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    McCarthy Tells GOP Opponents to ‘File the F*cking Motion’ to Remove Him

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    7
    House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy delivers remarks at the 2021 Capitol Christmas Tree lighting ceremony in Washington DC, December 1, 2021. USDA Forest Service photo by Tanya E. Flores.

    ANALYSIS – Some of the Republican Party’s more ‘firebrand’ conservatives are trying to bully and threaten House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Many in the media have tried to paint the battle in ways that discredit the GOP. 

    I support vibrant debate within our party, but constantly undermining the leadership when the GOP has a slim majority is getting old. And McCarthy is clearly getting sick of it too.

    Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz bashed McCarthy on Tuesday, giving him a list of demands while threatening a motion for McCarthy to vacate the chair, essentially to remove him as Speaker.

    This came just after McCarthy announced the Republican Party will move forward with an impeachment inquiry into Biden. However, Gaetz said that is not enough.

    The Daily Caller reported:

    “Now moments ago, Speaker McCarthy endorsed an impeachment inquiry. This is a baby step following weeks of pressure from House conservatives to do more. We must move faster. Now I will concede that the votes I have called for will likely fail. Term limits, balanced budgets, maybe even impeachment. I am prepared for that eventuality because at least if we take votes the American people get to see who’s fighting for them and who’s willing to tolerate more corruption and business as usual,” he said. 

    This all sounds good, but Gaetz seems to admit that it’s all more show than substance. The votes aren’t here. The GOP barely controls the House, and Gaetz is just posturing like he usually does.

    So, McCarthy did something I highly respect. He told Gaetz and his allies: “If you want to file the motion,” adding: “File the fucking motion.”

    Enough with the petty posturing, Gaetz. Work with the leadership to get real things done, and hopefully gain seats in 2024 to get more done.

    The House GOP was expected to vote on the impeachment inquiry, but McCarthy did not mention a vote to move forward with the inquiry. This follows the precedent set by then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi during the first Trump impeachment in 2019.

    The Daily Caller noted that:

    The speaker said he now believes there is enough evidence stemming from the House Judiciary Committee and House Oversight Committee to move forward with an impeachment inquiry into the president.

    McCarthy said in July that an impeachment inquiry would help Republicans better access documents detailing alleged misconduct from government officials benefiting Hunter Biden. Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik has endorsed McCarthy’s’ position, which Democrats adopted in 2019 during former President Donald Trump’s first impeachment.

    Asked Tuesday whether he was being hypocritical, McCarthy referred back to Pelosi: “I’m not, because she changed the precedent,” reported The Hill.

    “I warned her not to do it that way in the process. And that’s what she did; that’s what we did,” McCarthy said.

    As The Hill further noted:

    Moving forward on an inquiry without a vote allows swift action on a priority for conservatives who have been pressuring the House Speaker. McCarthy’s decision also protects moderates — particularly those who represent districts President Biden won in 2020 — from having to take a tough vote. 

    What McCarthy is doing is real and will be able to succeed. Let him get on with it, or “file the f*cking motion.”

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    VP Vance Issues ‘Official’ Two Word Response To Racist Attacks On Wife

    By
    Madeleine Jackson
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    0
    By Xuthoria - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,

    Vice President Vance has had enough…

    Vice President JD Vance had two choice words for racist troll Nick Fuentes and others like MS NOW host Jen Psaki, who have made comments about the second lady: “Eat s–t.”

    “Let me be clear. Anyone who attacks my wife, whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes, can eat s–t,” Vance told UnHerd in an interview published Sunday.

    “That’s my official policy as vice president of the United States.”

    He then told writer Sohrab Ahmari that “all forms of ethnic hatred” including antisemitism have “no place in the conservative movement.”

    Vance’s response comes after Fuentes bashed him for being a “race traitor” for marrying his wife; Usha Vance is an American citizen born in San Diego to two Hindu Indian immigrants. Fuentes has also used derogatory terms about Indians to describe The Second Lady.

    Fuentes has made a number of racist and antisemitic comments over the years, and he told Piers Morgan earlier this month that he believed Adolf Hitler was “really f*cking cool.” 

    The vice president’s comments were published a few hours after he told the crowd at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest that President Donald Trump had wisely “relegated DEI to the dustbin of history.” 

    Vance said DEI is antithetical to American values and a meritocratic society — which made it an easy target for the second Trump Administration.

