The looming strike by the United Auto Workers is as much a protest against Bidenomics as it is the policies of General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and Stellantis.

More than a decade ago, as U.S. automakers were teetering on the verge of collapse and two in the grip of bankruptcy amid the Great Recession, the unions and the autoworkers they represent made many concessions to keep the Big Three afloat. A big one was the agreement to accept contracts that no longer tied worker pay to inflation.

The pressure put on the unions at the time was tremendous. The Obama administration relentlessly pushed for acceptance of its program, largely because it wanted to claim credit for rescuing the auto industry. The workers were threatened with economic ruin if they did not sacrifice to prop up their failing employers. Politically, the unions were left adrift, abandoned by the Democrats who had long been their allies and finding little welcome among a Republican party still dominated by establishment types enthralled to the agenda of big business and Wall Street.

Jeremy Clarkson's hit Amazon series Clarkson's Farm is set to be renewed for a fourth season by the streaming giant despite suggestions it would be axed following the fall out from the ex-Top gear presenter's comments on Meghan Markle last year, it was reported today. 

Clarkson's show has been a ratings phenomenon for Amazon and something of a business boom for the Grand Tour star.

Since launching in 2021, the show - which also brought straight-talking Cotswold farmer Kaleb Cooper to prominence -  has documented Clarkson's attempts to transform his huge 1,000-acre Diddly Squat Farm into a working business complete with a farm shop and organic beer brand.

But the show's future has been brought into doubt after Clarkson sparked a backlash with an incendiary column about the Duchess of Sussex in which he said he 'hated' the royal.

Clarkson apologised for the article, calling his language 'disgraceful'. The Sun newspaper also apologised for publishing the column and removed it online. Ipso, the press watchdog, upheld a complaint that the column was sexist towards the duchess, describing some of Clarkson's comments about her as 'pejorative and prejudicial'.

It was thought that Clarkson's Farm would end with Season 3, expected in 2024, with The Grand Tour also ending after four more special episodes, the last of which is expected to be in late 2024. 

The White House, Democrats, and their allied media outlets have been pushing outright disinformation by claiming there is “no evidence” to support an impeachment inquiry into Democrat President Joe Biden, contradicting mounds of evidence uncovered by House Republicans and already in the public sphere.

The left’s message since the launch of the impeachment inquiry into Biden seems clear and coordinated: several media outlets, Democrats, and the White House itself have all used phrases such as “without evidence,” “no evidence,” or “no direct evidence” to describe the House GOP effort that Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced earlier this week. But their claims are, quite simply, disinformation and easily disproven as the House Republicans have actually amassed quite a bit of evidence this year before proceeding to the next stage of the ongoing investigation — a massive escalation — with an impeachment inquiry.

It is important to note an impeachment inquiry is not the consideration of articles of impeachment. That could — or might not — come later. But an impeachment inquiry is simply that: an inquiry. It is an expansion, acceleration, and coordination of several committees’ ongoing investigative work and may end up leading to an impeachment — or it might not. That remains unclear. While McCarthy launched it with a public comment and directive to the members of his conference and the committees that will lead it, McCarthy’s comments also do not preclude an eventual possible vote formally authorizing such an inquiry down the road. That’s exactly what House Democrats did under then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi in their first impeachment of then-President Donald Trump in 2019 — she made an announcement and then five weeks later the House formally voted on the authorization. That could very well happen here.

Webmaster addition: The panic we are seeing in DC over the Biden corruption scandal suggests that the scandal reaches far beyond just the Biden family.

Trade between Venezuela and the United States grew 113 percent during the first half of 2023 compared to the same period in 2022, according to the Caracas-based Venezuelan-American Chamber of Commerce and Trade (Venamcham), a non-governmental organization.

Venamcham’s general manager Luis García explained to the Spanish EFE news agency on Wednesday that the oil sanctions relief granted by the administration of leftist U.S. President Joe Biden to the socialist regime of Venezuela’s dictator Nicolás Maduro in November helped fuel the surge in commerce between the two countries in 2023.

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) is warning President Joe Biden’s latest Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules will cripple the nation’s steel industry, particularly in Ohio and Indiana, as similar measures did in the European Union last year amid an energy crisis.

Vance sent a letter to Biden on Thursday regarding the administration’s sweeping EPA rules on United States power plants. The letter was first reviewed by Breitbart News.

According to Vance, Biden’s EPA is unable to cite a single domestic power plant that is able to meet the green energy standards set out by rules, suggesting the agency “has failed to consider fully the impact of the standards to industrial consumers of fossil-fuel generated electricity.”

