Another deep freeze week here in Texas, with temperatures below freezing most of the week, but the state grid seems to be holding, and I haven’t seen any widespread power outages. I did lose power, but only for five minutes.
This week: More waste and corruption exposed by DOGE, the Secretary of Defense gets a spite audit from the IRS, and Texas rolls out plans for securing cybersecurity and nuclear power futures. Plus an unusual amount of stories about China, AI, Chinese AI, airlines, Canada, and an airliner in Canada.
Judge says that DOGE can access student financial aid data. “US District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan has denied an emergency filing to block DOGE’s access to federal records and government layoffs – saying in a 10-page decision that the 14 states who brought the lawsuit have failed to meet the burden of proof to prove ‘imminent, irreparable harm.'”
“A judge who blocked President Trump’s federal spending freeze is Chairman Emeritus of a nonprofit that will continue to receive millions in government funding as a result of his ruling, in an apparent conflict of interest seen as a second cause for the judge’s impeachment. On Wednesday, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) announced articles of impeachment against federal Judge John McConnell on the grounds that he overreached his authority and engaged in partisan activism by blocking Trump’s executive order freezing federal funding while Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) searches for wasteful spending. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Doug Ross has chosen 20 of the best examples of waste and fraud DOGE has discovered “Stacey Abrams/Power Forward Communities $2 Billion Grant (2025). DOGE uncovered $2 billion in taxpayer funds allocated to Power Forward Communities, tied to Stacey Abrams via Rewiring America, from a $20 billion EPA grant in April 2024. With $100 in revenue, it’s under scrutiny for potential fraud.”
The Democratic Party is polling about 31 percent approval, a near-historic low.
Despite enjoying a huge lead in fundraising, legacy media favoritism, and incumbency, in the 2024 election, Democrats lost the White House to Donald Trump. Ever since, they have offered nothing new, no novel agenda, no innovative policies—nothing other than screaming that they are loudly against everything and anything that the president is for.
In the past, what did they accomplish by following their prior two impeachments with attempts to de-ballot Trump? Who thought sending an FBI swat team to raid Trump’s home or waging five lawfare civil and criminal suits and issuing 91 felony indictments against him would win over the public?
Was conducting a media barrage of Hitler-Trump invectives, or lowering the bar of demonization that likely led to two assassination attempts of Trump a good way to win an election?
Apparently not, given the Democrats have now lost the presidency, the House, and the Senate. The Supreme Court is conservative. They have no power to subpoena anyone; they cannot block any nomination. Much of their old administrative state control is eroding. All the main issues—the economy, energy, border security, illegal immigration, crime, DEI/woke, and foreign policy—poll against the Democrats. The more they shouted that biological men must be able to compete as transgendered females in women’s sports, the more that 80% of the public disagreed, women were turned off, and the absurd idea was exploded by Trump.
The power of the administrative state, the legacy network news, print media, and Silicon Valley’s social media and search engines, the billions that poured into the Biden and Harris campaign all went for naught.
The efforts of moderators to warp debates, of network news to edit out unfavorable Harris or Biden comments, of leftists to cancel, deplatform, ostracize, censor, and shadow ban their enemies have failed. More likely to succeed now are numerous lawsuits against leftwing media for chronic defamation and censorship.
Given that collective meltdown, what would a sane Democratic Party do?
If they were stable, then they might renounce political suicide and perhaps return to something akin to the Clinton efforts of 1992 and 1996. Then the once self-destructive Democrats finally gave up on disastrous out-of-touch McGovernism, Carterism, an Dukakism. Instead, they began to embrace legal-only immigration, secure borders, balanced budgets, support for law enforcement, and meritocracy.
The result?
After twelve years in the wilderness (1980-1992), the Democrats regained power for the next 16 of 24 years—only in the second term of Barack Obama to go full radical Jacobin and soon lose it.
The current self-destructive obsessions with DEI/woke racialism, bi-coastal talk-down elitism, boutique transgenderism, and nonstop America Lastism all came to fruition during the Biden years. A shameless conspiracy to use an enfeebled John Biden as a prop to masque an otherwise unpalatable radical, neo-socialist agenda ensured the MAGA counterrevolution.
But instead of postmortem autopsy and introspection, since Election Day, the Democrats have doubled down on their veritable collective self-destruction.
On immigration, after wiping out the border and allowing in 12 million illegal aliens, including more than 500,000 suspected felons, they seem deliberately to be alienating public opinion even further.
So, thousands of leftists swarm and block the freeways of Los Angeles to protest the deportations of criminals. And how exactly?
By enraging middle-class commuters, while burning the flag of the country that they demand must allow them to stay, while chauvinistically waving the flag of the country to which under no circumstances they wish to return?
New Jersey Democratic governor Patrick Murphy idiotically virtue-signaled that he would defy the law, as he bragged that he was harboring an illegal alien living above his garage.
Then, when apprised that such performance-art showboating was a felony, in theory entailing a long prison sentence, the now buffoonish governor changed his narrative that the occupant of his garage was not really illegally living above his garage.
Democratic governors and mayors vie, bragging that they will be foremost in breaking the law by impeding the efforts of the federal immigration services to find and deport illegal aliens—for now, half a million criminals. Other activists are tipping off criminal illegal-alien gang leaders to avoid US government efforts to apprehend such dangerous criminals.
Is that the way to win back the working classes? By ensuring that the felons of M-13, Norteños, Sureños, and Tren de Aragua can flee and put in danger fellow American police officers?
Elon Musk has been appointed by Donald Trump to create a new government agency, DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), to find waste, fraud, and abuse in the government spending of taxpayers money.
He and his young team of tech standouts have exposed shocking waste and fraud, but mostly insanity, in the USAID’s $50 billion of foreign aid grants.
Why are Americans paying for overseas drag shows or gay and trans advocacy in culturally imperialist fashion in traditional and conservative societies abroad? Why are we paying eight percent of the budget of the hardcore left-wing BBC? Is that a way back to the White House?
Do Politico, the New York Times, or the Wuhan gain-in-function virology lab and birthplace of COVID-19 really need millions of dollars of taxpayer dollars?
Do Democrats really think the middle class will hate Elon Musk for exposing that their government may well have handed the communist Chinese the necessary cash to birth a manufactured killer virus that took one million American lives?
Is that a winning strategy—to scream in Congress that Musk is a Nazi, a dictator for showing that Biden’s USAID under leftist Samantha Power was a clearing house to enrich and empower well-off leftist organizations that only weakened their own country abroad?
On December 6, 2024, a federal judge ordered the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release documents related to the emergency use authorisation of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine. These documents had been hidden from public view.
The legal battle traces back to September 2021, when attorney Aaron Siri filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on behalf of the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency. The plaintiffs sought access to the vast trove of documents the FDA relied on to approve Pfizer’s vaccine.
Initially, the FDA proposed a slow release schedule. In November 2021, the agency stated it would release just 500 pages per month—a pace that would have stretched the full disclosure process to 75 years.
However, in January 2022, District Judge Mark Pittman of Texas rejected the FDA’s proposal, ordering the agency to expedite its release to 55,000 pages per month, aiming to complete the disclosure of all 450,000 pages by August 2022.
As the documents trickled out, researchers began uncovering glaring gaps that prevented a systematic review of the data. These gaps fueled suspicions about what else the FDA might be withholding.
It became evident that the FDA had withheld records directly tied to its emergency use authorisation of Pfizer’s vaccine, estimated to be over one million pages.
These documents, which the FDA had full knowledge of, were excluded from earlier disclosures, effectively misleading the judiciary and undermining public trust.
People need to go to jail.
Trump and Musk’s attempts to cut federal waste are super popular.
In recent months, Democrats have manufactured an elaborate narrative around Donald Trump’s push to streamline government operations and eliminate waste, branding it as a “constitutional crisis.” This exaggerated portrayal overlooks a critical reality: many Americans, particularly those who are politically moderate, actually support Trump’s initiatives aimed at reducing the size of government.
