Rogan announces ‘endorsement of Trump’ while promoting Musk interview on X

 Joe Rogan revealed on the eve of Election Day that he’s backing Donald Trump for president — less than two weeks after interviewing the ex-commander in chief on his wildly popular podcast.

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Joe Rogan made a 2024 presidential endorsement.X /@joerogan

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Rogan endorsed Trump for president on the eve of Election Day.PowerfulJRE/YouTube

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Harris had reportedly been in talks to appear on The Joe Rogan Experience but the two sides could not agree on terms for the vice president to make an appearance on the popular podcast.AP

The podcaster announced the endorsement on X while promoting his Monday interview with Elon Musk on “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

“If it wasn’t for him we’d be f–ked,” Rogan said of Musk. “He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way.”

“For the record, yes, that’s an endorsement of Trump,” Rogan wrote.

The nonchalant endorsement comes after the podcast host interviewed the former president in an Oct. 25 episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which has an estimated 14.5 million Spotify followers.

Trump suggested Rogan, 57, should back his presidential campaign during the nearly 3-hour sit-down.

“He gave me the nicest endorsement,” Trump had said, referring to Musk, who endorsed the 45th president shortly after he was nearly assassinated at his Butler, Pa. rally in July. 

“You should do the same thing Joe because you cannot be voting for Kamala. Kamala. You’re not a Kamala person. I know you,” Trump told the podcaster.

Rogan in 2022 said he was “not a Trump supporter in any way, shape, or form” but finally gave the Republican his support with less than 24 hours before Election Day.

In his new interview with Musk published Monday, the podcaster admitted that Trump isn’t a “perfect” choice.

“[The Democrats] have done such a job of painting Trump as a monster, you know, they’ve taken the worst things that he’s ever said and [amplified them] and he’s not a perfect person,” Rogan said. “But guess what? No one’s perfect. They don’t exist.”

But Rogan appeared to make the case that Trump was the better option when compared to Vice President Kamala Harris.

“There’s this other narrative that drives me crazy is that [Trump] is going to destroy democracy,” Rogan said before flipping the script. “So in order to destroy democracy, we have to install a president without a primary, we have to have a candidate that is the least liked vice president of all time — the least popular vice president of all time — and then use gaslighting and the full force of the media machine to turn her into the future and hope and she’s going to be change even though she’s the sitting vice president.”

Trump, 78, learned of Rogan’s endorsement at his Pittsburg, Pa. rally Monday night and shared the news with rally-goers.

“I have some more big news now. I’m just getting this right now,” the Republican nominee told his crowd of supporters. “So somebody that’s very, very respected asked me to do his show two weeks ago, and I said, ‘Why not?'”

“And to me, it’s very big because he’s the biggest there is, I guess, in that world by far … And his name is Joe Rogan and he’s never done this before. And it just came over the wires that Joe Rogan just endorsed me,” Trump said. 

“That’s so nice. And he doesn’t do that,” he added. “He’s not a person that does endorsements, but he did an endorsement. So I just want to say Joe Rogan, Elon Musk and Megyn [Kelly], thank you very much.”

Rogan previously endorsed liberal Democrat Bernie Sanders in 2020.

During the current election cycle, he said he was “a fan” of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. before the independent candidate dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump.

“He’s the only one that makes sense to me. He doesn’t attack people. He attacks actions and ideas. He’s much more reasonable and intelligent,” Rogan had said of RFK Jr.

He later clarified that his statements of support weren’t an official endorsement after drawing the ire of Trump supporters and Trump himself.

“I’m not the guy to get political information from,” Rogan had said.

Rogan’s interview with the Republican nominee has racked up more than 45 million views on YouTube as of late Monday. 

Rogan’s podcast which routinely claims the number one spot on Spotify’s top podcasts chart has an overwhelmingly male audience.

https://nypost.com/2024/11/04/us-news/joe-rogan-announces-endorsement-of-trump-while-promoting-elon-musk-interview-on-x/

IRA's unprecedented climate spending, much uninvestigated, may soon lead to huge scandals

 If it weren’t for the election season swamping news coverage, odds are more people would be talking about the revelation that, to quote a Bloomberg headline, “The World Bank Somehow Lost Track of at Least $24 Billion.” In fact, that may understate the reality: the World Bank’s “accounting gap” could be as big as $41 billion. The missing funds in question were for “climate finance” projects, “financed by taxpayer dollars from its member countries, the biggest being the US.”

