Cross-Examination

• Spending “bargain”: Congressional leaders have reached a federal spending level agreement of $1.6 trillion for some appropriations for Fiscal Year 2024. The deal now sets up a two-week window for the House and Senate to come to an agreement on budget legislation. Speaker Mike Johnson claimed the deal included “hard-fought concessions” from Democrats while also acknowledging that “these final spending levels will not satisfy everyone, and they do not cut as much spending as many of us would like.” The agreed-upon spending level is nearly the same debt-ceiling number former Speaker Kevin McCarthy negotiated last spring — $1.59 trillion. With an even slimmer majority to work with than McCarthy, will Johnson be able to convince the fiscally conservative Freedom Caucus to sign onto a deal that doesn’t include spending cuts as significant as they have been demanding? Congress has until January 19 to pass a budget to avoid any government shutdowns.

• Lloyd Austin hospitalized: Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is still in the hospital today after having secretly checked in for a second time on Thursday. As Fox News reports, he originally checked in on December 22 for an undisclosed elective surgery. Ten days later, on New Year’s Day, he was admitted to the intensive care unit at Walter Reed Hospital, apparently in “severe pain.” A day later, on January 2, Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, who was on vacation in Puerto Rico, was told via Zoom call that she’d be handling “certain operational duties” without even being told that her boss was in the hospital. Does this seem odd to anyone else? Austin was away from his post for days but told neither his immediate superior, Joe Biden, nor his immediate subordinate, Deputy Secretary Hicks. That sounds to us like an unauthorized absence. At the very least, as Senator Rand Paul remarked this morning, “It depicts a Biden administration that’s very aloof … that Biden is a figurehead and other people are doing the work, and if an important person like the secretary of defense goes missing for a week or two, ‘No big deal, we don’t need to bother the president with this because he’s not in charge anyway.’” All this raises an interesting question about the drone strike that the U.S. carried out in Baghdad on Thursday, which killed a high-ranking Iranian military leader: Who ordered that deadly strike if Austin was incapacitated and if Biden was unaware of his absence? Donald Trump says Austin’s failures are a fireable offense, but we can be confident that Biden is as likely to fire his woke defense secretary as Harvard was to fire its woke president.

• SCOTUS takes CO challenge: To no one’s surprise, the Supreme Court says it will decide whether Donald Trump can be booted off state presidential ballots on the grounds that he’s an insurrectionist — which is a dubious charge to bring against a former president who has neither been charged with nor convicted of insurrection in a court of law. Indeed, Trump told his supporters on January 6, 2021, to “peacefully and patriotically make [their] voices heard.” At issue is the wacky 4-3 decision by an all-Democrat Colorado Supreme Court that Trump had violated the Constitution’s so-called “Insurrection Clause,” a Civil War-era statute meant to keep high-ranking former Confederates from running for positions in the federal government. Maine’s rogue secretary of state followed soon thereafter. As the New York Post reports, “In a brief order Friday evening, the high court announced it will hear arguments Feb. 8 in the 77-year-old’s challenge to the Centennial State ruling, which temporarily removed from the state’s March 5 Republican primary ballot.” We can expect a quick ruling here, as primaries and caucuses in states such as Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina are just days away.

• National anthem omitted: The U.S. Junior National Hockey team whipped the host nation, Sweden, 6-2 on Friday night to take the gold medal. “The guys played excellent today,” said head coach David Carle. “It’s a joy for them. They focused on getting to this game and playing their best for the last game of the tournament and I thought they did that. It’s a great honor to be a part of a winning team.” The viral moment came afterward, though, when the team didn’t simply mouth the words to their national anthem as it was being played and their flag was being raised. Instead, the boys proudly belted out those words. As team captain Rutger McGroarty said, “It just shows how much we love our country, how we came together in such a short amount of time.” Canadian television ran the anthem, but ESPN didn’t — which we think says as much about Canada’s love of and respect for its national sport as it does woke ESPN’s belief that such enthusiastic singing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by a bunch of pasty-faced white boys is an unacceptable microaggression.

