Gov. Noem of South Dakota Addresses Joint Session of SD Legislature on the Southern Border

America is being overwhelmed by en masse illegal immigration. South Dakota is directly affected by this invasion. We are affected by cartel presence right here on our tribal reservations, by the spread of drugs and human trafficking, and by the drain on our resources.

Gov. Noem Holds Press Conference on the Southern Border

CEO Zuckerberg Will Get $700 Million in Income From Meta’s New Dividend—and a Hefty Tax Bill

SEE: https://www.marketwatch.com/articles/meta-dividend-zuckerberg-taxes; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:
Mark Zuckerberg is set to receive $700 million in annual dividends from Meta Platforms’ new payout, which could make him one of the highest earners in California—and one of its largest taxpayers.

Meta Platforms surprised Wall Street Thursday by initiating a 50-cent quarterly dividend, or $2 a share annually. Zuckerberg, Meta’s founder and CEO, owns 350 million shares, a 13% economic stake with 61% voting control since nearly all the stock he owns is supervoting B shares, according to Meta’s 2023 proxy statement.

With the new dividend, Zuckerberg will receive about $700 million in dividends a year. In recent years, he has received a salary of just $1 annually and no bonus—with his $27 million in compensation in 2022 largely related to personal security expenses.

New York tax expert Robert Willens tells Barron’s that Zuckerberg faces a 23.8% federal tax bite—20% federal tax on dividend income and a 3.8% Medicare surcharge—plus the top 13.3% state income-tax rate in California. 

States unlike the federal government generally offer no preferential tax rate on dividend income versus earned income.

“Since state and local taxes are no longer deductible for federal purposes, he’s looking at a 37 percent “all-in” tax levy on these dividends,” Willens tells Barron’s in an email.

Zuckerberg’s Meta stake is now worth about $168 billion with the shares jumping 21% to $479 Friday as investors reacted to an earnings beat in the fourth quarter and favorable financial guidance. The stock has hit a record in trading Friday. Zuckerberg now is fourth on Bloomberg’s list of the world’s wealthiest individuals behind only Elon Musk, LVMH’s Bernard Arnault and Jeff Bezos.

Barron’s wrote that Alphabet may follow Meta’s lead and initiate a dividend and that other big non-dividend payers like Amazon.com and Tesla could also follow suit.

Alphabet has resisted paying a dividend, preferring to return cash to holders via a large stock repurchase program. It is a prime candidate for a dividend given its ample earnings and free cash flow.

Barron’s has argued that tech giants like Meta and Alphabet can do both—buy back stock and pay dividends. Meta bought back $20 billion of its stock in 2023, and the dividend will cost it about $5 billion annually.

Tech companies that don’t pay dividends have often said it’s due to prioritizing spending elsewhere, particularly in areas of growth. For investors, a dividend is increasingly seen as a sign of management confidence in the business.

Another unstated reason that founder-led companies may not have wanted to pay dividends is that the founders with large equity stakes would face sizable tax bills on the dividends. 

Companies with powerful founders—in either a board or management role—that don’t pay dividends include Alphabet, Tesla, Amazon.com, and Berkshire Hathaway.

Berkshire’s policy has enabled Buffett to minimize his annual tax bill. Buffett released information on his 2015 taxes after he was criticized by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. Buffett said that he had $11.5 million of income (probably dividend income on stocks that he holds personally) during 2015 and paid $1.8 million in federal income taxes.

Buffett’s stake in Berkshire is now worth over $125 billion with the stock hitting a record high Friday. The Class A shares are up 0.5% at $584,385. With Buffett’s plan to donate his Berkshire stake after his death, he likely will have paid comparably little in taxes over a lifetime despite accumulating enormous wealth.

If Berkshire paid a 1% dividend, Buffett would get over $1 billion of income annually and would pay 30% of that income in federal and state taxes on that.

Did Iranian Agent Serving as Pentagon Chief of Staff Cause Death of 3 Soldiers?

