Tag: taxes

Seattle-area city to host taxpayer funded LGBTQ Pride catwalk for toddlers

A taxpayer-funded LGBTQ pride event in Lynnwood, Washington will feature a “kids catwalk,” in which a panel of adults will judge toddlers while they strut down the runway to sexually charged music.

One of the judges is Democrat state Sen. Marko Liias, who is the legislator behind SB 5599, which allows for minors to be taken by the state if their parents don’t allow them to obtain sex change procedures.

Also judging are Democrat Lynnwood City Council Members Josh Binda and Nick Coehlo, and former Democrat State Senator Maralyn Chase, The Center Square reported.

The “Wizard of Oz” themed event is scheduled for June 8 at the Lynnwood Convention Center and will be hosted by Lynnwood Pride in partnership with the City of Lynnwood, just north of Seattle.

“The Fashion Catwalk Contest” will be from 2 to 3 pm and split by different age groups. The kids category is for children between the ages of 2 to 12, according to Lynnwood Pride’s website.

Participants will select a three-minute song of their choice. The list of song choices suggested by Lynnwood Pride are songs that contain sexually charged lyrics. This includes “Texas Hold ‘Em” by Beyonce, “Free Your Mind” by En Vogue, and “Supermodel – You Better Work” by RuPaul.

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Biden admin backs ‘harm reduction groups’ that give free drug paraphernalia to addicts

President Biden and his administration have expressed support for providing free drug paraphernalia to fentanyl and other illicit drug users, an effort made feasible by controversial harm reduction groups that believe supplying addicts with clean smoking gear would reduce overdose deaths by eliminating injection methods.

However, a study released in February by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that smoking fentanyl was increasingly linked to overdose deaths in 27 states and Washington, DC. Researchers found that 74 percent of overdose deaths were linked to smoking fentanyl, while fentanyl overdose deaths through injection plummeted.

The Washington Post reported that the Biden administration has embraced the approach of harm reduction groups, despite the fact that these groups have received widespread criticism, and their efforts, which have failed to create significant positive outcomes, have been banned in numerous jurisdictions.

Critics of harm reduction groups believe supplying addicts with free drug paraphernalia only enables their addictions, and think alternative methods such as rehabilitation and therapy are better options. Those who favor harm reduction measures believe that providing clean drug equipment to users, such as smoke pipes and needles, and creating so-called “safe injection sites,” would prevent overdose deaths and the spread of infections caused by sharing needles. However, their methods have been proven as failed experiments.

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Are Biden And Netanyahu Orchestrating War In the United States?

I start by saying it outright: America is on the precipice of war! And I’m talking not only about war abroad; I’m talking about war within the United States. And these wars are being deliberately orchestrated by President Joe Biden in the United States and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel.

Strong language? Yes. But the facts prove the language is not hyperbolic.

On February 8, I wrote a column entitled U.S. Government Gives Millions To Jewish Group To Escort Illegals Into America.

In that column, I quoted Peggy Hall saying:

Here are the dark and dirty details of how the US is financially footing the bill for the immigrant invasion.

There is a Jewish organization called HIAS, which stands for Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.

HIAS gets hundreds of millions of dollars in US funding through the Office of Refugees Resettlement (ORR). ORR was created by Brandon Biden as part of the Department of Health and Human Services in the federal government. (Note: just a reminder for how bloated and excessive the federal government is. There is NOTHING in the Constitution that allows for these unfettered agencies that are created on the whim of the president.)

Check out the ORR website here, and note near the bottom of the list of agencies that are getting matching grants from YOUR money.

You’ll see that HIAS is listed as one of those agencies.

HIAS spends YOUR tax dollars on getting 500,000 ILLEGALS all the way from South America and Central America into the USA.

You might think that the poor immigrants should get the red carpet welcome wagon treatment. After all, think of the deplorable conditions they are escaping, not to mention the risks these asylum seekers face while trying to escape to a better life.

Um… that’s not really the case, at least for these refugees that are helped every step of the way by HIAS (funded with millions of dollars from the US government).

Keep reading, and I’ll show you exactly how HIAS describes how they are helping HALF a MILLION refugees cross the dangerous Darien Gap in the Panamanian jungle to grab money, housing, transportation, cash grants, medical care and jobs that should be going to authentic Americans.

After that column was published, I was chided by several people accusing me of distorting the facts relative to the significance of the HIAS connection to the collusion between Joe Biden’s White House and the Israeli organization in the planned and orchestrated smuggling of not 500,000 but millions of criminal illegal aliens into America—at a taxpayer expense amounting to billions of dollars.

Well, it turns out, not only was I right, but the half was not even told.

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Another Missouri Judge Approves Stacking City And County Marijuana Taxes

Buchanan County can collect a special marijuana sales tax on dispensaries within St. Joseph city limits, a judge ruled Wednesday in the second decision granting counties the right to stack taxes on top of city levies.

