PrairiePundit

 Washington Examiner: A special operations unit of the Texas Rangers saved a 6-month-old infant after she was tossed out of a raft by "smugglers" into the Rio Grande River, a hotbed for illegal crossings into the United States, according to authorities. The child's mother "had been assaulted by" the traffickers in Mexico, and she sustained a broken leg, the  Texas Department of Public Safety  wrote in a  Facebook  post on Tuesday, adding that the baby was recovered by a "specialized group" within the Rangers on March 16. The post included a photograph of a member of the South Texas Special Operations Group of the Texas Rangers holding the child. 9-YEAR-OLD MIGRANT MEXICAN BOY DIES AFTER ATTEMPTING TO CROSS BORDER RIVER The Rangers said the tactical team's "primary responsibility is to carry out specific missions, usually along the Texas-Mexico  border  region" and "conduct interdiction, and disruption of criminal activity usually ass

 The Center Square: Red states are leading economic growth in the U.S., a new report by the U. S. Commerce Department shows, with South Dakota, Texas and Utah reporting the highest growth. The report is based on 2020 fourth quarter gross domestic product (GDP) data and February 2021 unemployment rates. Real GDP increased in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in the fourth quarter of 2020. Real GDP for the U.S. as a whole increased at an annual rate of 4.3%. The percent change in real GDP in the fourth quarter ranged from 9.9% in South Dakota to 1.2% in the District of Columbia. The top three states in quarter-over-quarter growth were South Dakota (9.9%), Texas (7.5%), and Utah (7.1%). All three have Republican trifecta governments, with Republicans controlling the governor’s offices and both chambers of state legislatures. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, pointing to the report, tweeted, “The Texas economy expanded at a rapid pace of 7.5% in the last quarter of 2020. That means more jo

 Breitbart: Americans struggling to survive on federal benefits have waited weeks for word on their share of the $1.9 trillion stimulus. Some of the country’s most vulnerable citizens have been  waiting  weeks for the next round of promised financial aid from President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion “ American Rescue Plan ” coronavirus relief package, with no indication of when it would come. Chief among those are the millions of elderly Americans who depend on federal assistance to survive. As of March 24, nearly 30 million had yet to  receive  their portion, largely because the Social Security Administration had “not sent the necessary payment files” to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Despite a March 12  assurance  the money would be  delivered  “shortly,” weeks passed before the IRS had access to the necessary information to follow through. “To me, ‘shortly’ is two to three days, not two weeks,” 65-year-old Floridian retiree Mark Stevens  said . “People in my situation are feeling li

  Newsmax: More than a Million Migrants Expected at Southern Border This Year: US Official The stupidity of the Biden administration border policy keeps getting exposed and no one in this administration is doing anything to solve the problem. 

 Paul Sperry: For the past four years, Democrats and the Washington media have suspended disbelief about the Steele dossier’s credibility by arguing that some Russia allegations against Donald Trump and his advisers have been corroborated and therefore the most explosive charges may also be true. But recently declassified secret testimony by the FBI official in charge of corroborating the dossier blows up that narrative. The top analyst assigned to the FBI’s Russia “collusion” case, codenamed Crossfire Hurricane, admitted under oath that neither he nor his team of half a dozen intelligence analysts could confirm any of the allegations in the dossier — including ones the FBI nonetheless included in several warrant applications as evidence to establish legal grounds to electronically monitor a former Trump adviser for almost a year. FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten made the admission under questioning by staff investigators for the Senate Judiciary Committee during closed

 Washington Free Beacon: Congressional Republicans are calling the Biden administration’s reported plan to roll back sanctions on Iran before it commits to renewed diplomatic talks an unacceptable concession that will only embolden the hardline regime and reward its bad behavior. As Iran continues to balk at U.S. proposals for direct negotiations on a deal, the Biden administration is becoming desperate. American officials are now said to be offering Iran immediate relief from tough economic sanctions in exchange for commitments to scale back portions of its nuclear program and halt enriching uranium to levels needed for a weapon, according to Politico. That proposal, Republican foreign policy leaders told the Washington Free Beacon, breaks multiple promises from Secretary of State Antony Blinken to not lift sanctions until Tehran agrees to sit down with the United States and other world powers. Republicans also are learning of the proposal via media reports, highlighting the administ

