Joe Biden prefers to keep Americans in the dark…especially when it comes to his administration’s many many mistakes.
Watch Amanda break down the latest scandal below:
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The U.S. military has now sh*t down four high-altitude aerial objects over the United States or Canada within a week.
One object was the massive Chinese spy balloon downed off the coast of South Carolina Feb. 4 after it completed its eight-day journey conducting surveillance of sensitive military and nuclear sites across the entire United States.
The three other objects remain unidentified aerial phenomenon (UAP) – the new term for UFOs.
The Chinese spy balloon and UAPs are raising concerns over major gaps in North American security.
On Sunday U.S. military jet fighters shot down its fourth high-altitude aerial object, an octagonal entity over Lake Huron, Michigan.
Prior to that, on Friday, a second object was shot down over sea ice near Deadhorse, Alaska. And a third object was destroyed over Canada’s Yukon on Saturday, with investigators still hunting for the wreckage.
The U.S. military used AIM-9X Sidewinder short-range heat-seeking, supersonic missiles to bring down all four airborne objects.
One Sidewinder reportedly missed its target and landed harmlessly in Lake Huron.
Fox News reported:
“First shot missed. Second shot hit,” Milley told reporters. “We go to great lengths to make sure that the airspace is clear and the backdrop is clear up to the max effective range of the missile. And in this case, the missiles land, or the missile landed, harmlessly in the water of Lake Huron.”
While the weapons are primarily manufactured for U.S. forces, the missile is also sold in large quantities to a range of American allies, including South Korea, the UAE and Indonesia.
Canada, which is part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) uses Sidewinders as well, but has not yet received its order of these latest, more capable, AIM-9X missiles.
One ex Canadian Air Force general stated that the older Sidewinders still fitted on Canadian CF-18s could not take down these objects at that high an altitude.
Canada’s Global News reported:
Retired Canadian general Tom Lawson, who flew CF-18s before serving as Norad deputy commander and then chief of the defence staff, said Canada’s CF-18s currently use an older version of the AIM-9 Sidewinder.
“When I was flying CF-18s, I did not have a weapon that would shoot down something over 40,000 feet if it was moving too slowly,” he said. “My radar wouldn’t have locked onto it. My heat-seeking missile, my AIM-9, would not have locked onto this thing.”
Meanwhile, the downing of China’s alleged spy balloon by the stealth F-22 Raptor jet fighter marked the first time the 5th generation jet has shot down an airborne target, and may be the first time an AIM-9X was fired in anger since it debuted in combat in Syria and Iraq almost a decade ago.
It was also likely the first time the missile was ever fired at the mind-boggling height of 60,000 ft, which is also near the top reported operational ceiling of 65,000 ft for the F-22.
The rapid-fire series of shoot-downs over Alaska, Canada and Michigan beginning February 10, after the initial balloon downing near South Carolina on Feb 4, has raised pressure on the Biden administration to explain the nature of the high-altitude craft and whether they pose a threat to national security.
From mid-October to December 2022, the National UFO Reporting Center catalogued some 1,255 new sightings of UAPs.
One U.S. official attributed the rise in the sightings to boosted surveillance capabilities by the military and not a rush of new foreign objects flying over American airspace.
However, later on Sunday, the U.S. Air Force general overseeing North American airspace said it still wasn’t clear how the objects were remaining aloft or being propelled through the air, or where they originated.
He also said he had not ruled any explanation out – including extraterrestrial life.
Since then, the U.S. government has announced that it suspects that three unidentified flying objects downed since last Friday were benign commercial or research craft and not linked to China’s alleged surveillance balloon program.
The comments may ease concerns that China is conducting an even more aggressive surveillance effort against the United States than initially believed.
They should also dampen fears of a UFO invasion.
However, these sightings and downing of UAPs over North American airspace still appear to be generating far more questions than answers.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
There is no pleasing the woke mob…
During Sunday night’s Super Bowl XVII between the Philadelphia Eagles and the Kansas City Chiefs woke leftists were outraged when a Christian ad aired.
Let Amanda explain the controversy below:
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What did you think of President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address?
Pivoting to House Republicans, one of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s most ardent critics is reviewing the Speaker’s work so far and he has plenty to talk about…
Watch Amanda explain the situation below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – Joe Biden’s Chinese spy balloon fiasco keeps getting worse. As I noted earlier, almost all of the Biden spin about the Chinese balloon that spent eight long days surveilling military and strategic sites across the United States, was misleading or outright false.
