The People Who Know Biden Best Don’t Like Him

posted by Derek Hunter at Townhall 

I had the good fortune to take my family to Delaware for the weekend to celebrate Mother’s Day. It’s not like it was a massive trip, it’s a 3-hour drive, but Rehoboth Beach is a great place to go if you have young kids. It’s also, apparently, a great place to hide out if you’re trying to hide your mental decline. At least, that’s what it is for President Joe Biden. Well, that and a place for his son to party, probably. 

But even here, a place Joe Biden calls home almost more often than the White House, among the people who know Joe best – the people who literally live a pretty solid drive and a low iron shot away from his beachfront mansion – there isn’t a lot of love for him.

In driving through the state, I did not see a single Biden sign. There were quite a few Trump signs, though not a ton – this is a deep blue state, after all. But as far as passion and enthusiasm goes, I found none for Joe.

I’ve been here before and checked in on how “The First State” is feeling about its favorite son (seriously, can you name anyone else from Delaware off the top of your head?) and it’s never been good. That being said, Joe Biden won every election here in a walk since 1972. Sure, he benefited from a Democratic Party machine that kept voters in line and obedient, but you’d at least think the state would be mildly excited that he’s president. They don’t seem to.

I grew up in Michigan and knew Gerald Ford was from there, and he was not elected to be Vice-President or President (the only person to serve as both without having been elected to either). We didn’t brag about it, but everyone knew about it. 

Joe Biden has been elected to both and his vacation town seems embarrassed by it. 

I can’t blame them, he really is the worst President of the modern area, maybe even all time, but you’d still think there’d be some Delaware pride money to be made off it. Jimmy Carter is happy to have lived long enough to see his horrible failure of a presidency lapped by this boob, but Delaware seems in denial.

But you know who is popular there? At least in Rehoboth Beach: Donald Trump. On the boardwalk you will see a lot of Trump shirts for sale, hanging outside the stores to draw people in. There were at least 7 different design options they were showcasing, with more inside their stores. The most popular? The Trump mugshot with “Not Guilty” underneath it, according to one t-shirt shop manager I spoke to. There was the same shirt with “Guilty” written under it but, “That one doesn’t really sell.” 

I saw one pro-Biden shirt, just one. All it said was “Biden 2024” and it was hanging near the floor. 

That was one shirt from four different shops.

Joe Biden inspires blah. People either love or hate Donald Trump, people seem to hate Joe Biden or not think about him at all. Many people will vote for him, no one seems excited at the prospect.

Joe Biden is the melba toast of American politics – sure, it will stop your stomach from growling, but who cares? Is it really worth it?

In an election that will be about turnout, that turnout will, weirdly and probably for the first time in history, be driven exclusively by one candidate, and it’s not the current President.

Voters will show up to vote for or against Donald Trump, Biden is almost irrelevant. If he didn’t suck so badly at the job, there might be fewer people excited to vote against him, but no one is excited to vote for him. Not even the people who did so for the 50 years of his political career.

“He’s too old,” said the guy I asked who’d made a positive comment about the Donald Trump bear my wife won our daughters out of a claw machine. The machine was out on the boardwalk, not hidden in the back, and there was nothing Biden related in the arcade at all.

None of this means the election is in the bag – nothing is over until it’s over, and I wouldn’t put anything past Democrats – but things are looking good for Republicans at this point. Only have to keep it together for six more months. 

X22, Red Pill News, and more- May 14

 

John Ivison: Another warning about Trudeau from yet another former Liberal insider

 

Old age and death are the only guaranteed routes to forgiveness for politicians.

As English playwright Alan Bennett once said: “If you can eat a boiled egg at 90, they think you deserve the Nobel Prize.”

Perhaps it’s too much to expect a dispassionate appraisal of a sitting prime minister.

But has anyone been as roundly abused as Justin Trudeau by people who were formerly some of his closest associates and colleagues?

Former government whip Andrew Leslie, in his recent interview with National Post,  is merely the latest senior Liberal to publicly pour scorn on Trudeau, his cabinet and the cabal of senior advisers around him.

