PrairiePundit

 Washington Examiner: GOP lawmakers in statehouses across the country are calling for stricter voting regulations after concerns were raised in the 2020 election. Legislators have introduced three times the number of bills to restrict voting than this time last year, according to the  Brennan Center , which has tracked voting legislation in all 50 states. Twenty-eight states have introduced, prefiled, or carried more than 106 restrictive bills this year. Last February, there were 35 such bills in 15 states. Restrictive voting proposals are being advanced in states such as Texas, which have long pushed for more barriers to the ballot box, but newer proposals have also been brought up in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania,  according to the  Associated Press . The latter three all flipped for President Biden last year after former President Donald Trump won them in 2016. In Georgia, which flipped blue for the first time since the 1992 presidential election, GOP lawmakers are seeking to i

  Mike Miller: Retired NFL Player Calls for 'Separate Transgender Category' in Sports in Response to Biden's 'Body Blow to the Rights of Women and Girls' I suggested this shortly after Biden issued his executive order.  It is a good idea to keep girls' and women's sports competitive.

 Washington Examiner: Vice President Kamala Harris spoke of "abandoned land mines" in West Virginia when talking about job creation. During a local interview with  WSAZ 3 , the vice president correlated the administration's push for clean energy with the creation of new jobs. "All of those skilled workers who are in the coal industry and transferring those skills to what we need to do in terms of reclaiming abandoned land mines," Harris said. "What we need to do around plugging leaks from oil and gas wells, and transferring those important skills to the work that has yet to be done, and needs to get done." While land mines typically refer to underground explosives, Harris's gaffe was most likely referring to abandoned coal or strip mines. The  Washington Examiner  reached out to the White House for clarification but did not receive an immediate response. ... I suspect the folks in West Virginia are not impressed with her alleged suggestions for dea

  Washington Post: Lawmakers are struggling with trauma of the Capitol riot. Pelosi is trying to help.   I do not think Pelosi is handling the trauma very well herself.  Otherwise, she would not be insisting on having a division of National Gaurd in the building and even asking for crew served machineguns.  She is certainly no profile in courage and she is pushing a bogus impeachment effort despite being factually wrong in the allegations against the President.  She and the Democrats seem rattled by the fact there is great opposition to their handling of the allegations of vote fraud.

  Washington Post: Biden brother’s law firm touts his connection to the president, creating a headache for administration   The family has been selling access for as long as Biden has been in office.  He has been ok with monetizing his office to enrich his family and now finds it an embarrassment.  The media appears willing to make excuses for the family and sees it only as an embarrassment.  Hunter's laptop, which they tried desperately to ignore tells a different story about "the Big Guy."  The NY Post has more on Hunter's current financial dealings. BTW, Kamala Harris has a similar problem with her niece.

  NY Times: After Record Turnout, Republicans Are Trying to Make It Harder to Vote The presidential election results are settled. But the battle over new voting rules, especially for mail-in ballots, has just begun. Look, voting in person is not hard.  I have been doing it for decades and have never had a problem.  The mail-in ballots could and probably were a source of vote fraud where there was no verification of identity.  This is even more of a problem with drop boxes used to collect votes from who knows who dropped them in.  Many of the changes to voting requirements were clearly unconstitutional because they were not approved by the state legislature as required.  At some point, the Supreme Court should rule on this breach.

  NY Times: Trump Raised $255.4 Million in 8 Weeks as He Sought to Overturn Election Result The former president’s fund-raising slowed significantly after the Electoral College delivered its votes to make Joseph R. Biden Jr. the 46th president. The fundraising demonstrates how many Americans had questions about the legitimacy of the election results for Biden.  There is still a large number who think the Democrats rigged the vote in certain states.  The attempt by the Democrats and their media cohorts to tell them to "shut up" has failed.  There should be an investigation of the allegations of corruption in the swing states. It is also not helpful to Biden that his executive orders are also not supported by much of the public.

