Harris plagiarizes Wikipedia and blows off Catholics, Gwen Walz assigns America homework, social justice groomers keep trying to trans your kids, Williamson County’s sheriff gets accused of pay-for-play corruption, another Hamas leader eats a last meal of kosher drone, Columbia U wants to silence a pro-Israel professor, and a meat recall expands to my local supermarket.
The Biden-Harris administration announced [last] Friday that it was filing a lawsuit against the state of Virginia for enforcing voter integrity laws in the state that aim to curb illegal voting in elections.
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who has a history of espousing racist views, claimed without evidence that Virginia’s move to increase election integrity was an “eleventh hour effort” intended, in part, to “disenfranchise qualified voters.”
The DOJ claimed that it was doing so because it was “too close to the Nov. 5 general election” to remove voters:
Section 8(c)(2) of the NVRA, also known as the Quiet Period Provision, requires states to complete systematic programs aimed at removing the names of ineligible voters from voter registration lists no later than 90 days before federal elections.
However, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s executive order requiring that non-citizens be removed from voter rolls was signed on August 7, 2024 — exactly 90 days before Election Day.
The problem is the people who are being removed from the voter rolls are not, in fact, voters because they are not citizens, said Youngkin.
“With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls – a process that starts with someone declaring themselves a non-citizen and then registering to vote,” Youngkin said.
Youngkin said that the lawsuit was a “desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections in the Commonwealth, the very crucible of American Democracy.”
At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.
However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)
Let’s consider a selection of these excerpts from Harris’s book, beginning with one in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report, with the duplicated material marked in italics:
In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.
There’s more. In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the excerpt, with the airlifted material in italics and abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:
High Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the city’s West End neighborhood, on May 18, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.
The High Point Strategy has since been implemented in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Raleigh, North Carolina; in Providence, Rhode Island; and in Rockford, Illinois. The U.S. Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten additional cities.
In a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source. Here is Harris’s language, with duplicated material in italics, based on the page as it appeared in December 2008, before she published the book:
The Mid-town [sic] Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State Unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses, and social service agencies to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. What was innovative about Midtown Court was that it required low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service, while at the same time it offered them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior.
To make matters worse, in duplicating Wikipedia’s language, Harris seems to have missed critical information and misstated a relevant detail. She claims, in prose identical to the online encyclopedia’s, that “illegal vending was down 24 percent” as a result of the court’s policies. Early in the paragraph, Harris cites the Bureau of Justice Assistance report to substantiate the figure. But she made a mistake: On Wikipedia, the “24 percent” figure was apparently tied to a different report, which found that “arrests for unlicensed vending,” rather than unlicensed vending as such, “fell by 24 percent” (emphasis mine). Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.
While the BJA report was not the proper source for the “24 percent” claim, it did appear in the Wikipedia entry’s list of citations, and apparently was a fruitful resource for Harris and her coauthor, as they reproduced substantial portions of its sentences.
Nothing says “commitment to rigorous academic scholarship” quite like not just quoting verbatim from Wikipedia, but doing so incompetently.
Host of Fox News “Special Report” Bret Baier finally snagged that interview with Vice President and selected Democrat nominee Kamala Harris. Harris was campaigning in Washington Crossing, PA and was proud of the former Republicans and Trump administration people who took the stage with her and happy with their endorsement, delighted in their support of her as a presidential candidate.
The entire interview was a train wreck, but there were particular moments that were exceptionally cringeworthy, damaging, and proved with glaring certainty why she is unfit to lead.
Baier started off with the topic of illegal immigration, and you could visibly see Harris deflate like a balloon before the first question was asked.
Immediately Harris tried to filibuster Baier and do this interview’s version of “I’m speaking.” Harris brought up the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which she claimed addressed the flaws in the asylum system with more judges, 15 million more border agents, increased penalties, stemming the flow of fentanyl, shore up entry points, and how she has worked toward bipartisan efforts to strengthen the border.
Baier gently pushed back with documented facts, and Harris briefly got that deer in headlights look she gets when she is desperately trying to find her talking points. Then she jumped on her supposed record as California Attorney General (not her current position as VP) as proof that she knew how to handle this crisis. Failing to understand that the fact that a crisis exists is proof that you have no ability to correct it.
But the most purely evil and damning part of this topic of illegal immigration was the fact that Harris could not even form the words to apologize for allowing criminals into the country that resulted in the senseless deaths of Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin.
Former president Donald Trump poked fun at vice president Kamala Harris during the Al Smith dinner on Thursday evening, criticizing his political rival for failing to show up at the charity event in person.
Harris addressed the crowd at the white-tie event, which raises funds for Catholics charities, in a pre-recorded video – a highly unusual move for a presidential candidate. It has become a tradition for presidential candidates to speak at the event since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy appeared together in 1960.
The vice president is the first presidential contender to skip out on the dinner since Walter Mondale in 1984.
There’s an auspicious precedent.
“I guess you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the looters and rioters in Minneapolis and she would have been here, guaranteed,” Trump said.
He went on to joke that Harris must be “out receiving communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” a reference to a viral video from earlier this month of the Michigan governor feeding a chip to a leftist influencer on her knees.
Trump accused the vice president of being “disrespectful to Catholics.”
He also quipped about the Democratic nominee’s odd’s of winning the election, saying, “There’s a group called White Dudes for Harris but I’m not worried about them. Their wives and their wives’ lovers are voting for me.”
Does Kamala Harris need a mea culpa in PA? Or does her disconnect from voters in the Rust Belt go beyond state lines and religion?
That question has rolled around in my head since reading William McGurn’s column yesterday at the Wall Street Journal. McGurn uses Gretchen Whitmer’s bizarre mockery of the Catholic Eucharist while wearing a Harris-Walz hat to argue that the Democrat anointee for the presidency now has a Whitmer-created problem. But is that entirely true, or does it go beyond Whitmer’s blasphemy?
McGurn recognizes a broader problem, but perhaps not its scope. First, he outlines the direct issues with Catholics, who comprise 30% of Pennsylvania:
As California’s attorney general, Ms. Harris signed several friend-of-the-court briefs opposing religious exemptions for private employers such as Hobby Lobby and religious nonprofits such as the Little Sisters of the Poor. She said she was “proud” to have co-sponsored California’s Reproductive FACT Act, which compelled pro-life pregnancy centers to display notices about where women could get an abortion. The Supreme Court in 2018 rejected the law as a likely violation of the First Amendment.
But perhaps Ms. Harris’s most notorious Catholic moment came after she was elected senator. When Brian Buescher was nominated for a federal judgeship, she grilled him about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s fraternal organization. Although President John F. Kennedy was also a Knight, Ms. Harris treated the group as though it were the Ku Klux Klan.
She would later co-sponsor the Equality Act, which the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops said could force doctors and hospitals to perform abortions they oppose. Last month she snubbed New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan by declining to attend this Thursday’s Al Smith dinner, an election-year staple that has brought Democratic and Republican candidates together in a civil setting for decades.
Those are the direct issues, and those aren’t limited to Pennsylvania. Overall, Republicans now have a statistically significant edge in party ID among Catholics, according to Pew polling this year, 50/44. Nationally, Catholics accounted for 25% of the vote in 2020, although apparently pollsters didn’t include data on religion in state-level exit polling. One can expect a similarly significant number of Catholics in Wisconsin and Michigan, and perhaps slightly lower levels in states like Arizona and Georgia. In every state, however, Catholics make up a far larger part of the electorate than the Arab-Americans did in Michigan, and yet both Biden and Harris obsessed over their support all year long.
That’s one problem, but that’s not the only problem. A more recent Pew poll shows Harris trailing Donald Trump with Catholics by five points, even worse than Hillary Clinton performed in 2016. But the issue isn’t entirely religious:
Mr. Biden may be the last of the big-time Democrats whose base was the white working class. But it confers a sensibility Ms. Harris is conspicuously lacking. …
Politico reports that Ms. Harris’s prospects are “considerably dicier” because of a “cultural dissonance” between her progressive San Francisco persona and white working-class Catholic Pennsylvanians.
That gets closer to the real danger for Democrats, but it has less to do with “white” and “Catholic” than it does to working class. Biden had a political and cultural connection to working-class voters, not just because of his Catholicism but because of his background. He fit into that milieu even if that mainly came as a conceit, especially after fifty years in Washington DC, but he could talk in their language too … at least before his brain turned to jelly. People keep overlooking his 2012 address to the Democrat convention, which turned out to be the best of the week, in which he artfully bridged the gap between the working class and the Academia-drenched elite that had mainly taken over the party in the current generation.
Harris simply can’t do that. Not only is she incapable of connecting at anywhere near that level, she only recently even showed a desire to do so. Her lame attempt at repeating the mantra “I was raised in a middle-class household” ad nauseam is about as close as she gets. Culturally, she comes from the Academia-drenched elite and speaks their language, to the extent she speaks any political language effectively at all. Harris tosses around clichés as a means to connect to working class voters, which initially appeared to appeal to them but have turned into a major liability now.
The Democratic Party’s naked contempt for both religious believers and the actual working class has been evident for a long, long time.
More on the subject: “Blowing Off the Al Smith Dinner Might Have Cost Harris Pennsylvania — and the Election.”
The Catholic vote is not as monolithic as it used to be. In 1928, the Catholic vote was overwhelmingly Democratic, concentrated in urban centers. By 1960, the Catholic vote was fracturing through intermarriage and economic issues, but Kennedy still received about 65% of the vote from his co-religionists.
Today, Donald Trump can expect to get about 60% of the Catholic vote. In Pennsylvania, The Catholic vote might be pivotal in a state that Harris absolutely, positively has to win.
“Her San Francisco progressive persona isn’t a good fit for Joe Biden’s native state,” William McGurn wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday.
Snip. “In an election in Pennsylvania that will almost certainly be decided by less than 100,000 votes, Harris skipping the Al Smith Dinner was not only stupid but might be the mistake that cost her the White House.” Eh, probably not. Harris will probably lose the election because she’s part of an administration had presided over a wretched economy and let in millions of illegal aliens. Plus she’s a horrible candidate that literally nobody voted for. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Google is up to its old tricks, “hiding Conservative news on election 23 pages deep.””When using the search term “donald trump presidential race 2024,” researchers had to scroll through 23 pages of results before they come to a U.S.-based right-leaning news source, a single Fox News video six results down on the 23rd page.”
An excerpt from the book Walz' wife was reading to children shows them all riding the gay dad while he puts a vacuum cleaner up to his mouth. I'm sure it's nothing. From: Bathe the Cat. pic.twitter.com/2npr5s6mDN
Gwen Walz also seems to feel that the best way to get men to the polls is assigning them homework.
Can you put some really money behind that and put it on air? Maybe during college football?
