Red States Generously Funding Pregnancy Centers After Dobbs

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Red States Generously Funding Pregnancy Centers After Dobbs

(Headline USA) After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, red states are looking to put even more taxpayer money into organizations that convince mothers not to kill their babies and support mothers and their children after birth.

The efforts show pro-lifers are addressing families’ social and financial needs beyond the pregnancy, contradicting the leftist trope that they only care about unborn children.

The Republican-controlled Kansas Legislature is considering allocating millions of dollars in state funds to pro-life centers that encourage people to bring their pregnancies to term by offering free pregnancy tests and sonograms, as well as counseling and parenting classes taught by volunteers.

The Legislature is also considering offering millions more in income tax credits for donors supporting crisis pregnancy centers.

Committees also held hearings Thursday on proposals for a 70% income tax credit to donors who support anti-abortion centers, with a cap of $10 million in total credits.

The proposed legislation is similar to a longstanding Missouri law that provides income tax credits to donors supporting pregnancy centers. Arizona has such a law, and Mississippi’s Republican House speaker is trying to expand a cap on tax credits to $10 million from the $3.5 million authorized last year.

Arkansas and Oklahoma are considering adding similar tax credits, according to the National Right to Life Committee.

In Missouri, donors to pregnancy centers have received $15 million in total state tax credits over the past five years, and one state analysis estimates the centers served about 43,000 people last year.

Pro-lifers have operated pregnancy centers for decades, and the practice of conservative-led states offering financial aid to them predates Dobbs — the decision in June overturning Roe v. Wade.

Kansas already provides grants to programs that provide prenatal care and encourage people to carry their pregnancies to term. But it spends less than $339,000 in a state budget of $24 billion on the program — and made only two grants totaling less than $74,000 to anti-abortion centers.

Now, some pro-lifers talk about emulating Missouri’s more than $8 million annual funding, plus the income tax credits.

In Lawrence, 28-year-old Korbe Bohac is still visiting a pregnancy center nearly 8 months after her son Winston was born. She told legislators the classes and counseling make her a better, more confident parent — and helped preserve her mental health. She called it “a safety net.”

One such organization, The Insight center, has two sonogram nurses, and a doctor and radiologist sometimes volunteer their time. But services depend mostly on about 50 volunteers. The $340,000 annual budget is mostly supplied by private donations, but the organization received a community development grant in 2014 to launch parent education programs.

Smith said she believes the proposed tax credit would increase donations, helping Insight start a maternity home for people without shelter.

“We’re trying to build strong individuals and strong families. And isn’t that what we all want?”

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

Dems Destroy Tradition for Racial Pandering

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Dems Destroy Tradition for Racial Pandering

 (Headline USA) The Democratic Party on Saturday approved reordering its 2024 presidential primary, replacing Iowa with South Carolina in the leadoff spot as part of a major shake-up meant to empower Black and other minority voters critical to its base of support.

Although more changes are possible later this year, the formal endorsement by the Democratic National Committee during its meeting in Philadelphia is an acknowledgement that the start of the 2024 primary will look very different from the one in 2020.

States with early contests play a major role in determining the nominee because White House hopefuls struggling to raise money or gain political traction often drop out before visiting states outside the first five. Media attention and policy debates concentrate in those areas, too.

The new plan was championed by Joe Biden. The reconfiguring would have South Carolina hold its primary on Feb. 3, followed three days later by New Hampshire and Nevada, which is swapping the caucus it used to hold in favor of a primary.

Georgia would vote fourth on Feb. 13, followed by Michigan on Feb. 27, with much of the rest of the nation set to vote on Super Tuesday in early March.

Biden wrote the DNC rules committee in December, saying, “We must ensure that voters of color have a voice in choosing our nominee much earlier in the process and throughout the entire early window.” That committee approved the new lineup, setting up Saturday’s vote.

The move remakes the current calendar, which saw Iowa start with its caucus, followed by New Hampshire and then Nevada and South Carolina. The Republican Party has voted not to change its 2024 primary order, meaning the campaign has already began in Iowa.

“The DNC has decided to break a half-century precedent and cause chaos by altering their primary process, and ultimately abandoning millions of Americans in Iowa and New Hampshire,” Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel said in a statement Saturday.