  Washington Examiner: In dispatching Vice President Kamala Harris via Zoom to two key states this week to sell President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus package, the White House’s message was clear: We’re the government, and we need your help. Harris’s media campaign in West Virginia and Arizona targets two states whose Democratic senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have been reluctant to support the White House's sprawling pandemic recovery package. Her outreach marked a soft shift from the quiet perch she has occupied by Biden’s side since taking office, signaling that the White House sees her as a persuasive force who can help keep congressional Democrats in line. “The president and I feel very strongly that these are the moments, when we are facing a crisis of unbelievable proportion, that the American people deserve their leaders to step up and stand up for them,” Harris told WSAZ, a West Virginia television station. “If we don’t pass this

  Epoch Times: South Carolina GOP Censures Rep. Tom Rice Over Trump Impeachment Vote The rush to judgment in the impeachment vote is negatively impacting all the Republicans who supported it. 

 Bonchie: When I found out some weeks back that Andy Slavitt was being brought in by Joe Biden to be a top COVID advisor, all I could do was chuckle. This was a guy who has been consistently wrong for the entirety of the pandemic, including projecting over one million deaths. His Twitter feed presents itself as the ravings of lunatic, and his proclamations on things like lock downs and mask usage have been shown to be evidence free garbage. Yet, Slavitt might not be the worst example of failing up in the Biden administration. There’s a new contender, and she’s taking things to an unprecedented level. It’s truly the worst of Washington on display.   The fact that this woman spells her name with a “z” should have been a clue something was off, but I digress. Suzan Levine has announced her elevation to the Biden administration from serving as Washington state’s Commissioner of Employment Security Department. As head of the ESD, her job was ostensibly to protect her state from fraud involv

  Andrea Widburg: California’s education system set to embrace anti-Semitism ... ...   the new curriculum is a woke mess of micro-labels, intersectionality, socialism, and hardcore Jew-hatred. In a must-read article,   Tablet sums it up : In one sample lesson, [Kaplan] saw that a list of historic U.S. social movements—ones like Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Criminal Justice Reform—also included the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement for Palestine (BDS), described as a “global social movement that currently aims to establish freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions.” Kaplan wondered why a foreign movement, whose target was another country, would be mischaracterized as a domestic social movement, and she was shocked that in a curriculum that would be taught to millions of students, BDS’s primary goal—the elimination of Israel—was not mentioned. Kaplan also saw that the 1948 Israel War of Independence was only referred to as the “Nakba”—“catastrophe” in Arabic—an

  Breitbart: San Francisco Committee Changed School Names Based on Wikipedia and Wild The Accusations The ignorance of history by those responsible for the name changes is impressive.  Real historians were appalled.  

  Jerusalem Post: Israeli scientists say they’ve found ‘Achilles’ heel’ of cancer cells   Breakthrough study unveils vulnerability of malignant cells with high degree of chromosomal instability and could lead to new treatments. ... “For decades, we’ve been trying to understand why [aneuploidy] happens in cancer and how it contributes to tumor formation and progression,” Ben-David said. More importantly, he said, scientists have been trying to see “if we can take advantage of this quite unique difference between cancer cells and normal cells in order to selectively kill the cancer cells.” ... “The overall vision here is that by understanding how aneuploid cells are different from normal cells, and detecting the Achilles’ heel of aneuploid cells, this could be a very attractive way to selectively kill cancer cells,” Ben-David said. ... There is much more. This should lead to a new approach to attacking the cancer cells.  It looks like a breakthrough. 

