Trump’s Super PAC launches site to show soaring grocery bills under Bidenomics

 Donald Trump’s official Super PAC has launched a new website dubbed “Biden-Mart” that lets users compare Trump-era grocery prices to current costs under Joe Biden’s administration.

Biden-Mart.com, published by the Make America Great Again Inc. PAC, features an interactive grocery checklist that encourages users to “check off the items…to compile your weekly grocery list and see how much more expensive your bill has become under Joe Biden.”

There are over two dozen common food staples to choose from, including coffee, dairy products and a variety of different fruits and vegetables, the Daily Mail earlier reported.

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Donald Trump’s official Make America Great Again Inc. PAC launched Biden-Mart.com on Friday.

The Post clicked off a grocery list of items to see the impact Bidenomics has had over the last four years.

A two-pound bag of apples, two pounds of ground beef, seven lemons, one gallon of milk and one pound of sugar and coffee each totaled $30.07 — a whopping 57.11% increase from the $19.14 it cost during the Trump administration

Biden-Mart uses data from the United States Department of Agriculture data to compare the prices from January 2021 — when Trump left office — with January 2024.

“Putting food on the table has become harder than ever thanks to ‘Bidenomics,'” the website touts. “As costs for everyday items continue to rise, American families are struggling more and more to foot the bill.”

Overall, grocery prices have surged 25% in the past four years, outpacing inflation’s 19% rise over the same time period, The Washington Post reported least month.

The latest Consumer Price Index reading rose a higher-than-expected 3.2% in February, following a stiff 3.1% advance in January.

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, which tells users that “putting food on the table has become harder than ever thanks to ‘Bidenomics.'”

Even as inflation ran rampant last year, Biden spun the numbers as good news for his Bidenomics agenda that has consistently claimed to “reduce the [government’s] deficit” despite Treasury Department data showing the red ink has doubled in 2023, from about $1 trillion to $2 trillion.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics is set to release March’s inflation figures on April 10.

Consumer prices have not fallen year-over-year since President Joe Biden’s term began in January 2021.

The closest the economy has gotten to a yearly decrease since Biden took office was in July 2022, when the inflation rate remain “unchanged,” at a sky-high 8.5%.

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Earlier this month, Trump clinched the 2024 Republican nomination for president, eclipsing the 1,215 delegate threshold after wins in the Georgia, Mississippi and Washington state primaries.REUTERS

Trump — who clinched the 2024 Republican nomination for president — has cited inflation and the larger US economy as one of the top issues voters are considering going into the November election.

“People are going through hell,” he said when speaking on consumer prices during an interview with CNBC earlier this month.

“The middle class in our country has been routed and the middle class largely built our country and they have been treated very, very badly with policy.”

https://nypost.com/2024/03/29/business/trumps-super-pacs-biden-mart-shows-increased-grocery-bills/

GOP-led states file lawsuit to block Biden’s massive new student loan bailout plan

 Eleven Republican-led states have filed a lawsuit against President Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in an attempt to block the administration’s latest student loan debt cancellation plan. 

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Kansas federal court by the state’s Attorney General Kris Kobach, is also backed by attorneys general in Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas and Utah.

They argue Biden overstepped his authority in creating the Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE) Plan – an income-driven repayment plan for student loans that could cost taxpayers as much as $475 billion over 10 years. 

Biden’s latest student loan bailout plan could cost taxpayers $475 billion.REUTERS

The complaint claims that the SAVE Plan, set to go into effect July 1, is “every bit as improper as [Biden’s] first unlawful attempt at debt forgiveness” under the HEROES Act, in which the president sought to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loans for about 40 million people. 

Biden’s initial $400 billion debt forgiveness plan was struck down by the Supreme Court last summer. 

“Last time Defendants tried this the Supreme Court said that this action was illegal,” the lawsuit states. “Nothing since then has changed, other than introducing more legal errors into this Rule’s underlying analysis.” 