He can be added to the list that includes former ministers Bill Morneau, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott in recent books and memoirs. Other former ministers who have left government, such  Catherine McKenna  and Scott Brison, have hinted at their exasperation, while publicly keeping their own counsel.

Can they all be dismissed as disgruntled former employees, or is there merit to the criticisms that the prime minister and his entourage are unprincipled hyper-partisans who care more about spin than substance?

A common complaint is that Trudeau makes brazen commitments that he knows he can’t, or won’t, deliver upon.

The latest charge from Lt. Gen Leslie is that the prime minister and his cabinet are not serious about defence and have no intention of meeting spending targets because they believe the Americans will always defend Canada.

Leslie was involved in drawing up the Liberal defence policy document prior to the 2015 election. He says that this contributed to 2017’s “Strong, Secure, Engaged” policy that had specific timelines for equipment and an annex of 110 or so deliverables that were mostly missed. He said that since 2015, the Liberal government has not spent or has reprofiled, deferred or lapsed around $20 billion that was promised to defence, leaving the army “in a state of despair.”

Wilson-Raybould was at the centre of the infamous SNC Lavalin scandal, in which Trudeau was found to have used means that violated the Conflict of Interest Act to exert influence on his attorney general. Wilson-Raybould later resigned from cabinet, was kicked out of the Liberal caucus, won her seat as an Independent and then left politics in 2021.

Trudeau said he was merely standing up for the jobs of his fellow Canadians.

In her book, Indian in the Cabinet, she said she thought Trudeau would make a good prime minister and create a good team but was proven wrong.

“There are lots of pretty words, but there are a lot of promises that have been made that have not been kept. And that leads, of course, to disillusionment and disappointment,” she said in an interview with Reuters in 2021 .

In her book, she said she was angry that she had believed Trudeau “was an honest and good person, when in truth, he would so casually lie to the public and then think he could get away with it.”

Philpott has also written a book — Health for All — which is diplomatic about her exit from the Liberal party, after leaving in solidarity with Wilson-Raybould.

But she also notes the demands by Trudeau’s staff to land partisan punches on the opposition. “I don’t think that things turned out the way they were initially described. The hyper-partisanship is so built-in, it just becomes insurmountable,” she wrote.

Morneau’s criticisms in his book, Where to From Here, are more explicit and damaging. The former finance minister said policy rationales were often tossed aside in favour of scoring political points.

He noted the recommendations of the Department of Finance were disregarded on the emergency wage subsidy during COVID, as Trudeau announced a much more generous program than the one Morneau thought had been agreed upon. “It was one of the worst moments of my political life,” Morneau wrote.

Challenges, he said, were not managed on a daily basis at the highest level and Trudeau’s management and interpersonal communication abilities were sorely lacking.

“The prime minister had an inability (for) or lack of interest in forging relationships with me, and as far as I could tell, with the rest of his cabinet,” he said.

Wilson-Raybould said she was chosen because she was “an Indian in the cabinet” and Morneau agreed that ministers were picked for promotional reasons rather than for what they brought to the table. But that hardly mattered because power resided in the hands of a cabal of advisers around the prime minister who compelled agreement from cabinet ministers, he said.

One example of the improvised nature of public policy-making, according to Morneau, was the “baffling” decision to commit to a public dental plan when the pledge to bring in pharmacare remained unfulfilled.

There are, no doubt, other sides to these stories. Memoirs tend to ring their writers in halos and there is clearly some score-settling taking place.

My point is, the consistency in the accounts of some of the most senior Liberals elected in the sweep of 2015 adds to their credibility.

Not all were political rookies who became quickly disenchanted at the grubby compromises of politics. Veterans no longer in the frontlines complain that the Liberal party’s centrist traditions were trashed to allow Trudeau to become Canada’s “first NDP prime minister.”

When Trudeau launched his leadership campaign, he appropriated Goethe’s mantra: “Dream no small dreams, for they have no power to move the hearts of men.”

