Tag: joe biden

Federal Judge Smacks Down Biden’s ATF AR-15 Gun Ban

A Trump appointed federal judge just smacked down an attempt by Biden’s ATF to ban AR-15 pistols with arm braces.

It’s amazing. No matter how bad crime gets, the Democrat left is still intent on trying to disarm law abiding Americans.

Gun sales are through the roof right now, as Americans were horrified by the attacks on mostly unarmed Israelis by Hamas in October.

The Washington Examiner reports:

Judge crushes ATF AR-15 gun ban

A federal judge late Wednesday gave millions of gun owners breathing room when he slammed the Biden administration’s effort to ban a big slice of the AR-15 market.

U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk blocked the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from enforcing its ban on AR-15 style “pistols” equipped with arm braces, calling the agency’s new rule unlawful.

“Public safety concerns must be addressed in ways that are lawful. This rule is not,” said the Trump-appointed judge.

The nine-page decision is the latest to challenge the ATF over its rule requiring millions of owners of braced guns to register the firearms and pay a $200 tax, or face 10 years in jail. Kacsmaryk’s decision is the most sweeping, covering the whole country.

At issue is the ATF’s rule issued earlier this year to ban the braces on the guns. The agency claims it turns a pistol into a dangerous rifle and supporters have cited how the weapons have been used in a handful of mass shootings.

However, for years before its ban, the ATF allowed the braces to be sold, and they have become so common that some estimate 40 million or more are in circulation, making the AR-style pistol one of the most commonly held firearms in the nation.

This tweet includes an image of the guns in question.

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Biden DHS Head Claims There Is “No Disaster” At The Border

Despite record numbers of encounters will illegal immigrants crossing the southern U.S. border in their thousands every day, including suspected terrorists, the head of the Biden Department for Homeland Security claimed under oath Wednesday that there is “no disaster”.

Alejandro Mayorkas made the claim while testifying before Congress regarding the border security budget and spending, and asking for more funding.

GOP Senator John Boozman told Mayorkas that “by every metric the situation at the border is a disaster,” adding that “what you’re asking for does nothing to get those numbers down.”

Mayorkas attempted to pivot the exchange to suggest Republicans are resistant to providing funding to hire more personnel at the border.

Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith further asked Mayorkas: “So the situation at the border, you’re saying, is not a disaster?”

“That is correct,” Mayorkas then answered.

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White House: Economy ‘Exceptionally’ Good and People Like Their Finances, But Don’t Feel Confident Due to COVID, War

On Monday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” White House National Economic Council Director Lael Brainard reacted to negative poll numbers on the economy by stating that “the economy is performing exceptionally well” but “people have been through a very challenging few years between the pandemic, and then the oil price spikes associated with Russia’s war. It’s going to take a while for them to feel really confident,” and most people “feel like their personal finances are better now than they were before.”

Co-host Andrew Ross Sorkin said, “Speak to this, though, because I think there [are] a lot of folks who have been waking up to headlines of poll results over the weekend, as it relates to Bidenomics versus, frankly, Trumponomics and where he stands — the president that is — compared to where…the former president stands in terms of how people are thinking about the economy and how, frankly, unhappy they remain about the economy.”

Brainard responded, “Look, if I look around the world, I don’t think there’s a leader out there who wouldn’t rather have the economic record that President Biden has today. We have been growing, 3% over the past year. We’ve had unemployment down below 4% for 21 months in a row. Real incomes are growing. Wealth — this is remarkable — wealth is up 37% for the median household since before the pandemic. And we’re growing faster and have lower inflation than any other advanced economy in the world. So, the statistics, I think, are very strong. Now, people have been through a very challenging few years between the pandemic, and then the oil price spikes associated with Russia’s war. It’s going to take a while for them to feel really confident, but if you look at surveys, 70% of Americans feel like their personal finances are better now than they were before. We’ve still got to work on kitchen table economics, there are still a lot of Americans sitting around their kitchen tables with costs of medicine, pharmaceuticals that are still too high, and we’re working on that.”

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U.S. diplomats slam Israel policy in leaked memo

State Department staffers offered a blistering critique of the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war in a dissent memo obtained by POLITICO, arguing that, among other things, the U.S. should be willing to publicly criticize the Israelis.

