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Thursday, April 18, 2024
Mike Johnson Foreign Aid Packages
18 minutes ago
Wake Up Right
Politics

Here’s What YOU Can Do About Speaker Johnson’s Betrayal of America.

Republican Speaker Mike Johnson is preparing to drop a massive foreign aid package, comprised mostly of money for Ukraine, that ignores the wishes of GOP voters and delivers a giant win to Joe Biden.

The details: The House Appropriations Committee released a memo yesterday unveiling three bills that Johnson will package into a single rule totaling $95 billion.

  • Ukraine gets $60.84 billion in taxpayer dollars to replenish weapons & services and fund U.S. military operations in the region.
  • Israel gets $26.38 billion to replenish the Iron Dome missile defense system and other defensive and offensive weapons.
  • Indo-Pacific gets $8.12 billion to build up our defensive and offensive capabilities in the region to counter China. This includes $2 billion for Taiwan.

Joe Biden immediately endorsed this plan.

The backstab: When Johnson became Speaker, he supported the position, widely held by Republican voters, that Congress should not allocate a single dollar for a foreign country until Joe Biden agreed to secure the border.

  • In January, Johnson said: “Before we even talk about Ukraine… We have to take care of our own house. We have to secure our own border before we talk about doing anything else.”

The pattern: Unfortunately, this foreign aid vote is not the first time Johnson has ignored the will of Republican voters.

  • He pushed FISA re-authorization, which allows the Biden Department of Justice to spy on American citizens without a warrant.
  • He allowed Congress to pass the Democrats’ spending bill.
  • He let Democrats raise the debt ceiling, digging us deeper into national debt.

What do Americans think? A new poll found that just 11 percent of Americans say Ukraine funding is more important than securing the border, while 50 percent put the border first.

Big picture: Senator Rand Paul sums up the situation best: “As I see it now, I’m not so sure there’s a difference between Mike Johnson being in charge and the Democrats being in charge.”

The House will vote on the foreign aid bill on Saturday. Readers are encouraged to call Speaker Johnson and politely let him know how they feel.

  •  D.C. office: 202-225-2777
  •  Louisiana office: 318-840-0309

This article is adapted from the free ‘Wake Up Right’ newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

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Republican Speaker Mike Johnson is preparing to drop a massive foreign aid package, comprised mostly of money for Ukraine, that ignores the wishes of GOP voters and delivers a giant win to Joe Biden. show more
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UK Taxpayers
44 minutes ago
Jack Montgomery
Politics
UK

Taxpayers Fund ‘Research’ on ‘Transphobia’ in Archaeology, Whiteness, and Gay Porn.

Taxpayers are funding researchers to produce extremist left-wing ‘academic’ work, including anti-“whiteness” projects and papers claiming archaeology is transphobic and proposals to reinvent the field as “fully transgender inclusive.”

One researcher at the University of York created a presentation titled Bones Don’t Care About Your Feelings: Challenging Transphobic Invocations of Archaeology in (Social) Media. He is receiving a stipend of £18,622 a year (~$23,205) from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), a government body funded by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.

Another UKRI-funded research project focused on archaeology and transgenderism seeks to “establish a framework for a fully transgender inclusive archaeology that tackles normative interpretations of the past and supports the transgender community in a period of heightened attacks in the present.” Its abstract pledges to build on “queer theories of gender” and “reframe archaeology as a safe, inclusive space.”

UKRI has been exposed as funding a variety of woke research projects of questionable value in recent days. Several anti-“whiteness” projects are being funded, including one titled The unbearable whiteness of class: towards an intersectional reading of poverty discourses in Brexit Britain, and another titled Bordering on whiteness: Exploring the racialised subjectivities of Italian women in post-Brexit London.

Some projects focus on sexual deviance rather than race, such as ‘Playing’ with Gay Sex: Exploring Sexual Play in Queer Pornographic Video Games Through Sexual Scripting and The Europe that Gay Porn Built — which received an astonishing £841,830 (~$1,048,330) in taxpayer funding.

A spokesman for UKRI insisted the government body “invests in a diverse research and innovation portfolio” after “a rigorous peer review process by relevant independent experts from across academia and business.”

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Taxpayers are funding researchers to produce extremist left-wing 'academic' work, including anti-"whiteness" projects and papers claiming archaeology is transphobic and proposals to reinvent the field as "fully transgender inclusive." show more
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Bidenomics
1 hour ago
Data
Economy
Election 2024

Over 50% Say Biden’s Economy is ‘Poor.’