Circuit Judge Daniel Kellogg wrote in his two-page ruling that provisions in the recreational marijuana constitutional amendment passed in 2022 do not limit the taxing power of counties within corporate limits of towns and cities.

“To put it bluntly, the court cannot accept [the] plaintiff’s interpretation of ‘Local Government’ to prohibit the power of the county to impose such tax within the Saint Joseph city limits,” Kellogg wrote. “The definition of ‘Local Government’ includes both the city and the county. As such, both are authorized to impose and collect the tax.”

Vertical Enterprises, which is licensed for retail sales, cultivation and marijuana product manufacturing in St. Joseph, sued the Buchanan County Collector’s office, the Missouri Department of Revenue and the Buchanan County Clerk’s office to block enforcement of the tax.

Along with regular sales taxes—which in some locations approach 12 percent—people purchasing marijuana for recreational use also pay a special 6 percent state tax and a local tax of 3 percent if approved by voters.

The ruling will cost Vertical’s customers about $30,000 a month, said Chris McHugh, CEO of the company. There are two other dispensaries in St. Joseph and he estimated their tax payments would be comparable to his.

“Consumers should be outraged,” McHugh said. “They’re paying this.”

Statewide, consumers purchased $1.1 billion worth of marijuana in the first year of recreational use sales.

“This is millions and millions of dollars that never, never should be taken from consumers,” McHugh said. “It’s nothing but an anti-marijuana tax.”

McHugh said he will appeal Kellogg’s decision.

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Aid organisations slam $320m US pier in Gaza which fell apart

Aid organisations have criticised a US-built temporary pier in Gaza used to transport aid into the besieged enclave, after satellite images revealed it breaking apart.

The imagery showed the sea damaging the pier on Tuesday, with sections needing rebuilding and repairing.

The pier, which is made up of a narrow causeway and an area used to place supplies transported by ship, cost $320 million and went into use on 17 May.

US Department of Defense spokesperson Sabrina Singh spokesperson told reporters it will now have to be moved to Ashdod in Israel, where repairs will take at least a week to be completed.

According to CNN, the pier, known as the Joint Logistics Over the Shore (JLOTS), can only operate in good conditions.

Michael Selby-Green, a media spokesperson for Islamic Relief told The New Arab that his group and other aid organisations have repeatedly warned that the pier could not be a substitute for getting aid through land crossings that already exist.

“The damage sustained by the floating pier two weeks after it began operating exposes the structure for the distraction that it is,” he said.

He clarified that even at full capacity, the pier only delivers a small fraction of aid that could be brought in by trucks.

“It’s taken two-and-a-half months to build the pier and deliver the claimed 1,000 metric tonnes of aid, which is a drop in the ocean compared to what’s needed in Gaza. Every day that passes pushes more families closer to starvation and puts more lives at risk,” he added.

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NIH-Funded Scientists Develop mRNA Bird Flu Vaccine ‘to Prevent Human Infections’

Federally funded researchers have developed an experimental mRNA H5N1 bird flu vaccine that they said is “highly effective” in preventing severe illness and death in infected lab animals.

According to a University of Pennsylvania press release, the vaccine “could potentially help manage the outbreak of the H5N1 virus currently circulating in birds and cattle in the United States, and prevent human infections with the virus.”

The news comes as the U.S. and European nations consider vaccinating workers deemed as at risk for contracting bird flu.

The researchers — who on May 23 published their results in Nature Communications — reported their mRNA lipid nanoparticle vaccine elicited “strong” T cell and antibody responses in female mice infected with H5N1.

They also said their vaccine produced an immune response in male ferrets and prevented death.

U.S. News and World Report and other media outlets reported on the study, which was funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Robert Malone — an early pioneer of mRNA vaccines technology and an outspoken critic of U.S. federal biomedical corruption during the COVID-19 pandemic — called the news coverage of the study “investor hype” and “fear porn.”

“There’s no evidence of human-to-human transmission of H5N1,” Malone told The Defender.

Malone said the researchers would need to show that there’s a “reasonable facsimile” between ferrets and humans to claim the vaccine can prevent severe illness and death in humans.

The likelihood of people getting H5N1 is very small, Malone said. “The thing is, it doesn’t readily infect humans.”

Only those who are immunocompromised or who slaughtered an infected waterfowl might be at risk of transmission, he said, so H5N1 is being “used to instill fear” in the public to generate federal funding for H5N1 vaccine research.

Meanwhile, there’s plenty of evidence that the lead researchers have clear conflicts of interest, Malone said. “They absolutely stand to profit” from their experimental bird flu vaccine.

Scott Hensley, Ph.D. and Drew Weissman, M.D., Ph.D. at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania — who led the research — are listed as co-inventors on patents for mRNA vaccine technologies.

They’ll likely receive royalties payments, Malone said. “It’s similar to how [Dr. Anthony] Fauci gets money from his royalties.”

