Nigel Farage rips Biden: America now is 'no better than a bad joke' on the world stage

After the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from Afghanistan, Nigel Farage asked, "How on earth could we trust America again?"

Nigel Farage, the former Brexit party leader, unloaded on President Joe Biden Thursday for his foreign policy failures, saying the U.S. is no longer being taken seriously following the bungled Afghanistan withdrawal.

Farage, who calls himself "the most pro-American Brit you'd ever meet" as he worked for U.S. companies 40 years ago, slammed the current administration's response to Russia and Ukraine and how it left the U.K. in Afghanistan.

"[I]n terms of its presence on the international stage, and what it says as the leader of the free world being taken seriously, America right now is no better than a bad joke," Farage told the John Solomon Reports podcast.

The U.S. and U.K. have been close allies since World War I, and Great Britain spent proportionally the same amount of money on Afghanistan during its 20 years there that America did, Farage recalled.

"Nobody wanted it to go on forever," Farage said of the war in Afghanistan, "but there had to be the right way, and the right moment, to leave. And for Biden to unilaterally withdraw the biggest force — the American force — without even referring to your closest allies in the world since 1917; and when the British prime minister calls to have an urgent conversation, not to return that phone call for 30 hours, how on earth could we trust...

Coca Cola Abandons American Ideas

Now that we have entered the new world of diversity, inclusion and equity, the acronym DIE aptly applies. While schools have long been involved in these activities, businesses have now voluntarily adopted or been forced to accept this left-wing ideology as well.

Consequently, Coca-Cola has sent out notices to law firms demanding that the company will "require diversity among law firms who bill it for work in the United States and reduce payments if they do not comply."

Because of pressure from the Marxist, anti-American Black Lives Matter, many Fortune 500 companies have pledged to address alleged racial inequality more aggressively.

In fact, there is almost a competition among firms to see who gets the highest score of diversity and inclusion. How is this accomplished? 

To determine the Best Workplaces for Diversity, Fortune partnered with Great Place to Work® to analyze anonymous survey feedback representing more than 4.8 million US employees.

The Best Workplaces for Diversity list focuses on the experiences of women, people of color, LGBTQ people, employees who are Boomers or older, and people who have disabilities. The ranking is based on what these employees themselves report in a 60-question Trust Index© survey about the trust, pride and camaraderie they experience in their workplace, and how those experiences compare to their colleagues’ reports of the same workplaces. Great Place to Work also consider[s] employees’ daily experiences of innovation, the company’s values, and the effectiveness of their leaders, to ensure they’re consistently experienced, as well.

The remaining 15 percent of the rank is based on the diversity of the company’s overall workforce and its management, senior leadership and board, taking into account industry trends.

Coca Cola Company's Chief Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Officer, Lori George Billingsley, explains how Coca-Cola is creating a culture of diversity and inclusion.

The company that once touted "Red, White, and You," has come a long way to now being a leading proponent of the racism that is the underbelly of diversity.

Thus, Coca-Cola's general counsel is urging law firms to "effect real systemic change" by adhering to new requirements that [mandate that] outside counsel allocate a portion of work to diverse attorneys -- specifically Black lawyers -- or risk losing money or even future...

The Curious Case of Bogus Amazon Sellers

I’m sure I’m not alone in admitting that I generally love Amazon. The access to massive product variety, frequently great prices, the whole Prime feature, and a sense that you can really trust the entire framework just makes Amazon easy to appreciate. But that trust thing… well, lately I’ve had it rocked a little bit when it comes to Amazon. Here’s the executive summary:

• I have found multiple clearly fraudulent sellers in the “used” category
• I’ve engaged Amazon’s customer service and investigations staff, had my suspicions confirmed and told by Amazon they’d get rid of the bogus sellers
• The same sellers keep coming back, and they are pretty convincing if you don’t know better
• There seems to be no way for Amazon to keep them out
• Dealing with Amazon in this regard is kind of like talking with children who speak another language, and who also happen to be watching TV or something as you speak to them

Now let’s look at a real-world example.

Please note the instructions for how to engage this seller- you have to leave the Amazon framework and communicate through Gmail. We’ll go there in a bit, but also note the seller’s name “Lin.Martone”. This one has also shown up as:

• LI N Martone
• LinMartone

and each variant has a different gmail account to go with it. On this item, there have been NUMEROUS bogus sellers that come and go, all with the same “email me if you want this” and all with a price that’s too good to be true (hence the draw). All of this has been shared with Amazon via emails and calls. In each case, Amazon agrees fraud is in play, yet it it keeps coming back.

