The secret U.S. effort to track, hide and surveil the Chinese spy balloon
Nearly a year later, Biden administration officials say the threat was exaggerated, but U.S. military officials contend that too little has been done to detect high-altitude spy balloons.
China ousted the commander of its missile force, a move that analysts said was intended to ensure loyalty to leader Xi Jinping in the arm of the military that controls nuclear-tipped missiles pointed at the U.S. and would play a pivotal role in any attempt to seize Taiwan through force.
The removal of Li Yuchao, a veteran of the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force, marked an abrupt end to an unusually short stint in a key military post and comes days after China replaced its foreign minister in another decision shrouded in mystery.
Li, who was appointed commander in January last year, hadn’t been seen in public for several months. His ouster was confirmed at a ceremony a day before China celebrated the 96th anniversary of the founding of the PLA, which falls on Tuesday.
In a Tuesday commentary marking the anniversary, the official PLA Daily newspaper urged all military personnel to uphold Xi’s status as the “core” of the Communist Party leadership, and to persist with efforts to enforce discipline and fight corruption within the armed forces.
Alternatively, Xi is worried about a coup — though the two are not mutually exclusive.
Mr. Biden was unlucky in his son, but he also allowed a family environment in which milking connection to Joe was de rigueur. Paralysis seizes our elite over what has ensued. Suppose a journalistic tick-tock were written today similar to 1969’s “On Borrowed Time,” Leonard Mosley’s microscopic account of events between the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and the invasion of Poland in September 1939. Today’s version would include: Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine, President Trump’s impeachment for asking about Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine, the laptop episode in which Russia was framed as an imaginary culprit to change the subject from Hunter’s dealings in Ukraine.
What did Vladimir Putin make of these events? How might they have figured in his bet that the U.S. would let Kyiv fall into his pocket? Maybe one day he’ll tell us.
Mr. Biden ultimately summoned the NATO muscle memory to stand up to Russia’s invasion, and this column congratulated him. But Republicans in an election year can rightly ask what else exactly was an American president supposed to do? They can also ask what Mr. Biden failed to do. His surrender on Nord Stream 2, after Mr. Trump quashed the pipeline, sent a message of appeasement. In the war’s opening days, his administration seemed unduly eager to cede Kyiv to the Russian advance and spirit President Zelensky to safety.
At some point, questions should also be asked of Barack Obama. Why allow Mr. Biden to control the Ukraine portfolio when he wouldn’t restrain his son? Was Biden family corruption the reason you skipped over your veep and endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016?
The story here is all the more remarkable for being untold. In short order, the Hunter mess has managed to taint our intelligence community, the FBI, IRS and now the Justice Department. If news sense is not completely dulled by neurotic compliance, some editors must also be starting to see the outlines of another approaching debacle, in which skeletons from the Biden closet elect Mr. Trump.
It took only moments for the Democrat media complex to anoint the January 6 breach and riot at the U.S. Capitol Building an “insurrection.” As if beckoned by an unseen force, narrative builders dutifully lined up to receive the official wafer on their tongues, and voilà! “Trump supporters” who had never committed an act of violence at years of peaceful and crowded rallies were eligible for a 20-year prison stretch.
First they came for the cars. Then the gas stoves. Next was meat and dairy products. The latest on the chopping block? Wood-fired pizza. These types of tactics grab the headlines, but make no mistake: climate alarmism courses through the veins of the highest levels of government leaders and regulators.
As President Joe Biden would say, “I’m not joking, folks.”
Biden apologists have tried to minimize that transaction as a “lie and try” case, which they say is often not prosecuted. But such non-prosecution (though it shouldn’t happen) occurs because of what you’d infer from the “try” part — i.e., the liar got caught and failed to obtain the gun. Hunter’s case, to the contrary, is a lie and succeed case. He got the gun. What’s more, he was then seen playing with it while cavorting with an “escort” (see the New York Post’s pictorial, if you’ve got the stomach for it). Shortly afterwards, he and his then-paramour — Hallie Biden, the widow of his older brother — managed to lose the gun near a school (it was later found by someone else).
