A new major poll finds most Americans are growing more optimistic about the nation’s future – but Democrats are plunging new depths of despair.
The Associated Press reports the latest AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds “overall, the public has become less pessimistic about the state of politics and the system of choosing leaders. In July 2024, 66% were pessimistic about the state of politics in the country. Now 59% of the public are pessimistic. Forty percent are pessimistic about how the country’s leaders are chosen, down from 47% last July.”
“Republicans have grown slightly more optimistic about the future of the Republican Party than they were last summer. In July 2024, 47% said they were optimistic about their party. Now, three months into Donald Trump’s second term, 55% are hopeful about their party’s future,” the AP reports.
“While half of Republicans are pessimistic about the state of politics in the United States, that is down from 73% last July. And they have grown slightly more optimistic about the way our leaders are chosen under the country’s political system,” the AP adds.
But not everyone is happy, with Democrats almost in total despair.
“In contrast, Democrats have become more pessimistic about their party’s future, the state of the country’s politics, and the country’s process for choosing political leaders. Only 35% of Democrats say they are optimistic about the future of the Democratic Party, down sharply from 57% in the July 2024 poll,” the AP reports.
“About 7 in 10 Democrats are pessimistic about the state of politics in this country, up from 60% last summer. And 55% of Democrats are pessimistic about the way our leaders are chosen under our political system, up from last summer when Joe Biden was still in the White House,” the AP adds.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Great America News Desk.
The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Within weeks of President Joe Biden’s announcement he is seeking re-election in 2024, his job approval ratings have cratered to a new low.
The latest Gallup poll finds only 37 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing, the lowest number yet recorded for him.
“Biden’s latest approval rating is from an April 3-25 Gallup poll, which was completed the day he announced he will seek reelection, and marks a three-point dip from March and a five-point drop from February,” Gallup notes.
“Biden’s job approval has been in the low 40 percent range for most of the past 19 months, apart from the current reading and a 38 percent score last July,” Gallup adds.
Other than Ronald Reagan, no president has ever been re-elected with approval below 40 percent at this point in his first term.
Both Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump, who lost their re-election bids, had slightly higher approval at just over 40 percent.
In addition to widespread doubt Biden can physically and mentally handle a second term, Gallup finds Americans are unhappy with inflation under Biden.
“The drop in Biden’s job approval corresponds with Americans’ worsening evaluations of the U.S. economy. Gallup’s Economic Confidence Index for April is -44, down from -38 in March. It was last at this level in October,” Gallup reports.
“19 percent say the economy is getting better and 75 percent worse, compared with ratings of 23 percent and 72 percent, respectively, in March,” Gallup’s polling finds.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Is it time to cancel PBS? Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt is leading the charge and says it’s time to stop using taxpayer dollars to fund controversial programming to indoctrinate kids.
Watch Amanda explain the situation below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Things are heating up in President Biden’s Department of Justice. The bombshell discovery of classified documents from Biden’s time as vice president at numerous locations months after the FBI raided former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home has ruffled some feathers, to say the least…
Watch Amanda break down the ongoing scandal below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken is facing backlash after reports surfaced that the State Department organized therapy sessions for employees distressed by President-elect Donald Trump‘s victory in the 2024 election. According to sources who spoke to The Washington Free Beacon, the Biden administration’s State Department hosted the sessions for its staff to help them cope with the emotional fallout from the election results raising concerns about professionalism and the Department’s competency.
An internal email sent out by the Department’s Bureau of Medical Services encouraged staff to attend a one-hour webinar on “managing stress during change.” The session offered “effective stress management techniques” to help participants navigate the uncertainty they felt in the wake of the election.
It then invited employees to join a discussion on how to handle their feelings about the outcome of the election. The focus of the session, according to the email, was to “provide tips and practical strategies for managing stress and maintaining your well-being.”