 Thomas Lifson: The message is out to the next rogue federal bureaucrats who contemplate committing crimes in the name of wiretapping (or otherwise abusing the rights of) opponents of the Deep State: Don’t worry! You won’t be doing any jail time and may even get sympathy from the judge – in the unlikely event you ever get caught. Unleash the fearsome spying apparatus taxpayers provide against political opponents of Democrats. That’s the clear signal sent by FISA Court Judge James Boasberg (an Obama appointee to the federal bench, and a John Roberts appointee to the FISA Court, and reportedly a  member of Skull & Bones  while an undergraduate at Yale) with his sentence of Kevin Clinesmith, the former FBI lawyer who  lied to the court  in order to obtain a FISA warrant on Carter Page. Josh Gerstein reports in  Politico : The only person charged in the Justice Department's investigation into the origins of the probe of former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign and its ties

 Red States: It has been ten days since President Joe Biden was inaugurated, and yet, National Guard troops remain in Washington, D.C. Despite the left’s fearmongering, the event went off without a hitch and there have been no threats since. Indeed, at this point, troops appear to be spinning their wheels, sleeping in parking garages, and having to order from local restaurants since their food contract came up short. Several states have already recalled their troops. Now, it appears that some politicians are questioning the need for continuing to have members of the Guard stationed in the nation’s capital. The Hill reported that “Pentagon officials have pointed to unspecified threats in justifying their approval to keep about 5,000 Guardsmen at the Capitol through at least mid-March.” But GOP lawmakers are taking exception with the prolonged deployment. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) told The Hill, “I sit on the Intelligence Committee, but I’m aware of no specific, credible threat reporting

 Epoch Times: A media company that operates several West Virginia newspapers is suing Google and Facebook for threatening the extinction of local newspapers across the country by their alleged anti-competitive business practices. HD Media Company this week filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to determine whether the two Silicon Valley companies had violated anti-trust laws. The lawsuit claims Google had unlawfully exercised monopoly power of the digital advertising market, which has prevented newspapers from competing in the market and losing their primary source of revenue. It also claims that Google and Facebook had “unlawfully conspired to engage in anticompetitive conduct,” through an alleged secret deal nicknamed “Jedi Blue.” Details of the alleged agreement were first revealed when 10 state attorneys general sued Google for multiple violations of federal and state antitrust and consumer protection laws. According to a redacted version of the lawsuit ( pdf ) filed in Decemb

 

 Red States: Despite the efforts by Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and the liberal media to cancel Donald Trump and his presidency, their efforts are having the opposite effect, according to a worried Politico reporter: Trump’s base is “getting stronger” since he left the White House — and an impeachment conviction would “make him even more powerful.” Politico’s Tara Palmeri told MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace on Friday that there is now a “crusade” being waged on behalf of Trump in places like Wyoming, as reported by  Fox News , where the former president is “way more popular” than Rep. Liz Cheney, who has been under intense fire over her vote to impeach Trump. “People don’t want to hear anything against Trump. Actually, the more he stays out of the media, the more that he becomes this martyr, this looming figure over the GOP.” ...   Palmeri told Wallace she came to her conclusion about Trump’s popularity in Wyoming after talking with people about Cheney’s vote to impeach Trump, whi

 Jeffrey Carl: ... This is just the sort of behavior we are witnessing from the election-rigging Democrats over the past several weeks. They scream “insurrection” and “coup” at 74.2 million Trump supporters who supposedly bear collective guilt for the actions of a few hundred rioting LARPers at the Capitol, who were immediately denounced by virtually everyone on the Right (in sharp contrast to leftist rioters over the summer, who were coddled and encouraged by the Democrats). Meanwhile, these same election riggers have launched a “domestic terrorism” witch hunt against Trump supporters, in a clear and obvious attempt to suppress political opposition to the new regime. Like the child with his hand in the cookie jar, the more guilty the Democrats are of “winning” a blatantly rigged election versus Donald Trump, the louder they must scream about their noble crusade to save “democracy” from “fascism.” As commentator Glenn Greenwald recently told Tucker Carlson, “They’re trying to harness c

  Michael Barone: Biden's 'Racial Justice' Agenda: Judge Everyone by the Color of Their Skin ... Actually, racial discrimination in housing has been reduced since the 1968 federal Fair Housing Act, to the point that in metropolitan areas from Washington to Atlanta to Los Angeles, most blacks now live in suburbs, not in the central cities to which they were tightly confined in postwar America. But for Rice and Biden, "equity" requires not equality of opportunity but equality of results. That's one of the fundamental tenets of critical race theory training banned by outgoing Trumpites and reinstated by Biden on day one. A lower-than-population percentage of blacks in any desirable category, explains critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi, must be the result of "systemic racism" (a term Rice used twice and Biden six times Tuesday). If you don't agree, you're guilty of "white fragility" and you must be a "white supremacist."

