If the latest charges against Trump start to fall apart, it will throw the spotlight back on Democrats and Biden, and confirm what half the country believes – that this is a politically motivated prosecution.

Trump, about to turn 77, is still in a precarious position heading into 2024, with possible indictments related to Jan. 6 and Georgia still to go. Just from a stamina point of view, it will be tough for Trump to survive the heat.

But polls conducted after the 37-count indictment on classified documents was released show the former president is still the frontrunner in the GOP race. A clear majority of Republican primary voters – 81% – say they believe the indictment for illegally keeping secret documents and lying about it is politically motivated.

That’s a clear indication that the charges won’t yet hurt Trump’s cause in the GOP primaries, and may in fact boost him. A new Reuters poll showed 43% of Republicans support Trump, while just 22% picked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

But it’s still early and those numbers could change as more evidence comes back against Trump.

Trump is now in Miami in preparation for his court appearance on Tuesday, but he is already defiant in denying the indictment.

“I HOPE THE ENTIRE COUNTRY IS WATCHING WHAT THE RADICAL LEFT ARE DOING TO AMERICA,” he posted on his Truth Social site.

The question now is, will the spotlight eventually come back to Biden and his own problem with keeping classified documents in his garage?

And will voters blame Biden for bringing the case against Trump, despite the president’s attempts to stay away from it?

It’s pretty hard for Biden to claim he knows nothing about the indictments. Difficult to believe the Department of Justice wouldn’t at least brief the White House about the coming charges. The DOJ is part of the administration, along with the FBI.

If the latest indictment starts to fizzle, it could be bad news for the president and rocket fuel for Trump, much the same way the collapse of the Russian collusion case helped the former president.

Republican voters – and many independents – seem inclined to side with Trump right now in this latest attempt to wound him legally. And they are bound to take it out against Biden.

At the very least, the case against Trump is likely to drag on well past next year’s election, meaning voters will have to decide based on incomplete information.

The 80-year-old Biden – if he really does follow through with his reelection plans – better hope that Americans start to turn against his former rival soon, or there will be a reversal of the 2020 election — no matter how many indictments they bring.

A difficulty for Biden, however, is that the tax rate is more than three times bigger than he said, 25.6%, either demonstrating that he made a major mistake or qualifies to be called a political trickster. I endorse the second possibility, seeing as how the tiny-tax assertion could confuse the public enough for him to seem a hero catching cheapskate billionaires even though the top 1% of taxpayers deliver something like 43% of all federal taxes.

The way Biden arrives at his deception is by saying the billionaires and still other super-rich tax targets pay nothing for the unrealized gains they have in their stock portfolios. In fact, nobody does. The Constitution limits the personal income tax to actual income a person has received, not something that might be converted into income someday. Understand, too, that when stocks are finally exchanged for money, the money is in fact taxed.

But there is this to be said for taxes: If they are fair and honest, they are the best way to finance our government and, if they become egregious, the government should find ways to reduce the costs to what is affordable.

The worst and most common fiscal threat these days is something else: over-borrowing. Our debt has grown to an unbelievable $31.4 trillion with an ever-increasing expense of borrowing having sky-high consequences, a yearly cost of $352 billion in 2021, $475 billion in 2022 and a predicted $640 billion in 2023.

As far back as 1960, Congress decided that the federal government should establish a debt limit keeping spending and taxing within reasonable bounds by allowing no borrowing beyond cautious calculation. Knowing things could still go wrong, Congress also gave itself permission to vote to end the borrowing limit if a majority concurred. Guess what? The limit has been raised 68 times since then.

In 2006, a smart U.S. senator named Barack Obama explained it was a “leadership failure” when the government couldn’t pay its own bills from tax revenue but had to borrow and pay loads of interest. The interest paid that year, the senator said, was more than the costs of Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, education, homeland security, transportation and veterans benefits, all combined.

One of Biden’s biggest mistakes was to spend unneeded trillions on COVID-19 recovery on top of the trillions enacted under Trump that did the job by themselves. Various other factors helped initiate a recent debt-limit crisis that would have led to a ruinous default if we had not paid owed interest to foreign countries.

The catastrophe was averted because the debt limit was dropped by way of a compromise between Biden and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy who persuaded Biden to reduce some significant costs. What we need now is compromises that adjust taxes and spending in accordance with reason and reality on both sides of the aisle and a new president in 2024 unlike Biden, Trump or the previously cited sagacious senator who broke spending records as a president.

Tribune News Service

It wouldn’t be an indictment of Donald Trump if it did not contain at least one count of making false statements. One surmises that this is the only count that truly shocked Trump, who was assessed by the Washington Post to have made over 35,000 false statements during his presidency alone, and that only counts public ones.

Trump apparently doesn’t have any attorneys, at least in The Case of The Stolen National Security Secrets, because more or less contemporaneously with the unsealing of the indictment, the two principal lawyers representing him quit. True to form, Trump insisted that he had fired them. But apart from the fact that nothing Trump says is truthful, no rational attorney appreciates being associated with a debacle.

Both the evidence and the law disfavor Trump – lopsidedly. Of the hundreds of classified documents that Trump deliberately took with him to Mar-a-Lago and deliberately withheld knowing that he could not lawfully do so, the Justice Department chose to confine itself to charging Trump on 31, marked either “secret” or “top secret.” These included documents regarding White House intelligence briefings, documents concerning our military capabilities and those of foreign countries, documents concerning our military planning, documents concerning our vulnerability to military attack – and documents concerning our nuclear weapons. “The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents,” the grand jury charged, “could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.”

Trump had these sensitive documents strewn all over Mar-a-Lago – in his office, in his bathroom and in a ballroom, and actively schemed to keep representatives of the United States government from finding them. He suggested to certain of his lawyers that they lie to the FBI and the grand jury about his retention of the documents, and suggested to another that he hide or destroy documents. In familiar mob boss fashion — familiar to mob bosses and familiar to Trump – he caused another of his attorneys to falsely certify that all classified documents had been turned over, knowing, of course, that that was a lie. We will never know the scope of the harm that Trump has caused the women and men of our armed forces, or to the country as a whole. All we really now, from experience, is that Donald Trump couldn’t care less.

MAGA World responded with the usual risible nonsense, chalking the indictment up to retaliation by “the Biden Crime Family,” and so forth. William Barr, Trump’s former Attorney General, was somewhat more tethered. “These documents are among the most sensitive secrets the country has,” Barr told Fox News. “If even half of (the indictment) is true then he’s toast.” Donald Trump may indeed be headed to prison at long last. But it is the country he falsely claims to give a damn about that’s gotten burnt.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission.

The question is whether he would be running for president had not Donald Trump, as expected, been indicted again, this time on far out and desperate federal charges over alleged mishandling of classified documents.

Still, you have to hand it to the former governor of New Jersey.

He is the only one of eight or so Republicans who ran against Donald Trump for president in the GOP primaries in 2016 who is now running again.

He did not last very long back then, and probably won’t now, throwing in the towel after coming in sixth in the New Hampshire presidential primary.

Yet, Christie, 60, a former two term governor, was in New Hampshire Tuesday where he announced his candidacy for president again.

It is a given that Trump gets into people’s heads and drives them loco. This not only includes progressives who hate him, but Republicans like Christie as well.

And he is going to drive his opponents even crazier as his popularity soars and his fundraising increases following the latest questionable criminal proceedings against him.

“I never thought it possible that such a thing could happen to a former President of the United States,” Trump said, echoing the thoughts of millions of Americans. But these are the times we live in. If you can’t beat him, indict him.

Christie, back when he was considered a rising GOP figure, was once against Donald Trump for president before he was for him. Now he is against him again.

Before endorsing Trump in 2016, Christie on the campaign trail referred to Trump as a “carnival barker.”

“I don’t think that he’s suited to be president of the United States,” he said. “I don’t think his temperament is suited for that and I don’t think his experience is.”

After he was routed in the New Hampshire 2016 primary he provided Trump with an important endorsement, becoming the first Republican governor or senator to publicly come out for Trump.

“I will lend my support between now and November in any way for Donald Trump,” Christie said.

Christie then went on to campaign for Trump with the hope perhaps of becoming attorney general or a cabinet secretary. Trump did name Christie to head his transition team after he was elected, but Christie was shortly replaced by Mike Pence.

Now Christie, a longshot in a field of longshots, is on the attack again.

Appearing at a town hall type setting at Saint Anselm College, Christie said, “The person I am talking about, who is obsessed with the mirror, who never admits a mistake, who never admits a fault, and who always finds someone else and something else to blame for whatever goes wrong, but takes credit for anything that goes right, is Donald Trump.”

Christie could have been talking about Joe Biden.

But neither Christie nor any of the other Republicans candidates are running against Joe Biden. They are running against Donald Trump.

If they think Biden’s cowardly vendetta against Trump will help them, they are wrong.  Trump will campaign on the indictment, and the twisting of the justice system to indict him will only show how fundamentally fearful, vindictive and weak Biden is.

As for several of Trump’s GOP opponents, including Christie, their first (and maybe last) opportunity to confront Trump on it will come at the GOP’s first presidential debate August 23 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

To qualify for the debate, a candidate must have received 40,000 contributions from individual donors; showed at least 1 % in three national polls, or 1% in two national polls and 1% in two early state polls.

The rules are aimed toward eliminating fringe candidates.

Also, each participant must pledge to support whoever emerges as the Republican nominee for president.

Christie, well before he announced, said there was “no way” he would support Trump as the GOP nominee even though Trump does not want or need his support. Trump doesn’t even want or need the debate.

The extraordinary and pathetic indictment of a former president by Biden’s politized U.S. Justice Department on such weak charges may be enough to re-elect Donald Trump.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

The right to spread information — even information that may counter national security interests — is well established. The concerns raised by Montana and two presidential administrations go far beyond this, focusing on the app’s tracking — including gathering information about others — and collection of information on a mass scale. This collection could lead to numerous threats, ranging from future cyberattacks to election tampering to recruiting U.S. citizen spies. This information is also useful for commercial purposes such as targeting advertisements for goods and services.

The United States has several competing interests to consider. The first is constitutional: we value the freedom of speech, and TikTok is a speech platform. It is a way that millions of content creators connect with their viewers and followers. In most cases, the U.S. and state governments are constitutionally limited from regulating speech.

We also want our companies to be able to do business worldwide. If the United States is not seen to welcome foreign enterprises, other countries can justify their actions based on their perception of U.S. actions. This may limit the ability of U.S. manufacturers, farmers, software developers and others to sell their products abroad.

The United States also has a strong national interest in delivering messaging about American values to other countries. Our television, movies, books, websites and apps are all part of sharing our values and culture with those in areas less open than the United States. Again, U.S. action to limit apps and ideas from other countries can be readily used by our strategic competitors and adversaries to justify banning American content.

While the openness of idea-sharing is important and powerful, we don’t need to share all our data — particularly if this risks greater foreign-based identity theft and other cyberattacks. This is part of a broader question regarding how much data apps, websites, governments and others should be collecting (and how it should be collected and stored). Notably, foreign data storage places the data outside U.S. regulatory control, increasing the potential for misuse and reducing the accountability for abuse when it occurs.