Contrary to the furious pro-Biden spin, the 200ft tall balloon with a jetliner-sized surveillance package strapped to it, did pose an intelligence and military threat.
It could also have been shot down much earlier without undue risk to those on the ground – especially since it first cruised over the Aleutian Islands and parts of Alaska.
And no, President Trump did not know or ignore prior Chinese balloon incursions when he was in office.
Reports of brief crossings of Chinese balloons over peripheral parts of the U.S., like Florida, or U.S. territories far from the continental U.S. like Guam, did not surface until well after Trump left office.
Apparently, the Pentagon didn’t detect those extremely brief forays at the time, displaying a major gap in our surveillance capabilities.
But this incursion was of a whole different scope and scale.
I earlier argued that the primary goal of this latest extended cross-country balloon incursion for China was political.
It was a clear test. What would Biden and the U.S. military do? And their answer was, basically nothing until after the airship completed its 8-day surveillance mission.
However, an added, and more dangerous goal was potentially to test how to use a stratospheric balloon to employ a small nuclear device at an extremely high altitude to produce a massive electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would fry communications, power networks and almost all electronics across much of the United States.
For more on that see my previous piece.
But let’s return to the more mundane intelligence-gathering functions of this airship.
While the Biden spinners rushed to say that the balloon could not gather intel not already gained by Chinese satellites in low earth orbit, this simply ignorant, and untrue.
One left-leaning intelligence news site, SpyTalk, edited by the elderly Jeff Stein, wrote in an almost knee-jerk fashion without waiting for more facts: “Pssst: Chinese Satellite Not a Threat. Experts say news media hysteria over the floating orb not at all warranted.”
Stein then brought in his usual suspects to buttress his pro-Biden spin.
The liberal Stein quoted one of his regular minions, Paul Cobaugh, a left-leaning retired Army information operations specialist with no intelligence or technology background, as saying we have a “variety of capabilities to render it unusable or mitigate the threat.”
This is partly true. We do have means to mitigate the threat.
A senior U.S. defense official said on Feb. 2 that when the Chinese balloon was detected near Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, home of the 341st strategic intercontinental ballistic missile wing, the Pentagon “acted immediately to protect against the collection of secretive information.”
That likely meant shutting off signals-emitting systems and moving secretive aircraft and sensitive equipment under cover or into a hangar.
The Pentagon can take similar steps to stop satellites from gathering intelligence, but it is far more disruptive to have a giant airship looming overhead for long periods of time, as it was in this case.
But SpyTalk’s Cobaugh takes his uninformed argument about the balloon to an extreme, adding with no nuance or uncertainty:
“It’s not a threat.”
SpyTalk didn’t stop there though and added the always predictable, hyper-partisan, Trump-hating former Air Force general and CIA director Michael Hayden to the mix, who totally dismissed the Chinese balloon, and Biden’s inaction, by saying:
“Really, it’s not a big deal.”
Well, this is all just nonsense. It was a very big deal.
Beyond the various risks noted above and in my earlier piece, the ability to vacuum up valuable Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) unavailable to satellites, makes the balloon threat unique.
As Defense News reports:
Experts say balloons loitering at high altitudes can offer some advantages over satellites and drones — or could at least augment their intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities.
Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said one benefit of these balloons is their ability to hover closer to the ground than satellites, and they may be able to intercept communication or electronic signals that orbiting systems can’t.
“It could be thermal infrared, it could be signals intelligence. One of the reasons there are advantages to the suborbital position is you might not be able to do all of that from space,” he told C4ISRNET in a Feb. 3 interview. “There’s a whole lot of value to something other than space.”
Bryan Clark, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, said balloons also offer more persistent, less predictable coverage over an area of interest. While satellites follow a known orbit, airships use wind currents and automated controls to maneuver in different directions. They can also hover in one place for a long period of time.
Clark told C4ISRNET: “With a satellite, you know when they’re going to go overhead, so you stop doing whatever you’re doing for the time it’s overhead. If you have a balloon, it could be out there for days or months, and you’re sort of left either having to stop whatever you’re doing that’s generating intel — or you live with it.”
And there is much more our intelligence experts and agencies can’t yet divulge about this balloon.
Hopefully, once it is fully recovered we can expect a full damage assessment.