According to the Oxfam report that was the source for the Bloomberg story, “There is no clear public record showing where this money went or how it was used, which makes any assessment of its impacts impossible.” It is possible that much, maybe even most, of the missing money went to the intended people and purposes. But only the hopelessly naïve would dismiss the probability of rampant waste, malfeasance, graft, and outright theft as explanations for that “gap.” Spending of such magnitude and velocity with sloppy oversight is an invitation to thieves.

But the oversight scandal at the World Bank is chump change compared with the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and its massive planned “climate finance” program. The misnamed IRA is, in the words of its advocates, the “largest climate policy in US history.” [emphasis added] The law’s ambitions dwarf those of the World Bank. By various estimates, the IRA will lead to some $3 trillion in direct spending on grants, subsidies, and the like, plus another $3 trillion in related spending induced by mandates and rules. For perspective, that’s far more than the cost of Obamacare, and even more than the $4 trillion the U.S. spent (inflation adjusted) to fight World War II.

It makes zero difference which side you’re on regarding the urgency of climate change: the associated policies and spending are almost entirely about trying to create an “energy transition.” Nor does it matter what you think about whether such a transition is sensible (it isn’t): the sheer immensity of IRA spending represents a “whole of government” opportunity for waste, abuse, and fraud on an unprecedented scale.

If the likelihood for waste and abuse doesn’t strike you as obvious, consider a few well-documented features of federal spending in general. A March 2024 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on overall federal government spending in FY2023 found that “more than $175 billion of errors were overpayments—for example, payments to deceased individuals or those no longer eligible for government programs,” and “$44.6 billion were unknown payments.” [emphasis added] The only “good news,” the GAO wrote, was that the “unknown” was $11 billion less than in the previous fiscal year, when Covid money was still being liberally ladled out. Again, only the naïve would conclude that waste, fraud, and abuse didn’t account for any of those “unknown” payments and “errors” in the normal course of our government’s $6 trillion annual budget.

Now along comes the IRA, another federal government gusher, with its overall $6 trillion directed at “climate finance,” with far fewer administrative and oversight guardrails than one normally finds in federal programs. What could go wrong?

Where are all the curious investigative journalists? Fortunately, a few still exist, notably James Varney at RealClearInvestigations, who has recently published a preliminary investigation: “Overnight Success: Biden’s Climate Splurge Gives Billions to Nonprofit Newbies.”

The purpose of Varney’s investigation wasn’t to question the efficacy of the underlying spending policies, their cost-effectiveness, or their capacity to achieve their stated goals. (For the record, we have good reasons to question both the policies’ efficacy and goals. For example, a new analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research reveals that the “IRA spends $23,000 to $32,000 per incremental EV sold.”) Rather, Varney sought answers to simple questions that fall under the purview of investigative journalism: Who’s getting the money, and what is it being spent on? Let’s hope Varney will inspire more reporters to dig in, because the massive scale of this “whole of government” spending program cannot possibly be covered by one person.

By necessity, Varney focused on just one tiny corner: the White House’s $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. As an EPA press release announced this past April: “Biden-Harris Administration Announces $20 Billion in Grants to Mobilize Private Capital and Deliver Clean Energy and Climate Solutions to Communities Across America.” Varney found that there isn’t “much public information” about many of the organizations receiving the funding, nor about what they’re doing or planning to do with the money.

Merely reading the EPA press release would raise some reasonable questions about the potential for waste and the relevance to “climate.” For instance, the EPA announcement says that one of the awards aims to “[d]edicate over $14 billion toward low-income and disadvantaged communities, including over $4 billion for rural communities as well as almost $1.5 billion for Tribal communities—ensuring that program benefits flow to the communities most in need and advance the President’s Justice40 Initiative.” Need it be said that poor communities consume far less energy than wealthier ones? Thus, changing behaviors or purchases among them would do nearly nothing to achieve the IRA’s stated climate goals. Regardless, one would want to know more about what, exactly, the grant-receiving organizations are doing or will do, and who runs them.