While the initiative was likely well-intentioned in its goal to support mental health, the idea of government workers receiving taxpayer-funded therapy to cope with a political defeat has sparked fierce criticism. Among the most vocal detractors is Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Issa called the sessions “unacceptable,” emphasizing that government employees should not expect to be “soothed” over the results of a democratic election, especially when their salaries are funded by American taxpayers.
Issa lambasted the State Department for tolerating what he described as a “personal meltdown” from its employees. In a letter to Blinken, Issa noted that the U.S. government champions free and fair elections around the world, and that it was “disturbing” to see U.S. government officials struggling to cope with the results of a legitimate, democratically held election. He went on to question the appropriateness of taxpayer-funded therapy sessions for civil servants who, according to Issa, should be able to handle political change without resorting to emotional support services.
“It is unacceptable that the Department accommodates this behavior and subsidizes it with taxpayer dollars,” Issa wrote. “The mental health of our foreign service personnel is important, but the Department has no obligation to indulge and promote the leftist political predilections of its employees and soothe their frayed nerves because of the good-faith votes of—and at the personal expense of—the American taxpayers.”
Issa’s letter raised broader concerns about the State Department’s ability to effectively carry out its duties in a time of political transition. Given the stark policy differences between the Biden administration and the incoming Trump administration, Issa questioned whether the personnel involved in these therapy sessions would be able to effectively implement the policy priorities of the new president.
“The mere fact that the Department is hosting these sessions raises significant questions about the willingness of its personnel to implement the lawful policy priorities that the American people elected President Trump to pursue,” Issa wrote.
The idea that a portion of the U.S. government workforce may struggle with accepting a Trump victory—despite the fact that elections are a regular and democratic part of American life—raises questions about the professional competence and political neutrality of federal employees.
The controversy over these therapy sessions underscores a growing sense of frustration among conservatives who believe that the federal government has become too politicized, particularly in agencies like the State Department, which often take progressive stances on global issues. Critics argue that such therapy sessions are emblematic of a broader trend within the federal bureaucracy, where employees may prioritize their personal political beliefs over their professional duties to serve the American people impartially.
Article Published With The Permission of American Liberty News.
ANALYSIS – From the day cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was shot and killed on the set of the movie Rust, on Oct. 21, 2021, there has been a flurry of speculation over whether anyone would be criminally charged.
Hutchins was killed when a live round was fired from a real ‘prop’ gun being held by liberal actor Alec Baldwin.
Well, now the speculation is over, and Baldwin will be charged.
He has always denied responsibility, saying the replica old west revolver should have had dummy bullets and that he never pulled the trigger.
On the first point, Baldwin is correct; on the second, he is less convincing.
Baldwin statement on Rust charges 2/2:
'He relied on the professionals with whom he worked, who assured him the gun did not have live rounds.
The set armorer is responsible for ensuring gun safety. And there was no reason for live rounds to be on a movie set. Period.
Much less mixed in with dummy rounds.
The armorer certainly is responsible if not culpable. And a big question is why live rounds were on the set and mixed in with dummy rounds and who put them there.
But experts have shown that Baldwin’s claim of not firing the gun doesn’t wash.
It is physically impossible for this type of gun to fire without the trigger being pulled and/or the hammer dropped.
Beyond his immediate possible culpability as the man who ‘fired’ the gun, Baldwin was also a producer of the low-budget Western film.
After the shooting numerous current and former crew members from the film publicly claimed that safety was extremely lax, and formal complaints had been made and ignored about those safety concerns.
The shooting occurred while rehearsing a scene inside a wooden chapel on Bonanza Creek Ranch in New Mexico.
This is a popular western location seen in the likes of Jimmy Stewart’s 1955 “The Man from Laramie” and Paul Newman and Robert Redford’s 1969 “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”
As the crew worked out positions for the scene, Baldwin, playing a grizzled 1880s Kansas outlaw, fired a live round from an Italian-made Pietta Long Colt revolver replica – the bullet passed through Hutchins’ chest and lodged in director Joel Souza’s shoulder.
Hutchins died in a flight to the hospital in Albuquerque, while Souza was later discharged from the hospital.
