Authored by Betsy McCaughey via The Epoch Times,

America’s renters - more than one-third of the nation’s households - are in for trouble.

Left-wing politicians are demanding rent regulation from coast to coast. Wherever it is adopted, the result will be a disastrous reduction in the rental housing supply, leaving renters desperate for places to live.

New York is the poster child for the failures of rent regulation. The U.S. Supreme Court is currently mulling a challenge to the constitutionality of the city’s rent regime.

Whatever the justices decide, the public needs to consider less destructive, more targeted ways to help low-income people pay for housing. The court of public opinion needs to consider these facts.

Fact No. 1: Rent regulation isn’t targeted to the poor.

In New York, there’s no means test. What you need is luck or connections. The mean income of a rent-stabilized apartment dweller is $47,000, but census data show that tens of thousands of them earn more than $150,000 per year. Some occupants use what they’re saving on rent to pay for a weekend place in the Hamptons or New England.

The pols don’t object—a sure sign they’re calling for rent regulation to help themselves politically, not the poor.

In New York, 44 percent of rental apartments are regulated by the Rent Guidelines Board (RGB), established in 1969, which sets the maximum amount by which landlords are allowed to raise the rent. Those limits apply to all buildings of six or more units built before 1974.

In 2022, the RGB set the maximum rent hike at 3.25 percent on one-year leases and this year at 3 percent. Never mind that last year, fuel costs to heat the buildings soared by 19 percent and overall inflation hit 8.3 percent.

The decisions are political, not economic. Many Democratic politicians vilify building owners as “greedy landlords” and depict themselves as the champions of the downtrodden. It’s a scam.

Fact No. 2: Winners and losers.

The winners are the lucky few with rent-regulated apartments and the pols who count on an army of tenant activists to turn out at the polls. The losers are the 56 percent of renters who don’t score a regulated apartment and have to scour neighborhoods for an unregulated place that they can afford. They’re paying more.

Why? Because regulation causes some landlords to walk away, reducing the overall supply of apartments. The laws of supply and demand mean rents go up. New Yorkers in unregulated apartments are paying the highest rents in the United States for a one-bedroom apartment. They're the real victims, and they should be furious.

Yet the left-wing press pretends that rent control offers only benefits. The New Republic warns that the Supreme Court challenge threatens “laws that have benefitted the city’s tenants for generations.” Sorry, untrue—only some tenants, and not always the neediest.

It’s economic madness. The saner way to help those who need assistance paying rent is with a voucher. We offer the needy SNAP debit cards to help them pay for groceries. No one slaps price controls on grocery stores or designates certain stores as “regulated,” forcing them to sell at below cost.

Yet New York forces certain landlords to pay what should be a public cost shared by all, an argument made to the court.

Fact No. 3: The Marxist fantasy that rent regulation will help the poor is spreading across the United States and Europe as well.

Maine and Minnesota have enacted laws allowing municipalities to impose rent regulations. In November 2024, California voters will be asked to approve a proposition allowing local governments to add additional restrictions to the state’s existing rent caps.

The laws of supply and demand are international. Berlin froze rents in 2019, and the rental supply plummeted, according to the Ifo Institute, a think tank.

Yet London Mayor Sadiq Khan is calling for freezing rents for two years. London provides housing vouchers to the poor—a smarter approach—but when the city froze the voucher amounts during the COVID-19 pandemic, fewer apartments were available in the price range. The answer is to raise the voucher amount. Freezing rents will only make the shortage worse.

Ignore the demagogues. The evidence is in: Rent regulation is a political scam. There are better ways to help Americans afford a place to live.

In an interview last night with Fox's Bret Baier, former CIA Director Leon Panetta humiliated himself as he defended the letter that he and 50 other so-called 'intelligence officials' signed suggesting that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.

Even more unsettling were his comments that he believes it could still be Russian disinformation.

“That letter was used in the debate, I haven’t asked you this but do you have regrets about that now looking back, knowing what you know now?” Baier asked.

Panetta explained that he was “extremely concerned about Russian interference” in the run up to the 2020 Presidential Election between then-former-Vice President Joe Biden and then-President Donald Trump.

He claimed that intelligence agencies discovered that “Russia had continued to push disinformation across the board.”

He said that he wanted to “alert the public” about the “disinformation efforts” to influence the election.

“And frankly, I haven’t seen any evidence from any intelligence agency that that was not the case,” Panetta said.

“You don’t think that it was real?” Baier asked.

“I think that disinformation is involved here. I think Russian disinformation is part of what we’re seeing everywhere,” Panetta responded.

