Congratulations on surviving the first 1/6th of 2024! The Big Guy is exactly who we knew he was all along, Houston police screw up, some big crime stories, Wayne LaPierre is found guilty, and the world’s saddest Oompa Loompa. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
“Remember when Joe Biden told the American people that his son didn’t make money in China?” asked Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) in a video posted to X. ““Well, not only did he lie about his son Hunter making money in China, but it also turns out that $40,000 in laundered China money landed in Joe Biden’s bank account in the form of a personal check.”
Today, a U.S. District Court issued its final judgment in Texas v. Garland, which was a challenge to the U.S. House’s proxy voting rule under the Quorum Clause of the Constitution. In its final judgment, the Court concluded that U.S. House members must be physically present for their vote to comply with the Constitution’s Quorum Clause. Attorneys from the Texas Public Policy Foundation argued the merits at trial in January of this year.
The lawsuit was originally filed with the State of Texas in response to Congress’ unlawful passage of the $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill in December 2022. The U.S. Constitution requires a quorum, or a majority, of House members to be physically present for the U.S. House of Representatives to conduct business. As less than half of the members were present when the legislation was passed, with the rest voting by proxy, this legislation never should have passed, and the president should not have signed it.
“This meticulous, 120-page opinion was written after a full trial on the merits,” said TPPF senior attorney Matt Miller. “The Court correctly concluded that the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023 violated the Quorum Clause of the U.S. Constitution because a majority of House members was not physically present when the $1.7 trillion spending bill was passed. Proxy voting is unconstitutional.”
This basically says that every bit of that $1.7 trillion spending was unconstitutional, along with any laws, etc. passed in that omnibus. Just how do you back out all that money that’s been spent, assuming this is upheld?
Record meth bust in Eagle Pass. “The U.S. Customs and Border Protections (CBP) have seized six and a half tons of methamphetamine, over 13,000 pounds, at the Eagle Pass Port of Entry, making it the largest ever seizure in a single enforcement action.”
Mitch McConnell announced on Wednesday that he will step down as the Senate Republican leader in November, ending his tenure as the longest-serving Senate leader in history.
“This will be my last term as Republican Leader of the Senate,” the 82-year-old veteran of the chamber said to his colleagues on the Senate floor. “I’m not going anywhere… It’s time for the next generation of leadership.”
He’ll leave the senate when his term ends in 2027. You can condemn him as the ultimate swamp creature, or praise him for his effectiveness at things like getting Trump’s Supreme Court picks confirmed. It’s two sides of the same coin. I’m not sure he was as effective as Trent Lott or Howard Baker.
Houston Police Department Chief Troy Finner called it a “dark day” at a press conference for the Houston Police Department, announcing that 4,107 adult sexual assault cases were wrongly closed without investigation.
A case management code “suspended for lack of personnel” was used, which led to closing the cases without actually investigating them.
Finner said he was first made aware the code even existed in 2021 and instructed HPD’s special victims division to stop using the code; however, he found out on February 7, 2024 that it continued. HPD first began using the code in 2016.
He said he immediately ordered a review of all cases suspended using this code dating back to 2016, which will take at least 30 days to complete. While the number of cases they have today is 4,017, he says it is “fluid and subject to change.”
60 Minutes gets to enjoy some of that vibrant Muslim diversity in Sweden to the sides of their faces.
60 Minutes goes to Sweden to make a heart warming special about diversity, but see a different situation, then this happens. pic.twitter.com/oUd2ZuJ0RV
“After five days of deliberations, a jury in New York on Friday held the National Rifle Association liable for financial mismanagement and found that Wayne LaPierre, the group’s former CEO, corruptly ran the nation’s most prominent gun rights group. The jury determined that LaPierre’s violation of his duties cost the NRA $5,400,000, though he already repaid roughly $1.5 million to the organization.” Here’s the thing: While they prosecution was unquestionably politically motivated, LaPierre did run a crooked ship. In the long run, forcing Wayne and his corrupt cronies from office has done the NRA a huge favor.
Argentine President Javier Milei just ended his country’s budget deficit in nine weeks. If Trump and the Republicans manage to control both houses of congress next year, there’s no reason they can’t balance the budget…assuming they have the will.
“Austin Fire Department Chaplain Dismissed for Comments on Transgender Athletes Sues for Free Speech Violation. A chaplain for the Austin Fire Department was dismissed from his position after expressing beliefs on his personal blog about protecting women’s sports.”
After a volunteer chaplain of the Austin Fire Department (AFD) was fired for posting on his personal blog that men and women are biologically different and should not compete against each other in sports, a lawsuit was filed in an effort to protect his rights to free speech and religious freedom.
The Alliance Defending Freedom said in a press release that it filed a motion Tuesday on behalf of Dr. Andrew Fox, who served in a voluntary capacity as chaplain for AFD before he was dismissed in 2021.
Unlike APD, AFD public and union leadership has been infected by social justice. Dr. Fox appears to have a very strong case on viewpoint discrimination grounds.
White TV host tries to race-bait Jerry Seinfeld for hosting “mostly” white male comedians on his show. It doesn’t go well for him.
“Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bipartisan bill into law authorizing the release of grand jury transcripts from an investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. The new legislation, signed by the Florida governor on Thursday, will allow a public release of the jury’s transcripts from the 2006 probe into Epstein’s abuse of underage girls. The new measure goes into effect July 1.”
Weird Austin crime story: “Prominent local businessman arrested in Austin, accused of arson.”
