PrairiePundit

 Red States: ... But now that Cuomo has imploded in all kinds of scandal from the nursing home scandal to threats and the sexual harassment allegations, some Democrats seem more desperate than ever to distract from Cuomo and/or tag DeSantis with something. But unfortunately for their attempts, that effort isn’t going very well. From Townhall: “The sole Democrat elected to statewide office in Florida is calling on the U.S. House of Representatives coronavirus committee to investigate the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, for ‘alleged political favoritism’ in coronavirus vaccine distribution,” Yahoo  reports.  “That call comes in a letter that Florida’s agriculture commissioner, Nikki Fried, will send on Monday morning to Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., who heads the coronavirus committee, and Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, its ranking Republican member.” How dare DeSantis prioritize vaccinations for the elderly?! You know, those people who are most at risk from the virus. It’s th

 Washington Examiner: Lawmakers representing border districts say their communities are reeling from the economic effects of the yearlong ban on nonessential travel between Canada and Mexico and are calling on the Biden administration to reopen the northern and southern borders. President Biden vowed days after arriving in Washington in January  that he would look at easing  border restrictions. The Trump administration  announced on March 20, 2020 , that recreational and tourist travel would immediately be blocked at all land ports of entry. That ban has been renewed every 30 days since then and is valid through March 19. By last summer, politicians were pushing the Trump administration to look at ways to reopen some of the 167 land border crossings along the 2,000-mile southern border and 5,500 miles of the northern border. Biden signed an executive order in late January to come up with a plan in two weeks to review reopening the border, but that initiative has not been publicly rele

 Texas Public Policy Foundation: Recently, there has been a wave of cities (and companies) making pledges that they are “powered by 100% renewable energy.” Some states are getting in the game, too. Two years ago Hawaii pledged that its electricity would be entirely renewable by 2045. The California Senate recently passed a bill setting the same goal, while moving up the state’s timeline to get half its electricity from renewables from 2030 to 2025. All of Colorado’s Democratic gubernatorial candidates have made a pledge for that state to be “100% renewable” by 2030.  Many renewable energy advocates point to the Texas electricity market as a shining example of how these lofty renewable energy goals can become reality. Those same advocates fail to disclose (or maybe even recognize) two fundamental and cautionary truths of the Texas wind energy experiment. First, when Texans’ demand for energy is the greatest, in the heat of the summer days, wind energy nearly disappears from the grid. Th

 Politico: A six-month delay holding up the data that states use to draw their legislative districts is mangling plans for the 2022 elections, as states discuss postponing primaries and navigating legal deadlines for redistricting that some are now almost certain to miss. The Census Bureau announced in mid-February that redistricting data — the granular, block-level population counts that are used to draw equal-population political boundaries for state legislatures and the House of Representatives — would be released by Sept. 30 this year, well past the usual delivery date of March 31. Many states are typically done with redistricting by then, not just starting it, and the delay puts states with early primaries and redistricting deadlines in a difficult position. At least nine states have constitutional or statutory deadlines to redraw their maps, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, that won’t mesh with such a profound delay in the data delivery. Election offici

  Epoch Times: 4 Arrested in Texas on 150 Counts of Voter Fraud I suspect that there will be more such cases. 

 Clarice Feldman: If you’ve a memory longer than a nanosecond you might recall that in 2016 when he was nominated by then-President Obama to the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy created by Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, Merrick Garland was widely touted as a “moderate.” President Biden has now nominated him for  the slot of Attorney General, and the confirmation vote is scheduled for this coming week. How do you define moderate?  His confirmation hearings reveal to me that Garland is certainly not one: Last summer, 220 cities were besieged by gangs that attacked homes, businesses, federal buildings, and local law enforcement. In his confirmation hearing, Garland testified that the people who did this could not be considered “domestic terrorists” because they did this only at night and apparently terrorist acts can only be committed in the daytime in  his view.  Is that preposterous? Of course, it is. Did the KKK (Known during their heyday as “night riders”) burn crosses in mid-aftern

 CNN: The Biden administration is planning to open another facility in south Texas to expand processing capacity for children and families arriving at the US-Mexico border, a Department of Homeland Security official confirmed to CNN. It's the latest move by the administration to address the growing number of migrant families and unaccompanied children at the US southern border. Earlier this month, US Customs and Border Protection also announced the opening of a "soft-sided" structure in Donna, Texas, to help with intake. In January, more than 5,800 unaccompanied children and nearly 7,500 families were taken into custody by Customs and Border Protection at the US-Mexico border, according to the agency's most recent monthly data . And numbers are expected to continue to rise. On Thursday, Brian Hastings, the Border Patrol sector chief in Rio Grande Valley, tweeted about the volume of migrants approaching the border. "In less than a 24 hour period, this area alone