Varney reported that one award recipient obtained nonprofit status in 2023 and eight months later received a $940 million award. Another awardee received $2 billion just one month after obtaining nonprofit status and showing a prior reported income of $100 (not a typo). Varney doesn’t accuse any of these organizations of misdeeds; he merely sets out to establish some clarity on who got what, when, and where the money is going. However, when he contacted various recipients, he received either no responses or elliptical ones.

Again, setting aside the question of whether the spending will be useful, a reasonable person might object that we’re still in the early days and that it’s hard to spool up such an ambitious program. All true. But of course, the beginning is precisely the time when opportunities for waste and fraud get baked into a program. Varney reports: “The [$27 billion] awards were made by the Environmental Protection Agency, which is new to the world of major grantmaking. The agency acknowledges it has never handed out such gigantic sums of money, and its inspector general told Congress last month it marked a ‘fantastically complex’ and ‘unusual’ setup that his small staff would be hard-pressed to follow.”

Thus, we come back to obvious questions, such as: How is the grant-giving entity organized to evaluate and monitor funding recipients? How many of the groups were formed by political insiders? Regarding the latter, such arrangements can be perfectly benign, since insiders know where the money and opportunities reside. But the public has a right to know more. Certainly, one would hope Congress will put in place effective oversight. It is a huge amount of money. Again, from Varney’s reporting: “‘I can’t say enough about how complex this system will be,’ EPA Inspector General Sean O’Donnell testified to a House subcommittee in September. ‘It’s like they created an investment bank. It’s fantastically complex. I think it’s unusual.’”

Democrats have been eager to extol the IRA’s virtues. (The law was passed without a single Republican vote, only the second time something so consequential was so partisan. The other was Obamacare, which, it bears noting, didn’t create a “whole of government” lallapaloosa of multibillion-dollar grant-giving programs.) Given the stated claims and goals of the IRA, and the quantity of money already ladled out, one would expect to have seen far more news and press releases touting program successes. The IRA is, after all, the most expensive effort ever made to restructure an entire U.S. sector.

In the absence of further information, we can make a few reasonable suppositions: if the IRA is subject to typical levels of waste, abuse, and fraud for government largesse, then odds are that a major political tectonic shift is on the horizon. Perhaps more than any other single factor, the undoing of the climate-industrial complex could come from the volume of money being pushed into the economy to accelerate an impossible goal: the “energy transition.”

The popular expression “follow the money” comes from the iconic 1976 movie, All the President’s Men, which dramatized the Watergate investigation and the subsequent political earthquake. IRA spending dwarfs anything that precedes it. If serious investigative journalists do follow the money, it’s a good bet that we’ll see gargantuan scandals emerge.

Mark P. Mills is a City Journal contributing editor, the executive director of the National Center for Energy Analytics, and author of The Cloud Revolution.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-inflation-reduction-act-a-looming-political-earthquake

Will Hurricane Helene Aftermath Prove the Difference in N.C.?

 Just 21 days before the start of early voting, Hurricane Helene delivered biblical-level destruction to the hills, hollows, and mountains of North Carolina. The massive storm brought devastating floods that killed 232 people – half of them in this state – and buried entire riverside communities in rivers of mud.

Now, residents struggle for basic supplies. More than 2,500 families are homeless. Crowded shelters are well above capacity. Hundreds of road and bridge closures are disrupting transportation and the delivery of crucial aid.

Two days after the storm, Gov. Roy Cooper requested a Major Disaster Declaration from the federal government in order to surge assistance to state and local agencies and provide immediate relief to suffering North Carolinians. FEMA claimed in a news release that it sent 25 trailer loads of food and 60 trailer loads of water to North Carolina. But Hendersonville resident Andrea Corn says she has not seen a state or federal worker yet.

After the storm, Corn – a 55-year-old accountant who is more accustomed to preparing tax forms for local businesses than organizing relief missions – formed an ATV group to rescue elderly victims in Henderson County. Most roads and bridges had crumbled or washed away, and many folks could be reached only by going off-road.

