Important Takeaways:
- The order forces major regulators such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to report new policy priorities to the executive branch for approval, which will also have a say over their budgets.
- In a fact sheet, the White House described the move as, “ensuring that all federal agencies are accountable to the American people, as required by the Constitution”.
- “The Order notes that Article II of the US Constitution vests all executive power in the President, meaning that all executive branch officials and employees are subject to his supervision,” the fact sheet said. The order will also apply to the Federal Reserve but will exempt the central bank’s authority over monetary policy.
- The Trump order aligns with campaign promises to make independent agencies accountable to the president and a pledge Vought made in 2023: “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them.”
- The move comes as the White House has attempted to fundamentally reshape the US government, including by seizing Congress’s “power of the purse”.
- The administration has argued it can refuse to spend funds allocated by Congress, in defiance of the Impoundment Act of 1974, which explicitly bars the practice.
- The president has also summarily fired the independent watchdogs of government agencies; attempted to end birthright citizenship; dismantled the foreign aid agency USAid; ordered severe cuts to biomedical research funding; and imposed a funding freeze, among the many executive orders made in Trump’s first few weeks in office which contravene congressional authority, and are now being litigated.
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Important Takeaways:
- Trump on Monday evening signed an executive order that read:
- National security is also damaged by the publication of classified information. Former National Security Advisor John R. Bolton published a memoir for monetary gain after he was terminated from his White House position in 2019. The book was rife with sensitive information drawn from his time in government. The memoir’s reckless treatment of sensitive information undermined the ability of future presidents to request and obtain candid advice on matters of national security from their staff. Publication also created a grave risk that classified material was publicly exposed.
- To remedy these abuses of the public trust, this Order directs the revocation of any active or current security clearances held by: (i) the former intelligence officials who engaged in misleading and inappropriate political coordination with the 2020 Biden presidential campaign; and (ii) John R. Bolton.
- Trump also revoked the security clearances of the 51 former intelligence officials who signed a letter calling the Hunter Biden laptop Russian disinformation — which was used as justification to suppress reports about it just days before the 2020 presidential election.
- Bolton served as Trump’s third national security adviser, after Gen. (Ret.) Mike Flynn and Lt. Gen. (Ret.) H.R. McMaster.
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Important Takeaways:
- MAKE AMERICA SAFE AGAIN
- President Trump will take bold action to secure our border and protect American communities.
- This includes ending Biden’s catch-and-release policies, reinstating Remain in Mexico, building the wall, ending asylum for illegal border crossers, cracking down on criminal sanctuaries, and enhancing vetting and screening of aliens.
- President Trump’s deportation operation will address the record border crossings of criminal aliens under the prior administration.
- The President is suspending refugee resettlement, after communities were forced to house large and unsustainable populations of migrants, straining community safety and resources.
- The Armed Forces, including the National Guard, will engage in border security, which is national security, and will be deployed to the border to assist existing law enforcement personnel.
- President Trump will begin the process of designating cartels, including the dangerous Tren de Aragua, as foreign terrorist organizations and use the Alien Enemies Act to remove them.
- The Department of Justice will seek the death penalty as the appropriate punishment for heinous crimes against humanity, including those who kill law enforcement officers and illegal migrants who maim and murder Americans.
- MAKE AMERICA AFFORDABLE AND ENERGY DOMINANT AGAIN
- The President will unleash American energy by ending Biden’s policies of climate extremism, streamlining permitting, and reviewing for rescission all regulations that impose undue burdens on energy production and use, including mining and processing of non-fuel minerals.
- President Trump’s energy actions empower consumer choice in vehicles, showerheads, toilets, washing machines, lightbulbs and dishwashers.
- President Trump will declare an energy emergency and use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure.
- President Trump’s energy policies will end leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our natural landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers.
- President Trump will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.
- All agencies will take emergency measures to reduce the cost of living.
- President Trump will announce the America First Trade Policy.
- America will no longer be beholden to foreign organizations for our national tax policy, which punishes American businesses.
- DRAIN THE SWAMP
- The President will usher a Golden Age for America by reforming and improving the government bureaucracy to work for the American people. He will freeze bureaucrat hiring except in essential areas to end the onslaught of useless and overpaid DEI activists buried into the federal workforce. He will pause burdensome and radical regulations not yet in effect that Biden announced.
- President Trump is announcing an unprecedented slate of executive orders for rescission.
- President Trump is planning for improved accountability of government bureaucrats. The American people deserve the highest-quality service from people who love our country. The President will also return federal workers to work, as only 6% of employees currently work in person.
- President Trump is taking swift action to end the weaponization of government against political rivals and ordering all document retention as required by law. President Trump is also ending the unconstitutional censorship by the federal government. No longer will government employees pick and require the erasure of entirely true speech.
- On the President’s direction, the State Department will have an America-First foreign policy.
- BRING BACK AMERICAN VALUES
- The President will establish male and female as biological reality and protect women from radical gender ideology.
- American landmarks will be named to appropriately honor our Nation’s history.
