Government & Politics

• Team Biden’s losing battle with decrepitude: Try as she might, Jill “Lady MacBeth” Biden can’t fix her cognitively broken husband. Nevertheless, she persists. “This isn’t just about stopping an extremist,” she said at a campaign event in Green Bay over the weekend, “and this election is most certainly not about age. Joe and that other guy are essentially the same age. Let’s not be fooled. But what this election is about, it’s about the character of the person leading our country.” Perhaps a certain low-information segment of Trump-hating voters is persuadable to arguments about the Big Guy’s character. And they’d better hope so, given that his campaign is about to unveil a $50 million ad buy attacking “convicted criminal” Donald Trump. But with images of her husband being very publicly and very virally helped off the stage by Barack Obama during a $30 million Hollywood fundraiser this weekend, arguments about character are like arguments about deck furniture. The Bad Ship Biden is listing, and the first lady, who alone could’ve spared both her husband and her country all this embarrassment, is utterly unmoved. “Joe isn’t one of the most effective presidents of our lives in spite of his age,” she lied, “but because of it.”

• Inside Biden’s 48 hours at the G7 where alarmed allies noticed he was “losing focus and tired” after missing dinner, wandering off, and snapping at the press (Daily Mail)

• Obama pleads with digital influencers to back Biden (Fox News)

• Taxes or tariffs: At a recent meeting with Republican lawmakers at the Capitol Hill Club, Donald Trump “floated the concept of eliminating the income tax and replacing it with tariffs,” explained Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY). It is an intriguing idea, but would it work? Leading economists are skeptical. According to Erica York, senior economist of the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, “The individual income tax raises about $2 trillion annually on a tax base of personal income of roughly $15 trillion,” whereas “Customs duties currently raise about $80 billion annually on imports of $3.4 trillion." American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Kyle Pomerleau also threw cold water on the idea, observing that "it would take a tariff rate of 71 percent” to produce the same revenue currently derived from income taxes. Furthermore, Pomerleau asserts, “A tariff rate of 71 percent would dramatically reduce the volume of imports. As a result, the revenue generated would be nowhere close to $2.2 trillion.” However, this novel idea could work as a campaign issue to highlight and criticize the federal government’s overspending problem, as well as the fact that our markets are overrun with Chinese imports.

• NewsGuard probe: NewsGuard claims to be a nonpartisan and unbiased organization that rates news organizations for trustworthiness, and it gets federal funding for this self-appointed role of the “arbiter of trustworthy news” outlets. However, as we at The Patriot Post and other conservative news outlets can attest, NewsGuard is anything but unbiased. Given this reality, the House Oversight Committee announced it will launch a probe of NewsGuard. “This appears to be a very biased, very unfair service that’s getting federal funds. It could be another backdoor attempt at censoring conservative media outlets,” said Representative James Comer (R-KY). Somehow, he noted, “networks like MSNBC and CNN [get] tremendous grades” while conservative alternatives get “very poor grades.” The criteria is problematic for another key reason, he argued. “They turn around and they offer their grades to advertisers, and this is a form of, I believe, trying to discourage advertisers from advertising on conservative networks,” Comer noted. “There’s a concerted effort by the federal government to censor conservative media outlets,” and he wants to “determine whether there’s been any criminal laws broken.”

Economy

• Homeownership is expensive: If Bidenomics is working so swimmingly, shouldn’t regular folks be able to afford a house? We ask because a recent report by Bankrate makes it clear that home ownership has become increasingly less attainable since Joe Biden became president. As Bankrate notes: “The average annual cost of owning and maintaining a single-family home in the U.S. is 26% higher now compared to four years ago. … Bankrate calculated the average costs of property taxes, homeowners insurance, home maintenance costs and electricity, internet and cable bills and found that they add up to $18,118 a year for a typical single-family home (valued at $436,291 per Redfin) in all 50 states. … Nationally, that is an additional $1,510 per month on top of a mortgage payment. In 2020, those same expenses totaled $14,428 annually for a typical single-family home, equivalent to $1,202 per month.” Indeed, the cost of buying a new house just hit a new record, according to Fox Business, which reports the median U.S. home sale price recently hit $394,000 — a 4.4% increase from a year earlier. Thus, under Joe Biden, the American Dream has clearly become the American nightmare.

