"Florida Democrats are scrambling to claw their way back from the brink of irrelevance after an unsparingly brutal midterm election cycle that saw some of the last vestiges of the party's power in the Sunshine State slip away.

"Their challenges are steep. The Florida Democratic Party, now without a chair, has been mired in financial and organizational struggles for years. Republicans now hold supermajorities in both chambers of the state legislature, and for the first time since Reconstruction, there's not a single Democrat in statewide office. ...

"Updated voter registration numbers published by the Florida Department of State on Wednesday underscored just how far Democrats have to go. There are now nearly 400,000 more registered Republican voters than Democratic voters. Just 15 years ago, when Obama first won the state in 2008, there were nearly 700,000 more registered Democrats than Republicans."

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"While most corporate media coverage of last week's Republican National Committee (RNC) meeting was devoted to the contested leadership race between Ronna McDaniel and Harmeet Dhillon, the organization's conference yielded a significant win for election integrity.

"During the meeting, RNC members unanimously passed a resolution rejecting the use of ranked-choice voting (RCV) in U.S. elections. In an RCV system, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voter's second-choice candidate. Such a process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes.

"'Traditional American primary and general elections ensure that voters who support one candidate, not a plurality of candidates, are heard clearly while ranked choice voting schemes open elections to 'ballot ehaustion' or the disenfranchisement of voters who choose not to support multiple candidates who do not clearly represent their values,' the RNC resolution reads. The committee voted to reject RCV and 'similar schemes that increase election distrust, and voter suppression and disenfranchisement, eliminate the historic political party system, and put elections in the hands of expensive election schemes that cost taxpayers and depend exclusively on confusing technology and unelected bureaucrats to manage it.' ...

"While two states (Maine and Alaska) and several municipalities utilize RCV for their respective elections, the push to expand such a system is taking place in state legislatures across the country."

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"Every Republican senator and Democrat Joe Manchin are introducing legislation that they hope will terminate the Biden administration's new environment, social and governance (ESG) rule, which they say 'politicizes' the retirement savings for 152 million Americans.

"The Biden administration's Department of Labor unveiled a rule in November, set to go into effect on Jan. 30, that allows retirement plan managers to factor environmental and social issues into investment decisions.

"The bipartisan disapproval resolution led by Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., will be introduced Wednesday and a companion bill in the House will be introduced by Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky. Congressional passage of the resolution will allow Congress to overrule the administration and kill the regulation. ...

"Under the Congressional Review Act, joint resolutions of disapproval cannot be prevented from being considered on the floor. The resolution will only require a simple majority vote threshold to pass and be sent to Biden, and supporters of the resolution expect at least one more Democrat to support it and pass it in the Senate."

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"More Americans name the government as the nation's top problem in Gallup's latest poll, which encompassed the rocky start of the 118th Congress' term. With high prices persisting, inflation remains the second most-cited problem (15%), and amid elevated tensions about the southern U.S. border, illegal immigration edged up three percentage points to 11%. Mentions of the economy in general fell six points, to 10%, the lowest reading in a year. ...

"The government ranks as the top problem for both Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (24%) and Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (18%). Inflation and immigration are each cited by 18% of Republicans, while mentions of inflation (11%), the economy in general and race relations (9% each) trail the government among Democrats. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to view unifying the country and the environment as top problems. ...

"Gallup regularly tracks Americans' ratings of national economic conditions as excellent, good, only fair or poor, as well as their views on whether the economy is getting better or worse.

"Currently, more than four in five U.S. adults rate economic conditions in the country as only fair (38%) or poor (45%), with few describing conditions as excellent (2%) or good (15%). Furthermore, 72% of Americans say the economy is getting worse, 22% say it is improving, and 4% think it is staying the same."

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"Just about everyone in America has an opinion on how the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) handled the COVID pandemic response -- and these opinions often follow political lines. However, trust in the agency is low among Americans of all political stripes, and even Director Rochelle Walensky has acknowledged that the CDC has failed to 'reliably meet expectations.'