Those are the kinds of gun cases that get charged by the Justice Department even if the suspect hasn’t, in addition, committed tax felonies by dodging taxes on the millions of dollars he was paid, apparently for being named Biden. Yet after refusing for years to appoint a special counsel despite the five-alarm conflict of interest attendant to investigating the president’s son ( . . . and family . . . and the president himself), the Biden Justice Department is permitting Hunter Biden to dispose of the case with misdemeanor tax charges that will allow for a probation sentence, and diversion — essentially, no prosecution — on the gun felony that would result in imprisonment for most Americans who engaged in similar conduct.
Quite a deal.
Last week, Trump was flirting with 60 percent in GOP primary polling after being indicted, with a 45-point lead in some surveys. Democrats seem bound and determined to get him to 70.
The moral is that democracy is all well and good, but only so long as the voters select a candidate we approve of. Somehow, Donald Trump was elected without the permission — indeed, over the strenuous objections — of the permanent bureaucracy. The whole Trump-Russia narrative was concocted to correct that mistake.
At the end of the day, the Durham report contains few real revelations. Anyone who has been paying attention already knew most of what he details. But it does dot some I’s and cross some T’s. And what will happen now? People will pore over the the report and shake their heads and cluck their tongues. James Comey will be busy cashing his royalty checks and nattering on about his “higher loyalty.” Barack Obama will continue to enjoy his palatial residence on Martha’s Vineyard. Perhaps Joe Biden will be pushed into an adult nursery somewhere so that Michelle Obama can continue the legacy.
Will “those responsible” be “held accountable?” If you think the answer is yes, then I have a nice bridge in Brooklyn I would like to sell you.
The people enjoying these free digs aren’t privacy-conscious jet-setters, but the secrecy surrounding them might be comparable: They’re some of the millions of migrants who have illegally crossed into the U.S. since the Biden administration relaxed most border controls.
No one knows exactly how many people have poured across the southwestern U.S. border since President Biden took office, or where they’ve gone since. The official number of encounters by Customs and Border Patrol stands at 5.2 million people, logged over the last two full federal fiscal years and fiscal 2023 through March. But that number is imprecise because it includes repeat encounters with the same people and omits the many who slipped into the country unnoticed by border agents.
Under President Biden, the U.S. smashed past the 200,000 monthly encounters mark for the first time in July 2021 and it has repeatedly topped that record in the months since. By comparison, in fiscal 2020, which ended a month before Biden’s defeat of President Trump, the U.S. averaged 38,174 monthly encounters at the border, according to CBP figures.
Because of an official lack of transparency, all those people and the circumstances by which they have arrived and remained have made it hard to take stock of the historic influx. Through midnight flights and buses from the border to far-flung locales, the administration has made it difficult to identify where the migrants are now living and receiving services. Also unclear are the costs associated with the arrivals.
But flares have been sent up – especially over immigrant sanctuary cities like New York, Denver and Chicago, which have long promised to house migrants. While those cities are providing housing and other services for a small fraction of the recent migrants, the costs are significant for these budget-strapped metropolises.
In January the state of Illinois turned down Chicago’s request for more funds, saying it had already spent close to $120 million on its “asylum seeker emergency response” – or roughly $33,000 per migrant.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has asked for more than $500 million in federal aid, while pegging the city’s spending at between $2 billion and $3 billion.
Other data points of the opaque costs of Biden-era illegal immigration include Massachusetts’ estimate that it will need $28 million to launch a program to provide driver’s licenses to undocumented residents. The state is seeking a share of the omnibus spending bill passed by Democrats in December 2022 when they controlled both houses of Congress, which included $800 million for cities grappling with the influx.
These numbers are incomplete in part because it is hard to separate the added cost of recent migrants from costs for the millions of undocumented immigrants who were in the country before the recent surge.
Illegal migrants cost taxpayers over $150 billion a year, according to this estimate – up 30% since 2017.
