by dap | Apr 21, 2025 | Daily Signal
I guess
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres didn’t think his hyping global warming risks brought him enough attention, so now he says, “The era of global boiling has arrived!”
Global boiling?
Give me a break.
Yes, the
.
We can deal with that.
What annoys me is
pushing hysterical myths.
Myth 1:
will soon be ice-free.
It “could already be ice-free by the summer of 2030!” shrieks a DW report.
“‘
‘ is melting faster than scientists thought,” adds the BBC. “Earth’s biggest cities are at risk!”
Nonsense.
“It’s not happening at nearly the catastrophic pace that they claim,” says Heartland Institute fellow Linnea Lueken in my new video.
But the media show dramatic images of melting and missing ice.
“No ice! There’s all these walruses laying out on a stony beach. … It’s because it’s the summertime! In the winter, it all comes right back!”
As far as ice disappearing in winter, too, “Compared to the amount of ice that’s in the Arctic,” says Lueken, it “is like a grain of sand … so minuscule compared to the amount of ice that’s there, it doesn’t even show up on a trend chart when you plot it.”
But zealots push hysteria.
In 2009, Al Gore, while collecting a Nobel prize, said there was “a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap … during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years!”
In just five to seven years! Oh, no!
Wait … seven years have passed. In fact, 16 years passed. The ice cap has plenty of ice, even in summer. Yet nobody calls him on it.
“They absolutely should be calling him on it,” says Lueken.
Myth 2: Polar bears are going extinct.
Polar bears look cute, so environmental groups use them in ads to sucker you into donating money.
But Polar bear populations have increased!
In the 1960s, 17,000-19,000 was the highest of three scientific estimates of polar bear population. Today, there are about 26,000 polar bears.
Yet the Environmental Defense Fund collected almost a quarter-billion dollars from gullible donors running ads that say: “Your support can help Environmental Defense Fund save the polar bears!”
The Environmental Defense Fund hasn’t agreed to my interview requests. I understand why. I would call their advertising sleazy.
“Absolutely,” agrees Lueken, “the data is right there. It’s not hard to find out that polar bears are fine.”
OK, maybe polar bears aren’t going extinct, but we might starve!
That’s Myth 3.
MSNBC shrieks, “Climate change could create a massive global food shortage.”
President Barack Obama said, “Our changing climate is already making it more difficult to produce food!”
“There is no claim less true,” sighs Lueken. “Food production has skyrocketed.”
She’s right, and the data is there for everyone to see. Agriculture output sets record highs year after year.
In fact, the extra carbon dioxide in greenhouse gasses probably increases food production.
“We inject CO2 into greenhouses for a reason,” Lueken points out. “It helps to fertilize plants for faster and better growth.”
As the climate has warmed, the world experienced the biggest drop in hunger and malnutrition ever.
Still, when food prices rise, media idiots still blame climate change.
The New York Times claimed “devastation that climate change had wrought” caused a rise in coffee prices.
But global coffee production has increased by 82% since the 1990s.
The Times’ story focused on a brief decline in coffee production in Honduras. But since the ’90s, coffee production there rose more than 200%.
“They never apologize,” I note. “They never say, ‘Oh, we got this wrong.’”
“No,” replies Lueken. “Even if they did have a retraction, the damage is already done.”
Alarmist media and environmental groups never apologize.
When doom doesn’t happen, they just move on to the next scare.
I’ll cover four more myths about climate change next week.
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by dap | Apr 21, 2025 | Daily Signal
plans to ask Congress to rescind the funds it appropriated for public broadcasting, which is a good start in defunding NPR and PBS. The legislative branch must do that and then move to dissolve the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Rescission deals with the immediate. It applies instant pain to the public broadcasters because Congress would claw back money that it has already decided to appropriate. In this particular case, the administration is preparing to
to rescind $1.1 billion, according to published reports.
That would be around two years’ worth of appropriations, affecting fiscal years 2026 and 2027, as Congress “forward-funds” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting two years in advance. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting automatically got $535 million—the same as it got last year—in the last continuing resolution that
in March.
The rescission package will also include $8.3 billion in cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Once
submits the request, which it hasn’t done yet, Congress has 45 days to approve or reject the request. Sources have said the administration feels it has the votes to pass the package.
reported Monday that Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought drafted a memo outlining the cuts. Vought explained that public broadcasters will lose their funding because of their “lengthy history of anti-conservative bias.” I haven’t seen the memo, but I have been reliably told that the report and Vought’s description of public media’s leftist bias are accurate.
As I testified to the House’s Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency on March 26, NPR and PBS have refused to observe the simple code of decency that dictates that when taxpayers of all persuasions are coerced to pay for you, you owe them impartiality.
“NPR, PBS, and the other state broadcasters have, however, simply refused to abide by this simple code,” I told Congress. “They have been coddled by allies in Congress into feeling immune to it. They have shown scorn for conservative views on a consistent basis and have done so safely in the knowledge that their friends in Congress, of both parties, will save their bacon year in and year out. And indeed, this has so far always been the case since they were created.”