A prominent Austin businessman and founder of Continental Automotive Group, or CAG, was arrested Thursday on charges of Felony Arson and a State Jail Felony offense of Burglary.
Dorsey Bryan Hardeman, 75, is accused of starting a fire at a downtown Austin building on Sunday, according to an arrest affidavit.
According to Travis County court records, Trey Collins with the Minton, Bassett, Flores & Carsey firm has been retained as the attorney representing Hardeman. Sam Bassett told KXAN the office has just begun its work and “it is premature to comment. However, we will provide Mr. Hardeman an appropriate and vigorous defense.”
The affidavit said the Austin Fire Department responded to a building fire at the former Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop on 400 Nueces St. on Feb. 25.
Once the fire was contained, fire investigators determined the incident to be incendiary and found metal shavings on the ground below the door suggesting the door lock had been drilled out, records state.
The affidavit states fire investigators watched video surveillance from the building, which showed an older man entering the building with a red container consistent with a plastic gas tank.
Multiple cameras inside the building show a man pouring liquid from the red container and dropping multiple matches on the ground, the affidavit said.
Records show the man arrived at the location in a white 4-door Mercedez SUV.
Investigators interviewed the owner of Mellow Johnny’s Bike Shop who told AFD Hardeman was the owner of the property next door and had previously asked about purchasing the property at 400 Nueces St.
This is not what people refer to as “the perfect crime.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Remember Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me? It turns out McDonalds didn’t destroy his liver, a decade of alcoholism did.
A year after its censorship programs were exposed, the Global Engagement Center still insists the public has no right to know how it’s spending taxpayer money…
The State Department is so unhappy a newspaper published details about where it’s been spending your taxes, it’s threatened to only show a congressional committee its records in camera until it gets a “better understanding of how the Committee will utilize this sensitive information.” Essentially, Tony Blinken is threatening to take his transparency ball home unless details about what censorship programs he’s sponsoring stop appearing in papers like the Washington Examiner:
The State Department tells Congress, which controls its funding, that it will only disclose where it spent our money “in camera”
A year ago the Examiner published “Disinformation, Inc.”, a series by investigative reporter Gabe Kaminsky describing how the State Department was backing a UK-based agency that creates digital blacklists for disfavored media outlets. Your taxes helped fund the Global Disinformation Index, or GDI, which proudly touts among its services an Orwellian horror called the Dynamic Exclusion List, a digital time-out corner where at least 2,000 websites were put on blast as unsuitable for advertising, “thus disrupting the ad-funded disinformation business model.”
Mega-bank JP Morgan has officially left a $68 trillion investor coalition that is “focused on pressing the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases to decarbonize,” according to Bloomberg.
In other words, the “fight” to decarbonize is imploding.
JP Morgan said it is leaving the Climate Action 100+ because it has “made significant investments in developing its own climate risk engagement framework”, the report says. The bank claims to have 40 professionals now focused on sustainable investing.
And the damage for the Climate Action 100+ may only be getting started. Lance Dial, a Boston-based partner at law firm K&L Gates LLP, told Bloomberg: “I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more defections, especially given that there’s now a cost, such as potential litigation, that wasn’t there when companies joined.”
He added: “Attorneys general have subpoenaed firms about their membership of these groups.”
Remember that Chinese invasion we talked about earlier in the week? Republican U.S. Representative Tony Gonzales thinks it uses Sinaloa cartel.
In FY 2023, over 37,000 illegal Chinese aliens were encountered at the porous southern border, with an additional 20,000 having crossed since October when FY 2024 began. The federal data shows that the United States is seeing foreign invaders from more countries than ever before.
According to Rep. Tony Gonzalez (R-Texas), he believes the illegals crossing into California may indeed be staying there, he told the Daily Mail.
“As I’ve spoken to different agencies about why some communities [groups of migrants] to one place and others go another, one: it depends on what cartel controls that pipeline,” Gonzalez said.
‘It’s very clear that the Sinaloa Cartel is the one controlling that operation and sending Chinese more toward the California corridor…California/Arizona corridor that they control. That’s half the equation.’
Another theory: “[Oriel Ortega], the former director of Panama’s border patrol told The Epoch Times that the United Nations’ migration agenda is behind the chaos at the U.S. southern border and that U.N. partners are making things worse instead of better.”
More “refugees” behaving badly, with Eritrean, East African, gangs battling it out at an opera house in The Hague.
Results: “Six of Ohio’s eight largest cities experienced a drop in gun crime after the state allowed its citizens to carry a concealed weapon without a permit.”
Really? Which part of “communist China” was unclear to you?
The real people to blame are the Worldcon members who voted to hold a Worldcon in a communist country that routinely rapes and tortures ethnic minorities as a matter of policy to keep them in line. Communist China’s numerous trespasses against international human rights agreements and common decency alike have been known for decades, yet Worldcon voters took a look at China’s Worldcon bid and went “Nah, it’ll be fine!”
I’m not even mildly surprised at this outcome. Worldcon and most of science fiction’s institutions already showed that they had been corrupted and infected with social justice during the Sad Puppies incident. After that, I decided that neither Worldcon nor the Hugos were worth my time, money or attention. (And keep in mind that I had had collected literally every Hugo winning novel in first edition hardback up to that time.)
The commie Hugo kerfuffle didn’t cause me to lose respect for the Hugos or Worldcon because I had already lost all respect for both.
With layoffs left and left across America’s newsrooms, there’s lots of hand-wringing over the state of newspapers and “journalism” these days. Notably absent from these laments are any mention of leftism, wokeness, or the naked contempt today’s MSM journalists display again and again for ordinary Americans. Indeed, it’s such a long running theme on this blog that I had to wade through years of Media Watch-tagged posts to find one of the many specific takedowns of that contempt, but it was this one.
