Thanks: 
Likes: Maybe there isn't anything down there that they want anymore.Originally Posted by BillyCarpenter
It's not really a question for me.
Dislikes: 0
Maybe there isn't anything down there that they want anymore.
It's not really a question for me.
So, you disagree with Omar that America is currently a terrorist nation? Yes? No?
I don't know of any countries where the US is currently showing any terrorist tendencies
Biden administration announces plans to strengthen critical supply chains
The Biden administration announced on a series of steps designed to strengthen critical U.S. supply chains, building up domestic manufacturing capabilities for key products and addressing existing vulnerabilities.
President Joe Biden in February ordered a 100-day interagency review of domestic supply chains.
The outcome of this review and the resulting policy recommendations make up a new report totaling several hundred pages, due to be released on Tuesday.
The report’s initial recommendations focus on four products critical to the U.S. economy: large capacity lithium batteries, rare earth minerals, semiconductors and active pharmaceutical ingredients.
- Large capacity lithium batteries: The Department of Energy is aiming to release a 10-year plan to develop a domestic lithium battery supply chain capable of producing the batteries that power electric vehicles. The agency’s Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program will distribute $17 billion in an effort to support new research and manufacturing efforts in the United States.
- Rare earth minerals: The Department of Interior will lead a task force to identify sites where critical minerals could be produced and processed in the United States.” The report said the U.S. will develop the capacity for “sustainable production, refining, and recycling” of the 17 rare earth metals used in cellphones, cars and magnets, while meeting high environmental standards.
- Semiconductors: As the nation grapples with a chip shortage that has idled major auto manufacturing plants, the White House said it will work with the private sector to increase supply-chain transparency.
- Advanced pharmaceutical ingredients: The Department of Health and Human Services will use authority granted under the Defense Production Act to commit approximately $60 million to “develop novel platform technologies to increase domestic manufacturing capacity for API.”
In addition to these steps, designed to boost supplies of specific products, the administration also announced several broader initiatives.
To help train the workers that will be needed to staff these new projects, the White House will announce $100 million in additional grants to support state-led apprenticeship expansion efforts. The grants will be administered by the Department of Labor.
The Department of Energy will announce a new policy that requires awardees of DOE research and development grants to “substantially manufacture those products in the United States.”
Along with these efforts to bolster domestic supply chains, the Biden administration will also announce new steps to combat “unfair foreign trade practices,” which it says have contributed to the erosion of supply chains around the world.
One of these will be the creation of a “trade strike force” led by the U.S. Trade Representative’s office. The strike force will aim to identify “unilateral and multilateral” enforcement actions the United States can take to punish countries that it believes are engaging in unfair trade practices. According to a senior administration official, the strike force will focus on developing U.S.-China trade policies.
who cares what he has to say... he's (supposed) to be gone. but we all know that biden can't handle the reigns by himself... so in steps the mulatto gay guy.
Guatemalans Tell Kamala Harris to 'Go Home': 'Trump Won'
On Sunday, Vice President Kamala Harris made her first official trip abroad as a member of the Biden administration.
Her travels led her south to Guatemala, where she is supposed to be working out solutions to the “root causes” of the illegal immigration crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Evidently, some Guatemalans weren’t happy to see Harris.
When she descended the steps of Air Force Two, Harris was greeted by a crowd of protesters outside the airport — many of them pro-Donald Trump activists — flashing signs that read “Kamala Mind Your Own Business,” “Kamala Go Home” and “Kamala, Trump Won.”
Given the Biden administration’s coddling of illegal immigrants and its willingness to funnel cash to any country that claims need, you would have expected Harris to have be met with pro-illegal immigration signs and fawning pro-Biden activists.
As a group called Society in Action, which protested outside the airport, told El Faro, a Central American newspaper based in El Salvador, “We’re not against Kamala Harris’s diplomatic visit, but rather her interference and blackmail in return for aid.”
One of the demonstrators continued: “We’re against [the Biden administration’s] agenda of imposing the LGBTQ, pro-abortion ideology. In Guatemala we’re pro-life.”
As it turns out, about 87 percent of the Guatemalan population was Christian in 2016, according to polling cited by the U.S. State Department.
