Thursday, May 14, 2020
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
YUGE: Republicans Sweep Congressional Special Elections, Reclaiming California District from Democrats
Mike Garcia and Tom Tiffany won special elections.
Republicans won two special elections for the House of Representatives on Tuesday, picking up victories in Wisconsin and California. Republicans Mike Garcia and Tom Tiffany defeated Democrats Christy Smith and Tricia Zunker.
Garcia’s election victory, which takes place in California’s 25th congressional district, was set forth to replace former Democrat Representative Katie Hill following her resignation over a sex scandal. Hill resigned after being exposed for intimate and inappropriate relationships with subordinate congressional staff, yet has claimed that she represents a form of feminist victim for her inappropriate workplace behavior.
The former Navy fighter pilot’s victory over a Democratic State Assemblywoman ensures that the Republican Party has flipped back the first of the congressional seats it lost in the 2018 midterms. As of Wednesday morning, Garcia is up by a percentage count of 55% to 44%, suggesting a handy victory for the Republican to flip the district.
Hillary Clinton had won the popular vote of the northern Los Angeles county district by 6 percentage points in 2016, suggesting a possibility that the Republican Party could be broadening...
Impeachment Boomerang: Contacts exposed between US embassy, Hunter Biden-connected Ukraine firm
Ambassador’s impeachment testimony omitted mention of Burisma meetings, letters.
During President Trump’s impeachment, former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch testified to Congress that she knew little beyond an initial briefing and “press reports” about Burisma Holdings, the Ukrainian natural gas firm that had hired Vice President Joe Biden’s son Hunter and was dogged by a corruption investigation.
“It just wasn’t a big deal,” she declared under oath on Oct. 11, 2019.
But newly unearthed State Department memos obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show Yovanovitch’s embassy in Kiev, including the ambassador herself, was engaged in several discussions and meetings about Burisma as the gas firm scrambled during the 2016 election and transition to settle a long-running corruption investigation and polish its image before President Trump took office.
Yovanovitch, for instance, was specifically warned in an email by her top deputy in September 2016 — three years before her testimony — that Burisma had hired an American firm with deep Democratic connections called Blue Star Strategies to “rehabilitate the reputation” of the Ukrainian gas firm and that it had placed “Hunter Biden on its board,” the memos show.
She also met directly with a representative for Burisma in her embassy office, less than 45 days before Trump took office, a contact she did not mention during her impeachment deposition.
The discussions about Burisma inside Yovanovitch’s embassy were so extensive, in fact, that they filled more than 160 pages of emails, memos and correspondence in fall 2016 alone, according to the State Department records obtained under FOIA by the conservative group Citizens United.
The contacts included a detailed private letter hand-delivered to Yovanovitch by one of Burisma’s lawyers in September 2016, a briefing later that month from her staff on Burisma’s issues, and a meeting scheduled between the ambassador and a Burisma representative shortly before Christmas 2016 as the Obama administration was preparing to leave office.
Yovanovitch, who recently retired from State, did not respond Tuesday to a message sent to her private email seeking comment. Her lawyer during the impeachment proceedings, Lawrence S. Robbins, also did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
State officials declined comment.
David Bossie, a former congressional investigator and current outside adviser to Trump who runs Citizen United, said the documents his group obtained raise questions about Yovanovitch’s testimony last fall and what else Congress may not know about the embassy’s involvement with the Hunter Biden-connected Burisma firm.
"These new records clearly don't support Ambassador Yovanovitch's testimony under oath during...
Every breath you take and every move you make I'll be watching you...
Every breath you take and every move you make
Every bond you break, every step you take, I'll be watching you
Every single day, every word you say
Every game you play, every night you stay, I'll be watching you
[Chorus]
Oh can't you see, you belong to me
How my poor heart aches with every step you take..
President of French pro-migrant association murdered by Afghan migrant
In Cherbourg, the president of the association for aid to migrants was killed at his home on Tuesday, May 12. He had housed an Afghan asylum seeker. The individual was taken into custody for murder.