Our ruling elites seem unable to come to grips not only with President Trump pantsing them at every turn, but that their own smug sense of superiority and entitlement is what led to his rise in the first place. They don’t do “humble.”
Their smug sense of superiority shines through in every imperious announcement and self-satisfied Facebook post. That smug is the reason ordinary Americans love watching President Trump humiliate the media.
Snip.
The same people love to conflate contempt for their biased selves into contempt for the freedom of the press and the First Amendment. This is patently false. Ordinary Americans love the First Amendment. It’s the current smug, biased, dishonest incarnation of the MSM that we hate.
Look in the mirror. We don’t hate the free press. We hate you. Personally. And our loathing for you smug pricks dates back to long before Donald Trump ever threw his hat into the ring…
Ace of Spades offers up similar thoughts, including this reaction to ideas for media subsidies: “Fuck you. I will literally join a guerilla warfare unit before I allow you to take my money to propagandize against me.”
We’re not the only one celebrating the demise of the woke, left-leaning, Democrat-boosting MSM. After drinking the rich, zesty tears of Taylor Lorenz kvetching about How Horrible This Happened To Our Beloved Media, Matt Walsh offers similar thoughts.
“She’s basically telling us why the media falling apart. It’s Christmas morning but she wants us to be sad about it.”
“Feeling sorry for a journalist it it’s like feeling sorry for a tick that you just pulled off of your dog’s ear.”
“The journalism profession has completely discredited itself. It has unabashedly become a form of left-wing advocacy. And on the right we’ve been saying this forever, to the point that it just becomes background noise.”
“It’s far beyond bias.”
“People in the media like Taylor Lorenz have been ignoring us, and laughing at us and all that. Well, here you go. This is what happens. Now you’re all losing your jobs, now you’re all broke, and these entire, once prestigious, storied companies and outlets and publications are are going under.”
“Many of these people just have no integrity. They’re very bad people.”
“They have destroyed the lives of anyone they deem an enemy, even just normal people like civilians who, for whatever reason, find themselves in the left’s crosshairs, and they get destroyed. That’s a lot of when we talk about cancel culture.”
“Then the very people who do that lose their jobs, and, what, we’re not supposed to gloat about it?”
“You deserve to lose your job. You’re a very bad person, you have no integrity, you have delighted in your cruelty towards other people and now you lost your job.”
Journalism runs on trust, and nobody trusts them.
The other problem besides wokeness is over-saturation. “The media business has never been wider than it is right now, but it’s also never been more shallow.”
It’s not limited to America. The BBC has the same woke narrative problem.
Finally, Larry Correia with a succinct distillation of the problem:
We’re happy when journalists get laid off because we hate them. We hate them because they lie to us. https://t.co/7rTWYL4wui
The Senate’s bad border deal goes down badly, Big Brother is (still) watching you, Netanyahu tells everyone calling for a Gaza ceasefire to stick it in their murder tunnels, more Democrats arrested for (or convicted of) fraud, and a tiny bit of Disney news. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Republicans took one look at the abomination of a “bipartisan” border deal and declared it dead on arrival.
In a key vote on Wednesday, Senate Republicans moved to block the long-anticipated bipartisan border deal, which ties border-security provisions to aid for both Israel and Ukraine.
The bill was blocked in a 49 to 50 procedural vote, with only four Republicans joining Democrats in backing the legislation. The bill needed 60 votes to advance.
This setback comes after months of negotiations between Senate Republicans and Democrats on a measure President Joe Biden strongly requested. While the GOP wants more resources allocated toward the southern border, House Republicans and former president Donald Trump have made it clear they don’t want the legislation tied to foreign aid.
Hours after the bill’s details were revealed Sunday night, House GOP leaders rejected the package and declared it “DEAD on arrival in the House.”
Trump, who has made the border crisis a central issue of his 2024 presidential campaign, also weighed in on the border deal earlier this week. “Don’t be STUPID!!! We need a separate Border and Immigration Bill. It should not be tied to foreign aid in any way, shape, or form!” Trump posted on Truth Social.
Before the Senate voted on the matter, Biden blamed Trump for Republicans’ fierce opposition to the bill.
“Now, all indications are this bill won’t even move forward to the Senate floor,” Biden said Tuesday. “Why? A simple reason: Donald Trump.”
Hey Biden, I’m already going to vote for Trump. You don’t need to keep giving me new reasons.
The $118 billion Senate proposal includes about $60 billion in Ukraine funding, $14 billion in Israel aid, and $20 billion in border-security improvements, among various other items listed in the legislative package.
Senators James Lankford of Oklahoma, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Mitt Romney of Utah were the only Republicans to vote in favor of the bill on Wednesday.
Lankford should be ashamed to be in such company.
Texas isn’t taking the Biden Administrations abrogation of the rule of law lying down. “Texas Attorney General’s Legal Challenge to Biden Administration’s ‘Asylum Rule’ Will Proceed. A federal judge ruled Texas raised a plausible claim that the federal government is violating the Appointments Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”
The Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG) announced a procedural victory in one of its many ongoing lawsuits against the federal government this week, after a federal district judge ruled against a motion by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to dismiss a legal challenge to its “asylum rule,” saying Texas had a plausible constitutional challenge.
According to the OAG, the federal government violated the Appointments Clause in the U.S. Constitution when the DHS granted power to review asylum cases to immigration officers — a power uniquely held under federal statute by immigration judges.