The message suggests a growing loss of confidence among U.S. diplomats in President Joe Biden’s approach to the Middle East crisis. It reflects the sentiments of many U.S. diplomats, especially at mid-level and lower ranks, according to conversations with several department staffers as well as other reports. If such internal disagreements intensify, it could make it harder for the Biden administration to craft policy toward the region.

The memo has two key requests: that the U.S. support a ceasefire, and that it balance its private and public messaging toward Israel, including airing criticisms of Israeli military tactics and treatment of Palestinians that the U.S. generally prefers to keep private.

The gap between America’s private and public messaging “contributes to regional public perceptions that the United States is a biased and dishonest actor, which at best does not advance, and at worst harms, U.S. interests worldwide,” the document states.

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US to Transfer $320 Million in Precision Bombs to Israel

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that the Biden administration is planning a $320 million transfer of precision-guided bombs to Israel, a show of support for the Israeli onslaught despite the growing civilian death toll.

The report said the administration notified congressional leaders on October 31 that it intended to transfer Spice Family Gliding Bomb Assemblies, precision-guided air-to-surface munitions that can be fired by Israeli warplanes.

The bombs will be transferred from weapons manufacturer Rafael USA to its Israeli parent company, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. It’s unclear what funds will be used for the transfer.

Israel receives $3.8 billion in annual military aid from the US, and the Biden administration is looking to provide another $14 billion to support the Gaza campaign. In the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, the US began immediately shipping new military equipment to Israel.

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Why Biden’s Policies Are A Nightmare For Housing Affordability

We’re enduring a stagflationary crisis – there’s no way around it.

It doesn’t matter how much oil Joe Biden dumps on the market from the Strategic Reserves.

It doesn’t matter how many jobs he is able to temporarily buy with $8 trillion-plus deficit spending.

It doesn’t matter how many times the mainstream media claims we are “in a recovery” or claim to see the “green shoots” of a “soft landing.”

In reality, most Americans are struggling to afford necessities – increasingly, they’re simply unable to participate in essential markets. The longer this goes on, the deeper the hole and the harder it will be for people to climb out.

For most people, it feels like they wake up one morning at the bottom of a pit, barely able to see the sun, wondering what happened. Everything was going just fine yesterday – how’d we end up here?

For those who pay attention, we can watch the pit get deeper, a shovelful at a time…
Granted, we have seen worse conditions in the U.S. in the past. Both the Great Depression and the stagflation crisis of the 1970s were truly severe.

The people who think conditions are bad now haven’t seen anything yet (interest rates eventually climbed to 20% in the early 1980s). That said, there is a growing potential for today’s crisis to become the biggest financial crisis in our nation’s history – given a little more time, and just a little more digging.

Part of this ongoing problem is the heavy inflation in housing prices, and make no mistake, this is one of the biggest threats facing middle-class America right now.

Let’s describe the problem, then solve it.

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Biden ‘Countering Islamophobia’ While Incinerating Gaza Is The Most Democrat Thing Ever

In what is arguably the most liberal thing ever to have happened in all of human history, the Biden administration has announced its plans to develop a US National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia even as it helps Israel massacre Muslims by the thousands in Gaza.

“For too long, Muslims in America, and those perceived to be Muslim, such as Arabs and Sikhs, have endured a disproportionate number of hate-fueled attacks and other discriminatory incidents,” reads a White House statement on the announcement. “We all mourn the recent barbaric killing of Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6-year-old Palestinian American Muslim boy, and the brutal attack on his mother in their home outside Chicago.”

This comes as the death toll from the US-backed bombing campaign in Gaza nears 10,000, including 3,760 children, in what experts and authorities around the world are describing with increasing frequency as a genocide. If these people were Jewish instead of Muslim, they would not be trapped in a giant concentration camp while the IDF hammers them with a nonstop barrage of military explosives, but because of their ethnicity they are subjected to this horror.

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Youth Smoking Nears Zero

New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show youth smoking at a historic low, with just 1.9 percent of high schoolers lighting up in the past month. Youth vaping is also at its lowest level in a decade at 10 percent, and cigar use is down to 1.8 percent from 2.8 percent the previous year.

