In fact, an August survey from student and education resource publication Intelligent.com revealed that 62% of respondents said they are considering boycotting loan payments in the fall as almost half of them doubt they will be able to afford those payments.
[…]
“Millennials like me have gone through so many economic crises and watched these corporations and banks get bailed out,” said Amanda Acevedo, a 37-year-old radiographer from Orlando, in a recent interview with Bloomberg. “Meanwhile, we can’t pay the student loans we were told we needed for success.”
Viewers were left scratching their heads on Sunday morning as Democrat radical Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explained why she still owns a Tesla despite claiming she planned to replace it with a union-made model.
[…]
‘Er no look our car was purchased during the pandemic when travel, mass, before a vaccine had come out so travel between New York and Washington the safest way we had determined was an EV,’ she explained.
‘But that was prior to some of the new models coming out on the market that had the range available, but we’re actually looking into trading in our car now and hopefully we will soon.’
[…]
News of the Squad member’s Tesla emerged in 2021 when it was seen parked illegally outside a Whole Foods in Washington DC.
A sleepy town in southern Spain is in shock after it emerged that AI-generated naked images of young local girls had been circulating on social media without their knowledge.
The pictures were created using photos of the targeted girls fully clothed, many of them taken from their own social media accounts.
These were then processed by an application that generates an imagined image of the person without clothes on.
So far more than 20 girls, aged between 11 and 17, have come forward as victims of the app’s use in or near Almendralejo, in the south-western province of Badajoz.
[…]
The suspects in the case are aged between 12 and 14. Spanish law does not specifically cover the generation of images of a sexual nature when it involves adults, although the creation of such material using minors could be deemed child pornography.
Another possible charge would be for breaching privacy laws. In Spain, minors can only face criminal charges from the age of 14 upwards.
Some good questions. Clearly, the girls are victims. But is it child porn if the images are fake? What is the appropriate legal sanction, if any, for taking a public image of someone and manipulating it? If the boys had done this by drawing or painting, is it morally different than using AI to create the images? Is it a crime to draw an imagined image of a naked person – adult or child? Our legal infrastructure in the age of AI is woefully behind. The action is clearly disgusting and morally reprehensible, but how should the law deal with it?
When he was running for reelection in 1984, Ronald Reagan sought to make light of the fact that, at 73, he was the oldest major-party presidential nominee in American history.
“I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience,” he famously joked at a debate with Walter Mondale, the Democratic nominee, who was 56 at the time.
Reagan would have no reason to worry today. Both of the likely major party nominees in 2024 are significantly older than he was at the end of his first term: President Biden is 80, while Donald Trump is 77.
Bastida, now a 21-year-old University of Pennsylvania student, marched through the streets of New York City along with some 75,000 other activists on Sunday to demand the end of fossil fuels. She was also a part of the Climate Ambition Summit youth delegation convened by United Nations’ secretary general, António Guterres.
Notably absent from the summit was President Joe Biden, who skipped the event even though he was in New York for the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.
To Bastida, Biden’s absence was one more indication that he’s out of step with many young Americans when it comes to climate change. Many Gen Zers, those born after 1996, said they feel they are being asked to grab the reins and demand that leaders take action, when it should be the other way around.
Leaders need to recognize all the tools they have at their disposal right now to make real change instead of waiting for younger Americans to grow up and do it themselves, said Jilly Edgar, 24, who works at the Climate Museum in New York City and joined the march on Sunday.
The survey of 1,636 U.S. adults, which was conducted from Sept. 14 to 18, offered respondents seven emotions — three positive, three negative, one neutral — and asked them to select any and all that reflect their attitude toward the 2024 campaign.
Dread, the most negative option, topped the list (41%), followed by exhaustion (34%), optimism (25%), depression (21%), indifference (17%), excitement (15%) and delight (5%).
In total, a majority of Americans (56%) chose at least one of the three negative feelings (dread, exhaustion or depression), while less than a third (32%) picked at least one of the three positive feelings (optimism, excitement or delight).
(Reuters) – A white married couple that owns two landscaping companies has sued Houston, claiming that the city’s requirement that certain government contracts be set aside for minority-owned businesses runs afoul of the U.S. Constitution.