Being a veteran of many an investigation, I decided to follow one of these out before enaging Amazon for the first time. Here we go… bogus seller here is ter.kansey@gmail.com (you’ll love the spoofed Amazon page that’s coming):

Realize- we’ve already broken Amazon’s rules here, by leaving the web framework and communicating directly. The response- a sloppy cut and paste of a reply to somebody named Shane.

Here is where it gets good- sent in my inbox, a very official looking “Amazon page” complete with bogus order number.  I have to think that at this point, many shoppers might be fooled.

This person was trying to get me to buy an Amazon gift card, and read them the number as payment for an item that would most assuredly never come. When I called Amazon and shared this all with them, I found a number of challenges in dealing with customer service.

• You can’t share any of these sorts of screenshots- only email headers (which I did)
• When I mentioned fake order numbers and well-crafted fake phishing style pages being provided via email, I don’t know if it even registered with the person I was speaking with
• I pointed out over multiple calls and online reports at least half a dozen bogus “sellers” on this item alone, all with same methodology
•  You get the general feeling that Amazon could really care less, and that you are a bit of a bother when you engage them on this over the phone
• The same “sellers” keep coming back
• That anyone can join the Amazon used market as seller and then be allowed to tell customers to go through email and break Amazon’s rules WITHOUT AMAZON THEMSELVES CATCHING IT is bewildering

And that’s it. I’ll still use Amazon for new items, but am thoroughly spooked at how loose and sloppy this end of their used market is. I hope this blog can help even one person not to get scammed by what seems to be pretty common on Amazon.

Cheers!

ADDENDUM- Thanks, Stephen Foskett for taking this issue up on your own blog, and summarizing what to watch out for: (lifted from Stephen):

Here are the hallmarks:

1. Too-low round-number prices roughly half the retail cost
2. Items sold as used but with specific notes that they’re actually new
3. Instructions to email to begin the transaction rather than using the Amazon site, including obviously obfuscated gmail addresses with spaces between letters
4. “Just Launched” seller profiles with no ratings

Be careful out there!

https://wirednot.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/the-curious-case-of-bogus-amazon-sellers/

The Perilous State of America’s Republic

If the United States cannot, in Lincoln's words, “bind up the nation’s wounds,” and re-emerge as a strong democracy, the end of Western Civilization is in sight.

Americans should know how perilous their democracy has become. The majority of Donald Trump’s voters already believe the presidential election was rigged, and there is no doubt that suspect voting changes, attributed to the requirements of voting in a pandemic, have created large anomalies in five states that made a great many such votes impossible to authenticate. Untold numbers of ballots arrived at a time and in a manner that incites the inference that they were substantially fraudulent. The numbers of votes involved in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are undoubtedly adequately numerous to have influenced the election.

The courts have failed to address the questions raised by this disturbing pattern of votes confined to only five states. Some of the responsibility rests with President Trump’s counsel, who often have demanded remedies out of all proportion to the complaints alleged. They seem only now to be getting around to an attack on the constitutionality of unverifiable voting on a large scale in the four or five suspect states, which stand out like pike-staffs among the others where all went smoothly.

The refusal of the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the appeal from the state of Texas, joined by 18 other states, is an outright abdication. Of course, Texas and its co-petitioners have perfectly adequate standing to demand that all states, in choosing a president, conduct their elections credibly enough to assure the whole country that the Constitution has been followed in filling the nation’s highest offices. For the Supreme Court to take the position, as it did, that it could not hear the election challenge case because Texas and the others did not have the standing to challenge how another state conducts its presidential election is completely spurious in the circumstances. Where the courts don’t exercise their jurisdiction, a vacuum arises which is likely to be filled by lawlessness, and potentially, even violent lawlessness.

The United States has become a country where a majority of Americans—people of good will from both parties—believe presidential elections are not conducted honestly. (Think back to the contested election of 2000.) An overwhelming majority do not trust the media, which, in political matters, is effectively a totalitarian enterprise slandering the Republicans and censoring criticism of the Democrats.

The Supreme Court has declined to opine on the most important question that possibly can be legitimately brought before it, and the criminal courts approve approximately 98 percent of prosecutions, over 95 percent of those without a trial, such is the corruption of the plea bargain system that enables prosecutors to extort false inculpatory testimony with no consequences to itself or the untruthful witnesses who are granted immunity from prosecution for perjury.

