"The Democrat shellacking in last week's elections has predictably spawned countless discussions, tweets, and think pieces analyzing what went wrong. That Democrats must have a messaging problem has been the common denominator in many of these conversations.

"I would suggest that what Democrats actually have is a policy problem; not a messaging problem. And that's a much harder problem to fix.

"Their agenda simply isn't working for too many Americans. And their arrogance in refusing to consider that possibility will continue to cost them."

Read the entire article here.

"On Wednesday, a federal lawsuit filed against the Michigan secretary of state revealed the state's voter rolls potentially include more than 25,000 dead people, including names of more than 20,000 individuals who have been dead for more than a decade.

"In the lawsuit filed by the Public Interest Legal Foundation, or PILF, a nonprofit law firm dedicated to election integrity, the group alleges that the Michigan Secretary of State's Office, headed by Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, violated Section 8 of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. That federal law requires states to 'conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names' of voters who have died.

"In its 20-page complaint, the PILF detailed efforts it had made beginning in the run-up o the 2020 election to ensure Michigan voter rolls did not include deceased individuals. After obtaining data from the state in early 2020 and then hiring a data analysis expert who cross-checked the data against commercial databases and information obtained from the Social Security Administration, the PILF determined the current Michigan rolls included approximately tens of thousands of individuals who appeared deceased. ...

"Further investigation by the PILF revealed evidence indicating 334 individuals had registered to vote after their deaths. 'Without further inquiry,' the nonprofit's claim says, 'there is no way to know for certain whether these post-death registrations are the result of identity theft, data input error, or for some other reasons.'"

Read the entire article here.

"They made it all up.

"If you haven't been paying attention to all the ins and outs of RussiaGate and the so-called 'collusion' scandal, that's all you need to know about Thursday's arrest of Russian analyst Igor Danchenko.

"The Hillary Clinton campaign hired a bunch of shady operatives to put together a collection of lies and innuendo about Donald Trump and shop it to the FBI. It was the ultimate political dirty trick, one that was aided and abetted by the media long after Trump took office.

"Igor Danchenko, the guy who supposedly gathered all the spurious 'dirt' in the infamous Steele dossier, is accused of lying at least five times to investigators, special counsel John Durham alleges. Those lies were to cover up the fact that he really had no sources for his claims -- or, in some cases, the sources were Clinton associates.

"How's that for a vicious circle? Clinton officials feed their Russian stooge disinformation, it gets laundered through British spy Christopher Steele, and the FBI uses it as the basis for wiretapping the future president's team."

"The right of parents to have a say in what their children are taught in school wasn't everything driving the red wave that swamped Democrats on Tuesday, but their school board battles exemplified the anti-woke backlash sweeping the country.

"And, looming over every ballot, was Joe Biden's disastrous presidency. Soaring gas prices, inflation, supply-chain shortages, rising crime, out-of-control illegal migration and the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan are just a few of the self-inflicted debacles the president seems stubbornly determined to ignore."

"Someone go give Joe Biden an ice-cream cone. He probably feels pretty bad right now."

"President Joe Biden is underwater by double digits on overall job approval, and Republicans lead Democrats on a wide array of issues, according to a devastating new national survey from NBC News. Some liberals and Biden supporters had questioned whether previous ugly polls from outfits like blue-leaning Quinnipiac were outliers, but the NBC survey would appear to kill that particular form of spin. Voters don't like what they're seeing from a president who campaigned on the promise of being truthful, competent, moderate, bipartisan, and unifying. That's not how the Biden presidency is playing out at all, and the displeased American people are noticing:

"'A majority of Americans now disapprove of President Joe Biden's job performance, while half give him low marks for competence and uniting the country, according to results from the latest national NBC News poll. What's more, the survey finds that 7 in 10 adults, including almost half of Democrats, believe the nation is headed in the wrong direction, as well as nearly 60 percent who view Biden's stewardship of the economy negatively just nine months into his presidency...In the poll, 42 percent of adults say they approve of Biden's overall job as president -- a decline of 7 points since August, with much of the attrition coming from key parts of the Democratic base. That's compared to 54 percent who say they disapprove of the president's job, which is up 6 points since August. Using Gallup's historical data, Biden's approval rating in this poll (42 percent) is lower than any other modern first-year president's at a similar point in time, with the key exception of Donald Trump (whose approval averaged 37 percent in fall 2017).'"