    “We don’t treat anybody different because of their race or their sex,” Vance told the Phoenix crowd.

    Vance continued his message about unity:

    In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.

    And if you’re an Asian, you don’t have to talk around your skin color when you’re applying for college. Because we judge people based on who they are, not on ethnicity and things they can’t control.

    We don’t persecute you for being male, for being straight, for being gay, for being anything. The only thing that we demand is that you be a great American patriot. And if you’re that. you’re very much on our team.

    Watch:

    Those comments were also well-received by the arena. His remark on white men comes a few days after a viral Compact article reported a number of professional fields had “gatekeepers [who] promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man.”

    Vice President Vance touted a number of accomplishments he said the Trump Administration has had in less than a year, including closing down the southern border. He said the crowd must continue to support the “America First Party” — echoing Donald Trump Jr., who earlier in the day said the Republican Party was no longer a thing.

    Trump Jr. said it is a new era for the conservative movement — one that is constantly under attack from the Democratic Party and Republicans In Name Only (RINOs). He said those attacks are ramping up as both parties plow towards the 2026 midterm elections.

    Here is what the told the AmFest crowd:

    Midterms are coming around the corner and make no mistake, the Democrat Party wants to do whatever they possibly can to shut this movement down. Not just the Democrats. The RINOs.

    You see the manufactured attacks on JD [Vance], myself, my father — anyone who understands that this isn’t the Republican Party anymore. It’s the America First Party. It’s the Make America Great Again Party. And we are not going back!

    Watch:

    Democrats just filed articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth — and he could be removed if we don’t act. Hegseth is a God-fearing, America First patriot who made our country safer under President Trump — and that’s exactly why the Left wants him gone. We’re demanding 1,000,000 signatures before MIDNIGHT to show Pete he is NOT alone. STAND WITH PETE. ADD YOUR NAME NOW.

    Amanda Head: ‘Jesus Revolution’ Destroys Box Office Performace of Oscar-nominated Films

    By
    Amanda Head
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    5

    It’s time to run to your local movie theaters.

    A new faith-based film “Jesus Revolution” is setting the box office on fire. The new film has already surpassed numerous Oscar-nominated films’ box office earnings.

    Watch Amanda explain the phenomenon below:

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Is Biden’s DOJ Out to Get Trump? Or Did Trump Do This to Himself?

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    3
    Photo via Gage Skidmore Flickr

    In an event unprecedented in American history, a former U.S. president, protected by U.S. Secret Service agents, and currently running for president, was booked on federal criminal charges Tuesday by U.S. Marshals at the U.S. federal courthouse in Miami, before being taken to be fingerprinted and processed.

    Donald Trump pled ‘not guilty’ to all charges.

    The charges relate to Trump taking a lot of highly classified documents from the White House after he left office. And once discovered, he gave multiple bizarre reasons for having them.

    According to the indictment, the highly sensitive materials Trump kept included documents about overseas nuclear weapons holdings and various military plans.

    But they are really all about the fact that he refused to turn many of them over for upwards of 18 months. And I have criticized Trump for doing that.

    So, did Hillary Clinton get treated differently? Of course! And is Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) out to get Trump?

    Absolutely! That’s a given.

    But Trump could still have avoided all this had he behaved differently, before and after he got caught. And that’s important too.

    As with Richard Nixon and Watergate, it was about the cover up.

    The 37 charges against Trump include violations of the Espionage Act or the willful retention of national security information as well as one count of “conspiracy to obstruct justice,” one count of “withholding a document or record,” one count of “corruptly concealing a document or record,” one count of “concealing a document in a deferral investigation,” one count of “scheme to conceal” and one count of “false statements and representations.”

    Based on the evidence represented in the indictment, and from his own words and deeds, it seems that he did do most of the things he is accused of, despite the Team Trump calls that this is only a political prosecution.

    I have said before that Trump basically dared the Justice Department to come after him. And I still believe that had Trump simply turned over all the classified materials when they were first requested, this would have likely ended last year without any criminal proceedings.

    But Trump didn’t.

    The FBI then conducted a very showy surprise raid on the ex-president’s Florida home, Mar-a-Lago, on August 8, 2022. That raid, and the documents recovered there, eventually led to the 37-count indictment that now put Trump where he is.

    THE FBI RAID ON MAR-A-LAGO

    Many condemned the FBI raid that launched all this as unprecedented and wrong, including me. I argued that it sent a horrible message to the world and looked highly political. (As does the indictment, arrest, and potential trial).

