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October 2022

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden racks up multiple records in chaotic year at border By Stephen Dinan –

By on October 24th, 2022

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/oct/22/joe-biden-sets-new-record-terrorism-suspects-borde/

The Border Patrol apprehended a record 20 terrorism suspects in September, bringing the total for fiscal 2022 to nearly 100 and closing out the most chaotic 12-month period in border history.

On all the major yardsticks — illegal entries, gang members, convicted criminals, fentanyl and suspected terrorists — the situation got dramatically worse over the past year as smuggling cartels took advantage of the Biden administration’s more relaxed approach to the southern border.

All told, Customs and Border Protection reported nearly 2.4 million encounters with unauthorized migrants at the southern border in fiscal 2022, which ended last month. Of those, 2.2 million were caught by Border Patrol agents as they tried to sneak in, and the rest were encountered at ports of entry demanding to be let in without authorization.

Each of those numbers is believed to be a record, and they left Republicans seething — not least because the Department of Homeland Security released the numbers just before midnight Friday, in what critics said was a futile attempt to bury bad political news.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” the Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee said in a statement.

In September alone, CBP encountered 227,547 illegal immigrants at the southern border. That was the third-highest month on record, topped only by April and May of this year.

Among them were 20 terrorism suspects nabbed by the Border Patrol as they tried to sneak in along the southern border. That’s a monthly record, topping the previous high of 15 set in May.

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MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Democrats Celebrate Their Delusion Over Healthcare Gerard Scimeca

By on October 24th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/22/democrats-celebrate-their-delusion-over-healthcare/

In a desperate attempt to reshape the narrative, President Biden hosted a celebration last month for the “success” of his party’s disastrous $750 billion spending package. Given the Democrats had just authorized three-quarters of a trillion dollars of new federal spending to “reduce” inflation, it was fairly obvious that the messaging drummed up for Biden’s choreographed charade was pure deception and duplicity.

In their attempt to buy votes before the midterms, Democrats doubled-down on the same policies of economic misery that have plagued the nation since Biden took office. But what bears special attention are their lies surrounding the entirely new misery they created in healthcare. 

Take, for example, their laughable claim that they “beat the special interests” to “lower health insurance costs” for Americans. Rather than beating the special interests, the Biden administration is actually heaping more funding on them with generous Obamacare subsidies for insurers, all while premiums are expected to rise by 10% next year.

Call it welfare for the wealthy. When the Democrats crow about finding “savings” in healthcare spending we can simply translate that word to mean “cuts,” which the IRA does to seniors’ Medicare by over $230 billion.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Independents Hold Key To 2022 GOP ‘Red Wave’: I&I/TIPP Poll Terry Jones

By on October 24th, 2022

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/24/independents-hold-key-to-2022-gop-red-wave-ii-tipp-poll/

Despite both major parties claiming they have an advantage, the race for control of Congress appears to be a dead heat, the most recent I&I/TIPP data show. But there’s a big potential surprise element that could tilt the balance sharply: Nearly one out of every seven registered voters, or 15%, are “not sure” whom they’ll vote for.

The online poll of 1,158 voters across the country was taken from October 5-7, with a margin of error of +/- 2.9 points.

The poll asked those responding: “What is your preference for the outcome of this November’s congressional elections?”

Answers showed the sharp division among the electorate, with 42% saying they would prefer “a Congress controlled by Republicans,” and 43% saying they preferred “a Congress controlled by Democrats.” The results are within the poll’s margin of error of 2.9 percentage points.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The revenge of the technocrats Liz Truss’s spectacular downfall has emboldened our equally hopeless expert class. Tom Slater

By on October 24th, 2022

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/10/22/the-revenge-of-the-technocrats/

Watching prime minister Liz Truss’s short resignation speech yesterday, I couldn’t help feeling that she was selling herself short. She managed to summon up just two achievements to boast about from her 44 days in office: the energy price guarantee and the cut to national insurance contributions. But we all know she’s achieved much more than that. She’s tanked her party in spectacular fashion, for a start. Right now, the only thing in Westminster more unpopular than the Tory Party (a poll today put it at 14 per cent) is Truss herself – she is only slightly more popular than Vladimir Putin among the UK population.

Her history-making achievements don’t stop there. Her premiership was the mother of all political cock-ups, in an era in which they have hardly been in short supply. She may even have succeeded in partially rehabilitating her predecessor, Boris Johnson, who has emerged as a strangely plausible candidate to replace her. (At least he has a democratic mandate.) And beyond the party and personality politics, what makes the end of Truss so tragic is that, ideologically speaking, her premiership has managed to achieve the precise opposite of its goals. Whatever Trussonomics was – the underlying logic was never entirely clear – it is now utterly discredited. Indeed, Truss was only able to limp on for a few more days as PM by getting Jeremy Hunt to rip up her mini-budget in the Commons, while she looked on with a kind of lobotomised zen.

More positively, Truss set out to challenge ‘the orthodoxy’, ‘the Treasury view’, ‘the consensus’ preached by various unelected and unaccountable institutions. She even had the gall to suggest that maybe the Bank of England – whose galaxy-brained governor said in August last year that inflation would be ‘temporary’ – wasn’t working as it should. Her chancellor’s first act in office was to sack Treasury permanent secretary Tom Scholar, a man no one had ever heard of but whose expertise was apparently all that stood between us and barbarism, in an act that our hysterical media seemed to equate with regicide. Her refusal of a forecast from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) – another apparently unassailable institution, despite its stellar record of getting things wrong – was seen as another awful heresy.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

The ‘settler violence’ narrative and Knesset elections By Ruthie Blum

By on October 24th, 2022

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-settler-violence-narrative-and-knesset-elections/

The current spike in Palestinian terrorism, marked by dozens of rock-throwing, firebombing, stabbing, car-ramming and shooting attacks each day, was upstaged last week by what the local press and certain politicians were highlighting as an intolerable “surge in settler violence.”

It’s hard to describe the fervor with which news outlets and the “anybody but Bibi” camp—the parties on the left side of the spectrum vying to prevent former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from returning to power after the Nov. 1 Knesset elections—jump on stories of “settlers” assaulting Israel Defense Forces troops and Palestinians.

Take Thursday’s clash in the town of Huwara, near Nablus, for example.

Prime Minister Yair Lapid promptly labeled the thugs who threw stones at Palestinian vehicles and pepper-sprayed members of the IDF’s 202nd Paratrooper Battalion, wounding the commander and a soldier, “dangerous criminals who must be denounced and brought to justice without hesitation and with all severity.”

They “endanger the lives of our soldiers and harm the State of Israel,” he added.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz took it a step further and attributed the incident to the behavior of his right-wing rivals in the Religious Zionist Party.

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