Category: Update

“New Hampshire joins a growing list of states that mandate some level of local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement,” The Epoch Times tells us.

New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte signed a pair of bills into law that ban so-called “sanctuary” policies designed to keep local police from cooperating with federal immigration authorities.

“There will be no sanctuary cities in New Hampshire,” Ayotte declared at the bill-signing ceremony, flanked by lawmakers and sheriffs from across the state. “Period. End of story.”

At issue are two bill, HB511 and SB62. These curb local governments under the corporate control of the sovereign state from defying federal law on the matter of immigration — that is, “unless expressly prohibited by state or federal law, local governmental entities may not prohibit or impede any state or federal law enforcement agency from complying with federal immigration laws,” etc.

“New Hampshire now joins a growing list of states that have enacted anti-sanctuary laws,” The Epoch Times goes on to explain. “According to legal advocacy group Immigrant Legal Resource Center, more than 20 states, including Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Georgia, have laws mandating at least some level of local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.”

The idea of the state nullification of federal law — James Madison called it “interposition,” and it was a key idea of the early Jeffersonians — has been on the rise in recent years. (Cannabis legalization is a good example.) This movement of the states to rein in the “sanctuary city” movement goes in the other direction, forcing compliance with the federal government.

Yesterday, the federal debt was seen on USDebtClock.org as quickly and inexorably inching towards $36.9 trillion. The official budget deficit is over $2 trillion. And Moody’s made, on Friday, an adjustment in its ratings, stripping “the US of its top-notch triple-A credit rating as it warned about rising levels of government debt and a widening budget deficit in the world’s biggest economy.”

Now, none of the major ratings agencies bestows upon the federal government the top rating. “For the first time in history, the US does not hold a triple-A credit rating from at least one of the three big agencies. S&P in 2011 was the first to strip the country of its pristine rating, while Fitch took the move in 2023.”

Meanwhile, the president boasts of a record one trillion dollar military budget.

And Congress’s DOGE caucus, formed to back up DOGE cuts, is apparently dead.

Insolvency brinksmanship seems to be going gung ho ahead.

Last year to the day, James Bovard wrote this: “The Biden White House is proclaiming a new prerogative for presidents: they may suppress any evidence of their unfitness for office.”

Yesterday, on social media, Mr. Bovard updated the story he covered last year: “The damning audio of President Biden’s disastrous interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur is finally out. Here’s my New York Post oped last year on the BS pretenses the White House used to suppress the tape. Biden was not even sure if Trump was elected president in 2017 or in 2016.”

While Biden’s bumbling, brain-addled senescence was on display before the 2020 election, Democrats wouldn’t admit it until after his disastrous “debate” with Donald Trump last summer.

And, as Bovard indicated, now (finally!) we have the actual audio of the interview that was of some consequence last year. CBS gives some details:

Snippets from a 2023 interview that led Justice Department special counsel Robert Hur to describe former President Joe Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” were obtained and published by Axios Friday, showing Biden’s halting tone of voice and difficulty remembering dates.

CBS News has confirmed the audio matches the transcript of the interview released by the Biden White House in 2024.

In one four-minute clip, Biden was asked by Hur’s team — which was investigating Biden’s handling of classified records — about where he kept his documents shortly after leaving office as vice president. Biden’s response is marked by long pauses, and his voice appears hoarse at times. His speech is especially halting as he describes the period around his son Beau’s death.

In the audio obtained by news outlet Axios, Biden can also be heard struggling to remember the year when Beau died or the year when President Trump was first elected. Members of his staff can be heard correcting him or reminding him of the date.

Joe Walsh, “Recordings of Biden Justice Department interview emerge, highlighting his memory lapses,” CBS News (May 17, 2025).

It is noteworthy that CNN’s Jake Tapper had co-authored a book on the Biden decline cover-up in the Democratic Party. It is also noteworthy — and many commenters online have emphasized it — that Tapper was in on the cover-up. But that won’t be admitted, will it? At least, not by Tapper and other professional cover-up artists.

“The Treasury Department said Friday it would likely run out of cash to pay the nation’s bills by August,” Politico tells us, “setting a new, firmer deadline for Congress to act to avoid a catastrophic default on the United States’ more-than $36 trillion debt.”

“Because there is significant uncertainty in projecting cash flows months into the future,” Secretary of Treasury Scott K.H. Bessent wrote Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, on Friday, “it is impossible to identify precisely how long cash and extraordinary measures will last.” Bessent went on to surmise that funds “will be exhausted in August while Congress is scheuled to be in recess.”