So, yes, the high-tech, high-altitude, Chinese surveillance airship that spent 8 days traversing the U.S. was a threat, and the leftist partisan spin machine continues to churn out uninformed nonsense.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – Much of the world watched with rapt attention as a massive, sophisticated, high-altitude Chinese surveillance airship slowly crossed the entire United States last week, and Team Biden did absolutely nothing.
Despite being detected days earlier over the Aleutian Islands and parts of Alaska, the ‘spy balloon,’ as it has been dubbed, was first reported publicly by the White House when it was spotted over sensitive nuclear missile sites in Montana.
Most of us with military or intelligence experience quickly saw the danger and risks of allowing this huge thing unfettered access to our national airspace.
The airship, reportedly 200ft tall and with a payload the size of a jetliner, was likely solar-powered and maneuverable, perhaps using AI technology for guidance.
But once the news was out, Team Biden’s spin machine kicked into high gear.
“The balloon is not a threat.”
“We have everything under control. The Chinese can’t gain any valuable intelligence from the airship that they couldn’t gather from satellites in low earth orbit.”
And the big one – “we don’t want to shoot it down because the military says that would pose a danger to people on the ground in sparsely populated Montana.
Of course, much of the establishment news media went along for the ride.
In a belated show of impotent machismo, Biden finally ordered the balloon destroyed after it had completed its 8-day mission and exited U.S. airspace near South Carolina.
One of our most expensive and sophisticated stealth fighters, an F-22 Raptor fired a short-range AIM-9X Sidewinder air-to-air missile at the balloon, quickly sending down the airship with its surveillance payload breaking off as it dropped.
New reports say the balloon contained explosives to self-destruct if needed.
Hopefully, no boaters, swimmers, or fish were hurt by the falling debris.
And then the second wave of Biden balloon spin began, with reports that President Trump had ignored multiple similar incursions by Chinese surveillance balloons under his tenure.
Team Trump pushed back saying no one at a senior level had ever been briefed on any similar Chinese balloon incursions.
And it turns out Team Trump was correct.
It appears Team Biden had only gathered information that Chinese balloons had briefly entered U.S. airspace on a few occasions after Trump left office.
They had either not been detected at the time by the Pentagon, or at least they never briefed Trump or his civilian defense or national security officials.
Trump did not ignore similar Chinese challenges, and none of the short-lived, undetected balloon forays during his term lasted anything close to eight days and traversed the entire continental U.S. spying on key military sites throughout.
So, what can we gather from this major test by Communist China?
Well, despite those who claim otherwise, the unprecedented, slow-moving Chinese surveillance platform that traveled across the entire U.S. gave China intelligence it could not otherwise get on nuclear, communications and other critical military and strategic targets.
It also tested U.S. surveillance and counter-surveillance abilities and reactions.
It most certainly served to test China’s own growing capabilities, as it pushed the envelope against the United States.
But most importantly it tested America’s political will.
And Biden’s willingness to let the behemoth balloon cross the U.S. before finally shooting it down failed that test.
It also had the added bonus of showing the world how vulnerable the U.S. is to Chinese power and technology. And how unwilling it is to effectively counter it.
These might be the biggest wins for China.
But beyond that, could this balloon be a precursor to a new type of weapons delivery system?
Some would balk at the idea of a balloon dropping bombs in the 21st century as being far-fetched. But China has tested hypersonic missiles launched from balloons in the past.
And as noted earlier, these aren’t everyday hot air balloons.
However, that isn’t a likely use for these airships.
The biggest threat is sending one or more of these high-altitude balloons over the U.S. with a small nuclear EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) device.
As the Washington Examiner reports:
In a 2015 report for the American Leadership & Policy Foundation, Air Force Maj. David Stuckenberg, one of the nation’s leading EMP experts, wrote extensively about the threat balloons carrying bombs pose to national security.
“Using a balloon as a WMD/WME platform could provide adversaries with a pallet of altitudes and payload options with which to maximize offensive effects against the U.S.,” he wrote in the report.
Detonated at extremely high altitudes (200 miles) these small nukes could knock out power and communications across the US, wreaking widespread havoc for a year or more without firing a shot on the ground.
It also wouldn’t kill anyone or cause kinetic physical damage to anything directly. The damage comes afterward.
The Examiner continues:
Stuckenberg cited the research of the late Peter Pry, who headed a congressional commission on EMP and reported on the potential of a balloon-launched attack.
