"While Washington, D.C., continually talks about new, additional spending, the question we should be asking is, how do we even pay for old spending? The interest alone on what we already owe is unprecedented beyond reason. While it would be nice to see interest rates stay low forever, they won't.

"As the Biden administration blankets America with 'free' money, federalized infrastructure projects and promises to create irreversible new entitlement programs, it's time Americans understood just how much that free money is going to cost them. ...

"Nobody wants to talk about the tradeoffs associated with a $28 trillion debt. But at today's rock bottom interest rates, we've been spending close to $400 billion a year in interest on our debt. In April and May this year, we paid more than $1.5 billion EACH DAY and the numbers are rising.

"As economic conditions point to potentially rising interest rates, no one wants to consider what happens to those debt payments. Just as your mortgage payment can go up by a few hundred dollars with each 1% increase in rates, the payments on $28 trillion also go up fast. And at this point, interest rates have nowhere to go but up.

"Think about this: a 1% increase in interest rates would leave us spending more on interest than we spend on Medicare in a year, according to data from the Committee for a Responsible Budget (CRB). A 2% increase takes our interest payments up above $750 billion a year. And a 3% increase, which is well within the realm of possibility, would leave us spending almost as much on interest as we spend on Social Security in a year."

Read the entire article here.

"NEW YORK -- The New York City Board of Elections accidentally included results from a mock trial of the city's new ranked-choice voting system in unofficial primary returns released Tuesday -- a snafu that threw the election process into chaos.

Tallies released Tuesday afternoon indicated that Kathryn Garcia had come within 2.2 points of leading Democratic candidate Eric Adams after ranked-choice tabulations were processed. But, shortly after the results were released, reporters and campaign staffers noticed there were roughly 135,000 more votes counted than those reported on election night.

Three hours after releasing the numbers, the Board of Elections issued a statement acknowledging a 'discrepancy' and subsequently took down the totals from their website.

After 10 p.m. Tuesday, the board finally came clean with a statement: The 'test' ballots were never cleared out of the tabulation system and thus added the additional votes into the total, skewing the numbers. The board said that it has removed all of the erroneous ballots from the count and will re-run the results -- though when the new rankings will be ready was still unclear."

"Chris Rock famously said, when Barack Obama was president, 'The president and the first lady are kind of like the mom and the dad of the country. And when your dad says something, you listen.'

"Joe Biden, though, is the granddad of the country, and when you listen to Granddad, sometimes you wonder whether it's safe for him to be near a pair of scissors.

"No big deal, though; it's just that there's this guy who looks like he'd have trouble using Google Maps and he happens to be in charge of all the nukes. On the rare occasions when Biden's staff let him out of the dayroom to be seen on camera, pre-selected members of the press ask him the gentlest conceivable questions and then wind up cringing anyway as Biden gives one unnerving display after another."

Read entire article here.

"For years, we have been discussing the decline of journalism values with the rise of open bias in the media. Now, a newly released report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford has found something that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. The United States ranked dead last in media trust among 49 countries with just 29% saying that they trusted the media. The most tragic aspect is that it does not matter. The media has embraced the advocacy journalism and anyone questioning that trend risks instant cancellation.The result is a type of state media where journalists are bound to the government by ideology rather than law.

"The plunging level of trust reflects the loss of the premier news organizations to a type of woke journalism."

Read entire article here.

"Last month, we warned Republicans about the pitfalls of indulging President Biden's infrastructure fantasies. The bipartisan framework announced Thursday isn't causing us to change our mind.

"There is much to dislike about the so-called compromise proposal (even putting aside the minor detail that the nation's infrastructure is not, in fact, in dire need of repair). The deal negotiated by a group of five Republicans and five Democrats would mean $579 billion in new spending that, when slapped on top of what the federal government is already slated to spend on infrastructure, could mean $1.2 trillion in outlays over the next eight years. In a year when the White House expects U.S. debt as a share of the economy to be the highest in American history, the plan is vague about how everything will be paid for. A White House 'fact sheet' touting the plan has a line-by-line breakdown of the various new spending initiatives along with descriptions, but only bullet points on the proposed financing mechanisms, without any dollar amounts. Those bullet points include lines such as, 'State and local investment in broadband infrastructure' and 'Repurpose unused relief funds from 2020 emergency relief legislation.' Additionally, the plan lists 'Reduce the IRS tax gap' and 'Unemployment insurance integrity.' In other words, they couldn't get the numbers to add up, so they went for the old Washington standby of combating waste, fraud, and abuse.

"While this framework deserves to be rejected on the substance alone, it doesn't get to the heart of the matter, which is that this entire process is a charade. Democrats have made their plans very clear. They want to move the bipartisan plan through the Senate on a parallel track with a reconciliation bill stuffed with liberal wish-list items that will be rammed through on a pure party-line basis."

Read entire editorial here.