“This case offers a rare opportunity to litigate the application of the Appointments Clause of the Constitution, which states that Congress may only vest the power to appoint “inferior Officers… in the President alone, the Courts of Law, or the Heads of Departments,” the OAG wrote in a press statement regarding the case.
The office explained that by using asylum officers to perform jobs Congress assigned to judges when said officers were not appointed in the same manner, DHS violated the Constitution.
The OAG also argues that asylum officers are granting more noncitizens asylum than otherwise would be entitled to it. This is causing surges at the border and population increases that are in turn increasing the state’s costs relating to the increases, the state says.
“It is tremendously important for Texas and for our Constitutional order that this case is allowed to move forward,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said regarding the case. “The Biden Administration must not be permitted to ignore Congress and violate the Constitution. We take every opportunity to hold Biden accountable for his unlawful overreach.”
Rank-and-file Border Patrol agents have slammed the Senate’s $118B Senate funding bill that would guarantee 1.5 million illegal migrants entry to the United States, while sending the majority of funds to Ukraine ($60B+) and Israel ($14.1B).
Snip.
“Now that I’ve seen more of it, they can respectfully go fuck themselves. The more I’m seeing the more it just puts what they’ve been doing in writing. You want to shut this down, it’s real easy. Team up [the Department of Defense] with DHS and let us enforce like we were supposed to,” one agent told the Caller, adding “I feel like we are the only nation in the world that is this dumb about the border. Maybe it’s because we haven’t.”
Oh, and “Aliens from noncontiguous countries shall not be included in the sum of aliens encountered.” Did America’s enemies write this thing?
Cruz went on to say he knew [the Biden border bill] “had zero chance of passage” and that the entire purpose of the bill was to give “political camouflage to Democrats running in November.”
“Joe Biden can secure the border any day he wants,” Cruz said. “He doesn’t want to.”
The Secure the Border Act, which passed in the lower chamber as as House Resolution (H.R.) 2, was introduced to the Senate by Cruz in September of 2023, a fact he highlighted Wednesday, saying to “give me Ukraine aid and H.R. 2 and I’ll vote for that.”
H.R. 2 would have continued construction of the border wall, reinstated the “remain in Mexico” policy, and added border patrol agents and technology for both the southern and northern borders.
“Democrats do not want to secure the border; they want this invasion,” Cruz continued. “The Americans who are dying as a result, they’re [Democrats] willing to look the other way.”
A few weeks ago, Ohio congressman and Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan’s office released a letter to Noah Bishoff, the former director of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, an arm of the Treasury Department. Jordan’s team was asking Bishoff for answers about why FinCEN had “distributed slides, prepared by a financial institution,” detailing how other private companies might use MCC transaction codes to “detect customers whose transactions may reflect ‘potential active shooters.’”
The slide suggested the “financial company” was sorting for terms like “Trump” and “MAGA,” and watching for purchases of small arms and sporting goods, or purchases in places like pawn shops or Cabela’s, to identify financial threats.
Jordan’s letter to Bishoff went on:
According to this analysis, FinCEN warned financial institutions of “extremism” indicators that include “transportation charges, such as bus tickets, rental cars, or plane tickets, for travel to areas with no apparent purpose,” or “the purchase of books (including religious texts) and subscriptions to other media containing extremist views.”
During the Twitter Files, we searched for snapshots of the company’s denylist algorithms, i.e. whatever rules the platform was using to deamplify or remove users. We knew they had them, because they were alluded to often in documents (a report on the denylist is_Russian, which included Jill Stein and Julian Assange, was one example).
However, we never found anything like the snapshot Jordan’s team just published:
The highlighted portion shows how algorithmic analysis works in financial surveillance.
First compile a list of naughty behaviors, in the form of MCC codes for guns, sporting goods, and pawn shops.
Then, create rules: $2,500 worth of transactions in the forbidden codes, or a number showing that more than 50% of the customer’s transactions are the wrong kind, might trigger a response.
The Committee wasn’t able to specify what the responses were in this instance, but from previous experience covering anti-money-laundering (AML) techniques at banks like HSBC, a good guess would be generation of something like Suspcious Activity Reports, which can lead to a customer being debanked.
If Facebook, Twitter, and Google have already shown a tendency toward wide-scale monitoring of speech and the use of subtle levers to apply pressure on attitudes, financial companies can use records of transactions to penetrate individual behaviors far more deeply. Especially if enhanced by AI, a financial history can give almost any institution an immediate, unpleasantly accurate outline of anyone’s life, habits, and secrets. Worse, they can couple that picture with a powerful disciplinary lever, in the form of the threat of closed accounts or reduced access to payment services or credit. Jordan’s slide is a picture of the birth of the political credit score.
Tiabbi says worse revelations are to come…
“Netanyahu Rejects Hamas Cease-Fire Demands, Vows to Fight until ‘Absolute Victory.'”
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected Hamas cease-fire demands on Wednesday, vowing to fight on until “absolute victory.”
Netanyahu made the comments shortly after meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who arrived in the region Tuesday night after meeting with leaders of Qatar and Egypt in the most serious diplomatic push of the war to secure a cease-fire agreement. Through these diplomatic channels, Hamas presented Israel with a proposal for a three-stage cease-fire that would last for 135 days and culminate in the end of the war.
“Surrendering to Hamas’s delusional demands that we heard now not only won’t lead to freeing the captives, it will just invite another massacre.”
Indeed.
The Special Counsel’s report on Biden’s mishandling paints a picture of Biden’s mental decline we all know is true but which the media refuses to report.
