Cross-Examination

• Amazing Congress averts yet another shutdown: These folks have a flair for the dramatic, don’t they? Yet another Friday night shutdown deadline looms, and the House and Senate find a way to come together on yet another last-second resolution to keep the government and all its, ahem, essential services up and running. It’s almost as if it were scripted. As NPR — work with us — reports, “Congressional leaders have released the second and final bipartisan package of six 2024 fiscal year appropriations bills, teeing up a race against the clock for lawmakers to pass the bills before a deadline of Friday at midnight.” What’s interesting here, and what’s missing in the headline, is that House Speaker Mike Johnson is making good on his promise to conduct the funding of government in the way it was meant to be conducted: via a series of specific individual spending bills rather than a single gargantuan omnibus obscenity that no one will have read but everyone will have saddled with pork. As NPR continues: “The $1.2 trillion package includes defense, homeland security, financial services and general government, labor-HHS, the legislative branch, and state-foreign operations. It funds the federal government until the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.” Notice that date. This means the issue of government funding will be off the table until September, when it’ll reemerge just in time to be demagogued in the weeks ahead of the presidential election. At that time, the American people will hear vociferous arguments between the Party of Big Government and the Party of Not-Quite-So-Big Government. If we sound a bit jaded, it’s because we are. Our nation is more than $34 trillion in debt, which means your share as an individual citizen is just shy of $103,000.

• Blasey Ford’s Leftmedia book tour: The entirely un-credible witness Democrat lawmakers despicably used in their failed effort to tank Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation back in 2018 has suddenly reemerged. Christine Blasey Ford, who dubiously claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Kavanaugh when they were teenagers, is now making the rounds hawking her new memoir. She has appeared on “CBS Sunday Morning” and, most recently, with those cackling hens of “The View.” The Leftmedia outlets are treating her with the predicted narrative of being an exemplar of the #MeToo movement, gushing over her “courage” to dare to put herself through such a “deeply traumatizing” event to confront Kavanaugh. Never mind the fact that Ford had exactly zero evidence to support her spurious claim, which not even her closest friends at the time of the alleged incident could corroborate. What Ford’s book tour really amounts to is her getting her reward for being willing to be used by Democrats in their effort to smear Kavanaugh because they feared his presence on the Court meant the end of Roe v. Wade. Furthermore, bringing Ford out now after several years have passed and the public’s memory has become fuzzy regarding the Democrats’ blatant anti-Kavanaugh smear campaign serves to help them falsely portray her as believable to add fodder to their ongoing effort to undermine the Court’s legitimacy in the eyes of the American public.

• Biden to Israel: “Hey, you should really secure your border”: Evidently, the Biden administration is desperate to prevent Israel from eradicating Hamas from Gaza. Why? Well, because of voters in Michigan, a state Joe Biden can ill afford to lose in November. Thus, Biden recently called up Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to offer a new “solution” to prevent the IDF from carrying out its plan to wipe out Hamas targets in the Gazan city of Rafah. And what is Biden’s plan? It amounts to the IDF halting its advance in Rafah and focusing on securing the border between Egypt and Gaza, known as the Philadelphi Corridor, to stop the smuggling of weapons to Hamas. Never mind the fact that this would require Israel to do the very thing that the Palestinians complain against: Israel occupying Gaza. Furthermore, by advocating this “solution,” Biden is throwing Egypt under the bus, as Egypt is officially responsible for securing the Philadelphi Corridor. Finally, far from bringing as quick an end to this war as possible, all this action would ensure is that Hamas would stay in power in Gaza, allowing these terrorists to continue their hostilities against Israel as well as innocent Palestinians indefinitely. Maybe Biden should secure our own border.

• Judge orders FBI to turn over Covenant School killer’s manifesto: Score it Transparency 1, FBI 0. In a long-overdue legal correction, a federal judge has ordered the FBI to cough up the so-called manifesto of the Covenant School killer, along with other documents, for a private review by the plaintiff in the case, Star News Digital Media, which is the parent company of The Tennessee Star. As Star Editor-in-Chief Michael Patrick Leahy rightly put it, “The court’s order today is a significant victory for the public’s right to know about the motives of [the assailant], who murdered six innocent Nashvillians at the Covenant School on March 27, 2023.” What’s been most objectionable here isn’t the lack of information on the inner workings of a twisted person’s mind — which leaked excerpts reveal was full of racial hatred — but the double standard being enforced by the FBI. Were the killer a straight white male rather than a “transgender” biological female and a member of the Left’s protected class, you can bet that the bureau would’ve stamped the manifesto like a PR flack’s latest missive: “For Immediate Release.” As U.S. District Court Judge Aleta A. Trauger wrote in her order, “The court also finds that the significant public interest in both the requested materials and the law enforcement objectives asserted by the FBI support in camera review and that no showing has been made that the requested materials will be so voluminous that they would pose a significant danger to judicial economy.” Translation: The public’s right to know outweighs the FBI’s dishonest desire to propagandize mass shootings as a purely right-wing phenomenon.