It was the depiction of those dreams that always fascinated Trudeau. Before the 2015 election, he told the Globe and Mail: “I set the frame … And I’ll figure out how to get it across to people.”

He has done that very successfully ever since.

But his has been a government captivated by words, not action.

Trudeau has no apparent interest in the banalities of government, including the management of his cabinet or caucus. Ministers — senior ministers — report that they rarely talk about their portfolios with their boss. In the 2018 book, Un selfie avec Justin Trudeau, Jocelyn Coulon, a former adviser to Stéphane Dion, said the relationship between prime minister and his then foreign affairs minister was “glacial” and the only private meeting the two men had was when Dion was fired. “The prime minister is a man incurious about the affairs of the world,” Coulon remarked.

It is a situation that is unlikely to have improved as capable ministers were replaced by less able men and women, who, it was made clear, reported not to Parliament but to the issues-management team in the prime minister’s office.

Senior bureaucrats say the partnership with cabinet is frayed and the exhaustion palpable.

In the wake of the pandemic, there was a near breakdown in the delivery of core services — from passports to immigration visas; from airport security to the flow of travellers across borders.

This week, years after the crisis passed,  CBC is reporting that Canadians who want a passport still need to wait for three hours for service at a Passport Canada office.

The sage of Baltimore, Henry Louis Mencken, once satirized a government that sounds remarkably like Trudeau’s as a “a broker in pillage”: a collection of individuals whose only talent was getting and holding office and whose principal device was “to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and promise to give it to them. Nine times out of 10, that promise is worth nothing. The 10th time it is made good by looting A to satisfy B.”

The prime minister may have to wait until his old age before he gets any respect. The voting public seems to have come around to the views of his former colleagues that the country doesn’t need dreams that move the hearts of men, it needs some basic managerial competence.

National Post

John Ivison: Another warning about Trudeau from yet another former Liberal insider (msn.com)

jivison@criffel.ca

 

Former NBC/CNN Reporter Calls Dinner Guests 'MAGAts' When They Don't Share Her TDS

Jim Thompson reporting for RedState 

Nineteen years ago, during a northeastern storm, Matt Lauer was at the height of his public fame and private infamy. While hosting the Today Show, Lauer cut to a field reporter named Michelle Kosinski who was doing a "live" shot. She was in Wayne, New Jersey reporting on the storm. Perhaps Kosinski was looking for some stolen valor or an Emmy, or maybe she just lacked self-awareness—in any event, the shot showed Kosinski sitting in a canoe with a paddle in hand. The rest became an internet legend. 

In a nasal tone that sounds like a comedian making fun of a reporter, Kosinski intoned:

 “Good morning, well obviously we are getting a break from the rain but not the flooding…”

Just as she said “flooding” two men walked through her live shot. The water was ankle-deep. Oops. She looked ridiculous. When the Today hosts lit her up for the absurd optics and her blown Emmy moment, she claimed she wasn’t allowed to canoe into deeper water for fear of drifting away. She said that as she drifted away from the camera. 

Her shot was intended to evoke a sense of apocalyptic doom but instead, it made her and NBC look preposterous.

Kosinski moved on to CNN, but there was no Emmy for this "reporting." She did somehow eventually win one for her coverage of the 2008 presidential election, but for these floods—not so much.

Anyway, Kosinski left CNN in 2017. She no longer had to hide any pretense of being a partisan hack. Kosinski hates MAGA (aka anyone who disagrees with her), and she doesn’t hide it. 

She recently attended a dinner party with her Retired Banker and Trust Fund husband Kimbell Duncan. Several couples were invited. According to Kosinski, the conversation took a nasty turn. She describes how an Ivy League-educated couple revealed that they were “MAGA.” Well not exactly, she just assumed they were. Kosinski claims that the conversation drifted into politics when the duo said they wouldn’t even allow their children to apply to those schools: 

Our sister site, PJ Media mocked her effeteness and disdain for anything outside her mental orbit.

