Tag: joe biden

Borrowers With High Credit Scores Penalized Under New Federal Mortgage Fee Plan

Mortgage borrowers with good credit may face higher costs under a new scheme from federal mortgage associations Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The firms have released a new Loan–Level Price Adjustment (LLPA) Matrix for loans sold to them after May 1, 2023. Under the new matrix, borrowers with high credit scores will face higher mortgage fees than before and those with lower credit scores will face lower fees.

“It’s unprecedented,” David Stevens, a former federal housing commissioner and former CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association, told the New York Post. “My email is full from mortgage companies and CEOs [telling] me how unbelievably shocked they are by this move.”

The fee increase is unlikely to lead to significantly higher monthly mortgage payments for most borrowers. For instance, someone with a $400,000 loan and a 6 percent mortgage rate may wind up paying about $40 more per month, according to Stevens’ calculations.

But an extra $40 per month means an extra $480 per year. And over the whole course of mortgage repayment, a homeowner could wind up paying thousands of dollars more due to the fee shift.

Regardless of what the shift means in terms of actual costs, it seems unfair that borrowers with extremely good credit are effectively being penalized while borrowers with lower credit scores are being rewarded.

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Biden Campaign, Blinken Orchestrated Intel Letter To Discredit Hunter Biden Laptop Story, Ex-CIA Official Says

An adviser to Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, now Secretary of State, prompted former intelligence community officials to jointly suggest Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.”

Secretary of State Antony Blinken contacted intelligence officials weeks before the 2020 general election about New York Post reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morell testified before the House Judiciary Committee that Blinken called him to discuss the Post report. Later the same day, he emailed Morell a USA Today report alleging the FBI was investigating whether the Post report was a Russian disinformation campaign.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) wrote to Blinken April 20 in a joint request with Intelligence Committee Chairman Michael Turner (R-OH). The congressmen asked the Secretary of State to reveal the identities of everyone he communicated with about the laptop letter along with all documents and communications regarding it between October 18-November 24, 2020.

Fox News further reported:

A former CIA official testified that then-Biden campaign senior adviser, now-Secretary of State Antony Blinken “played a role in the inception” of the public statement signed by current and past intelligence officials that claimed the Hunter Biden laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign.

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Biden Policies Could Spell the End of Freelance Contractors, Republicans Say

Republican members of Congress say President Joe Biden’s administration is waging war on independent contractors. Democrats counter that they are trying to ensure workers are not exploited and businesses compete on a level playing field.

Kim Kavin, a freelance writer from New Jersey, said this is not a partisan issue.

“Our members have voted for everybody from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump,” Kavin told the Subcommittee on Workforce Protection of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

“All of us are in agreement on this.”

Kavin is one of five witnesses called before the committee for a hearing entitled “Examining Biden’s War on Independent Contractors.”

The hearing was called because the Biden administration is pushing a policy to deny Americans a fundamental right, according to Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Calif.).

“Today’s hearing is about the right to earn a living. In a free society, few rights are as fundamental,” he said.

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Biden Sending $325 Million In More Military Aid To Ukraine

Biden Administration Announces Additional Security Assistance for Ukraine / For Immediate Release:

Today, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced critical new security assistance for Ukraine. This includes the authorization of a Presidential Drawdown of security assistance with more ammunition for U.S.-provided HIMARS, artillery rounds, and anti-armor capabilities essential to strengthening Ukraine’s defenders on the battlefield valued at up to $325 million.

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Biden DOJ Indicts Four Americans For “Weaponized” Free Speech

The Biden administration’s Department of Justice has just charged four members of the African People’s Socialist Party (APSP) for conspiring to act as agents of Russia by using speech and political action in ways the DOJ says “weaponized” the First Amendment rights of Americans.

The Washington Post reports:

Federal authorities charged four Americans on Tuesday with roles in a malign campaign pushing pro-Kremlin propaganda in Florida and Missouri — expanding a previous case that charged a Russian operative with running illegal influence agents within the United States.

The FBI signaled its interest in the alleged activities in a series of raids last summer, at which point authorities charged a Moscow man, Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, with working for years on behalf of Russian government officials to fund and direct fringe political groups in the United States. Among other things, Ionov allegedly advised the political campaigns of two unidentified candidates for public office in Florida.

Ionov’s influence efforts were allegedly directed and supervised by officers of the FSB, a Russian government intelligence service.

Now, authorities have added charges against four Americans who allegedly did Ionov’s bidding through groups including the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement in Florida, Black Hammer in Georgia, and an unidentified political group in California — part of an effort to influence American politics.

AFP reports that the conspiracy charges carry a sentence of up to ten years, with three of the four APSP members additionally charged with acting as unregistered agents of Russia which carries another five years.

“Russia’s foreign intelligence service allegedly weaponized our First Amendment rights – freedoms Russia denies its own citizens – to divide Americans and interfere in elections in the United States,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen in the DOJ’s press release regarding the indictments, adding, “The department will not hesitate to expose and prosecute those who sow discord and corrupt U.S. elections in service of hostile foreign interests, regardless of whether the culprits are U.S. citizens or foreign individuals abroad.”

Looks like the United States has decided to dispense with those freedoms as well.

