Remember when the court system at least pretended to be objective? Remember a few months ago when liberals claimed that Clarence Thomas’ wife knowing conservative activists meant he had to recuse himself from everything?
Here in the real here and now, huge conflict of interest problems with the lawfare cases being waged against President Trump are being deliberately ignored in the headlong rush to convict Trump of something, anything, for any reason before November.
“Lara Merchan, the wife of the judge presiding over former President Donald Trump’s “hush money” case in Manhattan, once worked for New York Attorney General Letitia James, who brought the massive $350 million civil fraud case against the former president, with the revelation reviving claims of bias and calls for the judge’s recusal.”
Records reviewed by The Epoch Times show that Ms. Merchan worked for 21 years as a Special Assistant to the AG in New York, including three years under Ms. James. She changed jobs over two years ago.
Ms. James is a Democrat who fixated on President Trump as she campaigned for New York attorney general, calling him a “con man” and vowing to shine a “bright light into every dark corner of his real estate dealings.”
She began investigating the former president soon after taking office, eventually suing him for allegedly misleading banks and others about the value of his assets.
Ms. James eventually won the case on Feb. 16, with New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron ordering President Trump and Trump Organization executives to pay $350 million in damages, and barring the former president from doing business in the state for three years.
Judge Juan Merchan is presiding over a separate criminal trial involving President Trump in New York, in which the former president is accused of falsifying business records in order to conceal a $130,000 “hush money” payoff to an adult performer to stay quiet about their alleged affair.
The judge’s daughter, Loren Merchan, is president of Authentic Campaigns, a Chicago-based progressive political consulting firm whose top clients include Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who was the lead prosecutor in Trump’s first impeachment trial, and the Senate Majority PAC, a major party fundraiser.
Authentic Campaigns, and thus the judge’s daughter, is actively making money from this sham attack against President Trump, rendering Judge Merchan conflicted out,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung told The Post, adding that evidence of bias is even clearer now than it was in August when Merchan rejected Trump’s first recusal motion.
“The judge should do the right thing and immediately recuse himself in order to show the American people that the Democrats have not destroyed our justice system completely … him continuing to be involved in this Crooked Joe Biden-directed Witch Hunt is a complete violation of applicable rules, regulations and ethics.”
Evidently the family that TDSes together, stays together.
DEI — the identity-obsessed dogma that goes by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” — has now trained Google’s new AI to refuse to draw white people. What’s even more alarming is that it’s also infected the supply chain that makes the chips powering everything from AI to missiles, endangering national security.
The Biden administration recently promised it will finally loosen the purse strings on $39 billion of CHIPS Act grants to encourage semiconductor fabrication in the U.S. But less than a week later, Intel announced that it’s putting the brakes on its Columbus factory. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has pushed back production at its second Arizona foundry. The remaining major chipmaker, Samsung, just delayed its first Texas fab.
This is not the way companies typically respond to multi-billion-dollar subsidies. So what explains chipmakers’ apparent ingratitude? In large part, frustration with DEI requirements embedded in the CHIPS Act.
Commentators have noted that CHIPS and Science Act money has been sluggish. What they haven’t noticed is that it’s because the CHIPS Act is so loaded with DEI pork that it can’t move.
The law contains 19 sections aimed at helping minority groups, including one creating a Chief Diversity Officer at the National Science Foundation, and several prioritizing scientific cooperation with what it calls “minority-serving institutions.” A section called “Opportunity and Inclusion” instructs the Department of Commerce to work with minority-owned businesses and make sure chipmakers “increase the participation of economically disadvantaged individuals in the semiconductor workforce.”
The department interprets that as license to diversify. Its factsheet asserts that diversity is “critical to strengthening the U.S. semiconductor ecosystem,” adding, “Critically, this must include significant investments to create opportunities for Americans from historically underserved communities.”
The department does not call speed critical, even though the impetus for the CHIPS Act is that 90 percent of the world’s advanced microchips are made in Taiwan, which China is preparing to annex by 2027, maybe even 2025.
Handouts abound. There’s plenty for the left—requirements that chipmakers submit detailed plans to educate, employ, and train lots of women and people of color, as well as “justice-involved individuals,” more commonly known as ex-cons. There’s plenty for the right—veterans and members of rural communities find their way into the typical DEI definition of minorities. There’s even plenty for the planet: Arizona Democrats just bragged they’ve won $15 million in CHIPS funding for an ASU project fighting climate change.
That project is going better for Arizona than the actual chips part of the CHIPS Act. Because equity is so critical, the makers of humanity’s most complex technology must rely on local labor and apprentices from all those underrepresented groups, as TSMC discovered to its dismay.
Tired of delays at its first fab, the company flew in 500 employees from Taiwan. This angered local workers, since the implication was that they weren’t skilled enough. With CHIPS grants at risk, TSMC caved in December, agreeing to rely on those workers and invest more in training them. A month later, it postponed its second Arizona fab.