"A lack of public confidence in the agency charged with controlling infectious diseases has myriad consequences. The CDC just announced a reorganization aimed at addressing at least some of its shortcomings during the COVID pandemic. The goal of CDC reforms should be to restore the agency's credibility and public trust, and this would be accomplished most effectively with a robust external review.

"COVID was a challenging time -- our information about it was changing rapidly -- and though some of the agency's efforts had positive results, there were clear, avoidable failures at the CDC. A panel of experts that convened at the American Enterprise Institute offered a helpful framework for understanding these failures that can be grouped into four categories: protocol tunnel vision, position consistency, scientific and disease data dissemination, and assisting local health departments and healthcare workers."

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"A group of 25 states on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit against the Biden administration, arguing a recent rule allowing retirement plan managers to factor environmental and social issues into investment decisions violated the law.

"The lawsuit -- led by Utah Attorney General Sean Reyes and joined by 24 other states including Louisiana, Texas and Virginia -- challenges a Department of Labor (DOL) rule unveiled in November and which is set to go into effect on Jan. 30. The rule would open the door for fiduciaries to factor so-called environment, social and governance (ESG) considerations into Americans' retirement accounts, an action the states argued could significantly harm the financial interests of customers.

"'The Biden administration is promoting its climate change agenda by putting everyday people's retirement money at risk,' Reyes told FOX Business in a statement. 'Americans are already suffering from the current economic downturn.'"

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"It's not enough for George Soros to fund the media and encourage stories that back up his point of view -- he has to make sure no one disagrees with it.

"Last year, Soros partnered with fellow leftist billionaire Reid Hoffman (the co-founder of LinkedIn) to financially back a project to fight so-called disinformation. The name they chose might have come from George Orwell himself: Good Information Inc.

"Branding anything that goes counter-narrative as 'disinformation' has become the left's latest strategy to fight anything that threatens their spin, and Soros has taken note."

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"President Joe Biden took credit for knocking a few cents off of record-high oil prices after withdrawing millions of barrels from the nation's emergency strategic petroleum reserves (SPR), but records show his Department of Energy actually timed the first drawdown of the emergency oil supply to coincide with an already forecasted decline in oil prices.

"According to internal documents obtained by the Functional Government Initiative (FGI) through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), administration officials acknowledged agency assessments that predicted a drop in oil prices ahead of the first SPR release in November 2021.

"The White House announced the first withdrawal of 50 million barrels of oil from the nation's emergency stockpile on Nov. 23, 2021, days before the Thanksgiving holiday as drivers faced sticker shock at the pump."

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"With a new Congress, America's most ignored problem should once again be up for resolution.

"After not even visiting the border for years, President Joe Biden finally took a brief tour. The Republicans are flagging the millions of illegal crossings and the American people are upset that there has been no bipartisan resolution of the problem. Republicans get in, up goes a wall. Democrats get in, down goes the wall. That is not what Americans view as progress. ...

"Sixty-seven percent of Americans also think Biden's executive orders have encouraged illegal immigration, and 57% think they have increased the flow of drugs and crime into the U.S.

"Americans would be even more concerned about the border if they were fully informed. Voters actually vastly underestimate the scale of illegal border crossings. Sixty-four percent knew that illegal crossings have increased since Biden took office, but only 6% knew the extent -- between 2-3 million in the past year. The median voter underestimated the number of illegal crossings by a factor of 10. ...

"Giving people the facts on immigration made them want change more. When told that over 2.75 million people illegally crossed the border in the past year, 67% of voters, including 53% of Democrats, wanted Biden to enact new, stricter policies to reduce the flow of migrants. It turns out stricter immigration reform is a bipartisan issue."

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"President Biden seems to attract classified documents the way some people think motor homes attract tornadoes. They just inexplicably happen.

"After Biden publicly declared that he has 'no regrets' in the discovery of unlawfully stored classified material in various locations, he assured citizens that the special counsel investigation would soon peter out when they find that 'there is no there there.'

"Well, there turns out to be more there and the 'there' is yet another find in a private residence of Joe Biden."

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