Andrea and her husband, a volunteer fireman, brought supplies to victims stranded in remote “hollers.” Many residents were without power for more than a month following Helene’s visit. Samaritan’s Purse, a nondenominational evangelical Christian charity, distributed solar-powered lights to light the dark nights.

Well before the storm hit, these western North Carolina mountain towns were imbued with a culture of self-reliance. Residents call it “WNC Strong.” But in the wake of Helene, residents needed critical help that only government can supply: large-scale search and rescue operations, power and water restoration, and infrastructure repair.

Today, many of these residents feel abandoned by state and federal government officials. One question looming over the recovery efforts is whether it will impact voting behavior in Tuesday’s elections. “They are supposed to stand up for us, and we feel forgotten,” Corn said. “We’re going to need lots of money to recover, and our government is sending it to Ukraine.”

Chuck Edwards, Republican congressman representing western North Carolina, said state emergency officials cannot account for the whereabouts of 400 pallets of FEMA-supplied food and water meant for hurricane relief. He has requested 1,180 FEMA trailers to house thousands of displaced people.

In Buncombe County, local artist and photographer Anna Hitrova said that volunteers – not government workers – brought her necessary supplies after the storm. “The only people I’ve seen on the ground in Buncombe,” she said, “are churches and Samaritan’s Purse.”

Hitrova said she had a “blackpilled moment” when she drove through neighboring Swannanoa. She saw families camping on the lots where their homes once stood. They were without generators, phones, or anything else. “It was a shock; I was crying,” she explained. “It hit me how bad it was to be cut off from the world. The government waited to respond while people were dying.”

North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services has reported that most of the state’s deaths were in Buncombe County, home of Asheville and Swannanoa. “When I found out that FEMA had used money for housing illegal migrants and saw our government giving billions to Ukraine while families were getting $750, I was furious,” said Hitrova.

Some assistance came from unlikely sources. Billionaire Elon Musk, for instance, stepped up to help. The Space X CEO donated 500 Starlink internet receivers to groups across the devastated area. Musk’s donation came after the urging of local state representative Danny Britt and former President Donald Trump.

“Here, people had lost their homes and had nothing, but they had painted signs that read ‘God Bless Elon,’” Hitrova said. “I realized that Elon gave these people a lifeline that the government could not.”

Election Day Implications

North Carolina is a key battleground state with 16 electoral votes. Trump won the state narrowly in 2016 and by an even smaller margin in 2020. The current RCP average has the former president leading by only 1.5 points. Both Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris have visited the storm-ravaged region while campaigning.

During her Oct. 5 visit, Harris met with Asheville’s mayor and leaders of progressive groups such as NC Counts. After attending a local FEMA briefing, the vice president praised state and federal workers for the “nobility of their work and their calling.”

Two weeks later, Trump appeared at an Asheville recovery site flanked by Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley, an area native, and numerous North Carolina politicians and local business owners.

The former president said the American people were the real heroes of the recovery efforts and that the state and local governments had let storm victims down. Trump said he had come to express a simple message to the region: “I’m with you, and the American people are with you all the way.”

One-fifth of the state’s 7.3 million registered voters reside in the disaster area. Are the visits and pledges of support resonating with voters? In Henderson, a predominantly red county, it appears so. “I was shocked to see the level of highly motivated people out here voting this year despite their difficulties,” said Henderson County GOP Chair Brett Calloway.

Andrea Corn said that access to voting was the number one concern for Helene victims. “Some folks needed food, others had lost their home, and the first thing they were asking about was voting,” she said. “It was truly all that mattered for them.” Some residents told her they hadn't voted in two decades.

Corn recently closed her accounting office so her employees could help staff election sites. Calloway also says people are eager to help in the election campaign. A week after the storm, a man came into the GOP office to ask about volunteering. “I’ll have to do it around my wife’s funeral,” the teary-eyed man said. “My country needs me.”

As of Friday, nearly 58% of registered voters in the county had cast their vote. Turnout this year is 19% higher than in 2020. “Many of the voters we’re seeing are on the inactive voter rolls,” says Calloway. “Only 7% of our voters are Election Day voters, so there is no danger of Election-Day votes being cannibalized,” he said.