Christians believe in the inherent value of human life. We know that all humans are created in the image of God and endowed with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
It follows that a country of Christians wouldn’t be on board with a woman’s “right” to choose to kill a baby in the womb.
With regard to the bribery being sold as humanitarian aid, it seems that many Guatemalans just want equality of opportunity, individual freedom and to be left alone by Democrats — which makes them like many Americans.
But, furthermore, why would a country whose residents believe in the intrinsic value of human life and individual freedom buy into the Biden administration’s militantly anti-scientific, anti-freedom LGBT agenda?
There is something to be said for tolerance of people who don’t seem to fit in neatly with everyone else.
But that is different from ignoring the biological markers between male and female to instead effectively mandate that sex is determined by features of the personality — and then cracking down on individual and religious freedom based on this anti-scientific nonsense.
If the Biden administration had its druthers, religious Americans would no doubt be forced to participate in activities they believe to be sinful. Schools would be teaching children anti-scientific garbage about pregnant men and “people with vulvas.”
Free citizens with an innate penchant for mouthing off at authority would be compelled by their government to use certain pronouns in relation to others.
In the same way that France wants leftism to stay in American universities, many Guatemalan people would prefer that “woke-ism” remain an American problem.
And the truth is that the spread of ideological leftism does need to be confined to the United States, where it should be defeated.
This all leaves a final question: Why is the vice president of the United States in Guatemala instead of at the U.S. southern border, where the crisis is occurring and Americans are hurting because of it?
The answer is that the Biden administration has painted itself into a corner.
The best solutions to the illegal immigration crisis happen to be fortifying the border, prosecuting and deporting illegal immigrants, and removing incentives for criminal border crossings.
These are all Trump administration solutions that would work to solve the problem, but they fly in the face of the Biden agenda, which is to be anti-Trump.
Democrats have decided instead that the “root cause” of illegal immigration to the United States is that America is just too good relative to the rest of the world.
If we invested taxpayer dollars in humanitarian aid, then people of other countries wouldn’t feel the need to come to America anymore because their country would be as good or better, the thinking goes.
The problem is that this thinking is stupid.
It also happens to be dangerous because it requires us to beef up the rest of the world and cut ourselves down to size.
In an effort to pretend that the illegal immigration crisis is caused by factors other than Biden administration policy, this line of thought has sent Kamala Harris to other countries to investigate and report back about how bad they have it relative to us.
Her solution to our own problems, then, will always be to solve the problems of everyone else — to make all things equitable.
This is a load of bunk.
The Guatemalans know it as much as we do.
Unanimous Supreme Court: Illegal Immigrants Do Not Have A Right To Green Cards
In a 9-0 decision issued Monday morning, the Supreme Court ruled that a law, barring illegal immigrants from seeking green cards, is constitutional and that those illegal immigrants who later earned a Temporary Protected Status (TPS) are still ineligible to apply for permanent residency.
Justice Elena Kagan, widely recognized as one of the Court’s more liberal justices, wrote the unanimous opinion, upholding a rule that barred “unlawful entrants” who later received Temporary Protected Status from applying to remain in the United States. Temporary Protected Status technically “gives foreign nationals nonimmigrant status,” Kagan noted, but TPS does not rubber-stamp an “unlawful entry.”
The TPS status “applies to people who come from countries ravaged by war or disaster. It protects them from deportation and allows them to work legally. There are 400,000 people from 12 countries with TPS status,” according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
The Court was called upon to decide whether a “couple from El Salvador who have been in the U.S. since the early 1990s” who were given protected status in 2001 but who originally “entered the country illegally” were actually “admitted” into the United States when they were given protected status, enabling them to apply for a green card.
Kagan was clear, in her opinion, that they were not. “The TPS program gives foreign nationals nonimmigrant status, but it does not admit them. So the conferral of TPS does not make an unlawful entrant…eligible,” she wrote.
WELL that throws a bucket of ICE WATER on Biden's plans doesn't it?
If Congress had wanted to confer “admission” into the United States along with Temporary Protected Status, Congress had an opportunity when they wrote the law, Kagan noted. She also suggested that Congress could approve “pending legislation” that refines the Temporary Protected Status to include “admission.”
