The U.S. military is facing a dangerous recruitment crisis. It seems to me, the main contributing factor to this crisis has been the Left’s insistence on infusing politics into our military. Under President Biden’s leadership, the Pentagon has been more interested in fighting the culture war at home than equipping our service men and women in their mission of deterring war and protecting our nation.
Earlier this year, President Biden’s Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin issued a memo to use taxpayer funds for paid time off, lodging, and travel expenses for military service members and their families to receive elective abortions. A clear example of the Left’s push to prioritize a political agenda over longstanding federal policy, this memo was issued without necessary congressional approvals and in spite of the Hyde amendment, a decades-old federal law prohibiting federal funding for abortion that even President Biden himself supported during his tenure in the U.S. Senate. The simple fact is that the Defense Department has no authority to use our taxpayer dollars to facilitate abortion services—in fact, existing federal law makes doing so illegal.
In response, Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama has placed holds on the confirmation of certain military promotions to both demand Secretary Austin rescind the policy and also bring attention to the wider issue of the politicization of our military. Rather than addressing these clear problems and violations of federal law, Arizona’s own Senators have continued to play politics, repeat Democrat talking points, or avoid the issue altogether.
It is the policies of the Biden administration that are the real threat to military readiness and undercutting our national defense capabilities, and that is what Senator Tuberville’s holds are rightly pointing out.
As a former officer in the Army, I can tell you Arizona’s veterans and active-duty service members understand firsthand that politicizing the military is a problem—not a solution. Yet, our U.S. Senators in Arizona have both apparently missed that message.
In July, Senator Mark Kelly claimed blocking of certain military promotions “is doing real damage to our national security right now” and that it will “have cascading effects for years.” But Senator Kelly is fear mongering, plain and simple.
Similarly, Senator Kyrsten Sinema has indicated that she wants to find a “middle ground” between Senator Tuberville and President Biden.
When the military prioritizes social justice instead of operational readiness, uses drag queens as recruiting ambassadors, and spends 6 million man-hours pushing DEI and CRT, it’s no wonder confidence in our military has already dropped by double-digits since Joe Biden took office. Common sense would tell you that is no way to foster recruitment.
We can continue down President Biden’s destructive path of turning our military into a social experiment or we can choose a path that helps our military get back to fulfilling its mission of keeping our country safe.
I stand with Senator Tommy Tuberville.
Curtiss Leroy is a resident of Tucson, AZ, and a Heritage Action Sentinel. He is a former officer in the U.S. Army, serving in Alaska and Vietnam.
In boasting about Bidenomics two weeks ago in Milwaukee, President Joe Biden declared that his policies are “restoring the American dream.” Then he went into his creepy whispering mode and assured us “it’s working.”
Huh?
Isn’t a big aspiration of the American dream owning a home? Biden keeps making first-time homeownership harder for young families for two reasons. One is that the overall jump in inflation and the slower increase in wages and salaries means that homes are more expensive. High home prices benefit those who already own their homes, but much of the increased value is due to general inflation, which reached a high of 9% last year and hurts everyone.
A bigger killer for first-time homebuyers has been the steady rise in mortgage rates under Biden. When he came into office, the mortgage rate was 2.9% nationally. Now it is 7.1%, thanks in no small part to the Federal Reserve’s 11 interest rate increases prompted by the $6 trillion Biden spending and borrowing spree in 2021 and 2022.
So now, according to the mortgage company Redfin, just the increase in interest rates on a 30-year mortgage from 5% to 7% means that a middle-income family that could once afford a median-value home of $500,000 can only afford a home worth $429,000. Great, spend more and you get less house. Or instead of a single-family home, you can only afford a three-room condo or a townhouse. If we compare the rates today versus when Donald Trump was president, the typical homebuyer can only afford a house with a price tag more than $100,000 less than three years ago.
What a deal? Maybe this is one reason the size of a new home is smaller than in the past.
Here’s another way to think about the damage done by Biden policies: If you want to buy a $500,000 home today, which is close to the median price in many desirable locations, your total interest payments will be at least $800 more per month. That means over three decades of payments totaling at least $250,000.
Of course, rents are up nearly 20% as well, so for many 20-somethings, this means sleeping in the parents’ basement.
Biden talks a lot about bridging gaps between rich and poor and blacks and whites. But the group that is most handicapped by these interest rate shocks is minorities. Black homeownership is still less than 50% for black households. The Washington Post calls this “heartbreaking,” but they blame racism, not bad government policies.