App-based social media, including TikTok, raise concerns over their ability to collect extensive data. Such data ranges from GPS-based location tracking to personally identifiable information, such as birth date, age, and answers to common security questions, including physical attributes and background details gleaned from content. In the wrong hands, TikTok videos lend themselves to creating deepfakes and impersonations. Moreover, the problem is exacerbated by the app’s popularity, particularly among youth — a demographic that may not fully understand the implications of their online behavior. As such, social media companies must address these legitimate privacy concerns and ensure the protection of their users.

While foreign control of companies like TikTok intensifies the data problem, there can also be similar problems with domestic companies. A domestic firm may collect and share data with foreign partners, have data stolen via a cyberattack by a foreign state or state-aligned group, or even be purchased by a foreign firm. Of course, the domestic firm may misuse the data itself, or it could be stolen and misused by a domestic criminal organization.

Except for the lack of regulatory control and the organization’s intent, the domestic and foreign data collection problems are similar. Several things can be done to help.

First, we need to reduce our reliance on easily compromised identifiers. For example, the Social Security number was not designed to serve as the primary identifier it has become. Companies also don’t use it responsibly, as relying on a number that can be readily stolen from any number of locations in a singular way, typically along with some basic contact information, to extend credit or verify an individual’s identity is highly problematic. The use of the Social Security number should be phased out in deference to other secure identifying mechanisms.

We also need national privacy protections that give individuals control over how their information is used and by whom. This is a combination of a technical and policy issue. On the technical side, we need technologies that give consumers control over their identities and payment mechanisms. We will need policies that hold companies accountable for delivering what they claim to, respecting consumers’ decisions, and regulating the use of reusable legacy identifiers and other information.

Education is also essential. Everyone needs to understand and be on guard regarding their personal information, to whom they provide it and for what purposes.  Requiring companies to respect individuals’ privacy decisions is ineffective if individuals don’t do their part.  Technological and policy safeguards must protect those who lack — due to age, disability or otherwise — the ability to protect their own data.

Finally, we should require reciprocity from nations whose companies operate in our market and use access to our market to guarantee our companies equitable and fair access to other markets. We also should consider sanctions against countries that refuse to play by fair rules.  The United States must commit to promoting and enforcing digital rights, ensuring citizens have control over their data and access to an open internet.

Jeremy Straub is the director of the North Dakota State University’s Institute for Cyber Security Education and Research./InsideSources.com.

That’s the mantra this weekend among Democrats and state-run media (but I repeat myself).

In America today, that is undoubtedly true. No man — or woman — is above the law.

Unless his or her name is, say, Biden or Clinton or Comey or Clapper or Brennan or Wray or McCabe or Strzok or Lerner or Holder or… well, you get the picture.

No man is above the law unless… he’s a Democrat. In which case, there are no laws. Or at least, none that will ever be used against you.

If you read the feds’ “sweeping” indictment of former President Donald J. Trump, the charges barely rise to the level of, “Are you kidding me?”

The key evidence — the smoking gun — seems to be a conversation Trump had two summers ago in New Jersey. He was talking with several people — also known as witnesses — concerning an upcoming book. His remarks were recorded, because Trump didn’t want to be misquoted down the road.

Trump was chatting about the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark “Thoroughly Modern” Milley, the pride of Belmont Hill School.

Milley had been dumping on Trump, around the clock, on all the stations on the RCHN — the Russian Collusion Hoax Network. Milley’s latest whopper was that after the 2020 election, Trump had wanted to attack Iran.

The president had been rummaging around in some old documents — the way anybody does who’s looking for some piece of paper that’s suddenly become germane again. Apparently POTUS had just found what he was looking for.

The crooked G-men Democrats don’t use the words “Milley” and “Iran” because that’s the official procedure if you’re on the level, which they most certainly aren’t. But Milley and Iran are who and what Trump is talking about.

This is Trump on his own tape, talking about Thoroughly Modern Milley:

“He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t that amazing? I have a big pile of papers. This just came up. Look — that was him.”

He was probably holding the paper up, like anybody would do.

“They presented me this — this is off the record. They presented this to me. This was him… This wasn’t done by me. This was him.”

And next comes what I guess special Democrat prosecutor who calls himself “Jack Smith” considers the smoking gun.

“This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.”

To which I say, Big bleepin’ deal.

Okay, Trump shouldn’t have been waving the documents around, but so what? It’s not like he’s accused of taking $10 million in payoffs from a country to which we have now funneled at least $75 billion in foreign handouts to — do you see where I’m going with this?

The FBI has been ignoring those accusations against Joe Biden since 2020. If Republicans hadn’t won the House, the G-men would still be giving all the crooked Bidens a good-leaving alone.

But, but I thought no man was above the law.

Compared to what the Bidens are accused of, these allegations against Trump seem like very thin gruel indeed. Yet a special counsel to frame, I mean investigate Trump was appointed just last November. Now, less than seven months later, we have a 37-count indictment.

There’s a famous quote attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, the head of Stalin’s secret police: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

A Boston lawyer named Harvey Silverglate wrote a book about how easy it is now for the G-men to take down whomever they decide to target.

The title says it all: “Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent.”

Maybe Trump did violate some obscure statute about classified documents, but does he stand accused of taking millions in payoffs from sinister foreign nationals?

Was Trump ever the beneficiary of a vast left-wing conspiracy by the “intelligence community” after his son admitted on his laptop to being Joe Biden’s bagman and picking up cash for the family from the Red Chinese?

Of course not. Because… Democrats. Call it professional courtesy.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton was likewise violating the Espionage Act, only on a much grander scale, among other things destroying 33,000 emails subpoenaed by Congress. She hired the wife of an NBC “News” anchor as her lawyer. Her Democrat fellow travelers then permitted her to claim attorney-client privilege for all her aides, even the ones who weren’t lawyers. That meant nobody could testify against her. How convenient.

Yet Trump’s lawyer was just forced by a Democrat judge to turn over evidence against him because… Republicans.

At the end Hillary wasn’t indicted, because, as corrupt FBI boss James Comey lectured, “No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.”

Again, professional courtesy.

The FBI sat on Hunter Biden’s laptop for months, doing absolutely nothing, trying to run out the clock on the statute of limitations. But boy did the G-men move fast on Trump making a joke about Thoroughly Modern Milley.

I’m just surprised Trump also wasn’t charged with some federal version of lese-majeste, or maybe even blasphemy, for making sport of that bloated paper-shuffler Milley. How dare anyone laugh at the teammate of Adm. Rachel Levine on the 1-6 Belmont Hill football team of 1974!

And such fortuitous timing for the indictment, the day after we finally find out what was in that FD-1023 that the G-men a week ago were claiming didn’t exist. And the charges also came shortly after the release of the incredible Durham report about the Democrats’ Russian collusion hoax, and all the bombshells therein.

Hillary’s hoax was the biggest scandal in American political history, by far. Yet nobody went to prison, nobody even lost their pensions. Instead they all got big book contracts, sinecures on state-run cable TV and lecture tours. They became “adjunct professors” of ethics and bought mansions on Martha’s Vineyard.

But no man is above the law. Remember that, all you damn deplorables. Wink wink nudge nudge.

At least that’s the claim of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a far-left political organization that is drawing scorn for labeling Moms for Liberty and other parental rights organizations as “extremist organizations.”  The SPLC even includes them on the same “hate map” as neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

Another GOP candidate, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, just held a town hall in New Hampshire with Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice. Like many SPLC critics, he dismissed the attack as “a farce.”

“The SPLC is a tentacle of the woke-industrial complex,” Ramaswamy said. “I’m proud to be the first candidate to sign the Moms for Liberty Parent Pledge.”

While often presented in media reports as a neutral authority on hate crimes, the SPLC makes no secret of its left-of-center politics. In its report lumping parents protesting school board policies with the White supremacist militia movement, the SPLC made repeated partisan attacks against Republicans. It also claimed “backlash is a political strategy,” not a natural response from concerned parents.

Among their indicators that Moms for Liberty is an “extremist group” is its support for shutting down the federal Department of Education, a policy embraced by millions of Americans and multiple presidential candidates every four years.

The SPLC report included 523 “hate groups” in its latest map, which includes 230 chapters of Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education and other parental rights organizations. It also includes the Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom, both organizations promoting religious liberty and Christian beliefs, on the “hate groups” list.

In response, Moms for Liberty tweeted, “Last year, the Biden White House worked with the (National School Boards Association) to label Parents Domestic Terrorists. Today, the SPLC labels our organization — an org full of moms who care about their kids — a Hate Group. This is a coordinated attempt to silence and suppress us.”

Justice called the SPLC’s actions “absurd.”

“They put our picture next to the KKK? How ridiculous is that?”

Asked why the parents’ rights movement is facing so much backlash, Justice said it starts at the White House. “Look at what Joe Biden said. ‘There is no such thing as someone else’s child. Our nation’s children are all our children.’ Parents are saying, ‘No! They are my children.’ We have a right to oversee their upbringing. The culture war is in the classroom, parents are getting involved in protecting our kids, and now they’re fighting back.”

That’s not the only Biden connection. The Washington Free Beacon reports the author of the new SPLC report met with Biden’s National Security Council counterterrorism director John Picarelli at the White House earlier this year.

Jeremy Tedesco, Alliance Defending Freedom’s senior vice president of corporate engagement, said, “The Southern Poverty Law Center is a thoroughly discredited, blatantly partisan activist outfit known for sexism, racism and condoning domestic terrorism. No one should be listening to the SPLC. It is preposterous to now see the SPLC target moms and dads who simply want to have a voice at school board meetings — this is an organization that has lost its way entirely.”

Hugh Brown, vice president of the American Life League, called the SPLC “a joke.”

“It’s something that began with genuine intent when there was a need to combat racism in the ’50s, ’60s, perhaps the ’70s during the Civil Rights movement. And now, what you see is the perpetual hunt for the next created civil right. Because they have to justify their existence, they are very much just a left-wing, nonsensical group that takes its orders, more than likely, from Washington.”

“We saw the FBI, the Department of Justice target parents here in Virginia and other places, parents attending school board meetings,” Brown said. “So, they’re just following suit. Parents advocating for children is our God-given responsibility.”

Ramaswamy will be one of several GOP presidential hopefuls appearing at the Moms for Liberty national summit in Philadelphia. The schedule also includes Trump,  DeSantis and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Justice says her organization has reached out to Biden but received no response.

In a statement, Justice and fellow Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich noted, “Two-thirds of Americans think the public education system is on the wrong track today. Calling parents, who want to be a part of their child’s education, ‘hate groups’ or ‘bigoted’ just further exposes what this battle is all about: Who fundamentally gets to decide what is taught to our kids in school — parents or government employees?

“We believe that parental rights do not stop at the classroom door, and no amount of hate from groups like this is going to stop that.”

Michael Graham is the managing editor of InsideSources.com.

