"Democrats and much of the media are pushing to make permanent the extraordinary, pandemic-driven measures to relax voting rules during the 2020 elections -- warning anew of racist voter 'suppression' otherwise. Yet democracies in Europe and elsewhere tell a different story -- of the benefits of stricter voter ID requirements after hard lessons learned.

"A database on voting rules worldwide compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center, which I run, shows that election integrity measures are widely accepted globally, and have often been adopted by countries after they've experienced fraud under looser voting regimes.

"Of 47 nations surveyed in Europe -- a place where, on other matters, American progressives often look to with envy -- all but one country requires a government-issued photo voter ID to vote. The exception is the U.K., and even there voter IDs are mandatory in Northern Ireland for all elections and in parts of England for local elections. Moreover, Boris Johnson's government recently introduced legislation to have the rest of the country follow suit. ...

"Seventy-four percent of European countries entirely ban absentee voting for citizens who reside domestically. Another 6% limit it to those hospitalized or in the military, and they require third-party verification and a photo voter ID. Another 15% require a photo ID for absentee voting.

"Similarly, government-issued photo IDs are required to vote by 33 nations in the 37-member Organistion for Economic Co-operation and Development (which has considerable European overlap)."

"The U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Tuesday revealed the five states suffering the most from the country's labor shortage.

"The Chamber released its 'America Works Report' analyzing the country's available job numbers, which stood at 8.1 million in March, compared to its average worker-to-job ratio, which stands at 1.4 workers per vacant job. By comparison, the historical ratio average is 2.8 workers per job, according to the Chamber.

"These five states, however, have the lowest worker-to-job ratios in the country:

• South Dakota (0.6 workers per job)

• Nebraska (0.8 workers per job)

• Vermont (0.8 workers per job)

• Kansas (1 worker per job)

• Indiana (1 worker per job)

"'The worker shortage is real -- and it's getting worse by the day,' Chamber of Commerce President and CEO Suzanne Clark said in a Tuesday statement."

Read entire article here.

"Joe Biden finally released his proposed federal budget Friday, just before the Memorial Day holiday. It's almost as if the White House didn't want people to look at it too closely.

"The Congressional Budget Office reports that if everything that Biden has proposed were to be approved by the Democratic Congress, the national debt would climb by $22 trillion over the next decade. That's a $7.6 trillion increase in the deficit, and that's after the recovery from COVID-19's disruptions. ...

"The publicly held debt would skyrocket from 98 percent of GDP in 2020 to 130 percent by 2031, eclipsing the debt level of 114 percent held by the U.S. just after it fought World War II."

Read entire article here.

"May we never forget our fallen comrades. Freedom isn't free."

"The Squad might get headlines for its attacks on Israel during conflicts with Hamas, but they might end up marginalizing their party. A new Fox poll shows Americans back Israel by well over a 2:1 margin over the Palestinians, even while progressives in Congress accuse Israel of running an 'apartheid state.' Majorities of respondents also favor military aid and direct sales of weaponry to Israel, too ...

"The strident and radical messaging from the Squad and other progressives in the Democratic ranks cut directly against this solidified political consensus. American voters don't necessarily choose party affiliation over foreign-policy issues, but it's yet another way in which Democrats appear more and more radical and antithetical to the political consensus. That will have a corrosive effect, especially given the rash of attacks on Jews recently in American cities by pro-Palestinian activists. Progressives are playing with fire in more than one sense, and it's Democrats who may eventually get burned at the ballot box because of it."

"It is time for the news business to admit that 'fact-checking' is a tiresome, misleading, and dishonest blight on actual reporting. ...

"'Fact-checkers,' often employed by full-time 'fact-checking' organizations, are widely granted weighty authority they haven't earned and don't deserve. Members of the fact-checker species are no more likely to be right than the reporters whose work they presume to judge. They are themselves often merely former reporters who reached their ceiling in real journalism, or else young novices who have still to learn how it's done. Yet they're accorded outsize gravitas. That's why shallow would-be rebuttals that are really nothing more than opinion pieces are often labeled 'fact checks.' Their stolen authority conceals rather than exposes the truth.