Crime rates are skyrocketing across the country, and last summer “peaceful protests” against civil rights abuses tore apart cities across the country, killing approximately 50 people, injuring 700 police, with looters, vandals, and arsonists (not protesters) committing billions of dollars of property damage. The Democrats made no reference to this at their convention; almost all of these riots took place in Democratic-governed states and cities, and the elected leaders of those cities largely identified with the rioters and responded by reducing police funding. Again, the clear trend is to lawlessness.

The treatment of the controversy surrounding the financial relations of presumptive President-elect Joe Biden and his family with Russia, China, and Ukraine in particular, raises further disquieting questions. The severity with which practically all of the media and social media denounced and ignored suggestions of potential misconduct by former Vice President Biden and his family, including suspending the Twitter account of the New York Post, the country’s oldest newspaper, and of the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, is indicative of the undemocratic tendencies of the media and it helps to explain why professionally conducted surveys uniformly show that fewer than 15 percent of Americans trust the media. A free press is an indispensable pillar of a functioning democracy, but is now in the United States a despised, corrupted, and shriveled facsimile of the reliable and fearless media a vibrant democracy requires.

There is certainly room to question the conduct of Attorney General William Barr in unilaterally deciding that no mention should be made of the grand jury criminal investigation that has been conducted into these matters for over two years, enabling the media barely six weeks ago to suppress the story in a manner replicative of dictatorial regimes. There is no doubt that the existence of that investigation was a material fact in determining how people voted, and if Barr had emphasized the presumption of innocence, it would have been appropriate to reveal it to allow voters to...

Turn on Tune in Drop out - Never Trust A Liberal After he Turns 30

I will amend that to never trust a liberal.

Clinton sex accusers storm Al Franken's office

Security summoned when women challenge senator to 'come out' and talk

WASHINGTON – In the wake of photographic proof that Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., has brazenly harassed women for decades, one of Franken’s targets joined former President Bill Clinton’s accusers Wednesday to demand justice.

Franken disappeared for days after there were claims he groped and demeaned women.

Then he emerged Sunday, explaining that he has not considered resigning amid the slew of sexual harassment allegations but would cooperate with a Senate investigation into his conduct.

“I’ve let a lot of people down and I’m hoping I can make it up to them and gradually regain their trust,” said Franken, breaking an eight-day silence in a phone call with Minnesota Public Radio.

“The Ethics Committee is looking into all of this, and I will cooperate fully with it,” said Franken, who was elected to the Senate in 2008. “I know I have a lot of work to do to regain the trust of people I’ve let down.”

Earlier this month, KABC on-air personality Leeann Tweeden accused Franken of kissing and groping her without her consent while she was asleep.

Tweeden substantiated her claims with a photo that shows Franken with his hands over her breasts while he...

Rachel Maddow Dedicates Entire Show To Chris Christie Traffic Prank

Rachel Maddow was silent on Fast and Furious.
Rachel Maddow spent a little time attempting to argue that the IRS scandal was not mainly against the right wing.
Rachel Maddow ignores the multitudes of scandals, unconstitutionality, the march towards tyranny, or any of the myriad abuses of power the Obama Administration commits on an almost daily basis.

But what grabs Ms. Maddow's ire?  A traffic prank.

Warmist Gun Grabber, Chris Christie is facing the breathless onslaught of the leftist media finally with a real scandal to uncover!  The evil traffic pranksters! This will certainly be the top story of 2014 and the media is on it like lard on the first shadies wife.

Warmist Gun Grabber, Chris Christie issued a fatwah:
“I am a very sad person today,” the governor said. “I am heartbroken that someone I permitted to be in that circle of trust for the past five years betrayed that trust.”

Ok, wait it looks like MSNBC is completely full court press with wall to wall coverage of breathless impassioned reporting on this MAJOR story, the energy and glee they exhibit, foretelling of the end of Christie's presidential run. Finally the moribund doldrums are over and these journalists have a story of real hard hitting news to tell over and over! This is the essence of journalistic reporting, these months and years of no political news, have finally ended. The joy and thrill these hard nosed reporters must feel!

I could give two shits about Christie. He should not be the Republican nominee.

For MSNBC? I feel only disgust at these despicable propagandists.