Now TSMC has revealed plans to build a second fab in Japan. Its first, which broke ground in 2021, is about to begin production. TSMC has learned that when the Japanese promise money, they actually give it, and they allow it to use competent workers. TSMC is also sampling Germany’s chip subsidies, as is Intel.
Intel is also building fabs in Poland and Israel, which means it would rather risk Russian aggression and Hamas rockets over dealing with America’s DEI regime. Samsung is pivoting toward making its South Korean homeland the semiconductor superpower after Taiwan falls.
To be fair, Intel has had fabs in Israel since since 1996, and Tower Semiconductor has had fabs in Israel since the 1980s. Poland, to the best of my knowledge, has never had a fab.
In short, the world’s best chipmakers are tired of being pawns in the CHIPS Act’s political games. They’ve quietly given up on America. Intel must know the coming grants are election-year stunts — mere statements of intent that will not be followed up. Even after due diligence and final agreements, the funds will only be released in dribs and drabs as recipients prove they’re jumping through the appropriate hoops.
So in the name of embedding the racist poison of social justice, the CHIPS Act, ostensibly designed to increase America’s share of cutting-edge semiconductor manufacturing, is actually driving new fab construction out of America.
You might think that on Christianity’s most holy day, a president running for reelection in a majority Christian nation would go out of his way to avoid antagonizing Christians.
The White House on Friday announced “transgender day of visibility” for March 31, which this year falls on Easter Sunday.
“NOW, THEREFORE, I, JOSEPH R. BIDEN JR., President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim March 31, 2024, as Transgender Day of Visibility,” President Biden wrote in a Friday statement. “I call upon all Americans to join us in lifting up the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our Nation and to work toward eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity.”
Since its inception, the Biden administration has made LGBT activism a cornerstone of its policy priorities. Biden boasted in his statement that he appointed transgender leaders to his administration and ended the ban on transgender Americans serving openly in the military.
In the past, some of Biden’s transgender inclusivity events at the White House have backfired.
A transgender influencer was banned from the White House on Tuesday for posing topless at President Biden’s Pride celebration over the weekend.
Rose Montoya, who exposed his bare prosthetic breasts to the camera and onlookers at the official event, violated basic standards of decency and social manners, a spokesperson for the White House told the New York Post.
Children of the National Guard are also barred from sending in religious Easter egg designs for the 2024 “Celebrating National Guard Families” art event at the White House, Fox News reported Friday. The White House hosts many Easter traditions, including the military family art initiative and the annual Easter Egg Roll.
Easter egg submissions “must not include any questionable content, religious symbols, overtly religious themes, or partisan political statements,” according to the flyer.
You wouldn’t want Christian symbolism in an Easter celebration, now would you?
I’m surprised the Gay Mafia isn’t already suing Masterpiece Cakeshop to make them a cake depicting a crucified Easter Bunny.
Transexist dogma demands that you agree that 2+2=5. To note the biological reality that human beings with XX chromosomes are female, and XY chromosomes are male, and that no amount of cosmetic surgery can ever change that, is commit a heresy against the new church of social justice.
Transesxist dogma is so unpopular that they’re even rejecting it in New York City, but the Biden Administration still insists on forcing it down America’s throats.
Even in an election year.
Even on Easter Sunday.
The brazenness of dedicating Easter Sunday to transexual activism should convince you that the hard left is actively hostile to Christianity. They view it as a competing source of moral legitimacy that thwarts their will-to-power desire of a complete transformation of American society.
More specifically, they want to use social pressure and government coercion to remake Christianity itself in their own image, to make it compliant and subservient to a state they control, just as in Communist China.
People who dedicate their lives to the Risen Christ rather than utopian schemes to remake society are a threat to the left’s plans for total top-to-bottom social control, just like vast numbers of armed citizens are.
The radical left-wing anti-farm green agenda isn’t just trying to destroy agriculture in foreign locales like The Netherlands, it’s also happening in Oregon.
“The state of Oregon has effectively shut down small farms and market gardens on a large scale, and they’re actually sending out cease and desist letters to farms.” (By “market gardens” he means small farms that only supply produce locally.)
“They’re using satellite technology to find their victims and then send them these letters, and say you can’t operate, and they’re doing it in the name of water conservation.”
“Oregon’s government and dairy industry [have joined] forces against small farmers.”
“There are two different laws that they’re using.”
“They’ve redefined what a CAFO is.” CAFO stands for “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation.” According to Wikipedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge, a CAFO is where “over 1,000 animal units are confined for over 45 days a year. An animal unit is the equivalent of 1,000 pounds of “live” animal weight.[1] A thousand animal units equates to 700 dairy cows, 1,000 meat cows, 2,500 pigs weighing more than 55 pounds (25 kg), 10,000 pigs weighing under 55 pounds, 10,000 sheep, 55,000 turkeys, 125,000 chickens, or 82,000 egg laying hens or pullets.”
