Red Wing Daily: January 10, 2024
"the more you know...."
Links of interest today, in no particular order:
State:
The Arkansas Voter Integrity Initiative is now asking the Arkansas Supreme Court to certify the ballot language of a proposed constitutional amendment to require paper ballots and a second one that would impose certain limitations on absentee voting. We understand the Supreme Court has asked for a speeded-up response from both plaintiff AVI and defendants Secretary of State John Thurston and the state Board of Election Commissioners, which Thurston chairs. Submitted by the Restore Election Integrity Arkansas ballot committee, both proposals have so far been rejected for the 2024 ballot by AG Tim Griffin’s office.
Regions Bank pushed back on a story in American Banker that said Regions invited a “surge in check fraud with a new direct deposit policy” the Bank put into place in 2022. That policy — the Early Pay service — offered availability of customer deposits “no later than the day received,” and American Banker linked that to $135 million in check fraud losses Region experienced in April-September, 2022. Now American Banker’s story quotes Regions:
Regions says that the spike in check fraud losses was unrelated and grew out of a counterfeit check scheme and a separate stolen check scheme.
AG Tim Griffin rejected the “abortion as a right” ballot language again late last week. Deceptively named Arkansans for Limited Government, the ballot question committee advocating for the passage of the amendment said then they’d submit a third time, which they did yesterday. Don't expect them to stop until they get what they seek. After Roe v, Wade was overturned, Democrats across the country are putting this on the ballot, hoping for a result like what happened in Ohio, where it passed in 2023.
National:
Border911.com is a working group fronted by President Trump’s former Acting Director of ICE, Tom Homan, that “educates the American people about the facts of a non-secure border.” Starting with the fact that we’ve “lost operational control of our borders,” Border911 observes, “The most secure border we ever had was systematically dismantled by the Biden Administration … The historic illegal alien crisis is no longer about just illegal immigration. Its about public safety, public health, and sex trafficking of women and children at record numbers. It’s about a record amount of drugs flowing across the open border….”
The state of Oklahoma may sue drug manufacturers and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) for wrongful conduct that jacked up the price of insulin. We’ve long opposed PBMs, a third-party “in-between” you/your doctor and the pharmacy, because of the negative effect on prescription costs. With PBMs’ connection to the drug manufacturers, it’s akin to double-dipping — and Joe Voter is the one who pays.
The Washington Examiner reports that Americans purchased nearly 16 million firearms last year, per FBI background check data (subtracting background checks done for other reasons). In December alone, the 53rd month in a row of sales over 1 million, the National Shooting Sports Foundation said that there were 1,775,834 gun buys. These numbers are skyrocketing each time Biden says gun control is #1 on his agenda.
We sometimes use links from the non-conservative media; not only are they sometimes the only ones reporting on sensitive issues but many of those outlets are not paywalled. (We promise we will never send you to a paywall link!)