Kosinski seemed very clear that vigilance was the watchword. MAGAs are everywhere and are seemingly normal people. But behind that glass of Chardonnay, they are waiting for the moment when they can force you into the back of a pickup, jam a red hat on your head, make you eat beef jerky or something, and possibly read to you from the Gospel of John.

In the middle of her screed, Kosinski's (by then very unwelcome) guests were “MAGAts”.

She went on.

Another “crew” (aka MAGAts) used air quotes when discussing climate change. But Kosinski’s horror wasn’t over. She claims that her then-unwanted MAGAts took to “seething umbrage” when her friend mentioned the damage Trump had done. Kosinski said the MAGAts shut up because:

 “They would [have been] eviscerated on all idiotic points, especially on the economy.”

I imagine that when the evening wrapped up, Kosinski instructed the hired help to clean up as she and her husband retired to the sitting room. In her well-practiced nasally voice dripping with venomous contempt and intellectual superiority, Kosinski said: 

"OOooohhh my Gaaad Kimbell, we had dinner with MAGAts...we must fumigate the dining area before we set foot in there again! Let's use the guest house until it's done."

Kimbell: "Oh yes, pumpkin, let's..."

For the next two days, Kosinski lashed out at "MAGAts," claiming that they were the closed-minded and vicious ones.

What are the chances that Kosinski and her banker/trust fund husband are in tune with everyday Americans? Zero point zero. 

Four years after her near-death experience with New Jersey floodwaters, she bought a 12,000 sq. ft. Coral Gables home for $5.3 million. She sold it four years later for a measly $1.8 million increase. She must have sold her $7.03 million shack so she and her new Trust Fund Husband could stretch their legs. I have no idea where Michelle and Kimbell live now. Certainly not with the "poors" in her old neighborhood. Her old home is barely worth $12.9 million. Twelve thousand square feet is so "unwashed masses". 

What are the chances that either Kimbell or Michelle brought groceries from Costco for their nightmare-with-the-MAGAts dinner party? There is zero chance that she has any idea what the cost of butter or the cost of any other staple might be. Her wine isn’t store-bought, it’s shipped to Mr. and Mrs. Banker and stored in their temperature-controlled wine cellar. Shopping is so “common man.” 

Kosinski drips contempt for anyone who gets in the way of her ivory tower view. Her disgust for anyone who disagrees with her didn’t start when she got dumped by CNN. The Fourth Estate isn’t the vanguard of truth-telling, it’s the Fifth Column. Working reporters at NBC, CNN, and WaPo, to name but three, are full of Kosinskis. They hate you. 

As much as you dislike legacy media—it might not be enough.

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New Biden Rule Aims To Entrench The Deep State Forever

 The Biden administration’s rule seems designed to ensure the deep state will remain unaccountable to the president — and the American people.

If you think firing poorly performing federal employees is too hard, you are not alone. Most federal employees agree. Now President Biden has made this problem worse. New regulations will make dismissals of poor-performing and subversive employees even more difficult. The rule reinforces removal restrictions and prohibits the reclassification of federal bureaucrats. This broad regulatory change was built specifically to block the reinstatement of Trump-era reforms. The deep state will soon become even less accountable.

The federal employee dismissal process is broken. Agencies take six months to a year to remove poor performers, followed by lengthy appeals that often result in reinstatement with back pay. If the employee wins, agencies must typically cover their attorney fees — at rates of $400 to $1,000 per hour. This makes removing employees for even the worst offenses expensive and uncertain.

For example, the Department of Justice suspended two prosecutors who withheld exculpatory evidence from a U.S. senator’s defense team. The federal judge overseeing the case said he had “never seen such mishandling or misconduct.” Nonetheless, the prosecutors appealed and got the suspensions overturned on a technicality. The government restored two months of back wages and paid out $643,000 in attorney fees.

This dysfunction is all too common. Removing problematic employees is difficult in every federal agency. Just one-half of 1 percent of tenured federal employees were fired in 2023 for poor performance or misconduct.