How were terrorists able to perfectly time their drone attack without inside information?

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/did-iran-agent-serving-as-pentagon-chief-of-staff-cause-death-of-3-soldiers; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:


In September 2023, Pentagon Chief of Staff Ariane Tabatabai, an Iranian immigrant, was accused of having worked as an agent of the Tehran regime. Dissident media outlets produced emails that allegedly showed that Tabatabai had joined an initiative by the Iranian Foreign Ministry to coordinate operations and that she had even run her congressional testimony on Iran’s nuclear program past the head of an Iranian Foreign Ministry think tank.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center and Front Page Magazine had been among those to take the lead in warning about the potential danger posed by her and enemy agents in the Pentagon.

Tabatabai had served under Robert Malley, Biden’s Iran Envoy, who had been suspended from the Obama campaign for his backchannel contacts with Hamas, and has been under investigation for mishandling classified documents. But the emails appeared to show that she had personally worked for Iran and its influence operations aimed at the U.S. government.

Despite that she continued to be promoted until she is now the Chief of Staff to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC).

In January 2024, Iranian-backed terrorists launched their most successful single attack against an American base to date. The target was the living quarters where U.S  military personnel were stationed on an obscure support base in the Jordanian desert known as Tower 22.

While the drone attack would normally have been intercepted, the Iranian-backed terrorists had precisely timed the arrival of their drone to match that of an American drone returning home.

In the confusion, the Islamic terrorist drone was not intercepted and 3 American military personnel were killed and over 30 more were wounded. And it could have been worse.

The Iranians had known where the living quarters on the base were, what our procedures for drone arrivals and departures were, and when one of our drones would be coming back.

How were the Islamic terrorists able to precisely coordinate the arrival of their drone and ours?

Tower 22, located close to Syria and Iraq, was one of the bases that we helped Jordan build up during the Syrian Civil War. Under Obama, it was a key element for supporting the Syrian Sunni rebels while under Trump, it focused on fighting ISIS forces in Syria. Syrian Sunnis fleeing the country passed by, some were allowed to enter Jordan, while most, including some Sunni Jihadis, had to remain in what became known as the Rukban refugee camp.

The proximity of the Rukban camp to Tower 22 and the nearby Al-Tanf base would provide plenty of options for “refugees” to monitor and track the movements of American drones.

But Ariane Tabatabai’s presence in Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict raises another troubling possibility. Tower 22 was used as a jumping off point by special operators and the U.S. presence in that area falls under the shadow of the SO/LIC office.

Special operators had been stationed at Al-Tanf and the SO/LIC office would have potentially had access to a great deal of information about what was going on at Al-Tanf and Tower 22.

That indeed is why Tabatabai likely ended up in the office, not despite her ties to the Iranian regime, but because of them. During the campaign against ISIS, the United States came to rely on some of the same Iranian-backed Shiite Jihadist groups to do the heavy lifting on the ground.

Tabatabai could have been seen as a potentially useful backchannel for an office that was likely unofficially coordinating with Iran anyway. That would explain her initial role as a senior advisor.

But by elevating a former Iranian agent to a chief of staff of an office overseeing special operations, the Biden administration, the Pentagon and the SO/LIC may have been gambling that they could control that backchannel and that would have been a catastrophic mistake.

Late last year, 30 Senate members had urged the Pentagon to suspend her security clearance.

“Iran continues to threaten U.S. military personnel in the Middle East and remains intent on assassinating American citizens here in the United States. Given these facts, we find it simply unconscionable that a senior Department official would continue to hold a sensitive position despite her alleged participation in an Iranian government information operation,” they warned.

“Dr. Tabatabai was thoroughly and properly vetted as a condition of her employment with the Department of Defense,” a Pentagon spokesman claimed. “We are honored to have her serve.”

And the cost of that DOD decision may have been quite high, not just in security, but blood.

