Weekly Report to My Friends in Montgomery County and Maryland
I don’t write the headlines but… Watch: Crowd Awkwardly Leaves Kamala Harris Hanging
Story of the Week: The Drive-By Media Knew From Day One:
The drive-by media was all laudatory in the early days of the Biden Administration but now simply scornful of the changes the new Trump administration might make in its early days.
Apparently, the Biden administration had from its very first say no “boss” so to speak, reminding one of the “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain” from the Wizard of Oz.
This from The Free Press today and it’s about the first days of the Biden Administration:
“In the background, up very early and also very late, were busy bee [Administration]staffers with a very different vision for the country: opening the border on Day One; $175 billion for student loan forgiveness; plus, for good measure, his presidential proclamation recognizing Trans Day of Visibility (what about lesbians, Joe!). Any given day, staffers just put on the Joe Biden bodysuit and did something absolutely bananas and then said whoa, whoa, are you calling Joe Biden a communist?”
The Drive-by’s are also losing influence. This series of charts about 2024 says it all. Party leaders---here is where you go to reach people and its free!!! https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-a-majority-of-new-trump-voters-used-social-media-as-main-news-source/
Many of you know The Nation magazine. Its editor for over 50 years insisted Alger Hiss was innocent. John Nickols writes today that a switch of 112,000 votes in just three states—Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—and Harris wins. So there is no mandate. Well, I wrote him back in the comments section of the magazine and here it is:
If 42000 votes had switched from Biden to Trump in 2020, Trump and Biden end up in the House of Representatives where Trump wins 26 delegations to 23 with one tied. 15% of Biden voters or 12 million don't vote for him if they had known about the Hunter Biden laptop and Biden gets only 69 million votes vs Trumps 74 million and Trump easily wins.
Even without the laptop, despite nearly 160 million votes cast, a switch of .0002% of the vote in 2020 changes the results. In 2024, Trump won all battleground states where there was a real contest and that strikes me as a mandate. Although the Nation said Reagan, Bush 41/43 did not have mandates when they won!!
But Trump won the Senate and the House, and he picked up over half of the working men and women vote, nearly half of the Hispanic vote and a majority of the male youth vote, a big switch from 2020.
John Nichols wants to stop Trump's plans although 31 states voted yes and for Trump.
You lost Nichols despite spending $1.5 billion in 100 days. Transgender surgeries, open borders, woke nonsense, calling parents of school children terrorists, defunding the cops, kissy face with the Taliban, Hamas and the mullahs in Iran, plus high energy prices sunk your ship. Antifa gets $ from China and BLM was founded by communists. Thats why you lost.
Go Podcasts Big Time
Advised by his 18-year-old son, Barron Trump, and 27-year-old campaign advisor Alex Bruesewitz, Trump capitalized on these younger voters who listened to podcasts, who in the past leaned more Democratic. He stormed the podcast scene in a way no major presidential candidate had done before, garnering over 80 million views on YouTube alone across only five podcasts: The Joe Rogan Experience, Flagrant with Andrew Schulz, Lex Fridman, The Past Weekend with Theo Von, and Adin Ross’s live stream. Across other streaming sites and through clips on short-form social media, these podcasts translated into hundreds of millions of additional views.
This strategy wasn’t a waste of time. In 2020, Biden won 18-29-year-olds by 24 points, 60%-36%, with Trump trailing young women by 32 points, 65%-33%, and young men by 15 points, 56%-41%. In this year’s election, Trump only lost the demographic by 11 points, 54%-43%. Among young men, he actually led by one point, 49%-48%, while trailing among young women 61%-38%.
In 2020, Biden won Latinos by 33 points, 65%-32%. In 2024, he only edged out Trump by five points, 51%-46%. While the reasons for the shift are less obvious than the story around young men, inflation and rising prices likely played a significant role. While inflation was the top issue for whites, blacks, and Hispanics, the latter group prioritized it even more, with 33% rating it the most important issue in The Economist’s final pre-election poll, compared to 24% for blacks and 23% for whites.
The other group that Trump made the most gains with was the working class, especially compared to previous Republican candidates. Looking back to 2012, Obama won 63% of voters making $30,000 or less and 57% of those earning $30,000-$49,999 per year. In 2016, when Trump won, Hillary Clinton only received 53% and 51% of these income brackets, respectively.
