PrairiePundit

 Business Insider: Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging women to have as many as eight children as the number of dead Russian soldiers continues to rise in his war with Ukraine, worsening the country's population crisis. Addressing the World Russian People's Council in Moscow on Tuesday , Putin said the country must return to a time when large families were the norm. "Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, had seven, eight, or even more children," Putin said. "Let us preserve and revive these excellent traditions. Large families must become the norm, a way of life for all of Russia's people. The family is not just the foundation of the state and society, it is a spiritual phenomenon, a source of morality." "Preserving and increasing the population of Russia is our goal for the coming decades and even generations ahead. This is the future of the Russian world, the millennium-old, eternal Russia," Putin continued. Putin's rema...

 AP: Deutsche Bank viewed Donald Trump as a “whale” of a client, was eager to land him and eagerly cultivated a relationship that grew from $13,000 worth of revenue to $6 million in two years, according to documents presented Wednesday at the former president's civil fraud trial . The bank's dealings with Trump are a key issue in New York Attorney General Letitia James ’ lawsuit, which accuses Trump, his company and some executives of hoodwinking lenders and insurers by presenting them with grossly inflated statements of his asset values. The defendants deny any wrongdoing. They have sought to show that the bank felt delighted, not deceived, by Trump and courted his business. “We are whale hunting,” then-bank managing director Rosemary Vrablic wrote colleagues in November 2011, after she had been introduced to Trump's son Donald Jr. but had yet to meet the elder Trump. The bankers used “whale" to refer to a very wealthy client, Vrablic testified Wednesday. Vrablic f...

 AP: NATO member Finland on Wednesday closed its last remaining border crossing with Russia after the government decided to seal the entire border with its eastern neighbor amid rising political tensions. The Cabinet of Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo decided to temporarily close the entire 1,340-kilometer (830-mile) border between the two countries a day earlier over concerns that Moscow was using migrants to destabilize the Nordic country in an alleged act of “hybrid warfare.” The Raja-Jooseppi crossing point in Finland’s Arctic Lapland region, located some 250 kilometers (155 miles) from the northern Russian city of Murmansk, closed at 2 p.m. Wednesday, according to the checkpoint’s normal November schedule. Ville Ahtiainen, a deputy commander with the Finnish Border Guard in Lapland, told reporters that the remote border crossing, located in the middle of rugged wilderness, was quiet during the four hours it remained open Wednesday, with a handful of vehicles passing thr...

 Telegraph: Russia’s Black Sea Fleet has been forced back to base after the worst storm in 100 years hit southern Ukraine and occupied Crimea . No Russian ships are able to operate in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov because of the blizzards, giant waves and winds of up to 90mph, Ukraine’s navy and southern army command said. The brutal weather has been called the “storm of the century” by Russian media after it left at least 18 people dead, 33 injured and millions without power in Ukraine, Russia and Moldova. One Russian blogger said that naval minefields were feared to be drifting after the storm broke boom nets keeping them in place. High tides have washed away trenches, coastal barriers and firing positions at Yevpatoriya, a city near the Sevastopol naval base in occupied Crimea . In October, Russia moved the bulk of its fleet from Sevastopol to Novorossiysk, a base 200 miles farther east, after it was struck by Ukrainian Storm Shadow missiles . The Institute for the Study of...

 Stephen Kruiser: ... Donald Trump is politically battle-tested in ways that no other presidential candidate has ever been. In 2016, before he could ever get to the part where he deposed Hillary Clinton, he faced a concerted effort by the Republican establishment to deny him the nomination that he had rightfully earned via the primaries. That was still happening at the convention.  This time around, he's dealing with battles on multiple fronts. I'm losing count of how many things the Democrats have tried to frame him on, the most ridiculous being that he fomented insurrection.  Some Uniparty fans in the GOP Establishment would prefer that Trump go away so they don't have to worry about having their delicate Beltway sensibilities offended. They would rather "Harumph!" into their ascots at the Capitol Hill Club while Washington/Rome burns, that's why  Charles Koch's Super PAC just endorsed Hillary Clinton cheerleader Nikki Haley .  The corrupt attacks on Tru...

 American Action News: Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas will visit the Del Rio sector in Texas Wednesday, where the number of illegal immigrants in custody has hit 169% capacity, according to internal data exclusively obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation. Mayorkas will be accompanied by Border Patrol Chief Jason Owens while meeting with agents in the Del Rio sector to receive “operational updates,” DHS said in a press release Tuesday evening. Border Patrol nationwide had roughly 20,000 migrants in their custody as of Wednesday morning, according to the internal data. In addition to the Del Rio sector, Arizona’s Tucson sector is at 175% capacity and the nationwide capacity is at 90%, according to the data. Eagle Pass, Texas, which is located in the Del Rio sector, has seen a large influx of illegal crossings in recent days, forcing the shutdown of a port to vehicle inspections. The Tucson sector canceled all training activities, closed a ve...

