Tag: taxes

Feds creating comic books to push COVID masks, fight disinformation on 5G and elections

Colorado voters perusing their Secretary of State Web site ahead of this week’s elections are directed in the “What You Can Do” section to a most-unexpected resource: a comic book purporting to educate them on “deep fakes,” “troll farms” and “election misinformation.”

If the tool isn’t surprising enough to voters, its publisher just may be: It’s Uncle Sam.

Since October 2020, the Homeland Security Department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published two “graphic novels” aimed at combatting what it sees as two dangerous myths in America: Elections can be stolen and 5G towers have a connection to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The ranking Republican on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs said the comic books are powerful examples of ideology being placed ahead of security.

“When I helped pass the bill to rename CISA, the intent was to help the agency focus on Cyber and Infrastructure security, not establish itself as a comic book publisher or the Ministry of Truth,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told Just the News on Sunday “This is just one more sad example of what America gets with Democrat governance: less security, more nanny state.”

CISA declined to say how much taxpayer money was spent on the comic books, but defends the work. 

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Biden Considering $450,000 Payments To Illegal Immigrant Families Separated At Border

The Biden administration is considering paying illegal immigrant families who were separated at the border under former President Donald Trump’s policies up to $450,000 each, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

The illegal immigrants filed a lawsuit claiming the federal government detention resulted in major psychological trauma, according to the WSJ. Most of the families were made up of one parent and child who could receive around $1 million in payouts, though the amount could vary by family depending on the circumstances.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) represents some of the families involved in the lawsuit against the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security (DHS) and Health and Human Services, the WSJ reported. Around 940 families filed claims and the number of those who might qualify for the settlement is expected to be lower.

“President Biden has agreed that the family separation policy is a historic moral stain on our nation that must be fully remedied,” ACLU lead negotiator Lee Gelernt said, according to the WSJ. “That remedy must include not only meaningful monetary compensation, but a pathway to remain in the country.”

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8 Ridiculous ‘Green New Deal’ Programs in Democrats’ Bloated Spending Bill

Both chambers of Congress are focused on a raging debate over whether to pass a 2,465-page, $3.5 trillion tax-and-spend bill. With the legislation almost guaranteed to have no Republican support, different factions of Democrats are locking horns over the bill’s fate.

Progressives want to spend recklessly, which is much easier to do when you’re using other people’s money. In contrast, moderates are alarmed about what effect yet another federal spending blowout would have on already-high inflation and the dangerously huge national debt.

It is vitally important to have a discussion about overall spending levels. It is equally important to understand what those taxpayer dollars would be used on.

A key component of the bill is enacting a “Green New Deal” agenda, which is a top priority for left-wing activists.

The energy and environmental sections would spend hundreds of billions on a massive scheme that would only affect global temperatures by about 0.04 degrees Celsius in 2100.

Rather than delivering tangible environmental benefits, the bill would do far more to centralize power and control over the daily lives of Americans in Washington and provide handouts to political pet causes and special interest groups.

These nine items are just a sampling of the “green” insanity in the bill.

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How Democrats Could Hide $2 Trillion in New Spending With Budget Gimmicks

It now seems fairly certain unlikely that President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” will make it through the U.S. Senate as a $3.5 trillion spending plan.

Instead, the final version of the bill will probably have a topline spending figure of less than $2 trillion. Even Biden is now admitting as much. But it could have up to $2 trillion in additional, hidden costs, too—thanks to at least two potential changes that one budget watchdog group calls “blatant” gimmicks involving the expanded child tax credit and the Affordable Care Act.

Democrats are reportedly considering a one-year extension of the expanded child tax credit, which pays parents $3,000 annually for every child (and an extra $600 for kids under age 6) and is paid out as a refund even for families that owe no federal taxes. Previously, Biden’s plan called for a five-year extension of the child tax credit. As I wrote in September, the five-year extension was a budget gimmick designed to make the tax credit appear to be roughly $700 billion less expensive than it otherwise would be within the standard 10-year budget window. In short, Democrats were signalling that the expanded child tax credit would be permanent, but they were only accounting for half of what it would actually cost to make it permanent.

A one-year extension would be mashing that same “gimmick” button even harder.

In a similar way, Democrats are also reportedly considering a shorter-than-planned extension of the expanded Obamacare subsidies made available during the pandemic. Instead of being extended permanently, those provisions would technically expire after three years—even though everyone knows they are likely to be extended past that sunset date.

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NIH Funds ‘Toxic Brain Injection’ Monkey Experiments, Holes Drilled Into Skulls, Devices Implanted Into Brains

The National Institutes of Health is allegedly spending $16 million in taxpayer money on horrifying experiments where doctors “cripple monkeys with toxic brain injections.”

A disturbing report from the White Coat Waste Project has exposed cruel and inhumane monkey experiments funded by the National Institutes of Health.

According to the report, “WCW has filed a complaint with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) after uncovering cost disclosure violations by all seven National Primate Research Centers (NPRCs), the nation’s largest taxpayer-funded monkey labs imprisoning a combined 22,000 primates and receiving more than $100 million annually.”

Some of the experiments done by the NIH-funded NPRC’s involve:

  1. Turning monkeys into “binge-drinker” alcoholics (Oregon NPRC);
  2. Surgically-inducing heart attacks in monkeys (Washington NPRC);
  3. Exposing monkeys to biological weapons (Tulane NPRC);
  4. Intentionally threatening monkeys to cause fear and anxiety (California NPRC);
  5. Psychologically tormenting baboons (Southwest NPRC);
  6. Drilling into monkeys’ skulls and injecting them with the ADHD-drug Ritalin (Wisconsin NPRC); and
  7. Drilling to monkeys’ skulls and injected toxins to destroy their brains and cripple their limbs (Yerkes NPRC)

The organization unearthed a video from Emory University’s Yerkes National Primate Research Center, detailing how monkeys are locked alone in small cages where they have holes drilled into their skulls. After the holes are drilled, doctors reportedly screw in metal head restraining devices, implant electrodes and inject toxins into the monkey’s brains.

The toxic brain injections reportedly “destroy monkey’s brains and cause them to lose control of their limbs, mouths, and other body parts.”

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Federal Gov Pays University $750k to Create Tool That Warns Journalists Against Publishing “Polarizing” Content

The NSF project titled “A System for Mapping the (Local) Journalism Life Cycle to Rebuild the Nation’s News Trust” will warn journalists when content may be “triggering” of unfavorable discourse.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) provided a $750,000 grant to Temple University researchers for developing a product that tracks local journalism cycles, which is part of their new “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems” initiative.

The “America’s Fourth Estate at Risk: A System for Mapping the (Local) Journalism Life Cycle to Rebuild the Nation’s News Trust” project aims to create a data-based tool that informs journalists when publishing content might result in “negative unintended outcomes” like “the triggering of uncivil, polarizing discourse, audience misinterpretation, the production of misinformation, and the perpetuation of false narratives.”

The researchers hope to help journalists measure the long-term communication impact of stories, extending beyond existing metrics such as initial reactions, likes, and shares.

In an interview with Campus Reform, grant principal investigator and Temple University professor Eduard Dragut said the team will “use natural language processing algorithms along with social networking tools to mine the communities where [misinformation] may happen.”

“You can imagine that each news article is usually, or actually almost all the time, accompanied by user comments and reactions on Twitter. One goal of the project is to retrieve those and then use natural language processing tools or algorithms to mine and recommend to some users [that] this space of talking, this set of tweets, which may lead to a set of people, like a sub-community, where this article is used for wrong reasons,” he said.

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