Oregon seems to have redefined that. “This applies to people who have chicken houses, who have goat farms, basically anybody who has a barn or a facility that has a gravel or concrete floor.”
“What’s happening in Oregon, and why the small dairies have filed a lawsuit against the state…it doesn’t matter the size of the operation, you could have two milking cows.”
“Sarah King, who owns Godspeed Hollow Farm in Newberg, Oregon, has a pickup station that’s just 100 ft in length. She has an 11 acre property, and keeps things pretty simple. She has three milking cows. [Because] she has that milking stand, the state of Oregon said you are a CAFO, and because you are considered a CAFO, they require you to put in this infrastructure improvement which would cost her $100,000,”
“We’re requiring this massive infrastructure upgrade for you to continue to operate your facilities to protect our ground water from your two cows standing on a milking stand.”
Even if you have a gravel floor in a chicken coop, Oregon wants to come after you. “They have redefined CAFOs. This is going to impact nearly everybody.”
“This law is being enforced in the state of Oregon. It has already shut down some farms.”
There is an injunction on the definition of the law until it can be heard in court.
“You would think that they were going after raw milk, that always seems to be the case with a lot of these things, but this is actually going after anybody. Egg producers, anybody who has chickens that go up in a chicken house at night that may have a concrete floor.”
You have to go through a permitting process, and a lot of what they’re requiring is just simply too much for the small farmer. So that’s rule number one.”
“The second rule: In the state of Oregon, if you are using water, even groundwater, the only water that you can legally harvest and use without a permit is actually rainwater. They consider all water in the ground a resource of the public. Even if you have a private well on your property, that belongs to the people of Oregon.”
“This is a rule that went into place back in 2021, and then it has slowly rolled out to the point where market gardeners with a half acre of land are now receiving cease and desist orders saying you can’t water your gardens. Figure out another way to do it.”
The law says you can use up to 5,000 gallons a day, but market gardeners are proably only using 1,000 gallons a day. “You would think that they’re saying you’re a commercial business, because if you are growing food for yourself [But] There’s a lady has been growing food and selling it to neighbors. It’s been her primary income source and they shut her down.”
“Christina Del Campo um has just over a half acre. She grows blueberries, local vegetables, things like that. Her farm is called Oak Song Farm near Eugene. She’s operated there for 7 years and she recently received received a letter from the regional office of the Oregon Water Resources Department. It was a notification that the farm couldn’t irrigate its commercial crops without a water right.”
“They shut her down because, according to the Oregon Water Resources Department, the exemption for commercial use does not include irrigation of land.”
“Basically, the state of Oregon is coming in now and they’re they’re putting things on people’s wells to measure the amount of water. It’s very invasive.”
“Supposedly Oregon had these rules in place since 1909. They just keep changing them.”
“They’ve sent out letters not just to this one farmer, but multiple small farms, market garden farms, saying you can’t water your crops anymore.”
“This is actually a war on small farms.”
“We’ve seen this happening over and over and over again, where we’re seeing them utilize water rights [protection] to shut down farms across our country.”
“If you look at the number of farms that we’ve lost since 2000, it’s staggering. We’ve gone from 2,100,000 farms in 2000 down to 1,850,000 farms at the end of last year.”
“You’ve seen a lot of these cases where they’ve gone in and they’ve just shut off farms to water rights to an entire valley at a time.”
“We’re seeing them take control over people’s wells putting meters on people’s wells, shutting down small farms.”
“Everybody should have the right to farm fresh food. Oregon is basically taking that right away from every Oregon citizen by taking away the rights of the small farmers to operate their businesses in the name of some laws that were originally put in place to protect groundwater from much larger scale operations.”
If there isn’t some sort of sinister agenda behind these new regulatory pushes, destroying small farms certainly gives a pretty good impression of a sinister agenda. And no points for guessing which political party enjoys uncontested control of Oregon. Remember when Democrats claimed to be looking out for family farms? Doesn’t seem to be the case any more. Someone should ask Willie Nelson about all this…
Texas has a Right to Farm statute that should (theoretically) prevent such abuses here.
Welcome to spring! More evidence the Biden clan lied under oath, lots of illegal alien news, Ukraine hits more Russian oil refineries, and BlackRock and Planet Fitness enjoy the consequences of getting woke. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
In his opening statement before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, Hunter Biden’s former business partner Tony Bobulinski publicly accused the first son and his uncle, Jim Biden, of lying under oath about the nature of their business dealings with Chinese conglomerate CEFC.
Bobulinski is testifying on Wednesday about the Biden family’s foreign business dealings, the subject of the House GOP’s impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. He testified behind closed doors last month and vividly recalled meeting Hunter, Joe, and James Biden in May 2017 to discuss a proposed joint venture with CEFC.
Bobulinski cited three examples of alleged perjury from Hunter Biden’s sworn testimony last month, accusing Hunter of lying about: the timeline of his business relationship with CEFC, his father’s interactions with his business associates, and the threatening text he sent a Chinese businessman in which he demanded payment and said he was sitting next to his father.