In April 2022, the producers, including Baldwin, were fined $136,793 by the New Mexico Occupational Health and Safety Bureau, which said: “management knew that firearm safety procedures were not being followed on set and demonstrated plain indifference to employee safety.”
A wrongful death lawsuit was then filed against Alec Baldwin and other key members of the production in Feb. 2022.
The lawsuit named Baldwin and others who “are responsible for the safety on the set” and called out “reckless behavior and cost-cutting” that led to the death of Hutchins, according to the family’s lawyer.
The lawsuit also claimed that Baldwin and other “Rust” crew and cast committed “major breaches” of safety on the set.
That lawsuit was later settled.
But Baldwin’s legal woes continue as he is now being hit with two counts of involuntary manslaughter over the shooting.
Hannah Gutierrez Reed, the film’s young and inexperienced armorer, will also be charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter.
Meanwhile, assistant director Dave Halls who handed the gun to Baldwin prior to the shooting signed a plea agreement for a charge of the negligent use of a deadly weapon.
In return, he received a suspended sentence and six months of probation, according to the district attorney.
If Baldwin is convicted, he could be facing up to 18 months in prison.
“Involuntary manslaughter in New Mexico is a Class D felony punishable by up to 18 months in prison,” former Assistant U.S. Attorney Neama Rahmani explained to Fox News Digital. “If Baldwin is convicted, I can see him being sentenced at or near the max.”
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
The top Republican investigators in the House and Senate warn America may face a constitutional crisis, with the Director of the FBI facing possible Contempt of Congress charges for refusing to turn over a government document alleging a foreign national offered a $5 million bribe to then-Vice-President Joe Biden.
Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-KY) blasted FBI Director Christopher Wray for defying a congressional subpoena for an unclassified record “alleging a criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Joe Biden and a foreign national.”
“The document, an FBI-generated FD-1023 form, allegedly details an arrangement involving an exchange of money for policy decisions. In a new letter to Director Wray, Comer warns that if the FBI fails to produce the record by May 30, 2023, the Oversight Committee will initiate contempt of Congress proceedings,” Grassley reports in a statement.
“The FBI has continued to tie itself in knots to ignore a legitimate subpoena from Congress, which has a constitutional duty of oversight. The Bureau’s developed a serious reputation problem through its spate of failures and overreach, and leadership is doing it no favors by attempting to stiff-arm Congress. The FBI knows exactly what document Chairman Comer and I are seeking, and if they know us at all, they know we will get it, one way or another. If FBI leadership truly cares about protecting the agency’s reputation, they’d cooperate. These needless delays only harm the Bureau,” Grassley said.
“The FBI’s refusal to provide this single document is obstructionist. Whistleblower disclosures that Joe Biden may have been involved in a criminal bribery scheme as Vice President track closely with what we are seeing in our investigation into the Biden family’s influence peddling schemes. Congress and the American people need to know what, if anything, the FBI did to verify the allegations contained within this record. If Director Wray refuses to hand over this unclassified record, the Oversight Committee will begin contempt of Congress proceedings,” Comer said.
“Comer issued a subpoena for the unclassified FBI record on May 3, 2023 with a return date of May 10, 2023. After the FBI failed to produce the record, Oversight Committee counsel have attended two in-person meetings with FBI officials where they again refused to produce the FD-1023 form or offer any reasonable accommodation that would allow the Committee to review the document,” Grassley reports.
On May 16, 2023, Grassley and Comer requested a phone call with Director Wray to discuss the subpoena, but despite repeated requests the FBI has not scheduled a phone call.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – The fight against China’s growing global network of illegal police outposts has finally heated up here in the United States with the FBI raiding the large Chinese station in New York City (NYC).
This is the mission the FBI should be focused on, rather than raiding pro-life activists or colluding with Big Tech to censor Americans.
I’ve written about these extraterritorial Chinese police stations several times, highlighting the ones in NYC, as well as those in Canada and Europe.
