers Effect.’” (Nostalgia indeed: The last episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired in 2001.) But the trio’s patina of political objectivity began to chip, as a standard liberal argument surfaced. Given that the U.S. spends only $1.40 per capita on public media, compared to over $100 per capita in the U.K. and Norway and compared to, for example, the $849 billion spent on the military (almost $2,700 per capita), the high levels of trust in PBS from across the political spectrum suggests a tremendous value for very little money. The article concluded by calling PBS “a vital component of our democracy.” But Robby Soave at Reason magazine dispatched the findings quickly and neatly under the pungent headline "If Viewers Love PBS So Much, Let Them Pay for It." One issue: The study measured trust in PBS, not among all Americans, but among viewers of PBS. That was the sample: survey respondents who themselves watch PBS. This is hardly a surprising finding -- and is not whatsoever grounds for public funding. Regular viewers of Fox News, for instance, place very high levels of trust in Fox News. Does that mean all Americans do? Does it mean that Fox News should receive public funding? One doubts that the researchers would agree with such an argument….

We’ve got a new, fun interactive series called Worst Media Take of the Week, where you — our loyal NewsBusters visitors and MRC supporters — get to vote on which leftist journalist or celebrity had the worst media take of the week.  Much appreciation to all who voted last week via NewsBusters and the MRC’s various social media sites (Facebook, Instagram and X.com).   The results of the Worst Media Take of the Week are in and the winner is… Keith Olbermann! The former MSNBC’s Countdown host won with 56 percent of the vote! Olbermann took first place for blaming the terrorist attack in Colorado on the President: “The blood of Boulder, Colorado, is on the hands of Donald Trump.” PBS host Christiane Amanpour finished in second place with 35 percent of the vote. Washington Post associate editor/PBS contributor Jonathan Capehart third with 9 percent.  The following is a montage of all the nominees:      WINNER (56 percent of the vote)   Keith Olbermann: “The Blood” of Terror Attack Is “On the Hands of Donald Trump”  “You just round up all the people who you think look like threats. That is remigration. That is ethnic cleansing. That is Donald Trump’s presidency. And that, because you no longer bother to look for people who are guilty or who might be planning heinous acts, you just look for their skin tone and their names, that is why the blood of Boulder, Colorado, is on the hands of Donald Trump.”— Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann on his Countdown podcast, June 3.   SECOND PLACE (35 percent of the vote)   Christiane Amanpour: “I Literally Prepared to Go to America” As If It Was “North Korea” “When I went to Harvard to give this speech, and it was just a few days ago, last week. I must say I was afraid. I’m a foreigner, I don’t have a green card, I’m not an American citizen, I’m fairly prominent, and I literally prepared to go to America as if I was going to North Korea.”— PBS host Christiane Amanpour on her podcast Christiane Amanpour Presents: The Ex Files with Jamie Rubin, June 3.   THIRD PLACE (9 percent of the vote)   Jonathan Capehart: Shouldn’t We Be Worried About Trump’s “Mental Acuity?” “If President Trump is mentally anguished over the editing of a television [60 Minutes with Kamala Harris] interview, why shouldn’t I be concerned about his mental acuity in the office right now and all the crazy stuff he’s doing?” — Washington Post associate editor/PBS contributor Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC’s The Weekend, June 1.   Thanks again to all who participated!    Funded by James P. Jimirro