Most notably, Vance writes that the rules would devastate the U.S. steel industry:

The impact of the rule would be especially hard on a backbone of the nation’s industrial base: the steel industry. The country’s top two steel producing states of Ohio and Indiana are especially reliant on fossil fuels for electric power generation—80 percent in Ohio and 91 percent in Indiana. When the new standards drive up energy costs and undermine the electric grid, steelmakers in the Heartland and throughout the country will suffer. The steel industry has already warned that the “increased costs, along with potential base load generation and grid reliability issues from the premature closure of fossil fuel-fired power plants, will have a dramatic impact on the viability of steel plants in the Unites States.” [Emphasis added]

Congressional Republicans, eager to recoup fraudulent COVID-19 pandemic aid, are pushing back against the Biden administration for stonewalling efforts to recover payments to criminals and denying the magnitude of the crime.

The House Small Business Committee under Chairman Roger Williams (R-TX) marked up several bills Thursday — including two dealing with pandemic fraud that, according to the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Office of Inspector General, potentially amount to at least $200 billion in taxpayer funds. Biden’s SBA downplayed the fraud and claimed fraudulent payments amount to only $34 billion — a massive discrepancy from the SBA Inspector General’s report.

In addition to denying the magnitude of the issue, the SBA is making it difficult to report fraud despite the law. In authorizing the aid, Congress required the SBA to include an easily accessible link on its website to report suspected fraud and other measures to ensure it can be easily reported. However, the only link to report fraud on the SBA’s lengthy homepage is at the bottom, nestled within a long list of links.

As recently as Wednesday, that link sent users to a page in Spanish.

Congressional Republicans, eager to recoup fraudulent COVID-19 pandemic aid, are pushing back against the Biden administration for stonewalling efforts to recover payments to criminals and denying the magnitude of the crime.

The House Small Business Committee under Chairman Roger Williams (R-TX) marked up several bills Thursday — including two dealing with pandemic fraud that, according to the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Office of Inspector General, potentially amount to at least $200 billion in taxpayer funds. Biden’s SBA downplayed the fraud and claimed fraudulent payments amount to only $34 billion — a massive discrepancy from the SBA Inspector General’s report.

In addition to denying the magnitude of the issue, the SBA is making it difficult to report fraud despite the law. In authorizing the aid, Congress required the SBA to include an easily accessible link on its website to report suspected fraud and other measures to ensure it can be easily reported. However, the only link to report fraud on the SBA’s lengthy homepage is at the bottom, nestled within a long list of links.

As recently as Wednesday, that link sent users to a page in Spanish.

The State of California still leads the United States in poverty, according to new U.S. Census data released Tuesday.

CalMatters.org reported:

The “supplemental” rates are calculated on three years of data and California has held the top spot for a number of years, almost entirely because of its extraordinarily high costs of housing, utilities, fuel and other consumer needs.

Nationally, the new supplemental rate is 9.8% but once again California tops the states at 13.2 percent, more than a third higher than the national rate.

…

The ultimate irony of California’s high poverty rate is that it’s a deep-blue state where all of the political power is held by left-leaning Democrats who profess to sympathize with the plight of the poor.

Within the state, CalMatters.org notes, poverty is highest in the Los Angeles area, and lowest in the San Francisco area.

The District of Columbia is the only jurisdiction with a higher supplemental poverty rate than California, at 14.8%, though it is not a state.

In a key bit of synchronicity, two events took place in close succession that show that the Biden plan to run for 2024 is on the ropes.

The first was that the White House counsel’s office sent letters to major press outlets pressuring effectively directing them to treat the impeachment inquiry as a lie. Mind you, this media meddling comes after the Biden Administration lost its fight against a preliminary injunction, both at the trail court and appeals court level, against its campaign to influence social media platforms not to publish what it deemed to be “misinformation”. If you read Matt Taibbi’s Twitter files revelations, that campaign was light touch compared to this letter.

But the fact that it was Democratic Party fixture CNN that was first to public about the Biden Administration narrative control campaign was a sign that a weakened and desperate Administration had overplayed its hand. We’ll return to the letter later in the post because there are other ways in which it was extremely irregular.

But the big bombshell is the David Ignatius oped in the Washington Post telling Biden not to run again and even going so far as to tell Harris to step aside too. Tellingly, the article was not paywalled:

The significance is not that Ignatiius sticks the shiv in as nicely as possible, spending paragraphs signaling his regret at having to recommend against Biden 2024 despite Ignatius’ view that Biden “has been a successful and effective president.” It’s due to Igantius’ status as whisperer in chief for the surveillance-intelligence industrial complex. Remember, for instance, that Anthony Blinken gave an interview to Ignatius in January in which Blinken effectively committed the US to an open-ended war in Ukraine.

This Fox segment (yes, I know Fox) which ran there as Jesse Watters: Biden has done his job according to the Democrats, does a good job of describing the CIA’s relationship to the US press and Ignatius in particular: