Biden to Pay Nearly Three Times More than Trump Would Have Paid to Refill Strategic Oil Reserves

President Joe Biden will buy oil to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) at a price that is nearly three times higher than the price the Trump administration would have paid.

Biden’s Energy Department (DOE) aims to buy back crude oil at a price of $67 to $72 per barrel after selling 15 million barrels in December to complete the largest series of SPR releases in the nation’s history, according to a White House fact sheet. Former President Donald Trump proposed in March 2020 to refill the strategic reserves at a price of $24.49 per barrel; however, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer helped block the proposal, calling it a “bailout for big oil.”

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Victor Davis Hanson Commentary: In Today’s America, Some Really Are More Equal than Others

That once distinguished the United States from illiberal regimes following the Orwellian mantra “some are more equal than others” was the hallowed American idea of “equal justice under the law.”

The phrase is engraved above the entrance to the United States Supreme Court – an ideal that took centuries to achieve. Yet it is an ancient concept – what the Greeks called isonomia that distinguished classical democratic Athens from its anti-democratic rivals. Isonomia later became enshrined as the central criterion of all Western consensual governments.

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Federal Court Reverses Trump Rule Eliminating Protections for Gray Wolf Population

A federal district court restored protections for the U.S. gray wolf population on Thursday, ruling that a Trump administration action failed to consider threats posed to the species.

Judge Jeffrey White, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, found that the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) under the Trump administration ignored the “best available science” when formulating the rule. The agency improperly concluded that West Coast wolves were not distinct from the Northern Rocky Mountain wolf population, White said.

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Commentary: The Road to Vengeance

In Fall 2017, the president of Wesleyan University, Michael Roth, invited me to speak as part of a “difficult conversations” initiative. Wesleyan is a determinedly left-wing campus, and Roth saw the occasional conservative visitor as good for the intellectual climate. We were eight months into the Trump Administration, and I’d written pieces for Vox, CNN, the New York Times, and other liberal outlets that suggested I might praise President Trump in a way that would rise above naked partisanship.

I decided on a presentation of Donald Trump as a traditional American rogue figure, a model of Emersonian nonconformity, an outlandish character in a lineage of comic renegades. No other individual in my lifetime mobilized the entirety of respectable opinion in America against himself, I would tell them, and that very fact deserved analysis. Everybody in the elite denounced him—a strange uniformity for a social group that professes its admiration for thinking outside the box. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, the swamp, the art world, the media, academia . . . they hated him with a passion that revealed more about themselves than it did about the object of their enmity. He had to have something going for him to evoke such a monolithic pageant of slurs.

I laid this out before an audience of 200, and the faculty in the room more or less got the tongue-in-cheek element (though they asked some tough questions about Trump’s sexism).

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Tony Podesta Has Now Earned $1 Million Lobbying Biden White House for Blacklisted Chinese Tech Giant

Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta has earned at least $1 million to lobby the White House on behalf of Huawei, a Chinese technology and telecommunications company blacklisted under the Trump administration.

Podesta, brother of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign chairman John Podesta, received $500,000 from Huawei to lobby the Executive Office of the President between October and December of 2021, according to lobbying disclosures filed late Thursday. Huawei first hired Podesta in July 2021 and paid the long-time Democrat operative $500,000 to lobby the White House from July to September 2021.

Podesta lobbied on “issues related to telecommunication services and impacted trade issues,” according to disclosure forms.

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State Department to Waive Fees for Immigrants Denied Visas During Travel Ban to Reapply

The State Department will waive fees for immigrants seeking visas to come to the U.S. if they were previously denied one because of the Trump administration’s travel ban, according to a Wednesday announcement.

“An IV applicant who is the beneficiary of a valid immigration petition may submit another visa application after being refused and in most circumstances they are required to pay again the relevant application fees,” according to a Federal Register rule published Wednesday. “The Department exempts from such fees only those IV applicants who are applying again after being refused” a visa under the travel ban.

The ban prevented immigration from Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. President Joe Biden issued an executive order repealing the ban on his first day in office in January 2021.