“I don’t trust the Russians, and that’s exactly why I was concerned that the public not trust the Russians either.”

And finally, Baier asked if Panetta had any regrets over how he handled the story.

“No, I don’t have any regrets about not trusting the Russians,” Panetta said.

As Jonathan Turley pointed out,Panetta simply refused to acknowledge:

(1) American intelligence quickly debunked the claim and said that there was no evidence of Russian disinformation behind the laptop,

(2) the emails contained in the laptop were quickly authenticated by the other parties,

(3) the FBI authenticated the laptop,

(4) Hunter Biden has since sued over the use of his laptop, and

(5) the media has independently authenticated the laptop.

This was the man in charge of our CIA.

As a reminder, it has also been shown that the Biden campaign and associates coordinated the letter.

Watch the lying liar lie below...

Here's the clip of Leon Panetta telling Bret Baier he has no regrets about the MIS-information that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Russian disinformation operation. He wouldn't get this question on the lefty networks. pic.twitter.com/rHRDRsaS4H

— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) October 13, 2023

We give the last word back to Turley who summarized the former spook's self-immolation perfectly: "Panetta has become the personification of the economic theory of path dependence. No matter how much countervailing evidence is presented to Panetta, he still refuses to accept the authenticity of the laptop."

However, in order to admit to these facts, Panetta would have had to admit that he was a willing or unwitting dupe of the campaign. It is easier to simply continue to claim that this could all be the invention of the Russians.

Yet, as Turley exclaims, Panetta is still sought for his advice on other intelligence matters as he continues to repeat disproven claims because the truth is simply too costly on a personal level to acknowledge.

What do we call false claims that are repeated despite being repeatedly debunked and disproven? Oh, yea, disinformation.

Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times (Emphasis ours),

In a settlement agreement submitted on Oct. 3, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, and Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro agreed to settle the pair of lawsuits—known as U.S. Navy SEALs 1-26 v. Biden and Colonel Financial Management Officer, et al. v. Austin—which challenged the legal basis of the military-wide vaccine mandate.

The two cases were brought by servicemembers from all U.S. military branches, including numerous officers and several members of the elite U.S. Navy SEALs. The Navy SEAL plaintiffs initially filed their lawsuit nearly two years ago in October 2021 after President Joe Biden ordered that all U.S. troops and other executive branch employees be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Military servicemembers have raised numerous objections to the military COVID-19 vaccine mandate, including claims that the various military branches routinely rejected requests for religious accommodations to the mandates. Plaintiffs have also raised health concerns over the relatively condensed timeline under which the various COVID-19 vaccines were developed and then granted approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

While the various COVID-19 vaccines were originally made available to the general public under emergency use authorizations, the FDA eventually granted full approval to the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine version, later marketed as Comirnaty. President Biden introduced the vaccine mandate shortly after the FDA granted full approval for Comirnaty, but the lawsuits argued that the FDA-approved vaccine often wasn't actually available to servicemembers, meaning that the military vaccine mandate effectively required service members to take versions of the COVID-19 vaccines that didn't have full FDA approval.

Last year, Republican lawmakers introduced a provision in the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that repealed the military's vaccine mandate. President Biden ultimately signed the 2022 NDAA into law, despite objecting to the provision reversing his military vaccine mandate.

Liberty Counsel, a religious liberty nonprofit that represented military plaintiffs in the two cases, celebrated the Oct. 3 settlement agreement.

"The military COVID shot mandate is dead," Liberty Counsel founder and Chairman Mat Staver said in a statement. "Our heroic service members can no longer be forced to take this experimental jab that conflicts with their religious convictions."

The $1.8 million settlement will be split between the two cases, with $900,000 being paid out for SEAL 1-26 v. Biden and the same amount being paid to the plaintiffs in Colonel Financial Management Officer, et al. v. Austin.

"Through our daily work with service members in every branch, we have had the privilege of knowing some of the finest people who love God and love America," Mr. Staver said. "These heroes should not have been mistreated by our own government. At the same time, we have come to realize that many of the high-ranking members of leadership, the Pentagon, and the Biden administration need to be replaced. Collectively, they dishonored the brave men and women who defend our freedom. We stand ready to defend our defenders of freedom if any religious discrimination occurs in the future.”

Approximately 8,400 U.S. military servicemembers were involuntarily separated from the military as a result of the COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

The majority of servicemembers received a general discharge, as opposed to a more favorable honorable discharge. Servicemembers separated under a general discharge can be barred from rejoining the military and don't have full access to educational benefits under the GI Bill.