The Republican-led House Oversight Committee rebuked the claims of its Democrat members on Saturday, who said the House GOP is “wasting” taxpayer money on investigating the “conspiracy” of then-Vice President Joe Biden’s alleged involvement in a $5 million bribery scheme.
“Democrats are lying again about the FBI-generated Biden bribery record,” the GOP-led Oversight Committee tweeted in response to a tweet from the Democrat side of the committee.
The Oversight Committee Democrats tweeted, “In 2020, a sitting Republican Senator confirmed that AG [Attorney General Bill] Barr had begun an assessment—headed by U.S. Attorney [Scott] Brady—to investigate the corruption allegations pushed by [Rudy] Giuliani.”
The thread continued: “Now, Committee Republicans want to revive Giuliani’s conspiracy theories by using the tips he shared with DOJ [Department of Justice] to attack the FBI, damage President Biden, and boost the twice-impeached, twice-indicted former President’s poll numbers.”
The thread from the Democrats shows a video of ranking member Jamie Raskin, D-Md., saying the House GOP is looking into an FBI FD-1023 form “where a confidential human source quoted an oligarch from Ukraine who said that there was corruption with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden.”
“That was checked out by the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, Scott Brady, who was appointed in 2020 by Donald Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, to head up a task force of lawyers and investigators to check out this tip and Rudy Giuliani’s allegations that Joe Biden has been involved in corruption in Ukraine. And that assessment of this tip came back empty-handed,” Raskin said.
But Barr told told the New York Post, “Mr. Raskin seems confused about the limited scope of Mr. Brady’s review.
“The Pittsburgh office was simply adding evidence to ensure that it was not disinformation before passing it on to one of the already existing investigations underway in the department,” Barr added.
“He [Brady] was not authorized to open his own investigation. In other words, he was assessing the credibility of the evidence, not investigating its ultimate merits,” said the former attorney general. The information Brady collected was passed on to Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss.
The GOP-led Oversight Committee tweet continued: “The FBI’s 6/30/20 FD-1023 record stands on its own and contains information from a trusted confidential human source who had conversations with the foreign national who claimed to have bribed Biden.
“This record is being used in an ongoing investigation. Former AG Barr and the FBI have confirmed multiple times.”
NEW YORK, NY - MARCH 17: Former Congressman Barney Frank, D-MA-4, promotes his memoir "Frank: A Life In Politics From The Great Society To Same-Sex Marriage" at Barnes & Noble Union Square on March 17, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Taylor Hill/WireImage)
Barney Frank to Newsmax: ‘Mistake’ to Indict Trump.
As you all know, Barney Frank was one of the first White Progressives to come out of the closet. Sadly mostly white trash followed. But he has something interesting to say.
It was a “mistake” to indict former President Donald Trump on charges connected with documents in his possession, as the move was “politically unwise,” former Rep. Barney Frank said on Newsmax Saturday.
“I think people said, ‘Oh, this is a political indictment,'” the Massachusetts Democrat told Newsmax’s “Saturday Report.” “I think it’s the absence of politics. First of all, let’s be clear — and others have said this: There’s no sign that what Trump did endangered national security.”
Instead, Frank said that he thinks that documents were moved to Trump’s properties in a move that was “self-indulgent and sloppy.”
“I would like him to explain why he did it,” said Frank. “My own guess is that there were embarrassing things in there, for example, about his love affair with the dictator of North Korea, which [he] recently reaffirmed. But there’s no allegation that American national security was harmed by this.”
Frank added that he’d like to see the issue of Trump work out at the ballot box in November 2024, and the “best way to do that is to run against Donald Trump.”
Mark Zuckerberg Admits Scientific Establishment’s Frequent Errors Undermined Public Trust in COVID Misinformation Censorship.
Meta (Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed recently that the scientific “establishment” asked his platform to “censor” posts about COVID-19 that ended up being “debatable or true.”
In his comments during Thursday’s episode of the “Lex Fridman Podcast,” Zuckerberg discussed the “issues and challenges” of executing his platform’s policies on removing “misinformation.”
He said it can be “really tricky” when some content is false, “but may not be harmful, so it’s like, alright, are you going to censor someone for just being wrong, if there’s no kind of harm implication of what they’re doing?’
https://twitter.com/i/status/1667011470406860803
Zuckerberg noted the “establishment” encouraged him to enforce these shaky facts, saying they “asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true.”