President Biden couldn’t even remember when he was vice president or when his son Beau had died, leading special counsel Robert Hur to conclude that he could not bring charges for mishandling of classified documents, because a jury would see the president “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
In a report, Robert Hur concluded that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” But he declined to issue any charges, in part because Biden’s poor recollection would make him hard to convict.
If you want to see Fani Willis taken down only the way Ace of Spades can, then I direct your attention to “CashApp Cougar Fani Willis: Okay, Fine, So I Used Taxpayer Money to Hire a Human Meat-Mallet to Pound My Snizz Into Thin Tender Strips Like Veal Scallopini.” (Hat tip: Reader Tig if Brue.)
Members of the Austin American-Statesman took one look at the vast wave of layoffs hitting newsrooms across the country and decided “Now is the perfect time to go on strike!” (Note: Elon Musk should buy the name, fire everyone, and build a national quality newspaper from scratch.)
Dell demands all workers (no matter how far away) return to the office. Those who don’t will be “placed on a ‘career limiting’ fully remote contract. In my experience, working for Dell is itself career limiting…
Budget drag race community comes together to help fan with terminal brain tumor who’s also the happiest guy they know. “Don’t feel bad for me. Everyone’s terminal.”
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, then you’ve already familiar with some of how the Homeless Industrial Complex operates. Here’s a somewhat naive look at some of those problems.
There are some decent nuggets in here, but there are several big parts of the problem this piece ignores.
“America has a homelessness crisis as record numbers of people are ending up on the streets in a few concentrated city centers.”
“Cities are spending billions of dollars on failing projects to try and solve this problem, which has attracted a growing list of companies happy to provide their services for a price.”
“Helping the homeless has become a lucrative business, with multi-million dollar government contracts awarded every day. But if there’s so much money to be made, do these companies really want a long-term fix?”
Austin: “49 apartments for the homeless built at a whopping $739,000 a unit.”
“The annual budget for the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority Rose from $63 million in 2015 to $808 million in 2022, a 1,300% increase in just 7 years. And what did the hardworking taxpayers of Los Angeles get for their money? The number of homeless people went up by 56%.”
“Everybody deserves the right to Affordable comfortable shelter.” False. Shelter is a good. Rights are God-given and Constitutionally guaranteed, not material goods.
LA: “The Inside Safe Homelessness Reduction Policy [was] to have social workers offer hotel rooms to homeless individuals while they sought out longer term housing arrangements data collected by the City and compiled by local news outlet The Center Square found that the plan had cost $250 million over just one year the program only served 1,463 individuals, which works out to be $17,000 per individual per month, that is over $200,000 every year being spent on one individual.”
“The homeless industrial complex is actually a combination of bad management structures, bad incentives, and bad market conditions.”
“The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority is a joint Powers Authority that gets funding from federal, state, county and city budget budgets, but it doesn’t actually do any of the work itself.”
“According to the authority’s own website, the LHSA offers funding programs, design outcomes, assessment and technical assistance to more than 100 nonprofit partner agencies that assist people in experiencing homelessness achieve independence and stability in permanent housing.” Or so they say. How much of the money given to those 100 programs is siphoned directly to the pockets of leftwing activists?
“The organization that only runs a few programs of their own has over 750 employees, primarily dedicated to liasing with their nonprofit partners overseen by highly paid executives, including the CEO of public Va Licia Adams Kellum, who is paid a base salary of $430,000 per year.” Nice work, if you can get it. And that $420K doesn’t include any money that might be kicked back to her…
“According to SalaryCube and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this is roughly double the pay of the average CEO for organizations of this size in the private sector.”
“Most of the money entering this program goes to nonprofit partners, but since each of them are contracted for niche roles across dozens of different programs the real work is bogged down an endless siloing of responsibilities and overhead.” No, harvesting the graft to leftwing activists and causes via the overhead is the intended result.
“Even though these are nonprofit organizations, they all want to protect their role so their people can keep their jobs and they frequently get into turf wars over whose responsibility is what. They also don’t have a direct line of communication to one another since all report reporting goes back through the LHSA.”
“The Housing Authority isn’t even the central authority within Los Angeles. Within just this one city, different homeless issues are handled by the LHSA, the chief of Housing and Homeless solutions, county homeless services, the California Department of Housing and Community Development, the federal inter-agency Council of homelessness, in addition to federal, state, city, and local police departments.” The more red tape and bureaucracy, the more palms that get greased.
“A senior adviser on homelessness to Governor Gavin Newsom defended the state of California spending $17.5 billion that much money would have been enough to just pay rent at market rates for every homeless person in the state with around $4 billion left over.”
I think I’m done critiquing this video. Despite having some useful numbers, he’s not looking in the right places. “Addiction” and “mental illness” each receive one mention (besides the counselor accused of identity theft fraud), but no mention of how that’s the primary driver of keeping people on the street, and only one mention of “housing first,” and no analysis of why it’s a disastrous policy. Nor has he looked to see if the principles receiving fund are passing that money on to Democratic candidates and causes.
The biggest story right now is that Abbott isn’t backing down from securing the border, and a whole bunch of states are backing him in his high-profile fight with the federal government.
As the standoff continues between the Biden administration and the state of Texas over the crisis at the southern border, Gov. Greg Abbott says Texas will continue to push back against the invasion.
At the center of the current controversy is a recent U.S. Supreme Court order that allows federal agents to remove concertina wire and other barriers placed along the Rio Grande by the Texas National Guard and the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Ground Zero of that battle is Shelby Park in Eagle Pass, where state forces have taken over a park along the border and have thus far prevented federal officials from entering.