There are still men out there who don’t hate this campaign with every fiber of their being, and I think this ad could be enough to nag them right into Trump’s arms. https://t.co/vk6jwJY9oM
Yes, social justice warrior teachers do want to trans your kids. “Court Shuts Down BLM Teacher Trying To Force Trans Ideologies On Kids.”
Megan Williams is a first-grade teacher who forced her 6 and 7-year-old students to “observe” so-called Transgender Awareness Day. This Black Lives Matter activist subjected these small children to non-curricular propaganda about “gender identity” and sex changes.
Williams disturbingly went so far as to tell these kids that their “parents ma[d]e a guess whether they’re a boy or a girl” and may have been wrong. Parents complained, but Williams was backed by her school principal and superintendent.
Three mothers fired back by filing a lawsuit against Williams, the school, the district, and district officials in June of 2022. Their goal was to obtain a moratorium “on gender dysphoria and transgender transitioning,” parental notice and opt-out rights on the topic absent such a prohibition, compensatory damages, and punitive damages.
Thankfully, Judge Joy Conti of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania just ruled largely in favor of these mothers.
Judge Conti stated that “parents have a constitutional right to reasonable and realistic advance notice and the ability to opt their elementary-age children of noncurricular instruction on transgender topics and to not have requirements for notice and opting out of those topics that are more stringent than those for other sensitive topics.”
Here’s the remarks in the aired clip shared by Johnson:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%…The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
And here — I’ll put it in bold — is what CBS edited out for the broadcast:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%, and when I was there on the ground, and you should go, I mean, bring the cameras and talk to the people there, they’ll tell you, don’t- don’t take politicians words for this or the administration’s word, talk to the people there on the ground they had not been provided the resources almost two weeks out from the storm that they desperately needed. And when I was there 13 days, post- you know, post the storm hitting that state, people are still being rescued. They’re stuck in the higher elevations in the mountains because the roads are down and all the rest. So they need every- every available resource and all hands on deck. The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
Issues in the debate ranged from abortion to the border crisis, and allowing boys in girls’ sports.
On abortion, Cruz said he supported Texas’ pro-life laws while acknowledging that other states would make different decisions.
“In Texas, we overwhelmingly support that parents should be notified and have to consent before their child gets an abortion. In Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that late-term abortions in the eighth and ninth months, that’s too extreme. And I’ll tell you, in Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that taxpayer money shouldn’t pay for abortions,” said Cruz.
He went on to attack his opponent’s position on abortion as extreme, noting that Allred “voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental notification law. He voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental consent law. He voted to legalize late-term abortions, including the eighth and ninth months.”
Allred, meanwhile, said he would fight to “restore a woman’s right to choose” and to “make Roe v. Wade the law of the land again.”
Snip.
One of the biggest issues playing out in the campaign thus far has been Allred’s position on allowing boys in girls’ sports. The issue has been the target of Cruz’s campaign ads and led to Allred denying the accusations, despite voting against legislation to protect girls sports.
“I know a lot of y’all at home, for example, saw two biological men competing in women’s boxing at the Olympics,” said Cruz. “That was wildly unfair. You know, my youngest daughter plays volleyball. It’s not fair for a biological boy or man, a teenage boy, to spike the volleyball at her, and he has voted repeatedly in favor of that.”
FEMA’s entanglement with the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous open southern border policies by diverting storm relief funds ($1.4 billion, according to NYPost) for illegal and legal aliens may have undermined the federal agency’s ability to effectively manage emergencies, such as the Katrina-like disaster unfolding in the US Southeast.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas dropped the bombshell [two weeks ago]: FEMA “does not have the funds” to see Americans through the rest of this Atlantic hurricane season. The federal agency drained the funds by prioritizing taxpayer funds for illegal and legal aliens versus US citizens as the Biden-Harris globalist team rolled out the red carpet to anyone, even terrorists, via the open southern borders.
Connect the dots, if you can,” Tim Murtaugh, an adviser to former President Trump’s campaign, wrote on X, adding, “DHS says FEMA might not have enough cash to help people through hurricane season. But in 2 years of a new Biden-Harris program, they’ve spent $1 BILLION on housing and other services for migrants.”
Shedding a whole heck of a lot of color on the situation, Savanah Hernandez, a reporter for Turning Point USA, wrote on X that she has uncovered some of the “first looks” inside fully furnished luxury apartments for migrants that received free rent and utilities for two years.
Hernandez wrote in a note on The Post Millennial:
The Brunswick Landing apartments in Maine sparked controversy earlier this year when it was discovered that homeless migrants in the area were getting the opportunity to live in the units rent-free for up to two years. Migrants living in the apartments shared that not only is the rent-free, the utilities are paid and we got an inside look at the furnished apartments that would run the average American about $2,300 dollars.
“FEMA: Disaster Relief No Longer About Emergency Response, It’s About ‘Disaster Equity.'”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is supposed to be the government’s premier emergency relief organization in times of disaster, like the situation now faced by victims of Hurricane Helene’s aftermath in North Carolina and Tennessee.
But according to the FEMA website, the agency now places higher priority on instituting Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity guidelines than on easing the suffering of Americans displaced by disaster.
Among the goals listed in FEMA’s strategic plan are to:
Instill equity as a foundation for emergency management
Lead whole of community in climate resilience
Promote and sustain a ready FEMA & prepared nation
What does that look like in action?
Here’s an example of a FEMA disaster preparedness meeting where participants discuss how LGBTQIA individuals were suffering disproportionally before the storm compared to other disaster victims.
Notice how the focus shifts from doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people to ensuring that they are promoting “equity in disaster relief.”
Social justice is racist poison that ruins everything, and now it’s costing Americans their lives.
Here we go again. “Report: Migrant Caravans Leaving Southern Mexico Headed Toward US Border.”
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has declared a “blood feud” against three federal lawmakers from neighboring North Caucasus republics in his first comments on last month’s deadly shooting outside the Moscow headquarters of Russia’s largest online retailer Wildberries.
Kadyrov has vowed to help Vladislav Bakalchuk, the estranged husband of Wildberries CEO Tatiana Kim — Russia’s wealthiest woman — to return his wife and block the merger of their e-commerce giant with the smaller outdoor advertising group Russ.
The family and business dispute escalated last month when Bakalchuk led a group of men to Wildberries’ Moscow offices and allegedly tried to force their way into the building. Two security guards, who were ethnic Ingush, were killed in the shootout and multiple felony charges, including murder, were filed against Bakalchuk and several other ethnic Chechens involved in the incident.
Kadyrov is a piece of work, but one with a sufficiently strong independent power base that Putin has felt compelled to buy him off. Kadyrov declaring a blood fued against Russian officials probably isn’t a sign of harmony in Russia’s government…
Sinwar is only the latest high-profile terrorist to meet his fate at the hands of the IDF. His predecessor at the top of Hamas’s hierarchy, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in Tehran when a bomb covertly smuggled into an Iranian diplomatic safehouse exploded in July. Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, was neutralized in a July airstrike after seven unsuccessful IDF attempts to deliver him to justice. Hamas deputy commander Marwan Issa met his fate in March, two months after his deputy, Saleh al-Arouri, was cut down in the suburbs of Beirut by an Israeli drone.
A little over a year after the war Hamas inaugurated against Israel on 10/7 in the deadliest one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the terrorist organization has been entirely decapitated. Its fighters are scattered, disorganized, and reduced to chaotic rearguard actions against the Israeli troops busily rolling them up. Critics of Israel’s campaign like to insist that Hamas is an idea and therefore cannot simply be dispatched like the thousands of its fighters the IDF has cut down. True enough, but an idea cannot shoot at you or launch rocket attacks on your cities. That requires well-connected, deeply embedded commanders with years of experience conducting asymmetrical insurgent attacks on a superior force. Those commanders are all dead.
The Israeli officials who have pursued Hamas’s barbarians until the end have done so without much encouragement from the West. Indeed, the death of every Hamas commander was fretted over in the West as though it created a new impediment to peace and to the negotiations over the hostages Hamas itself captured on 10/7 — 97 of whom still have not yet been located. Joe Biden’s administration withdrew almost all rhetorical support for Israeli operations in places like Rafah, where Sinwar himself was taken out. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government deserves the gratitude of the civilized world for rejecting these entreaties seeking Israel’s surrender in its righteous war.
The Israelis did not choose the way this war began, but they will be the authors of its conclusion. And the end is near. The Israelis have brought the Gaza Strip closer to its day of liberation from the tyranny of an illegitimate terrorist regime than all the combined efforts of the peace processors in the global diplomatic corps ever achieved. It is a shame that the American administration that stood so stalwartly with Israel at the outset of this campaign willingly sacrificed its ability to celebrate alongside its Israeli counterparts. This should be America’s victory, too. But by spending months on end agonizing over how Israel was achieving its honorable objective, the Biden White House and its allies lost sight of our shared strategic goals.
We hit the Houthis with B-2s. I didn’t have that on my 2024 dance card…
“Williamson County’s Democrat Sheriff Accused of Accepting Pay-to Play Donation. On September 24, the Williamson County Commissioners Court issued a contract for over $500,000 to Family Hospital Management Company for ‘Jail Inmate Psychological Services’. Just four days before a county contract was issued, [Democrat Sheriff Mike] Gleason received a $20,000 campaign donation from the founder and CEO of the company that received the contract.” “Jail Inmate Psychological Services” sounds like a great avenue for leftwing graft…
“A North Carolina Democratic county leader, who is also running for a seat in the state House, was arrested after allegedly stealing Trump signs near a road last week. Moore County, North Carolina, County Chair Lowell Simon, 68, was charged with two counts of misdemeanor larceny of political signs after he admitted to removing Trump signs and keeping them in his car.”
“The Young Turks’ Ana Kasparian says she ‘woke up’ after being molested by LA homeless man and ‘the good people’ slammed her for talking about it. Kasparian described feeling “politically homeless” and shared how the backlash she received from liberals after the assault played a key role in her reevaluation.” Seems like social justice warriors feel that being molested by a homeless man or raped by an illegal alien is a small price to pay for taxpayer-subsidized abortion…
Boy dressed as girl assaults actual girl, gives her a concussion and blurred vision. You know what the school administrators did, don’t you? That’s right, they suspended the victim.
“Edgewood ISD Superintendent Gets Raise While Students Are Failing. Edgewood ISD extended Superintendent Eduardo Hernández’s contract until 2029 and raised his annual salary to $291,923.””Only 23 percent of Edgewood ISD students can read, write, and do math at or above grade level.” Edgewood is on the west side of San Antonio.
Columbia U is trying to make their campus Judenfrei.
