How many murders is too many to get out of prison?

Apparently three, according to a California Democrat who has recently revived a bill that would grant early release to prisoners serving life sentences without the possibility of parole – a sentence which is typically reserved for those who have committed the most violent and egregious crimes – murderers, rapists, and repeat offenders whose actions were beyond the pale.

However, under SB 94, spearheaded by State Senator David Cortese (D), the doors could soon be open for some of these offenders return to society. The bill primarily targets those sentenced before June 5, 1990, when voters passed Proposition 115 which expanded the state’s ability to impose life without parole for particularly heinous crimes. Those who have served 25 years or more could petition for early release, with eligibility based on a range of factors including “childhood trauma,” military service, cognitive impairments, and even age-related conditions that supposedly reduce the risk of future violence.

The list of those exempt from early release has raised eyebrows – which includes only those who committed first-degree murder of a police officer, killed three or more people, or engaged in sexual violence, such as a rape-homicide, any of which would make an inmate ineligible for release. This means that someone convicted of two murders could still appeal – as long as one victim wasn’t a police officer and neither crime involved sexual acts.

Cortese argues that many of these prisoners, who have languished behind bars for decades, are now classified as low-risk according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s own assessments. He contends that the bill simply introduces a judicial review process for cases that have not been reconsidered in years.

However, as The Center Square reports, the San Diego Deputy District Attorneys Association has voiced strong opposition, urging lawmakers to consider the potential risks to public safety. The association pointed out that California voters, through Proposition 115, clearly expressed a desire to keep the most dangerous criminals behind bars for life. They argue that SB 94 undermines this mandate by creating presumptions favoring the release of individuals convicted of serious crimes.

“By enacting Proposition 115, the voters of this state have told us they want to keep the worst of the worst in prison where they belong,” wrote SDDDAA ion opposition. “By creating presumptions favoring the release of these murderers, SB 94 will create unjustifiable risks to public safety.”

California State Sen. Minority Leader Brian Jones (R-San Diego) added that “SB 94 could literally let hundreds of the most heinous murderers out of prison early, even if they were sentenced to life without parole. This harsh punishment is reserved for the worst of the worst criminals.”

Amazing…

Authored by Samantha Flom via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Heightened security protocols at and around former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club have Palm Beach, Florida, officials contemplating its closure.

The U.S. Secret Service ramped up its protection of the former president’s estate, along with his other properties, after the July 13 attempt on his life.

One change was the closure of a portion of South Ocean Boulevard, which borders the club.

The closure, which began on July 20, is expected to last through to Election Day on Nov. 5 at the earliest, but officials are already receiving complaints.

“Our residents don’t feel safe right now,” Palm Beach Town Council member Julie Araskog said at the council’s Aug. 13 meeting.

“It’s hard to get a fire truck through, it’s hard to get out of their homes, it’s hard to get a caregiver in. I had a problem the other night, and you can’t get a nurse in.”

Despite the road closure, the Mar-a-Lago Club is expected to reopen for the start of the Palm Beach social season in the fall.

But Mayor Danielle Moore said: “If the road is closed, the Mar-a-Lago Club is closed.”

“There’s no way in God’s green earth that they can bring 350 people into that club,” Moore said. “It’s completely illogical that you’ve got a road closed and then you’re going to let 350 strangers into your club.”

While the mayor agreed with the need to secure Trump’s primary residence, she said: “You can’t have it both ways, boys and girls. Either the club’s open or not.”

Other council members voiced their agreement, directing staff to research the town’s legal options.

During Trump’s presidential term, the Secret Service closed the road by Mar-a-Lago when he was present in Palm Beach.

The latest closure is effective indefinitely, at all hours of the day, even in his absence.

The new protocol is just one of the measures the Secret Service has taken to increase protection for those in its charge in the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump, including maximizing personnel, increasing the use of drones, and faster approval of personnel requests.

Meanwhile, Palm Beach attorney Joanne O’Connor is still waiting for a response from the agency outlining the authority under which it is keeping South Ocean Boulevard closed.

While residents can access the road with proper identification, O’Connor noted in a July 22 letter to Secret Service Chief Counsel Thomas Huse that the closure “effectively cuts the town in two.”

Palm Beach Police Chief Nicholas Caristo said that the Secret Service and local police were working together to direct traffic in the area and improve signage to ease the congestion.

Caristo also advised that limiting bridge openings to only once per hour could help speed up traffic.

However, for that to happen, the Secret Service would need to reactivate the maritime security zone that was in place around Mar-a-Lago during Trump’s presidency.

Trump began operating Mar-a-Lago as a social club in 1993 under a declaration-of-use agreement with Palm Beach. A breach of that agreement could allow the town to revoke the club’s occupational license.

The Epoch Times has contacted both the Trump Organization and the Trump campaign for comment.

Entitled millennials or out of control inflation in the housing market? You be the judge.

Samuel and Laura Graves both earn six figure sums, but say the housing market has left them with no choice but to raise their two kids in an apartment, according to Yahoo Finance and Business Insider.

The couple is in their mid 30’s and lives in Portland, Oregon. They’ve been looking for a house for three years.

Laura told Business Insider: “We refuse to become ‘house-poor’ and, like many others, are choosing to sit it out until the housing market is reasonable again.”

With a combined income of $250,000, they aim to keep their mortgage payment between $3,000 and $3,500—about 30% of their $11,000 monthly income, the report says.

However, rising home prices and mortgage rates have pushed most homes they like to a $5,000 monthly mortgage, nearly half their income. Instead of exceeding their budget, they’ve opted to wait, paying $2,700 a month for a two-bedroom apartment and storage, hoping the market improves.

The report says rising home prices and high mortgage rates have made homeownership increasingly unaffordable. And, although the Federal Reserve may cut interest rates, this could drive more buyers into the market, potentially raising prices further and keeping housing supply tight.

The couple, living in Wilsonville, a suburb of Portland, faces steep home prices—$642,000 on average. One home they liked was listed at $635,000, with an estimated $5,000 monthly mortgage payment, consuming 43% of their income. Though aware that other parts of the U.S. offer cheaper housing, they are hesitant to move again, according to the report. 

Previously, they lived in Spokane, Washington, where they paid $2,200 a month for their home. But after six years, they missed their jobs in Portland. In 2021, Laura’s old boss offered to double her salary, prompting them to sell their Spokane home and return to Portland.

“We actually tried uprooting the kids to a more affordable town and found ourselves less happy in the end,” Laura concluded.

“Our children have begun talking about how they want a house so badly and their own rooms. We’ll never get these years back. By the time we buy, we won’t even need room for a play set.”

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

The already-long 2024 presidential campaign has become the strangest in modern history.

Here are ten unanswered questions that illustrate how and why we’ve entered this bizarro world:

1. How can Kamala Harris merely promise us fixes to come in 2025 for inflation and an open border when she is still vice president for another six months? Why can’t she enact her proposed solutions to these problems (which she helped create) right now?

2. Would the media prefer to help her win but lose further credibility themselves by failing to ask why she has disowned her last three decades of leftist agendas, or to reclaim some of their reputations and thereby risk her losing?

3. Does the left appreciate the new campaign and election protocols it has now established?

That is to say:

Cancel by fiat their virtual nominee four months before the election when he sinks in the polls?

Nullify the outcome of a year of primaries and the will of 14 million voters?

Threaten a sitting president with removal by the 25th Amendment process unless he steps aside as his party nominee?

Anoint a replacement nominee before the convention and without a single primary—and then prevent any rival candidates from challenging her?

4. After the precedents of 2020 and 2024, is the future orthodox protocol for any Democratic nominee now to avoid all interviews and ex tempore speaking, and stick to teleprompted speeches and scripted responses only?

Is the fear that a transparent progressive messenger with an overt and honest left-wing message will double down on it and thus guarantee defeat?