A recent focus group composed of Arizona swing voters, including those who previously backed Joe Biden, revealed a striking consensus on this issue: they overwhelmingly approve of Trump’s agenda and Elon Musk’s efforts with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to make government more efficient. “Every Arizona swing voter in our latest Engagious/Sago focus groups said they approve of President Trump’s actions since taking office — and most also support Elon Musk’s efforts to slash government,” reports Axios.
Vice President JD Vance confronted European leaders at the Munich Security Conference on Friday over their support for authoritarian restrictions on speech, putting the assembled dignitaries on notice that the Trump administration expects the continent to revive its commitment to Western values.
“The threat that I worry most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values,” Vance said. “When I look at Europe today, it’s not clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners.”
The vice president recited a litany of examples, taken from across Europe, in which governments cracked down on politically disfavored ideas.
In Brussels for example, officials notified citizens that they would shut down social media platforms “during times of civil unrest” if users post so-called hateful content. Vance also cited examples taken from Germany, where “police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online”; Sweden, where a judge recently explained to a man accused of participating in a Koran burning that he does not have “a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief,”; and the United Kingdom, where citizens can be arrested for silently praying within 200 meters of an abortion facility.
“In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear is in retreat,” Vance said.
The vice president lamented Europe’s abandonment of other democratic values, such as border security, he said, adding that Europeans should work with anti-immigration factions to address the record-breaking influx of illegal immigrants into Europe.
“While the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, [we] also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense,” Vance said.
A majority of French, German, Dutch, Italian, and Portuguese citizens believe that their countries should have stricter border security measures to curb illegal immigration, according to a poll conducted by the nonprofit EU-US Forum and the Tyson Group. Most respondents from France, Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands also agree that “I am more worried today than I was a decade ago about government censorship of my ideas,” according to the same poll.
Vance connected the massive flow of migrants into Europe with recent terrorist attacks, such as the one carried out this week in Munich by a 24-year-old Afghan migrant. The man has an Islamist motive, police said, and he plowed a car into a crowd of people blocks away from where the Security Conference is being held, injuring at least 30.
Another Saudi migrant rammed a car into a Christmas marked in central Germany last December, injuring hundreds, and killing five.
“Over the span of a decade, we saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city,” Vance said.
European leaders responded with a large bout of pearl-clutching and a chorus of “Well, I never!”
“Legislators File ‘Atomic Texas’ Act to Spark Nuclear Power ‘Renaissance.’ With the advent of small modular nuclear reactors, the nuclear industry feels bullish on a revival of nuclear power. Gov. Greg Abbott called for forging a “nuclear power renaissance” in Texas during his 2025 State of the State address, two legislators have filed legislation intended to make the concept a reality. State Rep. Drew Darby’s House Bill (HB) 2678 would create the Texas Advanced Nuclear Energy Authority and a low-interest loan fund to go with it, and is the companion bill to state Sen. Tan Parker’s (R-Flower Mound) Senate Bill 1105.”
Ukraine hits another oil refinery. I’m ignoring the news about U.S. Russian talks, etc., because Trump does a lot of persuasion bracketing, and it’s fruitless to place too much import on it at this stage.
New York governor Kathy Hochul says she might remove new York City Mayor Eric Adams from office, now that trump’s Department of Justice has dropped charges against Adams. My working assumption is that since Adams is a New York Democratic politician, he’s guilty as sin, but it’s funny how Hochul only started paying attention to Adams’ alleged misdeed when he started cooperating with Trump on deporting illegal aliens…
With the Trump administration cutting off billions of US taxpayer funding for the USAID international slush fund, formerly flush NGOs are now begging woke EU nations for money to continue operations, according to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
“WARNING! Our fears have come true: the globalist-liberal-Soros NGO network is fleeing to Brussels, after President Trump dealt a huge blow to their activities in the US,” Orbán wrote in a Tuesday post to X. “Now 63 of them are asking Brussels for money, under the guise of various human rights projects. Not going to happen! We will not let them find safe haven in Europe!”
“The USAID-files exposed the dark practices of the globalist network. We will not take the bait again!”
“A series of by-elections were held for local government seats on Thursday, with Nigel Farage’s [Reform] party storming to victory in Trevethin and Penygarn in Torfaen, Wales, gaining 47% of the vote from a standing start. Labour plummeted a whopping 49.2% to just 26.6% of the vote, down from 75.8% last time. Two independents then came in third and fourth, with the Greens in fifth on 2.6%.” The Tories didn’t even run a candidate.
Gov. Greg Abbott delivered his State of the State address several days ago, outlining his priorities for the 89th Legislative Session and listing his emergency items, which included an unexpected addition — the creation of a Texas Cyber Command.
“We must deploy cutting edge capabilities to better secure our State,” Abbott declared.
Minutes after the proclamation was made, information from the governor’s office on the new proposition was circulated, detailing the necessity of a Texas Cyber Command to increase the state’s ability to protect critical infrastructure from cyber threats and hostile foreign adversaries like China, Iran, Russia, and “other rogue outlets” around the world.
The governor’s plan is to have the new venture be headquartered in San Antonio — a city with a large presence of cybersecurity experts, including the University of Texas (UT) at San Antonio, which is a member of the United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) Academic Engagement Network.
Austin has at least as many cybersecurity firms as San Antonio…
“Attorney General Paxton Launches Investigation Into Chinese AI App. Paxton expressed concerns that artificial intelligence company DeepSeek could be violating the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act.”
In Houston: “22-year-old Chilean national arrested with device that disabled communication between arresting officers.”
“Transgender migrant featured in NYC Pride Parade charged with raping 14-year-old boy in public restroom.” “A migrant transgender woman [man] wanted by federal immigration officials allegedly stalked and raped a boy in Manhattan this week, The Post has learned. Nicol Suarez allegedly followed the 14-year-old into the bathroom of a bodega across the street from Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem Tuesday and attacked him, police and sources said.”
Chinese foreign investment declines 99% in the last three years. That’s what happens when you’ve got dirty commies being jerks of the world…
Accidents will happen. “Trump Administration Un-Fires Hundreds Of Nuclear Weapon Workers.”
California’s one party Democratic rule is so incompetent and burdensome that weed dealers can’t make money selling pot to Californians. “California’s legal cannabis market has hit another grim milestone: There are now 10,828 inactive and surrendered pot licenses in the state and only 8,514 active ones, meaning dead pot licenses now outnumber active ones.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Jihad terrorism is still very much alive in Africa. “70 Christians Decapitated in Church in Democratic Republic of Congo. DRC also faces violence from the Rwanda-backed armed group M23.”
“Trump Administration Pulls Approval of NYC Congestion Toll.” “The congestion toll came into effect last month, imposing a $9 charge on drivers entering Manhattan below 60th street. The tax will increase by $3 increments in 2028 and 2031 as drivers adjust to the program, if it remains in place.” London’s “carbon tax” is widely unpopular with drivers as well, so I imagine New York drivers are just as livid.
Happy Valentine’s Day! Or, as I call it in my house, “Passover.” DOGE uncovers more infuriating waste and fraud, another job number revision downward, a bit on the Russo-Ukrainian War, a Second Amendment ruling, and the Babylon Bee offers up a double-shot of Tolkien.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
“HHS Spent over $22 Billion on Giveaways to Illegal Immigrants over Past Four Years.”
The Department of Health and Human Services spent $22.6 billion on assistance to illegal immigrants from 2020 to 2024 as border crossings hit all-time highs, a new watchdog report shows.
The HHS Office of Refugee Resettlement, a unit that lost track of 32,000 migrant children, distributed the bulk of the funds to nonprofit organizations during President Joe Biden’s term, according to a report from government spending watchdog Open the Books, first reported by the New York Post.
In fiscal year 2023 alone, the ORR doled out $10 billion worth of grants as the Biden administration expanded the number of illegal aliens eligible for assistance. HHS distributed obligated funds of $2.6 billion in 2020, $2.3 billion in 2021, and $4.2 billion in fiscal year 2024. Over that time period, the Biden administration allowed record numbers of illegal immigrants to cross the southern border and remain in the country.
Some of the ORR money went towards a program that helped illegal immigrants save for car and home purchases, while another program distributed business and personal loans to help migrants build credit. Additional funds were allocated toward providing migrants with “legal assistance,” “cultural orientation,” and “emergency housing support.”
