Now that most prominent Democrats have dutifully lined up behind Kamala Harris as their 2024 presidential candidate, let’s have a roundup that confirms what regular blog readers already know: Kamala Harris is just the worst.
Short of Joe Biden staying in the race while exemplifying the energy and lucidity of an empty bag of Lay’s Sour Cream and Onion potato chips on the floor of a basement frat party, “passing the torch” to Kamala Harris is the best thing Republicans could have wished for — and simply “the next worst thing” for Democrats who, in their hail mary hour, reached into their quiver and pulled out the political equivalent of a Fran Drescher laugh track on repeat.
The entire party all of a sudden throwing their endorsement behind a woman who polled worse than a quart of cottage cheese that was left to sit in the sun for six months during the 2020 primary exemplifies the point I made a month or two ago when I argued that politicians have a talent for making the worst possible decisions.
Not only did Tulsi Gabbard publicly humiliate Kamala Harris on the debate stage during the 2020 primaries, but both polling and the results of Harris’ campaign forced us to one conclusion: most Americans find Harris detestable. And, in 2024, there doesn’t seem to be any indication that this attitude has changed.
I can’t describe the pleasure I get from watching the stupid decisions the Democratic party makes—namely, selecting Kamala Harris based on her gender and race to be Vice President of the f*cking United States —come back to bite them in the ass.
The fact is that if Harris was not vice president, she would never be next in line to be the Democratic nominee. She was picked to be vice president only because Joe Biden made his selection based on race and gender hustling, completely ignoring the fact that nobody seemed to like Harris and she doesn’t appear to have the brain torque necessary for the job.
By circumventing an actual legitimate selection process for Vice President, which should always boil down to a meritocracy as one of the most important positions in the world, Democrats planted a political seed in a pile of horse manure that has now blossomed into poisonous, cackling political fungus. And by moving Kamala Harris into position to be the next Presidential nominee, the party is officially taking the first bite of the fungi they began growing on the dung heap four years ago.
Beyond identity politics coming back to bite Democrats, the Harris pick makes no obvious sense because she is easily tethered and tied to the horrific last four years President Biden had in office. We are voting to “continue to be burdened by what was”, to use the parlance of Kamala’s time.
Under Kamala Harris, the Office of the Vice President has been called a “revolving door,” a “staff exodus” of key aides “heading for the exits.”
That’s not hyperbole from the national media. Our auditors at OpenTheBooks quantified an extraordinarily high 91.5-percent staff turnover rate. We used U.S. Senate disclosures to conduct our investigation and those databases can be downloaded below.
Elected in November 2020, Harris took the oath of office in January 2021. As of March 31, 2024, only four of the initial 47 staffers from the first year are still employed – consistently and without interruption – by the Vice President.
Furthermore, the turnover chaos isn’t getting better. In the trailing 12-month period, 24 staffers left — that’s almost half the employees.
The “top-to-bottom dysfunction” that The Atlantic referenced in October 2023 is shown in the reported payrolls that we captured.
“In her first year and a half as vice president, Harris saw the departure of her chief of staff, communications director, domestic-policy adviser, national security adviser, and other aides,” the magazine wrote.
If only that was all who left.
The semi-annual Report of the Secretary of the Senate, among other things, lists the names, titles and salaries of staff in the Office of the Vice President (OVP).
In the most recent publishing through March 31, only four staff from the original 47 listed in the 2021 report remained consistently employed and are among the office’s 50 current staff members.
The Kamala Harris Fabulous Four – here are the names, titles, employment date, and salaries of the four employees most loyal to Kamala Harris:
Yael S. Belkind has been assistant to the chief of staff since Jan. 20, 2021, earning $85,924;
Nasrina Bargzie was associate counsel since Feb. 10, 2021, now is deputy council, taking home $118,066.
Oludayo O. Faderin was associate director from July 2021, then became deputy director of west wing operations, making $85,924.
Olivia K. Hartman was hired in August 2021 as advance coordinator and became deputy director of scheduling, making $94,750.
Remember how everyone was saying that only Harris could use money raised for Biden? Trump’s lawyers say “Not so fast!”
Former President Donald Trump’s lawyers on Tuesday filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission arguing that Vice President Kamala Harris cannot legally gain control of nearly $100 million donated to President Joe Biden by changing the name of his campaign committee.
“This is little more than a thinly veiled $91.5 million excessive contribution from one presidential candidate to another, that is, from Joe Biden’s old campaign to Kamala Harris’s new campaign,” Trump general counsel David A. Warrington wrote in a complaint obtained by The Daily Wire. “Contributions by federal candidate committees to other federal candidates are limited to $2,000.”
“Kamala Harris is in the process of committing the largest campaign finance violation in American history and she is using the Commission’s own forms to do it,” the complaint alleges.
Candidates for office must create a campaign committee which includes their name, and file a statement of candidacy designating that committee as their fundraising vehicle. Harris did neither. Instead, on Sunday, the campaign treasurer “amended” Biden’s statement of candidacy to swap his name with Kamala’s, and pointed to Harris for President as her committee, using the same ID as the Biden for President committee. It also filed amended paperwork changing the name of that committee.
“There is no provision in federal campaign finance law for Kamala Harris to take over Joe Biden’s candidacy now by quite literally attempting to become him via an amendment… and making off with all of his cash,” Trump’s lawyers say. “Ms. Harris’ actions constitute a massive excessive contribution from Biden for President to Ms. Harris.”
With few exceptions, a campaign committee can only be linked to one candidate. Harris’s name has appeared on the Biden committee’s forms since 2020, but Trump’s lawyers argue that does not entitle her to the funds. Had Harris dropped off the ticket to challenge Biden for the presidential nomination, they note, she would not have been able to claim half of the campaign’s war chest.
“If the Commission were to deem Joe Biden to have ended his candidacy before transferring his campaign funds to Kamala Harris, then this only creates another violation. Federal candidates are prohibited from keeping contributions for elections in which they do not participate,” the complaint said.
Trump’s lawyers accuse Harris and committee treasurer Keana Spencer, who is in charge of submitting forms to the FEC, of committing “an attempted fraud on the Commission and should be referred to the Department of Justice for investigation and prosecution” as “a conspiracy to obstruct the lawful functions of the United States.”
You know who else doesn’t trust Kamala Harris? Democrats.
This is going to sound immodest,” Kamala Harris told an interviewer in the summer of 2019, “but I’m obviously a top-tier candidate.” That, she said, was why she drew so much fire from her fellow Democratic presidential candidates. But her face-saving appeal did not explain why she wilted in the face of those attacks, made a hash of her campaign, and ultimately dropped out of the race before a single primary vote was cast. Harris’s aborted presidential campaign clarified for Democrats what Republicans already knew — that the former California senator cannot live up to the standards her image-makers set for her. Contrary to the story Democrats are about to try to sell to the public, Harris’s party has never regained confidence in her abilities.
The trouble signs were apparent early in the vice president’s tenure. Just six months after she was sworn in, sources in Harris’s orbit began telling anyone willing to listen that her office was “not a healthy environment.” She was accused of refusing to read her briefing materials only to turn around and “berate employees” whom she accused of being responsible for her embarrassing unpreparedness. By the summer of 2022, 13 senior Harris staffers had left for greener pastures.