There’s one other impediment to homeownership for Generation X and millennials. Many 30- and 40-somethings are hamstrung by their existing and expanding debt. Credit card debt is now $1.03 trillion. Half of all families are expected to have problems paying off this debt each month. Delinquencies are rising, which can mean penalty rates of 20% to 25%.
So, if families can’t afford their existing debt, how will they get a bank to approve a $400,000 or more mortgage loan?
An even bigger question is how in the world can Biden call his economic policies a success?
Perhaps Biden has a secret plan to “forgive” trillions of dollars of mortgage debt, as he has already attempted to do with student loans. But that just shifts the debt burden to taxpayers — hardly a solution.
The Biden administration’s assault on homeownership isn’t just harmful to the families that are being priced out of the market. It’s bad for communities and cities around the country. When families become homeowners and set roots in a town, they are much more prone to care about not just improving their own house and maintaining the upkeep and mowing the lawn and trimming the hedges, but it gives them a stake in the schools and children in the neighborhood and the quality of the public services. In other words, homeownership gives Americans a sense of Tocquevillian civic pride.
Crime is lower, neighbors are friendlier and everyone’s property values rise when they live in a community of owners, not renters.
There is one reason to feel today’s downward spiral can be reversed. Back in 1980 when Jimmy Carter was president, mortgage rates weren’t 7%; they reached above 17%. Voters rebelled against the economic mayhem and chased Carter out of office. Ronald Reagan came into the White House, and with wiser economic fiscal policies, mortgage rates quickly fell in half and then lower still. It can happen again.
Stephen Moore is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, and chief economist at FreedomWorks. He is the co-author of the “Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy.”
Democrats used a nonprofit to engage in a partisan, multi-state campaign to flip states blue during the 2020 election, including Arizona, and plan to do so again in 2024.
Details of the effort — the Everybody Votes campaign by the Voter Registration Project (VRP) — were revealed in a new report by the Capital Research Center. According to a leaked secret draft plan, the campaign funded voter registration drives in eight swing states — Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, and Nevada — over five years beginning in 2016, seeking to register more non-white and other “underrepresented” (unmarried women, young) voters to bring registration parity to white voters.
John Podesta commissioned Everybody Votes while serving as Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign chairman. Podesta, a key player in Russiagate, formerly served as the Clinton White House Chief of Staff and counselor to President Obama; he co-founded and presided over Center for American Progress.
Everybody Votes succeeded in raising $190 million and registering 5.1 million people by 2022, which turned out around 1-2.7 million votes across the eight swing states for President Joe Biden in 2020. The Capital Research Center report estimated that the campaign generated over 198,600 votes in the 2020 election. Biden won in 2020 by over 10,400 votes.
“[T]he Everybody Votes campaign was blatantly partisan, developed by Democratic consultants and pushed by Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager,” stated the report.
Everybody Votes received its millions from progressive billionaires. Barbara Fried — mother of Sam Bankman-Fried, the corrupt cryptocurrency giant under investigation for fraud — co-wrote a 2020 memo for her super PAC led by fellow Stanford Law professors, Mind the Gap, advising donors to give 90 percent of their political cash to three nonprofits engaged in voter registration campaigns “most effective” for getting “additional Democratic votes,” naming Everybody Votes as one of them. Donors receive tax deductions for their contributions.
As AZ Free News reported last November, Bankman-Fried gave $27 million to a Phoenix-based PAC to turn out for Democratic candidates. The PAC’s treasurer, Dacey Montoya, is a key figure in many Democratic dark money network organizations, and received over $1 million from committees for Gov. Katie Hobbs and Sen. Mark Kelly.
NEW: My biggest story EVER, exposing a corrupt voter registration charity that may have decided the 2020 election by using $120+ million to target millions of Democratic voters in AZ, CO, FL, GA, OH, NC, VA, NV
Among the billionaires to donate to VRP were Warren Buffet ($5 million), George Soros ($10.4 million), Chuck Feeney ($2 million), the foundation of the deceased Wallace Coulter ($5 million), Barbara Picower ($4 million), Jeffrey Skoll ($1 million), and Pierre Omidyar ($500,000). Prominent dark money groups Proteus Fund, New Venture Fund, Hopewell Fund, Tides Foundation, ImpactAssets, and Fidelity Investments Charitable Gift Fund accounted for around $453 million in funds to VRP.