In 2020, Biden slightly improved with voters earning under $50,000 annually, garnering 54% support, and with those making $50,000-$100,000, earning 56%. However, in 2024, Trump flipped both income brackets, securing 50% support among voters making under $50,000 and 52% among those earning $50,000-$100,000.
Tax Cuts and Immigration, the Sharks Are Now Feeding:
Mr. Mickey Levy of Stanford University/Hoover Institute (the President is Ms. Condoleezza Rice) in the University’s morning bulletin warns that Mr. Trump’s two major initiatives aren’t good economic policy.
First, Levy claims Trump’s tax plan tax plan will cost the US government $4.5 trillion over the next decade.
Second, as for deporting millions of illegal aliens, Levy writes that it will cost the US economy negatively.
From Hoover Institution [email protected] my essay
Mr. Levy's analysis of a variety of probable Trump administration proposals reflects some assumptions that one could seriously question. For example, CBO's estimate of falling tax revenue with the passage of the 2017 tax rate reductions was wrong---new CBO revenue estimates within just a few months of the tax reform package passing Congress were actually $650 billion higher over a ten year window than their own earlier estimates.
But the reality has turned out even better. Between FY2017 and FY24, the US government has added $1.72 trillion in new revenue, from $3.32 trillion to $4.92 trillion or 48% growth. Annual spending prior to CV-19 was roughly 4.2 trillion. It is now for FY24 some $6.75 trillion. Or an increase of 58%. If spending had gone up only 17%, we would have a balanced budget.
And why is it bad if American citizens decide to spend their own money but good if the government gets to spend it? If the money would go to private individuals and require the USG to borrow the money they no longer have, is Mr. Levy saying with no tax rate cuts, the USG budgets are balanced? Well, of course not.
Gingrich and Clinton cut the capital gains tax, instituted the child tax credit, cut the tax consequences of retirement plans, cut non-defense discretionary spending by over $50B a year, INCREASED defense spending from $260 to $305 billion by FY2001, reformed welfare, and balanced the budget and produced over 3 years a surplus. Why cannot this be done again, with greater welfare reform and greater tax reform?
But where Mr. Levy falls down is on illegal immigration. He starts with lumping together illegal and legal immigration. He completely fails to take into account the costs of illegal immigration as follows: $20,000 average cost per year for their children to go to school; the costs of crime from gangs and criminal elements escaping the criminal justice of their native nations; the average annual cost of local and state government outside of education---police and fire protection, sanitation, environmental measures, general government, roads and infrastructure--all of which comes to $10,000 per year per person at the local and state level, as all non-Federal spending is over $3.2 trillion annually.
Illegal immigrants under Biden receive Medicaid; food stamps, housing, work permits, all of which cost between $250-$600 billion a year depending on how one calculates the costs. For example, if there are 4 million illegal alien children going to school, and many in NY, California or Illinois, the annual cost per student is easily for these states over $30,000 a year---and if Victor Davis Hanson is right that California has 50% of the illegal alien population, the cost is in the multiple hundreds of billions.
But there is more. Illegal aliens often work off the books and the cash they send home does not stay in the US economy--which in just the case of Mexico amounts to $60+ billion just in remittances.
If illegal immigration is so great as groups like the Immigration Council assert, why did lower rates of illegal immigration under Trump result in a better economy than under Mr. Biden?
As the BLS has noted, 99% of the new jobs in the last year were taken by illegal and legal immigrants with nearly zero for native-born Americans---and that potential naive born work force is increasing---and if not working, in large part due to the crazy means tested poverty programs the US maintains.
For example, here in MD a woman with 2 children gets $34,000 annually in benefits. At $15 an hour--the holy grail of progressive policy--she could earn $31,200 but lose $4500 in payroll taxes and another $2500 in state taxes even if for the Federal taxes she pays zero.
But under reform, if she could keep half of her benefits and work at home to be able to take care of the children, the US could eventually save half of the means tested poverty program costs that the Mercatus Center estimates cost the USA some $2.2 trillion annually.