"Scratch a fact-checker and he's just another guy lugging around his prejudices and thinking (like a grumpy reader) that a story is flat wrong just because it isn't written the way he'd have written it. It's more than a decade since I told my reporters not even to refer in their stories to fact-checkers' findings. Because they're irrelevant. That a fact-checker concludes X, Y, or Z usually reveals nothing useful.

"Yet fact-checking has spread like a nasty rash over the nether regions of our profession. The people conferring 'pinocchios' and 'pants on fire' ratings are as likely as not to base their decisions on criteria less related to accuracy than to personal taste, ideology, or slavish acceptance and imposition of a tyrannical orthodoxy."

"A rise in violent crime is endangering slim Democratic congressional majorities more than a year out from the midterm elections and threatening to revive 'law and order' as a major campaign issue for Republicans for the first time since the 1990s.

"Homicides in cities increased by up to 40% over the previous year, the biggest single-year increase since 1960, a trend that has not abated so far in 2021. Sixty-three of the 66 largest police jurisdictions saw a rise in at least one category of violent crime, ranging from homicide and rape to robbery and assault, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Homicides and shootings have gone up for three straight years in Washington, D.C., and at least a dozen mass shootings were reported nationwide over the weekend. ...

"'Rising crime is a problem that must be addressed through both economic policies that are incentives to work while also giving law enforcement the support they need to enforce our laws,' said GOP strategist Jon Gilmore. 'Republicans were successful in the 2020 cycle by addressing this important issue, and they would be wise to continue that drumbeat in the midterms.'"

"President Biden's COVID relief is quickly devolving into shocking stories of waste, fraud and abuse, along with a dose of misdirection and political spin.

"Biden bellowed on COVID relief, 'This historic legislation is about rebuilding the backbone of this country and giving people in this nation, working people, middle-class folks, people who built the country, a fighting chance.' That was the promise, but that is not the reality.

"What Biden didn't tell Americans is their money is actually being sent overseas for projects bearing little relation to the public health crisis. Scuba gear in Uruguay, gas turbine engines in Canada, HIV research in Ukraine, and management consulting services in Fiji are all part of what Democrats consider urgent emergency relief. Even 'Disinformation and fake news, TV, radio and multimedia project for PD' in South America via the Department of State.

"These are just some of the grants listed at pandemicoversight.gov, where the government's independent inspectors general have created an important resource for Americans to monitor government aid. ...

"It is incumbent upon American citizens and responsible media to watch closely where these emergency dollars end up and to hold accountable those who perpetuate waste, fraud and abuse because what we are being told is not what is actually happening."

Read entire article here.

"You may have noticed that after a year in which almost every health authority closed ranks to say that it was ridiculous to believe that COVID-19 emerged from a lab in Wuhan, now there is a rush to the microphones and newspapers to at least entertain the lab-leak theory. Dr. Fauci himself, who had dismissed the lab-escape theory as unscientific, is now saying he is 'not convinced' that COVID emerged in nature, or at a wet market. Even the head of the World Health Organization said the lab leak couldn't be ruled out, after a WHO investigation that was practically designed to rule out the lab-leak theory. Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting that U.S. intelligence had reports in November of 2019 that several staff at the Wuhan lab fell sick and had to be hospitalized."

Read entire article here.

"As the Biden administration takes shape as an even more aggressive third term for President Barack Obama, Republican senators have proposed legislation to prevent a repeat of the 2013 IRS targeting scandal.

"On Thursday, 43 Republican senators led by Mike Braun of Indiana and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, proposed the 'Don't Weaponize the IRS Act' to codify a Trump-era rule passed last year aimed at stopping the IRS from targeting 501c4 tax-exempt groups based on their political ideology. The proposed law would maintain the right of select tax-exempt groups from disclosing confidential identity information of major donors on annual returns with the government. ...

"'The American people remember all too well what can happen when the IRS is allowed to subject individuals to unequal scrutiny, depending on their political beliefs,' McConnell said in a statement. 'The prior administration was right to intervene and put hard limits on the sort of personal information unelected bureaucrats could demand from nonprofit organizations and their donors.'"