Cross-Examination

• Biden’s fake jobs: In stumping for Democrat candidates in the lead-up to the midterm elections, Joe Biden boasted, “In the second quarter of this year, we created more jobs than in any quarter under any of my predecessors in the nearly 40 years before the pandemic.” According to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. economy added 1,047,000 jobs during the second quarter. Well, it now appears that the BLS jobs estimate was way off, as the Philadelphia Fed’s latest employment assessment found that actual employment numbers for 29 states came in well below the BLS estimates. The Philadelphia Fed found that during that “historic” second quarter Biden was so keen to gloat about, it turns out that just 10,500 jobs were added. In other words, the BLS’s number of a million-plus jobs added was bogus. Senator Rick Scott (R-FL) blasted the revelation as “outrageous,” demanding “an immediate meeting with the head of [BLS]. WE NEED ANSWERS NOW!” The Philadelphia Fed notes that it’s able to produce a more accurate jobs numbers estimate due to more comprehensive jobs data than what is used by the BLS. Whether knowingly or not, the Biden administration was effectively lying to the American people about the state of the U.S. economy by claiming record job growth when data shows that job growth had essentially flatlined. In several states where the BLS had reported job growth, like New Jersey and Delaware, there were actually falling payroll numbers during the second quarter.

• The higher cost of heating your home: A major cold front across much of country is threatening to bring record cold temperatures, snow, and ice just as many Americans will be traveling for the holidays. In bracing for the cold weather, many folks will be shelling out big bucks just to stay warm this winter, as energy prices have increased by over 35% since 2020. This winter, Americans on average will spend roughly 17% more to heat their homes than they did last winter. Breaking it down further, for those Americans relying on natural gas to heat their homes, costs are estimated to rise by 25% over last year. It gets worse for houses heated by oil, as costs will rise an estimated 45% over the prior winter. “We’ve had a long period of very affordable home energy,” observed Mark Wolfe, executive director of the National Energy Assistance Directors Association. “Those days might be over for at least the foreseeable future.” That has everything to do with who’s sitting in the Oval Office. Thanks to Joe Biden’s anti-fossil fuel policies, Americans are spending hundreds of dollars more to heat their homes than they did just a couple of years ago. Under Donald Trump, Americans enjoyed affordable energy thanks to his policies that led the nation to becoming energy independent in 2019 for the first time in 62 years. Sadly, Biden has undone nearly all that progress, all in a foolishly impossible bid to fight global climate change. Thanks to Biden, all Americans are suffering rather than flourishing.

• Just who is Republican Congressman-elect George Santos? The biggest reason politicians have a negative reputation is their profession’s long history of playing fast and loose with the truth. It’s almost a tautology to say that politicians are liars. However, there’s the usual political lying that tends toward either exaggeration or shading the truth, and then there’s spreading outright false and fabricated claims. It appears that Republican Congressman-elect George Santos falls into that second category of liar. Santos, who is homosexual, seems to have made up much of his past out of whole cloth, including where he went to college, his Wall Street résumé, and his animal rescue charity “that saved more than 2,500 dogs and cats.” There are no records that back up any of Santos’s claims. Even his claim that he lost employees in the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre appears to be completely bogus. Consider the source, but The New York Times reported on his situation, including that he used campaign money to fund a rather lavish lifestyle of expensive clothing, high-end restaurants, and lots of out-of-state travel. Of course, Santos is pushing back. “It is no surprise that Congressman-elect Santos has enemies at the New York Times who are attempting to smear his good name with these defamatory allegations,” said his lawyer, Joseph Murray, who then added a fake Winston Churchill quote: “You have enemies? Good. It means that you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” While there is no question the Times leans hard left, the paper occasionally reports facts. Furthermore, if the holes in Santos’s story are as big as the Times claims, who vetted him as a candidate?

Headlines

• Musk says he’ll resign as head of Twitter (ABC News)

• Zelenskyy to meet Biden, address Congress as war rages on (AP)

• Trump taxes detailed in new report from Congress (CNBC)

• Twitter aided Pentagon propaganda campaigns across Middle East, amplifying agency-aligned accounts (National Review)

• FTX’s Bankman-Fried to agree to U.S. extradition in about-face after hearing (Reuters)

• Kamala Harris blames Republicans for border crisis: “Unwillingness to engage in any meaningful reform” (Fox News)

• Vatican dismisses pro-life leader Father Frank Pavone from priesthood (LifeNews.com)

• Thanks, Joe Biden: Women banned from universities in Afghanistan, Taliban says (AP)

• Court rules against White House COVID vaccine mandate for federal contractors (Daily Wire)

• Conservative Jew Josh Hammer gets the “white nationalist” treatment from SLPC (Daily Signal)

• Federal court rejects female athletes’ bid to scrap transgender sports policy in Connecticut (Daily Wire)

• Voter ID, partisan gerrymandering struck down in North Carolina rulings just before court flips to GOP (The News & Observer)

• Satire: Ex-Twitter employee scores new job working for FBI due to past experience working for FBI (Babylon Bee)

For more editors’ choice headlines, click here.