By Friday morning, 3.7 million North Carolinians had voted, surpassing the 2020 early voting total. Later, the State Board of Elections reported over 4 million votes cast in 2024, with over half of registered voters participating.

“This year, voting is a symbolic act for me,” declared Anna Hitrova. A onetime Democrat who now publicly identifies as a conservative activist, she says she has “given up” on the current government. “I am going to vote, I am going to vote for Trump, and I am going to do it on the first day of early voting in the progressive city of Asheville.”

Sloan Rachmuth is president of Education First Alliance, a North Carolina organization dedicated to defending parents’ rights. Her writing appears on her Substack and you can follow her on X: @SloanRachmuth

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/11/04/will_hurricane_helene_aftermath_prove_the_difference_in_nc.html

Farage: 'Save Yourselves. Vote for Donald Trump'

 Voters across the pond are quickly realizing what a massive mistake they made by electing Sir Keir Starmer’s far-left, Labour government in the United Kingdom. America, you cannot afford to follow suit.

It’s only been three months since the left-wing Labour government took over from the corrupted ‘Conservative’ party and already taxes are soaring, crime – especially in major cities – is rampant, and mass migration continues to climb ever upward. The sleaze in the heart of government is part of our daily conversation, and I can’t help but look over at America and think to myself, “Gosh, I hope they aren’t going to go the same way.”

We know the Democrat and Labour parties have been colluding this summer, with meetings at the Democratic National Convention, and scores of British activists descending on swing states in America to try and help Harris over the line. There’s no doubt in my mind that she would govern as far to the left, if not worse, than Starmer and his gang.

If you want your taxes up, vote for her. If you want diversity, equity, and inclusion at the heart of government and the education system, vote for her. If you want a resumption of America’s foreign policy “red lines” that are laughed at by dictators, despots, and mullahs, vote for her. 

I don’t say any of this with an intent to interfere in your domestic politics. I say it as a reflection of our politics in Britain, and our joint destiny as English-speaking nations. Frankly, we cannot afford a trans-Atlantic, globalist-left alliance between Westminster and Washington. In a matter of days, America has a chance to restore some balance in the Western world. I hope you will take that responsibility seriously. If not, we must ready ourselves for a world of major instability. 

Doubtless Putin, Khamenei, and Xi are licking their lips at the prospect of a Harris presidency. Just look at what she has achieved on the international stage, alongside her boss Joe Biden, in four short years: 

• Russia invaded Ukraine and there have been no positive steps to end the conflict;
• The Middle East is once again a tinderbox, with Iran intent on Israel’s erasure, afraid only of the repercussions of a Trump presidency if they try anything;
• China continues to pinch and pilfer from Western industry, especially America’s, which goes a long way to explaining the terrible Biden-Harris economy and indeed the most recent jobs numbers.

 Do not kid yourselves. This stuff is not about incompetence. It is, in fact, intentional. Mega-corporations and their top executive donors want their record profits. Politicians want their piece. And while Kamala claims she would deal with inflation by tackling what she calls “price gouging,” most of the industries that are concerned are laughing at her. This isn’t about a few cents off a pint of milk, or a penny off a pint of beer. It’s about the entire economic ecosystem that has been turned against us by outsourcing and profligacy.

 Simply put: it is unsustainable. 

 Four more years of 'tax and spend' will leave Britain bankrupt and America not far behind. For the world’s reserve currency, that is unthinkable. At this election, ‘America First’ also happens to be the choice that will best stabilize money markets the world over, and indeed bring about a new age of decentralized control, away from the mega-banks, and toward innovative technologies that put ordinary people at the heart of the algorithm. 

It’s why President Trump has done such an amazing job bringing in people like Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr, both of whom would have classed themselves as Democrats even as recently as the last presidential election. If they can see it, surely most Americans can, too. 

 This isn’t the time for playing around with your nation’s future. You cannot afford to throw away the next four years, as we might be resigned to in Britain. Our next election is five years away. Yours is tomorrow. Save yourselves. Vote for Donald Trump.