“ORR is part of a troubling trend of using nonprofit groups as ideological proxies. Vast sums are being outsourced to evade accountability and prop up an immoral, exploitive system that is hurtful to both American citizens and people in other countries who are longing for a better life,” Open The Books CEO John Hart told the Post.
Heh: “Terrified staff left hysterical as ‘well drilled’ DOGE nerds storm hyper ‘woke’ Department of Education.”
Elon Musk’s nerd army stormed into the Department of Education on Tuesday and saved over $900 million.
Musk’s DOGE lieutenants Akash Bobba and Ethan Shaotran, both 22, already have access to the department, NBC News reported.
And as many as 16 DOGE team members have entered the premises as the agency begins to be ripped apart.
Rep. Melanie Stansbury, (D-NM) described the terror agency staff are feeling after Musk’s team entered to ‘actively dismantle’ the institution.
‘They are in the building, on the 6th floor, canceling grants and contracts,’ she said in an interview with HuffPost.
The Department of Education was targeted by Donald Trump during his campaign, He is keen to dismantle the so-called ‘Deep State’ constantly working against conservatives.
Most Republicans believe the department employs some of the most activist liberal bureaucrats in the federal government.
Trump plans to sign another executive order on Tuesday to order all agencies to work with DOGE, according to Semafor, including with the ‘workplace optimization initiative.’
Snip.
The department has already terminated 89 Education Department contracts worth $881 million.
And over 29 training grants for DEI have been eliminated saving $101 million, according to the DOGE X account.
President Donald Trump campaigned on shutting down the Department of Education and sending the funding back to the states to fund their schools as they see fit.
Over the last two years, USAID had funneled $2.3 billion in “humanitarian assistance” to [Ilhan] Omar’s native Somalia. Last year it reported a request for $1.6 billion in aid and even with the Biden administration on the way out the door, it sent an additional $29 million in December 2024.
USAID support for Somalia had doubled under the Biden administration and with $3.3 billion from USAID allocated in the last 5 years, the end of the USAID gravy train for the Islamic terrorist state of Somalia must have been a painful blow for Omar, who is very close to the Somali regime. Former Somali Prime Minister Hassan Khaire had reportedly celebrated that “the interest of Ilhan are not Ilhan’s, it’s not the interest of Minnesota, nor is it the interest of the American people, the interest of Ilhan is that of the Somalian people and Somalia.”
It’s unknown if any of Omar’s Majerteen clan members benefited from the billions in American money, but considering the prominence of the clan in Somali politics, it’s likely to be the case.
Somalia, along with other Islamic terrorist entities, including the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Houthis in Yemen, and Hamas in Gaza, were among the top beneficiaries of USAID cash.
USAID boasted of having sent $2.1 billion to Gaza and the West Bank since the Hamas attacks of Oct 7. In 2024 alone, $917 million was programmed for the terrorist areas occupying Israel.
USAID provided over $3.7 billion to Afghanistan since the Taliban took over with $832 million in the previous fiscal year alone. The money was so unaccountable that USAID refused to cooperate with the U.S. Government’s Afghan War watchdog tracking money going to terrorists.
Even while the United States of America was at war with the Houthis, the Iran-backed Islamic terrorist group firing on US Navy vessels, USAID continued to direct billions of dollars to Yemen.
In 2024, USAID announced a $2.7 billion aid request for Yemen and allocated $753 million. In the last 5 years, USAID provided an estimated $3.4 billion in aid to an enemy terror state.
Other Islamic terrorist states that have heavily drawn on USAID include Pakistan which harbored Osama bin Laden, but benefited from $600 million in the last 5 years. While some American towns and cities lacked clean drinking water, USAID labored to build plants for Pakistan’s majority Muslim population even while it engaged in the persecution of Christians.
USAID spent over $700 million on Iraq during the last 5 years even though the country has long since been governed by Iranian puppets whose militias have been firing on American soldiers.
$3.4 billion was directed to Syria over the past 5 years by USAID even as it was caught in a civil war between Shiite Islamists aligned with Iran and Sunni Islamists aligned with Al Qaeda.
USAID allocated $1.1 billion to spend on Lebanon even as the country was run by Hezbollah.
While USAID is unable to function in Iran, between Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, over $8 billion was sent to Iranian puppet regimes even without counting the money spent on Gaza.
In total, USAID had spent some $18.5 billion on Islamic terror states over those 5 years.
PA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a video released on Wednesday night that his agency has discovered an unprecedented scheme that was utilized by the Biden administration to funnel money to far-Left activist groups.
“An extremely disturbing video circulated two months ago featuring a Biden EPA political appointee talking about how they were ‘tossing gold bars off the Titanic,’ rushing to get billions of your tax dollars out the door before Inauguration Day,” Zeldin said.
He continued, “The gold bars were tax dollars, and tossing them off the Titanic meant the Biden administration knew they were wasting it.”
Zeldin said that he has contacted the U.S. Justice Department and the inspector general to launch investigations into the $20 billion that was transferred to an outside financial institution for the purpose of doling out funds to leftist organizations during Biden’s final days in office.
“Fortunately, my awesome team at EPA has found the gold bars,” he said. “Shockingly, roughly $20 billion of your tax dollars were parked at an outside financial institution by the Biden EPA.”
“This scheme was the first of its kind in EPA history, and it was purposely designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight,” he continued. “Even further, this pot of $20 billion was awarded to just eight entities that were then responsible for doling out your money to NGOs and others at their discretion with far less transparency.”
He said that the financial agreement with the bank needs to be instantly terminated and the funds need to be returned to the government.
People need to understand what Trump is doing, whether it’s intentional or not, but he is cutting off the flow of money to the pool from which a variety of left-wing groups and activist groups around the world and in the US drink.
So imagine a pool that’s being filled with money. A lot of that money comes from the programs that have been cut off by his DEI orders, Federal funding.
But a lot of it came from USAID, which is essentially an international development and development agency of the government, which has a massive, tens of billions of dollars, budget. And now we know what has been happening.
It has been like a fire hose filling up the same pool that the DEI funding filled up, and they all drink from that, and he’s cutting off that flow.
This has the potential to be absolutely devastating to the DEI and left-wing industrial complex.
We always think of it as being George Soros and people like that, and, and it is, but they all are feeding into the same pool. And Soros doesn’t have enough money to replace what the US government spends on this stuff.
That’s why they are apoplectic. That’s why they are losing their minds. That’s why they are senators are trying to break into buildings. That’s why there’s a lawsuit after lawsuit because they know if Trump is successful in cutting off the various spigots that fill the pool from which left-wing activist groups drink, they are in big trouble.
The evil that the Biden Administration did lives on in so many ways. “January Jobs Report: 2024 Employment Revised Down by 600,000.”
The federal judge who ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze all funding pauses while federal spending is being assessed, has a history of anti-Trump and woke activism.
Chief Judge John McConnell Jr. of the U.S. District Court in Rhode Island can be seen in video footage from 2021 accusing Trump of being “a dictator” and claiming that “racism is a white people problem” and that “we all have racism inside of us.”
Judge McConnell certainly has stupidity inside him…
Newly confirmed Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi is suing Letita James along with other New York Democratic politicians for refusing to help deport illegal aliens.
Viking was not at his normal base in the Zhytomyr region when the war started, he was in Kyiv. His race to Zhytomyr was frustrated by a lack of rail services out of the capital and ended with a walk between 25-30 miles to get to the air base, still in civilian clothes. Once there, he was very quickly in the thick of action, and from Feb. 25 on he flew air defense missions that he described as “deterrence,” first flown in daylight and later at night, over the Kyiv region.
“We held them back,” Viking explained. “If their aircraft had come here and worked freely, everything would have been completely different.”
Viking and his fellow 39th Tactical Aviation Brigade (39 BrTA) pilots faced a significant disadvantage in terms of radars and missiles compared to the Russians. While Ukrainian fighters could occasionally track enemy aircraft, getting within missile-launch range was rarely possible.