 Jazz Shaw: Chuck Schumer and his Senate Democrat colleagues have a gun control problem on their hands. President Joe Biden has already promised his liberal supporters that he was going to get some gun control legislation passed, but even the bill viewed as having the best chance of reaching his desk has been declared “ dead on arrival ” in the upper chamber. H.R. 8 is the bill that was supposed to expand background checks to a “universal level” and was viewed as being at least somewhat less onerous to Second Amendment supporters. But now, it appears that Schumer and Pelosi won’t even be able to reuse their bogus reconciliation scheme to hammer H.R. 8 through because it won’t even reach fifty votes on the Senate floor. So now it’s back to the drawing board. Schumer is still claiming that he will bring  something  to the floor when the Senate returns from recess, but what that will turn out to be remains a mystery. (Free Beacon) Senate Democrats punted on taking up House gun-control bil

 John Sexton: Two reporters from the Associated Press and a camera crew from CBS News were allowed inside the Donna, Texas holding facility today. What they witnessed was massive overcrowding with 4,100 people packed in a space which ought to  only hold 250 . The Biden administration for the first time Tuesday allowed journalists inside its main border detention facility for migrant children, revealing a severely overcrowded tent structure where more than 4,000 people, including children and families, were crammed into a space intended for 250 and the youngest were kept in a large play pen with mats on the floor for sleeping… The children were being housed by the hundreds in eight “pods” formed by plastic dividers, each about 3,200 square feet (297 square meters) in size. Many of the pods had more than 500 children in them. Oscar Escamilla, acting executive officer of the U.S. Border Patrol in the Rio Grande Valley, said 250 to 300 kids enter daily and far fewer leave… More than 2,000

 Christopher Chantrill: I’m having a problem deciding whether the Biden administration is stupid or evil or just flat-out afraid of us Commoners. And then I realized that it’s all three. Here’s why. Our liberal friends never imagined that a Trump could happen. Nothing in their world prepared them for him. So what happens when you are confronted by something completely unexpected? You stop dead in your tracks. That is one of the basic themes in Jordan B. Peterson’s  oeuvre . As he writes in  Beyond Order. 12 More Rules for Life : Many herbivores, comparatively defenseless, facing imminent and brutal death, freeze in place, paralyzed by fear… But to have no more courage than a rabbit is definitely not to be everything you could be. And Nancy Pelosi is no herbivore, despite her fetish for storing ice-cream in $24,000 refrigerators. Non-herbivores, after freezing in place for a moment when threatened by the fearsome Trump dinosaur, decide what to do next. Friend or foe? Should Dems ignore

 Fox News: ... Just a third of Americans questioned in an NPR/Marist poll released on Tuesday say they approve of Biden's handling of the issue of immigration, with 53% saying they disapprove of his performance. While two-thirds of Democrats say they approve of how Biden has handled the issue in the first two months of his presidency, approval plunges to 27% among independents and to just 5% among Republicans. ... The new poll is in line with an ABC News/Ipsos survey released Sunday, which indicated that 57% of Americans disapprove of how Biden has handled immigration – and a majority (54%) say the situation at the border's a crisis. ... I think these numbers will get worse for Biden as the magnitude of this screw-up becomes more apparent/  He is enriching the Mexican cartels and turning sex criminals loose in the country and becoming a trafficker in children. 

 Silvio Cantu, Jr.: ... This is from an interview with  CBS News : While journalists have been blocked from accessing the sites themselves, Cuellar provided to CBS News photos from a Border Patrol facility in Donna, Texas, some of which show children with foil blankets waiting to be processed.  Other images from the Texas Democrat show families under a bridge in McAllen, Texas, at a temporary processing site as they wait to get into a holding facility. More photos show scores of young girls who Cuellar said have been held at the border facility for days, far longer than the legal limit of 72 hours that border officials have to turn over unaccompanied minors to the Department of Health and Human Services' Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for housing the children. Let me translate: in your face, Joe Biden! Cuellar apparently warned the Biden transition team to avoid quick changes on the border.  He has been screaming about the mess down on the border. I hope Democ

 Rich Lowry: President Joe Biden is so committed to bipartisan cooperation and fact-based governance that he’s launched an ignorant and incendiary attack on the new Georgia voting law. Biden says the new law is “Jim Crow in the 21st century” and “an un-American law to deny people the right to vote.” It’s now practically mandatory for Democrats to launch such unhinged broadsides. Elizabeth Warren, accusing Georgia governor Brian Kemp of having stolen his 2018 election victory over Democratic activist Stacey Abrams (a poisonous myth), tweeted, “The Republican who is sitting in Stacey Abrams’ chair just signed a despicable voter suppression bill into law to take Georgia back to Jim Crow.” Anyone making this charge in good faith either doesn’t understand the hideousness of Jim Crow or the provisions of the Georgia law. The old Jim Crow was billy clubs and fire hoses; the alleged new Jim Crow is asking people to write a driver’s license number on their absentee-ballot envelopes. The old Ji