This man was hospitable enough to accommodate in his own house in Bretteville-en-Saire, a migrant of Afghan origin. But Jean Dussine was unfortunately murdered on Tuesday, May 12. Witnesses said the victim “was sleeping when [the alleged assailant], an Afghan migrant barely 20 years old, attacked him with an iron rod. He could not be revived,” reported regional news outlet France 3 Normandy.
Jean Dussine was a retired teacher and former director of the Gonneville school in the Manche. At the same time, he had housed other migrants at his home, witnesses to the scene. They even reportedly raised the alarm which allowed the arrest of the alleged murderer.
The investigators are trying to determine the motive for this murder and the exact circumstances of the drama. Public prosecutor Yves Le Clair confirmed the arrest of the Afghan migrant. The suspect was taken into custody for first degree murder....
5 Key Provisions in Democrats’ COVID-19 Bill That Will Hurt Our Economy
Spanning more than 1,800 pages, the bill represents a partisan laundry list of mostly bad policies, calling for trillions of dollars of additional deficit spending on handouts and items unrelated to the crisis.
Lawmakers should focus on the task at hand and respond directly to the public health crisis and its related effects, not abuse these unprecedented circumstances to push through partisan priorities that would derail the recovery.
In these trying times, we must turn to the greatest document in the history of the world to promise freedom and opportunity to its citizens for guidance. Find out more now >>
Lawmakers must work together to create the conditions to safely reopen America, removing barriers to working, creating, and trading, and to enable American society to rise up again and drive the economic recovery.
1. Extending the $600 unemployment bonus: The bill would extend the misguided and harmful $600 unemployment bonus through January 2021, with an additional extension possible through March of next year.
It’s one thing to provide short-term and targeted unemployment benefits during forced shutdowns, but providing a year’s worth of unprecedented additional unemployment benefits—up to an extra $30,000 or more per worker—would be devastating to our economy, potentially even threatening our ability to combat COVID-19 and Americans’ supply of essential goods and services.
Using taxpayer dollars to pay unemployed workers more than employed workers is incredibly unfair to the hardworking Americans who continue to work each day—and wholly un-American.
Policymakers should be focused on creating the conditions that enable the 1 in 5 Americans who have lost their jobs to reconnect with their previous employers or find new employment, instead of incentivizing them to remain unemployed until 2021.
The HERO Act’s perverse unemployment benefits threaten the well-being of the workers they claim to want to help. Tantalizing workers with unemployment benefits equal to 150% or 200% of their usual earnings will only hurt them in the long run, by leading to long-term unemployment and to lower incomes and fewer opportunities, while slowing the American recovery.
2. Lifting the SALT cap: The House Democrats’ bill would lift the current $10,000 cap on the federal deduction for state and local taxes in 2020 and 2021.
Temporarily lifting the cap would provide a two-year windfall tax cut to the wealthiest taxpayers in the highest-tax states.
Before the 2017 reforms, high-tax states such as California, Connecticut, and New York were subsidized by other federal taxpayers across the country. In the case of high-income California taxpayers, the federal state and local tax deduction reduced their overall state tax bill by 40%.
If this proposed change to uncap the deduction were made permanent, it could encourage state governments to increase some of their most economically harmful individual taxes, slowing the economic recovery and passing the costs onto more responsible states.
3. Bailing out states and localities: The bill also includes more than $1 trillion in aid to state and local governments with the vast majority being unrestricted aid that does not directly respond to costs incurred in the fight against COVID-19.
Congress should not be sending blank checks to states and localities, which would only serve to bail out many states that are financially mismanaged and to prop up excessive levels of state and local government spending, and could set a dangerous precedent for the future.
Congress can avoid creating perverse incentives by relieving state governments of unfunded mandates and federal red tape that raise costs and reduce the effectiveness of state and local spending.
4. Forgiving student loans:
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