5. For the next 80 days, has the chameleon-like Kamala Harris now become a temporary MAGA candidate, as she expropriates Trump’s positions from border security to no taxes on tips? Does the media care to ask the new 80-day MAGA Harris why she has renounced many of her once emphatic beliefs?

6. If Democratic presidential reelection candidate Joe Biden was pronounced fit as a fiddle before June 27, but after July 21 was abruptly forced off the ticket as too debilitated to continue as his party’s nominee, what exactly is his status now?

(Half-cognizant and thus able enough to continue his not-so-important task as America’s president, but also half-enfeebled and thus utterly unable to continue as the far more important Democratic nominee, it appears.)

7. Does the new anti-Semitic Democratic Party prefer to risk losing with the radical nonentity WASP Tim Walz as vice presidential candidate rather than likely win with a popular, successful, and moderate Jewish Josh Shapiro?

8. If one vice presidential candidate went to a war zone to serve with his deployed unit, while his counterpart preferred to retire from the military to avoid doing the same and lies about his abdication, how can the media credibly assert that the former’s tour was militarily suspect and yet pronounce the latter’s absence as heroic?

9. If the current president canceled his reelection bid because he was too debilitated and unpopular, and is now rarely seen or heard, and if the vice president is out of Washington running a campaign in his place, but avoiding all press conferences, interviews, and unscripted addresses, who exactly, if anyone, is running the United States for the next six months of the lame duck Biden-Harris administration?

10. If Donald Trump all summer has been compared by his enemies to Hitler and his murderous Third Reich, and if a 20-year-old would-be assassin and murderer with ease took up a sniper’s position to kill Trump—without a notified Secret Service or other law enforcement attempting to abort the shooter’s attempted assassination—what signal does that send to other would-be assassins for the next 80 days of the 2024 campaign?

Is the message that if a 20-year-old amateur sniper can brazenly and visibly for nearly an hour breach all Secret Service security perimeters to shoot eight times at the president, hit him in the ear, kill one innocent bystander, and wound two others, then almost any future, more-experienced serious shooter could match or exceed the ability of that disturbed amateur to get close enough to Trump to fire more than eight shots at his head?

And that shooting Donald Trump in many leftist quarters would subsequently earn the unhinged killer eternal fame, applause, and immortality?

And that if there are such anticipated rewards and perceived opportunities, then we may well see more attempts on candidate Trump’s life?

In sum, presidential campaigns traditionally kick off after Labor Day and mostly follow accepted protocols. But this warped 2024 version violates every prior precedent and is not just creepy but dangerous—even before the campaign was supposed to formally begin.

…no, Goldilocks is not back!

Retail Sales soared in August… thanks to massive historical revisions and a surge in Auto sales… but Auto production crashed by the most since COVID lockdowns (lowering GDP expectations)… and homebuilder sentiment slumped… and the Philly Fed business outlook plunged… and the Empire Fed Manufacturing survey remains in contraction for the 9th straight month… and import and export price inflation was hotter than expected… all of which sent the macro surprise index down to 2024 lows…

Source: Bloomberg

Here’s Goldman’s Chris Hussey on the ‘mixed data’:

The weak-to-mixed reading of these prints continue to show the unreliability of surveys in the post pandemic era. And investors continue to look through them as they have been consistently weaker than the hard data – and consistently misleading – since 2020.

…but all the algos cared about was the “beat” in retail sales confirming that the ‘soft landing’ narrative is back (except it’s not), and WMT beating and raising (except consensus was already above their revision) reassuring that the consumer is not in shitsville (except they are because they are trading down to WMT!).

Nevertheless, stocks soared higher with Small Caps leading the charge along with Nasdaq as The Dow lagged (but was still up bigly). Some late day profit-taking spoiled the party but overall, it was a big day…

The Dow is on pace for its best week since Dec 2023… and Nasdaq’s best week since November’s Powell Pivot

…withd VIX plunging lower…

…at its fastest/largest pace of decline ever…

Bear in mind that historically, when the VIX has risen to close above 35, as it did on Aug. 5, the index has taken 170 sessions on average before returning to 17.6, its long-term median… not 7 days!

We do note that as the day wore on, VIX shifted back higher as calls were aggressively bid (and puts dumped), crushing the skew…

Source: Bloomberg

While VIX has tumbled, we note that VVIX remains above the scary 100 level still as the market is not fully buying that the panic is over…

Source: Bloomberg

And we also note that implied correlation has collapsed too – which shows that this vol compression is all systemic (index) and not idiosyncratic (single-name) driven…

Source: Bloomberg

Small Caps were lifted by another big short-squeeze…

Goldman – Summer volumes remain challenging (-10% vs 20day avg)… Seeing squeezy px action across the board on this melt higher

Source: Bloomberg

…and Nasdaq surged on the back of an aggressive bid for Mag7 stocks (the basket of Mag7 stocks is up 6 straight days)…

Source: Bloomberg

Here’s how Goldman’s trading desk describes the day’s narrative:

Stocks higher on the back of bullish earnings from WMT, DE, and CSCO and favorable macro data on the growth front (retail sales & weekly claims). EVERYTHING rally with all baskets on our screens green on the day.

Volumes were lower (-10% vs the trailing 20 days but tracking higher compared to the start of the week). Also seeing S&P top of book liquidity start to creep back to better levels after recent weakness (sitting around $10mm today).

• Our floor is skewed 3% better to buy today which feels like a combo of squeezy price action + decent buy tickets across large cap tech. HFs buying consumer vs selling Tech, Industrials, and Fins.

Notably, 0-DTE traders turned decidedly less positive as the day wore on…

Source: SpotGamma

The ‘good’ data (retail sales) prompted a significant drop in rate-cut expectations – erasing all the dovish shoft post-payrolls…

Source: Bloomberg

Bonds were battered on the day (2Y +15bps, 30Y +6bps), surging up to unchanged on the week…

Source: Bloomberg

The yield curve flattened significantly today – erasing all the post-payrolls steepening…

Source: Bloomberg

The dollar spiked on the hawkish retail sales data…

Source: Bloomberg

Gold puked on the Retail Sales print but recovered to end higher on the day (despite a strong dollar)

Source: Bloomberg

Bitcoin was clubbed like a baby seal again, back below $57,000 (as it seems someone is dumping crypto at $60,000 to chase what little momentum is left in stonks)…

Source: Bloomberg

Crude oil prices recovered yesterday’s losses with WTI back up to $78…

Source: Bloomberg

Finally, while stocks are soaring back higher (because ‘no recession’ and ‘slow-flation’ – goldilocks), bonds and rate-cut expectations are not playing along (flashing recessionary signals)…

Source: Bloomberg

Who will be right in the end (hint look at the first chart above on US macro data).

Quick-service restaurants (QSR) are locked in a fierce “value war,” offering cash-strapped consumers $5 meal deals or even better bargains to maintain their market share. This battle for value has intensified as QSR executives recognize that low- and mid-tier households have been financially squeezed by the Biden-Harris economy. With elevated inflation, high interest rates, depleted savings, and maxed-out credit cards, consumers are in rough shape. 

McDonald’s was the first to launch $5 meal deals, and Burger King followed suit. On Monday, Yum! Brands’ KFC said it would unveil a meal deal of its own in the near term: “KFC claps back in “Value Wars” with more deals for customers every day of the week this fall.” 

As the QSR value wars heat up, sandwich chain Subway could be the first casualty in the spiraling price battle:

Here’s more from the New York Post:

Subway has called a hasty meeting with franchisees of its 19,000 North American sandwich shops as they grapple with faltering sales and profits, The Post has learned.

…

“This conference is essential,” Subway said in the invite. “Join us … to discuss the state of the industry and an update on our business.”