 Stephen Bryen and Shoshana Bryen: Saudi Arabia is an authoritarian place where religious leaders have tremendous power and the royal family has more. Its standards for justice are not American standards. So when the CIA authors a report on the death of a Saudi journalist at the hands of Saudi henchmen, it isn’t surprising that the report, issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), points the finger at Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. What is surprising is that the report on the murder of Jamal Khashoggi is just three-quarters of a page of amateurish innuendo. OK, there were four pages released: a cover page; a page with the executive summary (below); a page that repeats the executive summary, then adds four bullet points of innuendo; and a list of individuals trailing down the third page to get to a fourth page. The entire executive summary is worth reading: “We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman approved an operation in Istan

 Daily Wire: Former President Donald Trump repeatedly tore into President Joe Biden during his CPAC speech on Sunday over a variety of issues ranging from the crisis on the southern border to the millions of American children who are not in school learning. “Joe Biden has had the most disastrous first month of any president in modern history, that’s true,” Trump said. “Already the Biden administration has proven that they are anti-jobs, anti-family, anti-borders, anti-energy, anti-women, and anti-science. In just one short month, we have gone from America first to America last.” Trump slammed the Biden administration for their “callous indifference toward working families” by not prioritizing getting America’s children back in school for in-person instruction. “They must get back and get back right now, right now,” Trump demanded. “The Biden administration is actually bragging about the classroom education they are providing to migrant children on the border while at the same time, mil

 Breitbart: President Joe Biden’s migration crisis at the United States-Mexico border is the epitome of an “America last” agenda, former President Donald Trump said Sunday. In a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Trump assailed Biden’s immigration executive orders that have helped drive up illegal immigration levels at the southern border. “In just one short month, we have gone from ‘America First’ to ‘America Last’ … there is no better example than the new and horrible crisis on our southern border,” Trump said. Specifically, Trump noted Biden’s stopping construction of the border wall, restarting the Catch and Release program, and halting most interior immigration enforcement — actions and promises of which illegal aliens are now taking advantage. “We ended Catch and Release, ended asylum fraud, and brought illegal crossings to historic lows,” Trump said. “When illegal aliens trespassed across our borders, they were promptly caught, detained, and sent back

  Roger Kimball: The ‘World’s Largest Bookstore’ Gets Into the Censorship Business   Amazon’s decision to remove Ryan Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally isn't about a P.C. company removing one book—it is a challenge to the fundamental principles underlying American democracy. This is the wrong way to deal with the subject matter you disagree with.  It looks like Amazon took a turn to the dark side of suppressing speech it disagrees with when it tried to kill off Parler.  There is information that should be available to those contemplating transgenderism.

 Madeleine Kearns: Yesterday, I noted on the Corner the perplexing reaction (from all the usual suspects) to Senator Rand Paul’s entirely legitimate line of questioning aimed at Rachel Levine, Biden’s pick for assistant health secretary. The absurd headlines and “hot takes” keep on coming. “Exchange between GOP senator, transgender nominee draws fire from Democrats,” reports the Washington Post. “Rand Paul’s ignorant questioning of Rachel Levine showed why we need her in government,” opines a writer for the same publication. “1st transgender nominee deflects inflammatory questions from GOP senator,” reports ABC News. “Rand Paul Launches Into Transphobic Rant Against Trans Nominee,” opines The Daily Beast. “Rachel Levine Responds to Rand Paul About Transgender Medicine,” reports the New York Times, neglecting to mention that Levine’s “response” was one of sheer evasion. Talk about burying the lede. Contrary to what progressive pundits insist, the real story of interest here is not Levi

 Rick Moran: ... The EPA is about to become very, very busy. Politico : President Joe Biden on Friday restored an Obama-era calculation on the economic cost of greenhouse gases, a step that will make it easier for his agencies to approve aggressive actions to confront climate change. But the administration stopped short, for now, of boosting the cost figure to higher levels that economists and climate scientists say are justified by new research. The interim figure — $51 for every ton of carbon released into the atmosphere — is well above the $8 cost used under former President Donald Trump, who declined to factor the global impacts of climate pollution into his calculation. It’s on par with a price based on analyses undertaken between 2010 and 2016 under former President Barack Obama, whose administration was first to calculate the figure known as the social cost of carbon. People who hate capitalism are calculating how much the capitalists have to pay for “polluting” the planet with