 Red State: ... Why? Why keep putting him out there, when they know he's going to fall all over himself like this? At what point in the last three years did Biden provide any evidence he could successfully read a teleprompter and not stumble all over himself? It's one thing to go out there and gaslight about the economy. Almost all presidents do that to some degree or another, but the current president  isn't even capable of doing that. I guess it's a good thing that Biden is so senile that none of his lies pass muster, but it's also a blackeye on a nation that relies on the projection of strength to maintain its place in the world order. What is strong about not being able to even read a teleprompter?  Rest assured, though, those two instances were not his worst flubs. That is reserved for Biden's chastizing of "Congressman Trump." BIDEN: We could use it to strengthen the Social Security and Medicare system instead of cutting them...or...like Congress...

 Fox News: Ahead of Thursday’s highly-anticipated debate between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and California Gov. Gavin Newsom , Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody will hold a press conference earlier in the afternoon to hear from California "refugees" who fled the Golden State for Florida. Among those featured will be a Vietnam veteran named Jay Berman, who lived in Southern California for 40 years before moving to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, because of high crime and vagrancy. Berman is now, according to DeSantis’ office, enjoying Florida’s low cost of living and can now afford to semi-retire without worrying about finding new clients. Another featured speaker will be Julie Gebhards, who home schools her children in Lithia, Florida . She is said to have left California after becoming disillusioned with the state’s education curriculum, particularly "pornographic material" in schools. Former New York police officer Steve Grossi will also speak at the press confere...

 Texas Public Policy: The cost of producing electric vehicles (EVs) is far higher than the prices they are being sold for. Nearly $22 billion in federal and state subsidies and regulatory credits suppressed the retail price of EVs in 2021 by an average of almost $50,000. Thanks to an unlawful multiplier, EVs receive nearly seven times more credits under federal fuel efficiency programs than they provide in actual fuel economy benefits. Regulatory credits with bonus EV multipliers from federal fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions standards and state EV sales mandates provide an average of $27,881 in benefits per vehicle for producers of EVs. Home and public charging stations used by EVs put a significant strain on the electric grid, resulting in an average of $11,833 in socialized costs per EV over 10 years, which are shouldered by utility ratepayers and taxpayers. Direct state and federal subsidies for EVs average $8,984 per vehicle over 10 years. ... All of that and they s...

 Daily Mail: The US has little grasp of how deep China 's network of espionage and influence operations runs through the nation, a dire warning from Congress has revealed. The Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) presence on American soil has already revealed itself in the network of secret police stations in major cities and the 'Little Red Classrooms' in kindergartens. Now, members of the bipartisan House China Select Committee have released a memo detailing how the U.S. has failed to combat Beijing 's infiltration - and it could get worse. The threat comes from the united front, a political strategy Xi Jinping has called his 'magic weapon'. It's the plan the CCP uses to influence beyond its circle without the information appearing to come directly from the Chinese government. China spends billions on the united front system each year. United front is affiliated with some 600 groups in the U.S., according to a 2020 Newsweek report, that are all in regular...

 Daily Mail: Biden slammed for bragging he is bringing prices down - even though they are UP since he entered office: President launches bid to take credit despite the majority of Americans disapproving of his economic record President Joe Biden on Monday touted his administration's success in bringing down the price of gas, groceries and airline tickets during the past year but received little thanks for his efforts. Republicans ridiculed his claims. 'FACT: Since Biden took office, airfare is up 21%, Thanksgiving dinner was up 25%, and gas prices are $0.86/gallon higher,' the Republican National Committee said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter . ... Inflation may have slowed and some prices may have dropped since last year, but most prices are still higher than they were before the pandemic. ... It still costs more to go to the grocery store or the gas station than it did when Trump was president. 

 Breitbart: Research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein is launching America’s Digital Shield, a website that exposes Big Tech meddling in the 2024 elections through real-time “ephemeral manipulation” that can shift millions of votes. Epstein announced the release of a “public data dashboard” that shows how Big Tech giants like Google, Bing, and Yahoo are manipulating online content to influence votes in the elections, according to a press release sent to Breitbart News. The new public dashboard, named America’s Digital Shield can be viewed here . The findings presented by Epstein, a Harvard-trained senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), raise concerns about the integrity of the democratic process amid Big Tech corporations’ ability to wield unparalleled amounts of power with regards to public consumption of online content. “If we don’t stop them, Google alone will be able to shift between 6.4 and 25.5 million votes in t...