Arizona organizations tied into the dark money network benefited over $19.16 million from VRP: $7.46 million to Mi Familia Vota Education Fund, $1.73 million for Mi Familia Vota, $5.43 million to One Arizona, $1.82 million for Central Arizonans for a Sustainable Economy (CASE), $1.73 million for Arizona Center for Empowerment, $941,000 for Arizona Coalition for Change, and $51,900 for Rural Arizona Engagement.
Everybody Votes appears to have originated in early 2015 from a plan emailed to Podesta by the Wyss Foundation, a leftist nonprofit with a history of illegal election interference. That plan originated from Bill Roberts, board member of leftist dark money group League of Conservation Voters, within Corridor Partners, a Democratic consulting firm. In November 2015, Podesta received a copy of a similar, retitled plan originating from Robert Richman, CEO of the Democratic campaign strategy group Grassroots Solutions. VRP and Grassroots Solutions shared a D.C. address from 2016 to 2018 according to tax filings, with VRP continuing to pay consulting fees to Grassroots Solutions.
VRP picked up the Everybody Votes campaign. Formerly known as “Voting For America,” VRP was an outgrowth of Obama’s Project Vote. Project Vote was an affiliate of ACORN: the bankrupted activist network guilty of violating election laws repeatedly.
Despite having an outsized impact on the 2020 election, it wasn’t until last year that VRP publicized the Everybody Votes campaign.
VRP plans to use the Everybody Votes campaign plan again for 2024, with hiring targeted in Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin in addition to Arizona.
The IRS prohibits 501(c)(3) nonprofits from engaging in partisan activity, especially that which influences election outcomes. AZ Free News documented in February how leftist nonprofits in Arizona manipulate the tax code to do just that.
Corinne Murdock is a reporter for AZ Free News. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to corinne@azfreenews.com.
While the White House touts the success of “Bidenomics,” American families are drowning in debt, especially on credit cards. The latest data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York show Americans ended the first half of this year with over a trillion dollars of credit card debt for the first time ever. At the same time, credit card interest rates are at record highs, pushing many Americans to the financial brink.
How we got here is a lesson in basic economics, something the Biden administration has willfully ignored.
Contrary to the White House talking points, President Joe Biden did not inherit a “reeling” economy and inflation was not “already there.” When he entered the Oval Office, the economy was growing at a $1.5 trillion annualized rate and inflation was 1.4 percent, comfortably below the Federal Reserve’s target inflation rate. But Bidenomics changed all that.
In just a year and a half, Mr. Biden managed to deliver two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth (a recession). Moreover, inflation reached 40-year highs, with prices rising in a single month about as fast as they rose in the entire year before Biden took office.
This is the bitter fruit of the Bidenomics tree. The seed was trillions of dollars in excessive government spending; it was watered with trillions of borrowed dollars and fertilized by the Fed’s printing trillions of dollars. The results are fast-growing prices, a sluggish economy, and family budgets getting squeezed.
Since Mr. Biden took office, prices have risen about 16 percent, but average hourly wages have risen less than 13 percent, and average weekly hours have been cut back. That has left the average American with an effective pay cut of about 5 percent, and families have been using credit cards to make up for that lost purchasing power.
In just two and a half years, outstanding credit card balances have exploded 34 percent, but it gets worse—much worse. The Fed has been steadily raising interest rates to combat the very inflation which it helped cause. That has pushed up borrowing costs, especially on credit cards; their average interest rate is now at an all-time high.
The combination of large balances and high interest rates is a financial death spiral for many American families. When the financing charges on your credit card bill are equal to or greater than what you can afford to pay each month, it becomes impossible to pay down your balance. You are effectively trapped in debt. On top of the higher cost of living, you’re now paying higher financing charges too.
And it’s not just credit card debt that has exploded during Bidenomics. Consumer spending during the last two years has been partly fueled by higher balances for auto loans and mortgages, the latter of which has grown almost $2 trillion in just two and a half years.
Mr. Biden’s false promises of a student loan bailout along with a moratorium on student loan payments have also encouraged young people to take on additional debt for schooling and not pay those loans back. In fact, instead of using the savings from the moratorium to responsibly pay down their debt, most borrowers have been further increasing consumer spending.
American families going deeper into debt is a hallmark of Bidenomics, so much so that even members of Mr. Biden’s administration are beginning to say the quiet part out loud. Vice President Kamala Harris recently claimed that most Americans would go “bankrupt” if they had a $400 emergency expense.