That’s good news from a public health standpoint, but the data raise questions regarding the Biden administration’s plan to ban menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars. A key argument for prohibition is that menthol cigarettes and flavored cigars appeal to youth, especially black youth, and banning them is essential to prevent future generations of addiction and outweighs the risks of illicit markets that are certain to follow. But the CDC data show that smoking rates among black high schoolers are so low they can’t be reliably calculated.

A smoke-free society is typically defined as one where cigarette smoking is below 5 percent of the population. Applying this standard to youth, the U.S. has achieved a smoke-free generation. With youth smoking all but eliminated, it’s hard to see menthol prohibition as anything other than an attempt to target adult consumers, particularly black smokers who are more likely to choose a menthol product.

Kids may have ditched cigarettes, but there are millions of adults who still use menthol cigarettes. Experiments in menthol prohibition in the European Union, Canada, and even Massachusetts aren’t promising examples for the United States. A study of the effect of menthol prohibition in Poland, which had the highest menthol consumption in the E.U. at almost a third of the cigarette market, found no statistically significant change in cigarette consumption after the ban. Canada, which had a far smaller share of menthol smokers at 11 percent of the population, did see 21.5 percent of menthol smokers quit after the ban was imposed. However, 19.5 percent of menthol smokers continued to source their preferred cigarettes through other channels, and 59 percent just switched to nonmenthol cigarettes. Massachusetts became the first state to ban all flavored tobacco products. The ban was a boon to neighboring states like New Hampshire and Rhode Island, which enjoyed a surge in cigarette sales. Massachusetts lost $116 million in cigarette tax revenue in the first 12 months of the ban, according to the Tax Foundation.

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Take It From Brazil, Biden’s Ban on Flavored Cigarettes and Cigars Will Be a Disaster

The Biden administration’s flavored cigarettes and cigars ban, currently under final review by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), will soon make it illegal to buy or sell menthol and flavored tobacco products in the United States. Having announced its intention to prevent people, especially children, from becoming addicted to cigarettes and other drugs, Biden’s FDA will have to grapple with the consequences of their chosen method.

A similar ban in Brazil gives us a window into the probable outcome of Biden’s flavored cigarettes legislation. In 2012, after a series of court battles, Brazil became one of the first countries in the world to fully ban flavored cigarettes, wanting to minimize the demand for cigarette products and curb smoking in the country, particularly among children. 

To enforce the ban, Brazil has used its federal police force and its military police to crack down on the illegal cigarette market—with its government and law enforcement being one of the most vocal proponents of tobacco crackdowns since the mid-1980s. But Brazil quickly faced the fallout from its prohibitionist policy. 

Brazil’s demand for illegal cigarettes, particularly flavored cigarettes, only increased. Illegal actors quickly entered the market, leading the Brazilian government to conduct dangerous raids against illegal cigarette providers, with some resulting in bystanders being killed in the crossfire. The Brazilian government has lost billions of dollars in enforcement and tax revenues, while expenditures on illegal cigarettes rise. 

Brazil now has one of the largest cigarette markets in the world, despite its efforts to rid the country of cigarettes through prohibition. According to the Brazilian Institute for Competition Ethics (ETCO), the illegal cigarette market now represents about half of the entire cigarette market. Illegal cigarette consumption nearly doubled from 2008 to 2013 and in Brazil’s border areas it nearly tripled. 

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It Begins. Biden’s DOJ Starts Arresting Trump Supporters Who Stood Outside the US Capitol and Committed No Violence – Despite Registered Rallies on Capitol Grounds that Day

On October 13, 2022, the FBI testified that they were using geo-tracking data to identify Trump supporters who had gathered near the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

A bombshell report by the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) revealed the “vast, secretive” partnership between private companies and the federal government to surveil and track the movements of millions of Americans.

According to the EFF, the intel alphabet agencies, including ICE, the FBI, US Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of Defense (DoD), as well as state and local law enforcement, are being funneled hordes of private cell phone location data by private brokers who harvest the information.

This is the same tactic that Gregg Phillips, Catherine Engelbrecht, and True The Vote used for their investigation into the mail-in ballot dropbox fraud during the 2020 election. The cell phone location data collected by this group was used to identify the network of Democrat operatives who committed mass election fraud, as seen in the recently-released documentary “2000 Mules.”

The FBI was alleged to have used this data to identify patriotic protesters who traveled to Washington DC on January 6, 2021, to support President Trump and the US Constitution.

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