• Conservative think tank files suit against Biden over “energy efficient” appliance rules (Not the Bee)

• Biden prepared to use oil reserves again to lower gas prices (Washington Examiner)

National Security

• Partisan battle over national defense: On Friday, the House passed the National Defense Authorization Act largely along partisan lines. Only six Democrats crossed over to vote with the Republican majority, with the final tally being 217-199. The traditionally bipartisan-supported NDAA has become much more politicized of late as the Biden administration has sought to use the military to push its hard-left social agenda. A number of components of the NDAA, which Democrats and the Biden administration have objected to, are a provision blocking the use of taxpayer funding for gender-bending medical treatments, pulling back on climate change funding initiatives in the military, limiting the Pentagon’s push of DEI programs, and the blocking of Joe Biden’s policy to reimburse military personnel who travel to other states for abortions. The Democrat-controlled Senate will likely seek to eliminate many, if not all, of these commonsense provisions.

• Another illegal immigrant, another heinous murder: We may never know just how much damage Joe Biden has done to our country via his wide-open southern border and the 10 million or so illegals he’s allowed to pour into our country, but this weekend, we saw yet another example of it. As NBC News reports: “A fugitive wanted in El Salvador in the killing of a young woman was arrested in the murder last year of a Maryland hiker, authorities said Saturday. The suspect, Victor Antonio Martinez-Hernandez, 23, was arrested in Tulsa, Oklahoma, at about 11:30 p.m. Friday, Harford County, Maryland, Sheriff Jeff Gahler said at a news conference.” The body of the victim, Rachel Morin, a mother of five, was discovered at Ma and Pa Trail in Bel Air, Maryland, last August 6, the day after her boyfriend reported her missing. Investigators believe Martinez-Hernandez “was hiding adjacent to a trail and where Rachel was walking and attacked and killed Morin before fleeing Maryland.” This murder, of course, calls to mind the equally heinous murder of Laken Riley, and it also raises a question our Mark Alexander has been asking for nearly two years: Where’s the national database of violent crime committed by these illegal immigrants?

• Biden planning to offer pathway to legal status to migrants who have lived in the U.S. for 10 years (NY Post)

• Vladimir Putin to visit Kim Jong Un in North Korea as alliance grows (National Review)

• WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich set to begin espionage trial in Russia (Fox News)

Culture

• Good news: Title IX gender-bending blocked: Last Thursday, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty blocked the Biden administration’s rewrite of Title IX, calling it an “abuse of power” and a “threat to democracy.” Doughty granted a preliminary injunction against the Biden administration’s new Title IX rewrite after four states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, and Idaho — challenged it. Doughty explained, “This case demonstrates the abuse of power by executive federal agencies in the rulemaking process. The separation of powers and system of checks and balances exist in this country for a reason.” Doughty also rejected the Biden administration’s unilateral redefinition of the term “gender discrimination,” noting that Title IX “only included discrimination against biological males and females at the time of enactment.” Doughty reasoned that such a terminology change could only come about via an act of Congress.

• West Virginia judge rules students who protested trans inclusion in girls track and field cannot be punished for protest (PM)

• Girls left in dust as male-born transgender athletes take state track titles in five states (Washington Times)

• NBC affiliate employee fired after two decades of service for sharing “Straight Pride” meme (Not the Bee)

• 171,300 patients traveled out of state for abortions in 2023 (The Hill) (Correction: 342,600 patients traveled out of state. 171,300 returned home.)

From the “Wacky Ideas” File

• The recruiting crisis continues, thanks to the Demo defunders: It’s hard to believe that it’s come to this, but the Seattle Police Department is so desperate for cops that it’s now recruiting DACA recipients to fill out its depleted ranks. Take a look. As Law Enforcement Today reports: “In April, KTTH’s Jason Rantz reported that staffing on the Seattle PD is at levels not seen in 67 years. As of December 31, 2023, the department had only 424 police officers working, the last date for which data was available.” Coincidentally, Barack Obama’s unconstitutional Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy — which protects from deportation immigrants who were brought illegally to the U.S. as children — turned 12 on Saturday, and Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security, headed by impeached DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, marked the anniversary by celebrating its recipients. Let’s be clear about how we got here, though: In the wake of George Floyd’s death, Democrats demonized law enforcement and called for the defunding of police in communities across the country. Never forget.

Misc.

• Nikki Haley mourns the death of her father on Father’s Day (The Hill)

• Couple who shielded their two young kids during Michigan splash park shooting shot combined seven times (NY Post)

• Trump’s CDC director: Gain-of-function research will cause bird flu pandemic with 25-50% mortality rate (Daily Wire)

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