Four of the first five new states under Democrats’ new plan are battlegrounds, meaning the eventual party winner would be able to lay groundwork in important general election spots. That’s especially true for Michigan and Georgia, both of which voted for Republican Donald Trump in 2016 before flipping to Biden in 2020.

The exception is South Carolina, which hasn’t backed a Democrat in a presidential race since 1976, leading some to argue that the party shouldn’t be concentrating so many early primary resources there. But the state’s population is nearly 27% Black, and African American voters represent Democrats’ most consistent base of support. Iowa and New Hampshire are each more than 90% white.

Some Black members of the DNC said those arguing to abide by tradition could be seen as implying that states with larger African American populations were incapable of handling the responsibility of going early in the primary.

“If we’re really a family, it means some of y’all got to shift to make room at the table for others,” said Leah Daughtry, a DNC rules committee member from New York.

Iowa Democratic Party chair Rita Hart argued that Republicans in her state were already accusing Democrats of “hav[ing] turned their back on Iowa and on rural America.”

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

Judge Says Drug Addicts Must have Access to Guns

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Judge Says Drug Addicts Must have Access to Guns

(Headline USA) A federal judge in Oklahoma has ruled that a federal law prohibiting people who use marijuana from owning firearms is unconstitutional.

Lawyers for Jared Michael Harrison had argued that their client’s Second Amendment right to bear arms was being violated by a federal law that makes it illegal for “unlawful users or addicts of controlled substances” to possess firearms.

Harrison had been charged after being arrested by police in Lawton, Oklahoma, in May 2022 following a traffic stop.

During a search of his car, police found a loaded revolver as well as marijuana.

Harrison told police he had been on his way to work at a medical marijuana dispensary, but that he did not have a state-issued medical-marijuana card.

His lawyers had argued the portion of federal firearms law focused on drug users or addicts was not consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, echoing what the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled last year in a case known as New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.

Federal prosecutors had argued that the portion of the law focused on drug users is “consistent with a longstanding historical tradition in America of disarming presumptively risky persons, namely, felons, the mentally ill, and the intoxicated.”

U.S. District Judge Patrick Wyrick in Oklahoma City agreed with Harrison’s lawyers, ruling on Friday that federal prosecutors’ arguments that Harrison’s status as a marijuana user “justifies stripping him of his fundamental right to possess a firearm … is not a constitutionally permissible means of disarming Harrison.”

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

Tenn. Leftists Want to Replace Columbus Day with Super Bowl Monday

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Tenn. Leftists Want to Replace Columbus Day with Super Bowl Monday

(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Leftists from the Tennessee government proposed to trade holidays and replace Columbus Day with a new holiday of Super Bowl Monday.

On Wednesday, Democrats Senator London Lamar and Representative Joe Towns Jr. introduced their bill to suggest that Tennessee should get rid of any recognition of Columbus Day and replace it with a Super Bowl Monday holiday to celebrate the game, which is always on Sunday, according to Breitbart.

“As introduced, removes Columbus Day as a legal holiday; designates the first Monday after the Super Bowl as a legal holiday,” the bill’s summary reads.

The Democrats say that the bill would change Tennessee Code “by deleting the language, ‘the second Monday in October, known as ‘Columbus Day,’” and inserting the language, “the first Monday after the Super Bowl, known as ‘Super Bowl Monday.’”

However, it seems that this bill exists only to attack Columbus Day which celebrates the person who is so hated by the left.

In 1937, President Franklin D Roosevelt chose Oct. 12 as the day to honor the Italian explorer who many say helped “discover the New World,” thus making Columbus Day a national holiday. However, even though it is a federal holiday, despite Lamar and Towns Jr. trying to denigrate Columbus Day with their bill, the holiday is not an official state holiday already in Tennessee because nothing is closed on or near Columbus Day in the state.

This means that the whole purpose of the bill is just to get rid of Columbus Day because it became popular for people on the left to constantly criticize Christopher Columbus.

According to Breitbart, some people still argue that replacing Columbus Day with Super Bowl Sunday is not a bad idea because so many Americans attend parties on Sunday day, which results in their production suffering at school and work the following day.