Read the entire article here.

"Who's this Brandon fellow?

"He must be quite a guy to receive so many well-wishes and life-affirming messages from such a wide range of Americans from all walks of life and coast to coast."

"After months of negotiations, President Biden on Thursday unveiled a rough outline of the latest iteration of his 'Build Back Better' agenda in hopes that it would grease the wheels for House passage of the companion infrastructure bill. While the proposal is pared down from what Democrats had been promising earlier in the year, in its current form, it is still large enough to be fiscally irresponsible and economically destructive.

For those following media accounts, the $1.75 trillion cost of the new framework is portrayed as a significant compromise from the $6 trillion originally favored by Senator Bernie Sanders, or the $3.5 trillion bill that has been discussed for much of the year. But keep in mind that the $1.75 trillion comes on top of the $1.9 trillion that Democrats passed in March and the $550 billion they hope to pass in a practically linked infrastructure bill. So if Biden gets his way, even a smaller bill would mean that in the first year of his administration, Democrats will have enacted $4.2 trillion worth of new spending. That spending comes on top of the $4 trillion that Congress authorized in the final year of the Trump administration in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. ...

House speaker Nancy Pelosi keeps trying to argue that the bill is 'about the children.' With debt as a share of the economy at the highest level since World War II, adding trillions in new obligations is irresponsible, whether or not it is offset by tax increases. Whatever resources are tapped to support new spending are resources that are no longer available for debt reduction."

Read the entire article here.

"Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe has spent nearly $100,000 advertising 'fake news' websites on Facebook during the Virginia gubernatorial campaign, Fox News can reveal.

"The Democrat's advertisements, which have been viewed up to 3.5 million times so far, are hidden on a Facebook page with a similar name to a local news website. The ads link to third-party websites that ostensibly publish local news, but exist to promote Democratic candidates. The websites have been widely described as disinformation and 'partisan propaganda.'

"The revelation comes less than a week before election day, and as the candidates fight for every last vote, with polls showing McAuliffe and rival Republican Glenn Youngkin locked in a tight battle."

Read the entire article here.

"One of the many awful things about our tax debate -- and our tax system -- is its infantilization of the American people and its degradation of citizenship. A tax system that is designed to fund the needful things the federal government does -- from making roads to making war -- is a tax system pure and simple, the goal of which is to collect sufficient revenue while doing a minimum of violence to the economy, private enterprise, and private fortunes. It is those private fortunes that arouse the moralists. And a tax system or a tax-policy debate that is primarily moralistic in character is an invitation to grubbiness: 'How much of the wealth of those people we don't like very much can we pry away for people like us?'

"King Baby has only one law: 'I WANT!' ...

"There are many good arguments against a wealth tax. For one, it is unconstitutional. (Yeah, Sunshine, I hear you, and you may think the apportionment clause is dumb, but it's not imaginary. And the 16th Amendment gives Congress only the 'power to lay and collect taxes on incomes,' not wealth.) It would be impossible to efficiently administer (even Switzerland got rid of its federal wealth tax, though there is one at the local level, and, in any case, we are not Switzerland), which is why most of the European countries that have had one have abandoned it. The most obvious problem (though there are many more) is that shares and other financial instruments can fluctuate substantially by the second -- Virgin Galactic shares, for example, went from $15.50 to $56 over the summer, which makes establishing a sensible tax valuation difficult. Wealth taxes are redundant in that we already tax income derived from wealth (that's what a capital-gains tax does), which is much easier to pin down. Wealth taxes penalize saving and reward consumption. Wealth taxes will make housing more expensive, especially for renters -- that is, the people who actually pay the taxes on their landlords' portfolios."

Read the entire article here.