Yes, these are entitlements---but they are for not working [or working but not enough to get above the poverty line.]
So, I think it makes little sense to continue to bring in millions of illegal aliens which will further depress wages, increase those who work off the books and send money out of the country.
And with workers coming in we also get criminal gangs and drugs---as well as mental patients, echoes of the Castro boatlift during the Carter administration.
With 106,000 Americans dying of opioid overdoses each year, we need less of an open border and more border enforcement.
And it is not just Mexico--as I told Senator Simpson when I worked immigration reform in the Reagan administration, an open border with Mexico is an open border with the world. See especially the information about Triad gangs from China which the Committee on the Present Danger-China has laid out in detail in recent podcasts.
Sincerely, Peter Huessy, President, Geo-Strategic Analysis
American men drop out of economy as immigrants claim jobs: Study
By Stephen Dinan - The Washington Times - Thursday, December 19, 2024
Americans clamoring for more immigrants to fill out the workforce are ignoring a labor source already here — people, mostly men, who have given up on the economy, according to a new study by the Center for Immigration Studies.
Roughly 1 out of every 6 U.S.-born men aged 20 to 64 is not part of the labor force, meaning they don’t have a job and aren’t looking for one.
It’s far worse for men who never made it beyond high school. Nearly a quarter of them aren’t in the workforce. That figure was less than 18% in 2000, and as low as 9% in 1970.
And those are exactly the people who are most likely to compete with new immigrants, who also tend to be less educated, said Steven A. Camarota, the researcher who wrote the new study.
“If the argument is that we don’t have enough of those workers, what that ignores is all the people on the economy’s sidelines who themselves are overwhelmingly people who don’t have a college education,” he told The Washington Times.
There are other potential factors too. Generous welfare benefits and changing social norms may each have enticed some men to drop out of the job market.
Mr. Camarota figured that if U.S.-born men participated in the labor force today at the same rate they did in 2000, there would be 4.4 million more workers available to take jobs.
Their absence isn’t just an economic problem, he argued. Those who aren’t in the labor force are more likely to suffer a litany of social ills, from poverty to mental health issues, higher levels of obesity, drug overdoses, suicides and reckless alcohol consumption.
It then becomes a dangerous cycle, with those problems preventing men from jumping back into the workforce. But it also offers a potential way out, Mr. Camarota said.
“The social problems contribute to what happens to these men,” he said. “If we could get more of them back into the labor force, especially ones in their 20s, that would help head off a lot of these problems or mitigate them.”
Jobless men aren’t a new problem. Some historians argue that a surge in younger male siblings helped spur the Crusades, and in more recent decades the lack of opportunities in Muslim countries has been suggested as a reason why jihadists can recruit successfully.
But Mr. Camarota’s link to immigration in the U.S. sparks feverish pushback.
Some immigrant rights advocates call the suggestion that migrants are competing for jobs a xenophobic argument.
Other critics battle over the numbers.
“Immigrants are not only major participants in the U.S. workforce, representing one in six U.S. workers, they are significant contributors to our economy and help keep critical social programs alive,” argues America’s Voice, a leading immigration group.
The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank affiliated with some of the country’s largest labor organizations, says the U.S. needs — and benefits from — foreign labor.
The Biden administration’s migrant surge helped keep inflation from running even hotter, EPI said, adding that the effect on U.S. workers’ wages is “neutral” at worst and “slightly positive” at best.
“Immigration to the U.S. provides many economic benefits, and those benefits would increase substantially if immigration policy was improved to guarantee equal and enforceable labor and workplace rights,” EPI says.
But Tom Homan, President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming border czar, said the negative feedback loop between jobs and migration is clear.
In an interview with the Immigration Reform Law Institute, Mr. Homan recounted his experience with a roofing contractor. The man said he tried to pay his U.S. workers $20 an hour, but he kept getting undercut by other outfits who paid migrant laborers $7.
“He had to end up laying off 20 U.S. citizen employees because he couldn’t win any jobs,” said Mr. Homan, a former immigration official. “That happens every day across this country, a thousand times.”
Mr. Camarota said the fact that so many are still sitting out despite the recent record-low unemployment shows they won’t be coaxed back without some external pushes.