Under the SAVE Plan, monthly income-based student loan payments would be cut in half, while monthly payments for minimum-wage earners would be eliminated. For student borrowers who owe $12,000 or less, all outstanding debt would be forgiven after 10 years. 

Most community college students would not have to pay back any debt under the plan, according to the Biden administration.

The red state attorneys general argue that the Biden administration’s $156 billion cost estimate for the SAVE Plan is “a floor.”

The Congressional Budget Office estimates it will cost taxpayers $230 billion over 10 years, while the Penn Wharton Budget Model expects it to cost as much $475 billion over a decade. 

Kobach argues that “not since the Civil War” has a president attempted to defy the Supreme Court in the manner Biden is.AP

“The law simply does not allow President Biden to do what he wants to do,” Kobach told reporters at the Kansas Statehouse Thursday, calling it “brazen” that Biden moved forward with another student loan bailout plan just weeks after the Supreme Court’s June 2023 ruling. 

“Not since the Civil War era has there been a sitting president attempting to defy the Supreme Court in this manner,” he added.

The White House did not respond to The Post’s request for comment. 

A Department of Education spokesperson declined to comment on the pending litigation but insisted “Congress gave the U.S. Department of Education the authority to define the terms of income-driven repayment plans in 1993, and the SAVE plan is the fourth time the Department has used that authority.”

“From day one, the Biden-Harris Administration has been fighting to fix a broken student loan system, and part of that is creating the most affordable student loan repayment plan ever that is lowering monthly payments, protecting millions of borrowers from runaway interest, and getting borrowers closer to debt forgiveness faster,” the spokesperson added.

“The Biden-Harris Administration won’t stop fighting to provide support and relief to borrowers across the country – no matter how many times Republican elected officials try to stop us.”

https://nypost.com/2024/03/29/us-news/republican-led-states-file-lawsuit-to-block-bidens-massive-new-student-loan-bailout-plan/

How Brown University spreads antisemitism even to high schoolers

 A monthly series of Harvard CAPS / Harris polls reveals disturbing, antisemitic attitudes held by many young Americans, including on Hamas’ massacre of Israelis (51% found it justified) and Jews as a class (67% considered them oppressors).  

That so many youth admit to holding views that would have placed them on the racist fringes of society in their parents’ generation points to the moral confusion fostered in many American classrooms.

Brown University’s contribution to this trend is notable, not only for the extremist ideology promoted on campus by its Center for Middle East Studies but also because it aims to shape even younger minds through its Choices Program, a social-studies curriculum for high schoolers that includes units informed by the same radical ideology.

According to the program’s website, its resources are used by 1 million students across the United States and in 200 international schools.   

Brown has one of the highest proportions of faculty who publicly support anti-Israel boycotts. 

(A study by the Amcha Initiative reports a positive correlation between faculty support for an academic boycott of Israeli institutions and antisemitic activity on campus.)

As the CMES’s founding director in 2012, Professor Beshara Doumani lost no time in establishing a “New Directions in Palestine Studies” initiative to “shape the agenda of knowledge production on Palestine and Palestinians” and build “an international community of scholars dedicated to decolonizing and globalizing” the field of study.

Jews are portrayed as settler-colonialists who took over native Palestinian land.

The concept of a Jewish homeland, Jewish history and a Jewish people is relegated to “myth” and “legend.”

Efforts to combat antisemitism are confronted as part of a Jewish colonial conspiracy to “delegitimize” Palestinian “resistance” — the preferred term for terrorism.

In 2021-2023, Doumani served as president of Birzeit University, where Hamas’ student faction won landslide victories in student elections, murders of Israeli civilians were celebrated and the radicalism that permeated the university increased.

Back at the program Doumani started at Brown University, a visiting fellow taught that “antisemitism, Zionism and Nazism were varying forms of racism and nationalism.”

A visiting professor declared that Zionism adopted “the logic of Europe, the logic of an ethnic, racial, pure state.”

And another referred to Jewish “Kristallnacht mobs” who are “thirsty for Palestinian blood.”