The chaos unfolding behind closed doors reinforced the impression she cultivated in public as a maladroit executive. The revolt of the staffers coincided with a one-on-one interview with NBC News reporter Lester Holt, in which Harris defended her failure to visit the rapidly deteriorating Southern border by laughing awkwardly while insisting she hadn’t “been to Europe” either. “I don’t understand the point you’re making,” Harris insisted. No one else appeared similarly perplexed.
As New York Times reporter Astead Herndon later detailed, Harris and her allies were so demoralized by the vice president’s faceplant that she withdrew from the public spotlight. “Over the following year, Harris traveled less often,” he reported, “and she mostly avoided further media interviews, preferring friendly settings like The View and a show on Comedy Central hosted by Charlamagne tha God.”
“Whatever happened to Kamala Harris?” Los Angeles Times columnist Mark Barabak asked in late 2021. Barabak attributed Harris’s disappearing act to the demands of the vice presidency and the Biden team’s allergy to the “merest hint of personal ambition” shown by the president’s subordinates. But as CNN reported at the time, Harris was being managed by the White House in ways her supporters bitterly resented.
“Many in the vice president’s circle fume[d]” over the degree to which Harris was “being sidelined,” the dispatch revealed. “The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she’s able to do politically.” Indeed, Harris was “perceived to be in such a weak position” that Democrats had begun to wonder aloud why the White House would allow the vice president to “become so hobbled in the public conscious” — the assumption being that this was done to Harris rather than something she did to herself.
After spending the first two years of the Biden administration waiting without reward for the competent campaigner Democrats had been promised to emerge, Harris’s allies began to show their impatience. The “painful reality” of Harris’s vice presidency, Times reporters wrote in early February 2023 after speaking to “dozens of Democrats,” was that “she had not risen to the challenge of proving herself as a future leader of the party, much less the country.” These sentiments were not confined to Harris’s embittered rivals within her own party: “Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.”
Democratic leaders soon moved on Harris in a scaled-down version of the very putsch that finally rid them of Joe Biden. In January 2023, Senator Elizabeth Warren was asked if Biden should keep Harris on the ticket in 2024. “I really want to defer to what makes Biden comfortable on his team,” Warren replied. The remark was described as “pretty insulting” by Harris’s staff, and Warren made multiple efforts to apologize to the vice president for her flippancy. But if Warren’s remarks betrayed her doubts about Harris’s political acumen, those doubts weren’t hers alone.
In September of that year, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper pressed former House speaker Nancy Pelosi for her thoughts on Harris’s potential. “Is Vice President Kamala Harris the best running mate” for Biden, Cooper asked. “He thinks so,” Pelosi replied curtly. In turn, influential House Democrat Jamie Raskin was asked the same question, and he, too, attempted an evasive maneuver. “That’s President Biden’s choice,” Raskin finally said when pressured for a definitive answer. “Raskin, after receiving backlash, later went on a different network to clarify his support,” Herndon noted.
Today, for want of any realistic alternatives, Democrats are stuck with Harris at the top of the party’s ticket in November. But for all the party’s public displays of bravado, Democrats appear to understand that the vice president needs to operate in a rigidly structured environment . . . or else. “Harris has been cautious and reluctant to participate in events that weren’t tightly controlled,” Axios reported on Monday. For example, when Harris was invited to attend a 2022 dinner at the house owned by the former owner of the Atlantic, David Bradley, Harris was so beset with anxiety that “her staff held a mock dinner beforehand,” with her staffers “playing participants.” The preparation must have proven insufficient because, in the end, Harris declined to attend.
Say what you want about Trump, but he’s never been afraid to attend a dinner party.
As attorney general, it was her job to give propositions appearing on the ballot accurate titles and explanatory summaries. In order to fool the voters into passing Proposition 47 — decriminalizing crime — and Proposition 57 — allowing the release of thousands of violent criminals — Harris intentionally lied to the voters about what these laws would do.
Proposition 47 basically turned every crime into a “misdemeanor.” Grand theft, commercial burglary and possession of illegal narcotics — all misdemeanors.
Theft of anything worth less than $950 — even theft of a gun — became a misdemeanor, no more consequential than a waiter giving a straw to someone who didn’t ask for one. As Californians have since learned, that $950 cap does not include the tens of thousands of dollars required to repair smashed car windows, store fronts or display cases.
As a result, smash-and-grab robberies have become the new sport in the Golden State, leaving entire inner-city neighborhoods without a pharmacy. The police don’t even respond to thefts of less than $950. Retail stores have to keep their entire inventory under lock and key, including ordinary items, like shampoo and toothpaste — and those are the ones that aren’t closing permanently. San Francisco’s landmark Union Square shopping district is now plastered with “For Lease” and “Going Out of Business” signs. Roughly 50% of all videos on the internet are clips of California “teens” dashing out of upscale stores with armloads of stolen goods — Gucci, Prada, Burberry, Luis Vuitton.
Last year, Los Angeles, Oakland and San Francisco topped the list of the U.S. cities with the most retail theft, according to the National Retail Federation. A fourth California city, Sacramento, came in at No. 7. These days, when a customer tries to actually pay for something, the cashier calls the manager.
The shoplifting is so pervasive that, earlier this year, a Target shoplifter strolled out of the store right past Gov. Gavin Newsom. During a CNN report on the rash of thefts in San Francisco, three shoplifters hit the CVS as they were filming.
Also good for business: Tourists are warned not to rent cars, because they’ll only be broken into. Drug addicts clog the sidewalks, writhing in their own needles and fecal matter.
KAMALA HARRIS: "The United States shares a very important relationship, which is an alliance with the Republic of North Korea." pic.twitter.com/H2dI5UYOlo
Let’s also not forget that she’s a liar, even about trivial crap:
You know how Democrats crowed about that one poll that showed Harris was leading Trump? Yeah, they oversampled Democrats, just as you would expect. Always check the crosstabs…
“How do you perceive Vice President Harris compared to President Biden in terms of competency and experience?” Jordan asked.
One woman said she believes Harris is “worse” while another said, “She doesn’t even know what’s going on at the border. That’s what she was supposed to be doing.”
Jordan asked when the group believes the United States will have its first woman president.
“When there’s a competent one,” a different voter said.
Another voter said, “I don’t get a good feel for her” while a voter named Mary said, “I think she’s an idiot.”
Jordan asked Mary why she feels this way about Harris.
“Because she hasn’t done anything in the time that she’s had. We don’t know anything about her as far as her three years so far in the White House. She’s not real smart.”
I can’t find a full video of that, just this snippet:
Either MSNBC or YouTube (or probably both) sure doesn’t want you to find that interview…
Here’s a story that demonstrates the astounding failure of Democrat-controlled California’s soft-on-crime (but hard on legal guns) policies to keep citizens safe.
A man whose record includes seven felony convictions now faces an attempted murder charge after prosecutors say he opened fire with a machine gun on two Los Angeles police officers, grazing one of them.
Malcolm Darnell Guss Jr. is accused of using a fully automatic AR-style rifle to shoot at Officers Stefan Carutasu and Joshua Rodney after they tried to stop his white Chevrolet sedan at around 9:30 p.m. on July 3 in Willowbrook near Broadway and Rosecrans Avenue, just south of Los Angeles.
The articles uses “machine gun,” which is probably technically correct in terms of the National Firearms Act definition, but it sounds like what he was using was an actual assault rifle, capable of selectable fully automatic fire. But since the democratic media complex loves to call Modern Sporting Rifles like the AR-15 “assault rifles,” they’re bereft of language when a real one shows up.