“Hunter Biden gave his transcribed interview to the House Oversight Committee on February 28 and lied throughout his testimony,” Bobulinski said in his written testimony.
Hunter Biden said his work for CEFC began with a retainer in 2017. However, Bobulinski insists, based on conversations he said he had with Hunter, that the Biden business relationship with CEFC goes back further, possibly to Joe Biden’s time as vice president.
Hunter Biden claimed his father never interacted with his son’s business partners and repeatedly denied his father’s involvement in those dealings. However, Hunter Biden confirmed Joe Biden met Bobulinski and multiple foreign business partners, and spoke to business associates on speakerphone.
James Biden denied in his closed-door testimony that he attended that May 2017 meeting, contradicting Hunter’s sworn testimony.
“The sole reason Hunter wanted me to meet his father was because I was the CEO of SinoHawk, the Bidens’ partnership with CEFC. I was a business associate. In his transcript, Hunter confirms that that meeting with Joe took place and incriminates his Uncle Jim for perjury by confirming it,” Bobulinski’s statement reads.
In his written testimony and the opening statement he delivered, Bobulinski also accuses Hunter of lying about the details of a text he sent to a Chinese business associate in July 2017 where he appeared to leverage his father’s influence. Hunter Biden testified that he was embarrassed by the text and claimed he sent it to the wrong Chinese business partner, a person not connected to CEFC.
“He leveraged his father’s presence next to him in that infamous text to strongarm CEFC into paying Hunter immediately,” Bobulinski said.
In March 2017, Hunter Biden’s then-business partner Rob Walker received a $3 million payment from State Energy HK, an account linked to CEFC.
Walker distributed roughly $1 million of the State Energy HK funds to bank accounts linked to Hunter Biden and other members of the Biden family, bank records show. The $3 million wire to Walker took place after Hunter Biden and his business associates held meetings with CEFC and helped explore business deals, according to Walker’s testimony and Hunter Biden’s federal tax indictment. Joe Biden’s vice presidency concluded only weeks before the State Energy HK payment came in.
Bobulinski also accused James Biden of lying under oath about the details of his involvement with Bobulinski and CEFC.
Testifying behind closed doors last month, James Biden repeatedly denied meeting Bobulinski, contradicting the testimony given by Bobulinski and Hunter Biden, according to a transcript of his testimony. Despite being shown exhibits to the contrary, James Biden doubled down on his denial that the May 2017 meeting with Bobulinski and Joe and Hunter Biden took place. Likewise, James Biden denied signing any agreement to get into business with Bobulinski through Oneida Holdings, a holding company created for the CEFC proposal.
When presented with a signed copy of the Oneida agreement, James Biden said he could not recall being part of the Oneida arrangement. The CEFC proposal involving Bobulinski fell apart, and the Bidens entered a separate joint venture with CEFC called Hudson West III to help CEFC explore U.S. energy deals.
“There are many other examples of Hunter’s and Jim’s lies, which I am happy to discuss during my testimony here today, and I hope this Committee will hold them accountable for their perjury before you,” Bobulinski’s written statement adds. When questioned by Republican lawmakers, Bobulinski repeated his accusations Hunter and James Biden committed perjury during their closed-door testimonies last month.
Alongside Bobulinski, imprisoned former Biden associate Jason Galanis is testifying virtually about the business enterprise he worked on with Hunter Biden and other business partners. Galanis’ opening statement on Wednesday mirrors private testimony in which he claimed Joe Biden helped his son finalize deals with Chinese and Russian business partners.
“The entire value-add of Hunter Biden to our business was his family name and his access to his father, Vice President Joe Biden,” Galanis testified. He believes he is risking his safety to testify because of alleged retaliation by the Justice Department during his time in prison for participating in a fraudulent bond scheme.
Bobulinski’s testimony will be no surprise to regular BattleSwarm readers following the scandal.
I’ll confine myself to one typical example, although many could be cited. On page 55 of the transcript, Hur asks Biden in what workspaces he kept documents at the vice president’s residence (the Naval Observatory); Biden’s response runs seven pages — although it was not a sensible response to the very simple question asked.
The president began by recounting that “I was the guy who wrote the Violence Against Women Act”; that agriculture is “a $4 billion industry in Delaware and the Delmarva peninsula”; that in a law-school torts class he was applauded for speaking ten minutes about a case he had not read; that “to make a long story short” he got a job out of law school at a firm in Delaware; and that “to make a long story not quite so long” he participated in a case while he was waiting for his bar results involving “this poor kid [who was] down a hundred-foot vessel, chimney, scraping the hydrogen bubbles off of the inside” but “was wearing the wrong pants, wrong jeans, and he —a spark caught fire and got caught in the containment vessel and he lost part of his penis and one of his testicles and he was 23 years old.” The senior partner told Biden to write a memo supporting a motion to dismiss the case, “and son of a bitch, it prevailed,” whereupon Biden thought “son of a bitch I’m in the wrong business, I’m not made for this.”