He was also realistic about limitations, saying it will require changes to welfare and disability systems to cajole people off those supports, as well as job training and other programs to help them get into the market. And he said paying higher wages will probably have to be a part of it, and that means reducing immigration.
“We’re not getting everybody back in the labor force,” Mr. Camarota said. “The question is can we do better, and I think we can, but we never will as long as we have the immigration.”
It’s not just immigrants who have picked up the slack. Women are also in the labor force at historically strong rates.
In the early 1960s, nearly half of women ages 18-64 weren’t holding or seeking jobs. By this year it was only slightly more than a quarter.
Stephen Dinan can be reached at [email protected].
Woke-up call for schools
Mr. Trump plans to use federal funding as leverage to eliminate woke policies in education, including in colleges and universities where academic freedom has eroded.
The president-elect believes billions of federal dollars should be withheld from schools that incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion policies and “anti-American insanity” on campuses. His advisers want to foster academic freedom by forcing an end to DEI policies.
Stanford University physician and economist Jay Bhattacharya, Mr. Trump’s nominee to run the National Institutes of Health, said he plans to make colleges and universities pay for policies threatening free speech on campus. NIH annually awards more than $25 billion to universities. And Mr. Trump is eyeing a proposal from conservative activist Christopher Rufo to root out DEI on college campuses by threatening to cut federal funding.
Want to know what the Teachers Are up to? It will cost you $33 million.
Parents are suing schools to find out what their kids are learning. Schools are suing parents to shut them up. How did we get here?
Elizabeth Clair poses for a photo in her home in Rochester hills, Michigan, on December 3, 2024. (Nic Antaya for The Free Press)
Elizabeth Clair, the mother of a seventh grader in suburban Detroit, wanted to find out whether her local school district had mended its ways after it lost a lawsuit for improperly tracking disgruntled parents. Instead, she’s the one who learned a lesson: Prying information out of local governments can be very expensive—and state transparency laws don’t always help.
Back in 2022, the Rochester Community School District settled a lawsuit for nearly $200,000 with another mom who accused the district of keeping a “dossier” on parents critical of Covid lockdowns. Clair said she wanted to know what the district was doing to stem future retaliation against parents. So, she filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for six months’ worth of emails containing the word anti-retaliation.
A few weeks later, she heard back from the district’s FOIA coordinator: Her request had been granted. All she had to do was pay $33,103,232.56. That’s right. More than $33 million.
The district explained that it would take an employee 717,000 hours at a rate of over $46 per hour to review the 21,514,288 emails related to her request.
“It’s just absurd,” Clair, a financial analyst for a local automotive company, told The Free Press. “For one person making, like, $83,000 a year, it would take them, like, 400 years to fulfill that FOIA request.”
A detail of an invoice for $33 million from Rochester Community Schools to Elizabeth Clair for her public records request. (Nic Antaya for The Free Press)
Clair isn’t the only Rochester parent to be slapped with a multimillion-dollar bill from the district. Jessica Opfer was told it would cost more than $25 million to fulfill her request for records about why the district got rid of a language arts curriculum that her eldest daughter loved. Lori Grein, a spokesperson for Rochester Community Schools, said both Clair’s and Opfer’s requests required diverting large amounts of staff time to review documents for material that wasn’t public and therefore had to be redacted.
“I obviously wasn’t going to pay these exorbitant fees, and at this point, I felt I had hit a brick wall,” Opfer told The Free Press.
Both Opfer and Clair tried to negotiate to bring down the prices. Clair tried narrowing down her request, but the district said her new ask would cost her over $1,000—a price she said, “was still too high,” and a sign the district was “clearly unwilling to cooperate.”
“As taxpayers in the community, as parents who send our kids and entrust our children to these institutions every day, I think everything should be transparent,” Clair said. “I fail to understand why this district puts up such a fight against us.”
“It just leads me to think,” she continued, “what are they hiding?”
While multimillion-dollar fees to review classroom curricula are unusual, the trend of American parents using the FOIA as a weapon in their disputes with school districts has grown substantially since the Covid-19 pandemic. During school closures and lockdowns, with kids at home learning on laptops, many parents saw firsthand what they were being taught in the classroom. The fact that teachers unions were advocating for continued lockdowns—even as many parents were itching to get their kids back in school—left many moms and dads feeling that teachers weren’t prioritizing their kids’ educational needs.