Columbia University is temporarily suspending a prominent pro-Israel business professor’s access to campus after he publicly criticized school officials for permitting anti-Israel campus demonstrations on the anniversary of the October 7 massacre.
Columbia notified Israeli-American business professor Shai Davidai on Tuesday that he will be banned from campus for violating university policy on harassing school employees.
On Tuesday night, Davidai posted a video on social media accusing Columbia of retaliating against him for posting a video of himself asking Columbia’s chief operating officer Cas Halloway why he allowed pro-Hamas demonstrators to protest on the anniversary of October 7.
“Right now I was supposed to be at the school of social work at Columbia, where the Jewish students are holding their own memorial service for the senseless violence of October 7th. But then I got a call from my lawyer, who says the university has decided to not allow me to be on campus anymore,” Davidai said.
“Why? Because of October 7th. Because I was not afraid to stand up to the hateful mob. And because I was not afraid to expose Mr. f**king Cas Holloway for not doing anything about it.”
Davidai should sue them over equal rights violation for millions. Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.
Researchers have unearthed two sophisticated toolsets that a nation-state hacking group—possibly from Russia—used to steal sensitive data stored on air-gapped devices, meaning those that are deliberately isolated from the Internet or other networks to safeguard them from malware.
One of the custom tool collections was used starting in 2019 against a South Asian embassy in Belarus. A largely different toolset created by the same threat group infected a European Union government organization three years later. Researchers from ESET, the security firm that discovered the toolkits, said some of the components in both were identical to those fellow security firm Kaspersky described in research published last year and attributed to an unknown group, tracked as GoldenJackal, working for a nation-state. Based on the overlap, ESET has concluded that the same group is behind all the attacks observed by both firms.
The practice of air gapping is typically reserved for the most sensitive networks or devices connected to them, such as those used in systems for voting, industrial control, manufacturing, and power generation. A host of malware used in espionage hacking over the past 15 years (for instance, here and here) demonstrate that air gapping isn’t a foolproof protection. It nonetheless forces threat groups to expend significant resources that are likely obtainable only by nation-states with superior technical acumen and unlimited budgets. ESET’s discovery puts GoldenJackal in a highly exclusive collection of threat groups.
Then there’s this: “The basic flow of the attack is, first, infecting an Internet-connected device through a means ESET and Kaspersky have been unable to determine.” There’s a 99% chance that these air-gaped systems are being attacked through the usual human engineering or security lapse vectors. Which leaves a 1% chance of some form of electromagnetic witchcraft…
“WeightWatchers Squeezes Higher After Unveiling New Low-Cost GLP-1 Treatment…WW announced the addition of a new compounded semaglutide to its lineup to beat America’s obesity crisis sparked by the processed foods industrial complex. The new treatment starts at $129 per month, and each additional month will cost $189. This is significantly less than GLP-1 obesity treatments from big pharma, which cost north of $1,000 a month.”
Fiat/Stellantis merged with Chrysler in 2014, and now they’re threatening to shut it down in two years.
BrucePac listeria meat recall expands, now includes some HEB items.
Disney plans to slash budgets on Marvel movies going forward. On the one hand, that’s probably prudent, since it gets harder and harder to turn a profit with soaring budgets. On the other hand, Marvel’s recent problems aren’t a product of big budgets, they’re a product of wokeness and crappy scripts.
Rick Beato has an interesting video with R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills. I didn’t realize that the other three members wrote the music then handed it off to Michael Stipe, who would go off and create the lyrics by himself.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ordered the case of M.D. v. Abbott be reassigned, in addition to vacating a contempt order [Clinton appointee Janis] Jack entered.
The panel released a 36-page opinion that found Jack has shown an extensive and well-documented pattern of antagonism toward the State of Texas and its counsel, and a bias favoring plaintiffs who have strived for years to get the state to comply with orders for timely investigations into abuse allegations.
Although the panel recognized Jack’s institutional knowledge and the complexity of the civil case, the court said, “It is necessary to reconsider the continued adversarial nature of this proceeding.”
Circuit Judge Edith H. Jones, in her analysis of the history between Jack and the Texas agencies she oversees, also strongly indicated Jack erred in not recognizing the state has been “substantially compliant” in recent years with the court’s orders.
The opinion, anticipating reassignment, gives notice to that regardless which jurist inherits the case, “as a general rule of law federal judges are not allowed to become permanent de facto superintendents of major state agencies.”
Jones said it is not appropriate “for federal court intervention to thwart the state’s self-management, where the state is taking strides to eliminate the abuses that led to the original decree.”
The Department of Family and Protective Services, in a prepared statement, said, “We are pleased that the Fifth Circuit recognized the significant efforts DFPS and HHSC have invested in serving the children and families of our state. We remain committed and are grateful to Gov. Greg Abbott and the Texas Legislature for their continued support in furthering the well-being of our most vulnerable Texans.”
TDFPS is hardly free of sin. At one point Abbott had to instruct them to stop requiring Critical Race Theory classes. Somehow I have a feeling that wasn’t something Jack objected to…
Yetter Coleman partner R. Paul Yetter, lead counsel for the plaintiffs and appellee advocate during the Aug. 5 oral argument, has worked the case since it was first filed.
“We respectfully disagree with the panel ruling and will ask for reconsideration by the whole circuit,” Yetter said, adding the case will stay with Jack at least until the reconsideration petition is decided.
When litigation began, Jack’s role involved addressing abuses within the entire foster care program and more than 10,000 children.
In 2014, Jack issued her ruling after trial and the remedial measures were appealed to the Fifth Circuit. Although the Fifth Circuit provided the state some relief in a series of orders over a period of years, Yetter said the merits of the case have been thoroughly adjudicated and the focus has been on compliance for the past five years.
The issues before the appeals court this time are primarily focused on 38 unresolved cases involving children with intellectual disabilities that are in the state’s permanent custody.
Wait, 13 years and $100,000 in fines over 38 cases? I would imagine that most of them have aged out of the system by now. Every life is sacred, but $100,000 a day in fines for 38 cases seems…disproportionate.
Speaking in Jack’s defense, Yetter argued the judge has been “incredibly patient” with the state for the past seven years, and the Fifth Circuit did not credit Jack where she praised state officials on progress made.
“There’s been improvement, and she’s called them out and praised state officials for that,” Yetter said.
In an amicus curiae filed by Alexander Dubose & Jefferson attorney Marcy Hogan Greer on behalf of National Disability Rights Network, Center for Public Representation, New Disabled South, and Disability Rights Mississippi, Greer argued Texas has continued to fail foster children with intellectual disabilities.
The Texas Health and Human Services Commission created a special “Provider Investigations” unit to investigate alleged abuses of children with disabilities “who are often incapable of advocating for themselves,” but that unit “has been plagued by incompetence, ineptitude, insensitivity, and backlog,” Greer noted.
Texas appealed a Jack contempt order in April that came with a $100,000-a-day fine. The Fifth Circuit stayed the fine and late Friday vacated it with the reassignment order.
The actual decision is here, and near the end it notes:
We take no position on issues that have not yet matured into appealable orders. However, as a general rule of law federal judges are not allowed to become permanent de facto superintendents of major state agencies. Horne v. Flores, 557 U.S. 433, 453, 129 S. Ct. 2579, 2597 (2009) (“[T]he longer an injunction or consent decree stays in place, the greater the risk that it will improperly interfere with a State’s democratic processes.”); United States v. Mississippi, 82 F.4th 387, 400 (5th Cir. 2023)(“Micromanagement, enforced upon threat of contempt, does not reflect the principles of comity” in prison context.). Nor, under the federalist structure created by the Constitution, is it appropriate for federal court intervention to thwart the state’s self-management, where the state is taking strides to eliminate the abuses that led to the original decree. Horne, 557 U.S. at 448,
129 S. Ct. at 2593–94 (“Federalism concerns are heightened” where “a federal court decree has the effect of dictating state . . . budget priorities.”).
Nor are federal judges even suited, by training or temperament, to manage institutions, personnel, or the provision of vital state services, even if counselled by monitors. In this case particularly, the integrity of oversight may have been further put at risk by the trial court’s creation of a “fund,” based on plaintiffs’ attorneys’ foregoing their court-approved fees, that the court may evidently disburse at its discretion. Federal judges should not be personally allocating resources from the state’s taxpayers for purposes not directly tied to and controlled by the state itself in order to abide by a court decree.
Indeed.
I’m sure there probably were some significant cases of abuse at the heart of the case, but 13 years seems like a ridiculously long time for a case to drag on (though far from the longest).
Authorities have arrested a confirmed Tren de Aragua gang member, after he allegedly recruited students from two Houston middle schools to join the Venezuelan gang.
According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Jorgenys Robertson Cova—an illegal alien from Venezuela—entered the United States two years ago.
Cova is suspected to have recruited students from Jane Long Academy and Las Americas—both of which are located in the Houston Independent School District. He was arrested last week after being wanted in Pearland for theft and was accused of recruiting the students.
The Texas Department of Public Safety confirmed Cova was part of the Venezuelan gang after observing known tattoos related to the gang on his arms that included a five-point crown and a clock and roses. Other known tattoos include stars, Ak-47s, and trains.
Via FAIR, here are some of the tattoos DPS seems to be focusing on.
Cova was scheduled for an asylum hearing in Houston on the same day he was taken into custody and booked into the Brazoria County Jail.
A Houston ISD spokesperson told Texas Scorecard that they have not been made aware of any activities related to the gang member, but will work with law enforcement to provide any information they need.
The gang has also been spotted in North Dallas, with Dallas Police officers confirming they have infiltrated the city. Members of the Tren De Aragua gang have congregated with other Venezuelans in the northern part of Dallas, nicknamed “Villa Dallas.” Since the gang’s arrival, the neighborhood has become riddled with illegal street racing, beatings, shootings, and extortion attempts.
It was bad enough when gangs recruited high schoolers, but now their dragging middle schoolers into a life of crime. Thanks, Joe Biden.
As I noted before, I never read about Tren de Aragua until the Biden-Harris Administration decided to flood America with illegal aliens, and now they seem to be popping up everywhere. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has designated Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization and is offering up to a $5,000 reward for information leading to capture of members.
There’s just no end to the vibrant diversity that Democrats have inflicted on ordinary Americans…
In a world where Democrats can read and understand the plain text of the Heller decision elucidating the fact that the Second Amendment “protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia,” we wouldn’t the following video. Sadly, so powerful is the Democratic Party’s lust for complete civilian disarmament, that doesn’t seem to be the world we live in. Hence this succinct Nick Freitas video.
“Why, in a country founded on the principles of individual liberty and rights, is there such a huge debate over the second amendment?”
