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Biden’s Big UN Speech Is Sure To Be A Disappointment – No nation’s leader should pointlessly antagonize, but leadership is not primarily about getting along. It is about unabashedly defending the nation’s interests, coaxing allies into joint action to defend common interests, and confronting governments who threaten them. Sadly, Biden doesn’t seem interested in leadership so much as he is in the approbation of the international community. So don’t look for Biden to champion America in Turtle Bay – it’s too Trumpian. Far easier to regurgitate what the audience wants to hear. It may get applause, but at the cost of U.S. influence. When an administration does not believe that America is exceptional, with a special role in the world, we should not be surprised when other nations see the United States as, in the words of President George H.W. Bush, just “another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call, somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe.” Heritage experts: Brett Schaefer and Jim Carafano

Biden's drone disaster gives Americans a bigger problem to worry about – Biden is no Obama. Even though he tries to mimic some of Obama’s policies, he is even weaker when it comes to foreign policy. As vice president, Biden famously opposed the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, fearing the blowback if it didn’t work. Biden added to the mess of the messy Afghanistan withdrawal by initially prohibiting the military from putting more troops in to ensure we could get more safely out. Now, chastened and embarrassed by the disastrous Aug. 29 strike, no one should expect Biden to be more emboldened to go in after America’s enemies. In all likelihood, he will get more risk-adverse. "Over the horizon" is likely to look more like "hiding behind the horizon." At the same time, Biden has placed all his bets on engaging, empowering and enabling the Taliban as the best way to keep Afghanistan under wraps. That won’t end well. Biden’s way of war is likely to just create a lot more space for global terrorism threats to reconstitute in Afghanistan and elsewhere—and Americans will likely reap the consequence of his misjudgments. Heritage expert: Jim Carafano

Biden Administration Whistles Past the Border as Crisis Worsens – It seems the Biden administration’s real problem with the border crisis is that some media outlets have dared to extensively cover it. If you were only plugged into mainstream liberal media coverage, you’d probably have little idea that anything at all is happening at the border. A historic flood of people illegally pouring into our country during a pandemic is back-page news, apparently. But for those who’ve been paying attention it’s hard to deny that the situation at the border has become an unmitigated disaster, almost from the moment that Biden became president. The number of border crossings and apprehensions have hit numbers not seen in decades. In fact, in July, the number of border apprehensions hit the highest point in 21 years, with more than 200,000 people arrested. This, despite the fact that July is typically a slow month as far as border crossings typically go, due to the extreme heat. Heritage experts: Jarrett Stepman and Mike Howell

The latest government report: 15 million mail ballots in 2020 that are unaccounted for – The new PILF report also shows an alarming number of mail ballot rejections. Sometimes the error is the lack of a signature or other mistakes made by legitimate voters; other times, it is something less innocent. Regardless, in 2020, over 560,000 mail ballots were rejected, many, no doubt, cast by legitimate voters who were effectively disenfranchised. If a voter makes an error while casting his or her ballot in person at a polling place, election officials can help the voter cure the mistake and cast a new ballot. But mail voting disenfranchises legitimate voters who make mistakes that could have been corrected. This report reveals the potential for errors and fraud is extremely high with mail ballots and automatic voter registration. Of course, some in Congress are trying to mandate both automatic vote by mail and automatic voter registration. To make matters worse, too many local prosecutors do not seem interested in investigating and prosecuting election fraud cases. Other local jurisdictions do not have the time or resources to investigate these cases. And rather than investigating and prosecuting potential cases of election fraud, the bureaucrats at the Biden Justice Department appear to be wasting their time attacking common-sense election integrity measures such as voter ID requirements or audits. Heritage expert: Hans von Spakovsky

More Radical Than Roe: House Abortion Bill Would Repeal Existing Laws, Prohibit Future Pro-Life Laws – Americans broadly support policies that the sweeping Women’s Health Protection Act would disallow. Rather than prohibit pro-life policies where they exist, Congress should pursue policies that protect innocent unborn human lives—including those not yet born—and society should support women who face challenging or unplanned pregnancies. Heritage expert: Melanie Israel

Amazon’s senseless bid to bury my exposé of Black Lives Matter – Kudos to Amazon for doing the right thing in the end, but the questions remain: Was the ban the result of an individual who just disagreed with the content of the book? Let’s not forget that Amazon has actually banned the sale of my former colleague Ryan Anderson’s “When Harry Met Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment.” Amazon’s original statement was Orwellian. It said the ad for my book “contains book/s or content that is not allowed. Content that revolves around controversial or highly debated social topics is not permitted. Please remove this content from your ad.” That beggared belief, sounding as if the tech giant doesn’t want social issues to be debated. What democratic society can subsist without debate? But wrecking American society is exactly BLM’s leaders’ goal, as they tell us. My book merely provides them and their trainers, allies and funders with the platform that the media, and Big Tech, have for too long denied them. In this sense, I pay them the compliment of taking them and their words seriously. Heritage expert: Mike Gonzalez

Biden’s Reckless Vaccine Mandate Risks Severe Economic Dislocation, Higher Prices – The most controversial part of Biden’s mandate is instructing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to issue an emergency rule requiring employers with more than 100 employees to mandate their workers to get vaccinated or get tested weekly. That could affect some 80 million private sector workers. It would be the first time OSHA has ever mandated a vaccination, and it’s intended to signal to companies that the days are numbered for vaccine choice. This White House is “done with persuasion,” as Reuters put it. Beyond the callousness of threatening millions of Americans’ ability to feed their family because Biden doesn’t like their health choices, this mandate could affect all Americans by worsening critical labor shortages that are already driving higher prices, breaking supply chains, and leading to shortages on grocery shelves. If Biden’s mandate forces just 10% of targeted workers to quit, that could mean millions more unfilled positions. Heritage expert: Peter St. Onge

We shouldn’t return to welfare as we knew it – Welfare reform was a success, yet that policy could be all but permanently overturned by President Biden and congressional Democrats. That’s the reality of the new child “tax credit” (really, welfare grants for people paid through the IRS) included in the American Rescue Plan, passed by Congress and signed by the president in March. This child credit, which used to require work, was transformed into a child allowance for one year. If Congress passes the House’s $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, the child allowance will be essentially made permanent. If the Biden child tax credit is made permanent, the pre-welfare reform system will be resurrected. The transformed child tax credit sends parents a monthly check regardless of whether they work. It pays about 85 percent of what welfare paid in 1995, yet it also expands the income eligibility, so millions of additional families are receiving it. Combined with other federal transfer payments, including cash welfare itself, low-income families who don’t work can now receive far more than they could have before the ’96 reforms. The inevitable result, proven before 1996, will be fewer struggling families striving to rise through employment. Heritage expert: Leslie Ford

The Truth About the So-Called Women’s Health Protection Act: A Radical Proposal to Mandate Unfettered Abortion Access in Federal Law – In the past decade, policymakers at the state level have enacted hundreds of life-affirming policies, from informed consent provisions to prohibitions on inhumane late-term abortions to policies that divert taxpayer resources from the abortion industry. Pro-abortion legislators in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate are advocating for legislation called the Women’s Health Protection Act. In fact, this far-reaching proposal would mandate an abortion regime far more radical that the status quo by endangering long-standing and future state and federal laws that protect unborn children’s lives, women’s health and safety, and medical providers’ consciences and religious liberty and that also protect taxpayers from being forced to fund the abortion industry. Heritage expert: Melanie Israel