Abbott says the state is taking action because of a failure from the Biden administration.
“The federal government has broken the compact between the United States and the States. The Executive Branch of the United States has a constitutional duty to enforce federal laws protecting States, including immigration laws on the books right now. President Biden has refused to enforce those laws and has even violated them,” said Abbott. “The result is that he has smashed records for illegal immigration. Despite having been put on notice in a series of letters—one of which I delivered to him by hand—President Biden has ignored Texas’s demand that he perform his constitutional duties.”
He went on to say the U.S. Constitution allows for states to push back against invasions:
James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and the other visionaries who wrote the U.S. Constitution foresaw that States should not be left to the mercy of a lawless president who does nothing to stop external threats like cartels smuggling millions of illegal immigrants across the border. That is why the Framers included both Article IV, § 4, which promises that the federal government “shall protect each [State] against invasion,” and Article I, § 10, Clause 3, which acknowledges “the States’ sovereign interest in protecting their borders.”
To that end, Abbott cited an executive order issued by him in November 2022 to “invoke Texas’s constitutional authority to defend and protect itself.”
“President Biden and his Administration have left Americans and our country completely vulnerable to unprecedented illegal immigration pouring across the Southern border. Instead of upholding the rule of law and securing the border, the Biden Administration has attacked and sued Texas for stepping up to protect American citizens from historic levels of illegal immigrants, deadly drugs like fentanyl, and terrorists entering our country.
“We stand in solidarity with our fellow Governor, Greg Abbott, and the State of Texas in utilizing every tool and strategy, including razor wire fences, to secure the border. We do it in part because the Biden Administration is refusing to enforce immigration laws already on the books and is illegally allowing mass parole across America of migrants who entered our country illegally.
“The authors of the U.S. Constitution made clear that in times like this, states have a right of self-defense, under Article 4, Section 4 and Article 1, Section 10, Clause 3 of the U.S. Constitution. Because the Biden Administration has abdicated its constitutional compact duties to the states, Texas has every legal justification to protect the sovereignty of our states and our nation.”
Signatories include: Governor Kay Ivey (AL), Governor Mike Dunleavy (AK), Governor Sarah Sanders (AR), Governor Ron DeSantis (FL), Governor Brian Kemp (GA), Governor Brad Little (ID), Governor Eric Holcomb (IN), Governor Kim Reynolds (IA), Governor Jeff Landry (LA), Governor Tate Reeves (MS), Governor Mike Parson (MO), Governor Greg Gianforte (MT), Governor Jim Pillen (NE), Governor Joe Lombardo (NV), Governor Chris Sununu (NH), Governor Doug Burgum (ND), Governor Mike DeWine (OH), Governor Kevin Stitt (OK), Governor Henry McMaster (SC), Governor Kristi Noem (SD), Governor Bill Lee (TN), Governor Spencer Cox (UT), Governor Glenn Youngkin (VA), Governor Jim Justice (WV), and Governor Mark Gordon (WY).
Moreover, documents prove that Biden’s assault on America’s border security was intentional.
As President Joe Biden’s immigration crisis overwhelms the United States and wreaks havoc on the state’s resources, confidential documents suggest the president’s open border policies were intentional.
The Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) filed a lawsuit against Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS), claiming the agency halted the 287(g) program, which assists in the deportation of illegal migrant child rapists, attempted murderers, assailants, carjackers, and other known criminals.
In August 2023, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) revealed that the government ended the program in January 2021— right after Biden entered office. However, the compromised agency gave no reason why the government did that.
The 287(g) program allows local law enforcement agencies to work closely with ICE to capture illegal aliens who have committed crimes. They were then able to turn the migrants over to federal officials for arrest and deportation.
Expenditures on one of the most controversial federal programs aiding the millions of illegal immigrants and refugees from Afghanistan, Cuba, and Haiti have skyrocketed more than $2 billion in two years, according to a new report by a non-profit government spending watchdog.
Spending on the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) jumped from $8.9 billion in 2022 to more than $10.9 billion last year, auditors at OpenTheBooks.org (OTB), the Hinsdale, Illinois-based watchdog, found.
Most of the ORR spending explosion came in grants under ORR’s Refugee and Entrant Assistance program that provides a lengthy list of services to such individuals, including emergency housing assistance, work authorizations, public assistance benefits, medical screening, school enrollment, employment, and mental health referrals, and legal assistance.
Such spending was $33.4 million in 2021, the first year of President Joe Biden’s administration. But it hit $404.5 million the next year and then increased to $616.6 million last year, according to federal data obtained by OTB under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Much of the funding went to seven social service organizations, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops ($66.5 million), the International Rescue Committee ($66.4 million), Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services ($66.2 million), Church World Service ($64.9 million), U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants ($64.6 million), HIAS (originally the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society)($56.4 million), and the Ethiopian Community Development Council ($51.6 million).
Trump says he’ll reverse all this:
NEW: Donald Trump says illegals shouldn't get too comfortable because they will be going home, pledges to work with Abbott and Texas to stop the invasion pic.twitter.com/i9dPyBglaA
1. More Democrats voted for Haley than Republicans.
Much like the morning after a drunken hookup with that salad-phobic dude from the IT department, the sun rose to reveal Darling Nikki’s reality. It turns out that a whopping 70% of Haley’s votes were grudge votes from Democrats according to exit polls.
I’m surprised Haley didn’t dump a bucket of Gatorade over herself Tuesday night as she celebrated another shattering loss. More importantly, either Haley doesn’t know a bunch of patchouli ghoulies voted for her, or she doesn’t care.