The two businesses owned by Jerry and Theresa Thompson in a complaint filed in federal court in Houston on Tuesday said the city’s program violates their constitutional rights to equal protection. The city has said that the four-decade-old program ensures that historically disenfranchised people have an opportunity to participate in lucrative government contracting, and fosters a more competitive economic environment.
The lawsuit is the latest to challenge affirmative action programs since the U.S. Supreme Court in June struck down race-conscious policies in college student admissions in rulings involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. The suit was filed on the same day that an anti-affirmative action group sued the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, claiming the Army school’s affirmative action practices unconstitutionally discriminate against white applicants.
Under Houston’s program, the city sets annual numerical goals for awarding different types of contracts to businesses owned by minorities. Between July 2021 and June 2022, about 24% of professional service contracts and about 14% of construction contracts were awarded to minority-owned businesses, according to the city.
C’mon, America. Are we really going to do this? In a country of over 330 million people with legions of brilliant, ethical, honest, compassionate and humble servant leaders, are we really going to be forced to choose between Joe Biden and Donald Trump? Is this the best we have to offer? If the polls are any indication, we are barreling headlong into choosing between these two terribly flawed grouchy old men.
The Democrats appear to be committed to nominating President Joe Biden to be considered by the voters for a second term. Biden’s cognitive decline is as obvious as it is distressing. The incidents of Biden getting confused, wandering off and rambling incoherently are increasingly frequent. His press conference in Vietnam last week was tragic. He rambled from inappropriate jokes to getting confused over questions and admitting, “I’m just following my orders here” to having his staff cut him off as he closed with, “I’m going to go to bed.”
As happens with many elderly people who are in cognitive decline, Biden’s unsavory personal traits have come to the surface. Unable to stop himself from wandering from a podium, he is now vacillating between strange whispering into the handheld microphone to shouting for no apparent reason. Biden has always been known for his prolific lying. He was even run off the presidential campaign trail in 1988 when he was caught plagiarizing. His sagging ability to think on his feet have him blundering into even more obvious lies. His claim last week that he was in Manhattan the day after 9/11 was disproven within minutes by video of him in Washington D.C. that day.
Biden’s years of rank corruption are also coming to the surface. The House Committee on Oversight and Accountability has released some of the evidence they have gathered about the Biden’s real family business. The evidence shows years of corruption where tens of millions of dollars from foreign bad actors flowed through a web aliases (Joe Biden had at least three) and shell companies controlled by Biden family members with Hunter Biden serving as the primary bag man. The product they were selling was allegedly access to one of the most powerful people on the planet — Joe Biden. The Biden family has not offered any other reasonable explanation for why foreigners have been giving them millions of dollars.
As if the lies, corruption, and slip into senility was not enough, Biden’s first term has been an unmitigated failure. Inflation has raged out of control eating into every American’s quality of life. People are struggling to buy groceries, cars and homes as real wages have stagnated. The Southern border is wide open with tens of thousands of illegal aliens flowing into our nation every month to eat at our overburdened social safety net. Our nation is running up our national debt to a nation-killing level. Our enemies and friends are laughing at us as the world order reorients away from a languishing lion.
Despite all of this, the Democrats seem dead set on propping up old Joe for another term.
The Republicans are not doing much better. Despite several fantastic alternatives who are younger, smarter, more conservative, more likable, and with better records in public office, the Republicans seem dead set on nominating former President Donald Trump.
Only three years younger than Joe Biden, Trump’s cognitive abilities are holding firm even as his stamina slumps with marathon rallies being replaced by short and infrequent campaign stops. His lifetime of lying is currently manifesting itself in a voluminous attempt to gaslight the nation as to his record and the records of his Republican opponents. His energies that were focused on the righteous populist anger of the average American in 2016 and 2020 have been redirected in 2023 to his lengthy list of personal grudges and electoral fantasies.
While the litany of indictments against Trump are the more the result of the Marxist weaponization of our judicial system than a true assessment of Trump’s behavior, he has always shoved past dowdy ethical to flirt with the skirts of law.
Trump’s record as president was decidedly mixed. He was exceptional in securing the border, deregulating, selecting conservative judges, pulling America back from bad international deals, destroying ISIS, and reigniting our economy. These remarkable successes are weighted down by his prolific spending, ballooning debt, and lethargy in adjusting government policy to the reality of the pandemic. Perhaps his greatest failure was his terrible selection of, and support of, government officials from Anthony Fauci to Christopher Wray. Instead of draining the swamp, Trump added to and protected it.