The NYPost spoke with a franchisee operator who owns twenty stores. The individual said, “Same-store sales are down 5% to 10% in recent weeks compared to the prior year.” The individual blames the downturn in the chain’s promotions, and foot traffic has plunged. 

“They are doing crazy coupons,” the franchisee owner said, adding, “Our gross sales are not even at 2012 levels, and profit then was five times what it is today.”

The latest national ad campaign with NBA great Charles Barkley appears to have been a flop. Data shared with NYPost showed that average weekly same-store sales for the Eastern US region with about 1,000 locations dipped 8.7% between June 25 and July 16 compared to the same period one year ago.

Restaurant consultant John Gordon said the Thursday meeting appears “very unusual.”

In recent weeks, Gordon said he had viewed Subway’s same-store sales figures across the West Coast and East Coast regions, which show a 10% plunge.

QSR value wars and emergency meetings by Subway do not occur during boom times; they are ominous signs that the consumer downturn is gathering pace. 

Authored by Connor O’Keefe via The Mises Institute,

Later this week, Kamala Harris is expected to break her campaign’s strange silence about policy by unveiling much of her economic platform. The vice president is scheduled to first join President Joe Biden for an event in Maryland on Thursday about “the progress they are making to lower costs for the American people” and then to deliver a speech about her own economic platform on Friday.

The Harris campaign clearly intends to continue spinning the Biden administration’s economic record as a success, and now to frame Harris as instrumental to that success. But the accomplishments that the president and vice president are set to celebrate this week are not real.

Biden and Harris entered office in January of 2021. The country was almost a year into the pandemic, and the economy was a disaster. President Donald Trump had abandoned any semblance of economic conservatism and ushered through two of the largest spending bills in U.S. history: the $2.2 trillion CARES Act in March of 2020 and a $900 billion Covid-related addendum to the annual omnibus spending bill in December of 2020 in addition to several other expensive measures and interventions.

The scale of government spending unleashed during Trump’s last year was unheard of, but was declared necessary because governors nationwide had shut down most of the economy in response to the virus. Production ground to a halt in the spring of 2020 for weeks, even months. The federal government flooded the economy with trillions of dollars — most of which were freshly printed by the Fed — to hide and delay the devastating economic impact of the lockdowns.

When Biden and Harris came into office in January of 2021, they quickly got to work expanding on what Trump had already done. In March of that year, they helped pass the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act.

In the following months, the Administration then cooked up and passed an infrastructure law and the so-called CHIPS and Science Act. They then hit setbacks later in the year when the administration failed to secure enough votes for its flagship Build Back Better agenda, and then in mid-2022 when the country was slammed by the worst price inflation in half a century.

The price inflation was the obvious consequence of the government injecting trillions of new dollars into the economy at the same time government lockdowns were restricting production. But while that was the fault of both the Trump and Biden administrations, the American public understandably pinned most of the blame on the man currently in the Oval Office.

So the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats renamed Build Back Better as the Inflation Reduction Act, made a few changes, and passed it in August of 2022. In addition to all the Covid spending, the infrastructure law, CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act accounted for an additional $2 trillion in new government spending.

By flooding the economy with so much new cash, the government was able to hide most of the destruction wrought by the lockdowns.

And, because of the Fed’s low rates and heavy-handed interventions, the inescapable economic pain was delayed and exacerbated. But as the Biden administration and Federal Reserve learned in 2022, it couldn’t be delayed forever.

Inflation ravaged the American public. But it was only one part of the economic pain the federal government’s economic interventions have locked in. The artificially-low interest rates led businesses to start unsustainable lines of production that make a recession — or market correction — unavoidable.

Some economists have argued that we are already experiencing the recession, but that recent government spending and hiring has propped up GDP and jobs numbers enough to hide it so far.

In addition to the government’s Covid spending and monetary policy, the Biden Administration’s many interventions in the energy sector, automotive industry, and healthcare field — among others — have reallocated resources into the production of goods and services that consumers don’t actually want. That locks in even more economic pain.

