"US presidents rarely look to make waves with speeches to the annual United Nations General Assembly, but President Joe Biden's nearly 40-minute talk Tuesday actually challenged global leaders ... to stay awake.

The world, Biden lectured, needs to 'act together.' This is a 'decisive decade.' We must work to prevent pandemics and fight climate change. 'We stand at an inflection point in history,' have a 'shared future' and can only meet 'the challenges' we face by ... 'looking to the future.'

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah."

"President Biden's sweeping domestic agenda is floundering as Democrats struggle to hold competing factions of their party together. House Republicans should not come to the rescue.

"Democrats are in a bind because they have grand ambitions of transforming the United States by dramatically expanding the social safety net, but the American people only gave them slim majorities. They are attempting to forge a path forward by more or less simultaneously passing two pieces of legislation -- a $550 billion infrastructure bill that passed with Republican support in the Senate, and a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill (into which they are trying to cram Biden's entire domestic agenda.) More moderate Democrats are becoming increasingly alarmed at the price tag of the massive socail-welfare bill, while progressives have been insistent that they would not support the smaller infrastructure bill if the larger one doesn't also pass. This conflict, which has been building for months, is about to reach an inflection point.

"House speaker Nancy Pelosi promised moderate House Democrats that the chamber would consider the smaller bipartisan bill by next Monday, September 27. ...

"We repeatedly warned Senate Republicans that it was a bad idea to negotiate with Democrats on an infrastructure bill, which was not only reckless at a time of historic debt, but obviously tied to the even-worse $3.5 trillion bill. Yet 19 of them voted for it anyway, and a number of House Republicans have indicated a desire to do the same. But the argument for Republicans to vote for the bill has become even weaker. Beyond the policy considerations, for House Republicans to save Pelosi from navigating the difficult dynamics of a divided caucus by providing her the votes she needs would be political malpractice. The back and forth between progressives and moderate Democrats over the past few weeks has underscored the fact that the two bills are inextricably linked. Any Republican who votes for the smaller infrastructure bill is making the passage of the larger reconciliation bill more likely."

Read the entire article here.

"A generation ago, labor unions actually tried to represent the financial interests of workers. For all their other faults, they at least focused on higher wages, better working conditions, and tight labor markets for their members.

"That era is long gone. Now, labor unions' top issues include 'racial justice,' 'climate change,' and 'immigration reform.' This is one reason why the percentage of workers in unions has dropped from a high of 33% to a low of 10.5% today. Unions have become just another institution captured by progressive elites who are completely out of touch with what working families actually want. ...

"The PRO Act...bans the secret ballot for union elections. Instead, it allows unions to obtain the power to bargain for an entire workforce through the so-called 'card check' process. Under card check, activists are free to pressure workers at their homes and workplaces to sign cards indicating that they support forming a union. Once activists have signed cards from a majority of workers, all the workers must then submit to that union. Under card check, workers have no privacy protection from union intimidation.

"Do you or anyone you know ever work as an independent contractor? This would include Uber drivers, DoorDash deliverers, or good old-fashioned freelance writers and truckers. If so, then this bill affects you, too. Just as California's disastrous AB 5 upended all of these industries by turning all of these independent contractors into regular employees, the PRO Act would do the same thing to every state across the county.

"The PRO Act would also abolish right-to-work protections in 27 states. In right-to-work states, such as Virginia, workers can choose whether or not they want to join a union. Under the PRO Act, no worker would be given that choice. Once a bare majority in any workplace nationwide has voted to form a union, all workers would then be forced to join that union and pay dues to that union every month. No exceptions."

Read the entire article here.

"Nearly two years after evidence emerged that the infamous Steele dossier was a political dirty trick filled with Russian disinformation and disproved allegations, Special Counsel John Durham unloaded a new indictment that exposes a parallel effort by Hillary Clinton's campaign to flood the FBI with more dubious Trump-Russia collusion dirt.

"In painstaking detail, Durham laid out in the indictment Thursday how Democrat superlawyer Michael Sussmann used Clinton campaign funds to construct a now-debunked memo and other evidence alleging that computer communications between a server at the Alfa Bank in Russia and the Trump Tower in New York might be a secret backdoor communication system for Trump and Vladimir Putin to hijack the 2016 election. ...

"Slowly over five years, the Russia collusion story has been exposed for what it it was: a three-legged political dirty trick in which highly credible figures with deep law enforcement, intelligence and news media ties were paid by the Clinton campaign to flood the FBI with unproven allegations that Trump was secretly colluding with Russia to steal the election from Clinton."

Read the entire article here.

"[A] new report from the Joint Tax Committee shows that the Biden-Democrat spending plan breaks his promise not to tax anyone under $400,000 income. The analysis found Biden's plan would hike taxes for those making as little as $30,000 a year starting in 2027.

"As we've previously said, virtually all of the tax hikes the government says will hit only the 'rich' and 'big corporations' will be paid mainly by you, a cold fact that can't be repeated enough. ...

"So don't buy the class-warfare tax-the-rich rhetoric of the left. It's really a con game played on the middle-class by the Democrats to make the public think they're 'building infrastructure,' when in fact they're building more government. This con will result not only in a massive, less-efficient federal government, but in more regulation, sharply lower incomes, more waste and corruption, and far less freedom to live your life as you see fit.

"Promises of utopia through ever-expanding government paid for by the rich, a perennial socialist ideal, never work out. In the end, average Americans, not the rich, always pick up the tab."