But, as the saying goes, when it rains it pours.

And it poured all over the FBI when it was announced that former FBI Agent Robert P. Hanssen, 79, “the most damaging spy in (FBI) history,” was found dead in his prison cell at the supermax U.S. Penitentiary in Florence, Colorado Monday.

Hassen had been serving life without parole after pleading guilty in 2001 to selling classified information to the Russians for $1.4 million in cash, bank funds and diamonds.

Among the information he sold was that the U.S. had dug a Cold War tunnel beneath the Soviet embassy in Washington for eavesdropping purposes. Another was that he provided Moscow with the names of three KGB officers who were spying for the U.S., two of whom were later executed.

Paul J. McNulty, the U.S. attorney who prosecuted Hanssen, said Hanssen’s crimes “cannot be overstated. They will long be remembered for being among the most egregious betrayals of trust in U.S. history. It was both a low point and an investigative success for the FBI.”

It was “an investigative success.” But what McNulty failed to add was that Hanssen operated as a Russian spy for 20 years before he was caught. And he was even surprised that he got away with it for so long.

Adding to the fallen image of the FBI was the arrest and indictment earlier this year of one of its former top counterintelligence agents.

That is Charles F. McGonigal, formerly head of the New York counterintelligence office, who was charged with selling access to Russian and Albanian officials in exchange for $240,000.

McGonigal, who is awaiting trial, was once considered an agency rockstar, who had access to some of the most sensitive information in the FBI’s possession.

FBI Director Wray at the time pointed out that like Hanssen, it was the FBI that initiated the McGonigal investigation, even though he did not say for how long McGonigal had been rogue.

Wray said the charges against McGonigal demonstrated “the FBI’s willingness as an organization to shine a bright light on conduct that is totally unacceptable, including when it happens from one of our own people, and to hold those people accountable.”

That “bright light” comment may come as a surprise to former FBI officials who have become persona non grata by the FBI after becoming whistleblowers and testifying on FBI wrongdoing before Congress.

It will also come as a surprise to Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Rep. James Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee.

Both repeatedly pressed Wray to publicly release unclassified documents — including with a subpoena — that allege that Joe Biden took a $5 million bribe from a foreign national to affect public policy when he was vice president.

While Wray provided an hour-long, closed-door briefing for Comer and ranking Democrat committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin, Comer said Wray still refused to turn over the documents to the committee.

However, upon the threat of contempt, Way finally caved.

No matter the outcome, McCarthy, Comer and the Republicans in the House appear determined to punish the FBI by withholding funds from the FBI for its $4 billion proposed new office building complex until it changes its ways, including stopping the politicization of the agency and ending its campaign against conservatives.

McCarthy said that the unwanted proposed structure would even be bigger than the Pentagon.

U.S. Rep. Scott Perry, a Republican from Pennsylvania, head of a subcommittee on public buildings, said all agencies that “have been weaponized” against the American people need to be scrutinized.

Republican Rep.  Andy Harris of Maryland, a member of the House Appropriations Committee, said, “I think that the FBI building’s funding this year is in definite jeopardy. We should not fund the new FBI headquarters until we get to the bottom of what’s going on.”

If you don’t build it, they will not come.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

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?”

“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 he 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.

“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.

“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 PSAs 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.

“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.

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 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.

Salena Zito is a CNN political analyst and a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner./Tribune News Service

The move comes more than 1,000 years too late for the previously ascendant Romano-British who couldn’t resist these Germanic peoples who showed up on the shores of England beginning in the fifth century, but surely, they would appreciate the gesture.

As part of an effort to make its instruction more “anti-racist,” Cambridge University is going to teach students that identities such as Anglo-Saxon are “constructed and contingent.” The school’s Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic is hoping to “dismantle the basis of myths of nationalism,” and also is keenly aware of “recent concerns over use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and its perceived connection to ethnic/racial English identity.”

To be honest, the Anglo-Saxons have been living on borrowed time for a while now.

In 2019, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists — worried about their association with, yes, the Anglo-Saxons — changed their name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England.

The change came after Mary Rambaran-Olm, the group’s second vice president, resigned and denounced the organization for allegedly encouraging white supremacy. As The Washington Post put it, the group effectively conceded that “‘Anglo Saxon’ is code for whiteness.”

There is no doubt that the term has been used by malicious and ignorant people over the years to make racist arguments and promote a simplified or outright false version of early English history. But that doesn’t mean the Anglo-Saxons didn’t exist or the term must be banished.

For all that the “woke” scholars warn against anachronisms, they should be careful not to imply that the Anglo-Saxons came to England wearing white hoods.

To simplify, the island’s defenses weakened after the Romans exited and tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes arrived and established dominance, although they’d subsequently be involved in desperate struggles for survival against Viking invaders.

The term Anglo-Saxon isn’t exactly a neologism. The authoritative book by Nicholas J. Higham and Martin J. Ryan, “The Anglo-Saxon World,” notes that it was in use by the eighth century, when writers on the continent apparently used it to distinguish between Saxons in England and those back on the continent. King Alfred the Great, one of the important figures in English history, called himself the “king of the Anglo-Saxons.”

The Anglo-Saxons gave us the most foremost language in the world, English, which derives from Old English or Anglo-Saxon.

They unified what came to be England as we know it, while the English monarchy dates to the Anglo-Saxon period.

The same is true of English Christianity, with the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons beginning in the sixth and seventh century.
The Anglo-Saxons set out the shires that were the units of local government until the lines were redrawn in the late 20th century.

What the academics hostile to their own field of study want to do is take a term that is readily recognized, broadly understood, and generates public interest, and replace it with something more obscure for no good reason.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

That missing ingredient is… Donald J. Trump.

God knows the Democrats and state-run media (but I repeat myself) are thrashing about, trying to find some possible way, no matter how far-fetched, to blame Bad Clouds on POTUS. Thus far they appear to be flailing.

What Trump says in all those Internet memes to Republicans now applies to Democrats as well:

“Do you miss me yet?”

Having a crisis – especially a “climate crisis” – without Trump to blame it on is like having a mocktail instead of a cocktail, a near beer instead of a real beer. For the media, a Trump-less catastrophe is as unsatisfying as “mostly-peaceful rioting” without looting or Molotov cocktails.

The smoke is bad, but seriously, is it any worse than the weed odors wafting up from every bleeping street corner in blue America, puffed out by all the student-loan deadbeats and illegal immigrants loitering while awaiting their next TANF and EBT direct deposits?

These fires started in Canada. But surely that can’t be possible – next thing you know you’ll be telling me that Hillary Clinton paid for the Russian collusion hoax, or that Hunter Biden’s laptop wasn’t “Russian disinformation,” despite what 51 Democrat hacks lied.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau might as well be a Democrat – he nationalized the protesting truckers’ bank accounts. He wants to disarm his citizens. He’s never had a real job. His father is rumored to be Fidel Castro or Mick Jagger. He has great hair, better hair than Gavin Newsom.

Obviously, a boy, er man of Trudeau’s stature couldn’t have created this crisis, and may I be the first to suggest that this is indeed an “existential crisis?”

Or it would be, anyway, if Trump were still in the White House.

Without Trump, it’s like hell without the devil. Something big is missing.

Don’t forget that Climate Cult is an organized religion. Democrats used to have newspapers and TV stations. Now they have religious tracts, and dollar-a-holler cable channels like CNN and MSDNC.

Their “journalists,” like the false seers of yore, can see omens and premonitions in the sky. This goes back to ancient times. Right before the Ides of March, Mrs. Julius Caesar foresaw battles “fought upon the clouds … most horrible sights seen by the watch.”

Forget Shakespeare, just go to The New York Times for the most horrible sights seen by the watch.

It’s alarming, the Times screamed in print yesterday, the way these clouds are smothering, billowing, blanketing, choking, suffocating and scorching. Other features of this GOP reign of terror include “stunning” lightning strikes, not to mention forests “turning to tinder.”

I sense another very-fake-news Pulitzer Prize in the works, for overheated rhetoric.

Is the world going to end, I asked our modern Delphic oracle, the Times? Maybe, the sheeple were told. But feareth not, brethren, the end of times will come only in “the not-too-distant future.”

In other words, just distant enough in the future so that we’ll have forgotten this week’s Armageddon.

It’s so terrible, the Times announced, that this spring “scientists announced with uncharacteristic alarm….”

Huh? When was the last time you heard one of their “scientists” speak with anything other than uncharacteristic alarm? If you want to get on state-run media, you’d damn well better be running around shouting “The sky is falling!”

I would describe uncharacteristic alarm among “scientists” quoted on state-run media as a characteristic, a feature, not a bug.

Is there even the slightest chance that this might be another overreaction, you know, like COVID-19, or global cooling?

“Though there is no specific research yet attributing this week’s events to global warming,” the Times grudgingly concedes, “the science is unequivocal.”

Unequivocal science. Just like it was with COVID-19. And vaccines. And global cooling.

Do you want to know who the most superstitious, ignorant rubes in society are? All the Democrats who chant, “Follow the science.”

These are the same Biden-voting boobs who believed Anthony Fauci. They’re still wearing masks outside after all these years. Actually, those may be the people secretly most excited by this week’s sky-is-falling doomsday rhetoric.

Because now they can wear their N95’s again outside proudly and not have normal people staring at them as if they’ve just escaped from a nuthouse.

Another group of deadbeats over the moon about this: the employees who want to continue their three-year paid vacations. You know, the “work-from-home” contingent. In other words, the hippies who get paid for not working, and that’s just fine with them.

And now they have a new excuse. Dude, like we totally wouldn’t mind going back to the office, except, like, we might die, because of what the fascist in the White House is doing to the planet….

Oh wait, like, you mean, Trump’s not the president anymore? Bummer, man! Is that why The Man wants me to start paying back the loans I took out for the queer-studies program at the community college?

This wasn’t a national emergency until airline flights from the three New York airports started getting canceled a couple of days ago. If it were only private jets being grounded, the ones that carry John Kerry and the rest of the Beautiful People to the islands and to the Hamptons, then this would be a comedy rather than a tragedy.

Too bad they don’t teach history anymore. But you can still google “Year without Summer.” That would be 1816. There was a volcano that year. If you think wildfires throw off a lot of smoke, read up on the “Year without Summer.”

But without Donald Trump, something is missing. The corrupt feds are going to have to indict him. Either that, or storm into the dressing rooms at CNN and MSDNC and confiscate all the anchors’ belts and shoelaces.

What if they threw a climate catastrophe and Donald Trump wasn’t there to take the rap? Would anyone still hear it?

You might even say that would be an existential crisis.

How about another example of the media failing us?

It protected a man wearing a hoodie during most of his campaign for the Senate, following his stroke. With little media criticism they allowed Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman to participate in only a handful of debates and public appearances. The media refused to see that there was a problem here. Fetterman’s mental and physical health has been an issue even before he was sworn into the Senate. For a while he had spent more time in a hospital than on the Senate floor. While we pray for his full recovery, Pennsylvania’s presence in the Senate has suffered to a degree because of Fetterman’s absence.

