More Biden-Inspired Censorship

It seems that Senators Josh Hawley (R, MO) and Chuck Grassley (R, IA) requested a collection of documents and answers to 10 questions from DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and Mayorkas sent back non-responses to the questions and heavily redacted documents in not responding to the docs request (“two documents already in the public domain” and “500 pages of material, approximately half of which are mostly or entirely redacted”).

DHS cited Freedom of Information Act disclosure privileges in making the redaction[.]

This is yet another example of the Biden administration’s intrinsic dishonesty and its penchant for censorship.

The Senators shouldn’t have had to respond with the obvious:

We remind you that the oversight letters we send to the Executive Branch are signed in our capacity as sitting members of Congress, a separate and co-equal branch of government.

And

Noting that DHS cited Freedom of Information Act disclosure privileges in making the redaction, Hawley and Grassley pointed out that FOIA provisions “do not apply to the oversight requests we submit in our capacity as constitutional officers and should not be applied to the materials that DHS produces in response to congressional requests.”
“Simply put, Congress controls when to make documents within its possession public, not DHS….”

2024 can’t come soon enough, and the Republicans better not blow that one.

Biden and His Iran Nuclear Weapons Deal

He’s still after one, one that would give the Mullahs hundreds of billions of dollars in return for their delaying, briefly, development and production of nuclear weapons. This despite the Mullahs’ avowed goal of destroying Israel, its empirical history of spending billions of dollars funding its terrorist clients and their terrorism, and the Mullahs’ current terrorism against their own subjects for those subjects’ heinous crime of protesting the Iranian government’s murder of a young woman Iranian “police” had arrested and had in police “custody” at the time of her murder.

Biden refuses to change his goal vis-à-vis that deal. Refuses to, not cannot, change. Gabriel Noronha, ex-special adviser on Iran for the State Department offered this:

Biden officials feel that to announce an end to negotiations would be admitting failure, and that snapback also signals the end to the JCPOA[.]

This is just a silly rationalization, though. It would be easy enough—and highly effective—to say words to the effect of “Worth a shot, didn’t work due to Iranian government intransigence, we’re ending negotiations.”

Acknowledging that something hasn’t worked out as planned and changing to something else is the stuff of successful business, and it’s the stuff of successful politics.

But Biden, the great Senator deal maker, is desperate for his deal. And that’s to the detriment of our national security and to that of Israel and to that of our other allies and friends.

Fiddling While….

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg seems to be a modern day fiddler. During the…negotiations…with rail unions just concluded, Buttigieg chose to go haring off to Portugal on vacation. He also appears to have told no one of the public he was heading out: previously undisclosed trip, according to the Washington Free Beacon as cited by Fox News.

“The secretary took a long-planned personal trip from Aug. 29 to Sept. 5,” a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation told Fox News. “As usual, while traveling on personal time he remained available and engaged on urgent issues, which in this case meant multiple calls with staff and stakeholders to work on the topic of rail labor negotiations.”

“Long-planned.” Nothing so trivial as a looming transportation strike with national economic implications was to disturb his precious vacation. Phone calls, though. Because there’s no need to meet in person with the players. Vacation.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio (R) noted the irony hypocrisy:

Rail workers just wanted a few days of paid sick leave. President Biden told them to pound sand and his Transportation Secretary vacationed in wine country[.]

And, of course, us taxpayers continued to pay Buttigieg’s his salary—he gets paid vacation, along with his paid sick leave.

What Biden’s Border Policy Has Accomplished

Here’s the flow of fentanyl into our nation that President Joe Biden (D) and his administration is so actively permitting with his No Southern Border policy. (For both graphs, Left-Click|Open-in-New-Tab to get a larger view.)Nor is the death and destruction limited to our southern border States.

Biden is permitting the attacks throughout our nation with his refusal to deal with our southern border.

Beyond that, it’s not just the Mexican drug cartels that the Biden administration is actively allowing to flood our nation with fentanyl through his policy. The cartels are getting, free-flowingly and cheaply, the precursor chemicals for manufacturing fentanyl from the People’s Republic of China.

Not only is the Biden administration refusing to secure our border—especially against the importation of this murderous drug—the Biden administration is refusing to take action against the PRC to put an end to its active role in poisoning Americans.

How Much

Progressive-Democratic Party politicians constantly and loudly insist that they need to raise taxes so that the rich actually pay their fair share.

Here are some data on what Americans actually pay at various levels of tax remittances.Notice, too, that the Federal Poverty Guideline for a family of four in 2020 was $26,200 for the Lower 48 and DC.

And there’s this, showing the progressing progressiveness of our tax code.Even as that marginal tax rate has come down, the percentage of total income taxes paid by those Evil Rich has gone up.

This is why those Progressive-Democrats steadfastly refuse to say how much is that “fair share,” whether in dollars or in rates.