    Apparently, the FBI had doubts about the raid as well.

    Steven D’Antuono, who left the FBI late last year, explained the FBI-DOJ disagreements over the planning and execution of the Mar-a-Lago search during an interview last week with the House Judiciary Committee.

    While he called the back-and-forth between DOJ and the FBI “an everyday discussion,” he noted that it still created “consternation” among the law enforcement officials, reported Politico.

    According to the interview transcripts reviewed by Politico, D’Antuono said DOJ wanted the FBI to quickly seize the classified documents from Mar-a-Lago, claiming they could fall into the wrong hands. But the FBI’s Washington Field Office team preferred to seek Trump’s permission, through his attorneys, to search the premises.

    The FBI even proposed a plan to surveil Mar-a-Lago in case Trump’s team tried taking any of the disputed papers offsite, according to D’Antuono.

    The FBI “had a plan in place to have surveillance around if we needed to,” he said.

    “Again, no one was there. So, if they brought in — they – meaning the [former] president’s, you know, people — brought in a big box truck, we would see it, right, and we would have the search warrant in hand and be able to act at that point.”

    In the end, DOJ got its way, and they conducted the surprise raid. Fortunately, Trump wasn’t there when it occurred. And that was at least something.

    “I didn’t want the spectacle for obvious reasons of why we’re sitting here today. … It’s a reputational risk, right, and that’s the way I looked at it from the Bureau,” reported Politico.

    Unfortunately, the FBI has still suffered a great deal of reputational risk, as has the DOJ under Biden. This all stinks as political.

    But Trump has played a big part in all this as well.

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    ‘Bidenomics’ – U.S. National Debt Passes $33 Trillion for First Time

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    4
    Image via Pixabay free images

    ANALYSIS – In case some readers weren’t sure, this is a big reason the conservative GOP ‘Freedom Caucus’ is threatening a government shutdown. Thanks to Joe Biden’s massive spending orgy, the gross U.S. national debt has breached the $33 trillion mark for the first time.

    To be precise, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, as of September 18, 2023 (just 12 days short of the end of our fiscal year), the national debt has risen to $33,053,950,837,720 or $33.05 trillion.

    America’s runaway inflation, which is crushing everyone’s pocketbooks, is just one result of this part of ‘Bidenomics.’

    This unprecedented debt is also fueling concerns that another fight over federal spending may trigger the first government shutdown since 2019.

    Without drastic spending cuts, it’s only going to get worse, much worse.

    Even accounting for newly passed spending cuts, the U.S. national debt is on track to top $50 trillion by the end of the decade, impacted by mounting interest and the cost of the nation’s social programs.

    This is unsustainable; a looming catastrophe waiting to happen.

    And, yes, while Donald Trump clearly overspent, especially due to the COVID-19 epidemic, this current staggering debt, and the debt going forward, is mostly Biden’s fault.

    As David Winston explained in Rollcall back in April:

    The president [Biden] and his White House have taken the 2020 COVID-19, one-time-only crisis budget as his administration’s working baseline, rather than the pre-Covid 2019 budget, which had a significant $4.4 trillion price tag.

    In 2020, because of the pandemic, the budget jumped 47 percent to $6.5 trillion, as both Democrats and Republicans supported the need for emergency funding. That COVID funding was to sunset as the country returned to normal — as it did last year. Apparently, Biden decided to ignore that crucial point.

    Instead, he saw that supersized budget in 2020 not as a crisis, but an opportunity that could be exploited going forward to pay for what amounted to a historic spending spree that kicked off with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan and drove what became the worst inflation in 40 years. During Biden’s first two years in office, he oversaw spending that was 40 percent higher than the pre-COVID 2019 budget.

    According to the CBO, Biden is going to match Trump’s addition to the national debt in just three years, reaching a total of $7.1 trillion over his four years. That would be $1.5 trillion more than Trump contributed during his term, which included the 2020 one-time COVID emergency spending. If Biden’s 2024 proposed budget actually passed, he would add as much to the national debt as Trump and Bush 43 combined. House Republican leaders have made clear his budget isn’t going anywhere; but it illustrates just how out of control Biden’s spending policies really are.

    This is a big reason why the House Freedom Caucus is willing to shut down the government to try to impose some sort of fiscal discipline.