NYC Waives School Vax Requirement for Illegal Kids

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NYC Waives School Vax Requirement for Illegal Kids

(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) The “rules for thee but not for me” principle perfectly applies to those who don’t follow the rules, with the children of illegal immigrants being able to go to school in New York City without providing proof of various childhood vaccinations that are mandatory for other — legal — children to attend the school.

This revelation also shows one of the many issues that New Yorkers need to deal with as city officials struggle to accommodate illegal immigrants that have arrived in recent months, according to the Post Millennial.

Since the summer of 2022, an estimated 11,000 children of illegal immigrants have been enrolled in schools operated by the city’s Department of Education, the New York Post reported.

In New York City, students in K through 5 are required to be vaccinated against various diseases like diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, measles, mumps, rubella, Hepatitis B, and chicken pox.

As previously reported by the New York Post, many parents are concerned that illegal immigrants not being required to vaccinate their children before them entering schools could lead to outbreaks of entirely preventable diseases. One such example happened at Simon Baruch Middle School in Manhattan which recently reported a case of chickenpox.

“When you are talking now about hundreds of children entering a school and coming from countries where we know the same childhood vaccinations are not available, it’s hard to not see where vulnerable families could be put at risk,” the parent warned.

As of Sept. 2022, DOE policy states that asylum-seeking children — who came into the country illegally — cannot be denied entry into city schools even if their parents can’t provide evidence of them being vaccinated. According to the policy, the immigrants are given thirty days from the enrollment “to provide evidence of vaccinations or be in the process of acquiring vaccinations.”

REPORT: AI Chatbot Less Likely to Flag Anti-White, -Male, -Republican Hate Speech

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REPORT: AI Chatbot Less Likely to Flag Anti-White, -Male, -Republican Hate Speech

(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) OpenAI, the company that created the headline-grabbing artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, has an automated content moderation system designed to flag hateful speech, but this system treats speech differently depending on who is insulted, with anti-white, -male, and -Republican hateful speech being mostly ignored.

According to a study conducted by research scientist David Rozado, the content moderation system used in ChatGPT and other OpenAI products is designed to detect and block hate, threats, self-harm and sexual comments about minors. Rozardo fed various prompts to ChatGPT involving negative adjectives ascribed to different demographic groups based on race, sex, religion and other markers.

The researcher found out that the software favors some demographic groups over others, according to the Daily Caller. For example, the software was far more likely to flag negative comments about Democrats than Republicans, and was more likely to do the same thing with liberals and conservatives, with anti-conservative speech not being flagged. The same thing with women and men. Negative comments about men were less likely to be flagged.

“The ratings partially resemble left-leaning political orientation hierarchies of perceived vulnerability,” the researcher wrote. “That is, individuals of left-leaning political orientation are more likely to perceive some minority groups as disadvantaged and in need of preferential treatment to overcome said disadvantage.”

The negative comments about people who are disabled, homosexual, “transgender,” Asian, black or Muslim were more likely to be flagged as hateful by the Open AI content moderation system, ranking far above the groups like Christians, Mormons, thin people and others. At the bottom of the list were wealthy people, Republicans, upper-middle- and middle-class people and university graduates.

The discovery comes after the growing concern about OpenAI products, including Chat GPT, having a left-wing bias, which, as expected, favors left-leaning talking points including, in some cases, outright falsehoods. Reason even forced Chat GPT to take various political ideology tests, revealing that it is politically leftist.

In a December UnHerd article, Brian Chau, a mathematician who writes about OpenAI frequently, warned bias in artificial intelligence could leak out into important domains of government and public life as the technology is widely adopted.

“’Specific’ artificial intelligence, or paper-pushing at scale, offers a single change to cheaply rewrite the bureaucratic processes governing large corporations, state and federal government agencies, NGOs and media outlets,” Chau wrote.

“In the right hands, it can be used to eliminate political biases endemic to the hiring processes of these organizations. In the wrong hands, it may permanently catechize a particular ideology.”

China Responds to U.S. Military Shooting Down Spy Balloon

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China Responds to U.S. Military Shooting Down Spy Balloon

(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) The Chinese foreign ministry responded to the United States military shooting down the spy balloon, claiming that the balloon was being piloted by a civilian.

Chinese officials professed that they were extremely upset by the action, as reported by the Daily Wire.