The Secretary urged “Congress to increase or suspend the debt limit by mid-July,” to prevent another scurrying chaos about government operations, like we’re used to, and “to protect the full faith and credit of the United States.”

Not doing so, the Secretary informed the Speaker, “would wreak havoc on our financial system and diminish America’s security and global leadership position.”

Michael Stratford and Jennifer Scholtes at Politico draw the obvious extrapolation: “If congressional Republicans don’t get their party-line bill to President Donald Trump’s desk before Treasury exhausts its borrowing power, GOP leaders will likely be forced to seek votes from Democrats to head off the fiscal cliff — an exercise that would likely require making major policy concessions to the minority party and risk alienating fiscal hawks.”

“GOP Lawmakers are hashing out the details of what will be in the sweeping package,” explains USA Today, “which is expected to boost funding for border security and defense while cutting taxes and possibly cutting social programs such as Medicaid.”

What are the odds that Republicans will work together to reduce government in their promised megabill before this new “deadline”?

Odds are that they will only increase spending. No?

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Paul Jacob writes about the budgeting process, debt crises, and allied subjects with some regularity. “The Continuing Crisis,” from March, gives a good idea of his general tenor.

In case there was any mystery left to the Democrats’ relay race to losing the 2024 presidential election, Joe Biden has explained it all.

Did he, asked the BBC’s Nick Robinson, just perhaps . . . drop out too late?

“What happened was,” replied the old pol, “what we had set out to do, no one thought we could do, and [had] become so successful in our agenda that [it] was hard to say ‘now I’m gonna stop now.’”

Well, he said something like that. If you want to talk about hard-to-do things, try transcribing 2025-year Biden.

“I meant what I said when I started,” Biden goes on, and after a word-stumble salad, goes on further, “‘I’m preparing to hand this to the next generation.’ The transition government. But . . . it . . . moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away.

“It was a hard decision.”

Regrets then?

“No, I think it was the right decision.”

Well, that clears it all up.

“Federal red ink now costs businesses more than $2.1 trillion per year, report says,” an article in The Washington Times tells us.

The cost of federal regulations has grown to more than $2.1 trillion per year, almost as much as the government’s annual haul from income taxes, according to a report released Thursday.

The report, released by the Competitive Enterprise Institute and titled “Ten Thousand Commandments,” outlined how the annual cost of red ink has steadily risen due to decisions made by presidents and Congress that impose new requirements and paperwork on businesses.

Mallory Wilson, “Federal red ink now costs businesses more than $2.1 trillion per year, report says,” The Washington Times (April 24, 2025).

“American households were found to pay on average more than $16,000 annually in these hidden regulatory taxes, which eat up 16% of income and 21% of household expenses,” Mallory Wilson reports. “That total exceeds household spending on health care, food, transportation, entertainment, apparel, services and savings, and is higher only than the cost of housing.”

The report is by Clyde Wayne Crews, Jr., and is the 2025 update of CEI’s ongoing coverage of the federal regulatory burden.

One of the most interesting sections of the report is near the very end:

Article I of the Constitution notwithstanding, administrative agencies, not Congress, do most of America’s lawmaking. Congress enacts weighty legislation but delegates the details to agencies. Agencies welcome this delegation and can use it to add to their powers in ways that often go beyond congressional intent.

This imbalance gives rise to the Unconstitutionality Index. The index is the ratio of rules issued by agencies to laws Congress passes.

The index is the featured image (see above) for this Update. Not a lot has changed in Washington — according to this measure, anyway — with the biggest increase in the number of regulations occurring in the first year of President Joe Biden’s term in office.

Michael Shermer, editor of the Skeptic, posted this on X:

Ok, we’re now entering hour 5 of the UAP hearing & they’re talking about privatizing space, colonizing the galaxy, semi-conductors & lasers, renewable energy, etc. I guess that’s what you have to do when you don’t have any actual evidence of aliens. Alas.

@michaelshermer, May 1, 2025.