More than half of Americans believe that Joe Biden’s economy is “poor” and less than a quarter believe it is good, according to a new poll from The New York Times/Siena.

The poll, conducted from April 7 to 11, found that 52 percent of Americans describe the current state of the nation’s economy as “poor.” Less than a quarter gave a positive description of the economy, with 17 percent describing it as “good” and just 4 percent describing it as “excellent.” Just over a quarter of respondents — 27 percent – described the economy as “fair.”

Additionally, the poll revealed that a substantial number of Americans are not happy with the direction the country is heading under Biden’s stewardship. Some 64 percent of respondents believe the nation is on the wrong track under President Biden’s leadership. Just 25 percent said the country is on the right track.

Biden’s handling of the economy has been a persistent weakness throughout his presidency. Serious levels of inflation persist as Americans struggle with rising living costs, and nearly all of the ‘new‘ jobs added to the economy under Biden’s watch are the result of individuals taking part-time work.

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More than half of Americans believe that Joe Biden's economy is "poor" and less than a quarter believe it is good, according to a new poll from The New York Times/Siena. show more
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2 hours ago
Election 2024

Biden, Panicking Over RFK, Wheels Out Kennedy Family Endorsements.

The Biden campaign is set to wheel out 15 endorsements from family members of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, as polling increasingly reveals RFK takes more votes from Joe Biden than Donald Trump. Siblings of RFK Jr. are set to endorse Joe Biden’s reelection bid on Thursday, including Kerry Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s younger sister.

“Daddy stood for equal justice, human rights, and freedom from want and fear. Just as President Biden does today,” she said of her father, Robert F. Kennedy Sr.

The Biden campaign has hired a team focused on seeing off the threat from RFK Jr., with the Democrats concerned he could act as a spoiler. Past polls have RFK Jr., performing better than any third-party candidate since Ross Perot in the 1990s, with his support pulled roughly equally from Biden and Trump supporters.

RFK recently announced left-wing multi-millionaire Nicole Shanahan as his Vice Presidential pick. Shanahan has donated millions to his campaign, which has been run by a former CIA operative.

RFK’s potential involvement in Presidential debates remains a concern for both major parties. He requires 15 percent of the vote in national polls, as well as securing his position on the ballot in enough states to prove electoral viability. He is currently short of these marks.

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The Biden campaign is set to wheel out 15 endorsements from family members of Robert F. Kennedy Jr, as polling increasingly reveals RFK takes more votes from Joe Biden than Donald Trump. Siblings of RFK Jr. are set to endorse Joe Biden's reelection bid on Thursday, including Kerry Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr's younger sister. show more
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Free Julian Assange
3 hours ago
Lawfare
UK

The Latest on Julian Assange.

The United States government has offered assurances to England’s High Court over Julian Assange, requested by judges after the WikiLeaks founder sought leave to appeal his extradition.

The court asked the U.S. to provide assurances the Australian would not be executed and afforded the same First Amendment protections as a U.S. citizen if extradited to stand trial. Assurances were sent before a Tuesday deadline, but Assange’s wife has complained they are riddled with “weasel words.”

“The United States has issued a non-assurance in relation to the First Amendment, and a standard assurance in relation to the death penalty,” she argued.

“It makes no undertaking to withdraw the prosecution’s previous assertion that Julian has no First Amendment rights because he is not a U.S. citizen. Instead, the U.S. has limited itself to blatant weasel words claiming that Julian can ‘seek to raise’ the First Amendment if extradited.”

She added that the U.S. note “does nothing to relieve our family’s extreme distress about [Assange’s] future – his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in US prison for publishing award-winning journalism.”

While the diplomatic note provided by the U.S. clearly states a “sentence of death will neither be sought nor imposed on Assange,” the language around the First Amendment seems more equivocal. It states only that he will have “the ability to raise and seek to rely upon” the First Amendment at trial but that deciding whether or not it applies “is exclusively within the purview of the U.S. courts.”

A hearing to debate whether or not the assurances meet the High Court’s requirements has been scheduled for May 20.

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The United States government has offered assurances to England's High Court over Julian Assange, requested by judges after the WikiLeaks founder sought leave to appeal his extradition. show more
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