Guss allegedly unloaded on the officers before they could get out of their patrol car, resulting in two graze wounds to the head. Both officers suffered lacerations from the glass fragments of the patrol vehicle’s windshield. Guss fled the scene but was apprehended July 12. On Tuesday, he pleaded not guilty in Compton court to attempted murder and other charges for allegedly using a machine gun in the attack.
Court records show Guss’ prior convictions include two strikes for residential burglaries in July 2014 and December 2018. Since 2020 he’s been charged three times with being a felon in possession of a firearm.
In December 2020, records show, Guss was arrested with drugs and a gun by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies. He was sentenced to two years in prison after striking a deal to plead no contest to a single felony charge in March 2021. That same month, he received another two-year sentence in a separate gun case that stemmed from a September 2020 incident.
The district attorney’s office in a statement said the two convictions had concurrent prison sentences
Guss was arrested again in the Antelope Valley in May 2022, charged with resisting arrest and assault with a deadly weapon. He pleaded no contest to the resisting offense and got 16 months in prison, according to court records.
In February 2023, a judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest after he allegedly violated the terms of his release. LAPD officers in Newton Division arrested Guss on July 10, but he was released a month later, county jail records show.
And yes, there’s footage of Guss trying to kill two cops by blazing away with a “machine gun” through his rear window:
(I’m not sure if it’s the youth, the Gen Z, or the California, but those cops do sound radically different than classic LA police as depicted in TV shows like Adam-12 or Dragnet.)
So we have a repeat offender with multiple felony convictions, who by all accounts should already have been behind bars for a good long time, driving around free as a bird. “Since 2020 he’s been charged three times with being a felon in possession of a firearm.” Once again, Democrats scream and shout about “gun crimes,” but in the locales they control (especially in places with a Soros-backed DAs like Los Angeles’ George Gascon), they seem to do nothing about locking up felons with multiple gun violations. And in a state with some of the strictest gun laws in the country, a felon had no problem obtaining a fully automatic weapon.
Soft on crime policies in Democrat-run California, whether at the state level through bad legislation or at the local level due to Soros-backed DAs who refuse to prosecute, is putting convicted felons back on the street and endangering the lives of both ordinary California citizens and law-enforcement officers. Given how thoroughly the mind virus rot of social justice has infected the Democratic Party, that won’t change until Californians are willing to start electing Republicans again.
Which seems deeply unlikely. But New Yorkers elected Rudy Giuliani in 1993 for the same reason, so maybe it’s not entirely impossible…
A whole lot of Elon Musk news of note has popped up this week, so let’s dig in.
First, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt against Trump, Musk endorsed Trump for President.
Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla, publicly endorsed Donald Trump for the first time in the U.S. presidential race, calling the Republican former president “tough.”
Musk, the world’s richest person, posted the endorsement with a video of Trump with blood on his face pumping his fist after multiple shots rang out at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday. Trump was safe.
The posts cement Musk’s shift towards right-wing politics and hand Trump a high-profile backer in his quest to return to the White House in the Nov. 5 election.
“I fully endorse President Trump and hope for his rapid recovery,” Musk posted.
“The martyr lived,” he wrote, citing a reported debate between conservative venture capitalist Peter Thiel and LinkedIn co-founder and Democratic megadonor Reid Hoffman.
Musk later posted a photograph of Trump at the event, followed by: “Last time America had a candidate this tough was Theodore Roosevelt.”
It IS true that Twitter’s current version violates the Digital Services Act, arguably, because the Digital Services Act is nothing but a censorship regime intended to shut down any speech that doesn’t parrot exactly what the Davos Elites want out there. That isn’t even an exaggeration; that is what it is intended to do.
If George Orwell wanted to write a law to make 2024 look like 1984, the DSA would be a great first start. It is, I say unironically, evil.
Elon clearly wants this fight, and he took his first shot back at the E.U. by revealing that they offered him and the other social media platforms a deal: comply with our censorship demands and we will help you deceive your users. He accuses the other social media platforms of taking the deal, and I believe him. Nobody is taking any shots at them because they have knuckled under.
The European Union isn’t just doing it for their own Elites–they are collaborating with US policymakers, the intelligence “community,” the MSM, and the censorship industrial complex to do their dirty work because there are limits placed on what government can do due to the First Amendment.
Billionaire Elon Musk said he is moving the headquarters of X and SpaceX out of California after governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill barring school districts from requiring teachers to notify parents if a child changes their gender identity.
“This is the final straw,” Musk said in a social-media post Tuesday afternoon. “Because of this law and the many others that preceded it, attacking both families and companies, SpaceX will now move its HQ from Hawthorne, California, to Starbase, Texas.”
Musk said he previously told the California governor a new law like this one would “force families and companies to leave California to protect their children.” Tesla moved its headquarters out of California to Austin, Texas in 2021.
California is the first state to pass such a law, and conservative groups have said they plan to challenge it in court. Ongoing litigation may complicate those efforts. A San Bernardino County judge already blocked one school district’s parental notification policy after the state’s attorney general sued last year.
The California Policy Center, a conservative think tank in the Golden State, said the new law “opens the door to child exploitation.”
“Gov. Newsom has okayed a bill that was based on the flawed logic that parents are dangerous and not to be trusted, and that the state or strangers are better positioned to deal with the difficulties of adolescence than parents,” said Lance Christensen, vice president of education policy and government affairs. “Hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements with victims of sex assault by public school employees is evidence that the opposite is too often true.”
Musk is reportedly moving Twitter/X headquarters to Austin. If so, I happen to know a Senior Technical Writer who is currently between jobs…
Slow Joe continues sliding down the slope of senility, Democrats continue freaking out over same, the media continues to be shocked that the media hid Biden’s decline, Democrats gear up to commit more voting fraud in November, tractors join the culture wars, Skydance eats Paramount, and postal rates are going up again. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
President Joe Biden struck a defiant tone during what was perhaps the most consequential press conference of his political career, insisting that he is the best candidate to take on Donald Trump in November, even as he stumbled through several answers.
Biden read prepared remarks off a teleprompter and answered questions from a pre-selected list of reporters Thursday night at NATO’s 75th anniversary summit, addressing a range of subjects including the history of NATO, Russia’s war against Ukraine, inflation, and Israel’s war against Hamas. The embattled president showed signs of his age throughout the event, as he coughed, whispered, stumbled over his words, and at time lost his stream of thought, at one point even referring to Vice President Kamala Harris as “Vice President Trump.”
“Look, I wouldn’t have picked Vice President Trump to be vice president did I think she was not qualified to be vice president,” Biden said, defending his choice of Harris as his running mate. At the end of the press conference, Biden told reporters to “listen to him,” in response to a question about the gaffe.
Parkinson’s disease specialist from Walter Reed Medical Center visited the White House at least nine times in the past year, according to journalist Alex Berenson of Unreported Truths, while the NY Post has reported that a cardiologist was present during one of the visits.
Dr. Kevin R Cannard traveled to the White House’s medical clinic each time, meeting with either President Joe Biden’s personal physician Dr. Kevin O’Connor, or a naval nurse who coordinates care for the president and other senior officials. O’Connor notably gave Biden a clean bill of health after his February annual physical.
The visits spanned July 28, 2023 with the latest being March 28 of this year. That said, Berenson notes that the most recent logs are from April 1, so it’s unknown if Cannard has visited more recently.