Surveys show that federal employees themselves object to this system. Half report chronic poor performance in their unit, and most don’t believe their agency effectively addresses poor performers. Fewer than half of federal career supervisors feel confident they could dismiss an employee for serious misconduct. Just a quarter believe they could remove a poor performer. Federal employees recognize the system is broken.

Unfortunately, this dysfunction empowers bad actors, and it is not uncommon for career employees to inject partisanship into their official duties.

Such partisanship was particularly evident during the Trump administration. The press widely reported on career employees opposing the president’s policies; some even boasted about their “resistance.” Many career bureaucrats acted as though they — not elected officials or presidential appointees — should set policy. Most Americans recognize unelected bureaucrats have too much control over federal policy. The “deep state” is real, and it is a serious challenge to our democracy.

President Trump addressed these problems with an executive order creating “Schedule F” for career officials in policy-influencing jobs. The order made them at-will employees, just like most private sector workers, without removal restrictions. Schedule F gave agencies the ability to effectively and quickly address poor performance or misconduct. At the same time, the order continued protections against politically motivated or discriminatory removals.

Schedule F was designed with successful state-level reforms in mind. Many states have made most or all state employees at-will employees. These reforms have generally shown positive results without the feared abuses materializing.

Texas and Florida — two of America’s three most populous states — have embraced at-will employment. Their state governments operate quite well. Schedule F would have expanded these successes nationally. The government can operate effectively if it has the will to do so.

Despite Schedule F’s potential, President Biden revoked it shortly after taking office. His administration has now issued a new rule designed to prevent a future administration from bringing back Schedule F. The new regulations reinforce career employee removal restrictions and prohibit reclassifying career employees into an at-will status. Federal bureaucrats who inject partisanship into their duties will remain hard to dismiss. So will chronic poor performers.

The Biden administration’s rule cements major flaws in the federal workforce. The rule protects poor performers and bureaucratic resistance. It seems designed to ensure the deep state will remain unaccountable to the president — and the American people.

Even government employees recognize the federal dismissal process is broken. President Biden’s new rule will make it even harder to fix. That is not good for America or democracy.

https://thefederalist.com/2024/05/14/new-biden-rule-aims-to-entrench-the-deep-state-forever/

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Jacob Sagert is a policy analyst in the America First Policy Institute’s Center for American Freedom. James Sherk is the director of the Center for American Freedom at the America First Policy Institute. He previously served as a Special Assistant to the President in the Domestic Policy Council at the White House during the Donald J. Trump administration.

Teachers Unions’ Fanatical Hatred Of Children Ignited The Parent Revolution

How have teachers unions responded to parental efforts to get more involved in their kids’ education? By attacking parents, of course.

by Corey DeAngelis for The Federalist

Not a single state had universal school choice prior to 2021. In the past three years, eleven states have enacted it. This is a monumental achievement — and more victories for America’s children are imminent. School choice advocates are grateful to the power-hungry teachers unions, which overplayed their hand and sparked a parent revolution.

The teachers unions-induced school closures harmed students academically, mentally, and emotionally, with virtually no reduction in overall coronavirus transmission or child mortality. Parents were understandably furious at the public schools that had broken faith with them during their time of need, and they weren’t going to just sit there and take it.

How did the unions respond to efforts to exert more control? By attacking parents, of course. No, it wasn’t the virus that needed to be defeated. It was you, mom and dad.

The unions publicly smeared parents who had the temerity to suggest that schools should do their jobs. In Chicago, home of the nation’s third-largest public school system, the local union took to Twitter to demonize those who favored reopening schools: “The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny,” tweeted the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) on Dec. 6, 2020.

A few months later, a union member in California named Damian Harmony would say “hold my beer” to the CTU by smearing parents who wanted schools reopened for their supposed “cynical, pearl-clutching, faux-urgency, ableist, structurally white-supremacist hysteria.” That same month, the United Teachers of Los Angeles union called California’s school reopening plan “a recipe for propagating structural racism,” and its president, Cecily “There’s No Such Thing As Learning Loss” Myart-Cruz, accused “white, wealthy parents” of “driving the push behind a rushed return.”