“Critics argue that the founding fathers never intended for the Second Amendment to apply to individuals, and today many politicians and political activists try to claim that ‘well-regulated’ means government regulation, and that the word militia means that only those serving in a state militia have the right to keep and bear arms.”
“But when we look back at the debates over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, a few things show up.”
“For starters, the American Revolution was fresh in the minds of the founding fathers. They knew that an armed populace was instrumental in securing America’s Independence.”
“The notion that the Second Amendment was solely about militias doesn’t quite hold up when you dig into the writings of the time. Take James Madison, the father of the Constitution and one of the chief writers of the Federalist Papers. In his own words, he explained that the right to bear arms was an individual right essential for the personal and collective defense of America.”
“And he wasn’t alone. George Mason perhaps said it best when he said ‘Who are the militia? They consist of the whole people, except a few public officers.'”
“And what’s more, there are literally dozens of similar quotes from the men who debated and ratified the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Virtually all of them recognize that the Second Amendment conveyed an individual right to keep and bear arms.”
“The reason for this is actually quite simple: Because the founding fathers recognize that rights are, by their nature, something that only individuals can exercise.”
“Because many of the same politicians who claim that the Second Amendment doesn’t protect an individual’s right to keep and bear arms also believe that some rights only belong to groups of people. But the concept of group rights runs into some major problems, because it suggests that a group collectively holds rights or privileges that an individual cannot have.”
“But this just begs the question if a group of people can collectively hold rights that an individual doesn’t have any claim to then. Where on Earth did the right come from in the first place?”
“Consider this when we talk about the freedom of speech, religion, or assembly, we don’t frame them as group rights. These rights belong to individuals and their exercise within the law doesn’t infringe on others rights. The Second Amendment should be no different, but still some claim that these rights need to be restricted or even abolished due to the undeniable fact that many have abused these rights.”
“But this begs the question: Are your rights forfeit the moment someone else abuses theirs? If so, we might as well just stop calling them rights and accept the fact that you don’t have rights as much as you do privileges which can be granted or take away as soon as a political elite decides you don’t need them, or it’s too dangerous for you to have them.
“But ironically, that’s exactly what the Second Amendment is supposed to prevent, and maybe that’s why certain politicians would like to see it gone.”
This loses style points for overuse of “begs the question” but is otherwise accurate.
Replacing individual rights with collective is of course precise poison social justice warriors want to force down America’s throats…
One of the more useful, long-time websites on the Internet is the Internet Archive, aka The Wayback Machine, which contains captured, iterative versions of a vast amount of the World Wide Web.
Except that, right now, the site is offline and under attack by hackers.
“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and stones and is constantly on the verge of a major security breach? It just happened.”
“The Wayback Machine [is] one of the most important websites in the history of the Internet, because it literally archives the history of the Internet. It’s been taking snapshots of websites, including their HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images since 1996, allowing us to remember the worldwide web in its peak form, when Amazon looked like this and weird people made weird websites just for fun. Unlike nowadays where everybody just chases algorithms on cringe factories like Tik-Tok and Instagram.”
It was founded by digital librarian Brewster Kahle.
“Unfortunately, the fate of this website hangs in the balance, as it’s currently getting pwned, boned and owned from multiple angles.”
“A data breach exposed 31 million email addresses and password hashes. Its Open Library lost a critical legal battle. Its website was defaced with some JavaScript graffiti. It’s been getting DOSed non-stop, and its current status is offline as we speak. What the hell is going on?”
“The Wayback Machine contains over 890 billion archived web pages weighing in at nearly 100 petabytes. It’s an unimaginable amount of data. If you look at one web page every second for the next 100 years, you would have looked at less than 1% of the total archive.”
“This data is practically irreplaceable. The only company that might be able to replace it is Google, but Google recently stopped using its own cached archive, and its search results now points to, you guessed it, the Internet Archives Wayback Machine.”
“We don’t know if the hackers have access to the archived website data, but if they do, and they might, they have the power to erase the history of the world wide web.”
“The Internet Archive will remove personal data and comply with GDPR [the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation], but some people want legitimate content to be memory-holed forever.”
Section on their Open Library project losing a lawsuit to publishers snipped.
“HIBP (which is not an STD, but rather a website that helps people find out if their data has been compromised in a data breach) was informed of the Internet Archives data breach on September 30th. It’s confirmed on October 5th. The Internet Archive gets notified on October 6th [before] making the data breach public on October 8th.
“The Internet Archive has been been facing aggressive DOS attacks going all the way back to May.”
“The website is defaced with some JavaScript library which triggers an alert message about the data breach before it’s been officially disclosed.”
“Right now on October 10th, the website is still being attacked and is completely offline. Things are not looking good.”
“What sort of sick, twisted hacker would want to mess with the Internet Archive, and why? Well, a hacktivist group called Blackmeta is claiming responsibility.”
“They say they’re not a bunch of teenagers, which means that they’re probably just a bunch of teenagers.”
According to this post, “Attributed by Radware to SN_BLACKMETA, a pro-Palestinian hacktivist with potential ties to Sudan that may operate from within Russia.” YouTuber Fireship (whose video this is) thinks that’s a false flag, but his reasons are “This doesn’t make sense and won’t get people to like you,” which hasn’t stopped those End Oil idiots. Indeed “this is stupid and makes people hate you” describes a vast array of real “activist” actions going all the way back to the Symbionese Liberation Army and attempts to levitate the Pentagon back in the 1960s, so I think Fireship’s deduction here is off-base.
Could be pro-Palestinian sorts, who have never seemed to care about “making friends” while raping women and beheading babies. Or it could be any number of social justice types, whose Khmer Rouge-esque “Year Zero” vibe jibs nicely with wiping out the Internet’s history. Or maybe they’re trying to erase Kamala Harris’ obvious past idiocies.
In any case, let’s all hope this attack fails, and that the Wayback Machine has robust, rotating offline backups…
More than 200 people have been confirmed dead as a result of Hurricane Helene, and that total is expected to rise as search-and-rescue crews reach more remote communities. Roads have been destroyed, many towns are still without power, and people are beginning to run out of food as trucks cannot get in to provide aid.
Amid all of this, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, the architect of the migrant invasion, warns that the Federal Emergency Management Agency is running out of money to aid hurricane victims. Meanwhile, thanks to the migrant crisis his catch-and-release policies created, FEMA has spent over $1 billion feeding, housing, and transporting illegal immigrants across the United States in just the last two years.
Before he was elected, President Joe Biden said of migrants wanting to enter the U.S. illegally, “We could afford to take in a heartbeat another 2 million.” Thanks to Biden’s subsequent policies, all supported by Vice President Kamala Harris, including the end of former President Donald Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program, the temporary suspension of all deportations, and the creation of the CBP One app parole program and the Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans parole program, the number of illegal immigrants allowed into the U.S. by Biden has been closer to 4 million.
Unfortunately for communities across the U.S., the ability of this country to take in millions of illegal immigrants has not been as smooth as Biden predicted. Cities, many of them controlled by Democrats, have been begging the federal government for assistance in housing, clothing, feeding, education, and providing healthcare for the flood of migrants who are straining budgets in their communities.
In response, the Biden administration has spent tens of billions of dollars helping to ease the pain caused by their illegal migrant invasion. Local governments are required to provide education to all children, regardless of legal status, and the Department of Education helps local governments pay to educate these children. Hospitals must provide emergency care to all patients, even illegal immigrants without health insurance, and so the Department of Health and Human Services helps local hospitals stay afloat by reimbursing them through Medicaid.
And the Department of Homeland Security helps provide food, housing, and transportation to illegal immigrants through FEMA’s Emergency Food and Shelter Program and Shelter and Services Program Awards program. When the influx of migrants was bankrupting cities across the country this past winter, Democratic mayors traveled to the White House to beg Biden for more FEMA money to help their communities “meet the growing needs of these individuals.”
And the White House gave them the FEMA money they wanted. In just the last two years alone, the Biden administration has spent over $1 billion in FEMA funds giving local communities the resources needed to deal with the migrant crisis that the Biden administration created.
if Joe Biden had said he wanted to let 4 million illegal aliens into the country, and subsidize their food and clothing, do you think he would have been “elected” in 2020?
CBS lies, altering interview of Kamala Harris on Israel:
Here are the two different 60 Minutes edits layered on top of each other in full. You will hear where Whitaker's questions line up, and the different edited answers from Harris.
SC 1842 (bottom) is what aired on Monday night. SC 1843.5 (top) is what the Face the Nation X account… pic.twitter.com/FEuQp2o0kn
Beyond the word salad that people pointed out, CBS and 60 Minutes edited out everything she says about providing aide to Israel in order to defend itself from attacks.
Now when you contrast that with the fallout from the Coates interview, this all stinks. This is a CBS agenda…
On September 30th, anti-Israel author Ta-Nehisi Coates sat down for what turned out to be a spirited six-and-a-half-minute interview on CBS Mornings, during which co-anchor Tony Dokoupil challenged some of the claims made in Coates’ new book, “The Message.”
The book contains several essays about some of Coates’ travels, with the longest one being about his trip “to Palestine.” It was claims made in that essay that Dokoupil zeroed in on for closer examination during their exchange:
“I have to say, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards, the acclaim, took the cover off the book, publishing house goes away, the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” Dokoupil said.
“So then I found myself wondering, why does Ta’Nehisi Coates, who I’ve known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very talented, smart guy, leave out so much? Why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the first and the second Intifada, the café bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits. Is it because you just don’t believe that Israel in any condition has a right to exist?” the CBS anchor continued.
Perhaps because Coates’ word is viewed as sacrosanct by woke leftists in the media, academia, and beyond despite his deeply flawed logic on issues like reparations, eruptions began almost immediately in the CBS newsroom, with tensions boiling over a week later during an editorial call:
During its editorial meeting on Monday at 9 a.m.—the morning of October 7—the network’s top brass all but apologized for the interview to staff, saying that it did not meet the company’s “editorial standards.” After being introduced by Wendy McMahon, the head of CBS News, Adrienne Roark, who is in charge of news gathering at the network, began her remarks by saying covering a story like October 7 “requires empathy, respect, and a commitment to truth.”
After quoting extensively from the CBS News handbook, she said, “We will still ask tough questions. We will still hold people accountable. But we will do so objectively, which means checking our biases and opinions at the door…”
Presumably, the “bias” accusations stem from the fact that, according to the New York Post, Dokoupil is “a convert to Judaism whose ex-wife lives in Israel along with their two children.”
“During its editorial meeting on Monday at 9 a.m.—the morning of October 7—the network’s top brass all but apologized for the interview to staff, saying that it did not meet the company’s ‘editorial standards.’”
Though Shalt Not Question the Holy Social justice.