As tensions rose, a growing chorus of parents started pushing back, demanding greater transparency into their kids’ education. Many were backed by right-leaning think tanks and nonprofits championing “parental rights.” And, rather than trying to rebuild trust with these parents, the schools went on the offensive.
In 2021, the National School Boards Association, which lobbies on behalf of nearly every school board in the country, labeled parents opposing school closures “domestic terrorists” and even suggested invoking the PATRIOT Act against them. In 2022, six months after Illinois lifted state lockdown restrictions, the Chicago Teachers Union defied a city order to return to in-person learning, which it said was “rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.”
It was during this uproar that parents started turning to local versions of the Freedom of Information Act, which grants Americans access to the records of federal agencies. Since the federal legislation was passed in 1966, each state has adopted its own laws that guarantee citizens’ access to public information—from city budgets to public school records.
Elizabeth Clair, the mother of a seventh grader in Rochester, Michigan, received a bill for $33 million for a public records request. (Nic Antaya for The Free Press)
But not all information is public. David Cuillier, the director of the Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida, said that each state’s laws allow for “a whole slew of exemptions”—such as “health records at public hospitals or grades of students in public schools, Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, that sort of thing.”
In addition, Cuillier said he’s noticed an uptick over the last decade in what he calls “vexatious requests.”
“They just ask for everything, and it would take staff a ton of hours,” he said. “It’s crippling some agencies, and they’re really struggling to figure out how to deal with that.”
Cuillier says such purposely broad requests are “weaponizing FOIA,” or “using it as a way to just harass and punish and get back at their governments” over personal feuds or for political aims.
At the same time, Cuillier said, local governments have become increasingly secretive and exploit the exemptions in the law. “It’s up to the government, their discretion, and usually they side on secrecy,” he said.
Nicole Solas, a Rhode Island mother of two and a retired lawyer, learned what can happen in this kind of conflict.
In the summer of 2021, Solas filed a request with the South Kingstown school district asking for communications between district officials relating to critical race theory and gender theory. She said she got back an estimated bill of $9,570 to fulfill it.
Solas said she felt this was a deliberate attempt to “price her out.” To avoid the high fees, she split her FOIA into 160 separate requests and filed them via the state’s Access to Public Records Act (APRA). But on June 2, 2021, the South Kingstown School Committee set up a special open session meeting. On the agenda? “Discussion/Action: Filing lawsuit against Nicole Solas to challenge filing of over 160 APRA requests.”
Solas described the public meeting to The Free Press as a “public struggle session.” A video of the meeting shows a member of the school board calling Solas’s requests a “disturbing attempt. . . to create chaos and intimidate our district.” During public comments, a black woman got up and accused Solas’s ancestors of “skinn[ing] my ancestors alive.” When Solas asked, “How does this relate to the agenda item?” another person in the audience responded, “Your whitedom!” Superintendent Michael Podraza said neither he nor anyone else in the system could comment on the dispute with Solas because the administrative staff had turned over since that time.
Two months later, the district sent Solas 6,500 pages of documents, which she says were almost entirely blacked out with redactions. In August, a local affiliate of the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the country, sued Solas and the school system, claiming that she sought the personal records of district staff, which are not subject to the open records law.
In the three years since, Solas has filed three lawsuits against the district, with the help of the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank. Solas alleged that she was denied the right to attend public meetings, that the district violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments by suing her, and that it violated the state’s public records law in not responding to her requests. Solas came out on top in that last suit through a settlement in April that required the district to grant all of her public records requests, cover her legal fees, and pay a civil fine. The NEA’s suit against Solas as well as her Constitutional rights suit are still pending.
“I had to spend a lot of time repairing the reputation that my school district wanted to destroy,” Solas said of her lawsuits. She has since taken her two kids, now 5 and 8, out of public school and enrolled them in Catholic day school, which costs her and her husband around $20,000 a year for both kids, she said.