The question isn’t whether Joe Biden is suffering from cognitive declines, the questions is how many kinds of cognitive decline is Joe Biden suffering from?
“Biden’s Cognitive Collapse: Greatest Media Scandal We’ve Ever Seen. With Russia collusion, they were inventing things we couldn’t see and trying to convince us that they happened. With the Biden cognitive failures, they were trying to convince us that something we all saw didn’t happen and wasn’t happening.”
You saw the debate and the interview.
Joe is not well. He should not be president, it’s a national security risk. This is what the 25th Amendment is made for.
There have been many media scandals. Rathergate comes to mind. But most immediately, Russia collusion was the most aggressive and sustained media misinformation campaign lasting years. It operated on the level of using bits and pieces of information and disinformation to try to convince us that something we could not see (collusion) did in fact happen.
The media conduct towards Biden’s cognitive decline operated on a different level.
We saw it. We wrote about it. But for years, at least since the 2020 election cycle, the media did its best to convince you that you didn’t see what you saw. The media didn’t try to convince you that something that didn’t exist existed, it tried to convince you that something that existed didn’t exist.
If we accept the actions and outcomes that are visible from Democrats right now, their definition of “democracy” is apparently to dismiss the will of tens-of-millions of Democrat party voters, and instead install a candidate the DC insiders select.
Democrats and even Biden administration officials are being very open about their intent. They are dismissing Joe Biden and debating the installation of their chosen alternative; all while trying to jail their political opponent.
Can democrats see their version of “democracy” is identical to horrible Vladimir Putin?…
Additionally, having just returned from an extended visit to Russia, where I literally spent exhaustive time researching how the government views their role within the social compact – and its consequence upon the average population, the “we know better” outlook currently on display by Democrat influence operations in DC is stunningly similar.
Democrats are defending “The Motherland,” where “mother” is their retention of omnipotent power. Yes, Democrats are Putin.
“Biden Officials Gave Radio Stations Questions They Could Ask Biden During Interviews; They Complied.” Of course they did. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Evidently donors aren’t interested backing a senile loser, as Biden campaign contributions have fallen off dramatically. “Contributions from large donors alone could be down by more than half this month and are lower across the spectrum, according to NBC News. ‘It’s already disastrous,’ a source close to the re-election effort told the outlet about the state of fundraising for the Biden campaign. ‘The money has absolutely shut off,’ another person close to the campaign said.” Now we get to see if Democrats will follow the will of actual voters who cast their ballots for Biden, or a donor class insisting he be kicked to the curb.
Democrats oppose a bill requiring American citizenship to vote. because of course they do. Getting illegal alien ballots in the system is one of the fraud vectors they need to stay in power. It’s amazing Republicans even need to specify that in a law.
Ditto Michigan, where Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer signing bills eliminating the board of canvasser’s investigative powers, instead requiring the board to refer allegations of fraud to county prosecutors. So they can make sure Soros-backed prosecutors can bury any fraud.
This is potentially huge: “Court Holds Federal Ban on Home-Distilling Exceeds Congress’ Enumerated Powers.”
Yesterday, in Hobby Distillers Association v. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, a federal district court in Texas held that federal laws banning distilled spirits plants (aka “stills”) in homes or dwellings exceed the scope of Congress’ enumerated powers. Specifically, the court concluded that the prohibitions exceed the scope of the federal taxing power and the Interstate Commerce Clause, even as supplemented by the Necessary and Proper Clause. The court further entered a permanent injunction barring enforcement of these provisions against those plaintiffs found to have standing (one individual and members of the Hobby Distillers Association.) The plaintiffs were represented by attorneys at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and background on the case (and the various filings) can be found on CEI’s website here.
Hobby Distillers Association has the potential to be a significant post-NFIB challenge to the expansive of use of federal power.
All sorts of federal regulatory shenanigans that depend on the Commerce Clause may be headed for the scrapheap of history… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Annals of evil: Porsche executive convicted for of throwing her newborn daughter out of a window to further her career. “Katarina Jovanovic, a Porsche executive in Germany, chose her career over family by throwing her newborn daughter out a 12-foot window to her death, and is now headed to jail for seven and a half years.” I wonder if German women’s prisons have shankings…
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has launched an investigation into whether the Biden administration used the “obscure Intergovernmental Personnel Act program” to fund the salaries of Big Tech employees as part of an executive order.
“To complete every action, agencies would have had to . . . bring on AI fellows by recruiting temporary — but influential — AI staff from external organizations through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) program. Critics, however, have raised reasonable concerns that these influential AI fellows are shaping federal policy to benefit their organizations’ funders and not the American people,” explained Cruz.
“Moreover, as federal agencies request increased funding for AI hiring, it is important Congress understand the extent to which, and how, agencies have already acquired AI staff in response to the expansive and demanding AI Executive Order.”
In October 2023, Biden issued an executive order to establish “new standards for AI safety and security.” The order also aims to address “best practices” for authenticating content and calls on Congress to pass “bipartisan data privacy legislation.”
Six months after the issuance, the White House stated they had completed all the actions in the order.
In Cruz’s investigation announcement, he casts doubt on whether hiring “only 150 people into AI roles” was enough to be able to complete the required work. Cruz also highlighted a number of reported incidents where, through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) program, Big Tech CEOs funded salaries of employees working in government agencies.
“In effect, large AI technology companies are influencing the Biden administration’s AI policy from the inside and advancing their own anti-competitive agenda to shape the future of the AI industry,” Cruz said.
Elon Musk announced on Thursday that social media platform X will sue ‘perpetrators and collaborators’ who have colluded to control online speech, as revealed on Wednesday by an interim staff report released by the House Judiciary Committee.
“Having seen the evidence unearthed today by Congress, 𝕏 has no choice but to file suit against the perpetrators and collaborators in the advertising boycott racket,” Musk wrote on his platform, adding “Hopefully, some states will consider criminal prosecution.”
The House report details a coordinated effort by the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and its Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) initiative to demonetize and suppress disfavored content across the internet.
As we noted on Wednesday, the WFA is a global association representing over 150 of the world’s biggest brands and over 60 national advertiser associations which created GARM in 2019.
This alliance quickly amassed significant market power, representing roughly 90% of global advertising spend, which amounts to nearly one trillion dollars annually.
GARM’s Steer Team reads like a who’s who of corporate America, including heavyweights such as Unilever, Mars, Diageo, Procter & Gamble (P&G), GroupM, AB InBev, L’Oréal, Nestlé, IBM, Mastercard, and PepsiCo. These corporations not only wield immense economic influence but are now revealed to be leveraging this power to control online discourse under the guise of “brand safety.”
“In New York City, hotels that have converted into shelters for hordes of illegal aliens have been given over $1 billion in taxpayer money to keep them in business. As reported by Fox News, the average hotel room for an illegal costs $156 per night, with some costing over $300 per night. As such, the city government has already spent at least $1.98 billion on housing for illegals, with 80% of that amount going to hotels or inns that have been converted into shelters, rather than to shelters operated by the city. Overall, the city has spent at least $4.88 billion on the mass migration crisis.” (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
Another loss for Biden’s tranny school mandate. “Carroll Independent School District (ISD) won a preliminary injunction against enforcement of the revised Title IX regulations issued by the Biden administration in April. The rules were set to go into effect on August 1. Federal Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas issued the preliminary injunction on Thursday, July 11, the same day the Amarillo federal court issued an injunction in the case brought by the State of Texas regarding Title IX.”