There are several odd things about this comment:

1. It assumes that “aliens” are behind “UAP” [unidentified anomalous phenomenon], which is hardly a proven thing (many other explanations for the phenomena seem at least partially persuasive);
2. The hearings, which are heavily controlled by Deep State mavens, may serve the very purpose of promoting budgets for the Space Force, for Elon Musk’s Mars push, for extra-terrestrial colonization generally, and more, so it could be (could it be?!?) that the current hearings are actually now serving the actual goals of many trying to direct the UFO disclosure movement;
3. No mention of the oddest element of current disclosures: the long list of historical leaked, FOIAed and found documents from the Pentagon referring to UFOs in no uncertain terms somehow never gets addressed by “experts” at the disclosure hearings; the Government (which bureau?) gives us no official accounting of the meaning of the Twining memo, the Roswell kerfuffle, reports of UFO engagement with U.S. (and Soviet) nuclear missile silos, and more.

This last problem would seem to be paramount. If the current government is to be taken seriously about UFOs, it seems like they must come clean on a long history of secrecy, fakery, lying, and research.

But, it is easy to engage in the haha-gotchas of “skeptics,” demanding big revelations about UFOs, whether “manned” by aliens or Nazis or ghosts, while the cloak of secrecy and non-disclosure agreements are in place. As Brandi Vincent explains at DefenseScoop.com, some headway is being attempted against the heavily compartmentalized secrecy that surrounds the UFO situation. “Lawmakers are drafting new legislative proposals and preparing to host hearings as part of a their ongoing campaign to enhance the U.S. government’s investigations into reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena.”

The Congress members are looking to institutionalize more accountability and disclosure from federal agencies on the historically taboo topic.

“This is not a one-time thing. It’s clear this is not a one-time data dump. This is a systemic change to the process in the way that we are transparent with the American people, and with that we’re working on legislation that will put that into practice,” Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., said Thursday.

Burlison, as well as Reps. Anna Luna, R-Fla., and Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., unveiled those plans during a multi-session congressional briefing on “Understanding UAP: Science, National Security and Innovation,” hosted on Capitol Hill by the UAP Disclosure Fund in collaboration with the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.

There, the Congress members heard presentations and participated in open-table discussions from a range of high-profile scientists and former government officials, including Harvard University Professor Dr. Avi Loeb, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon and former oceanographer of the Navy retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet.

“I’ve spoken to [U.S. military personnel] that are still in active duty and their sightings of UAP have become so numerous that they are desensitized to the phenomenon. My point being that the Navy possesses a trove of video evidence and data regarding UAP, and I see no reason why [certain] footage of UAP [on] Navy training ranges cannot be declassified and shared with the scientific community,” Gallaudet said.

At various points during the hours-long event, the lawmakers expressed aims to continue to build momentum for UAP transparency in the U.S. government. . . .

Brandi Vincent, “New UAP legislation in the works as Congress prepares for more hearings,” DefenseScoop, May 1, 2025.

But what are the ufologists saying?

Nothing like what Michael Shermer quips!

Richard Dolan (of Richard Dolan Intelligent Disclosure) doesn’t see evasion and pointlessness in the current disclosure push. He notes the major revelations from a recent interview with one of the most important government advisors in U.S. history, and goes on to offer three major “UAP bombshells” in the very recent past:

1. Matthew Brown, a Pentagon analyst with weapons of mass destruction expertise, identified himself as the author of the “Immaculate Constellation” report about a classified program using AI to collect UAP imagery from government servers. This was on the Weaponized podcast.
2. Physicist Dr. Hal Puthoff’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, where he discussed his work on remote viewing programs (!), UAP propulsion physics, and UFO crash retrievals.
3. Dr. Eric Davis, Christopher Mellon, and military officials presented scientific evidence and national security concerns about UAP to lawmakers at the continuing UAP hearings in Congress. They emphasized the need for increased transparency and data sharing across scientific and military communities.

Paul Jacob has written several times on this bizarre subject.

“London, which now has 215,700 millionaires, is one of only two cities in the top 50 — the other being the heavily sanctioned capital of Russia, Moscow — that has fewer rich individuals than a decade ago,” states The Epoch Times.

Changing demographics is a subject taking some popular notice, as populations worldwide get older and are replaced (so to speak) by immigrants as well as the young.

The city famed for its bridges and Big Ben, and for surrounding the peculiar financial center, the “City of London,” has recently “dropped out of the top 5 cities for millionaires around the world, with New York, the Bay Area, Tokyo, Singapore, and Los Angeles all ranking higher, according to a report commissioned by Henley and Partners, a United Kingdom-based investment migration consultancy,” explains The Epoch Times.