I and 20 other Republicans also sent Trump a joint letter requesting the rescission package. Other signatories came from high-profile conservative organizations, such as the Media Research Center, which organized the effort, the Claremont Institute, the American Principles Project, the Heartland Institute, and the Conservative Partnership Institute.
In it, we told the president that we had heard that a rescission package was coming and urged him “to include the complete defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its affiliates, PBS and NPR.”
“NPR’s and PBS’s demonstrable, documented bias further erodes the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s credibility. NPR’s audience overwhelmingly identifies as liberal, reinforcing the reality that public broadcasting is not a neutral service but a taxpayer-funded ideological platform. Americans should not be forced to finance a network that caters to one side of the political spectrum,” we added.
A copy of the letter was also sent to Vought.
What makes us think that there is a chance this time that NPR and PBS can be defunded, given that every Republican president since Lyndon B. Johnson created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting tried and failed?
Things are different now for many reasons, one being that Trump and Elon Musk are busy dismantling the permanent bureaucracy, and NPR and PBS, as state broadcasters, are the emitters of the views of this Acela Corridor.
Both men also believe PBS and NPR do not deserve one more penny of taxpayer money.
But ultimately, two things may have sealed the public broadcasters’ fate, and they have to do with NPR. The first was
by an NPR whistleblower, Uri Berliner, which was published in the Free Press on April 4, 2024. Berliner, a 25-year NPR veteran, exposed the rot inside the organization.
Berliner revealed that NPR’s audience has become completely lopsided, at only 11% Republican; that at the NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., there are 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans; and that in every story, from the Russia collusion hoax to Hunter Biden’s laptop to the origins of COVID-19, NPR took the far-left side and ignored the conservative perspective.
Then, there was the appointment of Katherine Maher as NPR CEO and president just about a year ago. As people dug through her social media posts, they found out she was so woke that wags such as Chris Rufo riffed that she was produced by artificial intelligence.
Maher
the First Amendment as “the No. 1 challenge” to censoring news she disagrees with (“disinformation” is how she would refer to it). She also said, “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
As for Trump, Maher has called him a “deranged, racist sociopath.”
Maher could be the reason why this time is different, and the rescission may just open the floodgates.
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by dap | Apr 21, 2025 | Slate
The surprising reality of political violence.
by dap | Apr 21, 2025 | Daily Signal
Congress has a decision to make. Hang
owners out to dry, or lock in a tax system that allows America’s entrepreneurs to thrive?
That’s the question
when deciding whether to renew critical expiring provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
less than a year into President Donald Trump’s first term, Tax Cuts and Jobs Act implemented tax cuts, structural reforms and simplifications that helped produce the booming American economy of 2018 and 2019. The results? Fifty-year unemployment lows and rapid gains in median household income—prosperity that would have continued apace if not for COVID-19 and the ensuing massive glut of federal spending.
But if the
is allowed to expire at the end of the year, nobody will be hit harder than small businesses.
Before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, flaws in the tax code discouraged businesses from investing in machinery and equipment by not allowing them to fully deduct those costs in the year
Instead, the tax code spread out those deductions for five, seven, 10, 15 or 20 years—an eternity for a small business owner scraping by with tiny profit margins and limited access to credit.
This kind of system would be especially harmful in the high-inflation environment that’s resulted from the breakneck pace of federal spending during the early 2020s. By the time deductions for machinery and equipment could be fully claimed, inflation could wipe out much of those deductions’ value.
It makes no sense to have a tax code that penalizes business owners for investing in their factories, workers and communities. But that flawed, old system has been phasing back in for the past three years and will return in full force in January if Congress doesn’t act.
Small startup tech companies—which spend heavily on research and experimental costs—face a similar situation.
Since 2022, they’ve had to delay 90% of many research-related deductions to a later tax year, including deductions related to employee compensation, material and supplies, the cost of obtaining a patent, and other valid business expenses. How are these small businesses supposed to innovate, scale up and compete with existing big tech companies when the tax code punishes them for doing so?
Since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s passage, it has helped shield family businesses like farms and ranches from a devastating 40% federal tax on assets passed down to family members.
In general, death taxes especially hurt asset-rich and cash-poor businesses. Most of the value of a ranch or farm is in the land, structures, machinery and cattle. It’s not sitting in a bank. Grieving family members shouldn’t be forced to grapple with whether to literally sell the farm to pay a severe double tax.
But, if the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provisions are allowed to expire, the death tax will expand – meaning the death of many family businesses.
Millions of small business owners benefited from the 20% pass-through deduction (known as Section 199A), which is set to expire at the end of the year. It had a larger impact on the amount of taxes paid by entrepreneurs and small business owners than anything else in Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. While this provision can certainly be reformed or improved, simply letting the provision lapse would slam Main Street businesses hard.
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act’s small business tax provisions have been in place for nearly eight years, over which time much has transpired—including the rise of new taxes, spending and regulations. Over that same period, thousands of small businesses were crushed by COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions.
Now is not the time to pull the rug out from under those that remain. At a time where faith in American institutions is critically low, small businesses are one of the only institutions that Americans of all stripes still widely trust.