Bad news on the tractor front: John Deere is going full woke, with DEI idiocy out the wazoo and pushing tranny ideology on children. Plus they’re closing an American plant to move the jobs to Mexico.
Chicken Soup for the Soul, the company that owned Redbox and Crackle, is shutting down. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
It’s not just U.S. companies that have problems with unions: Samsung’s is threatening a general strike in their high speed memory fab at Pyeongtaek. Any machine that goes down on a fab line needs to re-qualified, which is a gigantic, time-consuming pain in the ass. A car factory can resume production in last than a day, but fab can take several weeks to months to get production.
Return of the zombie mortgage. People who thought their second mortgages were written off after the 2008 crisis but didn’t get it in writing are now suffering a rude awakening.
I hope you survived Independence Day will all your digits intact! Slow Joe’s poll numbers plumb new depths, everyone knows the media is complicit in hiding his mental decline, Israel settles all family business, Rishi’s snap election is a debacle for the Tories, Wall Street looks to get the hell out of the Rotten Apple, and California legalizing weed was a big win…for illegal weed. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Voters that say Biden has the mental health to be President: It was only 35% pre-debate, look where it’s dropped to now post-debate, 27%.
How ’bout that he should be running for President? It’s 37% pre-debate, it’s now 28%…
I have never seen numbers this bad for an incumbent president during my lifetime … These numbers looked NOTHING like this in 2020. These numbers were bad already … they have gotten considerably worse even in just a few days after that first presidential debate.
How bad is Biden doing? This should come with the standard Instapundit “don’t get cocky” disclaimer, as well as a disclaimer that I haven’t examined this guy’s methodology and model at all, but even if the margins are half what he’s saying, it’s still really, really bad for Biden.
As in “Biden is winning Illinois…by three points” bad. New York is within striking distance for Trump. And right now he’s even edging Biden in New Jersey. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Biden says that no one is pushing him out of the race, though even Lightbringer McLegTingle himself has reportedly joined the chorus of concern over Slow Joe’s debate meltdown.
According to ‘several people familiar with his remarks,’ and perhaps most notably conveyed via the Washington Post, not only has Obama grown more concerned following the debate (and having to physically guide the 81-year-old off of a stage last month), the former president “has long harbored worries about his party defeating Donald Trump in November, repeatedly warning Biden in recent months about how challenging it will be to win reelection.”
Not only that, “Just before the debate, Obama conveyed to allies his concerns about the state of the race.”
So Obama gets to save face, while adding to the growing chorus of Democrats who have expressed everything from quiet panic to public hints, to outright calls for Biden to drop out of the race.
Usual “sources close to” caveats apply.
The mainstream media is shocked, shocked that Democrats lied about Biden’s cognitive decline as they actively aided and abetted them.
If you’re looking for a broader takeaway from all this, take how the press covered up Biden’s infirmity because it wanted to protect the Democrats, and apply it to literally every single thing that it does, on any topic, in any year, in any circumstance, forever.
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) July 3, 2024
They all knew:
Now that all the liberal journalists are claiming they didn't try to cover up Biden's deteriorating mental condition, here's a supercut of them claiming any and all damaging videos of Biden are fake and/or deceptively edited. pic.twitter.com/XI5zeTGih5
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) July 3, 2024
Democrats decided to shut Joe Biden down for a week. Not because they wanted to, but because they figured they had to. It was the only chance Biden had — thin as it turned out to be — to get through a 90-minute session in which he’d be asked questions he couldn’t answer with note cards, in which he’d be challenged vigorously and need to be quick on his shuffling feet.
Here’s the thing, though. What we saw on Thursday night was the result of that week of preparation and rest. And it was a disaster. So . . . what must the prep have been like?
Biden’s closest aides and the top Democrats with whom they are in constant communication know better than anyone in America that the president cannot function, that he cannot do the job. Yet, rather than ease Biden out, invoke the 25th Amendment if he wouldn’t go voluntarily, and ensconce in the Oval Office the vice president they insisted in 2020 would be ready to take over if the octogenarian collapsed, they decided they had to try to drag Biden across the finish line.
Why?
Because the Democratic Party is a trainwreck.
As catastrophic as Biden is in his senescence, he remains useful cover for the fact that the youth, energy, and money in the Democratic Party is woke-leftist, Islamist, counter-constitutionalist, post-American, and unelectable.
This doesn’t mean the whole Democratic Party is that way. But it does mean that sensible Democrats have to mind their tongues and genuflect in the crazies’ direction if they want to remain viable. They may personally believe, like the majority of Americans believe, that the border needs to be secure; that we can’t allow millions of illegal aliens a year to enter the country; that we don’t want boys and men invading the formerly safe spaces of girls and women; that mere statistical racial disparities in outcomes do not establish racism; that crime — especially recidivist crime — is a serious problem; that we need to back Israel’s wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, and their Iranian patrons; that a radical “green energy” transition the country is not ready for weighs too heavily on the budgets of everyday Americans even as it drives the national economy deeper into the ditch; and that America, warts and all, is fundamentally good — rightly, the envy of the world. But woe betide the Democrat who gives voice to such commonsense views.
Democrats have thus rolled the dice with Biden, and with the nation’s security, because the alternative is dealing with that rift.
Joe Biden is a lifelong mediocrity. But he has the fortuity of being both a Democrat from another era and Obama’s vice president. Because he’s a doddering blank slate, Democrats of all camps could project onto him their kind of Democrat. He could run in 2020 as the guy who could face down the radicals, and then govern under the thumb of the radicals — but with enough rhetorical feints to the old establishment Dems that they might yet rally around him . . . especially with no alternatives except the hard left and Donald Trump.
Why Joe Biden? Because Democrats want to stay in power and propping him up, as impossible as that has now become, seemed to be the best plan. Sadly, it may yet be.
Unemployment is at a three year high. And those are just the official figures. The truth is probably far worse.
Rigging the 2020 election through Zuckerbucks. “(a) tax-exempt non-profits are prohibited by federal law from engaging in partisan political activity, and (b) the Zuckerberg-funded ‘cabal’ had no other purpose except to guarantee Biden’s election.” And it did this through get-out-the-vote efforts exclusively in heavily Democratic precincts.
If you look at the Livemap, Israel also seems to have stormed various towns in the West Bank this week.
Israel may be in a “settle all family business” sort of mood…
“National Education Association members will vote on several anti-Israel resolutions at the union’s annual ‘Representative Assembly’ in Philadelphia this week, including the adoption of an official position holding that Israel is conducting a ‘genocide’ in Gaza and that opposing the Jewish state’s existence is not antisemitic.” I’m sure they’d rather focus on Gaza than undertake radical courses of action like teaching kids to read.
Six years after California legalized marijuana, the bodies keep piling up. Earlier this year, six men were murdered in the Mojave Desert. Four of the men had been burned after being shot with rifles. In 2020, seven people were killed at an illegal pot operation in Riverside County.
Violence like this was supposed to disappear after legalization. Legalization advocates argued that making the drug trade legal would end the grip of the cartels. Instead, the legal market has failed, and the cartels are taking over sizable parts of California and the rest of the country.
California’s legal drug revenues have fallen consistently, as have those in other legal drug states including Colorado, whose model helped sell the idea that drug money would fix everything.