 Bryan Preston: ... The Wall Street Journal was in attendance and noted the CEO’s disdain for EVs boils down to his belief they’ll ruin businesses, require massive investments, and even emit more carbon dioxide than combustion-engined vehicles. “The current business model of the car industry is going to collapse,” he said. “The more EVs we build, the worse carbon dioxide gets… When politicians are out there saying, ‘Let’s get rid of all cars using gasoline,’ do they understand this?” CarBuzz has mischaracterized Toyoda’s comments. It’s not “disdain for EVs” he’s expressing. It’s disdain for the failure to count the cost of what politicians are proposing. More EVs will demand more electricity. Toyoda is getting at two things. One, EVs are not powered by magical unicorn emissions, they are powered by the means we use to generate electricity. In Japan, the United States, and everywhere else, that’s fossil fuels to the tune of a huge majority of our electric power generation (61% in the U.

  Selena Zito: On the morning of Jan. 20, every room of the two-story Stroppel Hotel in Midland, SD, was filled with men and women who work on the Keystone XL pipeline. Most of these union laborers, welders and pipefitters started their day over a cup of coffee in the hotel’s common room before heading out to their jobs. By 4 p.m., the entire place was cleared out, leaving the historic hotel silent for the first time since owners Laurie and Wally Cox took it over six months ago. “Our whole world turned upside down with the stroke of a pen,” Laurie said. She is speaking of President Biden’s executive order , signed on his first day in office, that halted work on the Keystone XL pipeline in South Dakota and immediately eliminated 1,000 union jobs . TC Energy, the company that was developing the project, predicts that more than 10,000 jobs will be lost in 2021 due to the order. Now Laurie, who holds a master’s degree in social work, sits alone in the vacant hotel while her husband Wally f

 Foundation for Economic Education: Puerto Rico has had a long history of being harmed by Washington overreach . The island was once home to a thriving needlework industry until the federal minimum wage destroyed its competitive advantage. The same unintended consequence happened again in 1974 when increases in the minimum wage cut 32 percent of low wage jobs and triggered a mass migration off the island. Now history threatens to repeat itself once more as the Biden administration tries to more than double the federal minimum wage to $15/hour . Such an act would deal another blow to the struggling island—and many other parts of the United States. By forcing up the cost of employment the minimum wage hurts the very people it tries to assist, and creates the real risk of losing their job altogether . Adjusting this single minimum wage by median household income gives us an idea of how widespread the disemployment effect in different states would be and illustrates why this One Best Way

Washington Post:   FBI probe of U.S. Capitol riot finds evidence assault was coordinated Agents are probing interactions between on-the-ground instigators and leaders of national extremist groups. It looks like there was a conspiracy to take advantage of the Trump rally to attack the Capitol Building.  This does not fit the case that Pelosi et al conjured up for the impeachment.

 Newsmax/Bloomberg: Senate Republicans said they’re being rebuffed in their request to meet with Joe Biden over climate policies they say threaten “thousands of good-paying jobs.” Senators, led by Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, had sought the meeting after Biden canceled a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline and ordered a pause in the sale of new oil and gas leases on federal land. He also ordered agencies to review dozens of Trump administration regulations and promised “ambitious” new limits on greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles. On Friday, Sens. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma and Steve Daines of Montana said on Twitter the White House had refused the request. “Considering the effects their radical war on fossil fuels will have on nearly half the country, it is clear Oklahoma jobs are not the priority they should be,” Inhofe tweeted. White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Friday no meeting was planned, though she didn’t explicitly