Epstein’s Latest Victim: The Public’s Right to Know

A free press has devolved into regime media.

Amid the oppressive, choking miasma of lies incessantly and unaccountably belched by this sock-puppet administration, which is amplified, massaged, and muted as necessary by its lapdog media, dissent is essential and must be heralded.

Therefore, one should recognize and laud the Wall Street Journal for its revelatory report, “Epstein’s Private Calendar Reveals Prominent Names, Including CIA Chief, Goldman’s Top Lawyer.” The article endeavors to resurrect interest in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking ring. Whether it can facilitate justice for the survivors (many of them minors at the time), or spark further revelations about the predator Epstein’s connections with the global elite, is perhaps unlikely. The odds are stacked against such a just outcome. (Some outlets, such as the Daily Caller, have helped further the article’s reach, and these outlets also are to be commended.)

Yet, the Journal story did accomplish one goal resoundingly. By proving the exception, it proved the rule: a free press has devolved into regime media.

The default response to the economic stresses the communication revolution’s democratization of information has placed upon traditional news outlets has been more partisanship in reporting. Confirmation bias is big business. And, yes, the bias being confirmed is almost always a liberal or leftist one, given the ideological disposition of liberal older management and woke younger reporters. Yet, because of public expectations, not even the most biased outlets can patently express their partisanship. After all, our largely for-profit media’s goal is to survive and thrive.

Leave it to the Left to justify its departure from objective reporting into ideological proselytization. Welcome to the skewed world of “accountability journalism,” which is neither accountable nor journalism. As previously explained in American Greatness, accountability journalism

allows the Left to ignore any claim of objectivity in their reporting, in order to serve a ‘higher truth’ and ‘greater good’—specifically, the leftist agenda. It assumes one’s leftist ideology is the only acceptable one; and, ergo, its premises and conclusions are infallible. Any challenge to their personal partisan premises and conclusions are ipso facto erroneous—i.e., ‘disinformation.’

Accountability journalism is the seminal deceit in the Left’s effort to preserve its “fiefdom of the press.”

Oblivious to the irony of a morally relative ideology purporting to identify “the truth” (or is it “a truth,” or “my truth”?) when ideologically necessary to advance a political “narrative,” accountability journalism reaps what it purports to stanch: the erosion of public trust in the media.

This lack of public trust stems from a second factor: the media’s transmogrification from objective journalism to “accountability journalism.” The latter is merely a pretext for leftist...

71 Percent Of Americans Reject Privacy Killing Contact Tracing Apps

Europeans also say no to government monitoring.

Almost three quarters of Americans say they will not submit their privacy to contact tracing apps, with Europeans also rejecting the notion outright because they do not trust government to keep their information safe and refrain from misusing it.

A study from Avira reveals that the vast majority of Americans are against contact tracing apps, with 71 percent saying they will not download them, and 75% believing their digital privacy is at risk from the technology.

The poll found that only 14 percent believe the government would protect their data effectively.

When asked if they would trust big tech more than the government, 32 percent said they would feel safe giving Apple or Google their data.

The study also noted that those working in Government and Healthcare are the least-likely to download the technology, with 84% of people from these sectors saying they will not use the apps:

ARRESTED: Senior Treasury Official Charged For Leaking Paul Manafort Files To Media, Plus 1000s of Other Documents

A senior Treasury department official accused of leaking highly sensitive financial reports to a journalist looking into the overseas dealings of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, as well as transactions involving the Russian embassy, has just been arrested by the Justice Department.

Senior adviser at the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, has been charged with one count of unauthorized disclosure of suspicious activity reports, known as SARs, and one count of conspiracy to make unauthorized disclosures of suspicious activity reports (SARs)–for allegedly sending the files to an unidentified reporter beginning in October of 2017, according to authorities.

Brad Heath (@bradheath) tweeted a thread on Wednesday:

View image on Twitter

Brad Heath

✔@bradheath

DOJ has filed criminal charges against a Treasury Dep't official alleging a conspiracy to leak confidential "suspicious activity reports" about Paul Manafort, Rick Gates and others to a BuzzFeed reporter.

11:56 AM - Oct 17, 2018

• 733
• 781 people are talking about this

Twitter Ads info and privacy

Read in full here:

The reports, which focused on Manafort, the Russian Embassy, Prevezon Alexander real estate company, alleged Russian spy Maria Butina, and Manafort’s former business partner Rick Gates, were later detailed in roughly 12 articles, all published by BuzzFeed, according to court documents.

“Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards, a senior-level FinCEN employee, betrayed her position of trust by repeatedly disclosing highly sensitive information contained in Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) to an individual not authorized to receive them,” said U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman.

“SARs, which are filed confidentially by banks and other financial institutions to alert law enforcement to potentially illegal transactions, are not public documents, and it is an independent federal crime to disclose them outside of one’s official duties.”

“We hope today’s charges remind those in positions of trust within government agencies that the unlawful sharing of sensitive documents will not be tolerated and will be met with swift justice by this Office,” he added.

40-year-old Edwards had saved the SARs, along with thousands of other files containing sensitive government information, to a flash drive provided to her by FinCen, according to court documents. DOH alleges that the FinCEN employee saved over 24,000 suspicious activity reports to the flash drive.

The files were saved to a folder named “Debacle – Operation-CF,” which contained subfolders named “asshat,” “debacle,” and “emails,” according to Law & Crime.

The Virginia native, federal prosecutors say, sent the information to the reporter via an encrypted app.

On top of that, Edwards is also accused of sending the reporter internal FinCEN emails and documents including confidential memos and intelligence assessments that contained various threat assessments to...

France, Google And Facebook Push For Worldwide Hate Speech Regulation

"The same big tech companies that are wary of being regulated by the US government in order to protect free speech, will gladly volunteer to be regulated by foreign governments so that they can restrict free speech," NewsBusters' Alexander Hall reports.

From NewsBusters:

The French government and U.S. tech giants are pushing for a worldwide initiative to regulate the internet — including the issue of hate speech.

The new declaration from the French government titled the “Paris Call For Trust and Security in Cyberspace,” is part of an international effort to crack down on cyber attacks, foreign interference, and hate speech, according to the organization that drafted the document. American big tech companies such as Facebook and Alphabet’s Google have offered their support, willing to promote this regulation as a demonstration of their company values.

The group Access Now, which helped draft this “Paris Call,” said in a statementon Monday, November 12, that it could help counter the actions of nations that defend their sovereignty. The organization said,

“Sovereignty can justify overbroad data collection and government hacking, Internet shutdowns, restrictions on expression based on poorly defined standards of hate speech or terrorist content, and limits on the security of platforms, all in the name of the needs of the state. Ultimately, the Paris Call will reinforce other efforts to improve protections for users and their rights.”

[...]According to Cyberscoop, Google and Cisco were two of the major tech companies who are supporting this initiative. Nicklas Lundblad, a Google vice president, stated publicly that, “We support the Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace because as security threats evolve, continuous collaboration with the industry and with governments is the best way to protect users and...

The German government admits hundreds of thousands of people have had severe side effects following mRNA shots

The risk-benefit of the Covid vaccines is getting worse and worse and worse

This morning, the German Federal Ministry of Health posted a stunning tweet, admitting that 1 out of every 5,000 Covid jabs cause “serious side effects.”

This figure is likely a sharp underestimate, given the fact that side effect reporting systems for drugs and vaccines are largely voluntary.

Nonetheless, it implies that almost 300,000 Americans and Europeans have suffered severe side effects after receiving mRNA shots from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. (It is unclear whether the German side effect estimate applied to Covid vaccines from India and China, which use older technologies and are largely unused in wealthier countries, aside from China.)

—

(If you can’t trust the Bundesgesundheitsministerium, who can you trust?)

Health authorities now acknowledge that the mRNA vaccines do not stop Covid infection or transmission and likely have no preventative value against the Omicron variant within months. Thus their risk-benefit profile appears increasingly absurd, especially because Omicron is notably less dangerous than earlier Covid variants to everyone, vaccinated or not.

These Covid jabs are not cancer drugs, where patients and physicians will tolerate severe side effects. They are not even influenza jabs - at this point they are even less effective and far more dangerous.

The fact that the effectiveness of the mRNA shots is measured in weeks against Omicron is merely the last straw against them. Even if they worked worked long-term, regulators would likely have already pulled from the market any other product that caused this much damage for an illness that is little more than a cold for most...

Do You Know What I Am Made Of? It's Just A Tiny Piece Of Me, It's Just A Tiny Piece Of Me....