Hopefully, what I saw this past weekend in the news is the start of a productive, informative, and aggressive media approach – and not an aberration.

CNN pointed out that the vast majority of the world is not backing U.S. sanctions against Russia due to the latter’s invasion of Ukraine last year. President Joe Biden’s foreign support for Russian sanctions is coincidently about the same as his job approval numbers at home – both are around a dismal 35%.

This was newsworthy and troubling because the Biden administration gave us a false impression that the world stood with us on sanctioning Russia. It explains why the sanctions have largely failed.

There are other questions the media has yet to ask about the war in Ukraine.

For example, the cost to America is also of concern. We need a quantifiable account of the dollars and military equipment that each NATO country and other allies have provided to Ukraine to date (and not merely pledged). Then we need to account for how these contributions compare to our own.

Question: Has there been an apparent reversal in U.S. policy with regard to Ukraine’s bombing and attacks in Russia’s interior? We have been led to believe that this escalation was “off the table.” The new policy would be a notable change in direction.

On another well-reported issue, CBS Sunday Morning featured a provocative analysis on continuing the practice of allowing race to be a factor in college admissions. It focused on a Supreme Court case featuring the oldest private and public schools in the land, Harvard and the University of North Carolina, respectively.

It took a deeper dive into the originator of the Harvard-UNC lawsuit before the court, Edward Blum, who professed his displeasure over quotas in the early 20th century. This seems to be the motivation behind his incessant targeting of Black people in education. Over the years Blum has used court cases/people, like he is using Asian Americans, as plaintiffs, to achieve results on race that potentially would reduce the presence of Black students at top universities.

Having briefly participated in the Old Parkland Conference in Dallas which featured those representing the Asian American plaintiffs, I have firsthand knowledge about the sentiments they voiced. They and their sympathizers feel Black people should attend Historically Black Colleges Universities (HBCUs) because they would be “better for Black people” and “Black people would feel more comfortable” in these institutions. And, yes, that is racist.

The CBS report pointed out that Asian Americans already represent nearly 30% of the students admitted to Harvard this year, even though Asian Americans comprise just 7% of the U.S. population. This begs the question: What are they complaining about?

The report also featured an Asian American woman who denounced the lawsuit and did not want to be associated with it.

Why not go after legacies or geographical placements as they too give so-called “advantages” to certain students. For geographic diversity reasons, it is easier to get into the top colleges if you live in Idaho or Wyoming, than if you are from California or New York. For a state school, it is harder to gain admission and more expensive to attend if you are an out-of-state student. Legacy candidates sometimes only compete against other legacy candidates. In short, there are many factors considered in admissions. It is an “imperfect” process.

As a child I vividly remember Alabama Governor George Wallace blocking the admissions door to Black people, as he did not want “any” Black person at the University of Alabama.

Sixty years later we have folks who want “fewer” Black people at the top schools in America. Sadly, this is truly a “Back to the Future” moment that would hurt America. It would widen an already large income and wealth gap between white and Black Americans.

CNN and CBS, thank you. But we need more forthright investigative reporting from many more news outlets. Americans are smart enough to know what and what not to believe. The public can better guide our nation when it has all the facts.

Gary Franks served three terms as U.S. representative for Connecticut’s 5th District. He was the first Black Republican elected to the House in nearly 60 years and New England’s first Black member of the House. Host: podcast “We Speak Frankly.” Author: “With God, For God, and For Country.” @GaryFranks/Tribune News Service

On a daily basis, we cheat ourselves out of the full package that life has to offer.  Whether it be popping in ear buds in order to tune out others on the T or willfully avoiding an awkward but necessary phone call by sending an e-mail or text instead, the result is the same – a dulled, incomplete and inauthentic existence.  In essence, we shield ourselves from the physical world  by hiding behind a plethora of “digital crutches.”  For better or worse, life needs to be experienced in the fullest and most authentic way possible, head on and unedited.

The net effect of our over-reliance on high tech devices not only serves to dull our visceral senses and perceptions, but at the same time, cheats us out of our most cherished institutions and traditions.  We now need cell phones to gain entrance to almost all concert venues, as tickets are now completely paperless, and so are restaurant menus.  You’d be hard pressed to find a text book at your kid’s $50K a year college.  Not to mention, going to the movies now involves an online ritual of researching a title, selecting a seat in advance, and having your iPhone scanned upon arrival.   And making new connections has been reduced to a swipe right on a glass screen!

In an already impersonal post pandemic world, the last thing we need is more harmful  social change.  We can utilize technology to the brim but the need for traditional real world interactions and experiences will always be imbedded in our collective DNA.  Nothing is more frightening than the unyielding grip that the new crop of technologies seems to have on almost every facet of our lives.

Perhaps the key to reestablishing order is to unplug from the grid for awhile in order to experience life in the raw, once again.  Or it may just be as simple as occasionally picking up that land line phone, leaving those ear buds behind when going to the gym, or dusting off that clunky desktop PC, like the one I used to write this article.

Scott Liftman is a freelance journalist who resides in Framingham.

Except that Tuesday night at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics, the jokes were on him.

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may be the longest of long shots to win the GOP presidential nomination, but based on his last two appearances in New Hampshire (both town halls at the NHIOP), he’s decided that, wherever this campaign winds up, he’s going to have a good time getting there.

Mostly at Trump’s expense.

For example, when a member of the audience asked Christie whether, if elected president, he’d be willing to pardon Trump, he gave a serious and thorough answer to the question (spoiler alert: probably not) before adding that the question was moot.

“By accepting the pardon, the person must acknowledge their guilt. And that’s why I’m completely in the clear,” Christie said as the crowd laughed. “That will never happen.”

Christie, 60, began with a somewhat stilted, overly worked set piece about the choice between “big and small,” how petty politics and divisive leaders were making America a smaller place. “At every pivotal moment in our history, there was a choice between small and big — and America became the most different, the most successful, the most fabulous light for the rest of the world in history because we always picked big,” Christie said.

It seemed like a way to make an asset of Christie’s weight — a setup for “Go Big! Vote Christie 2024,” but the pitch never came.

But once he began taking questions from the crowd, Christie was loose and relaxed as he worked the packed room without notes or a script. A throng of national media was on hand,  a massive mismatch between press interest and candidate potential.

Christie used the NHIOP forum to announce formally he’s seeking the GOP nomination. But he also used it to address the fundamental question many New Hampshire GOP activists — who will be key to helping him build a campaign — have about his candidacy: Is he trying to win or merely play the role of political kamikaze targeting Trump?

“How are those two things mutually exclusive?” Christie said. “The guy’s ahead in the polls. Who am I supposed to be worried about — Nikki Haley?”

In Christie’s view, all the talk about lanes is pundit puffery. “There is one lane, and he’s in the front of it. And if you want to win, you better go right through him.”

“The reason I’m going after Trump is twofold. One, he deserves it. And two, it’s the way to win.”

In reality, “going through Trump” isn’t the only way to win. Targeting Trump and alienating many of the 79 million Americans who voted for him  — including the majority of New Hampshire Republicans — is one of the least likely ways to win.

Polls show that most Republicans support Trump and aren’t interested in hearing him being attacked. To many GOP primary voters, people who criticize Trump sound like Democrats. From a pragmatic political standpoint, there’s a strong argument in favor of the Ron DeSantis approach: Fight back when Trump attacks, but don’t do anything to alienate Trump loyalists — like Christie doing his impression of Trump promising to build the wall (“I’m going to build the most amazing wonderful wall, and Mexico is going to pay for it”) and mocking his failure.

It was funny, but how does it win GOP primary votes?

A 15-year-old in the NHIOP audience picked up on the paradox. He asked Christie how he planned to win over Trump voters “when you don’t seem to be appealing to the larger (group of) Republican voters?”

“I’m glad you’re 15 so you can’t vote,” Christie joked. But his question is serious, and the governor never gave a fully satisfying answer. “The way I’m going to appeal to any voter in New Hampshire is to make the case I can make,” Christie said. “I don’t have a specific strategy. I’m just going to be myself.”

Michael Graham is the managing editor at InsideSources.com.

And one, former Vice President Mike Pence, even road a motorcycle, a cobalt blue Harley Davidson, and did not fall off as Joe Biden did when he tumbled from his bicycle at his summer home in Rehoboth, Delaware.

Which says something about the physical state of the GOP candidates in the wake of President Biden’s latest header on the stage at the U.S. Air Force commencement ceremony in Colorado Springs  days earlier.

At least they don’t fall, not yet anyway.

And the oldest Republican candidate, frontrunner Donald Trump, 76, having been in Iowa two days earlier, did not bother to show up at all.

The event was Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst’s annual GOP “Roast and Ride” political gathering, which kicked off the summer campaign season in a state that holds the first in the nation caucuses in January.

You ride to the event on a motorcycle, the way Pence, 63, Ernst and the other bikers did, and if you don’t fall off or wipe out you get to attend the barbecue.

While it is sad to watch the increasingly frail 80-year-old president take another spill  — which again instantly made news around the world — it also seriously questions whether Biden is up to the job, let alone planning to seek re-election.

You have to wonder too if Biden could have gotten up at all were it not for the three aides who helped lift him back to his feet.

It was not a good look for the leader of the free world.

Hardly had Biden tried to make light of the fall (“I was sandbagged.”) than the ever watchful and ambitious leaders of the Chinese Communist Party had a warship cut provocatively and dangerously in the path of a U.S. destroyer twice in the Taiwan Strait. The U.S. ship was conducting joint exercises with Canada in the internationally recognized waters.

A week earlier, in another provocation, a Chinese fighter plane flew directly in front of a U.S. reconnaissance plane operating in international air space in the South China sea, causing the U.S. plane to hit turbulence.

China believes it can walk all over Joe Biden and not worry about any consequences.

We would think the same way about Chinese Communist Party Leader Xi Jinping if we saw television pictures of him stumbling and falling up the steps of his plane or falling on the stage during a Chinese military parade.

Recall how Americans mocked Soviet Union leaders Boris Yeltsin and Leonid Brezhnev during the Cold War for being drunk.

At any rate  the “ Roast and Ride” at the Iowa Fairgrounds was the place to be if you were running for president.

Making the most of it was Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, 44, Trump’s biggest threat.

He was accompanied by his attractive wife Casey, who wore a leather jacket befitting the occasion, not DeSantis. He wore just a checkered shirt.

But it was a striking looking black leather jacket. It featured an outline of Florida on the back with the words, “Where Woke Goes to Die” along with an image of alligator.

It looked as though she were ready to hop on a motorcycle too.

Asked to define what “woke” really is, DeSantis said it was “a form of cultural Marxism” that casts merit and achievement aside in favor of identity politics. “It is basically a war on the truth.”

Sounding like Winston Churchill in his famous and fiery “we will never surrender” fspeech on the eve of Hitler’s threatened invasion of England in 1940, DeSantis told supporters, “We will wage war on the woke. We will fight the woke in education; we will fight the woke in corporations; we will fight in the halls of Congress. We will never, ever surrender to the woke mob.”