"Day 2 of the Antony Blinken show was worse than Day 1: Testifying to the Senate the morning after a savage House grilling, he still had no clear answers to basic questions about the Afghan-pullout fiasco -- only gray evasion.

"Even many Democrats hit hard. 'The execution of the US withdrawal was clearly and fatally flawed,' said Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ). 'This committee expects to receive a full explanation of this administration's decisions on Afghanistan since coming into office last January. There has to be accountability.'

"But Blinken, a yes-man at Biden's side for two decades of disastrous foreign policy, took no responsibility, again fingering Team Trump for the whole debacle and sidestepping questions that would expose his own culpability. ...

"He wouldn't even offer insight into what State is doing to handle the fallout. When Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) asked him for specifics on how Team Biden is working to protect girls and women at risk from the Taliban, Blinken just repeated his now-weeks-old blather: 'We've worked to rally the international community to set very clear expectations for the Taliban going forward, including the expectation they uphold the rights of women, girls and minorities.' As if terrorists don't just laugh at finger-wagging.

"With countless Americans and allies still at the Taliban's mercy, the nation needs a top diplomat who can offer more than blander-than-bland evasion. But Tony Blinken, as ever, is focused only on telling his boss what he wants to hear while smothering anything to the contrary in a sea of fog. He must go."

"As the political ground crumbles beneath Biden's feet, opposing the left's $3.5 trillion package is becoming easier by the day. Also known as the 'Bernie Budget,' (the Vermont socialist has hit the road trying to sell it), it includes the worst provisions that party leaders knew they could not stuff into the smaller infrastructure package while keeping a straight face about any semblance of 'bipartisanship.'

"It is chock full of giveaways to powerful special interest groups in the coalition. For the Green New Dealers and the limousine Liberals, there are huge tax hikes on energy producers and corresponding giveaways for wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles. ...

"Most galling, perhaps, is the blatant hostility and targeting of many private sector companies, especially those responsible for developing the lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines. The budget would be funded in part via massive tax increases and government meddling in Medicare Part D negotiations. The net result would be a socialist takeover of the drug industry, restrictions on medication choice and outsourcing drug manufacturing and innovation to hostile nations like China."

"House Democrats are proposing almost $3 trillion ($3,000,000,000,000) in tax increases including tax increases on small businesses and working families. This would be the largest tax increase since 1968 compared to the size of the economy and the largest tax increase ever in nominal dollars.

"Some of these tax increases include:

"Raising taxes on working families by increasing the federal corporate income tax rate from 21 percent to 26.5 percent. This tax increase will be passed along to working families in the form of higher prices, fewer jobs, and lower wages. This will give the U.S. a combined state-federal rate of 30.9 percent, higher than our foreign competitors including China, which has a 25 percent corporate tax rate, and Europe which has an average rate of 21.7 percent.

"According to Stephen Entin of the Tax Foundation, labor (or workers) bear an estimated 70 percent of the corporate income tax in the form of wages and employment. Similarly, a 2020 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 31% of the corporate tax falls on consumers.

"A corporate tax increase will threaten the life savings of families by reducing the value of publicly traded stocks in brokerage accounts or in 401(k)s. Individual investors opened 10 million new brokerage accounts in 2020 and at least 53% of households own stock. In addition, 80 million to 100 million people have a 401(k), and 46.4 million households have an individual retirement account."

Read the entire article here.

"So what did they hide, and when did they hide it? Key Democratic committees -- Ways and Means in the House and Finance in the Senate -- are marking up unheard of spending and taxing plans. Right now. Yet they are not telling the public what they're really up to.

"The answer to 'what did they hide?' and 'when did they hide it?' is that they're hiding it now, and information is starting to leak out on specifics. There's no question that the Democrats want this $3.5 trillion reconciliation, which is really going to be more than $5 rillion, to avoid public scrutiny and to roll rapidly through both houses just to get it done.

"Some say that it's going to be a 10,000 page bill and that literally no one is going to know what's in it. ...

"The vast majority of Americans favor free market capitalism and oppose big government socialism. That's precisely why the Democrats are doing as much as they can to hide these policies and get the legislation passed before anyone gets through reading the first 500 pages, let alone the last 9,500."

"It isn't hard to make the case against vaccine passports: Requiring proof of vaccination is unnecessarily burdensome to business and a violation of individual privacy. ...

"Amusingly enough, liberals, the people most likely to support vaccine passports, have long made contradictory arguments. For years, we have heard Democrats insist that asking voters to present identification is a fundamental violation of civil rights, tantamount to Jim Crow.

"Who exactly belongs in this vast class of persons being denied the franchise has always been a mystery. Apparently, they are also people who have never had a job, driven a car, opened a bank account, flown on an airplane, received government benefits, ordered a beer, bought a pack of cigarettes or played the lottery.

"According to progressives, we need ID for everything in this country except the apparently sacred exercise of our voting rights. Liberals pretend that asking people to get the same ID they need to do almost anything else is an undue burden to vote, even though non-driver can get a government-issued picture ID in all 50 states. Yet now they pretend that using some cockamamie smartphone app dreamed up by bureaucrats in Albany or City Hall can be a requirement for participating in civilized life.

"The same people blithely dismiss the possibility of voter fraud out of hand while insisting that the honors system won't cut it for COVID. You can believe one of these things but not both."