Biden’s Cradle-to-Grave Government . . . The progressive hits keep coming from the Biden Administration, and the latest is the $1.8 trillion American Families Plan introduced in broad strokes on Wednesday. It’s more accurate to call this the plan to make the middle class dependent on government from cradle to grave. The government will tell you sometime later, after you’re hooked to the state, how it will force you to pay for it. The regular federal budget is more than $4 trillion a year. But the cost, while staggering, isn’t the only or even the biggest problem. The destructive part is the way the plan seeks to insinuate government cash and the rules that go with it into all of the major decisions of family life. The goal is to expand the entitlement state to make Americans rely on government and the political class for everything they don’t already provide. Wall Street Journal

 

 

 

Biden's Rambling Tirade . . . President Joe Biden on Wednesday said his political opponents "can't stop" him from "moving forward" with his controversial agenda. During a rambling address to a mostly empty House Chamber on Capitol Hill, Biden shoplifted former president Donald Trump's "Buy American" initiative and attempted to pass it off as his own. He repeated his inscrutable false claim about having traveled "more than 17,000 miles with" Chinese president Xi Jinping. Biden thanked politicians for the fact that so many Americans have received a COVID-19 vaccination but declined to credit health care workers, much less Trump and Operation Warp Speed, launched almost one year ago today to the widespread derision of so-called science experts and unaccredited media pundits. Washington Free Beacon

Biden Gave the Most Ideologically Ambitious Speech of Any Democratic President in Generations . . . Under a pose of guilelessness, Biden’s speech was in fact infused with political guile. The agenda he promoted to expand both free pre-school and community college, to subsidize the shift to a low-carbon economy, to fund a massive way of new public works construction by taxing the very wealthy, represented years of pent-up demand by progressives. But much of the money would be spent in ways designed to break up the Trump coalition, which was powered heavily by middle- and lower-middle class whites who do not have college degrees with contempt for many parts of the progressive agenda. Referring to his infrastructure proposal, Biden argued: “Nearly 90 percent of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan do not require a college degree. Seventy-five percent don't require an associate’s degree. The American Jobs Plan is a blue-collar blueprint to build America. Politico

 

Tim Scott in GOP response to Biden: ‘America is not a racist country’ . . . Sen. Tim Scott on Wednesday knocked President Biden for “empty platitudes” about national unity while also accusing the US of “systemic racism” in a blistering Republican response to Biden’s first speech to a joint session of Congress. The South Carolina Republican said Democrats hypocritically talked about unity while filibustering his policing reform bill and rejecting GOP efforts to influence Biden’s recently passed $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill. Scott, one of just three black senators, also said “America is not a racist country” — rejecting Biden’s recent assessment of America as systemically racist. New York Post

Government Official Who Approved Improper Spying On Trump Staffer Tapped For Spy Court Role . . . Mary McCord, a former Justice Department official who approved efforts to snoop on former Trump campaign aide Carter Page, has been appointed to advise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The same court excoriated government officials in late 2019 for providing misleading information in four applications to surveil Page, a former Naval officer, who served as a Trump campaign national security adviser. The surveillance court appointed McCord, who served as assistant attorney general for national security through May 2017, to be an amicus curiae on April 15. Daily Caller

Guiliani’s home raided by FBI: They left copy of Hunter’s laptop. Is Trump the target? . . . One must assume, at least partially. The Feds raided Rudy Giuliani’s apartment Wednesday morning, collecting all sorts of electronic devices. No doubt some of these have communications with Donald Trump. Apparently the only thing they didn’t care about was Hunter Biden’s laptop, leaving behind a hard drive that contains a copy of it. Go figure. “This is disgusting. This is absolutely absurd,” said Giuliani’s son Andrew. “And it’s the continued politicization of the Justice Department that we have seen. And it has to stop if this can happen to the former president’s lawyer. This can happen to any American. Enough is enough. The only piece of evidence that they did not take up there today was the only piece of incriminating evidence that is in there.”

More than 200 Seattle police officers quit over the last year . . . More than 200 Seattle police officers quit their jobs in the last year amid months of frequent anti-law enforcement, racial injustice protests and riots in the city. Many of the officers cited an anti-police climate in the city – including in the City Council -- and disagreements with police management in their reasons for moving on, leaving the department with what Police Chief Adrian Diaz called a "staffing crisis" on Tuesday. He said 180 police officers quit last year and another 66 officers so far this year. Fox News

 

 

Blinken warns Turkey, US allies against purchasing Russian weapons . . . Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday warned Turkey and other U.S. allies against buying weapons systems from Russia, saying such purchases could be subject to sanctions and strain ties with Washington. Blinken singled out Turkey as it undergoes talks with Russia for a second purchase of the S-400 anti-aircraft weapons system, saying it could be penalized under the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA).  "It's also very important going forward that Turkey, and for that matter all U.S. allies and partners, avoid future purchases of Russian weaponry, including additional S-400s," Blinken said. The Hill

Tibetans see repeat of own repression in China's treatment of Uyghurs . . . Tibetans are experiencing mass repression in China similar to that being enforced on ethnic minority Uyghurs in the western part of the country, the outgoing president of the Tibetan government in exile said. Lobsang Sangay, head of the exile government loyal to Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, said China is forcibly trying to turn Tibet into a Chinese province and Tibetans into Chinese, even as Tibet’s cause is getting less attention in the Western press. Tibet was an independent state in the Himalayas until Chinese troops annexed the region in 1950. The Dalai Lama fled into exile in India, where the exile government is based to this day. Washington Times

 

US economic growth expected to have picked up in first quarter . . . US economic growth is expected to have received a boost in the first three months of 2021 from massive fiscal stimulus that fuelled consumer spending, as well as looser lockdown restrictions after new Covid-19 infections slowed. Economists estimate that figures due to be released on Thursday will show that gross domestic product advanced 6.1 per cent on an annualised basis in the first quarter — or about 1.5 per cent compared with the previous quarter, based on the measure used by other major economies. Financial Times

 

 

Biden claims US billionaires made $1 trillion during pandemic — here's the truth . . . During his first address to a joint session of Congress, Biden said that while 20 million working- and middle-class people lost jobs during the pandemic, the richest 650 people in the US saw their wealth explode. The president was referencing a report by Americans for Tax Fairness and the Institute for Policy Studies, two left-leaning groups. The claim is that as of February, the country’s 664 billionaires now have a collective net worth of $4.3 trillion, up from just under $3 trillion on March 18 of last year. While March 18 was early on in the pandemic in terms of time frame (states were not yet locking down), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was at its lowest point around late March, dropping to nearly 19,000 points by March 20. Net value is largely derived from the value of stocks, meaning that if measured from the lowest trough, the stock market’s subsequent multi-month increase would obviously cause a dramatic increase in the net worth of the country’s billionaires. Washington Examiner