The Ukrainian Air Force began the war with around 32 Su-27s operational within two brigades, the 39 brTA at Ozerne in the Zhytomyr region of northwestern Ukraine and the 831 brTA at Myrhorod in the Poltava region of central Ukraine. At least 15 Ukrainian Flankers have been visually confirmed as destroyed but, in the meantime, additional examples have also been returned to airworthiness after overhauls. The aircraft are also regularly moved around between different operating locations, some of them austere in nature, making it harder for the Russians to target them.
Snip.
In these early days, Viking’s available intelligence on Russian air defenses was scrawled on a piece of map that he’d torn off, with information vital for survival being exchanged by word of mouth between pilots. The map simply showed the best route into a given area, with circles showing the approximate engagement ranges of hostile air defenses.
The primary job at this time was attempting to blunt the advance of Russian tactical aircraft flying from Belarus. “We were the only ones here, to put it bluntly. We were the first line of defense, and they were constantly trying to sneak their Su-34s and Su-35s in at night, at extremely low altitudes.”
Complicating their job was the fact that, according to Viking, the avionics and missiles of the Ukrainian Su-27s, at this time, were “two generations behind” those of the Russians. Within these parameters, “the battle was reduced to trying to get closer to [the Russians].” But even if that was possible, the Ukrainian Su-27 pilots were rarely able to get within the launch parameters of their missiles, with the Russian jets always having the opportunity to launch weapons first.
“Even though our [missile] launches had short ranges, we still tried something, we launched missiles, we held the Russians back, and we repelled these attacks every night,” Viking explains. “Almost every pilot flew two, sometimes three sorties each night.”
Also a lot of interesting discussion about how western munitions (HARM missiles and JDAMs in particular) have improved their chances.
Object to not deporting illegal aliens? Expect a beating from those “mostly peaceful” protestors.
“Harris County Comes Up Short on Funds For Planned Flood Control Projects. One set of projects for subdivisions may face a shortage of nearly $140 million.” Is there anything in the article that indicates where the real problem lies? Why yes, there is: “The framework, which has been slightly revised since then, shifts from targeting areas with the most damage to adding consideration of the Social Vulnerability Index and areas with lower incomes.” There’s no institution so robust that adding social justice to it can’t beat it out of whack…
Crazy story out of Columbine High School (yes, that one) in Colorado.
A friend of the student’s mom, Heather McCormick, accused a female teacher of grooming the teen girl at school. According to the allegation, she then worked with the school to secretly change the girl’s status to “homeless” so she could legally move out of her parents’ home … and into the teacher’s home.
The unnamed mom discovered thousands of phone calls and texts between the two, which revealed that the female teacher had, at the minimum, been making out with the student.
When the student’s mom went to the principal to let him know that a predator teacher had been sexually grooming her daughter, this is how the principal reportedly responded: “Ms. Kearney takes interest in helping kids navigate their sexuality.”
In two speeches given less than 24 hours apart in the French city of Toulouse, Jean-Luc Mélenchon delivered some of the most shocking yet brutally honest words from a European politician, openly calling for the older French to be replaced by a “Creole” generation of mixed races and cultures.
The leader of France’s far-left LFI is calling outright for replacement of White French people, conjuring up the Great Replacement term that has been demonized as a conspiracy theory by the left for years.
“In our country, one person in four has a foreign grandparent. 40% of the population speaks at least two languages. We are destined to be a Creole nation and so much the better! May the young generation be the great replacement for the old generation,” said Mélenchon.
“Burrows Promises Trump: Texas House Will Pass School Choice. Both the House and Senate budget proposals currently allocate $1 billion for education savings accounts.” Color me skeptical. The Democrat-backed cabal backing burrows has made killing school choice a priority in the past
“A US Navy aircraft carrier has collided with a merchant ship off the coast of Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea, a US Sixth Fleet spokesman revealed Thursday. The collision involved the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman and the merchant vessel Besiktas-M at around noon local time on Wednesday.” Fortunately there was no lose of life, but there’s a whole lot of stupid to go around for this one. At 189 meters, or over 620 feet, the Besiktas-M certainly isn’t small, but the Harry S. Truman is over 1,000 feet long.
Facebook lays off 4,000 workers, some of whom say they had glowing performance reviews last year.
Good news! Trump rescinds Biden’s plastic straw ban! There seems to be no end of the woke making your life more difficult to display their own climate virtue…
“Microsoft Drops USAID-Funded NewsGuard After Ted Cruz Starts Digging. Microsoft has dropped NewsGuard, a left-wing fact checking organization they partnered with that has helped the advertising industry justify blacklists for independent conservative media sites such as ZeroHedge.” Good.
Amid President Donald Trump’s frontal assault on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, Disney has scaled back and restated its DEI efforts, aligning them more directly with “business goals and company values.”
The tweaks, discussed in an internal memo, are less dramatic than DEI shifts at other major companies from Meta to Amazon to Google but meant to stem potential backlash after one of Trump’s first acts in office was to shut down federal DEI initiatives and put employees on leave. Federal contractors and grantees are also under scrutiny. PBS, funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, said this week it is closing an office dedicated to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts amid Trump’s flurry of executive orders.
Disney is also updating disclaimers that run before certain titles on its streaming services that currently warn viewers of “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures.” In a forthcoming change, the tag will read, “This program is presented as originally created and may contain stereotypes or negative depictions,” and be included in the Details section.
The memo today from Disney’s HR chief Sonia Coleman aimed to provide “an update on how our values are embedded in our leader compensation programs, specifically our Other Performance Factors (OPFs), as well as share some of the work that has been underway to evolve our talent strategy consistent with these values.”
The language does not mention diversity but focuses on belonging. It does not mention equity, but does call for an environment where everyone can excel.
Changes include replacing a Diversity & Inclusion metric with a Talent Strategy factor in executive compensation planning to assess how leaders uphold company values, incorporate different perspectives to drive business success, cultivate an environment where all employees can thrive, and sustain a robust pipeline to ensure long-term organizational strength.
“This new factor represents an evolution of important concepts in the former Diversity & Inclusion OPF and will be used alongside our other two OPFs, Storytelling & Creativity and Synergy,” the memo said.
While this may fall short of the full-throated denunciation of DEI we’d like all like Disney to issue, it does seem like a pretty significant sea change for the Mouse House. It also shows that Disney no longer fears the wrath of online social justice warrior activists.
DEI meant discrimination based on race and the whole panoply of radical leftwing victimhood identity causes, from transexism to #BlackLivesMatter. And it’s proven deeply unpopular with ordinary “normie” Americans, who have stopped attending woke Disney movies in droves. Now that corporate America is stepping off the social justice train, how long will the Democratic Party keep letting their radical fringe tail continue to wag the dog without ideological reinforcement from major corporations?
It’s been hard to keep up with the torrent of information spewing from DOGE’s deep dives into the federal budget. Even before that, it was obvious that a far-left, anti-Republican, anti-Trump, Democratic Media Complex was engaged in system preference falsification to pump up leftwing ideas to make them look more popular than they were. From the Russian collusion hoax to the “fine people on both sides” gaslighting to Hunter Biden’s laptop to the lab leak hypothesis to January 6 being an “insurrection” to Biden’s cogitative decline to the Democratic Party bypassing primaries entirely to foist an unpopular candidate off on the American public, a compliant, left-leaning media was always there to reinforce The Narrative, no matter how false.
Conservatives have long wondering who was paying to pump up this leftwing reality bubble, and now we know: the American taxpayer.
Yesterday’s report that the US government has been funding outlets such as Politico, the Associated Press, the BBC, and others raised more questions than it answered – though the obvious implication is that the US government has effectively been propping up regime-friendly media, which then peddles regime-friendly coverage – and spent years attacking independent outlets such as ZeroHedge, The Federalist, and many unlucky ones who have since been starved out of business….
And while funding for Politico and others has come from all over the federal government – WikiLeaks, citing a RSF report, highlighted that USAID was funding over 6,200 journalists across 707 media outlets and 279 “media” NGOs.
Texas natives Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Dennis Quaid, Billy Bob Thornton, and Renée Zellweger (plus True Detective producer/director Nic Pizzolatto) are pushing for the Texas legislature to pony up incentives for Hollywood to shift movie production to Texas.
“You don’t like what Hollywood has been dishing? It’s time to take over the kitchen.”