    While much of the news has focused on the ‘intransigent’ MAGA conservatives undermining Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the rest of the House Republicans on this issue, Biden refuses to even discuss the House majority’s proposals.

    Biden says he wants a “clean” debt ceiling vote without any provisions to control spending. This is not surprising since he just proposed a budget that will reach a record $10 trillion in spending by 2033. 

    As horrible as a government shutdown will be, allowing this massive debt to keep growing is unacceptable. Without massive cuts, everyday Americans will still be paying the bill, long after Biden is gone.

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Supreme Court Discrimination Ruling Undermines Corporate Wokeness

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    2
    Duncan Lock, Dflock, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

    ANALYSIS – BOOM! – The landmark Supreme Court decision against racial and sex discrimination by schools and universities (under the guise of ‘affirmative action’) will also impact corporate ‘diversity’ programs based on the same flawed, discriminatory ideas. 

    In what has become a major legal development in a growing wave of anti-wokeness, corporations will soon have to reconsider all their – likely illegal – Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) efforts. 

    While pushed by the increasingly leftist establishment, most of these woke programs have been illegal under U.S. state and federal laws, which explicitly prohibit discrimination by race and gender. But until now the courts let them get away with it.

    Now the Supreme Court has made it official. Affirmative action (aka – discriminatory ‘diversity’ efforts) are out.

    The court held by that Harvard and University of North Carolina’s (UNC’s) admissions programs violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

    Students for Fair Admissions, a conservative group, sued Harvard and UNC over their ‘race-conscious’ admissions programs, arguing they intentionally discriminated against Asian American applicants.

    In the decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “Both programs lack sufficiently focused and measurable objectives warranting the use of race, unavoidably employ race in a negative manner, involve racial stereotyping, and lack meaningful end points.”

    He added:  “We have never permitted admissions programs to work in that way, and we will not do so today.”

    Previously, the Supreme Court in the 2003 case of Grutter v. Bollinger, ruled that “the use of an applicant’s race as one factor in an admissions policy of a public educational institution does not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment if the policy is narrowly tailored to the compelling interest of promoting a diverse student body.”

    This was intended to be a very narrow exception, but soon became far more. And this helped woke corporate America justify its own discriminatory DEI programs.

    A 2022 Harvard Business Review 2022 survey, reported by The Epoch Times, showed that more than 60 percent of U.S. companies had a DEI program, which separates employees according to race and gender. 

    After the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots, major corporations announced explicit race-based hiring and promotion policies.

    But now that the 2003 decision has been superseded, they will all need to revisit the legality of their DEI programs. As Kevin Stocklin explains in The Epoch Times: 

    In an amicus brief regarding the Harvard and UNC case, the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute and attorney Ilya Shapiro argued that “what this Court authorized in Grutter as a temporary, grudging exception to America’s ideals and generally applicable law of Equal Protection … has metastasized into a threat blooming across the legal landscape, the economy, and society as a whole.”

    The exceptions granted by the Grutter case were narrowly tailored to government-funded universities’ admissions policies, and were intended to be a temporary remedy that would include “sunset” provisions. But corporations have applied them as a precedent to race-based policies on staffing and training, and expanded them to include new racial goals.

    “To the extent that corporate America has thought that Grutter provided some kind of fig leaf to the illegal discrimination they’ve been engaging in for the last two decades, this would be a really good time for them to rethink that,” Morenoff said. “It never made sense for corporate America to argue that there was a diversity rationale exception to our civil rights laws,” he said.

    However, if the Supreme Court decision reverses Grutter or the Johnson executive order, even that questionable pretense would be gone. Rather than standing on thin ice, Morenoff said, “they’re standing on no ice at all.”

    This is the next battleground – using this Supreme Court precedent to eliminate discrimination by sex and race from corporate America.

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    ‘Top Gun’ Blowback – Pentagon Won’t Help Hollywood if They Submit to China

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    1
    Austin Green, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

    ANALYSIS – In an unexpected, but long overdue move, the Pentagon has stated it will no longer work with directors if their movies will be censored by Beijing. This follows directly on the heels of Vietnam banning the movie ‘Barbie’ over its inclusion of a China-friendly map of the South China Sea.

    That movie’s producers apparently caved to Chinese pressure and included the map showing China essentially owning the South China Sea, which it does not, despite its claims. And Vietnam wasn’t happy.

    But, as I previously wrote, this Chinese censorship problem really exploded with last year’s release of Tom Cruise’s blockbuster “Top Gun: Maverick.” 