• Leading cause of death worldwide remains abortion: It is not disease, famine, war, or crime that is the leading cause of death worldwide, but an entirely preventable phenomenon that is primarily attributable to selfishness and convenience. Officially, roughly 60 million people died last year worldwide. But that number fails to include a significant portion of total human deaths. According to Worldometer, more than 44 million babies were aborted in 2023. In other words, the actual total number of human deaths last year was nearly 40% higher than is officially recognized. This makes abortion, for at least the fifth year in a row, the leading cause of death worldwide. Abortion is the intentional killing of innocent human beings, which is an inconvenient truth that the abortion industry doesn’t want to be recognized as such, instead couching it under the euphemism of “reproductive health.” Humanity is engaged in the mass genocide of the preborn, which is the single biggest threat to the future of humanity on the planet.

• DeWine “saves the day”: Evidently, Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine’s only objection to the transing of minors is when it comes to surgical procedures. One week after DeWine vetoed House Bill 68, legislation that included a ban on transgender medical procedures for minors, he issued an “emergency” executive order to bar minors from undergoing gender mutilation via surgeries. But when it comes to the administering of cross-sex hormones to minors and biological males participating in girls’ sports, DeWine apparently sees little problem with these issues, as his order does not bar either. He justified his veto by dubiously asserting that “this is about protecting human life.” He added, “Many parents have told me that their child would not have survived, would be dead today” without gender-bending interventions. DeWine’s order is an attempt to dissuade an override of his veto, as the bill originally passed with a veto-proof majority. Ohio lawmakers are scheduled to vote to override on January 10.

• Inflated jobs numbers: Nearly 440,000 U.S. government jobs have been quietly scrubbed from the Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs total for 2023. In other words, the first round of numbers measuring the total increase in government jobs this past year through November was inflated bigly. This means that the job market was not as healthy as was initially reported. This is significant because the government sector in December ranked the highest for job creation, supposedly adding 52,000 jobs. The BLS also adjusted down the total number of private sector jobs created over that same period by 358,000. Currently, the U.S. labor force participation rate sits at 62.5%, a historic low. Furthermore, the number of full-time workers dropped by 1.5 million since June of last year, but 769,000 part-time workers were added over that same span, indicating that more people are having to hold multiple jobs to make ends meet.

• Thin Blue Line ambushes: Two years ago, we reported the terrible news that 2021 was the deadliest year for our nation’s law enforcement officers. Said Fraternal Order of Police President Patrick Yoes at the time, “We are on pace this year to see the highest number of officers shot in the line of duty in one year ever recorded.” That awful milestone didn’t last long, though. As The Washington Times reports, a record 378 officers were shot while on patrol in 2023, which is a 14% increase from 2022, according to the FOP. But another grim statistic is even more disturbing: There were 115 surprise attacks on cops in 2023, resulting in 138 wounded officers, both of which are record highs. (A surprise attack is defined as one in which an assailant opens fire on an officer without warning and not in the course of an arrest.) “What’s happening today,” said FOP Executive Director Jim Pasco, “is the increased firepower, and again, diminishing respect for the law enforcement profession and for the work that law enforcement officers do.” Yes, better-armed criminals are a problem, but so are the Democrats’ disdain for law enforcement in general, and their increasingly pro-crime, anti-cop policies.

Headlines

• Wayne LaPierre announces resignation as NRA chief (Fox News)

• Letitia James seeks $370 million from Donald Trump in New York civil case (PM)

• Fact-checking four Biden claims in Valley Forge speech (Daily Signal)

• An astonishing 81% of Dems think Trump’s name should be removed from ballots (RedState)

• Ashli Babbitt’s family sues U.S. government for $30 million (Daily Wire)

• Third batch of Jeffrey Epstein court documents released (New York Post)

• Far-left host Mehdi Hasan out at MSNBC, slammed for pushing disinformation, anti-Semitism (Daily Wire)

• The Washington Post is in full-scale collapse (RedState)

• The Biden admin dramatically lowered standards related to immigrants from China, reduced number of questions asked from 40 to five (Not the Bee)

• National Park Service removes William Penn statue from historic Pennsylvania park in “inclusive” makeover to show more Native American history (Daily Mail)

• Alaska Airlines makes emergency landing after chunk of plane blown out on nightmare flight (Daily Wire)

• Florida man sues Dunkin’ Donuts over “traumatic” toilet explosion (Not the Bee)

• Satire: Mayor Adams seen quietly scratching inscription off Statue of Liberty’s plaque (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.