“China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and protest against the US’s use of force to attack civilian unmanned aircraft,” the statement claimed. “The Chinese side has repeatedly informed the US side after verification that the airship is for civilian use and entered the US due to force majeure – it was completely an accident.”

Chinese officials slammed the U.S. Department of Defense for their handling of the situation.

“China clearly asked the US to handle it properly in a calm, professional and restrained manner. A spokesman for the US Department of Defense also stated that the balloon will not pose a military or personal threat to ground personnel,” the statement read. “China will resolutely safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of relevant companies, while reserving the right to make further necessary reaction.”

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said China sent the balloon to the U.S. “in an attempt to surveil strategic sites in the continental United States.”

On Saturday, an F-22 Raptor shot down the balloon with a missile at 58,000 feet off of the coast of South Carolina.

The aircraft was initially spotted flying over Montana. Apparently the Biden administration was “well aware” that the balloon had drifted over Idaho on Tuesday, January 28. They kept the news quiet so not to interrupt the diplomatic visit the Secretary of State’s visit, to China.

The Biden administration did not take any action to bring it down until it was over the Atlantic ocean.

Biden made a statement regarding the balloon, saying he “ordered the Pentagon to shoot it down on Wednesday as soon as possible,” but the decision was made to wait until it was over the ocean to keep debris from causing damage.

Harvard’s Misinfo Program Abandoned, Leftist Prof Fired and Defunded

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Harvard’s Misinfo Program Abandoned, Leftist Prof Fired and Defunded

(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) “Misinformation expert” Joan M. Donovan will no longer be a teacher or a researcher at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Her research project will expire at the beginning of 2024.

According to the Post Millennial, the University released a statement saying the project is “winding down,” and is lacking in leadership, but did not report any specific details.

“The Technology and Social Change project is winding down — through an extended transition — because it does not have intellectual and academic leadership by a full HKS faculty member, as required of all long-term research and outreach projects at HKS,” Smith wrote.

Donovan is the research director at the Shoenstein Center, and leads a protect titled “Technology and Social Change,” which “explores media manipulation as a means to control public conversation, derail democracy and disrupt society,” according to the Center’s description of the project.

“TaSC conducts research, develops methods, and facilitates workshops for journalists, policy makers, technologists, and civil society organizations on how to detect, document, and debunk media manipulation campaigns,” the description added.

Due to the cancellation of the project, Donavan cannot hire any more staff or raise additional funding. In fact, she now has a cap on her spending until the project expires.

Donovan has a notorious reputation as a left-wing “misinformation” researcher. One study she co-authored looked at the January 6 Capitol protest, which found that at least a fifth of the protestors who participated in the riot “were motivated to take part in the riot because they supported Trump.”

She also testified in front of House and Senate subcommittees, addressing the spread of misinformation online.

Harvard Kennedy School spokesperson James Smith confirmed the cancellation of the project, but reiterated the school’s commitment to studying misinformation.

“Harvard Kennedy School is committed to the teaching and study of misinformation and disinformation, and several faculty members are leading significant projects that address these topics,” he wrote.

Black Reparations Inspire a Bevy of Intersectional Demands

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Black Reparations Inspire a Bevy of Intersectional Demands

(John Murawski, RealClearWire) Until a few years ago, the idea of paying financial reparations to descendants of African slaves was dismissed as a fringe idea.
Now a notion that President Barack Obama once rejected as impractical is becoming public policy.

California offers a dramatic example as officials there review a proposal that could pay in excess of $1 million each to some black residents, while more than a dozen U.S. municipalities are moving ahead with their own race-based programs to redress the legacies of slavery.

But the reparations movement is bigger and wider than that. Its rise in the United States has inspired a global movement committed to redressing perceived historical injustices to all manner of aggrieved groups.

The causes include gay reparations, climate reparations, colonial reparations, university reparations – and Roman Catholic Church reparations for officially sanctioning colonization, slavery, and genocide in the New World. Scholars, activists and legislators across the United States and Europe and in former colonies are drawing on the logic and language of the black reparations movement and international human rights law to make the claim that their causes also deserve atonement and compensation for past wrongs.