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Biden Regime to Change Definition of ‘Lawful Presence’ to Give Illegals Welfare

The Biden Regime has announced its plans to change the legal definition of “lawful presence” for the purpose of extending taxpayer-funded welfare programs like Medicaid and Obamacare to illegal aliens.

Under new plans unveiled by Joe Biden, illegal aliens enrolled in DACA, the massive amnesty program that was illegally enacted by executive order, circumventing Congress, during the Obama Administration, will become eligible to enroll in taxpayer-funded Medicaid and Obamacare programs. Biden says that his administration will implement the new definition of “lawful presence” by the end of this month.

In a pre-recorded video statement announcing his plans, Biden lectured actual American citizens while also referring to illegal aliens as “Americans” themselves, saying that “health care should be a right, not a privilege, and my administration’s worked hard to expand health care. And today, more Americans have health insurance than ever.”

“Today’s announcement is about giving DACA recipients the same opportunity,” Biden said at another point in the video, and added that he’s consulting with illegal aliens in his quest to redistribute American money into their pockets, saying that he’s working “alongside dreamers” to give them “the opportunities and support they deserve.”

Biden even used COVID to justify giving illegal aliens the hard-earned money of American citizens, claiming that “many” illegals “were essential workers on the front lines of the pandemic.”

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Biden Looking at Expanding Internet Surveillance After Discord Leaks

The Biden administration appears poised to increase internet surveillance in response to the leaked Pentagon documents that appear to have been posted on the messaging platform Discord.

NBC News reported on Wednesday that the administration was looking at expanding how it monitors social media sites and chat rooms.

The report cited an unnamed senior administration official and a congressional official who said the administration wants to “expand the universe” of social media sites that US law enforcement and intelligence agencies monitor.

According to the congressional source, the report said the “intelligence community is now grappling with how it can scrub platforms like Discord in search of relevant material to avoid a similar leak in the future.”

According to The Washington Post, the top-secret documents were posted on a private Discord server that a member later posted on public servers in March. The documents have been circulating on the internet since then and were discovered by The New York Times last week.

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Florida to investigate whether taxpayer dollars were used to purchase crack pipes for drug addicts – AG sues Biden admin for ignoring public records requests

Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody announced a lawsuit on Thursday against the Biden administration after it ignored Freedom of Information Act requests seeking proof that taxpayer dollars were not used to purchase crack pipes for safe smoking kits provided to drug addicts.

A $30 million federal grant program, announced by President Biden in February 2022, was used to reimburse local governments that provided addicts with safe smoking kits. The program was touted as a harm reduction effort that advanced safer drug use and racial equity.

Some of the smoking kits found in Baltimore, Boston, New York, Richmond, and Washington, D.C., reportedly contained crack pipes and other drug-related paraphernalia; however, the Biden administration has maintained that crack pipes were not provided to drug addicts in taxpayer-funded kits.

A press release this week by Moody stated that Florida plans to investigate the controversy after Biden’s Department of Justice and Department of Health and Human Services ignored a February 2022 FOIA request.

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What one tweet can teach us about “Fake News”

At the time I just laughed it off. It’s an absurd little piece of propaganda, but hardly the most egregious.

But, for some reason, it stuck in my head and started bothering me. After 48 hours or so I realized what about it was bothering me, and that it is actually an interesting microcosmic case study on what the era of “fake news” really means.

Everything about this tweet is fake. Everything.

The letter itself is obviously fake. The absurd zenith of the “children being precociously political” meme that became a running joke years ago.

Even if “Charlotte” exists, those aren’t her words, just a rough regurgitation of her parents’ brainwashing. And Charlotte almost certainly doesn’t exist.

There’s no reason to even suppose any physical letter exists at all and it isn’t just a photoshopped CG image. It easily could be.

The tweet itself is also fake – or at least pretend – because there’s no way President Biden operates his own social media accounts. I honestly doubt he’s even mentally capable of doing so. Rather, as Five Times August points out in another tweet, the Whitehouse employs a few “platform managers” and “social media directors”.

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Another Federal Judge Rejects the DOJ’s Argument That Cannabis Consumers Have No Second Amendment Rights

A federal judge in Texas recently agreed with a federal judge in Oklahoma that the national ban on gun possession by cannabis consumers violates the Second Amendment. Kathleen Cardone, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, also concluded that the federal ban on transferring firearms to an “unlawful user” of a “controlled substance,” first imposed by the Gun Control Act of 1968, is unconstitutional.

The case involves Paola Connelly, who was charged with illegal possession of firearms under 18 USC 922(g)(3) after El Paso police found marijuana and guns in her home while responding to a domestic disturbance in December 2021. Connelly, who said she used marijuana “to sleep at night and to help her with anxiety,” also was charged with violating 18 USC 922(d)(3) by transferring guns to her husband, a cocaine and psilocybin user. Both gun offenses are punishable by up to 15 years in prison.

As a preliminary matter, Cardone held that Connelly’s Second Amendment claims were not precluded by prior decisions in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which includes Texas, upheld Section 922(g)(3). Those decisions, she noted, preceded the Supreme Court’s June 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which said gun control laws must be “consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

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