He admitted to Fridman that he believes the requests made to him by the scientific community hurt their credibility with the public. “It really undermines trust,” he added.
Now that Trump has been indicted, why is Joe Biden walking as a free man? As we all know, the President can declassify top secret documents. Biden as a Senator or Vice President could not.
Now I’m thinking they’re letting Biden get his affairs in order before they show up and take him off. Remember he had documents spread out over several states. When confronted with this, he played dumb and said he had no idea how they got there. He had no idea why they were in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and California.
Trups documents were in a locked room. Plus Secret service agents were on the premises. Biden had documents in a box on the floor. Plus in other locations that were not locked.
Biden’s secure location. His garage.
Let’s hope when they show up to take Joe in, he doesn’t have a heart attack or stroke.
It’s a known fact that if the name were to be revealed, the Democrats would reveal it and that person would not be long for this world. What will be telling is what will the media say when this is revealed.
FBI officials confirmed Monday that the unclassified FBI-generated record “has not been disproven and is currently being used in an ongoing investigation by a confidential human source who provided information about the vice president by being involved in a criminal bribery scheme is a trusted, highly credible informant who has been used by the FBI for over ten years and has been paid over 6 figures.”
Remember Congressman Raskin denied that this was revealed to him. Denied it even though the FBI told him that four times.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr has denied a claim from Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) that the Justice Department concluded its investigation into allegations of President Biden taking a $5 million bribe.
AFP via Getty Images
Since Monday the Progressives have been having a lovefest over former AG Barr. They were buying the Raskin story that Barr looked at the latest Biden scandal story and passed on it saying it’s not true.
Well Raskin has some explaining to do. Barr said that the information about Biden was passed on to Scott Brady, the former US attorney for Pittsburgh who served from 2017 to 2021, had been tasked with the investigation before passing on the information to Delaware US Attorney David Weiss. This was told to Raskin four times. It’s still being investigated.
But even this afternoon Raskin is still claiming that Barr dismissed the story.
Before rebranding as a warrior for free speech and a passionate crusader for privacy rights, newly announced presidential contender Vivek Ramaswamy was pitching the U.S. and world governments on his efforts to install a broad, centralized database of private medical records.
All without the consent of the actual patients
In a pursuit forged through one of his subsidiary companies, a “health information” data mining outfit called Datavant, Ramaswamy’s outfit pursued the establishment of a single national and global database for all covid-related patient health records.
Through a partnership with Snowflake, a San Francisco-based cloud computing company, Ramaswamy wanted to “fight covid-19” by manufacturing a “single repository of all the real-world medical data” thanks to the production of a “national data infrastructure” of private and public patient records, all without the consent of the actual patients.
Datavant claimed the records would be anonymized through their internal systems and that the broad database would only be available to researchers and government officials. However, some weren’t buying the sales pitch, citing gross violations of medical privacy. Moreover, none of the methods to supposedly anonymize records were made open source for review.
Nonetheless Ramaswamy’s Datavant sought to profit off of the hysteria and violate basic ethical standards in the process. They succeeded in establishing a partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
While some companies were happy to contribute to the Datavant endeavor, citing the “national emergency” as the ultimate precedent for violating patient consent standards, many others balked at the idea, citing privacy issues.
Anthem Inc (now known as Elevance Health), the second largest health insurance company in the U.S., rejected the appeal to deliver customer records into a national and global database. When reached by the Wall Street Journal, an Anthem spokesperson said that “Anthem takes the security of its data and the personal information of health plan members very seriously.”
“Datavant’s proposed registry would be free for government and academic researchers to access, and would aim to include every patient who has been tested for Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus,” The WSJ story reported. “The consortium is aiming to have data covering 80% of U.S. medical claims, including those submitted to private insurers as well as Medicaid and Medicare Advantage.”
A fierce privacy advocate and “free speech absolutist”?
Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at Yale University, expressed concern about Ramaswamy’s data mining effort, telling Endpoints News: “This is highly sensitive information and the effort is important, but it is important to know the details.”
Datavant later helped to establish a global Covid-19 research database. However, like most of Ramaswamy’s previous business ventures, the end product was not remotely successful. The database is linked to a handful of incredibly shoddy covid-19 studies.