Federation for American Immigration Reform
A March study by the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that, after accounting for taxes paid by undocumented migrants, they cost taxpayers over $150 billion per year – a 30% increase since 2017.
Yet FAIR acknowledges the problem of fixing costs has become more difficult, given the record-breaking numbers of illegal crossers in the past two and a half years and efforts by some government agencies to mask their spending.
“We often had to grapple with a paucity of easily accessible official data,” the report notes. “Many state and federal entities do not publish detailed data that they collect, making it difficult to reliably separate illegal aliens from citizens of lawful immigrants. We have also encountered cases where the current administration has revoked or restricted documents published by previous administrations in order to reduce the visibility of data which shines a negative light on their immigration policy agenda.”
Those totals also involve far more than simple food and board. To arrive at its staggering sum, FAIR includes estimates of the costs in education, health care and law enforcement.
“The irony is not only are these sanctuary jurisdictions turning to Washington with their hands out, but that they still refuse to join with governors like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis in demanding that the federal government take decisive steps to stanch the influx of new migrants,” FAIR spokesman Ira Mehlman told RealClearInvestigations, referring to the Republican chief executives of Texas and Florida, respectively. “The obvious hypocrisy of declaring yourself a sanctuary jurisdiction while complaining about the costs and burdens associated with it are undeniable.”
Groups that favor more relaxed border security measures, such as the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and the American Immigration Council, did not respond to RCI’s request for comment; the liberal Brookings Institution declined to comment.
Cities housing many migrants have a hard time estimating costs. New York Mayor Adams has asked for more than $500 million in federal aid, while pegging the city’s spending one time at $2 billion and another time at $3 billion. Those are the sorts of bills New York has racked up putting what they call “asylum seekers” or “migrants” in hotels.
And Adams, whose requests sometimes include the claim “we are all in this together,” wants to spend even more. This month, he floated the idea of paying college tuition for illegal immigrants if they attend New York state schools outside the city.
Using Adams’ own number of some 40,000 illegal immigrants that New York City has foot the bills for, it means taxpayers are spending roughly $150,000 per person to host new arrivals. In March, City Hall scaled back its count of the number of its immigrants to 12,700, which meant the taxpayers’ were spending nearly $5 million a day to take care of them, according to a New York Post analysis.
The Office of the New York City Public Advocate, which helps immigrants navigate the benefits available to them, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Adams declined to address questions about spending, pointing instead to various links the city maintains for immigrants and noting the city has expanded a New York County Supreme Court decision in 1981 regarding shelter for homeless people to cover immigrants.
Whatever the current official number of illegal immigrants New York is dealing with it is but a fraction of those that have poured into various Texas communities along the border.
Officials at El Paso’s City Hall, one of the ground zeroes in the illegal immigration crush, did not respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment on its spending. But Gov. Abbott said his Operation Lone Star, launched in March 2021, has “allocated more than $4 billion to do the federal government’s job and secure the border,” Abbott’s spokesman Andrew Mahaleris said.
Many migrants like these who crossed into Texas soon found themselves on buses elsewhere.
AP
It was Abbott who began busing illegal immigrants to some of the sanctuary cities that declare themselves so welcoming, such as New York, Denver and Chicago.
“Texas began busing migrants to sanctuary cities last April to provide relief to our overrun and overwhelmed border communities,” Mahaleris said. “Mayors Adams, [Muriel] Bowser and [Lori] Lightfoot were all too happy to tout their sanctuary city statuses until Texas bused over 16,900 migrants, collectively, to their self-declared sanctuary. Instead of complaining about dealing with a fraction of the border crisis Texas communities see every day, these hypocrites should call on President Biden to take immediate action to secure the border – something the president continues failing to do.”
Lightfoot, departing as mayor of Chicago after her defeat in February, first turned to Illinois for millions to help the Windy City cope with its several thousand illegal immigrants Texas provided. In January, however, the state turned her down, saying it had already spent close to $120 million on its “asylum seeker emergency response.”