Despite falling revenues, Colorado legislators brag about $282 million in drug revenue. That number may sound high, but it’s a drop in the bucket considering the money that the state and cities like Denver are spending on homelessness, drug overdoses and law enforcement.
While the legal drug business is also collapsing in California, the state is spending a fortune fighting marijuana even as it tries to tax it. Gov. Gavin Newsom paradoxically promised to close the budget deficit with $100 million in drug revenue, meant to be used to fund law enforcement and fight substance abuse. The state seized over $300 million in illegal pot this year and uses satellite imagery and heavily-armed raids to fight untaxed marijuana.
But despite all those efforts, illegal marijuana has won and legal marijuana has lost.
The Los Angeles Times warned two years ago:
“Proposition 64, California’s 2016 landmark cannabis initiative, sold voters on the promise a legal market would cripple the drug’s outlaw trade, with its associated violence and environmental wreckage.
“Instead, a Los Angeles Times investigation finds, the law triggered a surge in illegal cannabis on a scale California has never before witnessed.
“Rogue cultivation centers like Mount Shasta Vista now engulf rural communities scattered across the state, as far afield as the Mojave Desert, the steep mountains on the North Coast, and the high desert and timberlands of the Sierra Nevada.
“Residents in these places describe living in fear next to heavily armed camps…”
Some of the growers are private citizens, but they aren’t likely to remain in business for long.
Cartels and gang members dominate the business. And open borders allowed them to bring massive numbers of laborers to boost their ranks. Not only California, but places as far afield as Maine that have large open areas and limited law enforcement resources, have been overrun by drug operations that more closely resemble parts of Latin America and Asia than the USA.
The coasts, from Southern California up to Oregon, are controlled by Mexican cartels which have expanded so much that they’re running short of workers even during the Biden open borders boom. Some have taken to brazenly advertising for illegal workers in Europe.
A local California DA described “Mexican cartel groups coming up to grow pot, and people from Bulgaria, France and Russia.” The vast exodus across the border has made it possible for cartels to freely bring in any workers they want, even as drug legalization and open borders effectively ended any real penalties for either illegal migration or marijuana.
Asian organized crime may be less on the radar, but it is no less ruthless or violent.
A few years ago, four Chinese people were murdered at an Oklahoma illegal pot farm. Chinese organized crime had “taken over marijuana in Oklahoma and the United States,” the head of the Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs revealed.
Once again, “the mafias set their sights on Oklahoma when the state’s voters approved a ballot measure that legalized the cultivation and sale of marijuana for medicinal purposes.” Now the Triads run their own compounds “ringed by fences, surveillance cameras and guards with guns and machetes” with 3,000 illegal grows having a value estimated at as high as $44 billion a year.
The Triads are not just in the illegal marijuana business, they traffic in everything from heroin to fentanyl. Legalizing marijuana, however, provided them with a profitable and semi-legal market that gives them a base to expand their efforts trafficking in even more lethal drugs.
Drug legalization has failed on every level. The legal drug business is collapsing. MedMen, which once promised to be the Apple of weed, fell from a $3 billion valuation to a bankruptcy with $411 million in liabilities. Despite the green crosses and online apps, 80% of Californian’s pot is still the old-fashioned illegal kind. Politicians may be boasting about hundreds of millions in revenue, but the cartels are making tens of billions and they’re taking over entire forests.
The future isn’t pot shops, weed apps or MedMen: it’s Mexican and Chinese organized crime compounds that are spreading across the West and parts of New England like a plague.
Also in California, State Farm is jacking home owners insurance into the stratosphere.
State Farm requested massive increases to its California residential insurance rates, which calls its financial stability into doubt amid an ongoing crisis in the state’s insurance market.
The company’s California subsidiary, State Farm General, the state’s largest writer of homeowners insurance, according to the Insurance Information Institute, submitted a request on Thursday to the California Department of Insurance for the following rate hikes:
30% increase in homeowners insurance
336% increase in condominium owners insurance
352% increase in renters insurance
With California’s property insurance market already facing an availability and affordability crisis, driven largely by rising wildfire risk, the timing could hardly be worse.
Gee, maybe you shouldn’t have legalized shoplifting in the name of “social justice.”
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has ruled unanimously in a case involving a 2021 Texas social media transparency law, sending it back to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
House Bill (HB) 20, which requires major social media platforms to be more transparent and prohibit viewpoint-based censorship, passed in the 87th Legislature. It faced an immediate legal challenge, resulting in a temporary block by a federal district court. This decision was appealed to the 5th Circuit, which temporarily lifted the block, allowing the law to take effect.
Justice Elena Kagan delivered the opinion for SCOTUS, writing, “Texas has never been shy, and always been consistent, about its interest: The objective is to correct the mix of viewpoints that major platforms present. But a State may not interfere with private actors’ speech to advance its own vision of ideological balance.”
So the Supreme Court will not save Americans from big tech companies teaming up with secret government entities to impose censorship on their platforms. Americans will have to do that for themselves.
The Tories got slaughtered in Rishi Sunak’s spectacularly ill-advised snap election, handing Labour, which seemed on life-support just a few years earlier, a 170 seat majority. “Labour got 3 times as many seats, but did not win – the Conservatives lost, and lost badly, punished by the electorate. Reform were the real winners – although they only got 4 seats.” Sir Keir Rodney Starmer KCB KC will now become Prime Minister, Sunak is going to go down as one of the Tories worst leaders, and Nigel Farage will finally sit in parliament. Will Labour take this as a greenlight to go full speed ahead on unlimited immigration and hard green NetZero? I wouldn’t put it past them.
Belarus does more sabre rattling on the Ukraine border. I suspect this is just a feint to tie up Ukrainian units on the border, as Putin puppet Aleksander Lukashenko might face a real revolt from his military if he tried to send units into Ukraine.
Remember all that panic over investors buying up housing? Thanks to the Biden Recession, they’re now unloading them at firesale prices. “It’s impossible to make money on mortgage properties with interest rates where they are today.” Well, unless they took out fixed rate mortgages, which real estate companies are evidently loath to do. “Inventory [in this Florida zip code] has gone up 800 to 900%.”
So I thought about doing a post on this Chinese-constructed, Malaysia-based, eco-themed Forest City ghost city just outside Singapore, with the obvious “post apocalyptic” slant, but one thing stopped me: It actually looks kinda cool and well-maintained, and if the usual shoddy tofu dregs building processes have been used, they’re not apparent in this brief tour. Everything looks classy and expensive. And for once, you can’t entirely blame the CCP for the debacle, since the Malaysian government evidently changed foreign ownership rules after most of it had been constructed.
This is a weird story: “Walter Ringfield Jr., the 27-year-old Phoenix resident charged with stealing keys to voting equipment from Maricopa County elections headquarters, has a history of theft allegations – and an apparent interest in running for public office.” He stole keys to a tabulating machine that couldn’t be used without access to other keys he didn’t have for a job he was temping at. Could be a another Democratic attempt at election fraud, or the guy just might be a klepto.
Michigan lawmakers want to make the AR-15 the official state gun. Nice. Texas already has a state gun, the Colt Walker pistol, which is pretty important historically. Tennessee’s official state gun is the Barrett M82, which I think wins the firepower crown, until someone names the Ma Deuce the offical state gun…
For those who have followed LinkSwarm links on falsified job data under the Biden Administration, it should come as no surprise that all the job gains in the largest and bluest state in the union in 2023 were fake.