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Important Takeaways:
- Vice President Kamala Harris gaveled in Monday’s joint session of Congress as she presided over the certification of Donald Trump’s victory…
- The 40 electoral votes announced by Texas officially gave him the White House just before 1 p.m. ET, joined by House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and loud applause.
- When Harris first announced Trump as the next president starting Jan. 20, applause paused her pre-written remarks and forced her to continue after gaveling for attention, certifying her own election loss to Trump.
- “The votes for president of the United States are as follows: Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received 312 votes,” Harris said.
- “Kamala D. Harris,”… “has received 226 votes,”
- The official count “shall be deemed a sufficient declaration,” she concluded, for Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance to take their oaths of office Jan. 20
- Harris ended it with the words, “The chair declares this joint session dissolved.”
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Important Takeaways:
- Israel’s high-level Security Cabinet is expected to meet Tuesday night to discuss a ceasefire with the terror group Hezbollah. Some analysts believe the White House pressured Israel to accept the deal.
- Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon announced some of the ceasefire terms.
- He stated, “So, first, I expect that it will have stages. You know, it’s not going to happen overnight. There will be a few stages, (a) few requirements. You know, the most important condition for us is the withdrawal of Hezbollah, North of the Litani (River). We said it from the beginning, that that will be our goal in this war.”
- Other terms of the deal include: Israeli forces to pull out of southern Lebanon within 60 days; Hezbollah forces to retreat north of Litani River; the Lebanese Army and the U.N. force known as UNIFIL will ensure Hezbollah withdraws and does not reestablish its presence; a U.S. led enforcement committee will oversee the ceasefire.
- Israeli leaders suggest there may be a cessation of hostilities with Hezbollah but not the end of the war.
- According to the agreement, a U.S. letter will guarantee Israel has the freedom to act in Lebanon if Hezbollah attempts to rebuild its military.
- “But we’re not done yet. Nothing is final until everything is final,” said State Department Spokesman Matthew Miller. “We continue to work to try and get an agreement over the line and we’re hopeful we can get one. But we need both of the parties to get to yes.”
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Important Takeaways:
- …formerly illegal gain-of-function research is now fully legal, meaning the bioweapons industry is free to start churning out more plagues like the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19).
- Entitled “United States Government Policy for Oversight of Dual Use Research of Concern and Pathogens with Enhanced Pandemic Potential,” a new White House document explains how “certain types of federally funded life sciences research on biological agents and toxins” is now legal, including the kind of biological agents and toxins that “when enhanced, have the potential to pose risks to public health, agriculture, food security, economic security, or national security.”
- The new rules are to replace those established in 2012 and 2014, which at that time did not allow for gain-of-function research to take place on United States soil – back then, gain-of-function was only supposed to take place in China, Ukraine, or elsewhere.
- Part of the new plan is to have the appropriate federal agencies complete “an interagency review” of the situation in order to “strengthen responsible conduct for biological research” moving forward.
- “This Policy has also been issued pursuant to Section 2315 of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2023 (42 U.S.C. § 6627) to achieve consistent review and oversight of life sciences research proposed for federal funding that may be reasonably anticipated to involve the creation, transfer, or use of pathogens with enhanced pandemic potential (PEPPs),” reads the “Purpose” section of the new rules.
- Everything laid out in the White House document makes gain-of-function research sound important and essential to both the well-being and perpetuity of humanity itself. We know, however, from what happened with COVID that tampering with disease is a recipe for disaster.
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Important Takeaways:
- Andriy Yermak, the head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, and Defense Minister Rustem Umerov, will meet with US officials “to try to concretely convince the White House to lift restrictions on long-range weapons strikes on Russian territory,” the lawmaker said.
- “They will provide a list of priority targets, without which it will be difficult to change the course of the war in Ukraine’s favor.”
- Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky once again called for allowing Ukraine to carry out strikes deeper inside Russia and “lifting the restrictions on long-range strikes for Ukraine now,” arguing it would end the war sooner “for Ukraine and the world as a whole.”
- “We consider strikes deep into Russian territory with American weapons no more provocative than strikes with American weapons on Russian territory near the border,” the Ukrainian lawmaker told CNN. “Both are Russian territory and it makes no difference how deep the targets are.”
- The Ukrainian seizure of Russian land in Kursk earlier this month injected a fresh wrinkle of uncertainty in what had become a grinding war of attrition with only small incremental gains apparently possible for either side.
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Important Takeaways:
- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made weighty promises to Congress on Monday ahead of the 2024 election, saying he planned to fight any pressure from the White House to censor content on his social media platform and that he would not donate his controversial “Zuckerbucks” in this year’s election.
- Zuckerberg said in his most explicit criticisms yet of the Biden White House that senior officials “repeatedly pressured” the tech billionaire’s company to suppress content related to COVID-19 on its Facebook platform in 2021.