While there is no evidence to support Ms. Harris’ claim, her statement is an indictment of the administration’s economic agenda. For most Americans, a much more likely scenario than bankruptcy is that they would have to put that emergency expense on a credit card—which many families have already had to do.
The squeeze on Americans’ family budgets will continue until we clean up the federal budget. If Washington doesn’t cut trillions of dollars in spending, the bills will keep piling up, both at the Treasury, and in your mailbox.
E.J. Antoni is a contributor to The Daily Caller News Foundation, a public finance economist at The Heritage Foundation, and a senior fellow at Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
Arizona Legislative Republicans are furious over President Joe Biden’s announcement about the Grand Canyon.
During his visit to Arizona on Tuesday, President Joe Biden established the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument. In his signed proclamation, Biden stated, “Protecting the areas to the northeast, northwest, and south of the Grand Canyon will preserve an important spiritual, cultural, prehistoric, and historic legacy; maintain a diverse array of natural and scientific resources; and help ensure that the prehistoric, historic, and scientific value of the areas endures for the benefit of all Americans.”
Today marks a historic step in preserving the majesty of the Grand Canyon.
First among American landmarks. Sacred to Tribal Nations. Revered by every American.
Arizona Republicans were quick to oppose the president’s action in their state. Senator Frank Carroll said, “Halting uranium mining in this region will only promote our country’s dependence on communist China for the minerals needed every day to support our energy supply. Even the FBI has sounded the alarm that China is the greatest long-term threat to our nation’s ideas, economic security and national security, yet President Biden is welcoming a greater reliance on this government with this action.”
Senator David Gowan also issued a statement: “There was entirely inefficient notice from the Biden Administration to the residents, business owners and elected officials of Mohave County. This is not how government should conduct itself within Arizona or within the United States. We don’t need the federal government coming in and dictating to Arizonans how to protect Arizona. We’ve been doing a fine job of conserving our precious resources and will continue to do so. This federal overreach is unacceptable and unconstitutional.”
Last week, Arizona House Majority Leader Leo Biasiucci and Senate Majority Leader Sonny Borreilli requested that an emergency, joint committee hearing be convened in Kingman in order to “hear testimony on President Biden’s radical proposal to circumvent Congress and unilaterally declare a new 1.1 million acre ‘national monument’ near the Grand Canyon in Mohave and Coconino Counties.”
The plea was directed to the Chairs of the House and Senate Committees on Natural Resources, Energy and Water (Rep. Gail Griffin and Sen. Sine Kerr) and the Chair of the House Committee on Land, Agriculture and Rural Affairs (Rep. Lupe Diaz).
The call for the emergency meeting was adhered to by the Chairs of the legislative committees, where Republicans met Monday night in Kingman and “voted to formally oppose the move that promises to adversely impact the state’s economy and our national security by devastating critical industries like mining and cattle ranching.”
Republican Representative John Gillette also chimed in, posting, “Arizona Democrats refuse to show up for public input on the Biden Land Grab. As Biden is planning to designate 1.1 million acres of AZ people land to build wind and solar via executive order 14008. Democrats call public comments a sham. We must vote them out!”
Arizona Democrats refuse to show up for public input on the Biden Land Grab. As Biden is planning to designate 1.1 million acres of AZ people land to build wind and solar via executive order 14008. Democrats call public comments a sham. We must vote them out! pic.twitter.com/cd4Oog2kKR
— Rep. John Gillette AZ House LD30 (@AzRepGillette) August 8, 2023
Senate President Pro Tempore T.J. Shope was at the hearing and shared his support for his fellow Republicans’ efforts to highlight this issue, writing, “Excited to be in Kingman today to discuss my strong opposition to the over 1 Million Acre land-grab in Northern Arizona that President Biden is expected to announce in the coming hours.”
Excited to be in Kingman today to discuss my strong opposition to the over 1 Million Acre land-grab in Northern Arizona that @POTUS Biden is expected to announce in the coming hours. #AZLeghttps://t.co/mhcBMFuWKm
After Biden’s establishment of the National Monument, Shope issued another statement, saying, “The Biden Administration is determined to halt mining across our country and here in Arizona, crippling our ability to meet demands. We must immediately open up mining in Arizona and address other national security risks here locally that are associated with China’s influence. Shame on President Biden for putting our citizens, our resources and our economy at risk.”
Daniel Stefanski is a reporter for AZ Free News. You can send him news tips using this link.