A US judge has sentenced a disgraced Black Lives Matter leader to federal prison after he was convicted at trial in April on wire fraud and money laundering charges. Sir Maejor Page, 35, of Toledo, Ohio, who uses the alias Tyree Conyers-Page, was found guilty of running a “fake charity scheme” for personal profit, defrauding donors of more than $450,000 they had given to his nonprofit Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta.
US District Court Judge Jeffrey Helmick of the Northern District of Ohio sentenced Page on Thursday to 42 months in federal prison. He was also ordered to pay a $400 special assessment fee, according to a press release from the Department of Justice.
Prosecutors accused Page of defrauding 18,000 donors who collectively gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to his fraudulent charity, Black Lives Matter of Greater Atlanta. Page took the donations and used them for his own personal benefit. He purchased entertainment, hotel rooms, clothing, firearms, and a property in Ohio that he intended to use as his personal residence, court documents showed.
Page continued to collect donations for his “social justice” charity through its Facebook page after the organization’s tax-exempt status was revoked for failing to submit IRS Form 990 for three consecutive years. He consistently shared content on Facebook relating to social justice and racial issues in order to establish the legitimacy of his nonprofit organization, despite the fact this it was no longer tax-exempt. The convicted fraudster used Facebook to communicate privately with donors, to which he falsely claimed that their contributions would be allocated to “fight for George Floyd” and the “movement.”
In a recent podcast interview, the political analyst who first predicted that Joe Biden would withdraw from the presidential race revealed that private polling he has seen appears to suggest that Vice President Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) is in serious trouble ahead of the November election.
According to Breitbart, Newsmax commentator and former political director for ABC News Mark Halperin gave his analysis on The Morning Meeting with Sean Spicer and Dan Turrentine. Halperin said that internal polling could see Harris lose all but one of the seven swing states in this election, as her current lead in the national popular vote is not enough to win the electoral college against former President Donald Trump.
“So the new New York Times poll shows her up three nationally,” Halperin explained. “We all know that three is like the bubble point, right? If she’s up three, she’s got a chance to win the Electoral College, but they’d rather be at four, and they don’t want to be at two. So three is right at the bubble. I’m not saying this Times poll’s right. But it’s in line with international polls.”
“We all know from our contacts in both campaigns that Pennsylvania is tough for her right now. And without Pennsylvania, there are paths, but there aren’t many. There’s no path without Wisconsin,” Halperin continued. “So you see here, Tammy Baldwin’s Senate campaign poll shows Harris down three in Wisconsin. We all said yesterday, Wisconsin and Michigan are looking worse for Harris than before.”
Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin’s (D-Wisc.) campaign had previously shared internal polling with both the Wall Street Journal and Axios, showing Harris losing to Trump in the state and Baldwin herself with a mere 2-point lead over her Republican challenger, Eric Hovde (R-Wisc.).
Such results in private polls align with the trend reflected in public polls, with pollsters such as Quinnipiac University and Emerson College showing President Trump gaining momentum in most of the swing states, now either leading Harris or tied in enough states to win the electoral college.
“I just saw some new private polling today that’s very robust private polling. She’s in a lot of trouble,” said Halperin. “The conversation I’m having with Trump people and Democrats with data are extremely bullish on Trump’s chances in the last 48 hours, extremely bullish. You think of the seven battleground states; which ones is Harris in danger of losing? I would say Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia. I’m not saying she’ll lose all six, but she’s in danger.”
If Harris were to lose these six states but hold the seventh swing state, Nevada, then the result would be an exact repeat of the 2016 election, with President Trump winning 306 electoral votes to Harris’ 232.
“Law enforcement has arrested Estefania Primera, an illegal alien from Venezuela, following reports that she was the ring leader for a gang’s sex trafficking operation in El Paso. Primera was named by a sex trafficking victim as the leader of a Tren de Aragua sex trafficking ring.”
People have been asking about the Texas temporary ID ruling in other threads, and now we have an update.
Secretary of State Asks Attorney General to Rule on ‘Limited Term’ Driver’s Licenses as Voter ID. Paxton received a request from Secretary of State Nelson to rule on the validity of “limited term” driver’s licenses as voter ID.
Texas Secretary of State (SOS) Jane Nelson issued an advisory on Tuesday that describes “limited term” driver’s licenses as an acceptable form of voter ID, though recommending other forms of photo identification if possible.
While the Texas Election Code does not specifically designate “limited term” ID cards as a permissible form of voter ID, it does describe “a personal identification card issued by the Texas Department of Public Safety” (TxDPS) as an approved form of identification.
As Nelson’s advisory acknowledges, TxDPS distributes “temporary term” driver’s licenses to noncitizens, provided they are an individual with lawful temporary status in the U.S.
The SOS’s guidance concedes that if an individual is registered to vote and presents a “limited term” driver’s license or ID card, they may receive a ballot after being fully informed by the election judge or clerk of the “eligibility requirements” necessary to vote in Texas.
The issue cited by the SOS is that while the limited term ID denotes noncitizen status at one point, it doesn’t mean that the individual has not since been naturalized. Transportation Code also includes the limited term ID as a valid form of identification, creating a small window for a potentially legitimate use of the document to vote.
Additionally, if an individual presents a “limited term” ID card but is not registered to vote, they may receive a provisional ballot after election officials fully evaluate what their lack of registration and unique form of identification suggests.
Nelson recommended using language such as, “The limited-term driver’s license/identification card you presented suggests that you are not a United States citizen. Your name does not appear on the list of registered voters. Per the Texas Election Code, to be eligible to vote in the State of Texas, you must be a qualified voter of this state,” when explaining the situation to the unregistered voter and prior to distributing a provisional ballot.
Nelson requested on October 9 that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton rule on whether a limited term driver’s license that “generates questions of voter eligibility” is a valid form of voter ID and if an election official must present a ballot to an individual who only provides such ID in person. The request is for a non-binding opinion by the Office of the Attorney General.
Nelson also asked Paxton how ballot workers ought to treat mail-in ballots that only list an ID number or driver’s license card that is “limited term,” in regards both to “counting” the vote and for investigating “instances of fraud.”
So Paxton will be able to nip this potential avenue of voting fraud in the bud.
“A former Democrat member of the Texas Senate is throwing his support behind a Republican candidate for the seat he once held. Former State Sen. Eddie Lucio Jr. of Brownsville announced his endorsement of Adam Hinojosa in the race against freshman Democrat State Sen. Morgan LaMantia, pointing to their shared pro-life values as a key reason.”
“The most fun I had going to see the new Joker movie was in the car ride and from it, because I was listening to Warhammer 40K lore on the Horus Heresy. And just listening to that was better than seeing Joker Folie a Deux.”
Finally, a non-insulting use for AI? They’re going to use AI to create dubs of original Japanese anime in voices that sound like the original Japanese voice actors. This would be a big improvement on a lot of the early crappy dubs, but I can’t imagine American voice actors being thrilled at losing those gigs…
“Electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer Fisker Inc. is under investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and faces formal objections from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) over its Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. The company filed for bankruptcy earlier this year after halting production in March…The DOJ contends in filings that Fisker’s proposed $750,000 cap on recall expenses in its bankruptcy plan is insufficient to cover both parts and labor costs required for vehicle repairs.”
Also: “New York-based company called American Lease was less deterred by this warning and in June agreed to purchase the remaining Fisker inventory—approximately 3,300 cars for a total of $46.3 million dollars. By October, American Lease had paid Fisker $42.5 million and had taken delivery of about 1,100 Oceans. That was the plan until the end of last week, at least. Last Friday evening, Fisker informed American Lease that the Oceans ‘cannot, as a technical matter, be ‘ported’ from the Fisker server to which the vehicles are currently linked to a distinct server owned and/or controlled by’ American Lease.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Also from Instapundit: Fisker left their California headquarters trashed when they vacated.
The issue originated in one of the Kia web portals used by dealerships. Long story short and a hefty bit of API abuse later, [Sam] Curry and his band of far-more-capable Kia Boyz managed to register a fake dealer account to get a valid access token, which they were then able to use to call any backend dealer API command they wanted.
“From the victim’s side, there was no notification that their vehicle had been accessed nor their access permissions modified,” Curry noted in his writeup. “An attacker could resolve someone’s license plate, enter their VIN through the API, then track them passively and send active commands like unlock, start, or honk.”
Bungled. “A founding member of the experimental rock band Mr. Bungle was found guilty Friday of first-degree murder in the killing of his girlfriend after prosecutors in California found an audio file the victim recorded on her phone as she fought for her life. A jury in Santa Cruz deliberated for a day before finding Theobald ‘Theo’ Lengyel guilty of first-degree murder in the killing of his girlfriend Alice “Alyx” Kamakaokalani Herrmann on the night of Dec. 4, 2023, inside her Capitola home.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
The pianist cashed his ticket and drove an exhausting 500 miles to the concert venue on the only night he could play, only to find a broken, out-of-tune piano. The restaurant couldn’t get his order right before he had to leave to perform. He refused to play multiple times before finally relenting and, still in pain from the drive, improvised the best-selling solo piano album of all time.
Even a flatworm can turn away from pain, and Asmongold (AKA ZackRawrr) offers a video in which studio executives reveal that ordinary American moviegoers have at long last inflicted enough pain on Hollywood studios over their attempting to shove wokeness down our throats that they’ve finally, finally gotten the message.
“Studios are assembling super fan focus groups to assess various materials for franchise projects to avoid social media backlash.” Well, at least they realize they have a problem. The problem is wokeness. If you work in Hollywood and think to yourself “Hey, can we put this ‘message’ for ‘modern audiences’ in a movie that’s in a beloved franchise,” the answer should always be “No, don’t do that.” Maybe Hollywood could hire me to be a focus group of one. Pay me an executive producer salary and run ideas by me, and I can tell you how not to ruin your bottom line doing stupid things. “No, Galadriel shouldn’t be a girlboss.” “No, you shouldn’t replace Indiana Jones with a young woman who does everything better than him.” “No, you shouldn’t make Superman gay.” It’s not rocket science. Drop me a line and I’ll help save you from your woke staffers (and yourself).
“Toxic fandoms have grown so powerful that talent executives and publicists privately bemoan the issue fear of triggering another backlash.” For “toxic fandoms,” read “ordinary fans tired of your woke bullshit.”
“‘They think the purity of the first version will never be replaced, or you’ve done something to upset the canon of a beloved franchise, and they’re going to take you down for doing so.’ That’s exactly right. I’m glad they understand.” We don’t watch something based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien to take in the vapid natterings of a pink-haired, 20-something gender studies major who thinks she can do a better job than the greatest fantasy writer of the 20th century. Go write your own books, you shallow snowflake loser. Leave ours alone. If you don’t love and respect Tolkien, don’t adapt Tolkien. If you don’t love and respect Star Wars, don’t write Star Wars. If you don’t like and respect existing D.C. and Marvel superheroes, don’t write them. See how this works? If you don’t respect the source material, we don’t care about your “spin.” Bugger off.