(Aside: Since when did Billy Bob Thorton start looking like Kid Rock by way of Father Guido Sarducci?)
A few quick points:
Following the LA fires, it’s probably the perfect time to make this pitch. California’s insane tax and regulatory environment under one-party Democrat rule has already been pushing production out of Hollywood for a long time, but the fires have made collapse in basic governing competence when it comes to crime, homelessness, infrastructure, water, land management and about a dozen other basic government functions painfully clear to even the most blinkered Hollywood functionary.
When McConaughey declares that targeted business incentives are not corporate welfare, he’s engaged in the time-honored rhetorical device known as “lying.” It is corporate welfare, but it’s not exactly new, as the Texas Enterprise Fund already provide similar incentives for non-film business, and the Texas Moving Image Industry Incentive Program offers industry-specific incentives. It is corporate welfare, but most in the form of tax rebates, though there is a grant program rolled in there as well.
There appear to be two identical movies subsidies bills filed in the Texas House, one from Rep. Ben Bumgarner, the other from Giovanni Capriglione. Given Capriglione’s longtime support of the Straus/Bonnin/Phalen/Burrows axis, I’m inclined to oppose the bill on that basis alone, much less the subsidy angle.
Even without subsidies and tax breaks, from Hollywood‘s perspective, getting the hell out of California makes a lot of sense. High taxes, high crime, homeless camps everywhere, and dysfunctional Democratic politics means that even basic urban competence is off the table for the foreseeable future. Texas, by contrast, most look like a low-cost, low-tax paradise (albeit a really hot one) by comparison. Certainly Texas has no end of competition for movie and TV production, but a lot of the things that make it attractive to business relocation apply here as well.
There’s also a Texas residency requirement. “You can’t carpetbag.”
“I think this is it for Hollywood being the hub of movie production.”
Direct grants and subsidies are a bad idea, targeted tax credits slightly less so. But Texas, unlike California, has taken care of basic governance so much better that it can afford to throw around subsidies without impacting basic services or tax rates. But that doesn’t mean it should.
But having Hollywood move movie production to Texas will likely benefit the nation as a whole, simply by getting production out of that stifling far-left monoculture and injecting a dose of reality and diversity of thought, the precise kind of diversity that Democrats hate.
And if Hollywood does want to move to Texas, they’re going to have to leave all their DEI, social justice and transsexual madness behind in California. Not only do Texans not cotton to that sort of thing, but race and transsexual quotas are actually against Texas law.
How long has it been since we did a post bashing communism? Well that’s too long!
Here Michael Malice talks with Yaron Brook and Lex Fridman about writing his book The White Pill: A Tale of Good and Evil (which I guess I should track down now) about the evils of communism and how western intellectuals covered up for them so long.
The clip starts with Malice describing Ayn Rand testifying before the House Committee on Unamerican Activities about the horrors of communism she witnessed before escaping the Soviet Union, and them simply not getting it.
Michael Malice: “The broader point in the book is how ignorant many people are in the west about the horrors of Stalinism and Communism, but also how many people in the west were complicit in saying to Americans ‘Go home, everything’s fine, this is great.'”
MM: “They really made a point to downplay, really gratuitously, some of the unimaginable atrocities of communism.”
MM: “Many people I’m friends with who are historians, who are interested in the space, this isn’t common knowledge to them, then we can assume that almost no one knows about it.” Conservatives knew about in the in the 1980s, thanks to coverage of Robert Conquest’s The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine and a 1985 documentary on the subject that I remember being played on PBS a few years later.
MM: “American exceptionalism has a positive context, but also has a negative context, where you think we’re invincible. All these horrible things happen to these other countries that can’t possibly happen here. We’re America, we’re special, and it’s completely an absurdity.”
Malice and Brook talk about the film Mr. Jones, which i still need to track down, and how New York Times reporter Walter Duranty. MM: “He was talking about how great it was, how if you hear about this famine in Ukraine this is just propaganda. “I went to the villages, you know everyone’s happy and fed.’ A lot of it was explicit lies.”
MM: “Anne Applebaum, who’s just a phenomenal, phenomenal writer [Or was before the TDS got her. -LP], she wrote a book called Red Famine: Stalin’s War in Ukraine, and she talks about how what people in America don’t appreciate is how clever in their sadism the Soviets were. And what they knew to do to Ukraine is, everyone is starving, so they knew if you got some meat on your bones, you’re hiding food. So they come back at night, take your hand, put in the door jam, keep slamming the door, ransack your house. They didn’t have to find the food, they burn down your house, take all your clothes, goodbye and good luck.”
Yaron Brook: “The view of the intelligencia: [Communism] is a great idea, it just was badly implemented. And no, it’s a rotten idea, it’s an evil idea, and it was implemented exactly, it was implemented exactly how it has to be implemented. There’s no alternative.”
It has been a hell of a week. First my contract position ended, then I came down with cold that’s had me drag-ass and expectorating for a few days, and my vet found “concerning” results in the blood work on my dog Avery. To balance this out, Trump has been on an absolute #winning tear as of late.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Looking to slash the federal government? From David Stockman (yes, that David Stockman) comes some places to start.
Summary of Savings From Headcount and Nondefense Agency Waste Reductions (FY 2029):
100% Elimination of Staffing at 16 Unnecessary Federal Agencies: $11 billion.
50% Staffing Cut at 9 Dubious Federal Agencies: $15 billion.
34% Staff Reduction at All Other Nondefense Departments: $59 billion.
Indirect Overhead savings from nondefense staff reductions and agency eliminations: $45 billion.
Total Nondefense Staff and Overhead Savings: $130 billion.
We begin with a summary of the 16 agencies to be shut down, along with the number of staff positions to be eliminated and the resulting direct employee compensation savings. These agencies are slated for complete elimination because in the context of a roaring fiscal crisis, they are either utterly unnecessary or inappropriate functions of government or comprise activities that are already being handled by other Federal agencies, state and local governments, or the private sector.
Self-evidently, these 16 agency closures would result in only a small down payment against the $2 trillion per year savings goal. Yet it is crucial to start here because each of these agencies represent cases of egregious regulatory excess or Washington-based enterprises that are not remotely the business of the central government in any season, but most especially not during a time when the Federal government is careening toward the fiscal shoals.
Stated differently, the list below comprises a kind of Litmus Test of fiscal resolve.
If these Federal bureaucrats and agencies can’t be eliminated, the prospect for reining in America’s unfolding fiscal calamity is dim indeed.
16 Agencies To Be Eliminated–Staff Cuts and Payroll Savings:
National Endowment for the Arts: 100 staff and $16 million savings.
National Endowment for the Humanities: 100 staff and $16 million savings.
Legal Services Corporation: 800 staff and $128 million savings.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA): 600 staff and $96 million savings.
Federal Trade Commission (FTC): 1,125 staff and $180 million savings.
Corporation for Public Broadcasting: 100 staff and $16 million savings.
OSHA: 2,200 staff and $352 million savings.
Consumer Products Safety Commission: 600 staff and $96 million savings.
Agency for Global Media: 1,125 staff and $180 million of savings.
National Endowment for Democracy (NED): 162 staff and $26 million savings.
Education Department: 4,245 staff and $680 million savings.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: 1,500 staff and $240 million savings.
Agency for International Development (AID): 10,000 staff and $1.6 billion savings.
FBI: 34,000 staff and $5.4 billion savings.
BATF: 5,300 staff and $848 million savings.
DEA: 9,315 staff and $1.49 billion savings.
Total 16 Agencies To Be Eliminated: 71,000 staff and $11.3 billion savings.
You’re just getting started…
This list of five ways the Biden Administration wasted your money will make your blood boil.
#1 Joe Biden and his minions spent 15 million dollars to distribute “oral contraceptives and condoms” in Afghanistan…
The Biden administration sent $15 million of taxpayer money in distributing “oral contraceptives and condoms” into Afghanistan, according to a private congressional funding notice reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
The award, earmarked by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) last July, transmitted the funds to Afghanistan.
The money was part of a whopping $100 million package for the Middle Eastern country to support the “basic rights and freedoms” of women and girls who were living under Taliban rule.