According to the latest report published by the non-partisan California Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) which is an agency of the California government, is overseen by the Joint Legislative Budget Committee of the California State Legislature, and performs and publishes extensive analyses of the state’s budget in addition to providing fiscal and policy advice to the California Legislature, contrary to prior reports of over substantial job gains in the deep blue state in 2023, the reality was far uglier.
In a report titled “Newest Early Jobs Revision Shows No Net Job Growth During 2023” we learn just that: the Early Revisions to state-level data flagged here previously, suggests that California actually lost jobs during the fourth quarter of last year. As the report details, “based on the most recent release of the early benchmarks, payroll jobs declined by 32,000 from September 2023 through December 2023. On the contrary, the preliminary monthly reports showed a solid increase in job growth (+117,000 jobs) at the time.”
This, according to the LAO, means that “with the fourth quarter revision, calendar year 2023 saw essentially no net job growth (+9,000 jobs overall).”
So maybe all but 9,000 were fake? Nope.
The data since January 2024 has not yet been rebenched, which means that the figure includes the Early Benchmark Revision for these recent months are growing at the same rate as the official CES estimates. But one can be absolutely certain that once the next set of revisions come in, California will not have generated any actual job growth for the second year in a row. In fact, make that all of America.
In the least anticipated team-up since Kathleen Kennedy and any Star Wars project, a Mexican Cartel drug cartel and Chinese underground bankers have formed an alliance.
A federal indictment has alleged an alliance between one of Mexico’s biggest drug cartels and Chinese underground bankers—who are accused of jointly conspiring to cover up more than $50 million in drug profits.
A Tuesday press release from the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs detailed the 10-count indictment, which charged 24 Los Angeles-based Sinaloa drug cartel associates with working alongside groups that have been linked to Chinese underground banking systems.
The name given to the federal government’s multi-year investigation was “Operation Fortunate Runner.” It ended with a superseding indictment of the group back in April, though it was only unsealed on Monday—revealing that the 24 individuals were each charged with one count of conspiring to perpetuate the distribution of cocaine and methamphetamine, one count of money laundering conspiracy, and one count of conspiring to operate an unlicensed monetary transmitting company.
“The superseding indictment alleges that a Sinaloa Cartel-linked money laundering network collected and, with help from a San Gabriel Valley, California-based money transmitting group with links to Chinese underground banking, processed large amounts of drug proceeds in U.S. currency in the Los Angeles area,” explains the DOJ press release.
“They then allegedly concealed their drug trafficking proceeds and made the proceeds generated in the United States accessible to cartel members in Mexico and elsewhere,” it continued.
Chinese and Mexican law enforcement agencies collaborated with the Justice Department to arrest fugitives who fled the United States to other countries after being indicted and initially charged last year.
Edgar Joel Martinez-Reyes, 45, is the lead defendant. According to reporting done by the Associated Press, prosecutors say that Martinez-Reyes played the part of manager—leading couriers who retrieved the drug cash from the Los Angeles area. Authorities say that he partnered with leaders of the Chinese money laundering operation and traveled to Mexico to negotiate contracts with the Sinaloa cartel.
Anne Milgram of the Drug Enforcement Administration said at a recent news conference, “This investigation shows that the Sinaloa Cartel has entered into a new criminal partnership with Chinese nationals who launder money for the cartels.”
Drug seizures at the unsecured southwest border have dropped over the past four years, although hundreds of thousands of pounds of illegal drugs have still been seized.
Meanwhile, there has been a rise in encounters with Chinese nationals.
According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, the number of Chinese nationals encountered at the southwest border during fiscal year 2024 has already eclipsed the numbers of the previous three years.
In FY 2024, there have been 27,700 encounters with Chinese nationals from October to April, as their data for May has yet to be released. During the entire FY 2023, that number was 24,314—compared to only 2,176 in FY 2022 and 450 in FY 2021.
We’ve been wondering what all these Chinese nationals were doing pouring into America, and “Cartel Thug” seems to be among the possibilities.
How much Chinese authorities have cooperated with the DEA, given that there is wide suspicion that the Chinese government has given its blessing to flood America with fentanyl, remains to be seen. But given how widespread the practice of siphoning off money for other enterprises is the Chinese banking sector, it’s entirely possibly that Chinese authorities are actually cracking down on it. Plus the underground bankers may not be current on their CCP bribes.
Crime cartels in one country do frequently cooperate with the cartels in another, though we’re use to thinking of such cooperation working on ethnic lines (Sicilian mobs cooperating with the American mafia, or Mexican cartels working with Mexican Americans or illegal aliens.) But where there are large amounts of illicit money to be made, strange bedfellows bloom.
More evidence of the Biden Recession, California’s welfare state goes extra crazy, Chicago has to spend mad money to produce illiterate children, an Assistant DA resigns, a cyberattack hits car dealers nationwide, a Brazilian thief gets ventilated, and God unites the entire world in hatred of the New York Yankees. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Taxpayers are funding a new high-rise building in Los Angeles where homeless people will enjoy skyline views, a cafe, a gym, and an art studio, not to mention the free rent.
The fancy new building is 19 stories high and has 278 units, each costing about $600,000. The total cost was $165 million, according to the Los Angeles Times. It is the first of three new high-rise buildings that will soon house homeless people.
Snip.
This modern tower for the homeless includes a TV in each apartment, a gym, an art room, a soundproofed music room, a computer room with a library, a TV lounge, a courtyard, and a cafe that will host movie nights. There are also six common balconies, four of which have dog runs.
Where are politicians getting all the money for this project? The buildings are funded by the city’s supportive housing loan program, Proposition HHH, which was approved by city voters in 2016, as well as state housing funds and $56 million in state tax credits.
The three apartment buildings will be located around the headquarters of the Weingart Center, a nonprofit that assists homeless people. Kevin Murray, a former California state senator, is the man behind the project. He serves as the chief executive of the nonprofit.
I’m sure all the Homeless Industrial Complex members involved got generously paid for their efforts. Once again, the message of the Democratic Party is: You’re suckers for working for a living.
Illinois Policy just issued a report showing that while CPS has doubled spending per student since 2012, grades are down by 60-80%, depending on the subject. “Just 1-in-4 CPS students can read or perform math at grade level,” the report says. “The percent of students enrolling in college after high school graduation is decreasing. And for those who do enroll, another study found many are struggling to finish college in four years – just 30% get their bachelor’s in four years compared to 47% nationally.”
By every other measure… there’s no other way to put this… CPS is falling apart.
In 2023, 26% of students in grades 3 through 8 across all of CPS could read at grade level and about 18% could do math proficiently. For 11th grade CPS students, only 22% could read at grade level and 19% do math proficiently.
CPS’ failure to engage students shows in the chronic absenteeism rate. Chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed.
According to ISBE data, 86.3% of teachers in CPS were rated as proficient or excellent in 2023, down from 91.4% in 2019. Yet many students in CPS are struggling to reach proficiency in core subjects.
There’s much more at the link, all of it tragic. An entire generation of Chicago students is failing — and being failed by their schools and, let’s be brutally honest, by their families.
If you’re thinking that CPS must be seriously underfunded to achieve such dismal results, you must have been living in a cave for the last 40 or 50 years. CPS will spend a jaw-dropping $29,028 per student this year. My family lives in a lovely exurb of Colorado Springs and our district spends roughly one-third of what CPS does — $10,214 per student — and we get much better results. It isn’t about the money. It rarely is.