America deserves better than to have a presidential campaign that resembles two semi-coherent old men yelling at each other from opposite ends of the bar about the television channel. Or do we?
Again it must be noted how the Bidens are on both sides of all of these machinations. It’s theater.
Hunter Biden has sued the Internal Revenue Service over claims agents illegally released his tax returns.
President Joe Biden‘s son claims the agency violated his privacy by unlawfully disclosing his records to members of Congress and to the news media.
[…]
It targets two IRS whistleblowers who testified to Congress about the income Hunter received from his work with a Ukrainian gas company and their concerns about how Hunter was getting special treatment due to his last name.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has quietly gotten rid of the dress code for members of the Senate in what’s seen as a way of appealing to the often casually dressed Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman.
Fetterman, like Schumer a Democrat, often causes buzz for those following the action on Capitol Hill by showing up in a hooded sweatshirt and shorts, though Republicans like Ted Cruz have also been seen before in sweats.
It was surely the most bizarre crisis of the Biden administration: America’s top-of-the-line jet fighters being sent up to shoot down, of all things, a balloon – a Chinese spy balloon that was floating across the United States, which had the nation and its politicians in a tizzy.
Now, seven months later, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tells “CBS News Sunday Morning” the balloon wasn’t spying. “The intelligence community, their assessment – and it’s a high-confidence assessment – [is] that there was no intelligence collection by that balloon,” he said.
Mykail James has a plan for when payments on her roughly $75,000 in student loans restart next month. She’ll cut back on her “fun budget” — money reserved for travel and concerts — and she expects to limit her holiday spending.
“With the holidays coming up — I have a really big family — we will definitely be scaling back how much we’re spending on Christmas and how many things we can afford,” James said. “It’s just going to be a tighter income overall.”
In October, roughly 27 million borrowers like James will once again be on the hook for repaying their federal student loans after a three-year hiatus. President Joe Biden tried to use his executive powers to forgive about $400 billion in student debt last year, but the Supreme Court overruled that decision in June, and payments kick in again in October.
Now there are big questions about how those people — many of whom had expected to have at least some of their debt erased — may change their spending habits as they budget for student loan payments again. It could crimp the economy if a large share of consumers cut back simultaneously, especially because the resumption in payments comes just as the retail and hospitality industry begin to eye the crucial holiday shopping season.
Here is my full column that ran in the Washington County Daily News earlier this week.
When I first entered the professional workforce long ago in the previous millennia, I recall the new employee onboarding process. Neatly pressed with my briefcase in hand, faux leather portfolio, and resume printed on crisp premium linen paper, I met with the Human Resources professional to read and physically sign all the paperwork. Included in that paperwork were the sexual harassment policies and the absolute prohibition of romantic or sexual relationships between superiors and subordinates. The existence of such a relationship was grounds for immediate termination.
It has been at least that long since such policies have been commonplace in the professional workforce, but Gov. Tony Evers’ office has not yet come into the previous century. His office is still one where bosses are allowed to have sexual and romantic relationships with their subordinates as long as the governor is closely monitoring the situation.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel broke the story last week that Evers’ long time Chief of Staff, Maggie Gau, the power behind the throne, has been in a relationship with one of her direct subordinates for years. When confronted with the news, the governor reacted aggressively rejecting the implication that such a situation was inappropriate. He said, “I don’t think it’s anybody’s g****** business” and assured people that, “I monitor their performance on a regular basis.”
It was also revealed that the governor’s office does not have a policy prohibiting such relationships and that the governor patently rejects the idea that such a policy is necessary. The governor rejects that such a policy is necessary because it is a small staff of about thirty people and he can personally evaluate each member’s performance to avoid any possibility of inappropriate behavior based on who is having sex with whom.
Since the governor has taken personal ownership and responsibility for each member of his staff’s performance, perhaps he can explain the meteoric rise of Gau’s better half. Originally appointed as a deputy in 2019 for $62,000 per year, the employee was promoted to report directly to Gau in 2020 and given a raise to $100,006 per year. This year, that salary was increased to $112,008. That is an 80% increase in pay in just four years when other state employees are barely seeing cost of living increases in their wages.