#2 Even more money was about to be spent on condoms for the Palestinians. It is being reported that the Biden administration “almost sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza”…
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also announced on Tuesday that Biden’s administration almost sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, which she called ‘a preposterous waste of taxpayer money!’
‘There was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza!’ Leavitt shockingly claimed.
#3 The Biden administration spent $10,000 for an “ice skating drag show” that was focused on climate change…
The 2024 Festivus Waste Report found that the Biden-Harris administration spent over $1 trillion this year, including giving a $10,000 grant to “Beards on Ice” — an ice skating drag show on climate change put on by the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, a self-described “queer cabaret arts organization.”
#4 20 million of our tax dollars were spent on a Sesame Street spin-off in Iraq that was designed to promote “inclusion”…
Additionally, the Agency for International Development (USAID) spent $20 million on a Sesame Street spin-off show in Iraq, titled “Ahlan Simsim,” in an effort to promote “inclusion” and “mutual respect.”
#5 This final example is the most sickening. 1.5 million dollars was spent to study how various species respond to motion sickness. In one of the experiments, holes were actually drilled into the skulls of young kittens. This is evil on a level that I don’t even know how to describe…
About $1.5 million was spent experimenting how different species, such as young female kittens, respond to motion sickness.
According to the report, researchers would strap kittens to a table, where they are spun around in several directions and have holes drilled into their skulls to keep them in place — “and it’s all being done with your money,” Paul writes in the report. “More than one and a half million dollars of it.”
Remember Ruy Teixeira, the prophet of a “permanent Democratic majority” thanks to Hispanic immigration? Now he’s saying that Democrats have made themselves too incompetent to elect.
The Democrats’ electoral problems have received a lot of attention—as they should! Whatever the commitments of a political party, they’ve got to be elected to pursue them. But that can distract attention from what they do when they are elected. Typically that underlies electoral problems that come to the fore and explains why it’s rarely enough for a party to tout their allegedly wonderful values or continually disparage their nefarious political opponents to fix their problems.
In other words, governance is key. You’ve got to run the government well and get things done voters care about if you want those voters to stick with you. And that’s where Democrats have been running into problems—big problems.
Think about it. If you wanted safe streets and public order would your first impulse be to turn to…a Democrat? Or if you wanted a secure, actually-enforced border? How about efficient, effective delivery of public services? Or rapid completion of public projects and infrastructure? Or nonideological public administration?
I don’t think on any of these fronts the reaction of a typical voter would be: “Democrats! Of course, I need Democrats to do all these things because they’re so good at them!” On the contrary, it seems like over time Democrats—both nationally and in many localities where they dominate—have become worse and worse at delivering in these areas. That’s a huge problem because why should voters take Democratic plans to improve their lives seriously if Democrats persist in running government so poorly? Democratic governance is their advertising and the advertising makes the Democratic “product” look pretty bad. So voters don’t want to buy it.
Let’s look at some specific areas. Take safe streets and public order. The Democratic-leaning commentator Noah Smith admits:
In the late 2010s, blue cities brought [a] problem on themselves: urban disorder. Crime rates began rising in 2015, fueled by national unrest. But blue cities didn’t respond by cracking down on crime as they did in the 90s and 00s. Progressives in the late 2010s reviled and rejected “stop-and-frisk”, “broken windows policing”, and other tools that blue cities had used to keep order in previous decades. Instead, they elected a bunch of progressive prosecutors, enacted more permissive policies toward public drug use, passed laws that made it hard to use violence against shoplifters, and sometimes even reduced penalties for minor crimes.
The result was entirely predictable. Blue cities became increasingly afflicted by pervasive, low-level urban disorder—drug needles in children’s parks, epidemics of car break-ins, and so on. Female friends of mine in San Francisco started to report being followed for blocks, harassed on the train, or even slapped in the head by street people on their way to work. The housing crunch made the disorder much worse, of course, by exacerbating homelessness.
Then the pandemic and the riots hit, and the trend got turbocharged. Without “eyes on the street” to deter crime, and with police cowed or disgruntled by the protests of summer 2020, progressive cities became increasingly lawless, chaotic zones. Violent crime soared in 2020-21, with waves of attacks on vulnerable populations like Asian elders….
Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder—restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on—represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life. In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want.
Opinions vary about how much things have improved in blue cities since their nadir. But the fundamental problem is: this never should have happened in the first place. And the culprit is well-articulated by Smith in the last paragraph of the quote above. Blue city Democrats have adopted a philosophy that is antithetical to good governance—it is not surprising it does not produce good governance; it is not intended to. Public order is treated as optional, subordinate to ideological goals Democrats wish to pursue. Until that philosophy changes in a big way and Democrats unapologetically and aggressively enforce public order, voters will continue to view Democratic governance negatively in this area. And they’ll be right to do so.
Instead of helping the Democratic Party, the massive influx of Hispanic illegal aliens is dooming it:
Voters also see de facto open borders and uncontrolled immigration on Democrats’ watch as symptoms of public disorder and poor governance. In their view, illegal (Democrats cannot even bring themselves to use the word) immigrants are in fact breaking the law by making unauthorized entry to the United States and creating a chaotic situation at our nation’s border. And they were shocked that almost all candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination endorsed decriminalizing illegal border crossings.
And then, even more astonishingly to the typical voter, these law-breakers were rewarded for their behavior on the Democrats’ watch. Consider what happened when Biden came into office in 2021. He immediately issued executive orders dramatically loosening the rules for handling illegal immigrants. His party’s left wing and various immigration advocacy groups rapturously applauded this. As The New York Times’ David Leonhardt summarized:
Biden tried to pause deportations. He changed the definition of asylum to include fear of gang violence. He used immigration parole—which the law says should be used “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons”—to admit hundreds of thousands of people. The parole programs alone amounted to “the largest expansion of legal immigration in modern U.S. history,” Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News wrote.
Would-be migrants, as well as the Mexican cartels that run transit networks, heard a clear message: Entering the United States had become easier. The number of people attempting to do so spiked almost immediately.
And continued to spike throughout the first three and a half years of the Biden administration until they finally took some steps to stanch the tide. But by that time the country had experienced truly mind-boggling levels of immigration. Indeed, the Biden immigration surge, driven heavily by illegals, was the largest in US history, surpassing even the immigration surges of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Predictably, this dramatic surge in illegal immigration and the diffusion of immigrants into overburdened cities countrywide caused a spike in the issue’s salience and negative sentiment toward Biden and the Democrats for letting the situation get out of control (where it remains to this day). In voters’ view, this was very poor governance indeed.
Leonhardt identifies the ideological roots of the Democrats’ cavalier attitude toward border security and tolerance of illegal immigration:
To many Democrats, support for immigration had come to feel like a moral imperative. Immigration lifted people out of poverty. It enhanced the country’s cultural diversity. It reflected a universalist belief in equality, regardless of a person’s country of origin…
In the 2000s, the Democratic Party…moved even closer to a universalist position. Democrats now speak more positively about immigration than any party has in the country’s history, according to an analysis of the Congressional Record. Many liberals have grown uncomfortable talking about restrictions and criticize both Clinton and Barack Obama for their positions. Obama combined full-throated support for immigrants, including legalization for many who were undocumented, with support for border security. When “an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers,” Obama said, it violates America’s promise.
Top Democrats would not make such an argument today. They are also unlikely to revere assimilation, as [Barbara] Jordan [black Texas Democrat, who chaired a 1990s commission on immigration policy] did. To universalists, glorifying American culture is jingoistic…
Today, immigration is the one issue on which even the left flank of the Democratic Party continues to support the neoliberal position. Democrats have grown more skeptical of deregulation and the free flow of trade than they were during the Clinton years. But they have grown even more supportive of the deregulated flow of people across borders. Many liberals are passionately universalist on the subject….
Because of this discomfort [with deciding who should be legally admitted to the country and who should not], the modern Democratic Party has struggled to articulate an immigration policy beyond what might be summarized as: More is better, and less is racist. The party has cast aside the legacies of Jordan and other progressives who made finer distinctions.