That response came last September when Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker issued an “emergency disaster proclamation.” His proclamation and the words of other state leaders presented a schizophrenic picture in which they portray Illinois as a “welcoming beacon of hope” and complain they weren’t given “official advance warning.”
Most of the money Illinois spent – more than $61.5 million, or roughly $31,000 per immigrant – went to contracts with organizations or staff “who provided on site case management and other services at multiple locations.”
Illinois dropped another $8 million on “interim housing,” nearly $4 million on “health screenings for asylum seekers, and more than $29 million on “hotel, transportation and housing costs,” according to their breakdown.
Nowhere did Pritzker or Lightfoot question the wisdom of the Biden administration ‘s border policies, and there was no indication they understood the burdens that had been put on border cities and states. Instead, the unmistakable message was that if illegal immigrants were going to be sent where the “welcoming beacon” shone, other people should pay for it.
“They can say all that is for free, but now they’re finding out they can’t have a welfare society and an open border,” said Lora Reis, the director of the Border Security and Immigration Center at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Denver held a budget “transparency and equity” meeting earlier this month at which Chief Financial Officer Margaret Danuser said the city will have spent between $17 million and $20 million on housing and other services for between 5,000 and 6,000 illegal immigrants between Dec. 2022 and this June. The city hoped to get federal taxpayers to reimburse it for $2.8 million, and a Colorado state fund for another $3.5 million.
Those figures show Denver spent about the same as Chicago at roughly $33,000 per immigrant, costs that are still far below New York City’s.
“None of these sanctuary mayors or governors have ever asked for a secure border. It was always just, ‘Feds, give us money!’” said Reis.
LGBTQ-Activist Mayor Linked to Buttigieg Arrested for Child Porn
The Democratic mayor of College Park, Maryland, who is openly homosexual and fancied himself a role model for LGBTQ youth, was arrested on dozens of counts of possessing and distributing child pornography on Thursday morning.
President Biden devoted most of his State of the Union address on Tuesday night to celebrating what he says is a long list of legislative and economic achievements—spending on social programs and public works, subsidies for computer chips, even more subsidies for green energy, and a strong labor market. But if he’s done so much for America, why does most of America not seem to appreciate it?
That’s the contradiction stalking his Presidency as he enters his third year and plots a likely re-election campaign. The disconnect is clear enough in the polls. His job approval rating average has climbed to 44.2% in the RealClearPolitics average, which should be better with all of that supposed good news. Gallup has it at 41%. Mr. Biden’s RCP average job approval on the economy is 38%.
The latest Washington Post/ABC poll is even worse for the President. Some 41% of Americans say they’re worse off financially than when Mr. Biden became President, while only 16% say they’re better off. Most people—62%—say Mr. Biden has accomplished either not very much or little or nothing. That includes 22% of Democrats.
And here’s the really bad news for Mr. Biden. Some 58% of Democrats say they’d prefer a different party nominee for President in 2024, and he even loses a head to head matchup with former President Trump 48%-44%. . . .
The President’s biggest problem is that all of his legislative victories haven’t delivered the benefits he promised. The $1.9 trillion Covid bill in March 2021 added so much cash to the economy that it helped to trigger an historic inflation. The result is that most Americans haven’t had a raise in their income after inflation in two years. This takes a shine off the low unemployment rate every time people hit the grocery store. They can see that the nearly $500 billion in spending and tax subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 had nothing at all to do with reducing inflation.
Americans also observe a fraying social consensus that has them worried about the country. Crime may not be as high as it was in the 1990s, but it has risen sharply in big cities. The record migrant surge across the border would be less worrisome if Mr. Biden seemed to care about stopping it. The fentanyl scourge isn’t his fault, but its breadth betrays a troubling decay in values.
As for foreign policy, Americans can see that the world is becoming more dangerous and its rogues more brazen.
Americans aren’t pleased, because he’s not a success, all claims by the Biden Administration and the media — but I repeat myself — notwithstanding.
The engine of the U.S. economy—consumer spending—is starting to sputter.