Thereupon, the senior partner invited him to go to the Wilmington Club, where “no blacks, Catholics are allowed — have been allowed to be members. The DuPont family name.” (Biden elsewhere in the seven pages repeatedly refers to the DuPont family, whom he describes as “Rockefeller Republicans” highly influential in Delaware.) Biden recalled being so taken aback by the Wilmington Club invitation that, in “the only time I ever lied that I can remember looking somebody in the eye,” he made up a story that his father was coming to visit that day. Then he immediately walked through “the basement on a public building and walked in with a guy named Frank and I said I want a job as a public defender.” This began “what got me — I had been involved in the civil-rights movement. That got me deeply involved in trying to reform the Democratic Party, which was a southern Democratic Party. We were a slave state by law.”
“And the whole point of telling you all this,” he continued, “is that I had a lot of material that I kept notes on” about the Democratic Party. And at that point, when he was 26 or 27 years old, Biden elaborated, “I went to work part time for a criminal-defense firm mainly, a real estate — there were five people. And so I was no longer a public defender. . . .” Then “one thing led to another” and Biden joined a group seeking to reform the Democratic Party. Even though he was young, they wanted him to run for the state senate. But he wanted to start his own law firm instead. “So to make a long story short,” he ended up running for county council, but “wanted to be sure that I was going to lose,” so he ran in a district that no Democrat had ever won. “And I won it. And next thing you know, I’m in a tough position. My generic point was that there was a lot of material that I had amassed that I wanted to save. I probably still have it somewhere. And so that stuff would travel wherever the hell I was.”
At that point, mercifully, Hur interjected, “trying to steer us back to the end of your vice presidency.”
To repeat, what I’ve outlined above comes from a single, uninterrupted, utterly non-responsive answer to a question about where Biden kept documents while living in the Naval Observatory circa 2016.
I would say that Grandpa Simpson is running the country, except it’s his Obama-retread aides who are doing that, and Grandpa Simpson is markedly more focused and coherent than Slow Joe is now. (Hat tip: Powerline.)
A senior official with United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP) revealed Wednesday that CBP agents in El Paso arrested a man for attempting to enter the country illegally, and a further search led to the discovery of gang connections and alarming images contained on the man’s phone.
CBP Chief Jason Owens announced the arrest on social media, saying the man was from Colombia and shared images of tattoos that connect him with the Clan Del Gulfo (CDG) cartel.
A federal law, Section 922 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code, bars illegal immigrants from carrying guns or ammunition. Prosecutors charged Heriberto Carbajal-Flores, the illegal alien, in 2020 after he was found in Chicago carrying a semi-automatic pistol despite “knowing he was an alien illegally and unlawfully in the United States.”
U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman rejected two motions to dismiss, but the third motion, based on a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, triggered the dismissal of the case on March 8.
“The noncitizen possession statute, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(5), violates the Second Amendment as applied to Carbajal-Flores,” Judge Coleman, appointed under President Barack Obama, wrote in her 8-page ruling. “Thus, the court grants Carbajal-Flores’ motion to dismiss.”
“Tyson closed down a pork plant in Iowa to hire ‘asylum seekers’ in New York. Tyson Foods just axed 1,200 jobs in Perry, Iowa, a town of just a few thousand people, and have moved those jobs, as well as others, to places like New York where they know there are ‘asylum seekers’ ready to replace American workers.”
The Biden administration announced Wednesday that it will impose the strictest vehicle-emissions regulations ever enacted as part of an effort to push the American car industry toward electric vehicles.
The emissions standards, which will cover light-duty vehicles — cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks — are set to apply to models produced from “2027 through 2032 and beyond,” the Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement.
The new rules set targets for the number of electric models produced in the United States as a percentage of all light-duty vehicles created each year. For instance, in 2030, hitting the EPA’s new targets would require somewhere between 31 percent and 44 percent of new cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks to be fully electric, with the exact percentage depending on the amount of emissions from other vehicles.
Though the regulations announced Wednesday are the strictest in the country’s history, they are a step back from the EPA’s April 2023 proposal, at least in terms of the rollout speed. While the target in 2032 is still for carbon emissions to be cut in half from the total produced by cars that went on sale in 2026, the shift will be more gradual than the changes the administration proposed last year and the targets in the earlier years easier to meet.
Another difference is the inclusion of hybrid vehicles. The April 2023 proposal called for two-thirds of cars sold in 2032 to be electric, but the new regulations amend that number to 56 percent of cars sold being electric and another 13 percent hybrid.
The electric car market is already saturated and EV sales are falling. Americans don’t want them, so the Biden administration is going to punish (and possibly destroy) the American car industry in their relentless pursuit of green graft.
“Texas School Fund Divests $8.5 Billion From BlackRock Over Anti-energy Policies. State Board of Education Chairman Aaron Kinsey said BlackRock was not in compliance with new legislation that prohibits state funds from being given to organizations that boycott energy companies.” Good. BlackRock’s “Environmental Social Governance” is bad for investors and bad for America.