According to my calculator, 70% of her 136,461 votes is 95,522. Do the subtraction and Haley received a paltry 40,938 Republican votes compared to Trump’s 172,202. In other words, Trump got well over four times as many Republican votes, and Haley got hammered like Thor for the second time.
And yet Haley still got more votes than Biden…
Things that make you go Hmmm: “U.S., Chinese Researchers Wanted to Engineer Virus Similar to Covid One Year before Pandemic Outbreak, Internal Docs Show.”
In an editorial fit for The Onion or the Babylon Bee, Los Angeles Times’ letters editor Paul Thornton wrote a column this week entitled “If you want to leave, fine. But don’t insult California on the way out.”
The column acknowledges an exodus from the state, but sees the problem as former Californians sharing their experiences about what drove them from the Golden State.
It is like Captain William Bligh asking the mutinous crew of the Bounty for a reference as they head for the lifeboats.
Thornton wrote that “more than 800,000 Californians moved away in 2022, and many thousands more left last year. Often, the departees, cash in hand from the sale of their $1-million bungalows, feel the need to express disdain for their home state, and even some anger too.”
He then begs them to keep mum about their reasons for leaving the state, which commonly range from rising crime to high taxes to runaway spending.
And speaking of the LA Times, 115 staffers were just laid off. Sucks to be you. I would suggest learning some Python, but with so many startups shutting down, it probably wouldn’t help. Instead, maybe they should learn to weld. (Hat tip: Legal Insurrection.)
“Senate Candidate Says Fraudulent Donation to Speaker Phelan Made in His Name…Jace Yarbrough, an attorney and Air Force veteran, was shown on a recent campaign finance report as having sent a $75 donation to Phelan on December 24, just days after he filed to run for the open Senate District 30 seat. Yarbrough, however, has categorically denied making any donation to Phelan…He also emphasized his role as counsel to State Sen. Angela Paxton (R–McKinney) during the impeachment trial of her husband Attorney General Ken Paxton that was championed by Phelan.”
Islam is on the verge of completely taking over Europe, in all ways—at least according to one who should know, Hans-Georg Maaßen, Germany’s top domestic intelligence chief from 2012 to 2018. In a recent interview, he stressed several points that spell the imminent downfall of Europe to Islam.
His warnings are buttressed by disturbing demographic changes. According to conservative estimates from Pew Research, over the next 25 years—meaning most of the current generation’s lifetime—Europe’s Muslim population will triple to a staggering 76 million. In fact, the actual current and future numbers of Muslims appear to be higher, though there are no official tallies. For example, in an earlier, 2011 study, Pew Research found that “The number of Muslims in Europe has grown from 29.6 million in 1990 to 44.1 million in 2010. Europe’s Muslim population is projected to exceed 58 million by 2030.” Clearly 58 million in five years’ time is more significant than 76 million in 25 years’ time.
Not only is mass migration responsible for Islam’s exponential growth in Europe, but once there, the average Muslim woman has significantly more children than the average European woman. “Muhammad” is taking West Europe by storm as the number one name for newborn baby boys.
During his interview, Hans-Georg Maaßen said that these large numbers are intentional, and the work of Europe’s ruling elite. For this intelligence chief, the “great replacement” theory is no myth. The more ideologically mixed a population is forced into becoming, the less able it is to identify itself, much less protect any beliefs:
[O]ur politicians want a different population. The political left follows the course of the anti-German ideology. The more heterogeneous a population, the less able it is to articulate itself and have a democratic say. The more politics accept immigrants from other countries as they see fit and grants them citizenship, the more politics select the people of the state and influence the election results. These migrants then vote differently than the locals.
Journalist who criticized tennis players Novak Djokovic for not getting the jab dies of suddenly.
B-21 Raider officially enters production. Though the B-21 has contained costs better than some Air Force programs, I believe the days of expensive manned bombers has passed.
Director Norman Jewison dead at 97. He directed more popular and critically acclaimed films, but for me he’ll always be the director of the vastly underrated Rollerball. (Previously.) (Hat tip: Dwight.)
America’s largest skyscraper will be built in…Oklahoma City? Yeah, can’t see the economic case there.
Ron DeSantis dropped out of the presidential race Sunday afternoon and endorsed former president Donald Trump, announcing the suspension of his embattled campaign in a video posted to social media just two days before the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary.
DeSantis’s departure comes days after his allies began making calls to top donors asking whether the candidate should drop out ahead of the New Hampshire primary.
The campaign continues to tell reporters that their candidate will stay in the race through South Carolina, force rival and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley to drop out should she lose her home state, and hopefully go toe-to-toe with Trump in the event that she drops out.
But behind closed doors, DeSantis allies are of course mindful of the fact that the Florida governor continues to poll in the single digits in New Hampshire compared with Haley, who is still polling behind Trump but is gaining on him in some surveys. As recently as Tuesday, one day after DeSantis finished roughly 30 points behind first-place finisher Donald Trump in Iowa, the campaign insisted that DeSantis still had a path forward to the nomination.
No one outside of the MSM and desperate NeverTrumpers give a rat’s ass about Haley.
On paper, DeSantis should have been a formidable candidate. The popular governor of a large, thriving state, DeSantis had more impressive credentials than Trump when it came to fighting wokeness, pulling it out root and branch in Florida institutions.
But his campaigning has, alas, been anything but impressive. Indeed, he never gained any traction and all the media attention as the “Trump alternative” has been lavished on Haley.
