Tag: democrats

Oregon lawmakers advance bill to limit federal use of National Guard

Oregon lawmakers are moving to restrict the federal government’s authority over the state’s National Guard despite a surge of violent anti-ICE protests, particularly in Portland.

Three Democratic state representatives introduced legislation that would block any deployment of the Oregon National Guard that would hinder its ability to respond to state emergencies such as wildfires. The bill also outlines the specific duties the Guard can and cannot be assigned. The proposal comes in response to President Donald Trump’s move to federalize the National Guard in California to help protect law enforcement amid anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles.

“Deploying the military against our country’s citizens is an affront to our democratic principles,” said Representative Dacia Grayber, one of the sponsors of the bill, in a statement. “Ensuring that the Guard can only be mobilized in keeping with their congressionally-authorized functions is a common-sense safeguard to ensure separation of responsibility between our military and our local law enforcement.”

The bill passed the House Rules Committee on Tuesday, though Republican House Leader Christine Drazan voted against it, saying she wanted to consult with the caucus, according to KATU. The bill now heads to the full House to be voted on.

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AIPAC Demands Democrats “Stand With Israel” on Iran

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) has been furiously urging House Democrats to release messages of steadfast support for Israel in its war with Iran, the Prospect and Drop Site News have learned, even as bipartisan lawmakers come together on a War Powers Act resolution to prevent U.S. troops or funds being used in yet another Middle East conflagration.

One member relayed that a colleague had received literally 100 phone calls from members of AIPAC and its allied pressure groups. AIPAC wants House Democratic members to state explicitly that they “stand with Israel” in its actions against Iran aimed at destroying the Islamic Republic’s nuclear capability, and add that Iran “must never have a nuclear weapon.”

In addition, AIPAC has taken particular pains to denigrate the moderate pro-Israel group J Street, both in private conversations with members of Congress and in public, picking a fight aimed at blocking any Democrats from using J Street as cover to deviate from AIPAC’s maximalist position. “They’re worried their members in Congress may start to shift toward J Street and they’re trying to head that off,” said an aide to one Democrat.

“I did see that AIPAC took issue with my statement,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington state. “They were taking on J Street for endorsing me, which was ridiculous.” To get a sense of how extreme AIPAC’s demands are, note that J Street’s own statement merely calls for diplomacy while still supporting Israel. “We urge the Trump Administration to meaningfully pursue a diplomatic resolution to this conflict as quickly as possible while making clear the US will do what is necessary to defend Israel and US troops from retaliation,” the statement read.

AIPAC issued the same tweet in response to any statement that fell short of its expectations, such as one by Rep. Greg Casar of Texas, which called for a diplomatic resolution: “Consistent pattern: J Street endorsees issue anti-Israel statements. @jstreetdotorg is many things, but it’s not pro-Israel.”

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The $96 Billion Lie: How Liberal Economists Manipulate Immigration Statistics to Hide the Truth About America’s Job Crisis

An economic analysis reveals how selective statistics are used to portray illegal immigration as beneficial while obscuring its true impact on American workers.

For years, liberal advocacy groups and complicit media outlets have pushed a narrative that sounds almost too good to be true: illegal immigrants are contributing $96 billion annually in taxes while maintaining higher employment rates than native-born Americans. Like most things that sound too good to be true, this claim crumbles under basic economic scrutiny.

The recent surge in claims about immigrant “tax contributions” and “employment rates” represents a sophisticated misinformation campaign. The cornerstone of pro-illegal immigration propaganda is the claim that undocumented immigrants pay $96 billion in taxes annually. This figure, popularized by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) and parroted by countless media outlets, is a masterpiece of statistical deception.

The $96 billion figure lumps together sales taxes paid by everyone, excise taxes on gasoline and utilities, property taxes supposedly “indirectly paid through rent”, which is an economic fallacy, and a small fraction of actual income taxes.

Advocates then present this mix as if undocumented immigrants are dutifully filing tax returns and contributing to Social Security like law-abiding citizens.

They are not.

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Indicted Atlantic City Mayor Wins Democratic Primary By Over 1,000 Votes

It’s only fitting that corruption pays off in a town that was bankrolled by the mob…

Atlantic City Mayor Marty Small is, to put it gently, in legal hot water. Facing criminal charges related to child abuse and witness tampering, Small is heading toward a July 2025 trial in a courtroom rather than a campaign trail.

And yet, none of that seemed to matter to Democratic primary voters in Atlantic City, according to WPUR.

In what might be the most on-brand moment for Atlantic City politics, Small not only won his primary — he cruised.

The report says that he beat challenger Bob McDevitt by over 1,000 votes (2,683 to 1,580 at last count), Small proved that being under indictment is apparently not a dealbreaker in local elections. If anything, it might just be a résumé booster.

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Ivy League Researchers Scaremonger About GOP Health Policy But Say Nothing About Similar Democrat Plans

Ivy League faculty members have a leftist bias — would you believe it?