I’m old enough to remember when the term “white supremacist” referred to those — such as neo-Nazis and members of the Ku Klux Klan — who believed that the white race is superior to other races. Now the unions and their allies were smearing parents as “white supremacists” for the horrible thought crime of wanting their children to go to school.

The smear became a running theme. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the local union voted to reject the school reopening plan as they endorsed a letter by the Educators of Color Coalition, which claimed that the reopening plan was “rooted in white supremacy norms, values, and culture.”

Likewise, 140 members of the Pasco Association of Educators in Washington state claimed in January 2021 that the “culture of white supremacy and white privilege can be seen in our very own community in regards to the decision to reopen schools in a hybrid format, despite rising cases and community spread.” The Washington Post even ran a blog post by a union member in New Haven, Connecticut, lambasting the supposed “racist effects of school reopening” and claiming that a “comorbidity is white supremacy.”

Not to be outdone, a member of the Chicago Teachers Union, Mike Friedberg, penned an article asking: “Will We Let ‘Nice White Parents’ Kill Black and Brown Families?” In his telling, it was “white privileged parents” who wanted schools open while “Black and Latine” parents wanted them closed. The reality was that although white parents were, on average, more likely to be ready to return to in-person instruction before minority parents, significant portions of families across the racial and ethnic spectrum wanted in-person instruction.

When the Chicago school district conducted a survey of parents in March 2021, more than four in ten wanted to return to in-person instruction. Although the survey did not identify the race or ethnicity of respondents, about three in ten students who returned that month for in-person instruction at campuses were majority black and majority Latino.

Ironically, the Friedberg article spent several paragraphs claiming that “remote learning is not a lost cause” and that the “‘learning loss’ argument is incredibly flawed.” Not only has massive learning loss been unquestionably documented, but it’s also significantly worse among black students.

According to McKinsey, by the end of the 2020–21 academic school year, students “in majority-Black schools ended the school year six months behind in both math and reading, while students in majority-white schools ended up just four months behind in math and three months behind in reading.” If any policy had racist results, it was the union-pushed school closures and remote learning — which really should be called remotely learning — not parent-backed school reopenings.

The California Teachers Association (CTA) even stooped to spying on parents, conducting what amounts to opposition research, the same as political candidates do on their opponents. A public records request uncovered emails from a union employee asking a public school principal for information about “the ideological leaning of groups that are funding the reopen lawsuits.” She noted that she had heard the principal had “lots of information regarding the Parents Association.”

When another union employee in the email exchange realized that they had accidentally used the principal’s work email, they went into damage control mode, asking him to “delete and disregard” the emails. One union employee was more sanguine, however. “I don’t think there will be an issue,” she wrote, “unless someone does a record request for his work email.”

The hypocrisy of the unions knows no bounds. In March 2021, while the CTA was still fighting tooth and nail to keep schools closed while spying on parents who wanted them open, the president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, Matt Meyer, was caught on camera taking his own kid to an in-person private preschool.

The unions even did oppo research on parents trying new ways of educating their children during the lockdowns. When the unions closed the schools, groups like Prenda helped parents open new “microschools” in their or other parents’ homes, church basements, and anywhere they could find space. Rather than embracing the idea, the unions sought to sabotage it.

Prenda was founded in 2018 by Kelly Smith, an MIT grad who was inspired by his kids’ experience at an afternoon coding club to create a network of small schools (typically five to ten students each) where learning is self-directed with the assistance of online tools and an in-person “guide.” While schools were closed during the pandemic, Prenda received a surge in interest from parents —especially those who wanted the benefits of in-person instruction while limiting their children’s potential exposure. Prenda began 2020 with about one thousand students at one hundred microschools and ended the year with four times that.

Where parents saw an opportunity, the unions saw a threat. Prenda’s rapid growth sent the unions into a panic. What if the kids who left their public schools liked Prenda better? What if they never came back?