Usually second place in Iowa is quite a respectable showing (Trump himself came in second to Ted Cruz in 2016, and Ronald Reagan to George H. W. Bush in 1976), one that punches your ticket to later primaries, usually to at least Super Tuesday. But Trump won an absolute majority in Iowa, something that hasn’t happened for a non-incumbent in the last half century. (Maybe longer; online records before that seem spotty.) DeSantis and his team seem to have figured, I think correctly, that he had no path to the nomination.
At this point, Trump looks poised to win every primary on the schedule, including Nikki Haley’s home state of South Carolina, where he currently leads her by 35 points.
Now the only question is whether the NeverTrump rump (and I include National Review here) will swallow both their pride and their shame at refusing to fight over the stolen 2020 election and embrace the overwhelming choice of the Republican Party base, or will they go hunting for another Egg McMuffin to prop up in a desperate bid to spoil Trump’s election chances?
Trump wins Iowa (and picks up Ted Cruz’s endorsement), Democratic party popularity becomes ever more selective, Hunter Biden’s laptop confirmed as Hunter Biden’s laptop (not that we ever had any doubt), two shithole countries exchange airstrikes, and a science fiction legend dies. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Donald Trump won the Iowa Caucuses in convincing fashion, winning 51% of the vote. Ron DeSantis came in second with 21%, and MSM-and-Never Trump darling Nikki Haley pulling in 19%, and Vivek Ramaswamy a distant 4th with 7.6%. (Ramaswamy then endorsed Trump.) The most satisfying part of this result is seeing the Hindenburg of Haley puffery crash and explode.
Ted Cruz has endorsed Trump. “‘I’m a big believer in letting democracy play out,’ Cruz said. ‘I’ve got to say Trump’s victory was across the board. He won 51 percent of the vote. He won 98 of the counties. Congratulations to President Trump on that dominating victory.'” Despite DeSantis many strengths as a governor, he did not run a good campaign. And remember, Cruz actually beat Trump in Iowa in 2016, and ran a competitive campaign into May. That’s not going to happen this year. Trump seems likely to win all the primaries in every state.
A Gallup poll released on Friday reveals that a record low percentage of Americans who identify as Democrats in 2023 hit a record low, when independent ‘leaners’ are excluded.
Just 27% of Americans self-identify as Democrats, the smallest figure in the party’s history according to the survey. That said, self-identifying Republicans also hit 27%, though it did not mark the lowest figure in the party’s history – which was in 2013 when just 25% of Americans identified as such. The previous low for Democrats was in 2017 and 2015 at 29%.
Independents, meanwhile, take the cake – with 43% of Americans identifying as such.
Not that any of us ever had any doubt, but DOJ confirmed that the “Laptop from Hell” is in fact Hunter Biden’s laptop, and that they knew that all along:
‼️ In a new court filing today, the DOJ confirms Hunter Biden’s laptop is real, that he left it at a computer store, and that the contents matched what they obtained from a search warrant of his iCloud. Don’t hold your breath for a retraction from Joe Biden (“It’s a Russian… pic.twitter.com/xSZ2YG8JIB
Things that make your blood boil: “Texas man arrested in connection with videos showing seven men who sexually assaulted toddlers at a public mall.”
A Texas man is in federal custody after the FBI linked him to videos from the dark web depicting group sexual assault on toddlers in a mall.
Arthur Hector Fernandez, 29, was arrested Dec. 18, 2023 in Kingwood, TX as the result of a Dec. 14 criminal complaint filed in federal court in Houston, records show.
The FBI were led to Fernandez as a suspect after viewing videos of an assault of a three-year-old child; a relative of the child “recognized the bracelets an individual in the video was wearing as belonging to Fernandez.”
The executive director of the Rainbow Resource Center, a prominent LGBTQ+ support center based in Modesto, has been identified as one of 17 men apprehended on suspicion of attempting to engage in sexual activities with a minor.
The revelation was first reported by the Modesto Bee.
Gerad Slayton, 42, was taken into custody during a sting operation organized by the Turlock Police Department, targeting individuals believed to be seeking illicit encounters with minors. Slayton, recently appointed as the executive director of the Rainbow Center, a local nonprofit dedicated to providing resources for LGBTQ+ individuals across all age groups, faces allegations of pursuing sexual activities with minors.
Rape kits that should have been analyzed by the NYPD but were left in storage at hospitals across the city are now part of a sprawling Department of Justice probe into the department’s Special Victims Division, The Post has learned.
The revelation comes after The Post revealed the snafu, which meant that an unknown number of cases were not fully investigated, victims didn’t get justice, and countless rapists could be roaming free.
Pakistan and Iran have traded airstrikes in each other’s territory. “The unprecedented attacks by both Pakistan and Iran on either side of their border appeared to target Baluch militant groups with similar separatist goals. The countries accuse each other of providing a haven to the groups in their respective territories.”
The Disney magic seems to extend everywhere. “Pixar is planning on MAJOR layoffs this year, up to 20% of employees could be dismissed.” Under Jobs it made money hand over fist, but after Disney went woke it’s produced one flop after another.
Speaking of layoffs, Sports Illustratedlays off everybody. Wait, you mean putting fat women and trannys on the cover of your swimsuit issue and fluffing Colin Kaepernick weren’t tickets to success? Who knew?
Science fiction legend and personal friend Howard Waldrop died over the weekend. Howard was one of the greatest short story writers the field has ever produced. Since you can’t make a living from short stories, Howard was never far from penury, and he spent six months living in a spare room in my house. Pretty much everyone in the field loved him, and he will be missed.
