Cross-Examination

• Biden buys more votes: In what appears to be little other than a campaign move to garner more votes for Joe Biden from recent college graduates, the Biden administration announced that it will cancel another $1.2 billion in student loan debt for some 153,000 borrowers who have enrolled in the Saving on Valuable Education (SAVE) plan. Using this plan, the Biden administration will effectively transfer to taxpayers the remaining balance of student loans from borrowers who have been paying down their debt for a decade or longer and whose original loan was no greater than $12,000. As Education Secretary Miguel Cardona ridiculously stated, “With today’s announcement, we are once again sending a clear message to borrowers who had low balances: if you’ve been paying for a decade, you’ve done your part, and you deserve relief.” So, when can responsible Americans who have either fully repaid their student loans or never took out any in the first place say the same? They’ve been paying their taxes, they’ve done their part, they deserve relief.

• WH teases new Russia sanctions: Following the sudden and untimely death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in a Siberian penal colony last Friday, the Biden administration is promising to follow through on a warning it gave Vladimir Putin back in 2021 that Russia would face “devastating” consequences should Navalny die in custody after he had been arrested on dubious charges. “We will be announcing a major sanctions package on Friday of this week to hold Russia accountable for what happened to Mr. Navalny and, quite frankly, for all its actions over the course of this vicious and brutal war that has now raged on for two years,” stated National Security Council Coordinator John Kirby on Tuesday. There was no hint as to what exactly would be included in this “major sanctions package,” but is it intended for Putin, or as a means of pressuring House Republicans into taking up the Senate’s $95 billion foreign aid package bill that includes over $60 billion in additional military aid to Ukraine?

• Two finally charged with murder in Super Bowl parade shooting: It’s been nearly a week since a group of thugs decided to settle their verbal dispute with firearms rather than fisticuffs after the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl parade. In doing so, they left one bystander, a mother of two, dead and 22 others hospitalized. (One of those hospitalized, alleged shooter Lyndell Mays, has nine bullet holes and had a GoFundMe page to help get him through this “tragic time,” during which he was “just being stupid.”) Prosecutors have finally charged two of the thugs, but it sure took them long enough. So, too, did it take them long enough to identify the assailants, but we already know how this works: If the shooter is a white male, the mainstream media will report his name immediately, but if the shooters are members of one of the privileged classes — in this case, young black males, although they could also have been jihadists — then we’re left clueless about the identity of the perps. This past Friday on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” the host tried to play dumb about the identity of the assailants. “I mean, we don’t know who did this shooting, by the way,” he said. To which one of his guests, Ann Coulter, said: “We have some idea. … If it were a white man shooting, we’d know.” Maher responded dumbly, “Well, we don’t know. I mean, they haven't—” to which Coulter elaborated, “That’s how we know it’s not a white man.” Maher lamely reiterated his “official” claim that we have no idea who the perps are, then closed by attributing “special powers” to Coulter. Of course, Coulter’s “special power” isn’t so special at all. It’s called observation.

• The mainstream media ignores a wave of church attacks: We tend to hear a lot of reporting on those rare instances when one of the favored constituencies of Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats is attacked, but we mostly get crickets and tumbleweeds when the institutions being targeted fall outside the protective umbrella of leftist special interests. Did you know, for example, that attacks on U.S. churches more than doubled last year? Neither did we. But, as The Washington Times reports, “Incidents of arson, vandalism, and other hostile acts against U.S. churches rose to at least 436 last year, more than double the number recorded in 2022.” This seems newsworthy, no? The Times continues: “In releasing its sixth ‘Hostility Against Churches’ report during the 2024 National Religious Broadcasters International Christian Media Convention here, the family values advocacy group said the figure is more than eight times the number of incidents recorded in 2018, when it began tracking such incidents.” As for the mainstream media news embargo, it’s almost as if they hate organized religion in general and Christianity in particular; almost as if they view it as a threat to the supremacy of the state.

• Three-quarters of big cities near insolvency: No one has ever accused government of fiscal responsibility, and that’s especially true of our big cities. After all, they’re run almost exclusively by Democrats, and if they run into financial difficulty, they can always petition their friends in the federal government for a bailout. Perhaps this helps explain why, according to a Truth in Accounting analysis of the latest financial reports, 53 out of 75 of our nation’s largest cities didn’t have enough money to pay their bills in 2022. As The Daily Fetched reports: “TIA found that the 75 largest cities in the U.S. had $307.4 billion worth of assets available to pay bills, but their debt totaled $595.3 billion. The analysis also noted that Pensions and healthcare accounted for the majority of the debt.” As The Center Square adds: “All 75 cities are required by law to have balanced budgets. … Instead, they used ‘accounting tricks,’ including ‘inflating revenue assumptions, counting borrowed money as income, understating the true costs of government, and delaying the payment of current bills until the start of the next fiscal year so they aren’t included in the budget calculations.’” Nice scam if you can carry it off.