 Washington Examiner: For months, health experts warned that distributing the coronavirus vaccines would be the easier part of the immunization process. The hard part would come later, when millions of people on the fence would need to be convinced to get a vaccine. Unfortunately, many Democrats ignored this warning when the vaccines were in clinical trials because they were on track to be approved by the “wrong” administration. Vice President Kamala Harris shares a large part of the blame. She openly questioned whether people should trust the vaccine during the 2020 presidential campaign, suggesting that the only reason the Trump administration would roll out the vaccines so quickly was because former President Donald Trump wanted to win reelection. “I think that we have learned since this pandemic started, but really before that, that there's very little that we can trust that comes out of Donald Trump's mouth,” she said back in September. When asked whether she would get the

 Epoch Times: Newly released FBI documents shed light on two meetings between FBI Agent Stephen Somma and FBI source Stefan Halper , providing further insight into the wide scope of the FBI’s investigation into the Trump 2016 presidential campaign—and the active role played by Halper, who acted as a confidential human source (CHS) for the FBI. Although Halper was not considered an official CHS for the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation prior to these meetings, Somma had known Halper since 2011, according to the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on FISA Abuse . Additionally, Somma had served as Halper’s handler from “2011 through 2016” as part of Somma’s “regular investigative activities.” The FBI’s meetings with Halper on Aug. 11 and 12, 2016, were done at the proposal of Somma, who said he “lacked a basic understanding” of political campaigns. Somma said that he selected Halper because he knew that Halper had been “affiliated with national political campaigns

 Red States: ... Now it looks like the Iranian backed terror group the Houthis have just fired off a ballistic missile at Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and several other Saudi cities are also under drone attack. Fortunately, the Saudis were able to intercept the missile aimed at Riyadh. ... This also followed an explosion on an Israeli-owned ship in the Gulf of Oman which is similar to Iranian attacks there in 2019 and the Houthis increasing their attacks on Marib in Yemen. Is this all coincidental that this comes after Biden has come in, lifting the terrorist designation on the Houthis without any concessions on their part or on Iran’s part, and indicated he’s willing to go back into the terrible Iran Deal? Not to mention Biden saying that he would end the support for the Saudis who were backing the internationally recognized government that the Houthis are trying to take out. Biden’s basically waving the flag to the Houthis and saying, “Come on,” and they are. It’s already a blood bath in Yem

  NY Times: He Came From Thailand to Care For Family. Then Came a Brutal Attack. The fatal assault in San Francisco on a defenseless older man was the latest terrifying episode for Asian-Americans, many of whom have endured racist taunts, rants and worse during the pandemic. I have always gotten along well with Asians and have several friends from high school that I stay in touch with on Facebook.  My daughter spent 10 years in Thailand and I really liked the Thais when I visited her.  I also liked the Vietnamese who were on our side when I was a Marine in Vietnam. One of the things Asians share with whites in this country is that they can be discriminated against in college admissions.  I think that is wrong.  It is also obviously wrong to assault anyone in this country and those responsible should be brought to justice.

  NY Times: At CPAC, a Golden Image, a Magic Wand and Reverence for Trump The faithful who flocked to the annual conference of conservatives made it clear that their allegiance was to the former president far more than to the Republican Party. From the Russian collusion hoax to two bogus impeachment efforts the left in this country has attacked Trump with the politics of fraud and utterly failed to separate most Republicans from supporting him.  Trump is still the most popular figure in the Republican party and in their eyes he was a great President. 

 Epoch Times: The attempt by several House Democrats to pressure television carriers to deplatform certain news organizations could trigger a lawsuit, law professor Alan Dershowitz said Saturday. “When the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, it’s been interpreted to mean, take no action, it doesn’t have to be law. The First Amendment applies to presidents to governors to mayors to anybody who can abridge the freedom of speech. And I think these letters abridge the freedom of speech,” Dershowitz said during an appearance on Newsmax TV. Reps. Jerry McNerney (D-Calif.) and Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.) sent a dozen letters to 12 different carriers this week urging them to deplatform or otherwise take action against Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News for allegedly spreading misleading information about the Jan. 6 Capitol breach and the COVID-19 pandemic. They pointedly asked the carriers if they were planning on carrying the networks “both now

  Breitbart: Josh Hawley: ‘Our Rights Come from God, Not Google’ Remember when Google's motto was "Don't be evil?"  They appear to have dropped that.