Jazzlyn Millberry in Pickerington, Ohio, has been visiting multiple grocery stores to look for the best deals./ANDREW SPEAR FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Retail purchases have fallen in three of the past four months. Spending on services, including rent, haircuts and the bulk of bills, was flat in December, after adjusting for inflation, the worst monthly reading in nearly a year. Sales of existing homes in the U.S. fell last year to their lowest level since 2014 as mortgage rates rose. The auto industry posted its worst sales year in more than a decade.
It’s a stark turnaround from the second half of 2020, when Americans lifted the economy out of a pandemic downturn, helping the U.S. avoid what many economists worried would be a prolonged slump. Consumers snapped up exercise bikes, televisions and laptop computers for schoolchildren during lockdowns. When restrictions were lifted, they rushed back to their favorite restaurants and travel destinations.
And they kept spending, helped by government stimulus, flush savings accounts and cheap credit, even as inflation picked up. Faced with four-decade-high inflation last year, Americans outspent it. Through most of 2022, consumer spending growth exceeded price increases by about 2 percentage points.
Now the forces that helped keep spending high are unwinding, while inflation remains elevated. The share of monthly income Americans set aside for savings was 3.4% in December, down from 7.5% a year earlier and from a record high in April 2020. Credit-card interest rates have been rising, and Federal Reserve officials have signaled that they plan an additional quarter-percentage point increase to the central bank’s benchmark rate this week. That would bring the rate to between 4.5% and 4.75%, from near zero at the start of last year.
Annual inflation, as measured by the consumer-price index, remained above 5% in December for the 19th straight month, the longest such streak since the early 1980s.
Consumer spending accounts for roughly 70% of the economy. A downshifting consumer is a key reason that business and academic economists polled by The Wall Street Journal, on average, put the probability of a recession in the next 12 months at 61%. However, many economists say, the U.S. might avoid a recession entirely if spending patterns stabilize.
One factor making forecasting more difficult: While unemployment is trending at a half-century low, big companies including Amazon.com Inc., Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and Microsoft Corp. have begun to cut jobs.
“The last bastion of strength is the labor market, but I don’t think it can withstand all these other forces,” said Nationwide Chief Economist Kathy Bostjancic.
Recent layoff trends worry Benjamin DeLong, a 32-year-old customer-account manager at an industrial manufacturer in southern Minnesota. His savings rose to $3,700 during the pandemic, thanks in part to government stimulus. He is now down to about 3 cents.
Mr. DeLong said he had to dip into his savings to cover the rising costs of his groceries, utilities and car insurance. He has found some relief in his grocery bills since he and his partner decided last year to purchase some pigs, jointly with other families, to be raised on a relative’s farm. Their portion of meat yielded nearly 150 pounds, saving them about $500 on groceries, Mr. DeLong estimated.
The possibility of layoffs, he said, is “part of the crunch that I’m having to consider now. What’s going to happen if I no longer have an income?”
Shoppers in New York./PHOTO: GABBY JONES FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
So far, jobs have remained plentiful and wages continued to rise in the face of Federal Reserve tightening. Unemployment was a low 3.5% in December. Hourly wages were up a robust 4.6% year-over-year. There were about 10.5 million unfilled jobs available in November, according to the Labor Department, a sign that demand for labor remained strong.
“Households had a ton of comfort they don’t normally have about their job prospects,” said Marianne Wanamaker, an economist at the University of Tennessee. “They knew they could get a job tomorrow if they wanted to, and that remains mostly true.”
Still, there are signs of labor-market weakness. Employers are shedding temporary workers at a fast rate, and people who lose their jobs are taking longer to find new ones. Meanwhile, the number of hours worked a week has declined for two straight months, according to the Labor Department, resulting in a slowdown in workers’ take-home pay.
Mikhail Andersson, owner of First Class Tattoo in New York City, has seen signs of weakening demand. After it was cleared to reopen from lockdowns in the summer of 2020, his business was slammed by customers flush with unemployment insurance payments and stimulus checks.