This is one big economic disaster — much of which still lies ahead. And yet, tomorrow, the president and vice president apparently plan to again celebrate the situation they’ve helped put us in. By taking credit for every person who reentered the workforce after the pandemic and trotting out economic data propped up by government spending, the two will paint Biden’s term as an economic breakthrough that Harris will build on as the next president.

From a campaigning perspective, that is the story Harris needs to tell and the tone she needs to hit. But, like most of what’s said in a presidential campaign, it’s in no way grounded in reality.

In a first which hasn’t been witnessed since World War 2, Western battle tanks have been operating inside Russian territory. Sky News is reporting Thursday that Ukrainian troops have used British Challenger 2 tanks during the ongoing cross-border offensive in Russia’s Kursk region.

“While the UK and Ukraine governments remain tight-lipped on operational details, a source has signaled British tanks have crossed into Russia for Ukraine’s Kursk offensive,” the publication writes.

The Ukrainian armed forces’ 82nd Air Assault Brigade had received up to 14 Challenger 2 tanks starting in January 2023. This highly provocative move condemned by Moscow later prompted Germany and the United States to also provide some tanks.

“According to government policy, the UK has confirmed Ukraine is free to use British weapons on Russian territory,” Sky News reports. “A source said this included Challenger 2 tanks and signaled that they had been used during the Ukrainian incursion, which began on 6 August.”

Sky News continues, “Details on how and when Ukrainian forces deployed Challenger 2 tanks within the Russian region of Kursk were not immediately clear. Neither was the number of tanks that may have been involved.”

If confirmed, this certainly marks one of the single biggest escalations of the war and suggests that French, German, or American tanks might also cross the border into Russia. Already the Russian side has confirmed that its aerial forces took out Bradley Fighting Vehicles during the Kursk raid, which has been unfolding for more than a week.

The US has been among a few countries which have greenlighted Kiev forces’ ability to use Western weapons to strike positions inside Russia, but only those areas from which strikes on Ukraine are launched.

The White House and Western allies have been vocal in supporting the Kursk operation, but the US claims it did not have foreknowledge of the invasion. President Biden on Tuesday told reporters, “I’ve spoken with my staff on a regular basis probably every four or five hours for the last six or eight days.”

He said that “it’s creating a real dilemma for Putin.  And we’ve been in direct contact — constant contact with — with the Ukrainians.”

Russian Telegram channels have since picked up on unverified video purporting to show a Challenger 2 tank in Kursk…

video shows the destruction of a British Challenger II tank by Russian Armed Forces in the border area pic.twitter.com/BadFMaFjwE

— S p r i n t e r (@SprinterFamily) August 15, 2024

On Thursday Politico is reporting that the Biden administration is now “open” to providing Ukraine with long-range cruise missiles, which would be “a move that would give Kyiv’s F-16s greater combat punch as it seeks to gain further momentum in its fight against Russia,” according to the publication.

At this point it’s easy to see that none of this will end well.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

It is time to get the United States out of the censorship business for good…

In the last three years, the House of Representatives has disclosed a massive censorship system run in part with federal funding and with coordination with federal officials. A federal court described this system as truly “Orwellian.”

The Biden Administration has made speech regulation a priority in targeting disinformation, misinformation or malinformation. President Joe Biden even said that companies refusing to censor citizens were “killing people.”

His administration has now created an anti-free speech record that is only rivaled by the Adams Administration, which used the Alien and Sedition Acts to arrest political opponents.

Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is an example of how speech controls and censorship have become mainstream.  Her agency was created to work on our critical infrastructure, but Easterly declared that the mandate would now include policing “our cognitive infrastructure.” That includes combating “malinformation,” or information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

I have testified for years about the censorship system. For much of that time, Democrats insisted that there was no proof of any coordination or funding from the government. Such evidence did indeed exist, but Democrats worked to block any investigation to confirm what we already knew about government officials targeting individuals and groups for throttling, bans, and blacklisting.