Nigel Farage is the MP for Clacton and the leader of the Reform UK party

https://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2024/11/04/save_yourselves_vote_for_donald_trump_1069859.html

Harris' 'SNL' appearance likely violated FCC rules. There's nothing funny about it

 Will Rogers said, “Everything is funny as long as it's happening to somebody else.”

Kamala Harris' presidential campaign can attest to the truism after the vice president appeared on "Saturday Night Live" three days before the presidential election. 

Make no mistake, there is nothing funny about an apparent violation of federal law by NBC and "SNL."

With Harris and Trump locked in a close race, the appearance was a bonanza for the campaign. It also was presumptively unlawful.

Lorne Michaels said candidates wouldn't appear on SNL

A month ago, The Hollywood Reporter quoted "SNL" creator Lorne Michaels saying it was implausible that either Trump or Harris would appear on the show given the clear federal rules: "You can’t bring the actual people who are running on because of election laws and the equal time provisions. You can’t have the main candidates without having all the candidates, and there are lots of minor candidates that are only on the ballot in, like, three states and that becomes really complicated."

The "SNL" cast and crew appeared to take the opposite meaning from Michaels' warning. They decided to broadcast a virtual campaign commercial for Harris and later ask for forgiveness rather than permission.

The skit was hardly subtle in jettisoning comedy for sycophancy. Former "SNL" cast member Maya Rudolph, impersonating Harris, said she wished she "could talk to someone who’s been in my shoes. You know, a Black, South Asian woman running for president. Preferably from the Bay Area."

Harris responded, "You and me both, sister."

"SNL" used a faux comedic skit to echo the Democratic presidential nominee's campaign themes. Harris assured her doppelgänger, "I'm just here to remind you, you got this. Because you can do something your opponent cannot do. You can open doors."

Rudolph even mouthed the campaign theme for Harris, declaring, "The American people want to stop the chaos and end the drama-la." Both then espoused their "belief in the promise of America."

NBC lawyers were clearly among the viewers who were not laughing Saturday night.

On Sunday, Trump was given a chance to speak on NBC after a NASCAR race.

FCC's rules try to ensure equal time for candidates

Since 1934, the Federal Communications Commission's equal-time rule has required radio and television broadcast stations to give competing political candidates the same amount of time.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, a Republican, denounced NBC's move as a premeditated and gross violation of the equal-time regulation. He said that the federal rules were designed for this very purpose, and that NBC discarded the rules to trawl for undecided voters for Harris, particularly young voters who have been a challenge for the vice president.

"NBC has structured this in a way that's plainly designed to evade the FCC's rules," Carr told Fox News on Sunday. "We're talking 50 hours before Election Day starts, without any notice to other candidates, as far as I can tell."

The Trump campaign has confirmed that an offer was not extended to appear.

"SNL" discarded any semblance of restraint and also featured Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who is in a race with Republican challenger Hung Cao.

"In the 2016 cycle, President Obama’s FCC Chair made clear that the agency would enforce the Equal Time rule when candidate Trump went on SNL,” Carr tweeted Saturday night.

So the producers of "SNL" were not only warned by its creator as the new season began but also were warned by the FCC in 2016. They decided to ignore the warnings.

On Sunday, NBC seemed to acknowledge the violation by filing an FCC notice under the equal-time provision acknowledging that it gave free exposure to Harris and Kaine − only days before voters went to the polls.

The true joke is on the public. With virtually all the news media supporting her, Harris has fielded a united front of celebrities from Hollywood to New York. By claiming that democracy is about to die, violations of FCC rules likely seem a trivial concern.

To save democracy, there is little time for legal niceties.

Indeed, some Democrats appear to be morphing into the very people they are vilifying. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., appeared on "Real Time with Bill Maher" on Friday to declare that Democrats will accept the result of a Trump victory only if they believe it is a “free and fair election.”

Trump was widely criticized for the same position when he said, “If everything’s honest, I will gladly accept the results.”

On Maher's show, Raskin said, "We're not going to allow them to steal it in the states, or steal it in the Department of Justice, or steal it with any other election official in the country."