 AP: When Deutsche Bank loaned Donald Trump 's company hundreds of millions of dollars, the bank always followed its own guidelines that include checking out information that would-be borrowers provide, an executive testified Tuesday at the former president's civil fraud trial . The loans — for projects in Florida, Chicago and Washington, D.C. — are a focus of New York Attorney General Letitia James ' lawsuit contending that Trump and his company deceived lenders and insurers by giving them financial statements that baldly overstated his asset values and overall net worth. The defendants deny the allegations. Deutsche Bank reviewed the financial statements before making the loans through its department that works with rich individuals — a pathway that allowed for more favorable interest rates than likely available from the commercial real estate division, according to the lawsuit. The deals came with conditions about Trump’s net worth and, sometimes, liquidity, and they oft...

 The Telegraph: When Finland officially joined NATO in April this year as a consequence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin threatened that it would respond with “counter measures”. Now, seven months later, it appears Putin is trying to take his revenge on its neighbour . Over the past ten days, Finland has hurriedly been shutting its border crossings with Russia. On 18 November, Helsinki shut four; another three were closed on the 24th. Now just one checkpoint along the 830 mile border - the most northern Raja-Jooseppi crossing - remains open, although according to the Finnish press it may not stay so for long. The reason for Finland’s rush to shut down its crossings is the sudden surge in the number of third-country asylum seekers arriving at the border. Since the beginning of November alone, some 900 migrants from countries including Morocco, Somalia and Afghanistan have crossed over from Russia with the aim of claiming asylum in Finland, the country’s border agency h...

 The Telegraph: A Ukrainian drone has struck a Russian aircraft factory more than 200 miles behind enemy lines. Ukraine’s military intelligence agency (HUR) claimed responsibility for the explosion at the Smolensk Aviation Factory. Footage of the blast showed plumes of black smoke billowing up from the plant, which also produces Kh-59 cruise missiles. Baza, a Russian Telegram channel with links to the military, said two drones were downed over the factory, one of which crashed into the roof and exploded. It said there were no casualties. This is the second time Ukraine has sent drones to attack the factory – a previous raid in October caused widespread damage to production lines. The attack appears to have been part of a wave of 35 drones Ukraine launched over the weekend in retaliation to a dawn attack by 70 Russian Shahed drones on Saturday. It comes at a critical time in the war, with front lines frozen and major question marks about military support and funding for Ukraine fro...

 Fox News: A train seen in Mexico headed toward the U.S. border had what appeared to be hundreds of migrants riding on top as record numbers of people trying to enter the United States continues. The migrants were riding atop a BNSF Railway train in central Mexico as it departed from it departs Irapuato, Guanajuato, around 200 miles northwest of Mexico City. The train route goes from there to Torreon, Monterey and then Piedras Negras, a border city across from Eagle Pass, Texas. GOP LAWMAKER SOUNDS ALARM ON ‘DANGEROUS’ THREAT TO US COMING FROM POROUS BORDER, AND IT'S NOT FROM MEXICO In response to a surge in migrants, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said Monday that it will temporarily suspend and reduce vehicle processing at ports of entry in Texas and Arizona.   In a statement from the CBP, the agency said beginning at 3 p.m. local time, vehicle processing operations at Eagle Pass International Bridge 1 in Eagle Pass will be temporarily suspended, and at 2...

 Betsy McCaughey: You can see it with your own eyes. But Democrats and their left-wing media allies call it a “fantasy.” What is it? Election fraud. A Lawrence, Massachusetts, voter who had been turned away from the polls on Election Day and told he had already voted found out he was the victim of fraud. He checked the footage on the video camera outside his front door and saw that a woman had removed mail-in ballots from his mailbox. He called police. It’s happening in many places. On Tuesday, Fight Voter Fraud Inc., a nonprofit voter rights group, appeared in Connecticut Superior Court to demand the arrest of a woman alleged to have been caught on video committing mail-in ballot fraud in the 2019 Bridgeport Democratic mayoral primary and again in the 2023 primary. The group, protesting that city officials pretend there’s no problem, also called on the Connecticut Legislature to appoint a special prosecutor. A staggering 60% of likely voters nationwide consider election cheating...