Some warn that reparations open a controversial and bottomless Pandora’s Box, given history’s long catalogue of official policies that criminalized or discriminated against sex workers, polygamists, Jews, Catholics, Slavs, and the Roma, among a vast array of potential claimants.

“If we pay reparations to black Americans, there’s no way it ends with black Americans,” said Wilfred Reilly, a conservative political science professor at Kentucky State University and author of “Hate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War.” “Once you start paying people for things that happened in the past before their lifetimes, you’re setting precedent there.”

Reparations advocate William Darity, a Duke University economist and one of five economic advisers to the California Reparations Task Force, acknowledged that claims against the United States and other European nations that enslaved Africans could potentially lead to similar claims against Western and non-Western countries that, in a previous political configuration in past centuries, engaged in slaving, concubinage, and other practices that were formerly accepted but are now viewed with moral revulsion.

“I would encourage the people who are concerned about these histories of injustice to do the work and make the case,” Darity said, noting that the full scale of potential claims may not be fully appreciated. “It could be immense; it could be enormous.”

A number of new claims are now in play. Gay reparations have successfully won financial restitution for surviving victims of government persecution in the 20th century, including incarceration and maltreatment in Gen. Francisco Franco’s Spain and Nazi Germany (a policy that was continued for another quarter-century in West Germany).

The U.S. movement, led by the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., seeks atonement and compensation for the surviving victims of the “Lavender Scare,” the postwar period of mass firings of thousands of gay federal civil servants in the United States who were suspected of being “perverts.”

Over the past decade, more than a dozen Caribbean nations have been seeking debt relief and other reparations from their erstwhile European colonizers for alleged native genocide and chattel slavery. Separately, a delegation that included New York Times writer and 1619 Project architect Nikole Hannah-Jones traveled to Rome last July to press the Vatican to commit the Catholic Church’s global resources to financially repairing the damage caused by the Church’s sanctioning of and benefitting from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 

Advocates of climate reparations seek trillions of dollars in aid from the wealthy nations of the so-called global North to the developing countries of the global South. In response to such claims, the European Union this year agreed to create a climate fund to mitigate the predicted ecological and humanitarian toll that will be caused by greenhouse gas emissions emitted by industrialized powers.

Gay reparations and climate reparations both have been the subject of recent books published by Oxford University Press in 2022 and 2021 and written by serious academics at reputable institutions, Bard College and Georgetown University. Foreign Policy magazine has run lengthy articles in support of gay reparations and climate reparations just in the past few years.

Proposals have also been floated for reparations for abused psychiatric patients and residential aged care patients, as well as compensating all women, whether they work or not, for the alleged income gap – a sign that the concept continues gaining purchase. At the same time, thousands of private individuals have taken matters into their own hands, Venmo-ing cash transfers to black acquaintances or to online fundraising efforts to aid black people in crisis.

UPDATE: Chinese Spy Balloon Shot Down off S.C. Coast

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UPDATE: Chinese Spy Balloon Shot Down off S.C. Coast

Update (3 p.m. Saturday): According to reports, the spy balloon that gripped Amerixa with its dayslong saga was shot down off the South Carolina coast near Myrtle Beach.

The U.S. military shot down the Chinese unmanned craft after the Federal Aviation Administration issued a ground stop for airports in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Charleston and Myrtle Beach in South Carolina, CNN reported.

The FAA also restricted airspace near Myrtle Beach “to support the Defense Department in a national security effort.”

Earlier in the day, President Joe Biden had pledged “we’re gonna take care of this” following harsh criticism and mockery for his inaction.

Original story below:

(Headline USA) The Chinese balloon drifting high above the U.S. and first revealed over Montana has created a buzz down below among residents who initially wondered what it was — and now wonder what its arrival means amid a chorus of alarm raised by elected officials.

Conservatives took to Twitter, alternately expressing outrage and bemusement at the situation, along with an overarching desire to shoot it down.

The episode called to mind the October 2009 news cycle surrounding “Balloon Boy,” when a nervous nation was captivated briefly when a Colorado family reported that their 6-year-old son was trapped in a homemade helium balloon. The event later proved to be a hoax.

But not all were in on the fun on Friday. The Biden administration drew sharp criticism for its failure to act as the object made its way across the U.S., spending time over Rush Limbaugh’s boyhood home in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, before continuing southward, where some said it may have been destined for a sensitive missile site in Georgia.