All polls indicate that the answer is yes. The question is how many.
CBS News correspondent Nikole Killion interview Azad Ahmad and his girlfriend Alexandra, both of whom voted for Obama in 2012, but both of whom are voting for Trump this year.
Alexandra: “My views on certain things have changed.”
Alexandra: “Being in a pattern of doing the same thing that I’ve been doing because it’s kind of like second nature. When you go in in a poll, you hit Democrat. Something has to happen. I mean, it’s just so expensive to survive, and we’re planning on having kids. I don’t want to live in a stressful environment, trying to rub two pennies together to try to make it.”
Azad: “Post-Obama, I decided that the [Democratic] party just wasn’t suitable to the goals that I had.”
Another black voter: “I think president Trump was a bad people’s person, but a great leader. He put our economy in a booming state. He provided a permanent funding for all HBCU.”
Despite salting her interviewees with Democrats reciting talking points, a lot of real frustration with Biden and the Democratic Party seeps through.
I notice, however, that everyone she interviewed was college educated. It woud be interesting to poll blacks worker blue collar jobs. I suspect the support for Trump would be even higher…
The Supreme Court on Tuesday lifted its freeze of a Texas immigration law which allows state and local law enforcement to arrest illegal immigrants and empowers state judges to deport them.
The Court’s six conservative justices dismissed the Biden administration’s emergency appeal, allowing the law to remain in effect while the issue is adjudicated by lower courts. The majority did not explain its reasoning, as is typical, but Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, issued a concurring opinion explaining that Texas should be allowed to enforce its law until a lower court definitively strikes it down.
“If a decision does not issue soon,” Barrett wrote, “the applicants may return to this court.”
On X Tuesday, Texas Governor Abbott acknowledged that litigation over the law will continue in lower courts.
“BREAKING: In a 6-3 decision SCOTUS allows Texas to begin enforcing SB4 that allows the arrest of illegal immigrants,” he wrote. “We still have to have hearings in the 5th circuit federal court of appeals. But this is clearly a positive development.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the ruling on X.
“HUGE WIN: Texas has defeated the Biden Administration’s and ACLU’s emergency motions at the Supreme Court,” he said. “Our immigration law, SB 4, is now in effect. As always, it’s my honor to defend Texas and its sovereignty, and to lead us to victory in court.”
In court papers, Paxton said the Texas law does not undermine federal law but complements it regarding immigration enforcement, which the federal government is supposed to be fulfilling. The Biden administration for many months has been flouting federal immigration law by paroling illegal immigrants into the U.S. instead of detaining them.
The Constitution “recognizes that Texas has the sovereign right to defend itself from violent transnational cartels that flood the state with fentanyl, weapons, and all manner of brutality,” Paxton said in filings, according to NBC News.
Texas is “the nation’s first-line defense against transnational violence and has been forced to deal with the deadly consequences of the federal government’s inability or unwillingness to protect the border,” he added.
Chalk one up for controlling the borders and the rule of law, right?
A procedural victory for Texas allowing the state to enforce its new border security law while the Biden administration’s battle against the measure continues to work its way through the courts was short-lived.
While the U.S. Supreme Court moved to allow the law to go into effect on Tuesday afternoon, hours later the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals put the law on hold yet again.
Senate Bill 4, which was set to go into effect earlier this month, creates a state crime for entering the country illegally, paving the way for state law enforcement to arrest illegal aliens.
After the federal government challenged the measure in a lawsuit, U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra blocked the law from going into effect. It has since been sent to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
In the meantime, a procedural fight had taken place over whether the state could enforce the law awaiting final judgment in the case.
In a 6-3 decision on Tuesday, the Supreme Court denied the Biden administration’s request to halt enforcement of the law, allowing Texas to begin enforcement immediately.
At the time, Attorney General Ken Paxton called the decision a “huge win” for Texas.
“Texas has defeated the Biden Administration’s and ACLU’s emergency motions at the Supreme Court. Our immigration law, SB 4, is now in effect. As always, it’s my honor to defend Texas and its sovereignty, and to lead us to victory in court,” said Paxton.
That victory was short-lived, as late Tuesday night the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals placed another stay on the law from being enforced.
Frustrating, but it underscores the difficulty the Supreme Court faces, namely: How do you reign in an executive branch hellbent on ignoring clear laws on securing the border against illegal aliens that instead actual aids and abets illegal aliens breaking those same laws?
What mechanisms can the Supreme Court use to reign in a rogue executive without causing a constitutional crisis?
The Fifth Circuit had a hearing scheduled this morning on the issue but evidently haven’t issued a ruling. I’ll try to update this if it does…
I haven’t reported much on the farce of Democrats tearing through the thicket of law to get at their great devil Donald Trump, mainly because it is such a farce, but here’s Christopher Rufo on Joe Rogan discussing how dangerous and anti-democratic their blood vengeance crusade is.