• Guaranteed handouts: An increasing number of Democrat-run cities have begun adopting welfare programs they have dubbed “guaranteed income.” These programs have been started on a very limited basis in places like Harris County, Texas, where roughly 1,900 spots are open for individuals to receive a monthly $500 check with no strings attached. The poor and elderly are the target demographic for these government handout programs. Democrats are pushing the expansion of guaranteed income, justifying it by pointing to the growing wealth gap between the super wealthy and the poor. However, what this program really amounts to is pushing socialism. It’s the government playing God. This free money is a means of “empowering people to make decisions for themselves about how to better their lives,” Democrat Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis asserts, adding that these payments “give people the ability to control their own destiny.” Funny — we thought that’s what a job did. In the end, this amounts to just another avenue for Democrats to push more people onto the government dole. How about working to cut back on all the needless hurdles, regulations, and taxes that the government imposes on people that make life that much more expensive? How about really seeking to empower people by getting the government out of their way so people can more freely use their God-given talents, skills, and abilities to earn and make a good living? One thing is certain: People working for themselves rather than relying on government handouts are better off emotionally and mentally, which makes them more positive contributors to society at large.

• Military families sour on recommending military service: When it comes to our broken military, the Biden administration continues to reap what it sows. As a new survey conducted by Blue Star Families reveals, just 32% of military families would recommend military service to others. For comparison, 55% of active-duty military families recommended military service in 2016, so we’re looking at a massive drop in this critical endorsement. As Military.com reports: “The annual survey had more than 7,400 responses between May and July 2023 and is the ‘most comprehensive’ survey of its kind, open to service members, veterans, military families and members of the Guard and reserves, according to the organization’s website. It is conducted by Blue Star Families in conjunction with Syracuse University’s Institute for Veterans and Military Families.” To readers of these pages, this information comes as no surprise. The Left’s decades-long efforts to disparage the American experiment, coupled with the Biden administration’s woke policies, have wrecked military morale — to the point where the only fix might be a new commander-in-chief.

• From “conspiracy theory” to real and awesome: If a right-wing conspiracy theory is simply an inevitable truth for which the evidence hasn’t yet been revealed, we should at least take comfort in The New York Times’s honesty. In an opinion piece by Adam Westbrook and Lindsay Crouse that combines print and video elements, they write: “As America closes in on a major election, mistrust is brewing around the mysterious government entity that’s now denounced in scary-sounding terms — ‘the deep state’ and ‘the swamp.’ What do those words even mean? Who exactly do they describe? We went on a road trip to find out. As we met the Americans who are being dismissed as public enemies, we discovered that they are … us. They like Taylor Swift. They dance bachata. They go to bed at night watching ‘Star Trek’ reruns. They go to work and do their jobs: saving us from Armageddon.” That last part — that they save us from Armageddon — is instructive. The deep state is nothing more than “our public servants, the everyday superheroes who wake up ready to dedicate their careers and their lives to serving us,” the twosome tells us. “These are the Americans we employ. Even though their work is often invisible, it makes our lives better.” To this, we must ask: Better for whom?

• DEI is spelled DIE: Wokeness, most often manifesting as “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” is being increasingly shown to be an ideological contagion that, if left unchecked, will wreak social disaster. A recent example of this comes courtesy of the nation’s organ transplant database. Thanks to DEI ideology, woke doctors claimed the database was systemically racist because it accounted for basic physiological differences between different ethnic groups. In determining who is most eligible for receiving a kidney transplant, a system is used that references a patient’s kidney function to assess the state of their kidney disease and how soon their organs may fail. The system accounted for ethnicity because that factor plays into assessing the diseased state of a patient’s kidneys. This was labeled as “racist,” and ethnic considerations were removed. Lo and behold, more black people with less severe kidney disease suddenly became eligible. Effectively, white people with more serious kidney disease were displaced by black patients with less severe kidney disease on the organ transplant list. But in the world of DEI, it’s okay if white people die at a higher rate because they deserve it anyway.

Headlines

• Biden finalizes crackdown on gas cars, forcing more than half of new car sales to be electric by 2030 (Fox News)

• Impeachment witness Tony Bobulinski claims Hunter and James Biden perjured themselves (Daily Wire) | Bobulinski lists Joe Biden’s alleged crimes during heated exchange with AOC (National Review) | Comer says he will invite Joe to testify about Biden family business dealings (National Review)

• Trump suggests he’d support a national ban on abortions around 15 weeks of pregnancy (AP)

• Fulton County judge allows Trump to appeal Fani Willis ruling (Daily Beast)

• Apple sued by Biden administration over alleged iPhone “monopoly power” (NBC News)

• Biden “cancels” nearly $6 billion in student loans for public sector workers (Fox Business)

• ERIC deemed 168,000 dead or relocated Virginians “eligible but unregistered” to vote (The Federalist)

• Chicago sues Glock, claims pistols “easily modified” to full-auto (Breitbart)

• U.S. hits all-time low in annual World Happiness Report (Not the Bee)

• Canadian government passes motion to stop arms exports to Israel (Daily Wire)

• Humor: Mexico begins constructing wall to keep illegal immigrants from coming back (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.