“The problem is that the fan base wants you to maintain what the original story was and not change the story.” That’s because we liked the original store and hate the woke garbage you’ve replaced it with.
“‘Fear of inadvertently triggering another backlash kept several studios from speaking for this story, even in the background.’ I think this is a good thing.” Damn straight. Screw up beloved franchises and fans will stay away in droves, and tell all their friends to stay away in droves. And not only will we stay away, we’ll actively hope that every social justice warrior working so hard to ruin the source material loses their jobs.
“We’re trying to put this agenda that we want to have in, like, this show. The fans don’t like it. Now the fans are the problem? No, you’re the problem for trying to force it into the show. You either meet the audience expectations, or you die.” Damn straight. The people that told you to should replace Jedi with lesbian space witches are the problem. They’re the ones that should be fired and never allowed to destroy your shareholder value ever again. The fans were the ones telling you not to set that giant pile of money on fire, and everyone in Kathleen Kennedy’s chain of command was going “Nah, it’ll be fine!”
“‘They’ll just tell us if you do that, the fans are going to retaliate.’ This is a good decision. You know what this shows? It shows that we’re winning. You don’t get to morally obligate an audience to buy your product. That’s not how the world works. Nobody has to do that.”
He points out early Sonic the Hedgehog footage feedback as an example of a non-political example of fans telling a studio they’re screwing up, and the studio listening. “They fixed it and they made it the way that people wanted, and now they’re making Sonic 3 with Keanu Reeves as Shadow.”
“If the companies are making products and people don’t like them, then they’re not going to sell. And that’s it. That’s the bottom line. Literally nothing else matters.”
Social Justice destroys everything it touches. Disney spent billions acquiring valuable cash cow franchises and then woke employees turned them into money losing failures. The woke insisting that Lightyear needed more gay lost Disney tons of money and goodwill. The staffers who kept wokeness out of Inside Out 2 made Disney a billion dollars. That and Deadpool and Wolverine proved that fans will still flock to theaters if you just stop trying to shove “The Message” down their throats and simply give them what they want.
Or you can keep trying wokeness and continue to enjoy the massive layoffs happening all across Hollywood.
Your choice.
It’s the woke that are toxic. It’s the fans that are trying to keep them from setting billions of dollars in shareholder value on fire.
A crippling dock strike gets the can kicked past election day, Hurricane Helene wrecks havoc on the highlands, illegal alien crime flourishes, two bombing plots aimed at “diversity” are thwarted, Texas A&M ditches woke classes, more Diddy dirt, and Japanese gamers aren’t onboard with Ubisoft’s “black samurai.”
The Biden-Harris administration’s ‘America Last’ policies have left the country vulnerable. Between draining the strategic petroleum reserve, sending hundreds of billions in cash and equipment to Ukraine (such as electrical transformers that are now needed for Hurricane Helene), and FEMA spending $640 million to help migrants, the agency tasked with emergency preparedness is now ‘broke,’ and doesn’t have enough money to get through hurricane season which typically lasts through November.
The agency is being stretched as it works with states to assess damage from Hurricane Helene and delivers meals, water, generators and other critical supplies. The storm struck Florida last week, then plowed through several states in the Southeast, flooding towns and killing more than 160 people.
Mayorkas was not specific about how much additional money the agency may need, but his remarks on Air Force One underscored concerns voiced by President Joe Biden and some lawmakers earlier this week that Congress may need to pass a supplemental spending bill this fall to help states with recovery efforts.
“This woman blasted Joe Biden live on NBC – she has family that has been trapped in NC for days and says FEMA is nowhere in sight. Why haven’t President Biden or Vice President Harris called a major press conference and/or landed on the ground in towns that were wiped off the map by last week’s flooding?”
Indeed, there are a lot of reports that some government agencies are actively hindering private rescue and relief efforts in North Carolina. “Let’s begin with this terrible report of a man who used his own helicopter to rescue stranded people above Asheville, N.C., and who was told if he continued, he would be placed under arrest.”
Also: “We have medical teams trying to access Burnsville (elevation 2,700ft) and Black Mountain. Authorities are threatening arrest. I’m gonna keep this short & simple; something is very wrong here.”
Also: “NEW – Federal Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has shut down aid flights into Western North Carolina. A NOTAM has been issued by the FAA that won’t allow anyone not approved by the state to fly aid missions.”
Plus a slate of 18-wheeler tire slashings in multiple locations that’s hopefully not government sanctioned. Hopefully…
The Trafalgar Group released a poll on Wednesday showing Trump has increased his lead in the vital swing states of Michigan and Wisconsin.
The recent poll shows Trump beating Harris by 2.2 points in Michigan, with Trump scoring 47.5% of the votes to Harris’s 45.3%.
On August 31, the Trafalgar Group had Trump beating Harris 47% to 46.6%, a lead of only 0.4%.
Trump is winning in Wisconsin as well, topping the Kackler by 47.1% to 46%. The poll had Trump at 47.3% to Harris’s 46.2%.
“These numbers are the best we’ve seen for Trump in this election cycle. If this momentum holds, he could easily win by a significant margin,” a polling source stated.
In Pennsylvania, which many pundits believe Harris needs to win, Trump is up, with 47.5% of the vote, compared to Harris’s 45.3%.
The Biden-Harris administration has allowed well over half a million illegal aliens with criminal histories to enter the United States.
U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-23) published the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data on social media platform X.
According to the newly released information, 662,566 noncitizens on ICE’s national docket have criminal histories. These numbers include 13,099 murder convicts, 15,811 sexual assault convicts, and 13,423 weapon offense convicts.
“We’ve known for far too long that the Biden-Harris border crisis poses a direct threat to Americans,” Gonzales said in a press release. “The truth is clear—illegal immigrants with a criminal record are coming into our country.”
The Texas congressman asserted that beyond the disturbing new data, it should also serve as a “wake-up call” for the federal government and cities across the United States that keep sanctuary policies in place.
Gonzales first requested the data on March 13 when he penned a letter requesting answers to several illegal immigration questions to President Joe Biden and U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Of the seven million reported cases on ICE’s docket, the letter requested information on how many noncitizens were charged with a crime by a municipality. Additionally, the letter asked how many were noncitizens convicted of a crime and released into U.S. communities.
Over six months later, Gonzales has finally received a response.
Sure seems like Gonzales has been a lot more active on this issue since Brandon Herrera primaried him…
As ‘Border Czar’ Kamala Harris visited the southern border for a photo-op on Friday, alarming new revelations also emerged showing that far-left Democrats in the White House rolled out the red carpet to 650,000 migrants with criminal records. This has already fueled chaos nationwide, including a new report of an “explosion in migrant prostitution” networks across America.
A newly leaked law enforcement document obtained by New York Post journalists shows that the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua has exploited desperate migrant women into sex trafficking networks across eight states.
At least eight states have seen an explosion in migrant prostitution since the gang laid down roots in the US, with authorities in Texas, Nevada, Illinois, California, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey and New York now fighting to curtail the sex trade, the memo shows. -NYPost
The Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has been linked to sex trafficking in eight states including New York.
In New York City, police sources told the NYPost that Tren de Aragua gangsters are recruiting their members and victims straight out of city-run migrant shelters.
In the Big Apple, Tren de Aragua is trying to recruit foot soldiers to force women into sex trafficking — in the hopes that it will become a main source of income for the gang, according to the leaked memo.
Funny how we didn’t see or hear a single story about Tren de Aragua prior to the Biden Administration, and now they seem to be everywhere.
Speaking of sexual slavery, a Yazidi woman captured by the Islamic State was just rescued…in Gaza. From the river to the sea/No sex slave shall be free…
“Philadelphia: Muslim teen hoped to make bombs for terror group, planned LGBTQ parade jihad massacre….Muhyyee-ud-din Abdul-Rahman, 18, of West Philadelphia, not only had bomb-making materials, that were found in the trash at his home, he had tested bombs in the woods behind his home and had likely considered an attack on Philly’s LGBTQ community.” Funny how some of the Democratic Party’s vibrant diversity wants to blow up other parts of the Democratic Party’s vibrant diversity…
John Kerry admits that the First Amendment is a huge barrier to forcing leftist views down people’s throats. “Our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to hammer [disinformation] out of existence. What we need is to win…the right to govern by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.” If anyone you know is committing #Wrongthink, be sure to report them to the Ministry of Love…
Israel hits a Russian airbase in Syria. One wonders what Russian’s adventures in Syria have gotten them other than some dead mercenaries and weapons sales.
Virginia high school teacher fired for refusing to use tranny pronouns awarded $575,000. Make them pay.
Albania wants to createa microstate in their own capital for “Sovereign State of the Bektashi Order” for the moderate Sufi Muslim sect. “His hoped-for Muslim state in Tirana, the capital of Albania, will be a Vatican-style sovereign enclave that will control territory the size of five New York City blocks and will allow alcohol, allow women to wear what they want and not impose lifestyle rules.” Not the worst idea I’ve heard this year. At least they could sell postage stamps…
A Texas A&M spokesperson has confirmed that the university will deactivate 38 certificates and 14 minors, including the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies minor.
The A&M spokesperson told The Battalion that the official list of deactivated programs will not be public until it appears before the Faculty Senate on October 14. A university statement cited low enrollment as the reason for deactivating the programs.
However, Theresa Morris, the director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, said that the LGBTQ Studies minor was among those ending.
An official in the Department of Communication & Journalism also confirmed that certificates for both Communication, Diversity and Social Justice and Communication & Global Media are being deactivated.
Additionally, the director of Marketing and Communications in the College of Performance confirmed that the certificates for popular culture and performing social activism were also in the deactivation process.
This comes after State Rep. Brian Harrison (R-Midlothian) repeatedly called DEI courses and the LGBTQ studies minor an “outrageous abuse of tax money” and examples of “taxpayer-funded indoctrination.”
Good. Maybe students will be forced to choose a major that adds to the world rather than tearing it down with social justice.
“Lawsuit Accuses Democrat State House Candidate of Not Paying Vendors. House District 80 Democrat candidate Cecilia Castellano is already under investigation by Attorney General Ken Paxton in a separate voter fraud case.”
A lawsuit filed in Tarrant County is accusing a Democrat running for the Texas House of Representatives of failing to pay her vendors and subcontractors in the business she operates.
House District 80 candidate Cecilia Castellano, who operates Azteca Designs and Construction, allegedly failed to provide proper compensation for work done by one of Azteca’s subcontractors, the Glass Doctor of North Texas, according to the suit.