The case began in November 2022, when Loper Bright Enterprises, a fishery based out of Cape May, New Jersey, appealed a district court opinion to the Supreme Court. The conflict between Loper Bright and the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) started after the agency decided to require private fisheries like Loper Bright to pay their regulatory inspectors for their time observing fishery practices.
While the law doesn’t explicitly allow this practice, the Fishery Service cites the Chevron Deference, a precedent set by a 1984 Supreme Court case, which states that an ambiguous law can be interpreted by government agencies as they see fit. In short, the Fishery Service wants private companies to pay their salaries and found a legal loophole to justify it.
While this may seem like an isolated incident, it is just one example of a long history of government agencies infringing on individual liberty. The outcome of this case holds supreme importance for the future of our republic and the preservation of our financial and civil freedoms.
Since 1950, the federal government has steadily grown in size. Today, it has over 2.9 million civilian employees, more than Walmart has worldwide. This growth has paved the way for the creation of a governmental pseudo-branch denoted the “administrative state.” The administrative state contains government employees who have a significant impact on people’s everyday lives but yet aren’t held accountable to citizens in the form of elections. These unelected bureaucrats undermine the central ethos of a republic, where elected officials are supposed to seek the good of their constituents or risk not being re-elected.
The problem with this system was made evident during the pandemic. During the COVID shutdown, hundreds of millions of Americans were sentenced to lockdowns, impacting their schools, churches, and families. Many of the people behind this policy were members of the CDC, one of the government agencies that comprise the administrative state. The decisions they made were not subject to the traditional checks and balances which typically constrain the US government. Instead, America found itself under a tyranny of the unelected.
This overreach extends beyond individual liberty into private business. When businesses can be encroached upon at a whim by unelected authorities, long-term investment becomes a much riskier endeavor. When the COVID shutdown occurred, many small businesses, with their small profit margins and high overhead, were unable to weather the storm. For the companies that survived, the blatant government intervention and the severe consequences that followed left a sour taste in their mouth for future capital investments. You’re not going to build a new business if a bureaucrat can shut it down the next day. All of these factors contribute to government agencies having a negative impact on financial markets and investor portfolios.
The Chevron Deference precedent, which is at the center of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, gives even more power to these governmental agencies. When ambiguity exists, this precedent allows courts to simply defer to agencies’ interpretations, even if those interpretations favor the agencies’ own interests. It also allows courts to seek out ambiguity in order to give near-unbridled power to these agencies.
If the Supreme Court upholds Chevron, it will further entrench the power of unelected bureaucrats and make it increasingly difficult for individuals and businesses to challenge agency overreach. However, if the Court rules against Chevron, it would represent a shift toward increased restraint of the administrative state, leading to a reevaluation of the scope and authority of federal agencies.
Israeli arms exports hit record sales. Funny how having products that actually work stimulates sales. I’m betting Russia is enjoying the opposite right now…
Baseball game announcer: We will not be singing the national anthem. Crowd: The hell we won’t! Patriotism ensues.
Speaking of DA’s behaving badly, a followup: Assistant Travis County DA Joseph Frederick, who was charged with aggravated assault, has resigned before he could be fired, his lawyer saying this was to maintain his health benefits, because he has Parkinson’s. Which is strange, because COBRA covers involuntary termination as well.
Argentine President Javier Milei has a glorious rant about how you can’t negotiate with leftists.
This week’s California restaurant chain closing due to the minimum wage hike: Arby’s. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“CDK Global, a major software provider to auto dealerships in the U.S., has been hacked, forcing the company to shut down most of its systems temporarily. This cyberattack effectively halted sales operations at approximately 15,000 car dealerships, including those under General Motors, Group 1 Automotive, and Holman.” Without this software, there’s essential dead in the water. (More details.)
Speaking of money-losing MSM outlets, the incoming editor of the Washington Post says thanks but no thanks after the staff there preemptively published a hit piece on him. How’s that letting the inmates run the asylum working out for you, Jeff Bezos?
George R. Nethercutt Jr., the Republican who ousted Democratic Speaker Thomas S. Foley in the Newt Gingrich Contract with America wave of 1994, dead at 79 (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Is olive oil good for your brain? I hope so, since it’s an Atkins-compliant dressing for my salad, so I generally get more than the recommended teaspoon a day.
An Oakland, California shooting on Juneteenth resulted in several people being hospitalized, according to the city’s police department.
The Wednesday night shooting started after a fight broke out near a crowd of roughly 5,000 people taking part in events around Lake Merritt, according to the Oakland Police Department. When police tried to move the crowd to a safe area, some people punched and pushed, with one officer being assaulted, the agency said.
The crowd was purportedly peaceful until an “illegal sideshow” with cars and motorcycles developed.
Several victims were hit by gunfire and transported to a nearby hospital, according to the Oakland Police Department. Authorities say there is currently no report of fatalities nor have there been any arrests made in connection with the shooting.
Multiple shots, several people hospitalized, no arrests.
1. In normal cities in normal states, there are usually enough police around to prevent two gangs from opening up on each other at a major holiday celebration. IN Oakland evidently things are different.
2. For all the talk of California having the toughest gun control in the nation, gangbangers seem to have no problem obtaining weapons. Evidently the California Democratic establishment only wants to disarm the law-abiding.
At what point do California voters finally realize that their Democratic Party leaders have abandoned trying to enforce the rule of law and shout “Enough!”?
Video of a shocking smash and grab robbery shows the moment a Sunnyvale jewelry store is overwhelmed by suspects armed with tools and hammers.
The incident took place at PNG Jewelers on Wednesday afternoon. The store is located at 791 E. El Camino Real. Police said at least five people have been arrested, but they are looking for more suspects.
The surveillance video’s timestamp shows the robbery happened just before 12:30 p.m. Well over a dozen suspects, clad in black clothing, barge into the store and begin smashing the glass counters as they ransack the place.
Sunnyvale Department of Public Safety said their officers responded to a report of a robbery in progress and that approximately 20 suspects were involved.
“The suspects fled the store in multiple vehicles before officers arrived on scene. Officers located two suspect vehicles as they were attempting to flee the area,” Sunnyvale DPS said in a news release.
For those unfamiliar with it, Sunnyvale is smack dab in the heart of Silicon Valley, between Mountain View, Cupertino and Santa Clara, and was home to numerous influential companies including Fairchild Semiconductor, Atari and LinkedIn. Homes there list for $2 million and up. El Camino Real is the central “strip” of Silicon Valley, running all the way in to San Francisco where it turns into Mission Street.
Daylight jewelry store robberies were hardly unknown before, but these large mobs of smash-and-grab looting are a direct result of Democrats decriminalizing shoplifting. Even though the haul here is clearly above the $950 limit of Proposition 47, California criminals that have honed their looting skills on smaller value targets are clearly seeking fatter scores, and show no hesitation in branching out to hit targets in affluent cities.
The continued slide of one-party blue California into abject lawlessness is no longer shocking, but it should be. In the name of social justice, Democrats are systemically destroying the underpinnings of ordered, law-abiding society. How long before insurance companies simply refuse to insure retail stores in California, and how soon until high end stores in Silicon Valley go the the way of those in San Francisco and simply close entirely?