On the campaign trail, Mr. Ramaswamy has presented himself as a fierce privacy advocate and “free speech absolutist.” Nonetheless, his blunder-heavy business record shows a man who has long been invested in financing and developing tools to invade sovereignty and personal privacy.
For more on Ramaswamy’s paradoxical advocacy and his continually changing political posturing, read Vetting Vivek Ramaswamy in The Dossier.
He’s running as a “R(ino)EPUBLICAN?” Just from this alone, if I had to choose between this yahoo and Pence, I’d be forced to vote for Pence — whom I can’t stand. –TPR
Power the Future Executive Director Daniel Turner joined ‘Fox & Friends’ to discuss how the policies are ‘taking a toll’ on Americans and the broader concerns surrounding the push.
The Biden administration is expected to soon finalize regulations restricting which home gas-powered furnaces consumers are able to purchase in the future.
According to experts, the regulations — proposed in June 2022 by the Department of Energy (DOE) — would restrict consumer choice, drive prices higher and likely have a low impact on greenhouse gas emissions. The agency could finalize the rules targeting residential gas furnaces, which more than 50% of American households rely on for space heating, at any point over the upcoming weeks.
“This is a classic example of one size not fitting all,” Ben Lieberman, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told Fox News Digital in an interview. “Every home is different, every homeowner is different and people are best off having a wide range of choices. They can work with their contractor to make the best decision for their home and their circumstances.”
“The efficiency standard would effectively outlaw non-condensing furnaces and condensing alternatives would be the only ones available,” Lieberman said. “Those are more efficient, but they cost more. And installation costs could be a big problem for some houses that are not compatible with condensing furnaces.”
“These efficiency measures not only reduce carbon and methane emissions, but also provide huge material benefits to American households in the form of cleaner air, modernized technology, and cheaper energy,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said after proposing the furnace standards last year. (Aaron M. Sprecher/Bloomberg)
Under the proposed regulations, DOE would require furnaces to achieve an annual fuel utilization efficiency (AFUE) of 95% by 2029, meaning manufacturers would only be allowed to sell furnaces that convert at least 95% of fuel into heat within six years. The current market standard AFUE for a residential furnace is 80%.
Because of the stringent AFUE requirements, the regulations would largely take non-condensing gas furnaces — which are generally less efficient, but cheaper — off the market. But consumers who replace their non-condensing furnace with a condensing furnace after the rule is implemented, face hefty installation costs.
“There are some really technical reasons why this is such a concerning rule,” Richard Meyer, the vice president of energy markets, analysis and standards at the American Gas Association (AGA), told Fox News Digital in an interview. “It has to do with the ability for consumers to be in compliance with this new efficiency standard.”
“They’re going to have to, in many cases, install new equipment to exhaust gas out of their home. These higher efficiency units, or so-called condensing units — a lot of consumers have them in their home, but a lot of consumers don’t. So, this rule would require additional retrofits for a lot of consumers. And those retrofits can be extremely cost prohibitive.”
The AGA, whose members provide natural gas to more than 74 million customers nationwide, filed comments in opposition of the furnace rules with the DOE last year. The industry group has argued consumers would be better served if the agency allowed the free market to naturally increase product efficiency.
Overall, between 40-60% of the current residential furnaces on the market currently would be prohibited under the proposed regulation.
A new natural gas furnace is pictured at a residential home in Spanish Fork, Utah, on Oct. 19, 2021. (George Frey/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“What we’re seeing across the U.S. federal government and reflected, of course, in many states right now is an active policy push intended to address climate change,” said Meyer. “But the outcome is to restrict the options and availability of the direct use of natural gas for consumers.”
“AGA’s primary concern is, one, removing that option, that choice, from consumers,” he continued. “Two, in many cases, natural gas remains the lowest cost and even lowest-emissions resource for many consumers. A lot of the policies we’re seeing that are designed to restrict natural gas may end up having a counterproductive result and could increase costs to consumers and could increase the emissions associated with the energy use by those consumers.”
In its announcement last year, the DOE claimed the efficiency standards would save the average family about $100 a year and reduce carbon emissions by 373 million metric tons and methane emissions by 5.1 million tons.