 Breitbart: More than 100,000 Chinese nationals have migrated into the United States since 2021, and the federal government is doing little to block them or to send them home, the New York Times reported on November 24. “When [President Joe] Biden and Mr. Xi met last week during an international summit in San Francisco, for instance, immigration was absent in their discussion,” the newspaper reported : Instead, they talked about fentanyl, American business investment in China and export controls, among other topics. In the past, American diplomats have tried to work with the Chinese government to persuade it to repatriate its citizens, and the response has tended to be the same. “They would just plain refuse to acknowledge the person was Chinese,” said Michele Thoren Bond, a former assistant secretary of state who worked on these issues . “It is not credible that a country that documents and monitors its citizens as closely as China does not have photos of every citizen,” Ms. Bond ...

  Gatestone Institute: The stance of the Arabs and Muslims is yet another indication of their disillusionment with the Palestinians in general and Iran's proxies -- Hamas, Hizballah and the Houthis -- in particular. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt and Jordan are as opposed to Hamas as they are to Israel. Hamas is another branch of the Muslim Brotherhood organization, which has long posed a threat to their national security. In 2017, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain cut ties with Qatar after accusing it of providing support for Islamist terrorists, including Hamas and the Taliban, as well as Iran. Now that their eyes have been once again forced open, the Palestinians should distance themselves from Hamas and other terrorist groups and join forces with those Arabs and Muslims who recognize that to create a better future for their people, it would benefit them immeasurably to recognize the legitimacy of the State of Isr...

 Breitbart: The number of illegal migrants known crossing into Germany has collapsed in just weeks after the government decided to try something new… border control. Around 300 illegal migrants are detected crossing on average into Germany every day, down considerably from the roughly 700 a day a month ago, analysis of police figures in a German newspaper claims. The sudden change follows a new policy of border control from the nation’s ‘traffic light’ coalition government, dominated by the pro-open borders left-wing Social Democrats and the Green party, with some input from the free-market liberal Free Democrats. The idea of increasing border controls was not popular with the SPD, but was eventually sold as a humanitarian action intended to protect people being abused by people smugglers in a bid to claw some popularity back after serious defeats in local elections. Initially intended to be active for just ten days, it has since had two 20-day extensions. While the number of arri...

 Daily Caller: Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives lost steam in 2023 compared to previous years as companies increasingly shift resources due to tightening economic conditions, according to Paradigm. The total percentage of American organizations with a DEI budget dropped 4 percentage points, from 58% in 2022 to 54% in 2023, while the number of organizations with a DEI strategy fell 9 points in that same time frame, according to a report from consulting firm Paradigm. DEI initiatives in the workplace gained huge traction following the death of George Floyd, which encouraged companies to divert resources to the practice, but now “external forces,” including tightening economic conditions as well as public and judicial pressure, are pushing back on those efforts. (RELATED: Retailers Brace For Slow Holiday Season As Inflation Bites) “After two years of unprecedented investment sparked by 2020’s racial justice movement, this year, global momentum around DEI slowed,” acc...

 Daily Mail: At least 400 women and children have been treated this year by Doctors Without Borders after they were raped in tents set up specifically to abuse migrants in the notorious Darien Gap, a bombshell new report has revealed . In October alone, 107 rape survivors, including 59 people in a single week, were treated by the organization. The youngest victims were 11, 12, and 16. 'A 100-kilometer stretch of wilderness known as one of the most dangerous migrant crossings in the world - people report being subjected to kidnappings and rape in tents set up for that purpose,' Doctors Without Border said last week. An estimated 460,000 migrants have crossed the Darien Gap so far this year in hopes of making it to the US. Earlier this month, a caravan made of 7,000 migrants made its way through the treacherous pathway. Armed groups of men demand money from migrants - most of whom have already spent their lives' savings just to make the trip north - just for being allowed th...

 Business Insider: Russia is wrestling with a labor crisis — but making it even worse by sending highly-skilled workers to war, a think tank said. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington, DC-based think tank, said Russia is failing to tackle its severe workforce shortage because of "inconsistent and contradictory" Kremlin policies These policies "seek to achieve mutually exclusive objectives of reducing negative shocks to Russia's domestic labor force, while disincentivizing migrants from working in Russia and enticing Russians to return from abroad while not providing them opportunities to work and trying to recruit them into a war they fled," The ISW said. Around 900,000 Russians have left the country in the wake of Russia's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to independent policy group Re:Russia. Many of them feared being drafted into the military to fight in Ukraine. At the same time migrants to Russia, many from C...