    And now the Pentagon, thanks to GOP Senator Ted Cruz, has made it clear it now bans any military assistance to directors who plan to comply (or will likely comply) with censorship demands from the Chinese regime in order to distribute their movie in China.

    In trailers for the ‘Maverick’ film shown in 2019, the flags of Taiwan and Japan had been removed from Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell’s flight jacket worn by Cruise in the 1986 original “Top Gun” movie.

    The flags were part of a Far East Cruise patch commemorating the 1963-64 deployment by the USS Galveston off Japan and Taiwan. In the preview clip for the movie in 2019, those two historically accurate flags were replaced by generic nonsensical symbols.

    This shameless kowtowing was an apparent attempt to appease Chinese investor Tencent. But after serious blowback in the U.S. — and after Tencent reportedly dropped its investment in the film – the flags were restored in the final version of the film.

    In another example, Chinese government censors actually pushed the producers of “Spider-man: No Way Home” to remove the Statue of Liberty, according to Puck. This, likely due to its association with the Tiananmen Square protests.

    Thankfully, the studio did not comply, and that movie wasn’t shown in China.

    The Defense Department updated its rules for working with movie studios after Cruz (R-Texas) inserted language, known as the SCRIPT Act. into the fiscal 2023 defense policy bill.

    Cruz has strongly condemned Beijing’s censorship of Hollywood films.

    “What does it say to the world when Maverick is scared of the Chinese communists?” he said at the time.

    tweet

    The latest Top Gun movie also reportedly showed us a peek at what might be the SR-72 – the super-secret experimental hypersonic spy plane under development by Lockheed Martin. It was called the ‘Darkstar’ in the film.

    Providing more context, Politico reported:

    According to a new Defense Department document obtained by POLITICO, filmmakers who want the U.S. military to help with their projects must now pledge that they won’t let Beijing alter those films.

    The DOD “will not provide production assistance when there is demonstrable evidence that the production has complied or is likely to comply with a demand from the Government of the People’s Republic of China … to censor the content of the project in a material manner to advance the national interest of the People’s Republic of China,” the document reads.

    Hollywood and the Defense Department have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship for decades. The Pentagon has allowed filmmakers to shoot their projects on military bases, Navy ships, or other locations, and weighs in on filmmaking processes. The military benefits from positive portrayals of service members, and moviemakers benefit from authentic settings and technical expertise.

    But as China’s ruling Communist Party has developed increasingly advanced censorship and surveillance tools, countless American companies — including Hollywood studios — have sought to comply with Beijing’s demands while attempting to dodge stateside pushback.

    However, from now on, producers of films greenlighted by the Defense Department must notify the Pentagon “in writing of such a censorship demand, including the terms of such demand, and whether the project has complied or is likely to comply with a demand for such censorship.”

    But not just that. DoD will also weigh any “verifiable information” from people not involved in the production who indicate that producers could comply with a censorship demand.

    So, hopefully Hollywood will stop caving to China’s blackmail, or risk losing access to their much-loved Pentagon collaboration.

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    NYT, Scientists and Journalists’ Failed Miserably on C*VID Lab Leak Story: National Security Experts

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    1
    Haxorjoe, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

    ANALYSIS – Thankfully the pressure continues to build on the establishment media and scientific community for its massive failure and cover-up of the C*VID-19 lab leak origin theory. 

    From day one of the C*VID outbreak in Wuhan, China, I argued that it would be dereliction of duty for any intelligence analyst worth his/her salt, or any journalist or expert, to ignore the elephant in the room – that there was a rare Chinese government Level 4 Biosafety Lab (BSL-4) within a few miles of the alleged ground zero for the virus.

    Compounding this fact with the understanding that China has a robust bioweapons research effort, and shoddy safety protocols at the relatively new lab in Wuhan, it should have been a no-brainer, everyone should have been all over this scenario.

    But sure enough, for partisan, ideological, and just plain stupid, reasons the establishment mob quickly dismissed that possibility outright, calling it a conspiracy theory and even worse, racist. 

    Many of these players wanted to stay on the good side of China, some had vested interests in keeping a lid on it, others instinctively rebuked anything President Trump proposed, and others simply wanted to obsessively focus on how Trump was allegedly failing on COVID rather than on where this deadly virus originated.