• Noncitizen appointed to San Francisco Elections Commission: Demonstrating that Democrat leaders in California are committed to elevating globalism over and against national sovereignty, a noncitizen Chinese national was sworn in as a member of San Francisco’s Elections Commission. Last Wednesday, the Hong Kong-born Kelly Wong became “the first noncitizen appointed to the commission,” as reported by KQED public news. Wong, who came to the U.S. in 2019 seeking a graduate degree, is an immigrant rights advocate. Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin further exposed the globalist goal of these California leftists, as he praised Wong, stating, “I’m very impressed by her commitment to enfranchising people who rarely vote, to educating people about the voting process, and to bring in noncitizens and get them the tools they need as they become citizens.” Back in 2020, San Francisco voted to remove citizenship requirements for commissioners. How is this not seen as an obvious wide-open back door for Beijing to step in and directly impact the outcome of elections not only in California but the rest of the country?

• Watchdog cries foul over Biden admin’s “Indigenous Knowledge”: We followed the science and the native shaman. That is effectively the argument Interior Secretary Deb Haaland gave last September when she announced the cancellation of seven oil and gas leases in the U.S. Arctic Ocean granted by the Trump administration, as well as banning any future leases across the entire region. Haaland justified her anti-fossil fuel decision by citing climate change and “the Indigenous Knowledge of the original stewards of this area, to safeguard our public lands for future generations.” Well, thanks to Haaland’s dubious “Indigenous Knowledge” claim, a watchdog group called Protect the Public’s Trust has raised an official complaint with the Department of Interior’s Office of Inspector General for Haaland’s use of “subjective beliefs over and above evidence derived from the application of the scientific method.” The complaint further states, “The American public can rightly hold serious concerns that the Biden administration’s decision making, through the use of Indigenous Knowledge, is susceptible to manipulation without even the pretense of adhering to scientific principles.”

• DEI infects the IRS: It’d be one thing if the Internal Revenue Service had a sterling reputation for decency and evenhandedness. But no. The IRS has earned its reputation as an utterly reviled organization — and especially among conservatives, whose political organizations were systematically targeted by Barack Obama and director Lois Lerner, and then stonewalled from justice by smarmy commissioner John Koskinen. Never forget. And now we learn that the diversity, equity, and inclusion training being forced upon the agency’s criminal investigators features content from a transgender professor who called for “the death of whiteness” in an academic journal. We can’t make this stuff up. As The Daily Wire reports: “The DEI training, obtained by Judicial Watch, was part of a mandatory continuing education program at the IRS, and began with a section by Dafina Lazarus Stewart titled, ‘Cultural Inclusion Is About Justice.’ Stewart, a transgender-identifying woman, chairs a department at the University of Denver and has focused much of her academic work on ‘whiteness,’ even calling on other academics to ‘commit to the death of whiteness.’” We’re not sure what “whiteness” has to do with the fair and impartial enforcement of our tax laws, but we think we’re on good ground when we say it has no place in a properly functioning IRS.

Headlines

• The fix is in: The $455 million “poison pill” in Trump judgment (Hot Air)

• Fani Willis’s father on her having cash at home: “It’s a black thing” (Newsweek) | Willis’s father backs up DA’s timeline of relationship with Trump prosecutor, contradicting ex-coworker’s testimony (National Review)

• Biden under pressure to take cognitive test amid dementia concerns (Washington Times)

• Supreme Court declines to undo sanctions on pro-Trump 2020 campaign lawyers (The Hill)

• Government-backed censors who rigged the 2020 election are now stealing 2024 (The Federalist)

• FBI source indicted for discredited Biden bribery allegations tied to Russian intelligence officials, prosecutors say (National Review)

• Russia arrests U.S. citizen on “treason” charges for donating $50 to Ukrainian charity (Daily Wire)

• Biden “releasing everyone” at border in latest secret move (Washington Examiner)

• Biden pushes to block Israel’s invasion of Rafah at the UN (Hot Air) | Netanyahu declares that Israel “outright rejects” possibility of Palestinian statehood after Hamas war (National Review)

• Antony Blinken scolded staffers over “problematic” language like “manpower” (PM)

• Emissions dropped in 2023 for first time since pandemic (Washington Examiner)

• Democrats blast “dangerous” Capital One-Discover merger (The Hill)

• Ben Crump says ending crime in U.S. as easy as changing “definition of crime” (Fox News)

• Satire: Another Democrat attempts to purchase a black man (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.