In mid-November of last year, Mr. Andersson started getting calls from clients who had booked daylong tattoo sessions, saying they could only afford shorter ones or pulling out altogether. Mr. Andersson, who specializes in tattoo projects that often take five or six all-day sessions to complete, had 15 cancellations for full-day slots in December.
“In my 15 years doing this, I’ve never seen that—people calling up and saying they don’t have the money to spend right now or can only afford an hour because their current situation is pretty bad,” he said.
For now, First Class Tattoo isn’t likely to slash prices because the baseline level of demand remains strong. Some 250 clients are still on the wait list.
Also weighing on many consumers: The rapid increase in rates in the past year, tied to Fed tightening, has pushed the cost of all types of debt higher.
Mortgage rates reached a 20-year high last fall. Some 57% of consumers were concerned about making housing payments in the fourth quarter, according to a survey by Freddie Mac, up from 48% in the third quarter.
The increases are gradually starting to slow down consumer spending, though it might take a while before the effect is fully realized.
“We’re probably going to have higher interest rates around for quite a while. You would think eventually that would dampen consumption, although that we haven’t had the full effect yet,” said Harvard University economist Kenneth Rogoff.
Credit-card balances were up 15% on the year in the third quarter, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the largest increase in more than two decades.
Additionally, tens of millions of Americans are set to start or resume making payments on student loans later this year, after the Supreme Court rules on President Biden’s student-debt cancellation plan. Payments have been frozen since March 2020, and are scheduled to begin again 60 days after litigation is resolved or the program is implemented.
Many taxpayers will get smaller refunds when they file their returns in the coming months because Congress didn’t extend the breaks put in place at the height of the pandemic.
Most Americans who lose their jobs can expect unemployment payments for six months or less, at a fraction of their former paychecks, the same as before pandemic programs kicked in. Pandemic programs allowed Americans to receive unemployment payments for as long as 18 months, and in some cases paid workers more than their paychecks.
The previously generous jobless benefits and direct federal payments to households caused the share of income Americans save every month to hit new highs in 2020. Since then, the saving rate has fallen to roughly 3% of monthly income, from more than 30% at the start of lockdowns. In 2019, the year before the pandemic, the rate was 8.8%.
The large stock-market declines over the past year also alarmed consumers, including Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Sara Laor, who is 57 years old. Ms. Laor said the declines depleted the holdings in her 401(k) and IRA accounts by nearly 40%.
Over the past year, her family has had to dip into their savings to pay for essential car and plumbing repairs. They are putting off other expenses, like buying a new car, and have given up ordering in meals.
She’s trying to spend more cautiously, shunning recipes involving pricey eggs and buying more canned food.
“Everything I do just feels like I’m a lot poorer: Can I do this or can I do that?” she said.
U.S. factories, shippers and importers are pulling back, a sign they anticipate less demand from Americans in the months ahead.
Inbound volumes at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in California were down 20.1% in December from a year earlier, and have been behind 2019 levels since August. A little over a year ago, backlogs at ports were drawing President Biden’s attention.
Nicholas Hobbs, chief operating officer of J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc., which manages truck and rail shipments, said the company has seen demand fall off for big and bulky products, including appliances, furniture and exercise equipment—although off-price retailers with discounted inventory are shipping more.
Jazzlyn Millberry, 33, has been looking for big ways to make cuts. One day last fall, her banking app informed her that the cost of one month’s groceries and household goods for her family of four had risen to $900, from about $600 or $700.
“I find myself now going to three or four different grocery stores just to get the best deals on things to save on costs,” said Ms. Millberry, a health-insurance claims analyst in Pickerington, Ohio.
On one recent outing, she stopped at Kroger for eggs and meat, Aldi for produce, Sam’s Club for her children’s snacks, and Target for toilet paper.
Even as she has cut back on groceries, restaurants, hairstyling and facials, her credit-card balances have grown in the past several months. She said she started making only the minimum required payment on her credit cards.
Gwynn Guilford and Paul Page contributed to this article.