We don’t know how exactly Iran’s terror groups were able to closely coordinate the arrival of their drone with ours, but it’s hard to believe that it could have happened without either sloppiness, close observation or inside information. Operational security had clearly been compromised and in such a situation it’s the fundamental duty of the Department of Defense to examine its procedures, tighten its security and look into Iranian agents inside its offices.

There should be no place for current or former agents of an enemy government which is actively attacking and killing Americans inside the Pentagon. And yet Tabatabai is still there.

And she’s not alone.

Nor is she even the only Pentagon Chief of Staff with Islamic terror ties. Front Page Magazine’s ‘Disloyal Military’ investigations into enemy agents and wokeness within the military not only cast light on Ariane Tabatabai, but also on Yousra Fazili, the Chief of Staff for the Pentagon Comptroller, as well as other hostile figures in the government and the defense industry.

Yousra Fazili, the daughter of Kashmiri Muslim immigrants who studied Islamic religious law or sharia at Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, a hub of Jihadist thinking, had testified in Congress in support of her cousin who had been arrested for his support for Islamic terrorists in India.

Fazili had worked for the Qatari ambassador, an ally of Iran, and which serves as a state sponsor of Hamas, and she had represented the International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations known as a Muslim Brotherhood operation, co-founded by figures tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and Osama bin Laden, and she has cheered on pro-Hamas protesters.

Despite multiple congressional letters and warnings from Senate and House members, the Department of Defense has done nothing to clean its house and the clock is ticking.

We do not know if inside information led to the deaths of 3 Americans in the Iranian attack at Tower 22, but it is only a matter of time until foreign enemy agents inside the government end up passing information to Iran, Qatar or other Islamic terror states that gets our people killed.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center will continue investigating the enemy within and working to hold them and their enablers in the government accountable before it’s too late.

Under Biden, We Don’t Know Who’s Coming into the U.S.

And the consequences are dire and real.

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/under-biden-we-dont-know-whos-coming-into-the-us; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

Pierre Lucard Emile, an illegal alien from Haiti, raped and beat a developmentally disabled person in Boston, according to prosecutors. Emile arrived at the port of entry in Brownsville, Texas “where he was deemed inadmissible and issued a notice to appear,” according to ICE.

In 2023, Peruvian national Emilio Vasquez-Santamaria was charged with murder after being arrested in connection with the killing of U.S. citizen in Eagle Pass, Texas. According to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), he crossed illegally at Eagle Pass in May 2023 and was released with a Notice to Appear for 2025.

A new January 2024 report from the U.S. House Judiciary Committee revealed that since January 20, 2021, the Biden administration has released more than 3.3 million illegal aliens into the U.S.

Who are they? What are their intentions? We simply don’t know. We do know there are at least 617,607 aliens on ICE’s non-detained docket who have criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. That means more than half a million criminal aliens are in U.S. communities, posing a serious threat to Americans in every state.

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, ICE released 68.1% of the aliens transferred to them by CBP for detention.

In Chicago, Jaime Ubaldo Obando-Andrade, an illegal alien from Ecuador, stole thousands of dollars worth of merchandise from a Macy’s store. Upon investigation it was discovered that he had a fake Washington state driver’s license and had cut off an ICE electronic monitoring device. Among the more than 21,000 migrants the sanctuary city has taken in, the Chicago Police Department reported arresting 686 Venezuelans in 2023, which represents a 11,333% increase in arrests of Venezuelans since 2021. Further, between October 2023 and January 2024, police in Oak Brook, a Chicago suburb, arrested 47 migrants for retail theft and burglary.

New York, another sanctuary city overwhelmed by the migrants it invited in, has also seen an increase in crime. Data from the New York Police Department shows that robbery, felony assault and grand larceny auto increased in October 2023 compared to the same time one year prior.

These are just a few examples of the increase in crime being committed by aliens processed and released by federal agents.