Please speak softly, for they will hear us

And they'll find out why we don't trust them

Speak up dear, 'cause I cannot hear you

I need to know why we don't trust them

Explain to me this conspiracy against me

And tell me how I've lost my power

Where can I turn? 'Cause I need something more

Surrounded by uncertainty, I'm so unsure

Tell me why I feel so alone

'Cause I need to know to whom do I owe

Report: FBI Conducted Domestic Influence Operation Targeting Social and Corporate Media to Discredit Hunter Biden Laptop Story

While the FBI was supposed to be investigating foreign influence operations ahead of the 2020 election, it was engaging in a political influence operation of its own right here at home. Throughout all of 2020, the FBI repeatedly “primed” former Twitter’s Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth to dismiss accurate reports of Hunter Biden’s scandalous laptop, and to refer to it as a Russian “hack and leak” operation, according to internal Twitter documents.

Although the FBI almost certainly knew the laptop—which had been in its possession since December of 2019—was legitimate, it conducted a multi-faceted influence operation targeting multiple social media platforms and major corporate media outlets to discredit accurate reports on a major scandal that threatened to torpedo Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.

Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger on Monday released the seventh edition of the “Twitter Files” onto the social media platform, revealing how the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community worked to “discredit factual information about Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings” in the media.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has given Shellenberger and two other independent reporters broad access to the internal communications between Twitter executives and government officials on the condition that they post the material on Twitter before they publish it anywhere else.

The sixth installment of the Twitter Files revealed how the FBI’s relentless attempts to exercise influence over Twitter’s content, its users, and its data, made even Yoel Roth—the far-left former head of Trust and Safety—uncomfortable.

The evidence uncovered in seventh edition points to “an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published,” Shellenberger wrote. “The story begins December 2019 when a Delaware computer store owner named John Paul (J.P.) Mac Isaac contacts the FBI about a laptop that Hunter Biden had left with him.”

The FBI issued a subpoena for Hunter Biden’s laptop and took possession of it on Dec 9, 2019. For the next year, the Bureau did nothing meaningful to address multiple alleged illegalities found in the laptop—but it did take action.

“At 9:22 pm ET (6:22 PT), FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sends 10 documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth, through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter,” Shellenberger wrote.


The next day, October 14, 2020, The New York Post runs its explosive story revealing the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. Every single fact in it was accurate.
And yet, within hours, Twitter and other social media companies censor the NY Post article, preventing it from spreading and, more importantly, undermining its credibility in the minds of many Americans.

They did the same to Facebook, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “The FBI basically came to us [and] was like, ‘Hey… you should be on high alert. We thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in 2016 election. There’s about to be some kind of dump similar to that.'”

While the FBI’s warnings of a Russian hack-and-leak operation relating to Hunter Biden’s laptop was based on outdated intel, the laptop in its possession was chuck full of incriminating information about Hunter, and his father, the then-Democrat candidate for president.

“Hunter Biden earned *tens of millions* of dollars in contracts with foreign businesses, including ones linked to China’s government, for which Hunter offered no real work,” Shellenberger wrote, linking to a video of investigative journalist Peter Schweizer summing up the alleged Biden family corruption and illegalities.

The Twitter files show that the FBI had no reason to be focusing on a Russian “hack and leak” operation:

Feds Provide Almost $2 Billion in Subsidies to Hire Alien Grads Rather than U.S. Grads

The Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, in which the American government pays American employers to discriminate against American workers has grown rapidly in recent years, and during FY 2017 it used nearly $2 billion swiped from trust funds for the elderly to favor 240,000 alien college grads over an equal number of U.S.-resident grads.

It is hard to believe, but true; employers of foreign students who have a decree from a U.S. institution are given an 8.25 percent tax break if they hire an alien, rather than a U.S. college grad with the same skills, and paid at the same salary, as we described in some detail in a recent posting.

When we wrote the prior article, we were working with out-of-date numbers; subsequently we secured estimated FY 2017 data that shows that some 240,000 American workers are adversely impacted by this program (shouldered out of jobs by the subsidized aliens); earlier data set that number at 140,000.

The subsidies to hire the foreign alumni are extracted from the Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment Insurance Program trust funds and were estimated to be in the area of $1.155 billion in that article. It is now clear that in FY 2017 the total subsidies came to something like $1.98 billion, or close to $2 billion.

The program, as we noted earlier, has had silent but bipartisan support; it was created by the Bush II administration without any congressional authorization, was subsequently expanded by the Obama administration, and has been tolerated by the Trump administration.