Whether on "SNL" or "Real Time," it is always funnier if it happens to someone else.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2024/11/04/harris-saturday-night-live-nbc-equal-time/76042193007/

NYC’s migrant chaos exposed Democrats’ failures, and could cost them the election

 I know exactly when I grasped that Donald Trump had a chance of winning Tuesday’s election: July 26, 2023, when I watched a line of people form outside Midtown’s Roosevelt Hotel.

The crowd of migrants — mostly young men and mostly Hispanic and African, with some Europeans as well — grew for six days in the sweltering heat while New York City’s government looked on helplessly.

Those enduring images demolished President Biden’s, and later Kamala Harris’, best chance to keep the White House.

The scene pulled the pin on a notion then prevalent among many voters: that progressive Democrats may be nuts, but those billed as moderate, like Biden and like New York’s governor and mayor, are capable of setting and executing responsible policy.

How did these images come to dominate national news?

First, Biden wanted to demonstrate how mean and heartless his predecessor was.

His very first day in office, Biden suspended a key Donald Trump policy that had kept the southern border from being overwhelmed by “asylum seekers,” many with no credible claim to asylum — the rule that had them “remain in Mexico” until their cases were heard.

You may revile Trump, but two things are true: The United States cannot accommodate an unlimited number of arrivals who step across the border in a disorderly fashion, and “remain in Mexico” was keeping that from happening.

Biden’s reversal sent a clear signal: America had reopened — to everyone.

As even The Washington Post acknowledged, “Illegal border crossings soared to record levels under President Biden, averaging 2 million per year from 2021 to 2023,” compared to about 800,000 in 2019.

Biden “paroled” millions of border crossers into the country, 1.3 million in 2023, easily five times Trump’s level. Millions more have evaded any detection at all by border officers and have gone uncounted.

Then, Mayor Adams put swagger before substance.

In April 2022, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, faced with the logistical nightmare of dealing with hundreds of thousands of unvetted people with no help from the feds, began regularly busing migrants to Washington, DC.

That had nothing to do with New York — but Adams, apropos of nothing other than wanting free ink, called Abbott a “coward” in response.

“Our country is home of the free, land of the brave,” Adams mused. “We do not . . . send people away who are looking for help.”

It was an open invitation — so Abbott began sending buses to Gotham.

Adams could have quickly realized that finding shelter for tens of thousands of asylum seekers was untenable. He could have petitioned the courts and the state to limit right-to-shelter rules that require the city to house all comers.

Instead, Adams began opening hotel after hotel, tent city after tent city — 212 sites now, housing 62,000 people.

Adams didn’t even try to seek to limit the right to shelter until May 2023, and then only to institute 30- and 60-day time caps.

Finally, Gov. Hochul did nothing, other than throw cash at the problem.

Hochul could have stepped in early and curtailed the right to shelter, which is a state matter.

But she let Adams deal with the mess, forking over at least $2.6 billion in state taxpayer funds to do so.

In July 2023, it all culminated in scenes of chaos at the Roosevelt Hotel, which City Hall had opened as a shelter.

That Adams allowed migrants to wait outside this high-profile Midtown property just a block from Grand Central Terminal for days — without even seeming to notice it — showed sheer incompetence.

The country’s voters were watching, though.

What did they see?

Biden, Hochul and Adams weren’t elected as “defund ICE” progressives, but as moderates (and Harris has positioned herself in this race as a moderate, as well).

Nor were the federal, state and local governments experiencing any lack of financial or operational resources.

The problem is simply that the United States does not have the ability to feed and house the entire world.

If New York, the richest city in the country, couldn’t deal with this influx of newcomers, how could other cities and even small towns manage it?

National Democrats weren’t remotely interested.

The Biden-Harris administration didn’t even begin to attempt to reduce the migrant flow until this year — and only because top national Democrats finally realized, two years too late, that the border crisis could lose them the White House.

This week, with 61% of voters viewing immigration as a critical issue, we’ll find out if it did.

If so, this election was decided two summers ago, in the middle of Manhattan.

Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

https://nypost.com/2024/11/03/opinion/nycs-migrant-chaos-exposed-voters-to-democrats-failures/

Persistent problems plague AI-assisted genomic studies, researchers warn

 University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers are warning that artificial intelligence tools gaining popularity in the fields of genetics and medicine can lead to flawed conclusions about the connection between genes and physical characteristics, including risk factors for diseases like diabetes.

The faulty predictions are linked to researchers' use of AI to assist genome-wide association studies. Such studies scan through hundreds of thousands of genetic variations across many people to hunt for links between genes and physical traits. Of particular interest are possible connections between genetic variations and certain diseases.

Genetics' link to disease not always straightforward

Genetics play a role in the development of many health conditions. While changes in some individual genes are directly connected to an increased risk for diseases like cystic fibrosis, the relationship between genetics and physical traits is often more complicated.

Genome-wide association studies have helped to untangle some of these complexities, often using large databases of individuals' genetic profiles and health characteristics, such as the National Institutes of Health's All of Us project and the UK Biobank. However, these databases are often missing data about health conditions that researchers are trying to study.

"Some characteristics are either very expensive or labor-intensive to measure, so you simply don't have enough samples to make meaningful statistical conclusions about their association with genetics," says Qiongshi Lu, an associate professor in the UW–Madison Department of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics and an expert on genome-wide association studies.

The risks of bridging data gaps with AI

Researchers are increasingly attempting to work around this problem by bridging data gaps with ever more sophisticated AI tools.

"It has become very popular in recent years to leverage advances in machine learning, so we now have these advanced machine-learning AI models that researchers use to predict complex traits and disease risks with even limited data," Lu says.

Now, Lu and his colleagues have demonstrated the peril of relying on these models without also guarding against biases they may introduce. The team describe the problem in a paper recently published in the journal Nature Genetics. In it, Lu and his colleagues show that a common type of machine learning algorithm employed in genome-wide association studies can mistakenly link several genetic variations with an individual's risk for developing type 2 diabetes.

"The problem is if you trust the machine learning-predicted diabetes risk as the actual risk, you would think all those genetic variations are correlated with actual diabetes even though they aren't," says Lu.

These "false positives" are not limited to these specific variations and diabetes risk, Lu adds, but are a pervasive bias in AI-assisted studies.

New statistical method can reduce false positives

In addition to identifying the problem with overreliance on AI tools, Lu and his colleagues propose a statistical method that researchers can use to guarantee the reliability of their AI-assisted genome-wide association studies. The method helps removing bias that machine learning algorithms can introduce when they're making inferences based on incomplete information.

"This new strategy is statistically optimal," Lu says, noting that the team used it to better pinpoint genetic associations with individuals' bone mineral density.

AI not the only problem

While the group's proposed statistical method could help improve the accuracy of AI-assisted studies, Lu and his colleagues also recently identified problems with similar studies that fill data gaps with proxy information rather than algorithms.

In another recently published paper appearing in Nature Genetics, the researchers ring the alarm about studies that over-rely on proxy information in an attempt to establish connections between genetics and certain diseases.

For instance, large health databases like the UK Biobank have a ton of genetic information about large populations, but they don't have very much data regarding the incidence of diseases that tend to crop up later in life, like most neurodegenerative diseases.

For Alzheimer's disease specifically, some researchers have attempted to bridge that gap with proxy data gathered through family health history surveys, where individuals can report a parent's Alzheimer's diagnosis.

The UW–Madison team found that such proxy-information studies can produce "highly misleading genetic correlation" between Alzheimer's risk and higher cognitive abilities.

"These days, genomic scientists routinely work with biobank datasets that have hundreds of thousands of individuals, however, as statistical power goes up, biases and the probability of errors are also amplified in these massive datasets," says Lu.

"Our group's recent studies provide humbling examples and highlight the importance of statistical rigor in biobank-scale research studies."

More information: Jiacheng Miao et al, Valid inference for machine learning-assisted genome-wide association studies, Nature Genetics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41588-024-01934-0

Yuchang Wu et al, Pervasive biases in proxy genome-wide association studies based on parental history of Alzheimer's disease, Nature Genetics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41588-024-01963-9

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-11-persistent-problems-plague-ai-genomic.html