“Congress, of course, could have gone further, by deeming TPS recipients to have not only nonimmigrant status but also a lawful admission,” Kagan said in her opinion, writing for the unanimous court. “Legislation pending in Congress would do just that.”
“The House of Representatives already has passed legislation that would make it possible for TPS recipients to become permanent residents,” Kagan noted, per the Star-Tribune. “The bill faces uncertain prospects in the Senate.”
Although the case likely does not impact most immigrants who entered the United States illegally, it does affect around 400,000 people from 12 countries — “Haiti, Honduras, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen” — if they did not enter the U.S. by “lawful” means.
More importantly, “[t]he case pitted the Biden administration against immigrant groups that argued many people who came to the U.S. for humanitarian reasons have lived in the country for many years, given birth to American citizens, and put down roots in the U.S.,” per the Star-Tribune — groups that are already uneasy with President Joe Biden’s immigration agenda and who have been pressing the administration itself to be more liberal when it comes to allowing immigrants who entered the United States illegally to stay.
That's very Christian of you.
Even Putin Is Calling Out Biden Over Hypocritical Prosecution of Jan. 6 Protesters
Weeks after the dissident blogger was arrested and detained by Belarusian police authorities, Roman Protasevich appeared on a state television broadcast Thursday praising the nation’s autocratic leader, Alexander Lukashenko, in a drastic change of rhetoric.
In the interview, the journalist retracted his former sentiments and allegations against Lukashenko, who has ruled the country for nearly 30 years.
“I realised that many things Aleksandr Grigoryevich [Lukashenko] is criticised for are just attempts to pressure him, and that in many moments he acted like … a man with balls of steel,” Protasevich said, according to Matthew Luxmoore, Moscow correspondent for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
After months of vocally supporting and advocating for national protests that challenged the country’s autocratic leadership, the journalist said he had organized the “mass unrest” and now regrets leading people to protest.
In addition, despite former statements alleging widespread government abuse and injustice, Protasevich said he “absolutely” respects the nation’s president.
According to some political commentators, Protasevich’s answers repeated and legitimized the government’s line on domestic dissident behavior, leading to the belief that the opposition writer was tortured, coerced or psychologically manipulated.
The interview fell just 10 days after the nation’s president employed a warplane to divert a Ryanair flight to Minsk, the country’s capital, in order to arrest the journalist on May 23.
Days after the incident, the United States and the European Union respectively condemned the Belarusian government and demanded it release Protasevich.
“Independent media are an essential pillar supporting the rule of law and a vital component of a democratic society. The United States once again condemns the Lukashenka regime’s ongoing harassment and arbitrary detention of journalists,” U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in a statement on May 23.
“We stand with the Belarusian people in their aspirations for a free, democratic, and prosperous future and support their call for the regime to respect human rights and fundamental freedoms.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, Lukashenko denounced the West’s intervention in a message to parliamentarians, defending his decision to ground the plane and arrest Protasevich.
The Belarusian leader met with Russian President Vladimir Putin shortly after the incident, finding support from one of the nation’s closest allies.
Less than two weeks later, the Kremlin’s leader condemned Washington’s treatment of the Belarusian government as an example of America’s “double standards,” comparing it to the prosecution of people who participated in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, according to The Washington Post.
“These are not looters or thieves, these people came with political requests,” Putin said Friday of the supporters of then-President Donald Trump who entered the Capitol in a demonstration over the integrity of the November election.
Later this month, the Russian leader plans to meet with President Joe Biden in Geneva. The two leaders are expected to discuss mutual concerns on coronavirus pandemic, terrorism and climate change, while issues including human rights, trade and international competition remain highly contentious.
Rising above the significance of the meeting, there remains an everlasting sentiment in the United States that despite the seriousness of the crimes committed, every American citizen is entitled to due process and equal protection guarantees.
When Congress, federal and state law enforcement agencies and parts of the nation’s new informal social policing apparatus conduct a nationwide search to capture those associated or affiliated with the Capitol riot, the very fabric of self-government is beset by those who merely strive to create an ideological monolith.
The United States is not structured, nor does it function like Europe’s last dictatorship. But what often gets unnoticed is that authoritarianism at home is nothing more than an aberration from the normal state of affairs.
If democracy can be saved only by imprisoning large swaths of a political faction, the purpose of the American republic has been lost.
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