The employers benefiting from the subsidies directly, and universities benefiting indirectly, know all about the program, which is all but unknown to the older Americans subsidizing it, and is similarly unknown to the young U.S. college grads who are hurt by it. Given this twisted political dynamic, inertia, and the total silence of the media on this point, the program persists and grows each year.

Estimation Techniques: Jobs Lost. There is an obscure USCIS document that shows the number of approvals of Employment Authorization Documents by category, "EADS by Classification and Basis for Eligibility, Oct. 1, 2012 - June 29, 2017", that Daniel Costa of EPI pointed out to me.

It shows the numbers of OPT/EADs (usually good for one year) issued to F-1 college grads, as well as the number of extensions for F-1 alums who had studied science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM), and each of these, recently, has been good for two more years. So I added the most recent regular OPT and STEM/OPT estimations to the prior year's STEM extension data to get a current estimate of the number of subsidized jobs held by OPT aliens (and thus denied to U.S. workers) at the end of FY 2017.

• Data were available for only the first nine months of FY 2017 so, assuming a constant flow of these applications, I multiplied the available number by 1.333, which produced this:
• Estimated regular OPT for FY 2017: 153,646
• Estimated STEM extension for FY 2017: 44,073
• Reported STEM extensions for FY 2016 : 45,184
• Total: 242,903

This I have rounded down to 240,000 to account for...

When Public Distrust of the FBI Comes Home to Roost

The FBI has spent years earning our distrust. Those leading the bureau have refused to address their obvious issues — behaving as if they were above accountability. But violating the public trust has consequences, which they are just now learning.

In just the last eight years, the world’s “premier law enforcement agency” has been caught

• implementing an “insurance policy” to subvert our electoral choice (Crossfire Hurricane),
• entrapping useful idiots for political advantage (Whitmer kidnapping and January 6 defendants),
• colluding with the DNC to pin their email server attack on the Russians and Donald Trump,
• hiding evidence of Biden family corruption (Hunter Biden laptop),
• obfuscating and perjuring before Congress (Seth Rich laptop testimony),
• raiding a journalist’s home to retrieve the diary of Joe Biden’s daughter (James O’Keefe),
• 
  conducting the first ever armed raid on a former president’s home (Mar-a-Lago), and
• violating our 1st Amendment rights to protect the Democrat narrative (social media censorship).
  

If there is anything more the FBI could have done to prove its untrustworthiness, it escapes my imagination — and I have a vivid imagination.

According to Rasmussen, 53 percent of Americans agree with the Roger Stone statement: “There is a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI who are using the FBI as Joe Biden’s personal Gestapo.”

The unethical, and even illegal, activities of the bureau are gaining public recognition. Suspecting the worst of the FBI is no longer the stuff of “lunatic conspiracy theories,” as its bad behavior has been documented by Michael Horowitz in his inspector general report and John Durham in his special counsel findings. As congressional investigations continue to examine the FBI as part of its oversight role, more evidence of corruption is coming to light every day. Here are highlights from some of the past bad actors.

• Peter Strzok attempted to oust an elected president.
• Andrew McCabe committed felony perjury to investigators.
• James Comey set a perjury trap for President Trump’s national security adviser and illegally leaked classified information to the press.
• Kevin Clinesmith falsified evidence, which was used to obtain a FISA warrant.
  
• Stephen D’Antuono oversaw an entrapment scheme to implicate MAGA conservatives.
• W. Jay Abbott failed to take action against sexual predator Larry Nassar, while he pursued employment opportunities with the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Many more continue to work at the FBI but are being protected by bureau refusal to cooperate with congressional oversight (looking at you, Director Wray).

None of these FBI officials received any punishment even approaching what would be applied to American civilians for similar offenses. The minimal punishments they received, if any, will do nothing to discourage future misbehavior at the bureau.

The public has been left with the perception that the FBI refuses to hold its own accountable for ethical or criminal violations. If there were a “few bad apples” ten years ago, they have now caused rot throughout the basket. The motto of the bureau that claims to operate “above reproach” has become a joke:

• Fidelity — but only to leftist ideology.
• Bravery — in subverting self-governance.
• Integrity — except when lies are more convenient.

Did the FBI understand the consequences of lost public trust? Did its members think treachery would lead to limitless power — in which they could wield police powers with impunity? How did they fail to see that their loss of integrity would eventually usurp their ability to function?

The bureau’s police powers derive from those they swear an oath to...