Extending the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act isn’t about slashing taxes for corporations, as some might mischaracterize what’s at stake. In fact, corporate taxes would only rise modestly if the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act expires. Rather, extending the business provisions in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act is about avoiding an unprecedented tax hike that would hammer small businesses, main street, workers and the American economy.
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by | Apr 21, 2025 | The Hill
President Trump entered the White House believing that he had a large mandate to drastically reshape American domestic and foreign policy, and especially the role of the federal government.
Now, not even 100 days into Trump’s second term, it’s clear that the administration is running the very real risk of overstepping its constitutional and political bounds.
And his focus on retribution against perceived political enemies opens the door for future Democratic presidents to retaliate against Trump or his allies.
As
in the Wall Street Journal last week, there is the very real possibility that Trump’s actions lead to an unprecedented third impeachment.
To be sure, Trump’s overreach also risks undermining the rest of his term.
Americans wanted strong, stable leadership, which is why they elected Trump.
But, as
, Americans are increasingly exhausted due to the never-ending parade of headlines and seemingly daily policy shifts being thrown at them from a directionless White House.
Further, Trump continues to show contempt for limits on presidential power in his quest to radically remake the federal government.
Indeed, in just the past three weeks: Trump’s unpredictable tariff policies sent financial markets into a tailspin, he is
looking to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, the administration
a unanimous Supreme Court ruling to return a wrongly-deported migrant and is essentially trying to put private universities under the supervision of the federal government.
Moreover, Trump’s preference for governing by executive order often crosses the line into usurping powers reserved for Congress.
Consider tariffs. Constitutionally, Congress — not the president — has the power to regulate trade, but Trump seized this power by declaring trade deficits to be a “
,” thus enacting tariffs via executive order, sidestepping Congress.
All of the self-generated disorder has caused Trump’s approval rating to decline significantly since the inauguration, a gift for Democrats.
Despite still struggling to overcome their own poor ratings, they are being assisted by the chaos Trump is causing.
Having begun his second term with 51 percent approval versus 44 percent disapproval, those numbers have now reversed.
One-half (50 percent) of Americans now disapprove of his job performance, compared to 47 percent who approve — a net 10-point decline in less than 100 days, per RealClearPolitics polling
.
Worse still, his approval on the economy, his signature campaign issue, is sinking.
According to CNBC’s most recent All-America
, 43 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, while a majority (55 percent) disapprove.
Similarly, on the issue of inflation and lowering the cost of living, less than 4-in-10 Americans (37 percent) approve of Trump’s approach, versus 60 percent who disapprove.
It is possible that economic sentiment improves if Trump is able to pass his long-awaited tax cuts, however, that will do little to address the fundamental issues of Trump’s overreach.
To that end, Trump’s disdain for the judicial branch — or any checks on his power — is not only unprecedented, but risks engendering a true constitutional crisis.
The administration is publicly
on federal judges who rule against it to be impeached, a severe violation of constitutional and legal precedent befitting a banana republic, not the United States of America.
Chief Justice John Roberts took the rare step of
the administration for its efforts, but it’s unlikely to have any impact on such behavior.
That being said, the starkest examples of Trump’s disregard for limits on presidential power were evident last week.
First, there was the case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, whom the administration admitted was wrongly deported, and is now in El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison.
Federal judges, including the Supreme Court in a 9-0 ruling, have ordered the administration to “facilitate” Garcia’s return, but sitting with El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, Trump
down on his refusal.
The administration has claimed Garcia was a gang member, but in deporting him without due process and now thumbing its nose at the Supreme Court, Trump is eroding the system of checks and balances our democracy depends on.
In that same vein, Trump continues to assert that he has the power to fire Jerome Powell, despite the immense damage that would do to the American economy.
As recently as Thursday, Trump
that he would be able to remove Powell if he wanted to, but that would be an unprecedented — and likely illegal — move.
The Fed’s independence is guaranteed by law, and Trump’s desire to fire Powell because he refuses to bend to Trump’s politically motivated desire for lower interest rates would destroy faith in American financial markets.
Finally, there is the brewing legal battle between Trump and elite universities, led by Harvard.
Make no mistake, Harvard and other universities should be punished for failing to protect Jewish students, and some of the administration’s demands, such as requiring stricter discipline for students who break the law, are fully within their power.
However, many others far exceed what the Constitution allows. For example,
Harvard to implement “viewpoint diversity” by directly intervening in hiring and firing decisions or ordering the school to reduce “governance bloat” are far outside of constitutional limits.
One consequence of Trump’s erratic overreach is that it has overshadowed the administration’s genuine successes in some areas.
Border crossings are
95 percent compared to the Biden administration, but the administration has little time to herald those numbers because they’re jumping from one “crisis” to the next.
To that end, Trump is seemingly determined to govern via executive order — he has already
nearly 130 — as opposed to legislation.
Not only is this a distortion of how the government is supposed to work, but it opens the door for the next president to undo everything, contributing to chaos down the road.
Douglas E. Schoen is a political consultant who served as an adviser to President Clinton and to the 2020 presidential campaign of Michael Bloomberg. His new book is “The End of Democracy? Russia and China on the Rise and America in Retreat.”