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Republicans Vow to Fight White House Plan to Pay Migrants Who Entered Country Illegally

U.S. Border Patrol agents assigned to the McAllen station encounter large group after large group of family units in Los Ebanos, Texas, on Friday June 15. This group well in excess of 100 family units turned themselves into the U.S. Border Patrol, after crossing the border illegally and walking through the town of Los Ebanos.

Congressional Republicans say they will fight a White House plan to pay up to $450,000 in reparations to migrants separated from their families under the Trump administration after entering the country illegally.

After The Wall Street Journal reported on the plan earlier this week, President Joe Biden called the report “garbage,” only to be corrected by his spokesperson the next day.

At issue is former President Donald Trump’s policy of prosecuting all adults who entered the country illegally, in accordance with federal immigration law, including those with children. The Biden administration rescinded the policy, along with many other immigration enforcement efforts.

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Watchdog Demands Inspector General Investigation into Tracy Stone-Manning’s Allegedly False Statements About Eco-Terrorism Case

A government watchdog group demanded that the Department of the Interior Inspector General launch an investigation into whether President Joe Biden’s Senate-confirmed Bureau of Land Management director nominee violated the False Statement Act with statements she made to Congress about her involvement in a 1989 eco-terrorism case during her confirmation process.

Tracy Stone-Manning was confirmed to lead the agency along a party-line vote on Sept. 30 amid strong opposition from Republicans who accused her of lying to the Senate Energy Committee about her involvement in an eco-terrorism case. Stone-Manning testified in federal court in 1993 that she sent an anonymous, threatening letter to the Forest Service in 1989 on behalf of her former roommate and friend which warned that a local forest in Idaho had been sabotaged with tree spikes to make the trees unsafe to log.

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Commentary: The Left Destroys Everything It Touches

What was the purpose for the insane opposition of the Left between 2017 and 2021? To usher in a planned nihilism, an incompetent chaos, a honed anarchy to wreck the country in less than a year?

No sooner had Donald Trump entered office than scores of House Democrats filed motions for impeachment, apparently for thought crimes that he might, some day, in theory, could possibly commit.

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‘We Will Use the Full Range of Tools’: Trade Representative Says U.S. Will Enforce Phase One Trade Deal with China

President Donald J. Trump, joined by Chinese Vice Premier Liu He, sign the U.S. China Phase One Trade Agreement Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2020, in the East Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the Biden administration would enforce the Phase One trade agreement negotiated by the Trump administration with China while giving a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Monday.

“For too long, China’s lack of adherence to global trading norms has undercut the prosperity of Americans and others around the world,” Tai said in prepared remarks. “China made commitments that benefit certain American industries, including agriculture, that we must enforce.”

China has fallen short on the purchase totals it agreed to as part of the agreement, increasing its purchases by only 69% as of July 2021, according to the non-partisan Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE).

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Trade Chief Katherine Tai Says U.S. Will ‘Build On’ Trump’s Tariffs to Fight China

Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the U.S. will “build on” existing tariffs targeting billions of dollars in Chinese imports issued during the Trump administration as President Joe Biden seeks to define his relationship with China, Politico reported.

Tai told Politico the Section 301 tariffs former President Donald Trump issued have “had the effect of getting a lot of people’s attention,” including U.S. companies, their workers, trading partners and China itself.

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Trump Administration’s Careful Afghanistan Withdrawal Plans Were Ignored by Biden, Former Trump Aide Says

Joe Biden’s national security team reportedly ignored the Trump administration’s careful plans for withdrawing from Afghanistan, resulting in the nightmare scenario currently unfolding in the war-torn country.

Former National Security Council Senior Director Kash Patel told Just the News’ John Solomon on Thursday, “I don’t even know that anyone could have made this awful scenario up. It’s literally worse than you could possibly conjure.”

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Judge Blocks Massive Alaskan Oil Drilling Project Backed by Trump and Biden

A federal judge blocked a massive Alaskan oil drilling project Wednesday after ruling that the Interior Department inadequately measured its environmental impact.

Judge Sharon Gleason of the U.S. District Court of the District of Alaska wrote in her opinion that the Bureau of Land Management’s assessment of the ConocoPhillips’ Willow project was “arbitrary and capricious,” noting that it did not even include the likely level of greenhouse gas emissions in its environmental impact report.

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