  Red States: Biden Has Some Advice for States Like Texas and it Will Be a Cold Day in Heck Before They Take It ... But as I previously wrote, the science indicates that after lifting restrictions, the numbers in Texas are continuing to go down, that their “Neanderthal thinking” as Biden called it, actually was consistent with the facts. If Joe Biden thinks he’s going to tell Texas and Florida, and the multitude of other states who have opened up to go backwards, he’s got another thing coming. They’re not going back and that doesn’t appear to be where the rise in cases is coming in any event. The rise in some states tends to be in the Northeast in places where there hasn’t been a lifting of restrictions. So even with cases continuing to drop, Biden thinks places like Texas should stop reopening. How does that comport with the science in this case? It doesn’t. Follow the science except when the science contradicts the narrative is apparently the message here. ... Biden's policy

 Washington Examiner: As Republicans and Democrats trade blame on who bears responsibility for the worsening  border crisis , the Biden administration has pledged to pursue several solutions that critics argue will only worsen the problem. More than a dozen Republican senators on Friday returned from a trip to the border led by Texas Republican Sen.  Ted Cruz , armed with images and descriptions of horrific conditions in facilities housing unaccompanied minors in Texas. The GOP lawmakers said some of the front-line Border Patrol agents with whom they spoke blamed President  Joe Biden  directly for inspiring a massive influx of migrants since taking office. But the White House has continued to point the finger at former President  Donald Trump  as scrutiny of the crisis mounts. White House press secretary Jen Psaki  said  Monday that the Biden administration is still “digging out of a broken system over the past four years,” and Biden himself argued repeatedly at a press conference on T

 Epoch Times: An anonymous border patrol agent who claims to have been working in Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) for over ten years spoke out about leaked administration documents obtained by Project Veritas . The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documents, according to the non-profit journalist group, say that “criminal aliens with sex-related offenses are attempting to re-enter the United States in record numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic.” The anonymous insider said that the documents, labeled “unclassified//law enforcement sensitive,” are not supposed to be shown to the public. One of them dated March 24, 2021, has the header “Border Intelligence Daily” and reads “Public Safety: FY 2021 Sex Offender Encounters by U.S. Border Patrol Reach Five Year High.” The leaked document reads that there have been 214 sex offender encounters, or arrests, from October 2020 to February 2021, compared to the yearly total of 154 during the previous fiscal year. The insider said the report i

 Fox Business: Multiple Republican lawmakers have come out against the idea of digital "vaccine passports" that would allow private businesses to require customers provide proof of vaccination. President Biden's administration is reportedly working on a way to standardize a process for allowing Americans to prove their vaccination status. New York State has already rolled out their own version of vaccine credentials . Some GOP lawmakers are wary of vaccine passports. NEW YORK LAUNCHES DIGITAL VACCINATION, TESTING PASSPORT APP "Considering that Democrats want to require vaccine IDs for people to conduct their basic daily activities, they now have zero grounds to object to voter ID laws,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., told Fox News. "If under Democrat logic, you should need an ID to enter even a grocery store, surely there wouldn’t be an objection to showing an ID to legally vote." House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, slamm

 Washington Examiner: As the debate over firearm ownership in the United States continues to grow following the deadly  Boulder, Colorado , Atlanta-area, and Virginia Beach shootings, the term "assault weapon" is once again being used in political discourse to describe many firearms. The term "assault weapon" or "assault rifle" has been predominantly wielded by those seeking more stringent firearm laws in the U.S. and refers to a class of firearms that possesses certain characteristic features. The components in question make a gun look military-style and have little effect on the overall mechanics of the firearm itself. On March 11, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a leading voice in the gun control movement,  introduced  the Assault Weapons Ban of 2021, which defined a "semiautomatic assault weapon" as a firearm that "has the capacity to utilize a [detachable] magazine" and has "any 1 of the following: a pistol grip, a forward g