Then Elon Musk bought Twitter. The release of the Twitter Files destroyed any plausible deniability of the government’s role in this censorship system. Various agencies had employees working with social media companies to target those with opposing or disfavored views. At the same time, we learned of grants from the federal government supporting blacklisting and targeting operations.

That includes efforts to quietly choke off the revenue of disfavored sites by pressuring advertisers and donors.

While companies like Facebook have continued to fight to conceal their coordination with the government, the Twitter Files pulled back the curtain to expose the system. Indeed, Democrats largely abandoned their denials and turned to full-throated defenses of censorship, even calling free speech advocates “Putin-lovers” and “insurrectionist sympathizers.”

In 1800, Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams in the only election where free speech was a primary issue for voters. It should be again. Vice President Kamala Harris is known as a supporter for these censorship and blacklisting operations. She can now defend that record and convince Americans that they need to have less free speech.

This debate should ideally focus on one simple legislative proposal. In my new book, I suggest various measures that can regain the ground that we have lost on free speech. One such measure is a federal law that would ban any federal funding of any offices or programs (government, academic, or corporate) that rate, target, censor, throttle, or seek to take adverse action against individuals or groups based on their viewpoints in public forums or social media.

There can be easy exceptions to this ban for individuals or groups engaging in criminal conduct or unlawful foreign interference with elections. Threatening individuals or trafficking in child pornography constitute conduct, not speech. They are criminal acts under the federal code.

Nothing in this law would prevent the government from speaking in its own voice. If Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas wants to challenge claims made about him or his agency, he can do so on the agency website or make his case to the media. That is the essence of free speech. What he cannot do is create a Disinformation Governance Board to regulate the speech of citizens or groups.

In my prior testimony to Congress, I warned about the use of what I called “censorship by surrogate” through which agencies did indirectly what they are barred from doing directly under the First Amendment.

This new law will not put an end to the burgeoning anti-free speech movement. It will not end the new market for groups making millions in seeking to silence or strangle sites with opposing views. However, it will create a wall of separation of the government from censorship systems.

It would also offer a simple and clear line for the 2024 election. Candidates will have to take sides on free speech. If candidates like Harris want to continue to support the government in blacklisting or censoring citizens, they should own it. We spent years of politicians engaging in cynical denials of the government’s role in censorship. If these politicians are “all in” with censorship, then they should be honest about it and let voters make the same choice that was made in 1800.

With billions to play with and enabling allies in Congress to conceal federal operations, speech regulation is an irresistible temptation for the government. We have seen how this temptation quickly becomes an insatiable appetite for government officials seeking to silence rather than answer critics.

Let’s get our government out of the business of rating, throttling  blacklisting, and censoring citizens.  It is time to pass a free speech protection act.

*  *  *

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster).

Wildfire smoke from Canada has poured into the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic areas of the United States, raising air quality alerts across the region. 

“That haze you might notice is wildfire smoke moving in from Canada. The thickest is aloft and to our north, but the current weather pattern may allow more into the area over the next few days,” Washington Post’s Ian Livingston said in a forecast for the DC metro area. 

Livingston continued, “… thicker patch of smoke drifted south under high pressure. The smoke is mainly aloft, but some is making it to the surface, which means a code yellow/moderate air-quality index in parts of the area and especially to our north.” 

The wildfire and smoke map from AirNow shows Canadian wildfire smoke is pouring into the eastern part of the US. 

AirNow shows that many of the air quality monitors in both regions are registering ‘moderate’—unhealthy for sensitive groups. 

The National Weather Service in New York said, “You may notice hazy skies today. It is coming from wildfire smoke, which has overspread across the area from north to south,” adding, “We expect this to stick around for the next several days.”

Opportunistic climate alarmists, such as Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau, have blamed human-made climate change for the wildfires in recent years. However, as the libertarian-conservative Canadian public policy think tank Fraser Institute recently said, “Canada’s burning because of bad forest policy, not climate change.”