U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika was right to blow the whistle on this cushy plea deal proposed for Hunter Biden by U.S. attorney David Weiss.

On rare occasions, the federal judge charged with reviewing a plea agreement will reject the terms of the agreement. In a number of such cases, the disparity between the guidelines for sentencing and the agreed punishment is so great that it catalyzes the judges review. The terms must pass this judicial sniff test.

Hunter Biden’s doozy of a plea deal over tax and gun charges was ripe for rejection.

Simply put: That deal stunk. And the judge said, “Huh, I don’t know about this.”

What we’ve learned from the hearing raises a host of additional questions.

Bargaining away even token jail time on the tax charges goes beyond lenience into outright unfairness, as does putting the gun charge out of the judge’s review if she accepts the proposal. Signing off on this odoriferous deal would have undercut the very promise of equal justice that sentencing guidelines were created to safeguard.

I’m hoping Judge Noreika presses back hard as the hearing continues. 

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We hear a lot about the science deniers today….
 
But: Who are the real science deniers?
 
Well, unfortunately, in 21st-century post-Roe America, there are people who deny the basic scientific reality that the entity in the womb is an unborn human being.
 
But the message from science is clear and unequivocal:
 
The fetus in the womb is a human baby. 
 
And philosophically, morally, that human being should be treated equal because that unborn human being is our equal.
 
It seems obvious, yet abortion advocates contort logic and their own conscience to deny the evidence.
 
It’s not an overreach of government to protect the natural right to life of every human being, born and unborn.
 
The science tells us this. Our own minds and hearts tell us this.
 
To believe otherwise is to deny science and our own humanity.

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The CEO of the business media company, Fortune, just said it's time for businesses to stop talking about ESG—environmental, social and governance—i.e. politicized investment. 

No, he didn’t say companies should stop doing it, only that they should stop calling it that. 

But why? 

If you meet someone and find out that every decade or so he has changed his name, you might want to know why. Politicized capital keeps changing its name: socially responsible investment (SRI), corporate social responsibility (CSR) and most recently, ESG. Ideas which bear good fruit, don't have to keep shedding their skin and changing their names. 

By whatever name, the imposition of political positions on companies using other people’s money is a bad idea. There’s an old adage that by the time a company is on the front page of Fortune, it’s time to sell the stock. 

Well, Fortune has been front-paging ESG quite a lot in the past year, once again signaling it’s time to drop a bad idea. 

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Covid’s over, so the people at the New York Times need another reason to be afraid—and for you to be afraid, too. So last week, they ran an article telling their readers, “how to determine whether it’s safe to leave the house.” That’s because of the supposed dangers posed by heat waves, flash flooding and smoke across the country.

What nonsense. If writers at the New York Times were journalists instead of activists, they’d add some context. Although heat-related deaths are rising, far more people die from cold than from heat.  

But the agenda is to advance the climate change narrative—even though a recent UN report found the world’s temperature hasn’t risen for the last 15 years. The goal is to frighten us into accepting intrusive nanny state regulations they claim— without evidence—will improve global warming.

But Americans don’t frighten easily. It’s not news that summer is hot.

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If it’s all true, it’s by far the biggest scandal in US history. At least nine members of the Biden family — including Joe Biden himself — have allegedly received at least $10 million dollars from corrupt foreign actors. One country involved is America’s chief adversary, China.

IRS whistleblowers have stated that many in government, including the Justice Department, worked to ensure no investigation of Hunter Biden would ever implicate the President.

It all sounds pretty newsworthy. But these disclosures have made hardly a ripple on the pond of mainstream media coverage.

Of course, the media leans left. But there’s more to it than that.

This time, the media’s credibility is at stake. The roadmap to the corruption was on Hunter Biden’s laptop – the laptop it insisted, before the election, was Russian disinformation. By covering the story now, the media must confess its own corruption and complicity then.

And so the silence continues.

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A recent article published by the pro-ESG business publication, Fortune says that “ESG detractors have basically won.” A full half of Fortune 500 CEOs now believe ESG issues are “unduly impacting business decisions.” 

Reminder: ESG refers to environment, social, governance investing, an approach originated by the United Nations by which policies rejected in the political process get imposed on companies by Wall Street Firms such as Blackrock, using your money. 

It was working … for a while. They moved corporate America into the culture wars and charged you extra fees to do it. 

It’s becoming increasingly clear that they pushed too hard and people like you are waking up. Now ESG is a tarnished brand. The struggle to get business back to business is not over yet. But you're making progress. Keep it up.

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The Supreme Court is one of the few American institutions not captured by the left. That’s why the left is trying to delegitimize it.

Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse are spearheading Supreme Court ethics legislation. This comes after completely manufactured ethics scandals aimed at Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. They’ve been spread by the usual media suspects, including ProPublica, which itself has been paid by a pro-court packing activist group, ironically enough.

Fortunately, the bill has virtually no chance of passing. If senators really believe a Supreme Court justice is corrupt, the Constitution has already provided a remedy: they can impeach him or her.

But that’s not what this is really about. The Democrats’ true agenda is to undermine the current Supreme Court just to facilitate their plan to pack it. They’re willing to destroy Americans’ faith in their institutions just to seize power. Pathetic.

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Free speech at our nation’s public universities is constrained today, especially for Conservatives. That means learning from a diverse range of thought is diminished and removed from academic and intellectual credibility.

Earlier this year at Arizona State University, Dennis Prager, Charlie Kirk and others were invited to speak on the topic of Health, Wealth, and Happiness. 39 professors wrote a public letter condemning Prager and Kirk, claiming Prager—author of “Why the Jews”—and Kirk were white nationalists. The event did take place, but with tremendous security measures. Then the two administrators who put the event together were fired.

ASU thinks this was all fine, but defamation and punitive consequences for freedom of speech at a public university is not freedom of speech—it is punishment and retribution for speech. And unconstitutional.  Dennis and I were fortunate enough to testify to this effect this week before the Arizona legislature. 

There should be consequences for ASU’s deplorable behavior.

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President Biden has been working to remake the US economy, all in the name of climate change. The price of energy—and everything else—has skyrocketed. The US is no longer energy independent. Gas stoves are under siege. We’re being pushed toward expensive and inconvenient electric cars. New regulations aimed at air conditioners are on the way.

Our quality of life is being eroded even as nothing is demanded from China—far and away the world’s greatest polluter.

Now, a United Nations report reveals that the world’s temperatures haven’t even risen for the past fifteen years. And leaked documents seen by the Associated Press prove politicians urged scientists to cover up that very important fact.

Global warming hysteria provides a convenient pretext for politicians to seize enormous amounts of power. We saw it during Covid. We shouldn’t be so quick to give in.

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Stuart Epperson—the co-founder of the Salem Media Group—has died this week at the age of 86.

I have been a part of Salem since 2000 and Stu has been a formidable presence in this media corporation each and every step along my way and every Salem employee’s way. Sometimes, I’d hear that message in person—at a corporate meeting of managers or at a special event in various places across the nation, or just a morning phone call. But even when he wasn’t in person, it was well known:

Stuart wanted the corporation he co-founded with Ed Atsinger to make a difference, to be salt and light. He wanted all that we are doing in the conservative space to be a compliment to where Salem started—in the Christian space.

Stuart believed that the true hope for this nation was found in Christ alone.

He’d want very much for all to know the joy he now has today—joy of a man made right with God as a result of Christ’s work on all of our behalf.

Our hearts go out to Nancy, his wife, his four children, his twenty-four grandchildren—his extended family.

Well done, good and faithful servant, Stu.

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