"The Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision Wednesday ruled that a California law allowing union organizers access to farms to organize workers is unconstitutional because it in effect deprives farm owners of their property rights without just compensation.

"The six Republican-appointed justices ruled for the businesses while the three Democrat-appointed justices dissented, siding with state officials who defended the pro-union rule. It represented a show of force from the conservative majority on a hot-button political issue after a recent string of largely unanimous or 8-1 rulings.

"'The right to exclude is "one of the most treasured" rights of property ownership,' Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. 'Accordingly, the growers' complaint states a claim for an uncompensated taking in violation of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.' ...

"The libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), which represented the growers in the case, said the ruling is a victory not only for farmers in California but property rights more generally.

"'Today's ruling is a huge victory for property rights. The decision affirms that one of the most fundamental aspects of property is the right to decide who can and can't access your property,' PLF senior attorney Joshua Thompson said."

"Several former and current members of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) are sounding the alarm against President Biden's nomination to lead the agency.

"Former ATF Director Michael Sullivan, as well as a current ATF member involved in training and a retired ATF deputy director who wished to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, expressed concern that Biden's nominee is too political to lead an unbiased agency.

"'I am concerned that somebody who has taken such a strong and hostile position against the Second Amendment, as well as gun owners and some of the most popular firearms in the United States, would be viewed as a political leader for an agency that, I think, has worked extremely hard to build the American public confidence in its handling of interpreting both the Gun Control Act and the various regulations around it,' Sullivan told Fox News."

"Liberal activists fearful of Democrats losing control of the Senate are pushing for stalwart liberal Justice Stephen Breyer to retire this year but Democratic senators don't share their enthusiasm, knowing a fall confirmation battle could quickly become a partisan circus.

"Senators say it's entirely up to Breyer, who is 82 years old, to make a decision on when to step down from the high court. They aren't relishing in another bruising Senate confirmation fight, which could put President Biden's legislative agenda on hold and further fuel partisan tensions in the chamber. ...

"Progressive activists, however, argue the future composition of the court is the most important consideration and one that could have an impact on law and public policy for decades to come.

"One of the groups that has been most outspoken in calling for Breyer's retirement is Demand Justice, which is led by Brian Fallon, a former senior aide to Schumer and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton."

"The political fight over firearms regulation is not a matter of public safety but a matter of culture war. If you doubt that, consider a related case: We still have on the books anti-switchblade laws that were adopted by states such as Colorado in a national moral panic following the premiere of West Side Story. Without those knife-control laws, the United States surely would have degenerated into a dystopian hellscape straight from the minds of . . . Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim. ...

"Sound suppressors -- popularly known as 'silencers' to the great irritation of the sort of person who will officiously correct you if you say 'clip' when you mean 'magazine' -- are commonplace items throughout much of the world, including in most of Europe, where some shooting clubs will go so far as to require their use as a matter of courtesy. In many European countries, you can buy a suppressor at a sporting-goods store with no more paperwork than is required to buy a pair of hiking boots. In real life, a firearm equipped with a suppressor doesn't make that cute little 'pew!' sound that it emits when James Bond is using one -- it sounds like a gun going off, but more quietly. ...

"In the United States, we have a cumbrous federal regulatory apparatus under which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives regulates the sale and transfer of suppressors in accordance with the National Firearms Act of 1934. (The states add another level of potential regulation, but suppressors are legal in all but eight of them.) Acquiring a suppressor requires a considerable pile of paperwork, an extensive background check, the payment of a special federal transfer tax, etc. The waiting time for getting approval can run more than a year. On top of that, lending someone a suppressor can put both of you at risk of becoming federal felons, and so those who own suppressors sometimes take the extraordinary step of forming a legal trust to take ownership of the accessory, so that family members who have been added to the trust can take the suppressor down to the shooting range without legal peril.

"Texas means to change that -- and, if it is successful, Texas's effort will change a lot more than the noise level at the shooting ranges in Houston. The firearms may be muffled, but the regulatory shot will be heard from coast to coast."

Read entire article here.

"For the past year, liberals unleashed on the nation an avalanche of ideological nonsense, coupled with brutal pressure to conform. Those who bucked the party line found themselves canceled and unpersoned and had their opinions subjected to mockery and claims of delusion and 'anti-science' prejudices.

"Until now. Because the tide is turning. And sometimes the break from the party line comes from surprising places.

"Late-night comics are usually reliable parroters of the message of the day. So it says something that last week, Bill Maher launched an impassioned critique of 'woke' culture, while this week, Jon Stewart went on Stephen Colbert's show to say in no uncertain terms that it looks like the Wuhan coronavirus came from . . . the Wuhan lab.

"Using a term from Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, Maher accused liberals of 'progressophobia' -- 'a brain disorder that strikes liberals and makes them incapable of recognizing progress.'"

Read entire article here.