And nobody fell down.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

Wu repeatedly declined to say why the blue police lights and siren were on in her city police SUV as she was bombarded with questions about Tuesday’s accident which shook her up and injured the driver and child who were in the other SUV.

“As with any kind of departmental or city vehicle that is involved in a crash there is a review that happens,” Wu said as she entered an event in Charlestown.

Wu did add one tidbit – that “it was not an emergency yesterday where we were headed. It’s an incident that is under review and I have full faith in the team and their professionalism.”

But the incident report released on Wednesday morning didn’t even name Wu, listing her instead as a “passenger who is known to the Commonwealth.”

It was a case study in non-accountability and evasion – something you’d expect from an old boys network pol but hypocritical from a progressive who promised to hold police accountable as one of the cornerstones of her administration.

She’s supposed to be about transparency and open government.

And there are important questions still not answered. Will the police officer driving Wu be disciplined? Will the driver of the other vehicle be cited?

In fact, it took hours to even disclose she was in an accident on Hyde Park Ave. in Roslindale, and nearly a full day for police to provide the accident report. Wu showed up at a press conference hours after the accident and didn’t say a peep about it.

The next day, she still couldn’t provide basic answers like who ordered the blue lights on, and what’s the policy for her police vehicle as it navigates crowded Boston traffic.

“I’m not totally familiar with all the policies and procedures,” she said when asked about the blue lights. “I was on my phone and not really seeing what was happening as the lights were turned on at that intersection.”

Wu was also careful not to throw her female driver under the bus, repeatedly praising police and first responders who were at the scene of the crash within minutes.

Wu was also pretty dismissive of the injuries that did occur to the other occupants, Nothing to see here folks, move along.

We’ll see about that. This is the kind of accident ripe for a personal injury lawsuit.

It comes on the heels of other highly publicized cases of public officials getting caught using blue lights in their official vehicles, including former U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins, who put her emergency lights on in a shopping center parking lot to intimidate another driver.

Rollins never paid a price for that incident, but she eventually was forced out last month for violating ethics laws.

Because we’re not all there.

Someone told me that joke recently, and it seemed appropriate for what’s going on. I mean, everything has been spiraling out of control here for quite some time. But it seems to be getting worse, crazier, not making any sense whatsoever.

Just to take one example – nip bottles of alcohol. There’s a movement to outlaw the little mini-containers, and I get it.

Winos chug them – the smaller the bottle, the larger the problem. They increase litter. And perhaps worst of all, they’re easy to hide and drink while you’re driving.

Remember what they found in Rep. David “Sleepy” LeBouef’s wrecked car when he was lugged for driving legless last year — multiple containers of Dr. McGillicuddy’s non-prescription Wild Grape elixirs.

So you can understand why it might be good public policy to get rid of nips. Yet at the same moment, some legislators on Beacon Hill are pushing to allow barrooms to sell mixed drinks to go.

How does that make sense? You want to outlaw mini-bottles, but simultaneously allow drivers to grab cold highballs that go down easier than straight booze, and will likely contain more booze than the standard 1.7-ounce “airplane” bottle.

Also, don’t most states, including Massachusetts, have a law on the books against “open containers” in cars?

How about gambling? First the state legalized casinos, and now sports betting. Guess what’s happened – state lottery sales have taken a big hit, especially from sports betting. Who could have ever seen that one coming?

We all understand that gambling, like booze or drugs, can get out of control. What used to be called a “vice” is now a “disease.”

Once you had to know a bookie to make a bet on a sporting event. Now you just need an app on your cell phone. How do you think business is doing?

What the Lottery did to bingo games at your local parish church a half-century ago, online sports betting is now doing to the Lottery. Once again, it’s Schumpeter’s creative destruction of capitalism, even if the Lottery is a state-run enterprise.

But the Lottery has a solution to its declining revenues. It’s peddling a new scratch ticket – a $50 scratch ticket! What could possibly go wrong?

I was only a kid at the time, but I can still remember the arguments made in the Legislature against the Lottery back in the early 70’s. Oh sure, the Catholic church said, Beacon Hill will start off with just a once-a-week drawing. But then it’ll be twice a week. Then they’ll go to daily numbers, like the Mob. Then it’ll be Keno, and punch cards, and big multi-state games….

Guess where the $50 scratch tickets are selling fastest? (Hint: it’s not Weston.)

Next we have drugs. By a narrow margin, Massachusetts legalized weed a few years back. (I voted against it.) It just didn’t seem like this society needed yet another drug, gateway or otherwise.

As the Commonwealth made it easier to get a good buzz on, we also decided to outlaw menthol cigarettes, because they’re so addictive. Now, does anyone seriously believe that if you have a severe tobacco jones, you’re just going to quit because you can’t get Newports?

No, you’re just going to switch to Marlboros or something else. Or if you live close enough to the border you’re just going to drive to New Hampshire or Rhode Island.

But cigarettes are so dangerous, right? Of course they are. On the other hand, has anyone working in a cigarette factory or distribution center ever died after inhaling tobacco dust that caused a fatal asthma attack?

But that’s just what happened to a young woman in Holyoke who worked for one of the new weed companies. She died last year after breathing in cannabis dust. The company that owned the facility just announced that it is closing down all of its operations in Massachusetts.

Newports take decades to kill you. Weed can apparently get the job done in a matter of months.

Have you heard about the plummeting tax revenues in the Commonwealth? Working people, Americans, are fleeing the state at the rate of 1,100 a week.

Non-working people, illegal immigrants, are flooding into the Commonwealth. Unlike the people who were leaving, they must be supported. In Taunton, among other places, they’ve taken over an entire hotel, 160 rooms.

According to the city, the state is paying the hotel chain more than $150 a night for each room. Plus all the illegals get three hot meals a day, delivered, which costs an additional $37 per day, per person.

No wonder the state’s taxpayers are clearing out. In terms of flight per 1,000 residents, Massachusetts ranks now fourth in the nation, trailing only New York, California and Illinois.

Just like with the death and unemployment rates during the recent Panic, Massachusetts is punching way above its weight class.

The median rent in Boston is the second-highest in the nation, behind only New York City — $3,839 a month here vs. $4,032 in New York, according to the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation.

The proposed solution? A new “transfer” tax on real estate transactions. That’s what the “advocates” are lobbying for on Beacon Hill for this week – maybe up to 2% on transactions of over a million bucks.

Someone would have to pay that extra $20,000 or so to the hackerama. Who do you think would end up footing the bill – the tenant or the landlord?

But that’s okay, because the money from this latest new tax would be used for… affordable housing. Wink wink nudge nudge.

Then there’s mass transit. There’s not enough money for the MBTA. Hey, let’s make everything free! That should solve the funding problem!

Did any of these people ever hear of the old saw, that if you want to get more of something, you just have the government subsidize it. (Think illegals on welfare.)

If you want to get less of something, you just tax it more. (Think American citizens who aren’t on welfare.)

Taxachusetts – it’s back. As for all of us who’ve been in Massachusetts most of our lives, we’re here, as the old country song goes, for better or for worse.

But not for long.

This would be accomplished by bringing these vital services directly into the homes and neighborhoods of our residents by Mobile Integrated Community Care Units (MICCUs). MICCUs could serve as extensions of the local Community Health Centers in Boston with close partnership with the Boston Public Health Commission and all Boston hospitals.

These units would be staffed by an EMT-Paramedic, a clinical social worker, and an alcohol and drug counselor. They would have immediate and direct access for consultations with the behavioral health and addiction care teams as well as from primary care providers at their respective Community Health Centers and local hospitals when needed.

MICCUs would help broaden the scope of public health and safety responses for Boston residents with a particular focus on those areas in critical need such as the Mass and Cass neighborhoods. These units would provide more integrated services with specialty trained and unarmed crews in situations that include crisis intervention, behavioral health care, housing emergencies, and substance use disorder care.

MICCUs would become imbedded in each neighborhood to develop strong relationships with frequent 911 callers and their family members. This will include applying de-escalation techniques during all domestic and street mental health crisis encounters as well as provide safe transport to a higher level of care if needed.

MICCUs would also be instrumental in performing motivational interviewing and coaching techniques on those afflicted with substance use disorders and most vulnerable for fatal overdosing. They will also carry out drop-in wellness checks on those recently discharged from rehab facilities and offer immediate referrals and transport to appropriate Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) Programs or detox facilities when warranted.

Additionally, MICCU’s would help alleviate the tremendous deficiencies and inequities in our current health care and public safety delivery systems and limit costly ER visits and hospitalizations. These units will perform home safety checks and serve as extenders of the primary care team to help manage conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, obesity, lung disease, and behavioral health issues that have been responsible for many of the poor health outcomes in those infected with COVID-19.

I wholeheartedly support the recent proposal from the Massachusetts Senate to study the efficacy of converting a decommissioned ship into The Floating Hospital for mental health, substance abuse and recovery. This is a novel therapeutic strategy that truly complements this special mission of the MICCUs. These units could also serve as extensions of the Floating Hospital including immediate consultations with specialty care providers there.

Boston attracts many patients from afar to our world-renowned medical facilities. It is time to bring exceptional “concierge” type medical and crisis care services to our own medically disadvantaged residents, while also offering direct access to a state-of the-art facility in our harbor. This includes Boston’s elderly, handicapped, homebound, homeless, recently incarcerated, and people of color as well as those suffering with mental health issues, substance use disorders, multiple chronic illnesses, and limited access to primary care providers.

Dr. Hamrock is a Board Member of Power Forward, Inc., an organization dedicated to ending the stigma of addiction and providing sober living scholarships to the most vulnerable

In 2014, for the first time in history, more women than men graduated with a four-year college degree.

Yet while women are an ever-increasing presence in boardrooms and C-Suites, there is one critical area where things seem stuck in time. That’s venture funding for women-led startups, especially in tech.

That’s why I’m worried about an upcoming decision at the World Trade Organization. Without meaning to, global policymakers could take action that makes it harder for women entrepreneurs – especially in the life sciences – to attract venture capital.

In the United States and elsewhere, strong protection for intellectual property rights is key to innovation. That’s what start-ups start with — a discovery or invention that’s securely their own, either because they themselves own the patent or have licensed it on an exclusive basis. When a talented entrepreneur seeks investors, she is pitching her IP as much as she is pitching the idea that she wants to take from the lab to the marketplace.

Right now in Geneva, the WTO is debating a petition to waive intellectual property protections for COVID-related therapeutics and diagnostics. Because many treatments being developed for COVID-19 have potential application to many other diseases and conditions, acceding to the WTO proposal could undermine the confidence in IP security on which venture funding depends.

To inform its position, the U.S. is currently studying the anticipated effects of such a waiver. The study should reveal how damaging such a move would be.

My organization, Springboard Enterprises, has been working for 23 years to help women entrepreneurs innovate in technology and life sciences through access to resources, sources of capital, and a powerful community of investors, industry leaders, and tech specialists.