 NY Post: The Cuomo administration largely ignored a county official’s pleas for COVID-19 tests for nursing homes at the pandemic’s height last spring — even as the governor allegedly secured the then-scarce tests for his relatives, The Post has learned. The slight is the latest stumble in Cuomo’s pandemic response, particularly with respect to nursing homes, where thousands of residents have died of confirmed or suspected cases of the coronavirus. Troubled by reports of COVID-19 running roughshod through nursing homes early in the pandemic, Jack Wheeler, the manager of upstate Steuben County, requested in April 2020 that the state Department of Health provide enough tests for every resident and staff member of three facilities in his jurisdiction. The DOH, however, only came through with enough supplies for one of the three facilities, Hornell Gardens, with the precious diagnostic tests then hard to find, Wheeler told The Post. That lackluster response came, as The Albany Times-Union

 Washington Examiner: A temporary  Border  Patrol facility in Donna, Texas, that is meant to hold a maximum of 250 people was holding more than 5,700 people Monday, putting it at 22 times over the legal limit, according to two government officials with firsthand knowledge of the numbers. The extreme overcrowding, which is of added concern because of the coronavirus pandemic, comes as the Biden administration struggles with a border crisis that has  seen it take twice  as many migrant children into custody as were held during the peak in 2019 during the Trump administration. BORDER PATROL HAS RELEASED 30,000 DIRECTLY INTO THE US SINCE JANUARY Rep. Beth Van Duyne, a Texas Republican who had toured the facility Monday as part of a delegation, said that it was significantly over capacity because other federal agencies are not accepting families and unaccompanied children quickly enough. “No matter what you see from our small lenses is equal to the emotion that you feel when you see it in c

  Washington Examiner: Twice as many children are in Border Patrol custody under Biden than Trump peak in 2019 ...   As of Sunday, 5,767 unaccompanied minors were being detained inside cells at Border Patrol facilities near the U.S.-Mexico border. In comparison, only 2,600 children were documented in custody at the height of the 2019 border crisis, according to federal data exclusively obtained Monday evening. ... That is what happens when you invite in illegals. 

 Kevin Williamson: ... ‘Shut Up,’ She Explained Elizabeth Warren — the ridiculous hustling flatbilly grifter from Massachusetts from Oklahoma who snookered the academic establishment by pretending to be a Native American while writing dopey self-help books that are so sloppy and intellectually dishonest that it’s a surprise skeezy old Joe Biden hasn’t plagiarized them yet, a political grotesque who prides herself on being in the first generation of her family to attend college but rage-tweets as though she were in the first generation in her family with opposable thumbs, as ghastly and deceitful and god-awful a sniveling and self-serving a creature as the United States Congress has to offer — is, in spite of the genuine facts of her sorry case, getting a little full of herself, and believes that as a senator, she should be above the petty “heckling” of the little people You know, peons. Like you. Sometimes, they mess up and tell you what they are thinking. And what Senator Warren is t

 BizPac Review: ... Rasmussen asked a pointed question: “Should voters be required to show photo identification such as a driver’s license before being allowed to vote?” The response was telling. The majority of 1,000 national likely voters queried said “yes.” The breakdown went like this: White 74%, Black 69%, and Other Non-White 82%. When all voter polling results were figured in, 75% said they were in favor of voter ID laws. That’s three out of four Americans. ... Both Hume and Hemingway join a chorus of conservatives who are fighting tooth and nail for voter ID and to defeat H.R.1, the ironically named “ For the People Act 0f 2021 .” Regardless of the overwhelming support by American voters for voter ID laws, the Democrats are pushing ahead to do away with them. This would allegedly make it far easier for fraud to occur and for illegal immigrants and others who would not normally be allowed to vote to cast ballots in elections. Those individuals reportedly tend to support Democrat

 The Lid: China’s economy is emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic better than ever, while America’s economy looks to regain its footing after an entire year lost. Lockdowns decreased oil demand and  forced shutdowns at many American refineries , costing thousands of jobs across the country. China’s refineries are  outperforming expectations  as the rest of the world looks to recover from the coronavirus crisis. China has overtaken the U.S. in crude oil imports, yet President Biden is attacking America’s energy sector. Biden’s energy policy threatens our nation’s small refinery workers and endangers the competitive edge the United States maintains over China. President Biden’s attack on the American energy sector is an extreme governmental overreach threatening both good-paying jobs and the free market. If these small refineries and their workers disappear, we will suffer skyrocketing energy prices and risk a near-total collapse of our economy. Meanwhile, China and its communist dictator