Joe Rogan: “How disturbed are you by what seems to be this acceptance that people have for prosecuting political opponents?”
JR: “Because to me, it’s, regardless of what you think about Donald Trump as a human being and the polarizing figure that he is, setting the precedent of trying your political opponents to somehow or another, either put them in jail, or make them seem like complete total criminals in a way that would, for the casual, for the person who’s not reading deep into the headlines.”
JR: “The casual Democrat that sees this Trump real estate thing that just happened, where he got fined $365 million. I’ve seen people argue ‘fraud is fraud and this is that and he’s a fraud,’ and then I saw Kevin O’Leary from Shark Tank explain this is what every real estate developer does.”
JR: “They say ‘My building’s worth $400 million,’ and then someone comes along from the bank, and they say ‘No, it’s worth $300 million. We’ll give you a loan on $300 million’ or whatever.”
Christoper Rufo: “It’s negotiation.”
JR: “People overvalue their property all the time. [Someone] has a house and it’s worth $700,000, they decide to list it as $900,000.”
CR: “We have a democratic system that favors Trump, in the sense that he won in 2016, he’s winning the primary right now for republicans in 2024.”
CR: “But you have a bureaucracy that is dead set against him. And the rhetoric amounts to a very odd claim. They essentially say: ‘We want to keep him off the ballot, we want to put him in prison, we want to bankrupt him so he can’t become the president, even if the people support him. We want to deprive the people of making the decision.'”
CR: “So you want to take it out of the realm of politics and into the realm of administrative justice or the criminal justice system, and adjudicate it in that way on bogus pretexts.”
CR: “Who actually rules in this country? Is it the American people who get to decide by their vote who represents them in the government? Or is it the permanent bureaucracy that has accumulated so much power?”
CR: “I’m of the mind that the people should decide, not the bureaucracy. And this is a contest where Democrats are saying essentially we have to destroy democracy in order to save democracy.”
Evidently there’s no undemocratic Rubicon Democrats won’t cross, no bridge they won’t burn, to destroy democracy in the name of saving it from Orange Man Bad.
Happy Ides of March! You might want to avoid knife-wielding Romans today. Trump trial news, lots of Russo-Ukrainian War news, transexual madness starts to recede, and more Disney missteps. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Biden’s proposed budget is going to lower the deficit by $3 trillion. By which he means it will grow by $16 trillion.
Following yesterday’s release of Biden’s $7.3 trillion budget, the Biden administration bragged about lowering the deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade – an average of 0.8% of GDP over that period.
This would consist of roughly $2.6 trillion over 10 years in additional spending programs, offset by around $4.8 trillion in tax increases over the same period. Most of the tax and spending proposals have been included in prior budget proposals from the White House, according to Goldman’s Alec Phillips, however there are several new items.
The budget would increase the corporate alternative minimum tax on book income from 15% to 21%, raising $137 billion over the next decade. It also limits a corporation’s ability to deduct employee pay exceeding $1mm/year, raising $272 billion over 10 years. The largest proposed tax increases include; raising the corporate minimum tax from 21% to 28%, as well as a series of tax increases on high-income earners, including new Medicare taxes, and a new 25% minimum tax on incomes over $100 million, raising $500 billion over the next decade.
Of course, it has zero chance of passing under the current Congress – but that’s not the point.
As one DC strategist wrote in a morning email noted by CNBC’s Brian Sullivan, the budget deficit will still grow by another $16 trillion over the next decade – and that’s with aforementioned tax hikes.
Without them, the deficit grows to $19 trillion.
In short, talk of ‘$3 trillion saved’ is total bullshit in the grand scheme of things, given how much the national debt will grow in the best case scenario.
The judge overseeing the Georgia election-fraud case struck down six counts in the indictment on Wednesday finding that the language in the counts didn’t provide “sufficient detail” for former president Donald Trump and more than a dozen other co-defendants “to prepare their defenses intelligently.”
The counts that Fulton County Superior Court judge Scott McAfee struck down all involved allegations that some of the defendants in the case solicited various Georgia elected officials to violate their oaths of office and to unlawfully appoint pro-Trump presidential electors.
The six counts struck down by McAfee on Wednesday involved Trump, his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Ray Smith and Bob Cheeley. The defendants were accused in the various counts of soliciting elected members of the Georgia house and senate and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to violate their oaths “to unlawfully appoint presidential electors.” Trump and Meadows also requested that Raffensperger “unlawfully decertify” the 2020 presidential election, according to two of the counts that McAfee struck down on Wednesday.
Fani Willis ruling: She can stay on the case despite her numerous ethical lapses and bias, but her boytoy Nathan Wade has to go, so he’s stepping down.
“Judge Sets Trial Date for Hunter Biden’s Federal Gun Case.” “U.S. district judge Maryellen Noreika ruled the trial will start on June 3 at a status conference with Hunter Biden’s attorneys and special counsel David Weiss’s team of prosecutors.”