There you have it. Democrats have developed a philosophy about immigration that prizes ideological commitments over the mundane realities of a secure border, public order and enforcement of the law. Until Democrats decisively reject that philosophy and show by their actions that they are committed to stopping illegal immigration with every tool at government’s disposal and restoring order to the immigration system, voters will continue to regard Democratic governance in this area as very poor indeed. And who can blame them?
According to a press release from the United States Attorney’s Office, Middle District of Florida, a 39-year-old Orlando man named Matthew A. Inman has been arrested and charged with “transportation of child sex abuse material.” If convicted, he’ll face between five and twenty years in jail. Though when you hear the details, you may agree with me that this doesn’t seem like nearly enough time behind bars for this guy.
The press release continues:
According to the complaint, between August and October of 2024, Inman received and saved several videos of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to his phone. These videos depicted adults sexually assaulting young children. In October 2024, Inman traveled to Las Vegas and began talking online with an undercover law enforcement officer posing as the father of a 9-year-old boy. During this conversation, Inman expressed interest in meeting and sexually assaulting the purported child. He also sent CSAM videos to the undercover officer.
The FBI obtained a search warrant for Inman’s electronic devices and residence. During the execution of the search warrant, Inman attempted to delete the evidence from his phone and hide in the attic of his house.
A criminal complaint is merely a formal charge that a defendant has committed one or more violations of federal criminal law, and every defendant is presumed innocent unless, and until, proven guilty.
This case was investigated by the FBI. It is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Richard Varadan.
According to Spectrum News 13, “Inman was arrested by the U.S. Marshals, and he is currently in the Seminole County Jail with no bond.”
Fox 35 in Orlando reports that Inman worked for Visit Orlando, according to his LinkedIn profile. He served as the manager of business affairs. He’s also been the treasurer for the Orange County Democratic Party since July 2023 and president of the Rainbow Democrats since 2021.
A threat of a trade war causes the President of Columbia to back down in less than 10 hours about taking illegal alien deportees out.
Wow:
Trump approval currently has NO racial demographic signal. Wild!
White – 55% Black – 57% Hisp/oth – 58%
— Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen Reports (@Mark_R_Mitchell) January 23, 2025
Never mind. “The mysterious drones spotted in northern New Jersey late last year were authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration FAA and were not dispatched by foreign enemies of the U.S., the White House confirmed on Tuesday, ending months of speculation.”
“Dallas City Council Member’s Re-Election Bid Halted by Term Limit Charter Amendment. The city secretary denied Carolyn King Arnold’s application for candidacy.” Bonus: Arnold is a convicted felon.
“Trump to Cancel Student Visas of Pro-Hamas Protesters. The executive order is directed toward international students who participated in pro-Hamas protests.” If you come to America to get an education, do that. We have quite enough domestically grown Jew-haters on the left as it is; we don’t need to import any more.
Facebook/Meta is in talks to get the hell out of Delaware and reincorporate in Texas, largely based on what a Delaware judge has done to Elon Musk. Seems like Delaware incorporation doesn’t provide the slam-dunk legal protection it used to.
Disney is in a weird place right now. They’ve sort of, kind of, announced that (like most of the rest of corporate America) they’re backing away from wokeness, to the extent that they’re cutting woke storylines from Pixar properties, and Disney was able to course correct in enough time to make Moana 2 and Inside Out 2 big hits last year (plus Deadpool & Wolverine, which I suspect was too rude to ever be infected with wokeness), but the company itself is still infected with DEI, and they still have an awful lot of very expensive turds, conceived and crafted in the woke era, sliding down the alimentary release canal.
First up: Captain America: Brave New World, due to plop out February 14 (because it’s just perfect Valentine’s Day fare) after numerous poor test screenings. Re-shoots have reportedly pumped the budget up to a staggering $375 million, which would put it among the ten most expensive films of all time and means that, by traditional Hollywood metrics, the film would have to take in close to a billion dollars to make a profit. It’s not even remotely on track for that.
“It’s tracking round about the same level as The Eternals at the moment.” “Not a win.” The Eternals made $402 million worldwide, which would be a financial disaster for Captain America: Brave New World.
But that’s not the only woke-era disaster cued up for Disney, as the widely reviled live-action Snow White remake is coming out in March. Honestly, all this is just an excuse to post this video featuring comments on the Snow White trailer…sung and set to music.
So that’s two expensive, high profile bombs Disney has to flush out of the system before they can release movies that have better than a snowball’s chance in Hell of making a profit. Disney’s streaming business is finally profitable, but that’s after $11 billion worth of losses to recoup. Park revenue was up, but profits from it down. And ESPN profit has been down enough that they laid off some 300 staffers, part of a $7.5 billion cost-cutting effort introduced by Iger. But that didn’t keep Iger’s own compensation from increasing to $41.1 million, up 30% from FY2023.
Democrats used election fraud and lawfare to strike down a glad-handing, dealmaking Trump the Grey who was treated with deep suspicion by the Republican establishment, and now he’s returned, more powerful than ever, as Trump the White with a unified GOP behind him, someone who has already unleashed a executive order blitzkrieg the likes of which the nation has never seen before. Trump now threatens the Democrats’ one-ring control of the federal bureaucracy, not to mention black and Hispanic voters, in a way previous Republican presidents never did. And Democrats have only themselves to blame for it, not only for their radical, shrieking TDS obstruction in his first term and their radical embrace of a deeply unpopular social justice agenda, but also their use of overreach in using so many executive orders to achieve their agenda. Now Trump has the blueprint and precedent to go after all their power centers. The scope and ferocity of Trump’s assault on a permanent leftwing deep state makes it seem less like The War of the Ring than The War of Wrath, in which the Valar returned to Middle Earth to finally settle Morgoth’s hash once and for all.
OK, I’ll stop making Tolkien analogies now.
Let’s just say that Trump’s first week back in the White House has unleashed a blizzard of winning, and I haven’t even remotely corralled all of it here.
In his final minutes as president, Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons to his two brothers, James and Francis, and his sister, Valerie, to protect them from what he predicts will be politically motivated attacks led by President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans.
“My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me—the worst kind of partisan politics,” Biden said in a statement. “Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.”
Biden used his presidential power to pardon five members of his immediate family: James, his wife Sara, Valerie, her husband John Owens, and Francis. The outgoing president said the pardons “should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that they engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”
James and Sara, in particular, were pardoned, presumably because James wrote Joe a $200,000 check on March 1, 2018 — the same day he received the funds from distressed rural hospital provider Americore.
In September 2017, James and his wife also sent his older brother a $40,000 check that used funds originating from a Chinese energy firm CEFC in addition to other transactions involving Joe that caught the attention of the Republican-led House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. Both checks were classified as loan repayments.
The other family members were pardoned to ensure they aren’t targeted by the incoming administration. The clemency act covers any nonviolent offenses they may have committed since January 1, 2014.
Like running an illegal pay-for-play graft mill for foreign governments. Which is what the Biden Crime Family did.
The federal government’s method of searching through information incidentally collected on U.S.-based individuals violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, a federal judge has ruled.
“To countenance this practice would convert Section 702 into precisely what Defendant has labeled it – a tool for law enforcement to run ‘backdoor searches’ that circumvent the Fourth Amendment,” U.S. District Judge LaShann Dearcy Hall said in the ruling, which was released on Jan. 21.
Government officials acquired information on the defendant, Agron Hasbajrami, a legal permanent resident who they arrested in 2011 and charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization. The information was gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lets authorities spy on people.
After Hasbajrami pleaded guilty, authorities disclosed that some of the evidence they used in the case was the fruit of information they obtained without a warrant under a FISA supplement called Section 207, which enables authorities to conduct surveillance on non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States.
Donald Trump won the 2024 election in part because the Left’s hysterical style of attacking Trump no longer worked.
After a decade of this unhinged furor, it proved worthless in winning public support — and for two simple reasons.
One, after years of Russian collusion hoaxes, the laptop disinformation farce, and the warped lies about the “suckers” and “fine people on both sides” — the shrill Left became predictable.
So, the bored public began tuning them out, switching channels, hitting the mute button, and pulling the plug.
Like the deleterious effects of inflation that eventually render a currency worthless, nonstop hectoring, hysterics, pontification, and distortion finally made all such criticisms of Trump mostly as valueless as 1930s German marks.