Glass Doctor had entered an agreement to work on a project with Azteca in November 2023, where the subcontractor was slated to earn $49,643.36, according to the filing. Later, Glass Doctor was tasked with replacing damaged glass installed by another subcontractor for an additional $18,487.77.
However, Glass Doctor says the payments never arrived.
Plaintiffs instead painted a picture of Azteca going out of their way to avoid providing the payments, claiming the project was “not built pursuant to written plans” and back-charging Glass Doctor to fix work done by a third party.
Fort Bend County Judge KP George has been indicted on misdemeanor charges related to faked racist messages on social media but could face felony charges over an alleged attempt to hide evidence.
A grand jury indicted George last Thursday in relation to a scheme in collaboration with Taral Patel, his former chief of staff and now Democratic candidate for county commissioner. Patel was indicted on four felony and four misdemeanor charges after investigators tied him to fake social media and email accounts used to make offensive posts and circulate falsified polls.
“Netflix Cancellations Skyrocketed After Founder Donated, Endorsed Harris. Netflix cancellations went through the roof after co-founder and chairman Reed Hastings endorsed and donated to VP Kamala Harris.”
“[German] Green Party co-chairs Ricarda Lang and Omid Nouripour are stepping down. The move could make things even harder for Germany’s fractious coalition government. Germany’s Green Party is going from crisis to crisis. Three days after regional elections in the eastern state of Brandenburg delivered a stinging defeat to the party, its entire leadership has resigned. Now, the party will have to choose a replacement at its party conference in November.”
My my, hey hey/Disney cancels the movie about Rei.
Who could possibly be pissed off about a historical game starring a black samurai? Well, for starters, Japanese gamers.
The Democratic Party has long benefited from its reputation as “the party of the working man” long after that description ceased to be true. But the New Left have all but completed their long march through the party’s institutions, and now they’re run by college-educated social justice Marxists who don’t even bother to conceal their contempt for people who make their living working with their hands.
Has anyone noticed that CNN stands nearly alone in the mainstream media as resistant to the Kamala Harris Joy™ Revival? Perhaps they perhaps get a dose of reality from the presidential debate they moderated in June. Or maybe their Close Encounter of the Harris-Walz Kind in late August showed CNN that Gertrude Stein’s observation about Oakland — there’s no there there — applies even more to Harris.
Or maybe they just pay attention to their own data. Yesterday, Harry Enten dumped all sorts of cold water on Democrat prospects this November with Harris at the top of the ticket. Or perhaps in this context, the problem comes from the man who no longer gets listed on it. Joe Biden’s ignominious booting from a nomination union workers supported has created a potentially large shift in the electorate, one that could doom Democrats in the states they need most:
HARRY ENTEN, CNN SENIOR DATA REPORTER: One of many elements that we’ll be looking at this morning. You know, sometimes there are data points that just jump off the screen, should set off sirens. All right, this is union households. This is democratic margin and presidential election. It ain’t what it used to be. You know, you go back to 1992. Bill Clinton won that union vote by 30 points. Hillary Clinton only won it by 12 points back in 2016. That was the lowest mark for a Democrat since 1984, Mondale versus Reagan. But look at where Kamala Harris is today. She is only leading by nine points. That would be the worst Democratic performance in a generation. Ten points off the mark of Joe Biden, who, of course, won four years ago. He was sort of that union guy, union Joe, right? Won it up by 19 point. She’s ten points off his mark. And the worst in a generation if this, in fact, holds, Sara.
SIDNER: It is interesting to note that the difference between this and this – and Biden still won.
ENTEN: Still won.
SIDNER: But those numbers are significantly down. All right, talk to me about manual labor. Those folks who went to trade schools.
ENTEN: Yes, those folks who use their hands. I think a lot of people oftentimes conflate the union vote with those who use their hands. Mike Rowe, of course, has been arguing more people should go to trade schools, more people should get a vocational degree. Look at this margin.
Dirty Jobs’ didn’t resonate because the host was incredibly charming. It wasn’t a hit because it was gross, or irreverent, or funny, or silly, or smart, or terribly clever. ‘Dirty Jobs’ succeeded because it was authentic,” Rowe wrote. “It spoke directly and candidly to a big chunk of the country that non-fiction networks had been completely ignoring. In a very simple way, ‘Dirty Jobs’ said ‘Hey — we can see you,’ to millions of regular people who had started to feel invisible. Ultimately, that’s why ‘Dirty Jobs’ ran for eight seasons. And today, that’s also why Donald Trump is the President of the United States.”
Back to CNN:
SIDNER: Wow.
ENTEN: This, to me, oh boy does this tell you about the state of our politics now versus back in the early 1990s. Margin among vocational and trade school grads in pre-election polling. Bill Clinton was leading that vote over George H.W. Bush by seven points. Look at where Donald Trump is today over Kamala Harris, a 31-point advantage. When I think people think of the working class, they think of people who use their hands. And we know that Donald Trump has been going after that vote, and he is in a very, very strong position, more so perhaps than any other bloc. The folks who go to trade school, vocational school, that has moved from being a core Democratic group to now being a core group of Donald Trump’s massive amount of support among the working class.
And it’s not just the white working class, no matter how much the Protection Racket Media tries to spin this as some sort of white-supremacy impulse. Enten shows that Trump has made real inroads among non-white voters, especially among those in the working and middle classes:
ENTEN: Yes, you know, we have been noting on this program, right, that Donald Trump seems to have been having some real impact among voters of color, getting into that traditional democratic support. And I was very interested to see this, because we’re talking about the working class, right? So, this is the margin among non-college graduates, all right, the voters of color. You go back four years ago. Look at that, Joe Biden won that group by 45 points. Look at where Kamala Harris’ support is today. She’s still leading amongst that group, but that lead is down 17 points to just 28 points.
And I will note that the margin among voters of color who actually graduate college has only been changed by five points. Five points compared to four years ago. The reason Donald Trump is doing so well amongst voters of color is because he has really gone in and grabbed a lot of voters that he didn’t previously have among those who didn’t graduate college. And this is part of a larger trend that we’re seeing throughout our politics, Sara, in which Republicans, specifically Donald Trump, is doing very, very well among working class voters whether they were in unions, whether they went to trade school, or whether they’re voters of color. The fact is, Donald Trump seems to have gone into a hotbed of traditional Democratic support and made a lot of movement in ways I don’t think a lot of people would have thought when he went down that escalator just back in 2015.
If those numbers hold up in this election cycle, the results would be catastrophic for Democrats all the way down the ticket. They barely won in 2020 and barely lost in 2016 while remaining strong in these demos in both cycles. If those demos are shifting significantly to the GOP, it spells doom in what had been an evenly split electorate otherwise.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that many working-class voters in deep-blue Philadelphia continue to support Republicans over Democrats.
This could cause significant problems for VP Kamala Harris:
Gabriel Lopez grew up in a family of Democrats in the Kensington neighborhood of deep-blue Philadelphia. So in 2016, the first presidential election he was old enough to vote in, he picked Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.
But Lopez, now 27, says his views have changed. He switched his registration to Republican this year, and he plans to vote for Trump, who’s running for president a third time.
“Democrats keep saying [Trump] is going to bring down the economy, but he was already president for four years, and taxes were lower,” Lopez said. “We’re tired of the same politics. We got a different type of guy, and the people actually love him.”
A home health aide and rideshare driver, Lopez said Democrats haven’t kept their promises to bring down prices or improve life in his community. Trump, he said, is “at least straightforward.”
The thing is, the left and media cannot blame racism or sexism because the shift began years ago.
Philly houses 20% of the state’s Democrats.
The county lost more Democrat votes in 2020 than any other county.
In 2020, President Joe Biden “performed worse than [Hillary] Clinton in 41 of the city’s 66 political wards.”
The most significant shift occurred in working-class communities, especially those “where education levels were lowest and poverty rates were highest.”
Yikes:
The trend was consistent across racial groups, though it was most pronounced in majority-Latino neighborhoods. In two North Philadelphia political wards — including the one where Lopez lives — Biden in 2020 performed worse in nearly every voting division than Clinton did in 2016.
In some areas, voters increasingly cast ballots for Trump. In others, Democratic vote totals declined because turnout did — fewer people showing up in blue strongholds is effectively a gain for Republicans.
The Pennsylvania Democrat Party has brushed aside concerns, which I expected to hear. The party claimed Harris has “a robust get-out-the-vote program” and bragged about supposed high enthusiasm for Harris, “especially among younger voters and voters of color who were skeptical of Biden before he dropped out of the race in July.”
One recent poll showed Harris performing better than Biden did in 2020.
However, “enthusiasm to vote was lowest in the city’s working-class neighborhoods.”
Retired trucker Jim Kohn voted Democrat all his life until 2016, when he chose Trump over Hillary:
Kohn, a retired truck driver who lives in South Philly and for years voted along with the Teamsters union, is still a registered Democrat. But he’s planning to vote for Trump for the third time, and he believes more of his neighbors frustrated with inflation and the high cost of goods will, too.
“When Trump was president, everything was cheaper,” he said. “Now, everything is so sky high.”
Trump’s presidency was capped by the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused a historically sharp economic downturn that economists say shifted prices upward for years to come.
Hillary won Kohn’s “largely white, working-class neighborhood” in 2016.
Trump won in 2020. The votes for Trump went up by 52%.
The piece goes on to note that Republican voter drives in Philadelphia and across the state are signing up new Republicans faster than Democrats.
It’s not just the U.S. All over the world, left-wing parties have gone from those with a substantial membership that came up through union ranks to parties dominated by upper-middle class college-educated Marxists pushing social justice. It happened in the UK, with “the transformation of Labour from a party of working people into a metropolitan machine more concerned with gender-neutral toilets and taking the knee than with what working-class people want and need.”
In the U.S. as abroad, the most salient characteristic of parties supposedly of “the working man” is their naked contempt for anyone who actually uses their hands to work for a living.
The election season is upon us, which means it’s time for Democrats to try to win the only way they know how: Cheating. So here’s a roundup of links on some (but far from all) the ways Democrats will attempt to cheat in November.
A network of left-wing organizations backed by billionaire George Soros is working to naturalize and mobilize immigrants and refugees in order to activate them as voting blocs in swing states, boasting that they could “sway the outcome of national, state, and local elections.”
Chief among these groups is the National Partnership for New Americans, which describes itself as “a national multiethnic, multiracial partnership network of 60 of the country’s leading immigrant and refugee rights organizations.” The group received $560,000 from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations from 2016 to 2021. The group had a total revenue of $4.11 million in 2023.
“Our network has supported the naturalization of over 250,000 U.S. Citizens and has been a key driver of advocacy to make naturalization more affordable and accessible,” the National Partnership for New Americans states. Its website features an image of a t-shirt that reads “Naturalize 2 Million by 2022,” along with the phrase “New American Voters.”