Francis Dietz, a spokesperson for the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute which represents heating equipment manufacturers, said his organization’s members are in favor of regulations that aren’t “overly stringent.”
“Our main goal in this is to have a rule that is reasonable enough so that there are still higher efficiency choices for consumers,” he told Fox News Digital. “So, you know, you would have one at a level low enough where it would be more affordable for consumers and others who felt they needed even more efficiency would still have some choices there. That’s really our main goal.”
Over the last several months the Biden administration has taken aims at several household appliances including gas stoves as part of its climate agenda.
The expected rule, meanwhile, comes amid a blitz of DOE rulemaking targeting appliance efficiency standards. Over the last several months, the DOE has unveiled new standards for various appliances including gas stoves, ovens, clothes washers, refrigerators, air conditioners and dishwashers.
And in December, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm touted that the administration had taken 110 actions on energy efficiency standards in 2022 alone. The energy secretary added that the regulations strengthened U.S. leadership in “the race towards a clean energy future.”
According to the current federal Unified Agenda, a government-wide, semiannual list that highlights regulations agencies plan to propose or finalize within the next 12 months, the Biden administration is moving forward with rules impacting dozens more appliances, including pool pumps, battery chargers, ceiling fans and dehumidifiers.
Under the DOE’s mission statement, the Unified Agenda highlights advancing “energy efficiency and conservation” as one of five central pillars. Broadly, Democrats and environmentalists have argued that electrification, banning natural gas hookups and implementing strict energy efficiency standards could help accelerate emissions reductions.
Organizations such as the Moms for Liberty seek to push back against critical race theory in schools. (Reuters)
Why do groups like Moms for Liberty scare White Progressives, certain Blacks, and the LGBTQ crowd? It’s really very simple. Moms for Liberty feel that they do not need co-parents. Schools should teach the children how to Read, Write, and Arithmetic.
White Progressives have no issues with teachers going off curriculum and injecting their social views. That’s not what a well rounded education is about.
Some Black parents and Black hate groups are more about students learning about racism, and government programs than learning how to do it for themselves.
The LGBTQ crowd cares about what boys can be girls and girls can be boys. Big topic is about boys using girls bathrooms.
A few months ago, Mike Rowe stumbled upon a 2011 video of himself speaking in front of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee during the Obama administration about the mindset of government toward skilled trades. His argument was that skilled trades were the key to saving our economy, not those jobs that require a four-year degree.
His argument fell on deaf ears.
So he went again in April of 2014, this time testifying before the House Committee on Natural Resources to discuss the opportunities for skilled trade workers in the energy industry. This time he brought props, specifically the poster his guidance counselor from high school pointed to when he tried to bully Rowe into picking a high-priced university over a community college his senior year.
Rowe said he had nothing against college, but the universities his counselor recommended were expensive. “I had no idea what I wanted to study. I thought a community college made more sense, but Mr. Dunbar said a two-year school was ‘beneath my potential’,” explained Rowe.
“Mr. Dunbar pointed to a poster hanging behind his desk — on one side of the poster was a beaten-down, depressed-looking blue-collar worker. On the other side was an optimistic college graduate with his eyes on the horizon. Underneath them, the text read: Work Smart NOT Hard,” Rowe told the committee.
“Mike, look at these two guys,” Mr. Dunbar said. “Which one do you want to be?”
The “Work Smart, Not Hard” PR poster used in the 1970s inside guidance counselor offices across the country.
(Courtesy photo)
“I had to read the caption twice. Work Smart NOT Hard?” Rowe recounted.
The visual was jarring, not to mention insulting, yet once again, nothing happened.
Rowe made his final plea to Congress in March of 2017 when he once again schlepped to Capitol Hill, this time for the House Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary, and Secondary Education. He discussed how Career and Technical Education (CTE) can help close the skills gap and empower students to succeed, and stressed the need to reform the current law.
His message was simple: Career and technical education, and skilled trade professions, need a PR makeover and a champion. “If you want to make America great again, you’ve got to make work cool again,” he said.
This time he got some movement. The Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act (Perkins Act) — the primary federal law aimed at developing and supporting CTE programs — was reauthorized, but not with the robust reform needed. His ideal of a groundswell of support for the trades from our lawmakers never materialized.