Venture capital financing for women-owned startups peaked in 2019 at a mere 2.8% of total venture funding. Since then, the level has actually declined, to 2.3%. There’s good reason for concern that a blow to the innovation economy, such as the TRIPS waiver extension, will hit marginalized groups such as women and minorities hardest.

What a loss that would be. Despite the persistent funding biases against them, our Springboard partners have managed to build and scale companies making great contributions to the economy and our social well-being. For example, Springboard partners lent their expertise and agility to transform a home-testing kit for food sensitivities into one of the earliest and most widely available COVID-19 home testing kits.

Right now, women entrepreneurs are working to decentralize clinical trials, allowing patients to participate from their homes or other remote locations, thereby reducing the burden of participation. Democratizing clinical testing by making trials more accessible and efficient accelerates research and improves patient outcomes.

Springboard partners are also developing a proprietary platform for delivering therapeutic genes to treat diseases such as Pompe, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s.

Many proponents of the TRIPS waiver seem to be focused on railing against large pharmaceutical companies. But the waiver would harm all innovators who are creating novel solutions in life sciences, therapeutics, and diagnostics — innovators like our Springboard women. The extension of the TRIPS Waiver would threaten the viability of their enterprises — and countless others innovating to make ours a better and more caring world.

Natalie Buford-Young is CEO of Springboard Enterprises, a network of influencers, investors, and innovators dedicated to building companies at scale led by women who are transforming industries in technology and life science.

“I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘woke, woke, woke,'” he said the other day. “It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.”

Of course, Trump wasn’t volunteering his equivalent of an elementary rule of usage from Strunk & White at random. His newfound disdain for the term “woke” has everything to do with his contest with Ron DeSantis for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

The former president’s by-any-means-necessary approach to fighting DeSantis means that he doesn’t care if he’s adopting the arguments of the other side as long as he’s taking a dig at the Florida governor; it’s his version of what people who are woke — to use the offending word — call “allyship.”

Contra Trump and the progressives who agree with him on this point, “woke” is a useful term for social justice excesses and everything associated with them. If the word didn’t exist, it — or something very similar — would have to be invented.

As it happens, it was invented long ago, and not by the right. The term dates to the first half of the 20th century when it was used by African Americans to describe how they should be aware of threats from white people — “Stay woke.” The word gained new prominence with the Ferguson, Missouri, protests in 2014, when it became an online trope. The publication Vox notes that “the idea of staying aware of or ‘woke’ to the inequities of the American justice system was a heady one.”

Then, as often occurs in American political and social life, it got repurposed. Conservatives took the word over and began applying it to cultural radicalism largely around issues of race and gender.

Is it used promiscuously? Sure. Does DeSantis say it too much when describing his fights in Florida? Maybe — there’s always a fine line between good branding and overkill. But there’s no doubt that wokeness is a real thing.

We see it, for instance, in elaborate pronoun policies, in the dumbing down of standards in the name of equity, and in the assumption that every institution in American life is racist. “Woke” has replaced “political correctness” as a term, but the concepts aren’t the same. P.C. tended to denote a hypersensitivity to alleged offensiveness, whereas woke gets to something that goes much deeper — a critique of American life as fundamentally racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic.

The concepts of “white privilege” and “white supremacy,” so prevalent on the left, are central to this worldview, and the remedy is an outcomes-based focus on so-called “equity.”

Whenever the term “woke” goes out of style, whatever replaces it will be found similarly lacking.

The word and what it denotes are going to stay at the center of the GOP debate, though, because Republican voters are rightly alarmed by the cultural direction of the country. In the absence of a better word, “woke” is unavoidable.

Rich Lowry is editor in chief of the National Review

To say Sununu’s announcement landed with a thud is even giving it too much impact. Almost no one thought he was really going to run anyway. Well, maybe CNN bit on it.

It comes the same day former Vice President Mike Pence announces his White House bid and the day before former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum wades into the 2024 battle. That’s right, Burgum.

Sununu said he decided not to run because he didn’t want to expand the crowded field any more, making it easier for Donald Trump to win the nomination.

“The stakes are too high for a crowded field to hand the nomination to a candidate who earns just 35% of the vote, and I will help to ensure this does not happen,” he tweeted.

Sununu also got on his favorite network to scold Republicans who are in the race, saying they should get out if they can’t win.

“There are 12 people in the race. I don’t think all 112 of them firmly believe that they can be president, I think a lot of them just want to audition to be in the Cabinet or vice president. And at this time, there’s no place for that,” he said on CNN.

But the reality is you can include Sununu on that list. He was dead last in the polls even in his home state and could not compete against Trump or even Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. His brief flirtation with a White House run was somewhat embarrassing, although it did give him a platform on liberal networks. Sununu is such a political lightweight he makes Mitt Romney seem like a heavyweight.

Sununu, who also turned down a U.S. Senate bid last year, said he plans to stay involved in the race by endorsing someone.

No thanks, Chris. Who wants that kiss of death?

Let’s not forget where Sununu comes from. His father, former White House chief of staff John Sununu, was forced out partly because of the “travelgate” scandal – taking more than 70 rides on military jets for personal use like ski trips and visits to the dentist. So his constant dumping on Trump for ethical problems sounds a little hollow.

“If he is the nominee, Republicans will lose again,” Sununu said of Trump in an op-ed in the Washington Post. “Just as we did in 2018, 2020 and 2022.”

Sununu of course leaves out 2016, when Trump won the White House for Republicans.

Sununu is relatively popular in the Granite State, and likely could win another term as governor. Or maybe he’s holding out for an upset defeat of Trump so he can latch on with another RINO candidate.

While he was flirting with a run, Sununu was trying to walk a fine line of being a Romneyesque Republican, and calling himself conservative. Sununu is more in the mold of former Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, and Sen. Mitt Romney – all former or current Bay State governors, none of them profiles in courage.

Last time we heard from Romney he was feuding with George Santos

Are these weak Northeast governors supposed to represent the new Republican Party? If so you can count on Democrats controlling the states for decades to come.

With Neuralink’s device, a robot surgically inserts a device into the brain that can then decode some brain activity and connect the brain signals to computers and other machines. A person paralyzed from the neck down, for example, could use the interface to manipulate her physical environment, as well as to write and communicate.

This would indeed be a breakthrough — for people with paralysis or traumatic brain injuries. For others, I am not so sure.

There are other ways of augmenting my intelligence with computers, most notably the recent AI innovations. It is true that I can think faster than I can speak or type, but — I’m just not in that much of a hurry. I would rather learn how to type on my phone as fast as a teenager does.

A related vision of direct brain-computer interface is that the computers will be able to rapidly inject useful knowledge into our brains. Imagine going to bed, turning on your brain device, and waking up knowing Chinese. Sounds amazing — yet if that were possible, so would all sorts of other scenarios, not all of them benign, where a computer can alter or control our brains.
I also view this scenario as remote — unlike using your brain to manipulate objects, it seems true science fiction. Current technologies read brain signals but do not control them.

Another vision for this technology is that the owners of computers will want to “rent out” the powers of human brains, much the way companies rent out space today in the cloud. Software programs are not good at some skills, such as identifying unacceptable speech or images. In this scenario, the connected brains come largely from low-wage laborers, just as both social media companies and OpenAI have used low-wage labor in Kenya to grade the quality of output or to help make content decisions.

Those investments may be good for raising the wages of those people. Many observers may object, however, that a new and more insidious class distinction will have been created — between those who have to hook up to machines to make a living, and those who do not.

Might there be scenarios where higher-wage workers wish to be hooked up to the machine? Wouldn’t it be helpful for a spy or a corporate negotiator to receive computer intelligence in real time while making decisions? Would professional sports allow such brain-computer interfaces? They might be useful in telling a baseball player when to swing and when not to.

The more I ponder these options, the more skeptical I become about large-scale uses of brain-computer interface for the non-disabled. Artificial intelligence has been progressing at an amazing pace, and it doesn’t require any intrusion into our bodies, much less our brains. There are always earplugs and some future version of Google Glass.

Of course, companies such as Neuralink may prove me wrong. But for the moment I am keeping my bets on artificial intelligence and large language models, which sit a comfortable few inches away from me as I write this.

Tyler Cowen is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist./Tribune News Service

After an eight-year investigation, the NHTSA concluded that ARC inflators have a safety defect that creates an unreasonable risk of death and injury.

The agency demands that ARC recall the inflators because they could explode and hurl shrapnel. The company has argued that the recall demand exceeds the agency’s legal authority and that auto manufacturers, not equipment manufacturers like ARC, must do recalls.

The company could be heading for a legal battle with auto safety regulators.

If ARC rejects the recall, the NHTSA might arrange a public hearing and file a lawsuit to compel the company to issue a recall. Consequently, the company may face legal penalties and be obligated to provide compensation or pay fines to individuals affected by faulty airbag inflators.

The penalties for violating federal safety regulations can include fines, imprisonment and civil penalties. The specific penalties would depend on the nature and severity of the violation and the applicable federal and state laws.

ARC is simply on the wrong side of public relations and automotive history.

It’s tough for any company to rebound from the brand damage that ARC is doing. There is a massive window for potential loss of customers and business due to the ensuing controversy. Airbag manufacturers are businesses that exist for our safety — that’s all they’re here to do.

Fighting a recall is the worst-case scenario when it comes to public relations. In 2019, the now-defunct Takata Corp. was responsible for the largest recall in automotive history.

The Takata recall began in 2008 when reports of airbag ruptures and injuries emerged. Takata, a Japanese automotive parts manufacturer, supplied faulty airbag inflators to numerous automobile manufacturers, including Honda, Toyota, Ford, General Motors, BMW and others. Initially, the recall was limited to specific regions with high humidity, such as Gulf Coast states. However, it later expanded to include vehicles worldwide due to concerns about the long-term safety of the affected airbags.

Takata eventually went out of business due to the financial and legal repercussions of the recall. The recall and associated lawsuits placed a significant financial burden on the company, leading to its bankruptcy.

Ultimately, Takata’s failure was a brand trust issue, yet it’s one that ARC doesn’t seem capable of learning. There’s no path back to consumer trust from where ARC finds itself today.

Aron Solomon is the chief legal analyst for Today’s Esquire/InsideSources

It was a time when Republicans and Democrats viewed themselves as competitors, with different ideas about getting to the same place, rather than as bitter enemies. Despite the GOP’s venom toward President Franklin Roosevelt, just elected to his third term, and plenty of division about whether American should enter the European war, Americans still fundamentally rowed in the same direction.

It was, in short, a different time. Truman, a Democrat, proposed to run an investigation that would expose and publicize the failures of a Democratic administration that was trying to rally the country for eventual entry into the war. The Roosevelt administration approved the investigation and cooperated with it. The Democrat-run committee held hearings and issued reports that pointed out what a Democratic administration was doing wrong. The Republicans on the committee were treated as equals and, for their part, refrained from partisanship.

The result was an improved national defense program, one which, after delays when the attack on Pearl Harbor abruptly accelerated our need to defend ourselves, succeeded in providing the materiel needed to liberate Europe and defeat the Japanese.