Such extremist rhetoric reeks of Holocaust inversion and evokes ancient, antisemitic blood libels.

When dozens of student organizations at Brown responded to Hamas’ savagery on Oct. 7 by calling the terrorist group’s actions “just,” their legitimization of the atrocities reflected the lessons they were being taught by their school’s educators.

Brown’s Choices Program delivers similar ideology with some of the same activist-scholars serving as contributors.

The professor who spoke of Jewish “Kristallnacht mobs” appears in the curriculum’s videos to teach that Israel is an apartheid state, guilty of racism.

Other videos feature “scholars” with histories of anti-Zionist activism to misinform students that Israel was established as a settler-colonialist state on the indigenous land of current-day Palestinians.

It was meant only for Jews, who deprive indigenous Palestinians of their homes, civil rights and liberties.  

Arab aggression against Jews before and after the 1948 creation of Israel is downplayed and legitimized, while Palestinian terrorism is entirely ignored.

The Jewish people’s claim of indigeneity, evidenced by massive archaeological and historical documentation of a continuous Jewish presence in the land, is disregarded or dismissed.

In the student readings, terror organizations are called “resistance groups,” and their deadly attacks justified as “armed struggle against Israeli occupation.”

The Western world’s terrorist designation of Hamas is minimized by suggesting that only the United States and Israel consider it a terrorist group, but “the U.N. does not”; Hamas “calls itself an Islamic national liberation and resistance movement.”  

Jews are depicted as European colonial interlopers with no significant connection to Israel, the overall message being that an independent Jewish state is unjust.    

Notably, per a review of federal data by GoLocal, Brown University received over $11 million in funding from the “Palestinian territories,” which includes money for an endowment of the professorship Doumani holds.  

The Choices curriculum’s Middle East unit was promoted with funding by the Qatar Fund International for teacher-training workshops and scholarships to enable teachers to purchase the curriculum.

Such foreign funding helps promote sectarian activism over objective scholarship and partisan politics over scholastic rigor in US schools and universities. 

Is it any wonder we’re witnessing a new generation whose prevailing set of values includes history’s oldest hatred?  

Ricki Hollander is a senior researcher at the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting & Analysis.

https://nypost.com/2024/03/29/opinion/how-brown-university-spreads-antisemitism-even-to-high-schoolers/

Is Biden normalizing Hamas?

 The crisis between the White House and Israel continues to escalate. The State Department reacted angrily to Israeli statements that the U.N. Security Council resolution demanding a ceasefire had undermined negotiations to release Israeli hostages held by Hamas, calling the Israeli statement “inaccurate in almost every respect.” President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken took umbrage at Israel’s response after the U.S. abstention allowed the resolution’s passage without explicitly linking a ceasefire to the release of hostages.

Israel is right, however, but should not be surprised. Biden approached the 2020 elections by arguing the adults would be back in charge, but his team’s true legacy is normalizing Hamas in a way once unthinkable.

Consider former Secretary of State John Kerry, who technically joined the White House as an unconfirmed environment czar but really acted as a foreign policy adviser on par with Blinken. Kerry has a soft spot for Hamas. Just weeks into President Barack Obama’s administration, for example, Kerry became the first U.S. lawmaker to visit Gaza since Hamas took control in a bloody coup against its Palestinian coalition partners. Kerry not only met with officials but also brought back messages and proposals, essentially becoming Hamas’s mailman. He legitimized a pariah group. 

The Biden team also hired Rob Malley, Blinken’s chum and confidant, despite Malley’s long-standing ties to Hamas. Such ties were extensive enough that they were too much, at least initially, when Obama was assembling his team. Malley, whose father worked for the PLO and whose mother worked for Algerian militants, is now under investigation for alleged leaks of classified material to the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Top White House officials also appear tolerant of, if not sympathetic to, Hamas. Yale Law School has been a feeder for both the Obama and Biden administrations. It is a chummy place, dedicated more to building networks among future leaders than the practical study of law.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan and his principal deputy Jon Finer both attended Yale Law School with Darryl Li, now an academic but at the time a voice critical of Israel and advocating the normalization of Hamas. Yale Law students are seldom silent about topics in which they believe. While informal influence networks are hard to document, neither Sullivan nor Finer spoke up to shut down Hamas advocacy or the group’s calls for the elimination of the Jewish state.