That sarcastic conclusion comes from the latest example of rhetorical scaremongering over the budget reconciliation bill being considered by Congress. When Republican lawmakers decide to scale back health care benefits, the professoriate loudly proclaims that people in their legions will die. But when Democrat lawmakers do the same thing, these same commentators decide to join the Witness Protection Program.

Deaths Metric

On June 3, a series of researchers affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and the Yale School of Public Health released a letter regarding the House-passed budget reconciliation bill. In it, they claimed that several specific provisions in the bill “would result in more than 42,500 deaths annually.” They further claimed that allowing enhanced Obamacare subsidies to expire at year’s end, as they are scheduled to do under current law, “will cause an additional 8,811 deaths,” meaning that “altogether, we project that these changes will result in over 51,000 preventable deaths.”

The letter leaves much to unpack. For starters, the idea that anyone can know with any level of certainty the precise number of deaths attributable to a specific policy — not 8,810 or 8,812, mind you, but exactly 8,811 — is absurd on its face. If the researchers know the specific number of people who will die due to one policy change, then why not tell us the names of said individuals, and where, when, and how those people will die, while they’re at it?

Second, the expiration of the enhanced subsidies at year’s end comes because of Democrats, not Republicans. When they controlled Congress and the presidency, Democrats passed provisions letting these subsidies expire. Democrats fully expected future Congresses to extend them but wanted to try to disguise their true cost, just like they tried to hide the full $5 trillion cost of the failed Build Back Bankrupt legislation. They should neither complain nor blame Republicans for not wanting to fix or extend Democrats’ bad law. (The same applies to Republicans when it comes to tax gimmicks they might include in reconciliation.)

Ideological Bias

But the real “tell” regarding this letter comes in the form of a question the researchers didn’t answer. I emailed the lead authors, Rachel Werner at Penn and Alison Galvani from Yale, with a simple question: “Do you plan on conducting similar analyses on the number of deaths associated with Gov. [Gavin] Newsom’s proposal to freeze enrollment of undocumented immigrants in MediCal, and charge existing undocumented enrollees a $100 monthly premium? Why or why not?”

Astute readers may not be surprised to learn that, even after following up, I received nary an acknowledgement, let alone a reply. The researchers might claim they never received my message or that they only published their letter in response to a request from Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for an analysis of the effects of the reconciliation bill. (Any Republican lawmakers in California reading this should please — please — ask the researchers for the type of analysis I requested, if only to highlight their hypocrisy.)

But it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to recognize the real reason for the disparate treatment. The letter was a headline — “Republican bill will kill X people per year!” — in search of a story and a justification. That’s why Wyden and Sanders requested it, and that’s why the researchers gladly complied. But when it comes to attacking Newsom, or Democrat Govs. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois or Tim Walz of Minnesota, all of whom have proposed scaling back taxpayer-funded coverage of illegal immigrants — not because they believe such benefits should go only to citizens, mind you, but because of skyrocketing costs — they suddenly become mute.

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Economic suicide by design

This week, Oregonians heard the announcement that Tektronix, an iconic Oregon-based company, is moving its headquarters from Oregon to North Carolina.

Tektronix has decided that it has had enough of the Oregon Democrat high taxes, poor schools, and constant degradation of the quality of life for its employees. Textronix was once one of the largest employers in the state of Oregon. Anybody working in the electronics branch of technology relied on Tektronix test equipment to troubleshoot electronic problems. Driving by the Tektronix campus was very sad for me when we moved to Oregon. The parking lots around the Tektronix buildings were mainly empty, and slowly got even emptier. As an Electronic Technician who relied on the Tektronix test equipment my entire career, this was like watching an old friend slowly die from neglect.

Elections have consequences, and so does how people vote. Voting for more taxes, higher fees, and the crazy bills the Democrat supermajority pushes through is costing Oregon thousands of highly-paid citizens who have had enough, and they then leave Oregon for different states. Yet Oregon continues down the same old path to economic disaster. Oregonians cannot figure out that Democrats are all the same; their solution to problems is to raise taxes and fees on everything. For decades, Oregonians have been voting for Democrats to lead Oregon, and nobody noticed that conservatives and Republicans were leaving over economic or freedom issues. The Democrats, Liberals, and progressives just kept on making Oregon less affordable and less desirable to raise a family or retire here.

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Tipping The Scales: Why So Many Cases Against Trump Are Heard By Democrat-Appointed Judges

As the Trump administration faces substantial pushback in the courts, including an unprecedented wave of nationwide injunctions halting its policies, some are claiming that his opponents are tilting the scales of justice by selectively bringing their lawsuits before sympathetic courts in a practice called “forum shopping.” They note that three-quarters of the lower court justices who have blocked Trump policies were appointed by Democrats.

Gaming the federal justice system, however, is harder than it sounds because plaintiffs bring cases before courts rather than judges. Most federal courts have a mix of judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans. The plaintiff’s goal in forum shopping is to launch their suit in a district where they are more likely to draw a sympathetic justice – ideally, this district would also include an appellate court stacked with like-minded judges.