Did Governor Evers conduct a competitive hiring process before signing off on the promotion? Were other candidates considered? What were the selection criteria? What experience or previous performance supported the promotion for that employee more than other employees of similar rank and tenure? If everything is above board, then surely the governor would willingly show the rigor behind his hiring and promotion methodology, no?
But, of course, even if everything has been done with full transparency and fairness, the mere existence of the relationship taints the office. Even the University of Wisconsin-Madison, one of the most leftist organizations in America, correctly points out the reason that they have a policy prohibiting romantic relationships between superiors and subordinates. Their policy states, “… such relationships create an environment charged with potential or perceived conflicts of interest and possible use of academic or supervisory leverage to maintain or promote the relationship. Romantic or sexual relationships that the parties view as consensual may still raise questions of favoritism, as well as of a potential abuse of trust and power.”
This is common sense and normal practice everywhere except in Governor Evers’ office. Furthermore, such relationships put the organization at great risk of legal liability. If the relationship goes sour, then the organization can be sued for allowing someone in a position of power to wield it over a romantic interest. Others in the office can sue the organization if they think they have been discriminated against or denied fair treatment based on the relationship. These lawsuits can result in the organization, in this case the State of Wisconsin, paying out millions of dollars in damages to the plaintiffs and their lawyers. In this case, it is just the taxpayers’ money, so we understand why Governor Evers is unbothered by the risk.
Governor Evers is running an office in which romantic relationships between superiors and subordinates is allowed at great risk to the taxpayers and at great consternation to others in the office who do not have exclusive access to his chief of staff’s ear in the wee hours of the morning. He has forcefully, and repeatedly, taken personal responsibility to ensure that all employment practices are appropriately followed irrespective of such relationships. It is his burden of proof to show that his office is being run in a professional way within the legal strictures and societal norms the rest of us live by every day.
Quirk voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then Donald Trump in 2020.
Had President Joe Biden, the self-described “most pro-union president in American history,” done enough to forestall a strike?
“I don’t know what he’s done,” Quirk said. “Ask him. I don’t think he knows what he’s done. Seriously. I’m not trying to be mean.” Quirk wasn’t freelancing: Fain and the union haven’t yet endorsed Biden’s reelection, throwing into doubt Biden’s standing in autoworker-heavy communities like his.
[…]
He wasn’t supporting Biden or Trump at the moment, and he didn’t think either party was truly on autoworkers’ side.
“They’re all full of shit,” Butler said. “We haven’t had a president in there for years, with the exception of Trump, that was really for the people, all the way back to the Reagan days.”
“Historically, man, if you didn’t vote Democrat years ago, and you were in the union, sometimes you got your ass kicked,” he said. “Democrats were for the working people. That shit has changed. I’m telling you what, the Democratic Party was not what it was 20, 30 years ago.”
The Assembly also approved along party lines a proposal that would require a two-thirds vote to pass a bill that increases states sales, income or franchise taxes.
Republicans who support the bill say a higher threshold would ensure tax increases are carefully considered. They cite 16 states that also require a supermajority to raise taxes.
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel broke the story last week that Evers’ long time Chief of Staff, Maggie Gau, the power behind the throne, has been in a relationship with one of her direct subordinates for years. When confronted with the news, the governor reacted aggressively rejecting the implication that such a situation was inappropriate. He said, “I don’t think it’s anybody’s g****** business” and assured people that, “I monitor their performance on a regular basis.”
It was also revealed that the governor’s office does not have a policy prohibiting such relationships and that the governor patently rejects the idea that such a policy is necessary. The governor rejects that such a policy is necessary because it is a small staff of about thirty people and he can personally evaluate each member’s performance to avoid any possibility of inappropriate behavior based on who is having sex with whom.
Since the governor has taken personal ownership and responsibility for each member of his staff’s performance, perhaps he can explain the meteoric rise of Gau’s better half. Originally appointed as a deputy in 2019 for $62,000 per year, the employee was promoted to report directly to Gau in 2020 and given a raise to $100,006 per year. This year, that salary was increased to $112,008. That is an 80% increase in pay in just four years when other state employees are barely seeing cost of living increases in their wages.