He wrote in the report, “Peter Pry, a former CIA analyst and member of the Congressional Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from EMP Attack, stated, ‘Imagine the consequences of a balloon EMP attack that damages and destroys electronic systems at the speed of light within an EMP field with a radius of hundreds of kilometers. The Eastern Grid generates 75% of U.S. electricity and supports most of the population.” Pry also notes, “Virtually any nuke detonated anywhere over the Eastern Grid will collapse the entire Eastern Grid, not just the area within the EMP field, because of cascading failures that will ripple outward.”
This is now a viable threat that Biden’s weakness has made even more possible.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
Bad news for Biden.
A new poll provides some chilling details for President Biden’s reelection plan. Will he finally start to listen?
Watch Amanda explain the new development below:
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The popular video game “Sims” has always blurred the lines between reality and fantasy but now the game is trying to appeal to a woke crowd.
The disturbing new features allow users as young as 13 to be able to create gender-confused avatars…Parents are rightfully concerned.
Watch Amanda explain the controversy below.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
ANALYSIS – As crazy as it may seem, even as violent crime continues unabated and illegal aliens flood into our nation’s capital, the extreme left (aka ‘progressive’) local D.C. government is trying to pass a revised criminal code that would lower penalties for a number of violent criminal offenses.
While the D.C. criminal code is outdated and in major need of revision, making existing laws even more lenient is a recipe for disaster.
This is why the new GOP-led House is moving to quash D.C.’s latest leftist crime-enabling law by using Congress’ constitutional authority over the District.
Murders, carjackings and armed robberies have been in the news almost daily recently, and while the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) claimed that murders decreased in 2022 vs. 2021, the numbers are up for debate and still extremely high.
As a special police officer and security contractor in D.C., I have personally seen the rise in violent crime over the past three years, in part fueled by the BLM riots of 2020.
More than 200 murders were reported last year. This is the second year in a row the number has topped 200.
Meanwhile, other violent crimes, such as armed robbery and carjacking, appear on the rise.
Taking your car by force in D.C., increased by 46% in April 2022 when compared to April 2021.
Armed robberies with a firearm were up 23% by October, having climbed well over 1,000 by that month last year.
And 2023 is off to a worse start.
According to a January NBC Washington headline: “2023 Off to Violent Start for DC, With Crime Up and Some Residents Worried.”
This, in a city which already has one of the highest crime rates in the country.
Washington, D.C. has had the highest violent crime rate of any city in the U.S., at 1,000 crimes per 100,000 residents, based on 2020 data.
Similarly, it had the highest property crime rate in 2020, at 3,493 crimes per 100,000 residents.
Despite all this, in Nov. 2022, the leftist D.C. Council approved the Revised Criminal Code Act (RCCA).
This proposed law reduces penalties for violent crimes, including carjackings, robberies and homicides.
To her credit, the more centrist Democrat mayor, Muriel Bowser, vetoed the bill in January, but the far-left council overrode Bowser’s veto less than two weeks later.
This is why the GOP-led House has decided to act.
The Daily Caller reports:
Republican Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde and Tennesee Sen. Bill Hagerty will introduce a joint resolution of disapproval to block the Washington, D.C., Council’s Revised Criminal Code Act of 2022, which would lower penalties for a number of violent criminal offenses, according to legislation first obtained by the Daily Caller.
Clyde will introduce the House version Thursday. Hagerty will introduce the Senate companion next week, sources with knowledge confirmed to the Caller.
Congress can exercise authority over D.C. local affairs, according to the District Clause of the Constitution (Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17), and Congress reviews all D.C. legislation before it can become law. Congress can change or even overturn D.C. legislation and can impose new laws on the district.
As Congressman Clyde said:
The D.C. Council’s radical rewrite of the criminal code threatens the well-being of both Washingtonians and visitors — making our nation’s capital city a safe haven for violent criminals. In response to this dangerous and severely misguided measure, it’s now up to Congress to save our nation’s capital from itself.
The House GOP effort will still have a tough road to follow. It will need bipartisan support to pass in the Senate.
A simple majority is needed, but Democrats control the upper chamber by two seats if you include VP Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote.
After passing the Senate, it would still need Joe Biden’s signature.
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
FBI agents descended on Joe Biden’s beach home in Rehoboth Beach, DE on Wednesday as the Justice Department continues its search for classified documents…
Watch Amanda explain the latest developments below:
Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.