Rowe said his quixotic quest sprang from the early days of his mikeroweWORKS Foundation , as he was trying to figure things out. “The first time I went [to Congress], I was trying to figure out what the foundation really ought to be, and I essentially told them the ideals of ‘work’ needs better PR,” he explained.
Rowe reminded lawmakers that good PSAs make people think. “Like the weeping Indian made us think about littering because of the iconography that accompanied the whole campaign. It was also Woodsy the Owl and Smokey the Bear; they all got people to think in terms of basic conservation differently,” he said.
“So my point to Congress was we just have to get people to think differently about the definition of a good job. And we need to put better examples of real people out there who are prospering as the result of learning a trade,” he said.
Rowe realized after three futile attempts of trying to figure out who should do it that no one was ever going to launch that campaign. “No concerned citizen group, no NGOs, certainly no group of corporations — all who had a hand in the anti-littering campaigns of the 70’s — were going to step up, despite their efforts working in every measurable way,” Rowe explained.
So, he’s doing it himself.
“We just shot seven or eight PSAs a couple months ago with people who we helped through the trade scholarship fund at the foundation. HVAC workers, plumbers, welders, all making six figures, and I am going to put these PSA’s out there in the same spirit of those ads that made people think differently about conservation, and we are going to make people think differently about work,” he said.
The spots are pitch-perfect. The first one with Chloe Hudson begins with Rowe dispelling the notion that you cannot make six figures working with your hands. It then cuts to Hudson, a welder who received a work ethic scholarship from mikeroweWORKS and went on to earn six figures a year, talking about the beauty of her life.
Welder Chloe Hudson was awarded a work ethic scholarship from the MikeRoweWORKS Foundation.
(Courtesy photo)
“I’m going to raise whatever I have to, I’m going to spend whatever I have to get these examples front and center. So that’s what I’ve got. In a way, it’s nothing new. In another way, it’s me finally saying, ‘Look, this was a good idea 10 years ago, and why not me?’ I’ll do it. I’m going to do it,” Rowe says with his characteristic charm that has endeared him to millions for more than 20 years.
His endeavor is not without risk; in the foundation space, people are suspicious of marketing and advertising, and Rowe doesn’t blame them for being skittish. “If you look at just one random example, whether it’s the Red Cross or the United Way, people go to the sites, and they’re like, ‘All right, well, how much money did you spend in this category of administration or marketing? And how much did you actually put for your program?'” he said.
“It is a conversation I have to have with my own people from time to time because we’re not a scholarship fund primarily. We are going to give away $2 million this year, and we’ve given away close to $8 million so far, and we’re going to give away a lot more. But my purpose in giving the money away through work ethic scholarships is to make sure that I can circle back in a couple of years to find somebody who has a story to tell, because their stories will move the needle with guidance counselors, who, by the way, are still getting bonuses on the number of people they steer toward college, not toward trade schools,” he explained.
Rowe said people really need to acknowledge the “unspeakable stupidity” of taking shop classes out of high schools 40 years ago. “The unintended consequences of that alone have been unraveling in ways that’s just mind-boggling. We effectively removed from view an entire category of vocations,” he said.
“In the long history of stupidity, you’d have to go a long way to find something dumber than universally removing shop class from high school. But of course, at the same time we did that, we started telling that same generation of kids that the best path for the most people was the most expensive path,” he said of the idea that higher education is the only path to success.
Which brings Rowe to wonder: Were they intentionally telling students who went into trades that they were achieving lower education?
It should make us wonder as well: Who did these decision-makers think was going to take care of their plumbing, fix their car, install their air conditioning, repair their furnace, or rewire their house?
Rowe said in their defense, they were launching a PR campaign for four-year schools. “What they did was what always happens with these PR initiatives; you go too far. They weren’t content to merely say, ‘Look, we need more people going into higher ed. We need more doctors, we need more engineers.’ The truth is, we did, but they went too far too fast.”
In short, rather than just making a persuasive case for a four-year degree, they did it at the expense of anything other than a four-year degree. That’s when everything that wasn’t the university path became subordinate.
Rowe said he knows he is not going to open the eyes of the varsity blues crowd. “I can’t. They’re not persuadable. But there are a lot of people in the middle, a lot of people that just want to feel better about the possibility of exploring a career. So that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to take my own advice. I’m going to stop telling Congress what to do, and I’m going to do it myself,” he said.
