"The Department of State has funded a deep-pocketed 'disinformation' tracking group that is secretly blacklisting and trying to defund conservative media, likely costing the news organizations vital advertising dollars, the Washington Examiner can confirm.

"The Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups, is feeding blacklists to ad companies with the intent of defunding and shutting down websites peddling alleged 'disinformation,' the Washington Examiner reported . This same 'disinformation' group has received $330,000 from two State Department-backed entities linked to the highest levels of government, raising concerns from First Amendment lawyers and members of Congress."

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"Specialized U.S. Navy diving teams carried out the bombing attack against the underwater Nord Stream pipelines which supply Russian gas to western Europe during a top secret mission overseen by President Joe Biden, a bombshell report claims.

"Divers planted C4 explosives on three Nord Stream pipelines in June 2022 which were detonated three months later using a sonar buoy which broadcast a signal that triggered the bombs, according to the report.

"The attack was carried out in response to Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine and designed to force Germany and other European nations to end their reliance on Russian gas, it is claimed. The move would also disrupt Moscow's income from gas sales - which have contributed billions of dollars to its war effort.

"The sensational report by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, published to his Substack, cites a source 'with direct knowledge of the operational planning' behind the alleged plot. The White House and the CIA flatly rejected the report on Wednesday, branding it 'complete fiction'."

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"The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) proposed a revenue procedure this week to crack down on the service industry's reporting of tips.

"The Service Industry Tip Compliance Agreement (SITCA) program would be a voluntary tip reporting system in which the IRS and service industry companies cooperate, according to the announcement Monday. As part of the proposal, the IRS will give the public until early May to provide feedback on the program before implementing it.

"'Those 87,000 new IRS agents that you were promised would only target the rich,' tweeted Mike Palicz, federal affairs manager at Americans for Tax Reform. 'They're coming after waitresses' tips now.' ...

"'There's no reason they'd be issuing guidance on how to crack down on this if it was only going to end up being voluntary,' Palicz told Fox News Digital in an interview. 'Ultimately, the goal is to go and grab as much revenue as possible and from whoever they can.'

"'All of this in the backdrop of -- they told us they're not going to be coming after people earning $400,000 or less,' he continued. 'Well, here's a new IRS rule that's focused on bringing in tips from waitresses. That's what they're focused on doing, that's what they're putting new rules on.'"

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"State of the Union speeches are usually pretty scattershot, but President Joe Biden's 2023 one set a new record.

"He ranged across a world of issues without substantively addressing the biggest ones -- crime, the border crisis, China, the nation's looming economic woes -- because his record is so weak on all of them.

"Instead, he offered lie after lie in a shameless bid to fool the electorate ahead of his 2024 run for re-election. His only 'big idea' is to make bogeymen out of the wealthy and offer the American people more freebies, more unsustainable spending. ...

"His flagging polls show the American people aren't fooled. Just like Biden, they see that his act is getting stale."

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"California's secretary of state just issued data that show the 2022 election was a mess.

"Why? Because of voting by mail.

"Indeed, this was California's first election that relied on the United States Postal Service to get the mission accomplished. In September 2021, Sacramento passed new legislation that said everyone registered to vote -- dead or alive -- is automatically sent a ballot in the mail, every election.

"That might sound good, but the new data prove that mass voting by mail should have remained a pandemic experiment.

"An analysis by the Public Interest Legal Foundation shows over 226,000 mail ballots were rejected by California election officials. That's a quarter million citizens who thought their ballot would count, but it didn't."

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"When it comes to raising the debt limit, the White House keeps insisting on 'no negotiations,' a line President Joe Biden will likely repeat Tuesday in his State of the Union speech -- in stark contrast to his own decades-long record.

"It's not just that, as vice president, he led such negotiations time and again, calling them a 'normal political battle' and saying 'my way or the highway' is 'no way to govern.'

"Heck, during his decades in the Senate, Biden proudly voted against raising the limit nine times -- with explanations like 'I refuse to be associated with the policies that brought us to this point' (March 2006). ...

"As Biden himself said in 2011, 'grown men and women' need to 'learn that they have to have compromise' to avoid putting Uncle Sam in default."

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"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."

Read the entire article here.