The article by Guy Birchall mentions a couple of causes, including high taxes and rising crime rates. What it does not mention is the changing demographics of the city. That is, the cultural and racial make-up of London. Actor and comedian “John Cleese has been called out for suggesting the number of immigrants in London means it ‘is not really an English city anymore,’” a Huffington Post UK article explained a few years ago. Cleese was merely noting the big change in the kind of people who live in London. “‘I had a Californian friend come over two months ago, walk down the King’s Road and say, “Where are all the English people?”’”

It is not absurd to think that a rise in numbers of one group could effect a decline in another.

Apropos of yesterday’s subject, population decline, China’s population collapse was a focus but not the focus. On YouTube, however, many “content creators” are focusing more acutely on China’s version of the problem. The ‘This Thread’ podcast claims, for instance, that China’s situation is much worse than compared to that of the U.S.:

A number of YouTubers are concentrating on a much bolder claim: that the CCP has been lying about its population for years, and that the total population is a tiny fraction of what officials claim. This presenter argues, for instance, that the country’s population is probably less than half a billion:

Look around on YouTube, and you’ll find video after video portraying China’s biggest cities as seemingly empty! Where did they all go? That’s their question. These YouTubers also suggest that Chinese pandemic deaths have been extraordinarily high, persistent, and consistently covered up.

Caution: most outside observers consider this YouTube trend a species of folk fiction, something like the dreaded “conspiracy theory”: false, hyperbolic, crazy — not to put too fine a point on it. But we do know that governments lie; we know that communists lie with more alacrity and out of greater necessity — so maybe there is something to the notion that 1.4 billion people is not just a small statistical fib, but the grandest example of the Big Lie.

On Friday, the White House relaunched its COVID-19 information website, unveiling a sleek new landing page dedicated to the “true origins” of the pandemic. 

COVID.gov, previously ballyhooing the testing, treatment and vaccination against the coronavirus, now redirects to this website.

Criticizing both the Biden administration and former Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s handling of the pandemic, the website indicates that the Trump administration now embraces the theory that COVID-19 leaked out of a laboratory in Wuhan, China. One section reads as follows:

PROXIMAL ORIGIN PUBLICATION:

“The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2” publication — which was used repeatedly by public health officials and the media to discredit the lab leak theory — was prompted by Dr. Fauci to push the preferred narrative that COVID-19 originated in nature.

GAIN-OF-FUNCTION RESEARCH:

A lab-related incident involving gain-of-function research is the most likely the origin of COVID-19. Current government mechanisms for overseeing this dangerous gain-of-function research are incomplete, severely convoluted, and lack global applicability.

ECOHEALTH ALLIANCE INC. (ECOHEALTH):

EcoHealth — under the leadership of Dr. Peter Daszak — used U.S. taxpayer dollars to facilitate dangerous gain-of-function research in Wuhan, China. After the Select Subcommittee released evidence of EcoHealth violating the terms of its National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) commenced official debarment proceedings and suspended all funding to EcoHealth.

New evidence also shows that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has opened an investigation into EcoHealth’s pandemic-era activities.

NIH FAILURES:

NIH’s procedures for funding and overseeing potentially dangerous research are deficient, unreliable, and pose a serious threat to both public health and national security. Further, NIH fostered an environment that promoted evading federal record keeping laws — as seen through the actions of Dr. David Morens and “FOIA Lady” Marge Moore.

And that’s not the half of it; there’s a lot more.

At the bottom of the page it says that the page’s content was “sourced from the House Oversight Committee website, a Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic of the Committee on Oversight and Accountability in the U.S. House of Representatives.”

Readers of Paul Jacob’s weekday commentary on this website (thisiscommonsense.org) will be surprised by none of this — except, perhaps, that the administration of the president who awarded Dr. Fauci a “Medal of Freedom” admits to so much of the anti-freedom nature of the pandemic response.

Some excusing, though, of Trump’s role in the pandemic debacle can be seen in this passage: “Prolonged lockdowns caused immeasurable harm to not only the American economy, but also to the mental and physical health of Americans, with a particularly negative effect on younger citizens. Rather than prioritizing the protection of the most vulnerable populations, federal and state government policies forced millions of Americans to forgo crucial elements of a healthy and financially sound life.”

Just “prolonged” lockdowns? No mention of the president’s early support of them?

Finally, one aspect is catching some attention: a short section on President Joe Biden’s pardon of Dr. Fauci. Tim Pool speculates that this indicates that the Trump administration is readying itself — or at least sending out “feelers” — for an arrest and indictment of Fauci.

As to be expected, Dr. John Campbell has expressed, with candor, his approval of the White House’s newfound candor.