To see whether Trump’s adversaries are engaging in forum shopping, RealClearInvestigations analyzed 350 cases brought against the administration. We found that plaintiffs have brought 80% of those cases before just 11 of the nation’s 91 district courts. While Democrat presidents have appointed roughly 60% of all active district court judges, each of the 11 district courts where the anti-Trump challenges have been clustered boasts an even higher percentage of Democrat appointees. In several of these venues, the administration’s challengers are almost guaranteed that a judge picked by Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or Bill Clinton will preside over their case.

The analysis of these 350 cases, which covers all those identified in popular litigation trackers and RCI’s independent research as of this week, lends credence to claims that anti-Trump litigants may be strategically filing suit in courts where they are most likely to receive a favorable ruling – a practice that has been both pursued and decried by Democrats and Republicans.

RCI also analyzed three dozen cases in which judges imposed the most extreme restraint on the Trump administration by entering a nationwide or universal injunction – prohibiting the administration from enforcing its policy not only against the party bringing the case, but anyone, everywhere. The analysis shows that these injunctions have disproportionately emerged from Democrat-leaning courts where plaintiffs have brought the lion’s share of suits, and that Democrat-appointed judges are overwhelmingly responsible for ordering them.

This is consistent with other analyses indicating that Democrat-appointed judges have handed down the bulk of all adverse rulings against the Trump administration.

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Clouds Over Bluesky: The Left’s Social Media Safe Space Under Fire For Intolerant And Hateful Postings

Bluesky has become a safe space for liberals seeking to avoid the triggering presence of opposing views since the Trump reelection. The relatively small site now has over 30 million followers (in comparison 260 million for X and 3 billion on Facebook). Now, however, users like billionaire Mark Cuban are complaining that Bluesky is just another intolerant echo chamber on the left and some are reportedly returning to X.

Billionaire Mark Cuban was one of the early champions of the site, writing “Hello Less Hateful World” in joining the site in November 2024.

At the time, some of us criticized the premise of the Bluesky devotees. Many supported the anti-free speech and censorship efforts during the Biden Administration. Bluesky offered a replication of the echo chamber in higher education, where liberals can go unchallenged or uncontradicted. This included some of the most intolerant figures in media, academia, and the government.

Now, Cuban and others are experiencing what many of us have lived through in higher education for years, an orthodox environment where even marginal disagreements are treated as litmus tests.

Cuban this week decried that “Even if you agree with 95% of what a person is saying on a topic, if there is one point that you might call out as being more of a gray area, they will call you a fascist etc.”

In his post on Monday, Cuban notes that “the replies on here may not be as racist as Twitter, but they damn sure are hateful. Talk AI: FU, AI sucks go away. Talk Business: Go away. Talk Healthcare: Crickets.”

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HILARIOUS: Crazy-Eyed Sen. Cory Booker Goes INSANE in Screaming Rant on Senate Floor Over Senator Alex Padilla Arrest – Says They Made Him “Forcibly Kneel Before This Executive… Violently”

Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) on Thursday gave a psychotic speech on the Senate Floor, railing against the Trump Administration for, in his words, making Senator Alex Padilla “forcibly kneel before this executive” when he was briefly arrested on Thursday. 

As The Gateway Pundit reported, Padilla was physically restrained and removed for heckling DHS Secretary Kristi Noem while she was giving a briefing on the Los Angeles riots. In the middle of the briefing for the media, no Senators, he aggressively approached Noem at her podium and began shouting before he was taken to the ground and detained.

DHS said in a statement that Padilla “interrupted a live press conference without identifying himself or having his Senate security pin on as he lunged toward Secretary Noem.”

“I have questions for the Secretary because the fact of the matter is half a dozen violent criminals that you’re rotating on your— hands off!” Padilla yelled at Secret Service officers after the incident, as he was being escorted out of the room and resisting arrest.

But Padilla’s Democrat colleagues think he’s above the law because he’s a United States Senator and a radical Democrat. They would cheer prolifically if a Republican member of Congress were taken down by Biden’s Secret Service, just like they cheered for the prosecution of innocent January 6ers whose only crime was peacefully attending the Capitol protest.

Booker responded to the incident on Thursday with a complete meltdown, looking like a crack addict in need of his fix. “They treated a member of the United States Senate violently,” he cried.

He looked insane!

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Former appointee of Tim Walz sought in deadly shootings of Minnesota lawmaker and her husband, had ‘No Kings’ flyers in car: sources

A former appointee of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz is being sought in connection with the assassination of a state lawmaker and the shooting of another, police sources said.

Vance Luther Boelter allegedly posed as a police officer when he shot Sen. John Hoffman and his wife in their Champlin home early Saturday, leaving them seriously injured before moving on to former Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman’s house — where he is believed to have slaughtered her and her husband, sources told The Post.

Boelter, 57, was appointed by Walz in 2019 to serve a four-year stint on the Governor’s Workforce Development Board, documents show.

He previously served on the Governor’s Workforce Development Council in 2016 under then-Gov. Mark Dayton.

The killer had flyers with the words “No Kings” in his car, a reference to Saturday’s planned protests against the Trump Administration, as well as a “manifesto” and a list of other politicians’ names, said police, who briefly cornered the shooter at Hortman’s home before the suspect fled.

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