“We’re a single-income household. I don’t know how long we can afford this, but I feel like I have no option because I don’t have school choice in Rhode Island and my public school district. . . ” she said, pausing for a moment, “. . . they literally hate me.”
It’s not just culture war issues that have schools clamming up. In Utah, John Gadd, a father of six, found himself embroiled in a battle with his state school board association because he wanted to understand why his property taxes had gone up 71 percent in nine years.
Gadd knew that much of the money was going to public schools. So, he filed Utah’s version of an FOIA request with the Utah School Boards Association (USBA) and his local Alpine School District.
John Gadd, a father of six in Pleasant Grove, Utah, is suing the Utah School Boards Association to find out how they’re spending his property tax dollars. (Spenser Heaps for The Free Press)
His bills for at least five FOIAs to the district added up to more than $8,200. But what concerned him most was that all four of his FOIA requests for the financial records of the USBA—an entity that provides assistance to all of the states’ school boards—were denied.
The USBA claimed it wasn’t subject to FOIA because it isn’t legally a “public association.” “Local boards of education,” it argued in court, “do not exercise control over USBA”—meaning it’s not a government entity.
Cuillier, the FOIA expert, said this defense is “a huge issue today” and a common sign of a broader problem: “the privatization of government services, which in some states allows them to hide information from the public.”
“If it’s using our money to do government services, then we ought to see how that money is spent,” Cuillier added. “If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, then it’s a duck.”
Gadd, a retired lawyer, didn’t buy USBA’s excuse either. After scouring public records, he calculated that the USBA has received over $74 million of taxpayer dollars in the last 10 years from local school districts. And, he notes, the organization is run by elected school board officials from across the state. Gadd even dug up records showing USBA’s $1.15 million headquarters is classified as a “government building” and is exempt from property taxes.
In March, he filed a lawsuit against the USBA claiming that its records should be open to the public. The case is pending, but in the meantime, Gadd reached out to all 50 state school board associations across the country. Of the 21 he’s heard from so far, only two—Washington and Oregon—said they are subject to state FOIA laws.
Back in Michigan, the fight for transparency has hit another roadblock. In March 2022, Carol Beth Litkouhi, a mother of two, sued the Rochester district after her request for the curriculum from the “History of Ethnic and Gender Studies” class was denied on the grounds that the district was “not knowingly in the possession of any records.”
“I thought, this makes no sense,” Litkouhi told The Free Press. According to the class syllabus, which Litkouhi did get a copy of, “there should be case studies and readings and assignments, and nothing was turning up.”
It turns out that Litkouhi had stumbled on another major exception in the state’s open records law. In February, a Michigan court ruled against Litkouhi, declaring that “public school teachers are not included in the definition of ‘public body’ and therefore records created and retained by individual teachers are not public records subject to disclosure for purposes of FOIA.” Last month, the Michigan Supreme Court denied Litkouhi’s appeal.
Her lawyer, Steve Delie, of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan-based free market think tank, called the ruling “a massive blow to transparency.”
“It’s hard to think of something more core to public schooling than what is being taught,” Delie said. “And now that can be withheld.” He added that the ruling “goes beyond schools,” and can now empower government bodies across the state to shield records from public view.
Since filing her suit, Litkouhi said she has been labeled as “hateful” and accused of trying to “destroy public schools.”
“I’m literally just a mom responding to what has been happening to me when I asked about a class in my district’s school,” she said.
But she’s not giving up. In November 2022, Litkouhi won a seat on the Rochester Community School Board. But even then, she said, it took months to overcome objections from the board president so she could just see documents detailing the district’s legal bills. Still, she’s not giving up.
“I care about our schools too much to let this sort of thing happen—to let them slip, to let leadership at the top think that this is the way that they should treat the community,” Litkouhi said. “The lack of access to information like this is what has created all of the lack of trust to begin with.”
EGREGIOUS’: Detransitioner Sues Doctor Who Prescribed Her Irreversible Sex-Change Drugs at 12
Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell | December 11, 2024
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Peter Huessy is a Member of the Montgomery County Republican Central Committee. Since 1981 he has been President of Geo-Strategic Analysis of Potomac, Maryland. He was a former special assistant to the Secretary of the Interior and consultant to the US Air Force. He can be reached at [email protected]