And another one. “Kaluga Oil Facility Hit By Drones.” I know a lot of previous Ukraine drone strikes on oil facilities hit storage tanks. It can be hard to tell with the quality of videos, but in both of these videos, it appears that these recent strikes are hitting either the cracking or fractional distillation towers, which are much higher value targets and more difficult to replace.
The Biden admin knows that US military personnel will not be safe in Gaza, but millions of dollars will be spent to build a pier to send aid that the Gazans don’t even want and that someone in the admin hopes will become a “commercial facility.”
That’s what they think “American leadership” looks like.
Apart from wasting taxpayer money, this is building infrastructure that, unless Israel finishes off Hamas, will fall into the hands of terrorists.
Also, it will take 60 days to build (at least), by which time Israel should have finished pounding Hamas into a thin paste. It’s stupid piled on top of stupid.
I haven’t paid much attention to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s independent presidential run because I doubt it’s going to be on enough state ballots to even play a spoiler role. But the idea that he’s thinking of picking NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers as his running mate seems extra stupid. Yes, he’s won a Super Bowl and is a four-time MVP, is 40 years old (and thus constitutionally eligible to serve, but what the hell does an NFL quarterback know about running the country? Also, since Rodgers is under contract to the Jets, won’t having to play NFL football preclude him from actively running as VP pick?
Crazy white boy Shuan King is now a Muslim.
Breaking: BLM hoaxer Shaun King and his wife have converted to Islam. King identifies as black and previously identified as a Christian pastor. He regularly uses his large social media platform to threaten people.
“Captain Marvel 3, Ant Man 4, Eternals 2All Cancelled.” Second time to break this out this week:
Related: Just about all of the $71 billion Disney spent to acquire Fox was essentially wasted. They got into a bidding war, and then “they don’t use the catalog that Fox has that they were given.”
In the middle of trial, New York prosecutors abruptly dropped their case Wednesday against three collectibles experts who had been accused of scheming to hang onto and peddle the pages, which Eagles co-founder Don Henley maintained were stolen, private artifacts of the band’s creative process.
In explaining the stunning turnabout, prosecutors agreed that defense lawyers had essentially been blindsided by 6,000 pages of communications involving Henley and his attorneys and associates. Prosecutors and the defense got the material only in the past few days, after Henley and his lawyers apparently made a late-in-the-game decision to waive their attorney-client privilege shielding legal discussions.
In waving attorney-client privilege, it looks like Henley made himself a prisoner of his own device…
Democrats hate the gig economy, since they can’t force independent contractors to join unions (and thus rake off their union dues). So Biden’s NLRB issued a “joint-employer standard” to force companies to treat gig employees and subcontractors as subject to union representation. Well, a federal judge in Texas squashed that rule.
Last week, a federal judge in Texas issued a ruling that struck down a new joint-employer standard by the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that would have classified numerous companies as “employers” of specific contract and franchise employees, obligating them to negotiate with unions representing those workers.
U.S. District Judge J. Campbell Barker in Tyler decided in Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America v. National Labor Relations Board that the NLRB’s new “joint employers” rule is too broad and violates federal labor law.
The new NLRB rule would have expanded the standard for finding a joint employment relationship under the National Labor Relations Act, which states and defines the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively with their employers through representatives.
“This ruling is a major win for employers and workers who don’t want their business decisions micromanaged by the NLRB,” said the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “It will prevent businesses from facing new liabilities related to workplaces they don’t control, and workers they don’t actually employ. The U.S. Chamber will continue to fight back against the NLRB and its campaign to promote unionization at all costs.”
The initial Chamber of Commerce complaint was filed jointly with a variety of other business organizations that asked the court to “vacate” the rule because it is based on a “flawed premise that it is contrary to common-law principles.” The complaint goes on to state that if the new rule were to go into effect, it would force companies to “face business-altering decisions.”
“The new Rule imposes joint-and-several liability on virtually every entity that hires contractors subject to routine parameters, defines the terms of those contracts, or collaborates with a third party of any kind in achieving common goals that have an incidental or indirect effect on the third party’s employees,” the complaint states.
In the opinion, Barker wrote that the rule “would treat virtually every entity that contracts for labor as a joint employer because virtually every contract for third-party labor has terms that impact, at least indirectly, at least one of the specified ‘essential terms and conditions of employment.’”
Barker stated that the rule is not valid because it would classify certain companies as the employers of contract or franchise workers, even when they had no significant control over the workers’ employment conditions, stating that “reach exceeds the bounds of the common law and is thus contrary to law.”
There are extensive reams of labor relations laws and rulings, but that’s not good enough for Democrats. They had to issue a transparently illegal ruling because workers and businesses continue to flee unions and closed shop states for right to work states, which is why union membership continues to decline and there’s nothing they can do about it.
The best way to shore up American worker wages is to stem the flood of illegal aliens across our border, but the Biden Administration will never do that.