 CNN: As the bulldozers worked their way through the remains of the southern Gaza town of Al Qarara on Sunday morning, a group of people watched with anxiety. They were hoping the truce between Hamas and Israel would allow enough time for the bodies of their loved ones to be recovered from underneath the rubble. Then they can finally be buried. For nearly seven weeks, most people in the Gaza Strip have been just trying to survive, focusing on the basics: finding shelter, fleeing the fighting, getting access to food and water. The pause in hostilities has given Gazans a moment to breathe – and take stock of the devastation around them. The town of Al Qarara is in the southern Khan Younis governorate, an area that has seen a marked increase in the damage to buildings in the past two weeks, according to analysis of radar satellite data . Residential buildings, destroyed in Israeli strikes during the conflict, lie in ruin, amid a temporary truce between Israel and Hamas, in southern G...

 Mark Levine: Chutkan rules against Trump over and over again, despite the seriousness of his motions -- she has violated his 1st (gag rule), 5th (due process), and 6th (effective representation of counsel) amendment rights; she has said outrageous things about Trump when sentencing other defendants yet refused to recuse herself; she put an outrageously short timeline on defense counsels' trial prep; and now she has rule he cannot subpoena the Jan. 6 committee records, yet a few days ago ruled that she would not strike references to the violence on Jan. 6 from papers filed by the government, which is obviously prejudicial to Trump.   This follows the denial to Trump of his attorney-client privilege right by another judge on her last day as chief judge (thereby forcing his lawyer to testify against him and provide notes to the grand jury; this was done in a secret proceeding.). AND, of course, not only is the current judge a radical Obama appointee, the grand jury was made up...

 Daily Signal: After Iran-backed Hamas terrorists massacred about 1,200 Jews in Israel and Iran-backed militias throughout the Middle East attacked U.S. bases across the region, the U.S. State Department under President Joe Biden extended a waiver that allows Iran to sell electricity to Iraq and use the money to purchase goods overseas. “It is beyond insane,” Robert Greenway, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, told The Daily Signal on Friday, three days after the State Department extended the waiver. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news outlet.) “Among the most irresponsible things you can do is to pay your enemies to attack you,” Greenway, who orchestrated former President Donald Trump’s sanctions against Iran, added. He described Iraq’s payments to Iran for electricity as a “money laundering scheme.” As of 2022, Iraq was the world’s fifth-largest oil producer , producing 4.61 million barrels per day, according to the U.S. Energy Information Admin...

 Betsy McCaughey: You can see it with your own eyes. But Democrats and their left-wing media allies call it a “fantasy.” What is it? Election fraud. A Lawrence, Massachusetts voter who had been turned away from the polls on Election Day and told he had already voted found out he was the victim of fraud. He checked the footage on the video camera outside his front door and saw that a woman had removed mail-in ballots from his mailbox. He called the police. It’s happening in many places. On Tuesday, Fight Voter Fraud, Inc., a nonprofit voter rights group, appeared in Connecticut Superior Court to demand the arrest of a woman alleged to have been caught on video committing mail-in ballot fraud in the 2019 Bridgeport Democratic mayoral primary and again in the 2023 primary. The group, protesting that city officials pretend there’s no problem, also called on the Connecticut legislature to appoint a special prosecutor. A staggering 60% of likely voters nationwide consider election cheati...

 American Action News: Families are fleeing a Mexican town along the border with the U.S. due to violent cartel activity, including burning homes and intense battles, according to AZCentral. Rival cartels began fighting Oct. 21 in Sasabe, Sonora, burning down homes and moving into ones residents left behind, according to AZCentral. Roughly 15 families remain in the town that was once populated by about 2,500 residents, according to Gail Kocourek, education and media coordinator with Tucson Samaritans, who has been helping some of them flee. Some of the families are now fleeing to the U.S., and a few of them have received humanitarian parole to enter at the port of entry, according to AZCentral. “They’re caught in the crossfire,” Kocourek said. “It’s getting worse and worse.” Some residents of the Mexican town have not found it so easy to enter the U.S. at the port of entry, resorting to crossing illegally through holes in the border wall, according to AZCentral. U.S. Customs and B...

 AP: In audio intercepts from the front lines in Ukraine, Russian soldiers speak in shorthand of 200s to mean dead, 300s to mean wounded. The urge to flee has become common enough that they also talk of 500s — people who refuse to fight. As the war grinds into its second winter, a growing number of Russian soldiers want out, as suggested in secret recordings obtained by The Associated Press of Russian soldiers calling home from the battlefields of the Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk regions in Ukraine. The calls offer a rare glimpse of the war as it looked through Russian eyes — a point of view that seldom makes its way into Western media, largely because Russia has made it a crime to speak honestly about the conflict in Ukraine. They also show clearly how the war has progressed, from the professional soldiers who initially powered Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion to men from all walks of life compelled to serve in grueling conditions. “There’s no f------ ‘dying the death of th...