Beijing says these outposts aren’t doing any police work, only helping Chinese citizens abroad, but Chinese state media reports that they in fact “collect intelligence” and solve crimes far outside their jurisdiction.
But they do far more than that.
They are accused of conducting illegal surveillance on legal U.S. residents and citizens of Chinese extraction and intimidating, threatening, and coercing them.
In some cases, they have reportedly even kidnapped people outside of China.
According to the New York Times (NYT), the FBI raided the suspected Chinese police outpost, hidden in New York City’s Chinatown last fall, seizing materials from one of the secretive operations for the first time.
The Chinatown outpost was on the third floor of a six-story office building on a busy street. It was raided by FBI counterintelligence agents working on a criminal investigation with the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York.
Of course, as the NYT reports, the Chinese Embassy in Washington downplayed the outposts, claiming they are staffed by volunteers who help Chinese nationals perform routine tasks like renewing their Chinese driver’s licenses.
Despite the official Chinese denials, the NYT reports, “Western officials see the outposts as part of Beijing’s larger drive to keep tabs on Chinese nationals abroad, including dissidents. The most notorious such effort is known as Operation Fox Hunt, in which Chinese officials hunt down fugitives abroad and pressure them to return home.”
In October, prosecutors in Brooklyn — the same office that searched the New York office — charged seven Chinese nationals with harassing a U.S. resident and his son, pressuring the man to return to China to face criminal charges.
As reported by the NYT, “It’s outrageous that China thinks it can come to our shores, conduct illegal operations and bend people here in the United States to their will,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in 2020.
At least 102 such outposts have been documented in 53 countries in recent months by the human rights group Safeguard Defenders. Wray said in November that he’s “very concerned” about the outposts, which he called “police stations.”
“It’s a long-arm power to show their own citizens inside China that their government is so strong,” said Safeguard Defenders researcher Chen Yen-ting. “We have the power to reach globally, and even if you go out, you’re still under our control.”
These outposts are ostensibly set up by local Chinese municipalities or regions. At least four Chinese localities — Fuzhou, Qingtian, Nantong and Wenzhou — have reportedly set up dozens of foreign police outposts in Japan, Italy, France, Britain, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and other nations.
These don’t include the ones in Canada and the U.S.
Let’s hope the FBI keeps up the pressure on illegal Chinese police activity in the U.S., and the State Department gets involved in controlling any Chinese entities and personnel it has allowed to enter and operate on U.S. soil.
Communist Chinese influence and subversion in the U.S. is the greatest domestic threat we face, not Americans exercising their constitutionally protected right to free speech.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
New Poll Reveals Democrats Are Losing All Hope
A new major poll finds most Americans are growing more optimistic about the nation’s future – but Democrats are plunging new depths of despair.
The Associated Press reports the latest AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds “overall, the public has become less pessimistic about the state of politics and the system of choosing leaders. In July 2024, 66% were pessimistic about the state of politics in the country. Now 59% of the public are pessimistic. Forty percent are pessimistic about how the country’s leaders are chosen, down from 47% last July.”
“Republicans have grown slightly more optimistic about the future of the Republican Party than they were last summer. In July 2024, 47% said they were optimistic about their party. Now, three months into Donald Trump’s second term, 55% are hopeful about their party’s future,” the AP reports.
“While half of Republicans are pessimistic about the state of politics in the United States, that is down from 73% last July. And they have grown slightly more optimistic about the way our leaders are chosen under the country’s political system,” the AP adds.
But not everyone is happy, with Democrats almost in total despair.
“In contrast, Democrats have become more pessimistic about their party’s future, the state of the country’s politics, and the country’s process for choosing political leaders. Only 35% of Democrats say they are optimistic about the future of the Democratic Party, down sharply from 57% in the July 2024 poll,” the AP reports.
“About 7 in 10 Democrats are pessimistic about the state of politics in this country, up from 60% last summer. And 55% of Democrats are pessimistic about the way our leaders are chosen under our political system, up from last summer when Joe Biden was still in the White House,” the AP adds.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of Great America News Desk.