The National Education Association hatched a plan: Scare parents away from trying Prenda in the first place. To do that, they wrote up two “opposition reports” (their words), one on microschools generally and one on Prenda specifically. The first one warned union members and their allies: “The Opposition Report has documented widespread support for micro-schools.”

The report identified more than 20 additional microschool networks and related organizations, and recommended that their staff and allies familiarize themselves with a list of anti-microschool talking points the NEA had developed, such as that the microschools “do not guarantee students or educators the same civil rights protections that are required in public schools,” their staff are “not required to be credentialed,” and their students “are not held accountable to state standards of learning.” Of course, none of these issues topped parental concerns about schools being closed.

The second opposition report focused on Prenda specifically and included personal information about Kelly Smith, including his home address and a picture of his house. The report also raised concerns about the “safety” of Prenda and other microschool students who might be exposed to guns, drugs, and unfenced swimming pools.

Union-backed groups like Save Our Schools Arizona used these talking points to lobby the legislature to regulate Prenda and other microschools. Fortunately, state legislators saw through their absurd and self-serving arguments, and microschools continued to flourish.

It was particularly ironic for the unions to argue that using parents’ homes for microschooling was unsafe while the unions were simultaneously arguing that students were not safe at school during the pandemic. Apparently, they weren’t safe anywhere.

Friedberg had claimed his support for keeping schools closed was because he did “not want to risk my students’ lives, their families’ lives, or my own life.” He may well have been sincere in his fears, but not all his colleagues were. Some, like CTU executive board and area vice president Sarah Chambers, seemed to have other motivations for working remotely.

How remotely? Thousands of miles, apparently, as she was tweeting from poolside at a resort in Puerto Rico. “Spending the last day of 2020 poolside,” Chambers wrote from her @sarah4justice Instagram account alongside a selfie of herself lounging by the pool, adding: “We have the whole pool to ourselves.”

These are just some of the egregious union actions that awakened a sleeping giant. For far too long in K-12 education, the only special interests represented were the employees — the adults — in the system. But now, America’s kids finally have a union of their own: their parents.

Dershowitz to Newsmax: Dems Had 3 Goals With Trump Trial

Video presentation here:

https://www.newsmax.com/newsmax-tv/alan-dershowitz-donald-trump-nyc/2024/05/14/id/1164639/

 Democrats had three goals with the Manhattan criminal trial involving former President Donald Trump, legal scholar Alan Dershowitz told Newsmax on Tuesday.

Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee, was charged with falsifying business records to cover up a payment to Stormy Daniels to keep the adult film performer quiet about an alleged affair.

"The purpose of this trial is three-fold," Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said on "National Report." "No. 1, to convict him down and dirty before the election, although it will get reversed after the election. No. 2, to have a gag order on him, and No. 3, to keep them locked up in the courtroom, so he can't campaign, and those goals may very well be accomplished.

"This is election interference at its most obvious, and every American, no matter whether you're for Trump or against them … I voted for [President Joe] Biden ... whatever your political affiliation is … I'm a Democrat … you should be equally concerned about how this legal system is being weaponized and abused for partisan purposes."

During testimony on Monday, former Trump attorney Michael Cohen admitted to recording Trump without the former president's knowledge.

"It's unethical," Dershowitz told co-hosts Shaun Kraisman and Emma Rechenberg. "It violates the code of professional responsibility. And then he lied about the reason he did it.

"He said the reason he did it was to provide the tape recording to [former National Enquirer publisher] David Pecker. Most jurors will think the reason he did it was to protect himself in case Trump turns against him."

Regardless of Cohen's motivation to record Trump, Dershowitz said, "it's not ethical to record your own client without your client knowing about it, even if you think you're doing it to protect him.

"The whole incident regarding the recording is not going to be believed by the jury," Dershowitz said. "And if the jury thinks that Cohen lied to them, even if they don't care that he lied to other people, jurors care deeply if they're lied to.

"I think anybody on the jury, certainly the two lawyers on the jury, will look askance at his testimony for the reason why he claims he did this on ethical thing of recording his own client."