    Meanwhile, Big Tech social media platforms openly censored any views, including mine on LinkedIn, that simply reported on and explored the facts and available intelligence on the Wuhan lab and its potential relation to C*VID.

    Over time however, this subpar reporting, and the massive effort bordering on a conspiracy to suppress the truth on C*VID’s origins, began to crumble.

    The June 9 World Health Organization Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens report, and various other serious investigations, concluded that deliberate human involvement, or at least human error, may ultimately have been at the root of the pandemic that has killed over 15 million people worldwide.

    In December, reports The Blaze, Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence also concluded in their interim report that it was “plausible” that Ch*nese military researchers possessed the C*VID-19 virus “as part of bioweapons research” prior to its release into the world as a consequence of a safety incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

    Many of the obtuse big media outlets, colluding with Big Tech, and the misguided science experts have begun to retract and recant. Some even quietly admitting they may have been wrong on the lab leak origin theory.

    But that isn’t enough. Far from it.

    As reported by The Blaze:

    A group of national security experts published a letter this week denouncing those in the mainstream media who downplayed, ignored, or outright denied the possibility that the C*VID-19 virus originated in a Chinese c*mmunist l*b in Wuhan.

    The January 11 letter addressed to the editors of the Lancet, Nature Medicine, the New York Times, and Time magazine, was signed by forty-three national security experts, including House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas), former Defense Intelligence Agency acting Director David Shedd, former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, and numerous former State Department and National Security Council officials. 

    The Blaze continues:

    The letter implicates news outlets like the New York Times and scientific journals such as the Lancet in an apparent campaign to censor or displace dissenting voices around the pandemic’s origins.

    Not only was journalists’ and editors’ failure to entertain the possibility that the W*han Institute of Vir*logy — controlled by the genocidal Chinese regime and notorious for performing gain-of-function experiments on coronaviruses — a dereliction of duty, it “served to hamper national and international policy discussions about how to mitigate against future pandemics of any origin — natural, accidental, or deliberate.”

    Their letter calls for those who intentionally or not helped absolve the Chinese c*mmunist regime of any guilt in originating and spreading the deadly C*VID virus to be held accountable. 

    The authors also called on major news organizations “to carry out deeper investigations into the pandemic’s origins, particularly by examining all credible origins hypotheses.”

    This is the minimum they should do.

    As the letter states, American security and prosperity depend upon “rigorous scientific debate, research, and scholarship, as well as an intrepid and independent news media.”

    And all these media outlets, scientific journals, and individual journalists and experts “failed in their duty.”

    They should all be called out and shamed publicly, and they should provide the nation, and the world a very public apology.

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Forget China, You Can Now Take a Balloon to Edge of Space

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    0
    Image via Pixabay free images

    ANALYSIS – Until now, only billionaires could afford to enter sub-orbital space. And it needed to be by high-powered rocket (think Jeff Bezos in his Blue Origin, or Richard Branson in his Virgin Galactic). 

    Star Trek actor William Shatner also did a flight on a Blue Origin’s rocket.

    But now you too can see the earth from 20 miles high. It will cost you just over $120,000 and it’s by a high-altitude balloon.

    And, no, it’s not aboard a Chinese spy balloon. These will be private companies running the trips.

    The billionaires in rockets still have one treat we can’t get – they can briefly experience weightlessness. They also go twice as high.

    Space officially starts at the Karman line, 62 miles above the earth’s surface. But for most people there won’t be that much of a difference.

    And at half the price, no training required, and a much softer, smoother ride, these edge-of-space balloons will be far more accessible and may become popular among the slightly less rich.

    And unlike the rockets, these balloons will give you a much longer ride, with luxury amenities, food, and drink.

    There now appears at least two companies on the verge of launching these space balloon trips. One is American and the other is French.

    Both seem to avoid mention of the 1937 Hindenburg hydrogen-filled dirigible disaster.

    The French company Zephalto with its Celeste balloon will provide Michelin-starred fine dining. It is partnered with France’s national space agency.

    These balloons filled with helium or hydrogen will depart from France with two pilots on board and six passengers and rise 15.5 miles into the stratosphere.

    Once at peak altitude, the balloon, carrying a pressurized capsule, will stay aloft for three hours, giving guests a chance to take in views previously seen only by astronauts. While in the air, passengers will be served high-end French food and wines.

    These near-space rides will start at €120,000 ($132,000) per person in 2025, Bloomberg reports.

    The other option will be Florida-based Space Perspective, which is testing its own passenger balloon, designed to reach the edge of space.

    Eight civilians and a pilot will be able to comfortably travel up 100,000 feet (19 miles) to near space in a reusable pressurized capsule carried by a gigantic hydrogen-filled balloon called Spacecraft Neptune – because Neptune’s atmosphere is predominantly hydrogen.

    The company operates out of leased facilities at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, but plans to expand to Alaska and Hawaii, and then possibly to other countries around the world.

    Flight will cost about $125,000 per person. And it plans to launch a year earlier than the Celeste.

    Neptune’s ride will be similar to the Zephalto balloons, ascending at a sedate 12.5 miles per hour. It will give passengers two full hours to observe 360° views of Earth rotating beneath them and space above.

    The overall ride will last six hours – two hours to ascend, two hours to float along the stratosphere, and two hours to descend into the Atlantic Ocean, where a recovery ship will be waiting.

    The capsule comes complete with luxury seating, refreshments, a restroom, and Wi-Fi (so you can post to Instagram or live stream on Facebook as you fly – because – of course). The company plans to offer flights for weddings, corporate events, and scientific excursions.

    Its flights are scheduled to begin in 2024, but the first batch of 600 tickets is already sold out.

    Bon voyage. No smoking aboard.

    Opinions expressed by contributors do not necessarily reflect the views of Great America News Desk.

    Judge Again Blocks Biden From Violating 1st Amendment

    By
    Paul Crespo
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    0
    Gavel via Wikimedia Commons Image

    ANALYSIS – Even when presented with overwhelming evidence that Team Biden colluded intimately with Big Tech social media companies to censor conservative Americans, the White House doubled down on violating the 1st Amendment. 

    As I wrote last week, on July 4th a federal judge blocked “federal agencies from communicating with Big Tech firms to censor posts.”

    This, after a lawsuit against the Biden administration by three Republican state Attorney Generals (AGs).

    According to the judge, Terry A. Doughty, the AGs “have produced evidence of a massive effort by Defendants, from the White House to federal agencies, to suppress speech based on its content.” 

    “If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States history,” Doughty wrote in his preliminary injunction against more than 40 administration officials. 

    “In their attempts to suppress alleged disinformation, the federal government, and particularly the defendants named here, are alleged to have blatantly ignored the First Amendment’s right to free speech.”

    Please note – ‘disinformation’ is any information the left and Team Biden don’t like.

    This is serious constitutional stuff. One would think the White House might say, “ok, we overstepped a bit.”

    But not Team Biden.

    Using the Orwellian doublespeak, the left always uses to hide the truth, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said: “We are going to continue to promote responsible actions.” 

    She added: “That is something that we’re going to continue to do to make sure we protect public health and make sure there is safety and security.”

    Using similar verbiage, the Department of Justice announced later that same day that it would appeal the decision, to protect public health, safety, and security.

    Basically, Team Biden said, we don’t care, we want to keep violating the Constitution and censoring our opponents. And we are going to request an emergency order from the judge to do it.

    The Daily Caller reported:

    Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Louisiana Attorney General Jeffrey Landry opposed the Biden administration’s attempt to stop the injunction in a court filing Sunday, writing the administration was essentially asking to “continue violating the First Amendment.”

    “In essence, Defendants argue that the injunction should be stayed because it might interfere with the Government’s ability to continue working with social-media companies to censor Americans’ core political speech on the basis of viewpoint,” they wrote in the court filing. “In other words, the Government seeks a stay of the injunction so that it can continue violating the First Amendment.”

    Thankfully, on Monday the same federal judge blocked Biden again, denying the administration’s attempt to pause the injunction. 

    The Washington Post reported that Judge Doughty noted again that the plaintiffs (the state AGs) would likely succeed in proving the government colluded with social media companies “to engage in viewpoint-based suppression of protected free speech.”

    Responding to the hysteria surrounding his initial injunction, Doughty also wrote:

    Although this Preliminary Injunction involves numerous agencies, it is not as broad as it appears. “It only prohibits something the Defendants have no legal right to do—contacting social media companies for the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner, the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms. 

    Rejecting the administration’s argument that the order could chill law enforcement activity to protect national security, the judge added that It also contains numerous exceptions for communications related to criminal activity, explicit dangers to national security, and foreign election interference.

    Meanwhile, this important battle will continue as the AGs’ lawsuit works its way through the legal system.

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