The data is clear: President Joe Biden’s policies incentivize increased illegal immigration, allow for easier processing of illegal aliens, result in more illegal aliens into U.S. communities, and repatriate or deport fewer criminal aliens than any other administration. These are all problems that he could fix—if he cared to.

The fact is that a quick process, release, and a notice to disappear undermine any semblance of border security. What we have is a human smuggling superhighway into every state in our nation, and little awareness of who many of these people actually are—or  where they end up.

A citizen journalist interviewing migrants crossing the border in Arizona just showed the world what failed border policies import into America look like. When asking a migrant who they were, the man’s response was: “You are not smart enough to know who I am. But soon you’re gonna know who I am.”

There is no way to know how many security threats are strategically placed across the country today. But one thing is for sure, just as this one migrant said: Soon we will know who they are.

Selene Rodriguez is a Policy Director for the Secure and Sovereign Frontier campaign at the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

One of the Canadians Iran hired to murder dissidents on US soil was from the Hells Angels

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/02/one-of-the-canadians-iran-hired-to-murder-dissidents-on-us-soil-was-from-the-hells-angels#; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

Iran regime proxies are active in America and Canada. Two months ago in Canada, British Columbia lawyer Ramin Joubin, who has has been “building a database tracking the number of regime insiders operating in Canada and threatening people who speak out against Iran,” stated that his file has “700 names right now that either have temporary residence, permanent residence or citizenship that are in Canada and that are somehow regime affiliates.”

In fact, a major proxy of Iran, Hizballah, has an  external operations group, Unit 910, which was shown to be more active in Canada than in the United States. Unit 910 is also known as Islamic Jihad, or the Black Ops of Hizballah. The North American influence of the Iranian regime is dangerous to dissidents and a sad commentary on the security concerns of both governments, which also both maintain open-door immigration policies. This latest plot to murder two residents of  Maryland also shows up how the regime is recruiting non-regime thugs, such as this Hells Angel, to execute its plans.

More on this story. “Iran allegedly hired Canadians to conduct assassinations on U.S. soil, according to indictment,” by Alexander Panetta, CBC News, January 29, 2024:

Two Canadians planned to conduct assassinations in the U.S. on behalf of Iran’s intelligence services, according to allegations in a newly unsealed indictment.

The suspects are accused of plotting to shoot a man and woman living in Maryland, one of them a defector from Iran.

The charges unsealed Monday by the U.S. Department of Justice include details of the alleged plot, including the sum of the would-be killers had charged for the job: $350,000 US.

News of the charges emerges at a time of acutely high tension with Iran, as the U.S. threatens retaliation after three U.S. military members were killed in an attack by an Iran-backed militia.

The indictment identifies one Canadian suspect as Damion Patrick John Ryan, a full-patch member of the Hells Angels criminal gang who allegedly assembled a team of gunmen in late 2020 and early 2021. He was allegedly working with another Canadian, Adam Richard Pearson, who was living illegally in Minnesota at the time….

Sherri Ann Charleston, Diversity and Inclusion Head at Harvard, and Plagiarist

SEE: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2024/02/sherri-ann-charleston-diversity-and-inclusion-head-at-harvard-and-plagiarist#; republished below in full, unedited, for informational, educational, & research purposes:

Did Sherri Ann Charleston really think she would get away with it? After the plagiarism scandal brought down her friend and protector Claudine Gay, she must have wondered if anyone would start to look into her own “scholarship.” And now the Washington Free Beacon, that samaritan organization, has done exactly that. Sherri Ann Charleston turns out to be even more of a plagiarist than Claudine Gay. Will Harvard do the right thing, and fire her for her violation of the most basic of academic norms, or brazen it out, and hope that eventually people will lose interest? What the academic world most needs now is a a dozen Journals of Plagiarism Research, that will investigate complaints made by those who claim their work has been plagiarized, and publish its findings, a sure way to terrify into silence would-be plagiarists incapable of doing their own work.