  Breitbart: Priest: Joe Biden Is ‘Most Aggressively Anti-Catholic President in History’ I think the same could be said of Pelosi.  ... “For most of his political life — from his consistent pro-abortion record to his officiating at a gay wedding in 2016 — despite his Catholic affiliation and public pious practices, Joe Biden has magnified and institutionalized countless major violations of the Ten Commandments,” Father Pokorsky writes in an essay Friday. “The hypocrisy rivals that of the chief priests and Pharisees and is worthy of the same condemnation,” the priest declares. “Indeed, Biden is the most aggressively anti-Catholic President in history.” The reason for the harsh assessment of Biden’s record is the dichotomy between his outward show of piety on the one hand and his record of supporting evil on the other, Pokorsky notes, adding that “Biden’s habitual and unapologetic sinful acts are on full display.” “The next Republican that tells me I’m not religious I’m going to shove

  His "what am I doing here moment" was not that unusual. Here we have Jill having to step up and explain Biden's rambling answer about the kids on the border he in effect invited in.  Hat tip to Defiant America.com .

 Silvio Cantu, Jr.: ... What could go wrong?  Let me share a few possibilities: 1. These kids are coming from Mexico and Central America, where COVID is getting worse, not better.  Is it fair to ask: whom will these children infect?  Are they going to be isolated?  How is that going to look? 2. Who is paying for this?  My guess is that the taxpayers will pay for it, but the problem is that no one explained this during the campaign.  All we heard in the campaign was that the Biden administration would be more "humane."  My guess is that most Americans do not believe that "humaneness" is the same as taking thousands of children from other countries. How will this play in 2022?  Not well — every Democrat running in 2022, especially in districts between the coasts, will be worried about explaining this disorder on the border. The Democrat open borders policy is deeply unpopular in much of the country.  Democrats like the uncontrolled migration because it helps them stea

  Epoch Time: Censorship of people by Big Tech is “probably the biggest problem that we face right now in this country, as a party,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) said Friday. People being kicked off websites such as Facebook and Twitter leave them without “a communications architecture” and struggling to communicate, Nunes told The Epoch Times’ “Crossroads” at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida, with exceptions for the “ghettos of the Internet.” Noting The Epoch Times is available but has been targeted by Big Tech, Nunes also mentioned Rumble, a video sharing platform, and Parler, a competitor to the large social media services. The Californian said he foresees in the future conservatives being removed from services like iTunes. “That’s what’s probably coming. And so we’re in for a long fight. And people are asking, ‘What can we do?’ You have to tell your congressman and your senators that this has to end, so that pressure comes on to these tech oligarchs, becaus

 Legal Insurrection: Democrats love to redefine words to suit their purposes, and the latest example of this from the Biden White House is a doozy. They are reportedly calling the Democrat-only support for Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID (aka the Pelosi Payoff ) bill “bipartisan.” Both Democrats and Republicans have long abused the word, of course. Legislation passed with a mere handful of—or even only one or two—opposition party votes is hailed as “bipartisan” because politicians understand that a good segment of the American people prefer legislation that is not rammed through by one party. The Biden White House is taking this one step further. Now, apparently, “bipartisan” means without a single member of the GOP supporting the legislation . . . just polling showing that some GOP mayors, “officials outside Washington,” and voters do support it. ... How would the Biden team feel if Republicans described the bill as receiving bipartisan opposition if somewhere in the country a Democrat

 Washington Examiner: A declassification wish list was sent to former President Donald Trump's White House by members of Congress, according to a former Pentagon official who also served as a top investigator for the House Intelligence Committee. On that list,  Kash Patel  said, was a classified House Intelligence Committee report that criticized the analytic tradecraft in the Obama administration's 2017 intelligence community assessment’s conclusions about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s motivations in the interference campaign leading to the 2016 election. However, despite an eleventh-hour declassification order by Trump before he left office last month, it has remained outside the public's view. "I don't know if he personally signaled it," Patel  told  RealClearInvestigations  when asked if Trump ever personally indicated that he wanted that particular document released. "I know it was included in a list of documents that ... some members of Congres