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W.H.O. Seeks $7 Billion After Latest Pandemic Treaty Draft Collapses

The World Health Organization (W.H.O.) on Sunday launched a new financing mechanism seeking $7 billion in donations it claims can be quickly deployed without strings attached.

Fresh staffing hires for the Geneva, Switzerland-based organization are at the top of the to-do list once funds are secured, adding to the 8,000-plus already on the payroll.

The call for funding contributions came as the W.H.O. begins its annual meeting on Monday with government ministers and health bureaucrats hoping to reinforce global preparedness for the next pandemic in the devastating wake of coronavirus, AP reports.

It follows the W.H.O.’s comprehensive failure to secure a global treaty on future pandemic responses after two years of closed-door meetings, as Breitbart News reported.

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World War I Incited the Vampires

Commentaries about World War I frequently talk about causes and consequences but almost never mention the enablers.  At best, they might mention them approvingly, as if we were fortunate to have had the Fed and the income tax, along with the ingenuity of the Liberty Bond programs, to finance our glorious role in that bloodbath.

Economist Benjamin Anderson, whose Economics and the Public Welfare has contributed greatly to our understanding of the period 1914-1946, and is a book I highly recommend, nevertheless takes as a given that the Fed and income tax had a job to do, and that job was supporting U.S. entry into World War I.  After citing figures purporting to show how relatively restrained bank credit expansion was during the war, he writes:

We had to finance the Government with its four great Liberty Loans and its short-term borrowing as well. We had to transform our industries from a peace basis to a war basis. We had to raise an army of four million men and send half of them to France. We had to help finance our allies in the war, and above all, to finance the shipment of goods to them from the United States and from a good many neutral countries. [p. 35]

We had to do none of these things.

Only the government made them necessary, and the government was not acting on behalf of its constituents when it formally entered the war in April, 1917.  The U.S. was not under serious threat of attack.  The population at large, Ralph Raico tells us, “acquiesced, as one historian has remarked, out of general boredom with peace, the habit of obedience to its rulers, and a highly unrealistic notion of the consequences of America’s taking up arms.”  Later on he reports that

In the first ten days after the war declaration, only 4,355 men enlisted; in the next weeks, the War Department procured only one-sixth of the men required.

Bored with peace they may have been, but it was hardly reflected in the number of volunteers.  For more details about US response to the war see this.

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Biden’s $320M Gaza Pier Has Detached & Drifted Onto Israeli Beach

A section of the $320 million floating pier built and erected off Gaza’s coast has broken off and floated onto an Israeli beach. The Saturday mishap is the latest setback for the US humanitarian aid project, after three US troops were reported injured aboard the pier two days prior, including one critically.

The Times of Isreal’s military correspondent Emanuel Fabian has reported that “An American vessel used to unload humanitarian aid from ships into the Gaza Strip via a floating pier disconnected from a small boat tugging it this morning due to stormy seas, leading it to get stuck on the coast of Ashdod, eyewitnesses say.”

The recovery operation has not gone well either, as “Another ship was then sent to try and extract the stuck vessel, but also got beached,” Fabian writes.

And yet a second US Army vessel also got stuck in shallow waters while trying to rescue the pier section. Overnight US ships had been moving two pieces of the floating pier to the Port of Ashdod in southern Israel when the now beached section detached and drifted away. American troops can be seen in footage standing helplessly on the beach.

An official US Central Command (CENTCOM) statement says the following:

This morning four U.S. Army vessels supporting the maritime humanitarian aid mission in Gaza were affected by heavy sea states. The vessels broke free from their moorings and two vessels are now anchored on the beach near the pier.

The third and fourth vessels are beached on the coast of Israel near Ashkelon. Efforts to recover the vessels are under way with assistance from the Israeli Navy.

The pier operation was already last week off to a rough start — and was paused for two days — after desperate Palestinians mobbed and ransacked the first trucks transporting aid unloaded from the pier before they could reach a distribution warehouse managed by the World Food Programme.   

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95% of This Historic City’s Welfare Dependents Are Illegals. Now, Democrats Are Trying to Place Them in People’s Homes.

The city of Westbrook, Maine, is considering a new ordinance that would permit private homes, churches, and community centers to serve as homeless shelters. Most housing assistance applicants are recent migrants, and the proposal comes after the city’s welfare program official acknowledged that “90 to 95 percent” of welfare recipients are migrants, referred to as “New Mainers” by open borders activists.

Jennie Franceschi, Westbrook’s Director of Planning and Code Enforcement, indicated that the ordinance would enable single-family homes and churches to become emergency shelters if community needs dictate. The proposal does not mandate homeowners or churches to house homeless individuals but allows them to register as official homeless shelters voluntarily.

Resident Martin Malia argues the current proposal could lead to an 11.4 percent tax increase. Malia expressed fears that the ordinance might also attract more homeless immigrants, further taxing the general assistance program and municipal resources.

Despite these concerns, the Planning Board did not address Malia’s points in detail. The board ultimately voted unanimously to move the ordinance and another establishing a licensing process for homeless shelters to the city council.

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