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Important Takeaways:
- Do you believe Donald Trump? He is entirely convinced that if we stay on the path that we are currently on we are heading into a “great depression”, and many believe that he is right on target. Unemployment is rising, manufacturing activity is contracting, bankruptcies are soaring, home sales have fallen to depressingly low levels, the cost-of-living crisis never seems to end, poverty is soaring and homelessness is at the highest level ever recorded. Since Barack Obama first entered the White House, our politicians in Washington have been propping up the economy by adding 25 trillion dollars to the national debt. Now our national debt has crossed the 35 trillion-dollar mark, and our politicians continue to spend money at a pace that is absolutely absurd. But despite this tremendous influx of borrowed cash, the wheels are starting to come off the U.S. economy anyway.
- This week, everyone is talking about a “recession” because of what has been happening in the financial markets.
- Prior to Tuesday’s session, more than 6 trillion dollars in global stock market wealth had already been wiped out…
- Bloomberg estimates that approximately $6.4 trillion has been erased from the value of global stock markets over the past three weeks.
- Last Friday, the Sahm rule was triggered when the unemployment rate went up again…
- The Sahm rule, created by the former Federal Reserve official Claudia Sahm, triggers when the unemployment rate’s three-month moving average moves 50 basis points above its 12-month low.
- That rule was triggered Friday, with the moving average rising 53 basis points above that one-year trough, according to the real-time Sahm Rule Recession Indicator from the St. Louis Federal Reserve.
- The Sahm rule has successfully predicted every single recession since 1970, and it is indicating that another recession is here.
- Today, we learned that Dell is planning another round of mass layoffs…
- While Dell has confirmed the layoffs, it hasn’t revealed how many employees are losing their jobs. SiliconAngle reports that roughly 12,500 Dell employees are being laid off this week, citing an unnamed source. Impacted employees are primarily on Dell’s sales and marketing teams. A layoff tracker has since reported the same number.
- Former Dell employee Ian Armstrong, who previously worked on the company’s UX design team for eight years, called the layoffs a “bloodbath” in a post, reporting that Dell has now laid off 24,500 staff in the past 15 months.
- Meanwhile, the cost-of-living crisis continues to crush working families all over the nation.
- At this point, it takes an additional thousand dollars a month for the typical U.S. household to buy the exact same goods and services that it did three years ago…
- The typical U.S. household needed to pay $227 more a month in March to purchase the same goods and services it did one year ago because of still-high inflation, according to calculations from Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi shared with FOX Business.
- Americans are paying on average $784 more each month compared with the same time two years ago and $1,069 more compared with three years ago, before the inflation crisis began.
- That is one of the primary reasons why credit card debt is at an all-time high and credit card delinquencies are soaring into the stratosphere…
- As I discussed a few days ago, we are witnessing a very alarming surge in business bankruptcies…
- Over the past year, business bankruptcy filings are up 40.3 percent, and have now reached a number not seen since the second quarter of 2020, at the peak of lockdowns. American households are following along, with total bankruptcy filings up 16.2 percent in the past year, including 132,710 new filings in the second quarter of 2024 alone.
- A 40 percent increase in one year is quite serious.
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Important Takeaways:
- A Secret Service sniper claims that another assassination attempt against a presidential candidate seems inevitable before Election Day because the attack on former President Donald Trump exposed the weakness in Secret Service security, according to a scathing letter circulating within the agency.
- “This agency NEEDS to change, if not now, WHEN? The NEXT assassination attempt in 30 days?” read the letter, first published by RealClearPolitics.
- “We all SHOULD expect another attempt to happen before November. We’ve exposed our inability to protect our leaders due to our leadership.”
- Law enforcement sources verified the authenticity of the letter to The Post.
- It was sent Monday to the entirety of the Secret Service Uniformed Division — the agency’s police force that secures the White House.
- The sniper demanded the resignation of high-level supervisors, whom the agent accused of failing rank-and-file Secret Service staff.
- “Sadly we have fallen short for YEARS. We just got lucky and looked good doing it. I have conveyed these thoughts to not only supervisors … Only to be brushed off as those with less experience somehow knew more than me,” the letter read.
- “Secret Service SUPERVISORS ‘knew better’ and the foot soldiers working, made the best of a BAD situation.”
- It went on to say that the reputation of the Secret Service and all its agents had been marred by the failures of July 13, which resulted in Trump being shot in the ear and a hero firefighter behind him being killed. The sniper said the day was “a stain I will never be able to cleanse.”
- The identity of the counter-sniper who wrote the letter is unclear. They described themselves as a veteran of the Marine Corps, and a member of Secret Service’s counter-sniper team for more than 20 years.
- Law enforcement sources previously told The Post that a full 30 seconds elapsed between when local police confronted gunman Thomas Crooks and the first shots he fired at Trump — prompting questions as to why Trump was allowed to remain onstage.
- The acting Secret Service director said Tuesday agents were never warned that Crooks was on the roof with a rifle.
- Meanwhile, newly revealed footage from the site of the shooting showed local cops encircling the building he shot from for more than two minutes before the attack, reinforcing that baffling question.
- Local police were in charge of the grounds from where Crooks fired, but the Secret Service was ultimately in charge of coordinating the day’s security.
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