Did Governor Evers conduct a competitive hiring process before signing off on the promotion? Were other candidates considered? What were the selection criteria? What experience or previous performance supported the promotion for that employee more than other employees of similar rank and tenure? If everything is above board, then surely the governor would willingly show the rigor behind his hiring and promotion methodology, no?
[…]
Governor Evers is running an office in which romantic relationships between superiors and subordinates is allowed at great risk to the taxpayers and at great consternation to others in the office who do not have exclusive access to his chief of staff’s ear in the wee hours of the morning. He has forcefully, and repeatedly, taken personal responsibility to ensure that all employment practices are appropriately followed irrespective of such relationships. It is his burden of proof to show that his office is being run in a professional way within the legal strictures and societal norms the rest of us live by every day.
Just release all of the footage online. Transparency is the best antiseptic. The “security” excuse for not releasing it is BS. I expect that some politicians and staffers just don’t want us to see how they reacted that day.
When Democrats controlled the House, they resisted releasing the entirety of the footage, arguing that doing so would be compromising to the security of the US Capitol complex. Even so, certain clips have made their way into documentaries about that day and played a prominent role in the public hearings staged by the January 6 committee last year.
But now, the Committee on House Administration has opened up access to the footage more broadly, allowing reporters, certain non-profit groups, January 6 defendants, and those who were injured during the riot to view the footage.
Five American citizens being held hostage by Iran will be released in return for the unfreezing of $6 billion held in South Korean banks, the U.S. government announced on Monday – enraging Biden administration critics, particular as the timing coincided with the anniversary of 9/11.
The five U.S. hostages – businessmen Siamak Namazi, 51, and Emad Shargi, 58; environmentalist Morad Tahbaz, 67; and two anonymous individuals – will be freed once the money has been transferred from South Korea to an intermediary, Qatar, and then on to Iran.
Five Iranian citizens held in the U.S. will also be released.
‘It’s already evening, isn’t it? It’s around the world in five days – it’s interesting.
‘One of my coworkers said, “Remember the famous song “Good Morning Vietnam”?” Well, good evening, Vietnam’.”
[…]
He regaled reporters with a story he says is from a John Wayne movie and features the ‘Indians’ – not the ones he just met with – who don’t buy it when a Union soldier says ‘everything will be good’ if they go back to the reservation.
‘And the Indian looks at John Wayne and points to the Union soldier and says, ‘He’s a lying dog faced pony soldier.’ Well, there’s a lot of lying dog faced pony soldiers out there about global warming. But not anymore,’ Biden said. ‘All of the sudden, they’re all realizing it’s a problem,’ the president said, whispering into the mic.
[…]
‘I’m just following my orders here,’ he said at another point, as he looked at his list to call another news organization or name, as reporters in the audience yelled and waved their hands frantically to be called on.
[…]
After Biden answered one of the two questions posed to him by VOA, he told the journalists, ‘I tell you what, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go to bed.’
But reporters in the audience kept shouting questions, with press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre then stepping in.
Diversity statements are a new flashpoint on campus, just as the Supreme Court has driven a stake through race-conscious admissions. Nearly half the large universities in America require that job applicants write such statements, part of the rapid growth in DEI programs. Many University of California departments now require that faculty members seeking promotions and tenure also write such statements.
Diversity statements tend to run about a page or so long and ask candidates to describe how they would contribute to campus diversity, often seeking examples of how the faculty member has fostered an inclusive or anti-racist learning environment.
To supporters, such statements are both skill assessment and business strategy. Given the ban on race-conscious admissions, and the need to attract applicants from a shrinking pool of potential students, many colleges are looking to create a more welcoming environment.
But critics say these statements are thinly veiled attempts at enforcing ideological orthodoxy. Politically savvy applicants, they say, learn to touch on the right ideological buzzwords. And the championing of diversity can overshadow strengths seen as central to academia — not least, professional expertise.
[…]
Candidates who did not “look outstanding” on diversity, the vice provost at UC Davis instructed his search committees, could not advance, no matter the quality of their academic research. Credentials and experience would be examined in a later round.
The championing of diversity at the University of California resulted in many campuses rejecting disproportionate numbers of white and Asian and Asian American applicants. In this way, the battle over diversity statements and faculty hiring carries echoes of the battle over affirmative action in admissions, which opponents said discriminated against Asians.