Top Biden officials continue their lip service about Hamas being a designated terrorist organization, but Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin legitimize it with their intervention in Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 assault and Jerusalem’s efforts to eradicate Hamas terrorist infrastructure. After all, there is little nuance to the Biden team’s choice: either side with a democratic ally against a U.S.-designated terrorist group or else normalize that terrorist group.

When it comes to condemnation of terrorism, any discussion of shades of gray essentially suggests some terrorism is more acceptable than other terrorism. There can be no difference between the U.S. demanding ceasefires in Rafah and outside powers a decade ago hypothetically demanding the U.S. cease attacking the Islamic State in order to feed that group and its hostages.

Biden’s invitation for Recep Tayyip Erdogan to visit the White House on May 9 further reflects tolerance of Hamas. Erdogan is not only Turkey’s president, but he is also, alongside Iranian leader Ali Khamenei, the world’s greatest cheerleader and support for the terrorist group. In effect, Biden and likely Blinken, Sullivan, and Finer are setting the stage for Erdogan to bash Israel and endorse Hamas from either the Rose Garden or the Oval Office.

U.S. leadership is meaningless without moral clarity. Some critics and cynics suggest Biden is turning on the Jewish state only because the Israel-Hamas war puts swing-state Michigan in play in 2024. They are wrong, however. Biden may respect Israel as his post-Oct. 7 speech reflected, but his aides are the most anti-Israel, pro-Hamas team ever assembled. Biden’s words are meaningless. His legacy will be Hamas’s survival, normalization, and empowerment.

Michael Rubin is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/2941800/is-biden-normalizing-hamas/

Amgen Diversified Portfolio To Drive LT Growth, Though Uncertainties Loom: Raymond James

 Raymond James has resumed coverage of Amgen Inc 

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, noting a diversified portfolio where Amgen has a strong presence that can help drive solid, sustainable long-term growth.

Raymond James writes that Amgen has effectively diversified its portfolio across various therapeutic areas, reducing concentration risk and enhancing growth potential. 

Recent deals, like the Horizon deal, have bolstered its presence in rare diseases, positioning it for substantial growth. Successful launches of key products have further strengthened its position. 

Raymond James resumes with a Market Perform rating.

Recently, Amgen’s data from animal and early-stage human trials of its experimental obesity drug AMG 133 (maridebart cafraglutide) was published in Nature Metabolism, confirming the GIPR antagonist and GLP-1R agonist activities in cell-based systems and the ability of AMG 133 to reduce body weight and improve metabolic markers in male obese mice and cynomolgus monkeys. 

However, concerns linger regarding the long-term durability of some flagship products and reimbursement challenges in certain markets. 

The company’s innovative pipeline, particularly in oncology, rare diseases, and obesity, holds promise but also faces uncertainties. 

In December, the FDA reviewed Amgen’s supplemental New Drug Application, seeking full approval of the KRAS-blocking drug Lumakras (sotorasib). 

This review, which resulted in a Complete Response Letter, was based on the CodeBreaK 200 trial results for adults with previously treated locally advanced or metastatic KRAS G12C-mutated non-small cell lung cancer. 

The FDA also issued a new post-marketing requirement for an additional confirmatory study to support full approval that will be completed by February 2028.

Despite these challenges, Amgen maintains confidence in its ability to execute and sustain its margins. 

Overall, the stock’s risk-reward balance appears relatively stable, with potential for multiple expansions through pipeline execution, although future acquisitions may be limited.

https://www.benzinga.com/analyst-ratings/analyst-color/24/03/37991995/amgens-diversified-portfolio-to-drive-long-term-growth-though-uncertainties-loom-an