More on Sherri Ann Charleston, the Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Harvard, can be found here: “Not Just Claudine Gay. Harvard’s Chief Diversity Officer Plagiarized and Claimed Credit for Husband’s Work, Complaint Alleges,” by Aaron Sibarium, Washington Free Beacon, January 30, 2024:

It’s not just Claudine Gay. Harvard University’s chief diversity and inclusion officer, Sherri Ann Charleston, appears to have plagiarized extensively in her academic work, lifting large portions of text without quotation marks and even taking credit for a study done by another scholar—her own husband—according to a complaint filed with the university on Monday and a Washington Free Beacon analysis.

The complaint makes 40 allegations of plagiarism that span the entirety of Charleston’s thin publication record. In her 2009 dissertation, submitted to the University of Michigan, Charleston quotes or paraphrases nearly a dozen scholars without proper attribution, the complaint alleges. And in her sole peer-reviewed journal article—coauthored with her husband, LaVar Charleston, in 2014—the couple recycle much of a 2012 study published by LaVar Charleston, the deputy vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, framing the old material as new research.

Through that sleight of hand, Sherri Ann Charleston effectively took credit for her husband’s work. The 2014 paper, which was also coauthored with Jerlando Jackson, now the dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education, and appeared in the Journal of Negro Education, has the same methods, findings, and description of survey subjects as the 2012 study, which involved interviews with black computer science students and was first published by the Journal of Diversity in Higher Education….

The school is also facing an ongoing congressional probe over its handling of antisemitism and its response to the plagiarism allegations against Gay, which Harvard initially sought to suppress with legal saber-rattling. Half of Gay’s published work contained plagiarized material, ranging from single sentences to entire paragraphs, with some of the most severe lifts coming in her dissertation. Though Gay stepped down as president on January 2, she remains a tenured faculty member drawing a $900,000 annual salary….

It is enraging that Gay continues to receive that huge presidential salary. No one has offered an explanation as to why that was done. Was it a bribe, to keep Gay from claiming some kind of “racism” was involved in her forced resignation? And how long will she continue to be paid such a grotesque and unmerited sum?

Charleston also lifted language from Louis Pérez, an historian at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Alejandro de la Fuente, an historian at Harvard; and Ada Ferrer, an historian at New York University, among other scholars.

Charleston cites each source in a footnote but omits quotation marks around language copied verbatim. The omissions violate Harvard’s Guide to Using Sources, a document produced for incoming students, which states that quotation marks are required when “you copy language word for word.”…

The main difference between the papers is a long section in the 2014 article about “culturally responsive pedagogy theory,” which the authors say their findings support. Both articles are littered with the tropes of progressive scholarship, including a disclaimer about “positionality”—the authors assure readers that they reflected on their own “racial, gender, and socioeconomic status”—and a lament that computer science is a “White male-dominated field.”

Both also criticize the idea that “computing sciences is for nerds, only for White people, [and] only for geniuses.”

Such language is typical of the diversity initiatives Charleston oversees. Since 2020, her office has pumped out a stream of materials that bemoan the “weaponization of whiteness,” discuss the ins and outs of “white fragility,” and urge students to “call out” their peers for “harmful words.” One message, signed by Charleston herself, was titled “A Call to Dismantle Intersecting Oppressions.”

We must continue to work against systematic oppression in all its forms—racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and more,” she wrote….

How appropriately diverse and inclusive this Head of Diversity and Inclusivity turns out to be, save for whites, of course, whose mere being creates “systematic oppression in all its forms.”

But let’s not lose sight of the main problem: will Sherri Ann Charleston get away with her many examples of plagiarism? Will her recycling of her husband’s paper of 2012, presenting it as new research — which goes beyond plagiarism but, as Peter Wood says, constitutes academic fraud — be enough to sink her career at Harvard, or will Harvard itself insist on keeping her on, and becoming, even more than it has already, the laughingstock of the academic world?