America got a taste of old-fashioned bipartisanship last week, and  a much-needed one at that. With our government on the brink of default on its debt and financial calamity imminent, Democrats and Republicans, led by President Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy, respectively, functioned as the proverbial grown-ups in the room, striking a compromise that extended the debt limit for two years and protected Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other vital programs while also cutting some spending. Biden and McCarthy stared down their parties’ fringes to get the deal done, with 77% of House Democrats and 70% of House Republicans approving a compromise that passed by a 314 to 117 vote.

Neither Biden nor McCarthy had an easy task. Progressive Democrats were prepared to play a dangerous game of “chicken,” risking a disastrous default rather than agreeing to an even modest rollback in spending. MAGA Republicans seemed positively eager to implode the economy and the markets so that Biden could be blamed. To his credit, McCarthy opted to be the adult in the Republican conference, a particularly unenviable assignment given its composition and the frayed thread by which McCarthy’s speakership hangs.

The president may have driven home the deal that saved America from economic collapse, and fresh jobs and growth reports may have sent the financial markets soaring, but the week wasn’t a total loss for his detractors. The man tripped on a sandbag protruding on a stage at the Air Force Academy, giving Biden-haters the opportunity to crow because, well, the man tripped. Thus did Sandbag-Gate become an issue in the 2024 presidential campaign.

Still, it was a good week for the big girls and boys, and one which could not help but make one remember what once was and what might be – even if barely conceivably – once again. “Our teams were able to get along, get things done, were straightforward with one another, completely honest with one another,” said Biden in an Oval Office address the night the compromise passed Congress. “Both sides operated in good faith. Both sides kept their word.” Somewhere, maybe, Harry Truman is nodding approvingly.

Jeff Robbins is a Boston lawyer and former U.S. delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission

That last veteran to serve as governor was U.S. Army veteran Michael S. Dukakis (1955-1957) who served as an enlisted man in Korea after the Korean War ended in 1953. He left the governor’s office in 1990.

So it is of interest that Gov. Maura Healey, a non-veteran and a progressive, would take an interest in the well-being of Massachusetts men and women who served their country.

Progressives as a rule tend to shun all things military.

Dukakis, 89, who enlisted following graduation from Swarthmore College, was a 21-year-old radio operator on the DMZ, the armistice line that still separates the two Koreas.

The Korean war, often referred to as “The Forgotten War”—lodged as it was between World War II and Vietnam– began on June 25, 1950, when the Communist North Korea, later abetted by Communist China, invaded South Korea, then a fledgling democracy and a U.S. ally and protectorate.

It ended back where it began on the 38th parallel (the DMZ) that separated the two Koreas, on July 27, 1953, when the warring parties signed an armistice, which is still in effect.

A total of 33,686 Americans were killed in action, and thousands more wounded during the short but intensive three years period.

This compares to the 47,434 Americans killed in action in Vietnam, a war that lasted three times as long.

Like many wars before, memories of the Korean War are beginning to fade as the men who fought there are aging out and taking their memories with them, just as their older brothers who fought in World War II have done.

For instance, both World War II veterans former Massachusetts Attorney General Frank Bellotti (U.S. Navy) and former U. S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (U.S. Army) recently observed their 100th birthdays.

Their ranks are thinning.

The ranks are also thinning for Korean War veterans as well. They are being replaced by veterans of Iraq, the long war in Afghanistan, and unsung battles in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere.

Still, it came as something of a surprise to learn around Memorial Day that the Korean War Veterans Association, once a vigorous entity, will be disbanded and its offices on the fifth floor at the Massachusetts State House shut down.

The notice came in “The Morning Calm,” the KWVA’s thinned out quarterly publication whose title is from Korea’s misleading nickname as “The Land of the Morning Calm.”

While the few remaining members can join other KWVA chapters—if they are not shutting down too– things for the Korean War vets will not be the same.

Ironically, the demise of the KWVA comes at a time when Gov. Healey has beefed up support for veterans..

Healey, in a Memorial Day executive order, reinvigorated former Gov. Charlie Baker’s Governor’s Advisory Council on Veterans’ Services and named former state Rep. Jon Santiago to head it.

She also, naturally, made sure that the 12-member council will be woke and that the makeup represents “diversity of race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, ability, immigration status, and economic status.”

Healey earlier showed her commitment to veterans by naming Santiago as the state’s first cabinet-level secretary of the Executive Office of Veteran’s Services, an office and position that was created in 2022 following the deaths at the Holyoke Soldiers Home during the COVID pandemic.

Santiago, a physician, worked in the emergency room at Boston Medical Center during the COVID crisis. He is also a major in the U.S. Army Reserve with two overseas deployments.

Healey said of Santiago: “His public health experience and military service” made him “uniquely qualified” for the position.

While we are not sure which building Santiago will work out of, the KWVA office in Room 546-4 of the State House will soon be available.

The KWVA would proudly turn their flag over to him.

Hail and farewell.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.

Today, Zimbabwe’s 10 trillion dollar note is available on eBay for $69.99. But there’s one piece of paper that’s worth even less: the affidavit of support used in U.S. immigration.

To bring foreign relatives over permanently, American citizens must file immigrant visa petitions for them. An affidavit of support is required as part of the application process. Something similar is now being used for the fictitious “lawful pathways” the Biden administration has invented.

President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security has been abusing a limited immigration power called “parole” to bypass the legal system, bringing in tens of thousands of foreigners a month. If this sounds sketchy, it is. That’s why several states are suing the government, alleging that Biden “effectively created a new visa program — without the formalities of legislation from Congress.”

Parole was meant to be used but rarely — for things like emergency medical care or foreign witnesses needed in court cases. Biden has wielded it on a colossal scale. Uniting for Ukraine was created last year using parole. Thus far it has brought in some 113,000 immigrants. This year, the administration invented yet another new parole program, this one to admit 30,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans. More such fake-visa programs seem to be on the way.

Let’s leave aside for a moment the illegality of these programs, or the fact that people coming in are not vetted for criminal records in their home countries. One thing that’s supposed to make us feel better about all these potentially needy people coming in at once is that their American sponsors have to fill out a declaration of financial support, similar to an affidavit of support.

Who is allowed to sponsor someone to enter on parole status? The bar is so low as to be nearly subterranean. For the Ukraine program, sponsors “must be in lawful status in the United States or a parolee or beneficiary of deferred action or Deferred Enforced Departure (DED).” That means, incredibly, that someone who arrived illegally a year ago can now sponsor someone else to come illegally. And so on.

In theory, the financial sponsor of a Ukrainian is supposed to help the paroled migrant with housing, work and school, and ensure “that the beneficiary’s health care and medical needs are met for the duration of the parole.”

For the Cuban Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan program, the U.S. supporter just “agrees to provide them with financial support for the duration of their parole.…”

It sounds great – no burden on the taxpayer. However, experience tells us that no one will ever be sued to enforce these worthless promises. To my knowledge, the federal government has never sued to enforce an affidavit of support, although individuals have.

Certainly, some sponsors will keep their promises. Others might try, but they won’t have the capacity to handle serious or unexpected health, education or other needs of their parolees. Others might change their minds or lose their own jobs and be unable to help. What happens then? The parolees fall back on Johnny Taxpayer.

A recent report pegs the annual net cost to taxpayers of illegal immigration at $116 billion.

Congress should act to limit Biden’s ability to abuse parole for mass classes and entire nations. They should also legislate some teeth into financial support affidavits used in immigration, by requiring a deposit, collateral or other consequences for sponsors failing to keep their word.

Otherwise, such declarations, like a 2008 Zimbabwean dollar, are worth only the paper they’re printed on.

Simon Hankinson, a former Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. State Department, is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center/Tribune News Service

That’s the major reason Democrats and Republicans in Washington were locked in a stalemate for weeks over hiking the debt ceiling. The biggest sticking point was whether people should be allowed to collect government assistance indefinitely to finance their nonworking lifestyle.

For everyone who toils for a living, the idea of paying taxes to support healthy people who won’t work feels like a slap in the face.

House Republicans proposed requiring food stamp recipients and people on Medicaid to work 20 hours a week or participate in some job-readiness activity such as training, high school equivalency courses or substance abuse treatment. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy explained that government assistance programs are supposed to be “temporary, not permanent” and “a bridge to independence” rather than a lifestyle.

This isn’t about denying benefits to children and their mothers, or the disabled, or pregnant women. This is about childless adults who are do-nothings. “Remember what we’re talking about: able-bodied people with no dependents,” McCarthy said.

Last week, the two parties struck a compromise, giving Republicans a small victory. Food stamp recipients up to age 55 will have to work or participate in work readiness for 20 hours a week. Veterans and the homeless are exempt.

Democrats held firm against any work requirement for Medicaid. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called it a “nonstarter.” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) bashed the work requirement as “just cruel.”

But count on Republicans to fight for it another time. About half of all Americans — 156 million — get their health insurance through a job. They or someone in their family has to work for it, and many stay in jobs largely for the health coverage. Why should able-bodied adults who choose not to work be handed Medicaid?

The new Democratic Party is repudiating its own history and the work ethic that has made America a land of opportunity even for people who start out poor.

In 1996, Democratic President Bill Clinton signed a reform that required welfare recipients to work or participate in work readiness. Then-Sen. Joe Biden voted for it. That reform slashed poverty among single-parent households by a staggering 62% by 2016. Childhood poverty was slashed more than 75%, proving that the best anti-poverty program for children isn’t a handout. It’s a working parent.

But in recent years, Democrats watered down Clinton’s reforms, making it easy to collect cash assistance, housing subsidies, food benefits and healthcare that add up to more than what many unskilled jobs pay.

In 2021, Democrats pushed for the Build Back Better bill, which would have made monthly checks to parents — $300 per child — a benefit with no strings. Thanks to holdout Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), it didn’t pass. Manchin objected that “there’s no work requirement whatsoever.” Rep. Gwen Moore ( D-Wis.) denounced Manchin’s emphasis on “the so-called dignity of work — that’s like hearing a fingernail on a chalkboard.”

Democrats argue that all human beings deserve dignity. Of course they do, but that shouldn’t mean a lifetime seat on the taxpayer-funded gravy train. Democratic mayors in dozens of cities are pushing for just that — a guaranteed monthly income for the nonworking poor.

The debt-limit showdown is a preview of a bigger fight to come.

.Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York 

The Dap would chuckle and tell the Kentucky Republican: “Good luck, pal!”

You see, back in 1981, the longtime Boston city councilor was getting the same run-around from the corrupt G-men that Chairman Comer is getting today.

The feds were giving Dapper the same stiff-arm (and middle finger) they’re giving Comer now.

Under federal law, the FBI had been forced to turn over a document Dapper had been looking for, but there was a problem. Everything that O’Neil wanted to see in the report was… redacted, that is, blacked out.

As Comer said on TV this week, “My experience with getting documents from the FBI, when they’re redacted it’s all blacked out. They don’t show you anything.”

From 1981 to 2023, nothing has changed.