The balloon roiled diplomatic tensions as it continued to move over the central U.S. on Friday at 60,000 feet. Secretary of State Antony Blinken abruptly canceled an upcoming trip to China.

Curiosity about the bobbling sky orb that’s the size of three school buses swept the nation and the internet, with search terms like “where is the spy balloon now?” and “spy balloon tracker” surging on Google. There is no such tracker just yet, but a couple St. Louis TV stations offered grainy live feeds of the balloon.

Internet users posted wobbly videos and photos of white splotches in comments sections and speculative feeds. And online storm chasers, more accustomed to tracking raging systems and funnel clouds, offered updates on the balloon’s path through cloudless skies.

It crossed into U.S. airspace over Alaska early this week, according to officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic.

In Montana—home to Malmstrom Air Force base and dozens of nuclear missile silos — people doubted Beijing’s claim that it was a weather balloon gone off course. And the governor and members of Congress pressed the Biden administration over why the military did not immediately bring it down from the sky.

“I question whether or not we would even found out about this if people hadn’t spotted it in Billings,” said Chase Doak, a resident of the southern Montana city who appears to have captured some of the first known video footage and photographs of the balloon.

A white balloon with what appeared to be a solar array hanging beneath it was seen over Billings Wednesday afternoon, around the same time the local airport was temporarily shut down and a day before the Pentagon said it was tracking a Chinese spy balloon over the state.

Initial speculation over its origins ranged from the foreign to the extra-terrestrial.

When Todd Hewett’s 10-year-old son saw it over Billings he thought it was a comet. Hewett got some shaky footage, using a cellphone to take video through a telescope, and was skeptical of the Chinese claim it was a civilian balloon.

“Shoot it down,” he said. “If we could somehow pierce the bottom of it to allow some of the gas to escape to allow for a more controlled descent (that) would be nice .. but if we can’t do that … blow it up.”

Montana has some experience with balloons launched by adversaries: Japan in World War II targeted the western U.S. with incendiary “balloon bombs” that were floated over North America with plans to harm people and start forest fires. More than 30 of the bombs made of rice paper landed in Montana, according to the Montana Historical Society.

In Oregon, five children and a pregnant woman on a church picnic were killed in 1945 when they found one of the bombs and it exploded.

On Friday in Kansas City, Missouri, the National Weather Service said it received reports of a large balloon in the Kansas City metro area and posted two images of white orbs taken from the weather station office in Pleasant Hill, Missouri. The service confirmed it was not a National Weather Service balloon.

A graphic generated by a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration online tool was eagerly shared on Facebook, showing the balloon’s trajectory sweep into the U.S. South. Local National Weather Service offices were asked on Twitter whether the balloon was theirs. No, was their answer.

Montana U.S. Sen. Jon Tester, who chairs the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, said he would hold a hearing to get answers from the Biden administration. He called China’s actions “a clear threat.”

Rep. Ryan Zinke sent a poll to constituents early Friday saying the balloon was still over the state and asking if should be shot down. When the Pentagon said the balloon had since drifted over the central U.S., Zinke raised the possibility China had more than one balloon over the U.S..

“I don’t know if that’s the only balloon. We’ve asked for those answers,” he told The Associated Press. He said the balloon should have been shot down. “The message that it gives to our allies is, we’re not capable of dealing with a balloon,” he said.

The Pentagon late Friday acknowledged reports of a second balloon flying over Latin America but officials did not specify where it was spotted.

Republicans in Montana have grown increasingly outspoken in recent years about China posing a threat to U.S. national security.

A bill pending before the state Legislature would ban “foreign adversaries” from owning, leasing or renting critical infrastructure or farmland. The measure’s sponsor singled out China as being interested in acquiring U.S. lands and resources to “help them with spying efforts.”

US Sen. Steve Daines on Friday rejected the Pentagon’s contention that it was too dangerous to bring the balloon down over Montana. He told reporters there would have been “no better place” than his sparsely populated home state.

“You’ve got higher odds of hitting a cow or a prairie dog or an antelope than you would of hitting any kind of a structure or a person,” he said.

Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press

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