Democrats often rebut the Republican argument on illegal immigration — that the left encourages it to forge a path to permanent Democrat political power — by saying that illegal immigrants don’t have the right to vote. But the effort by the Soros-funded group to get as many immigrants as possible on the voter rolls as a way to “sway” elections indicates that the left does view immigration as a political tool.
Figures suggest that mass immigration could be a boon for Democrats’ electoral chances. One analysis found that congressional districts with a higher-than-average foreign born population voted for Democrats in 90 percent of cases during the 2018 midterm election. The foreign-born population residing in the United States surged to 51.6 million — the highest level ever — under the Biden-Harris administration. An estimate from the Center for Immigration Studies found that illegal immigration accounted for approximately 58 percent of that spike.
President Joe Biden beat former President Donald Trump by only 11,000 votes in Arizona in 2020, a fact that underscores the impact mass immigration could have on American elections. Biden beat Trump by just 12,000 votes in Georgia, another crucial swing state, in 2020. The New American Voters campaign notes that there are more than 86,000 individuals who have been naturalized in Georgia since the election.
The New American Voters campaign, a project of the National Partnership for New Americans, maintains demographic reports on critical swing states and the country as a whole.
“Since the last presidential election in November 2020, an estimated 62,179 voting age adults have become newly naturalized citizens in Arizona,” reads one such report, which also track the top ten countries of origin for new citizens in each state.
National Partnership for New Americans Executive Director Nicole Melaku used the release of its demographic data as an opportunity to push Biden to swing further to the left on immigration, pressuring him to support “pathways to citizenship.”
One 2020 report from the National Partnership for New Americans explains that “new American voters form critical voting blocks that can have the power to sway national electoral outcomes,” highlighting their growing share of the population in key swing states and calling them “a sleeping political giant.”
A 2022 report from the group celebrated newly-naturalized voters as part of the “new American majority,” a term used to describe “all people of color, unmarried women, and young voting eligible Americans.” The National Partnership for New Americans directly compared the margin of victory in the 2020 presidential election to the number of newly-naturalized voters who had since gained citizenship within each state.
The National Partnership for New Americans isn’t the only leftist organization working to leverage mass immigration to impact American elections, however. There’s also the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, an organization that’s received nearly $7 million from Soros between 2016 to 2022, and had $25 million in total revenue in 2022.
Two of the most recent listed grants from the Open Society Foundations, which total nearly $4.3 million, are intended “to encourage naturalization among eligible immigrants, assist them with the process, and mobilize their civic participation.” The center is one of the organizations behind Citizenshipworks, an effort also funded by the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative to help non-citizens residing in the United States become citizens.
The Immigrant Legal Resource Center isn’t exclusively concerned with naturalizing and mobilizing non-citizens. The organization also works to prevent the deportation of illegal aliens. It received $500,000 in 2021 from the Open Society Foundations to fund its efforts to “dismantle the infrastructure of criminalization, detention, and deportation of immigrants.”
A coalition of 19 Republican attorneys general have launched a criminal investigation into the Democrat fundraising platform ActBlue over allegations of money laundering.
As American Greatness reported in April, multiple independent investigative journalists, including O’Keefe Media Group (OMG) and Election Watch have uncovered what appears to be illegal activity involving millions of dollars in campaign donations to Act Blue that have been laundered through unwitting small donors.
The process of breaking up large donations and submitting them under the names of small donors to cover up illegal contributions has been dubbed “smurfing.” Suspicions that ActBlue routinely engages in this type of illicit fundraising have dogged the outfit since at least Joe Biden’s presidential campaign in 2020.
The Committee on House Administration, chaired by Congressman Bryan Steil (R-Wisc.), launched an investigation into Act Blue in November of 2023 to look into reports that the fundraising giant was skirting campaign donation laws and allowing rampant fraud on the site. The committee widened its probe in August 2024.
In a letter sent to top officials on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) on August 5, Steil urged them to “immediately initiate an emergency rulemaking to require political campaigns to verify the card verification value (‘CVV’) of donors who contribute online using a credit or debit card, and to prohibit political campaigns from accepting online contributions from a gift card or other prepaid credit cards.”
In September, Steil sent letters to five states, urging them to launch criminal investigations into ActBlue’s alleged illicit activities, citing three specific areas of concern:
– Donations significantly disproportionate to an individual’s net worth or previous giving history.
– Uncharacteristic donations from party-affiliated registered voters suddenly contributing to candidates of the opposing party.
– Unusually frequent donations from elderly individuals or first-time donors.
The number of GOP AGs involved in the effort has since swelled to 19.
On Tuesday, the 19 Republican Attorney’s General sent a letter to ActBlue CEO and President Regina Wallace-Jones demanding information and explanations regarding the suspicious donations.
Recent reporting suggests that that there may be donors across the country who are identified in filings with the Federal Election Commission as having donated to candidates through ActBlue (and other affiliated entities), but who did not actually make those donations. That raises a host of concerns about whether ActBlue’s platform is being used to facilitate “smurfing”––a type of money laundering in which donors break up large donations and submit them under different names to disguise who the money comes from and thereby skirt contribution limits in violation of state and federal law.
As one former FEC commissioner recently explained, wealthy donors—some of whom are foreign nationals and therefore barred from donating to federal candidates at all—can employ complicated schemes like this to make donations in others’ names. This concern is not hypothetical. Indeed, in an indictment filed last week in federal court, the U.S. Department of Justice alleged that a major U.S. political figure knowingly participated in such a scheme in a recent election cycle to receive contributions from a foreign national through straw donors. Further, the apparent irregularities in FEC filings also raise concerns about whether ActBlue’s fundraising methods are deceptive and properly safeguard donor’s data privacy.
Some of us and our colleagues have raised these concerns with you directly, and at least one senator has raised these concerns with the FEC. Independent investigations have shown that there are donors across the country who show up on FEC filings as having donated to candidates through ActBlue (and other affiliated entities) but deny having made those donations. Given the prominent role it plays in our elections, it is incumbent on ActBlue to address the serious questions created by apparent irregularities in ActBlue’s FEC filings.
ActBlue is one of the largest fundraising platforms for election-related donations. Already during the 2024 election cycle ActBlue has raised billions of dollars. But there are concerns about where those dollars came from. It is essential that we know whether political donations—particularly in such large volumes—are being solicited, made, and processed consistent with campaign finance, consumer protection, and other state and federal laws. We, the chief legal officers of Iowa, Indiana, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming ask that you explain what measures you have in place to ensure that donations made through your platform follow State and federal law.
Just as important, we ask for clarification as to what measures you take to make sure that the donors identified as donating via the ActBlue platform are who they claim. If individuals are inadvertently donating to political campaigns, are misled into making repeat donations, or are having donations made in their name that they do not wish to make, that could violate election-related disclosures or state consumer fraud statutes. Our States’ citizens deserve to know that those facilitating election-related financing are following State and federal laws. Thus we appreciate the assurances that you will provide in answering our questions promptly before the upcoming elections in November.
To prevent voter fraud, many states require voter ID. But in California, Democrats enacted laws to outlaw it.
On Monday, California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill preventing local governments from requiring voters to present identification at the polls.
Monday evening, X CEO Elon Musk posted in response to the legislation, “Wow, it is now illegal to require voter ID in California! They just made PREVENTING voter fraud against the law.”
Snip.
The new legislation is in a response to Huntington Beach residents passing a voter ID requirement in March. In April, California’s Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta and Democratic Secretary of State Shirley Weber sued the city to invalidate the law, claiming the legislation violated state voting protections.
The bill was passed by the Democratic-controlled California Assembly and Senate earlier this year after members claimed voter ID laws disproportionately affect low-income, elderly and minority voters. The new bill goes into effect on January 1, 2025 when California will become one of 14 states that do not require voter ID for elections.
Despite the bill being signed into law, Huntington Beach has yet to respond to the lawsuit. According to Newsweek, California’s Democratic lawmakers have introduced multiple bills to prevent conservative-leaning locations in the state such as Shasta County from adopting voter ID laws.
Here in Texas, a federal judge wants Democrats to be able to “harvest” ballots.
Six progressive organizations were victorious in their lawsuit challenging a state law that prohibits paid ballot harvesting, with San Antonio-based federal Judge Xavier Rodriguez issuing a ruling on Saturday that declared the law unconstitutional and enjoined state officials from enforcing it.
La Union Del Pueblo Entero (LUPE) was the lead plaintiff, along with the League of Women Voters of Texas, Texas American Federation of Teachers, the Texas Alliance for Retired Americans, the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), and OCA-Greater Houston.
The law in question, which was passed within Senate Bill (SB) 1 during the Texas Legislature’s first special session in 2021, creates an offense for “vote harvesting services.”
Specifically, the law bans “in-person interaction with one or more voters, in the physical presence of an official ballot or a ballot voted by mail, intended to deliver votes for a specific candidate or measure” and only if it’s done for compensation or benefit.
Volunteers are not prohibited.
According to the plaintiffs that include LUPE, their paid canvassers are often invited into voters’ homes and asked for assistance with their mail-in ballots.
LUPE staff members and volunteers have been asked for assistance with voting by mail and in-person at the polls by elderly and disabled voters, and have provided such assistance, the lawsuit says, adding, “LUPE often provides its volunteers with t-shirts or gas cards, particularly because there is little public transportation in the Rio Grande Valley.”
According to the judge, confusion about the law’s applicability was not addressed by state officials in charge of enforcing it, such as whether the gas card or other items may qualify as compensation that makes ballot harvesting a crime, and he agreed with their position that the law chilled their First Amendment rights.
In his holding, Rodriguez declared the canvassing restrictions in Texas Election Code Sec. 276.015 unconstitutional under the First and 14th Amendments, and ordered the state’s Office of the Attorney General and the Secretary of State not to investigate violations of the law and local prosecutors not to enforce it.
State Sen. Bryan Hughes (R-Mineola), who authored the legislation, reacted to the news on social media, arguing why the law is needed and adding that Rodriguez’s decision will be appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.
“I’m glad the Fifth Circuit will be reviewing,” Hughes wrote.
“I included this in SB1 to protect vulnerable voters — the elderly, first-time voters, voters with limited English proficiency. These are the voters most often preyed upon by vote harvesters and paid political operatives,” he explained.
The Heritage Foundation has a voting fraud tracker. The page for Pennsylvania shows nine voting fraud incidents since 2020, two of which were for “Altering The Vote Count.”
This is just a sampler of how Democrats intend to commit voting fraud between now and election day. If you know of any others, feel free to share them in the comments.
I’m sure they next month will provide many more examples…