Dapper O’Neil’s problems with the FBI dated back to 1980. A lifelong Democrat, he endorsed a Republican for president – Ronald Reagan. He even campaigned with Reagan and his wife Nancy down in Bristol County.

The Dap created a bit of a stir when, seeing Nancy walking to the stage, he turned to some reporters and quipped, “Not a bad tush, for an old broad.”

After Reagan’s landslide win, Dapper asked the new president for the job he’d always dreamed of — US marshal in Boston. He’d had enough of the City Council — “the Munsters,” as he called them.

Marshal Dapper — it had a great ring to it.

Reagan was all in on the idea, but there was a complication. The FBI would have to conduct a background check on the Dap. A couple of months later, Dapper got the word from the DOJ.

Sorry, Dap, but the FBI report on you was… devastating.

Dapper went crazy. He’d been robbed. But then he heard about some new legislation that had been passed by the people he used to call “social-planning liberal do-gooders.” It was the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) that anyone could use to get government documents — theoretically, anyway.

Dapper filed a FOIA request for his own FBI report. A few months later at City Hall he got a packet from the G-men. He was very excited. Now he would know who had ratted him out! I was working out of City Hall and Dapper called and told me to come downstairs if I wanted a story.

By the time I got to the fifth floor, I could hear him swearing from out in the hallway. I walked in and Dapper was standing up, holding up a page of the report to the overhead lights, trying to make out what was written under the black marks. But the light wasn’t helping. He could see nothing on the paper except… blacked-out lines.

“What the bleep is this bleep?” he was thundering.

Neither of us had ever seen anything like this before. Boy, have I seen a lot of it since then. Rep. Comer is 100 percent correct — FBI redacting is a total scam.

Dapper handed me a few sheets and asked me if I could maybe make out the names underneath all that government ink. It didn’t take long to see how hopeless the task was — these were copies, not originals.

Of course the G-men were toying with Dapper.

They didn’t redact any of the rotten stuff everybody said about him — “voted for liquor licenses and then accepted free meals and alcohol… an ignorant bully… rude to his colleagues…” etc. But no names, no Sixth Amendment rights to confront his accusers. One of the damn goo-goos even called the Dap a “reprobate.”

“What the bleep is a reprobate?” he bellowed. (We had to look it up. It means an unprincipled person, a rascal.)

The feds left only left one name un-redacted — Ed Lineberger (or something like that). He was a jailbird and he had a beard — two strikes against him right there, as far as the Dap was concerned.

A couple of years earlier, as Dapper had been leaving Amrheins in South Boston after dinner, Lineberger had pulled a knife on the Dap and mugged him. As he fled down West Broadway, the Dap pulled out his trusty .38-caliber Police Special revolver and shot him.

It wasn’t a life-threatening wound, and as he was taken away in an ambulance, a puzzled Lineberger asked the EMTs, “Why’d he shoot me? All I wanted was his money.”

Now Dapper was finding out that the damn bastard who’d stuck a knife in his face had ratted him out to the FBI from his prison cell. He had told them that Dapper was insane. The Dap was amazed — this bird that’d brought a knife to a gunfight was calling the guy with the gun crazy?

I asked Dapper if he wanted me to deliver a message to Lineberger in my story in the paper.

“Tell him I’ll see him at his next parole-board hearing!” Dapper said.

The next morning, I went down to check in with Dapper. He was still steaming. One of his aides timidly poked her head into his office and whispered, “Councilor, it’s Lineberger on the phone. He’s calling from prison — collect.”

Dapper stood up and started screaming again, just as his aide had known he would do.

“Tell that bearded little weasel I don’t take collect calls from jailbirds!”

Or words to that effect.

Now Comer says he’s going to get the FBI’s un-redacted report on Biden’s alleged $5-million payoff tomorrow. He had to inform the FBI that he had already had a copy of the FD-1023, which was smart, because otherwise they would never, ever have coughed up anything.

In fact, at first the feds lied to him and said no such report even existed. Now that they’ve been busted, they’re promising to hand-deliver him a clean copy of the report they said didn’t exist.

As Dapper would say, “Good luck, pal.”

While Trump’s approach to politics often appears more incoherent than intelligible, there in fact is a calculated strategy steering his primary campaign. It involves turning his intensifying legal troubles into martyrdom at the hands of the left-wing political establishment, while at the same time relentlessly attacking his top opponent, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. 

Though this strategy is largely devoid of actual policy, it has been effective thus far: Trump has consolidated the support of the majority of Republican primary voters nationally, doubling his lead over DeSantis, per RealClearPolitics’ average of primary polls. Bearing in mind that national data is best viewed as a general gauge, the latest polls in the first four primary states also find Trump with at least a 20-point lead.

Throughout the campaign, Trump will continue positioning himself as a victim of political persecution and making the case that President Biden and Hunter Biden – both of whom are also under federal investigation – are the figures who deserve more serious scrutiny. Regardless of the truth or falsity of this narrative, it allows Trump to maintain a solid constituency within the Republican Party that will continue supporting him, especially in light of the potentially multiple additional indictments he is likely to face.

Indeed, Trump’s martyrdom narrative will only become more entrenched if he is indicted in the special counsel’s probe, either for mishandling classified documents or for attempting to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. This is especially likely if the concurrent federal probes into President Biden’s potential mishandling of classified documents and Hunter Biden’s alleged influence peddling – among other investigations into the First Son – fail to result in charges.

In a recent letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, which Trump posted on his Truth Social platform, Trump’s lawyers sought to reinforce the narrative that their client is suffering an unfair application of justice, versus the Bidens, who are being given a free pass.

To be sure, Trump’s lawyers well-know that the Attorney General must decline the meeting they demanded, as Garland took the appropriate step of recusing himself from the special counsel’s investigation into Trump to avoid the appearance of political interference, as he did with the probe into President Biden. But this fact is irrelevant to Trump and his team, whose primary focus is uniting Republicans around Trump by positioning him as a political warrior facing unjust persecution.

Throughout his political career, Trump has proven himself a virtuoso at playing both the winner and the victim, and this is no exception. As Rich Lowry recently wrote for POLITICO, this role has allowed Trump to construct “an impenetrable political forcefield” with Republican voters – each success he experiences proves that he is on top, while any setback validates his victimhood and shows that his political enemies are threatened by his strength.

This positioning, taken together with Trump’s habit of persistently attacking his political opponents, has made him into an almost unbeatable primary opponent, as DeSantis is quickly discovering.

As Republican voters have embraced Trump’s self-contrived image as a political martyr, DeSantis, who was once viewed as the most viable non-Trump candidate, has simultaneously declined in the polls. In turn, DeSantis’ deterioration has motivated other Republicans to jump in the race – a scenario that inherently benefits the former president, as it splits the non-Trump vote.

Even though DeSantis only officially declared his candidacy recently, Trump has been going after him for months with anything he feels he can make stick – ranging from DeSantis’ support for cuts to broadly popular entitlement programs, to accusing him of “grooming” high school girls, to calling him a “RINO globalist” and “Ron DeSanctimonious.”

For his part, DeSantis has only recently begun hitting back after months of tiptoeing around the former president’s barrages. The Florida Governor recently suggested that Trump was “moving to the left,” referring to his recent flip-flopping on issues such as immigration and spending, and has sought to implicitly contrast his record advancing conservative reforms with the chaos Trump brings. 

“At the end of the day, leadership is not about entertainment…It is about results, and in Florida, we didn’t lead with merely words…we have produced a record of accomplishment that we would put up against anybody in this country,” DeSantis said at a recent campaign stop in Iowa. 

If history is any guide, DeSantis’ veiled shots will only fire-up Trump to double-down on insulting his former protégé. 

To be sure, Trump’s 2024 playbook – insulting his challengers into submission and positioning himself as a political martyr and an aggrieved victim of the political left – is nothing new. And while it’s hard to say whether this strategy will continue to pay off as the campaign begins in earnest, it appears increasingly likely that Donald Trump will bludgeon his way to the top of the GOP ticket, once again.

Douglas Schoen is a longtime Democratic political consultant.

That invasion, which led to victory over Nazi Germany, took place on June 6, 1944 — the longest day — and will be commemorated Tuesday.

Excluding the UK and Canada, the U.S. had some 71,000 troops in that invasion, 54,000 who stormed the beaches at Omaha and Utah, along with 13,000 paratroopers and 4,000 glider infantrymen who landed inland.

Joe Biden’s army in his war against the American taxpayer is made up of 85,260 new IRS agents – down from 87,000 — which not only doubles the existing size of the agency but will cost the taxpayers billions to pay for the expansion.

It is too bad Biden will not send IRS agents to the southern border to protect the American people from the millions of illegal immigrants who have invaded the country. Instead, they will go after Americans.

Biden administration maintains that the new agents will only go after tax dodging corporations and billionaires who are not paying their “fair share” of the tax burden.

Also, supporters say, most new hires will be information technicians, taxpayer service staff and auditors who will crack down on corporations and high-income tax evaders, Hunter Biden excluded.

The Republicans maintain that the new hires will be used to go after small business owners, the middle class, and workers who earn their living through cash payments, like waitresses, bartenders or food service personnel.

It is true that Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was able to contain or trim federal spending in the debt ceiling bill, including some cuts in the IRS budget.

It is also true that he could not have done it without the help of the Democrats. While the Republicans hold a slim majority in the House, more Democrats voted for the bill than did Republicans.

The vote in passing the bill, which was then fast-tracked in the Senate, was 314 to 117. The bill got 165 Democrats voting for it compared to 149 Republicans.

Voting against the bill were extremist members from both the left, who wanted to spend more, and the right who wanted to spend less.

Even though passage of the bill was a major victory for the dogged 58-year-old Speaker, he came under fire from Republican conservatives for not cutting enough, especially in the IRS budget.

And when it came to the hiring of an army of new IRS agents, McCarthy had it both ways.

Early on he vowed that on his first day as Speaker “we’re going to repeal the 87,000 IRS agents.”

Keeping his vow, the House in January voted to repeal the proposal on a 221 to 210 vote.

“This was our very first act of the new Congress, because government should work for you, not against you. Promises made, promises kept,” he said.

The bill, which Biden was going to veto anyway, was sent to the Democrat-controlled Senate where it disappeared.

However, McCarthy was able to rework the proposal into the debt ceiling bill that the House passed in April that eventually forced President Biden to the negotiating table.

Up to that point, Biden had refused to negotiate.

It was during these negotiations, and the compromises that went along with them, that the proposal for hiring the new IRS agents was apparently restored with McCarthy’s acquiescence.

Rep. Andy Biggs of the House Freedom Caucus called the new IRS agents “the New Stasi,” which were the dreaded secret police of Communist East Germany.

The federal government has gotten along without thousands of new agents for years. Why does it suddenly need them now? To shake down billionaires?

Of the 750 or so billionaires in the country, you can rest assured that Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg among them are not worried. They just lawyer up.

It is you, me and the average working stiff who should worry. The Biden government has become an occupying army.

Peter Lucas is a veteran Massachusetts political reporter and columnist.