Second, the wearied public never heard reasoned counterarguments from the likes of a Rachel Maddow. Instead, on spec, she kept mouthing, “The walls are closing in” on Trump.
Former President Joe Biden did not explain why his open border was a better idea than Trump’s closed one. He preferred mumbling about “semi-fascists!” and the “ultra-MAGA!”
The Never Trumpers did not critique the Trump deficits. Instead, they hammered away that Trump was Hitler, or Mussolini, or Putin — or just a dangerous dictator or autocrat.
Angry retired generals never demonstrated why Trump was, in their view, an existential threat to democracy. Instead, they shouted nonstop in op-eds and interviews that he was a fascist, Nazi-like, no different from the guards at Auschwitz, a pathological liar, and should be summarily removed.
Worn-out voters began to understand that these psychodramas were substitutes for substantive criticism or occasions for legitimate debate.
Indeed, the exhausted public finally concluded that the hysterics increased in direct proportion to the poverty of the charges.
So, what did 10 years of such derangement achieve for the Left?
Trump now has control of the White House and both houses of Congress operate under Republican majorities.
The Supreme Court is mostly conservative. Almost all of Trump’s issues — the border, immigration, the economy, foreign policy, and crime — poll well over 50 percent.
No matter, the Left is still hammering away at the trivial and irrelevant — and remains paralyzed in furor and hysterics.
Former Okaland mayor Sheng Thao was “indicted [last] Friday. Also indicted: Andre Jones, who the NYT describes as her ‘boyfriend,’ David Trung Duong, and Andy Hung Duong. David Duong is the head of a local waste management company, and Andy is his son.”
“Starbucks Lost $25 Million Lawsuit Because They Fired An Employee For Being White.” Good. Don’t be racist and don’t violate anti-discrimination laws. It’s not rocket science.
Left UK Guardian newspaper staffers: We’re striking for better wages! Guardian management: Enjoy being replaced by AI.
And another huge Russian oil facility goes up in a giant fireball, this one in Ryazan, some 476 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
Biden: Stop attacking American ships. Houthis: LOL. Trump: Stop attacking American ships…or else. Houthis: “Yes, Mr. President. Please don’t kill us.”
“West Texas Teacher, Coach Charged With Continuous Sexual Assault of a Child. Justin Esquell is accused of sexually abusing a victim for four years, starting when the child was under the age of 14.”
This could be a very big story. “Trump Announces Tech Companies Will Invest $500 Billion in AI Infrastructure.”
President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a joint venture between three large tech companies to invest as much as $500 billion into building out U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The joint venture, known as Stargate, involves Oracle, Open AI, and Softbank and will see the companies join together to build out American data centers to power artificial intelligence systems, including ChatGPT. Stargate, which could cost up to $500 billion over a four-year period, will begin with a data center in Texas, a state friendly to crypto and other parts of the tech industry.
The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners. The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.
That’s a lot of heavy hitters, but some of them (I’m looking at you Microsoft) have embraced wokeness. Hopefully their AI project won’t be infected with it.
If they need a technical writer, I know one who’s going to be available soon… (Update: I’m hearing it will be built out in Abilene.)
An end to flag madness. “State Department implements “one flag policy,” meaning no more Pride or BLM flags flown at U.S. facilities.”
CNN laid off 210 people or about 6% of it’s staff of 3,500. That still seems an unsustainably high staff for a network that averages less than a million viewers. Indeed, it’s something like 286 viewers per staffer. What advertisers are willing to pay money to reach so few people?
The Biden economy is still sucking, the arsonist who helped set LA ablaze was (of course!) an illegal alien, a Tik-Tok triptych, Dan Patrick announces a staggering warchest, WaPo walloped, Stacey Abrams is busted, and Americans are told “no thanks” by Chinese RedNote users.
The bad news for American workers doesn’t end there. “1 in 5 postings on Greenhouse are ‘ghost jobs.'”
There were many reasons why they did it. Some did it for the same reason Biden’s administration did: To make their company look like it was doing better than it was. Some post them just in case there is a unicorn out there with magical qualifications.
But the most frustrating reason was the final one:
Some hiring managers even admitted they post fake jobs to keep their own employees on their toes, saying they want workers to feel ‘replaceable’ so they will work harder.
“LA County Arson Suspect is Illegal Immigrant Repeat Offender Protected By California’s Sanctuary State Policies.” Because of course he is. “The suspect, Juan Manuel Sierra-Leyva, is a Mexican national who has already been convicted of multiple crimes, but because California is a sanctuary state, he is unlikely to be deported, the New York Post reported.”
Just days after reports that she’d planned to can her fire chief, Kristin Crowley, after she publicly criticized the level of funding she’d received from the city, Bass is facing intense criticism yet again from a memo up on a city website, which shows that just months ago, the chief practically begged city hall to stop its budget-cutting spree on fire response.
The memo, which was dated Nov. 18, was written to the fire commissioners, according to the Washington Free Beacon. That’s a five-person board appointed by Bass.
In Crowley’s memo, she urged the commissioners to let Bass and the city council know how dire the situation was.
“In many ways, the current staffing, deployment model, and size of the LAFD have not changed since the 1960s,” Crowley wrote.
A federal judge in Texas has found that American Airlines violated both federal law and their fiduciary duty to their employees by using the company’s 401(k) plan to push ESG. Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.
Texas Republican Lt. Governor Dan Patrick is loaded for bear. “Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick posted ‘over $33.5 million’ cash-on-hand for his re-election campaign in 2026.”
Ron DeSantis continues to drive the enemy before him and hear the lamentations of their women. “United Teachers of Dade, Florida’s largest teachers union, failed to meet the requirements of a new state law that requires at least 60% of union members pay dues.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Keir Starmer’s Labour government has been trying to give away the Chagos Islands, despite them being the home to vital U.S. military base Diego Garcia. Fortunately, someone has slammed the breaks on the deal until Trump is in office.
Big drone attack from Ukraine against Russia, with reportedly over 200 drones used.
“WaPo’s Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, who portrays Republicans as groomers and predators, arrested for possession of child porn. Washington Post cartoonist Darrin Bell arrested for possession of child pornography.”
But it’s not all bad news for Bezos! TDS sufferer Jennifer Rubin quit.
Remember Stacey Abrams, the black female Georgian Beto? The mediocrity whose fawning media profiles never turned into actual election victories? Well, “Stacey Abrams Group Hit with Largest Fine in Georgia History for Violating Campaign Finance Law.”
A Democratic advocacy group founded by former Representative Stacey Abrams and once led by Senator Raphael Warnock were fined $300,000 on Wednesday for breaking Georgia’s campaign finance law.
Georgia’s ethics commission found that the New Georgia Project and its affiliated action fund raised $4.2 million and spent $3.2 million to support Abrams during the 2018 election cycle when she ran for governor. The groups failed to disclose those partisan contributions in violation of state campaign finance law. Abrams ultimately lost to Republican Brian Kemp, who defeated her again in 2022.
The two entities agreed to pay a $300,000 penalty, the largest fine in the commission’s 38-year history, in two $150,000 installments for 16 instances of illegal activity. The punishment is aimed at the groups, not Abrams and Warnock directly.
The New Georgia Project failed to register as an independent campaign committee and failed to file campaign finance reports of contributions and spending in 2018, showing their support for Abrams and other Democratic candidates.
In 2019, the groups committed the same offense without disclosing $646,000 in contributions and $174,000 in spending to support a voter referendum for Gwinnett County’s citizens to join the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority system. Despite the nonprofit’s efforts, voters rejected the referendum.
Just like Beto…
You didn’t expect Ken Paxton to let Biden leave office without one last lawsuit. “Texas Sues Biden Administration Over ‘Unlawful’ Methane Tax. Along with 22 other states, Texas is seeking to bar the final rule from taking effect on January 17.”
Turns out Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin didn’t bother to tell the chain of command that he was having major surgery. Or that he was hopped up on goofballs afterwards…
Not the Bee: “Asked what he’ll talk about at Mar-a-Lago, John Fetterman says, “I demand that I need to be made Pope of Greenland.” Fetterman seems to be the rare Democrat with a sense of humor…
