Illegal aliens continue raking in welfare benefits, the #SchumerShutdown continues, a look at the Democrats’ foreign paymasters, a jihad attack thwarted, cartels are enslaving American Indians in California in the name of weed, some Joe Rogan interviews, Nasty Nancy bows out, Kill Bill returns to theaters, and Bass Pro Shop Fight Club.
It’s astounding, the things we learn when the money runs out and governments actually have to start prioritizing for a change. As the Schumer Shutdown drags through Week Five with no end in sight, the country’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — aka “food stamps” — ran out of money on Saturday. And given who was taking, it’s a miracle that there was any money left at all.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins reported yesterday that earlier this year, “we told every state to send us their SNAP data so we could make sure illegal immigrants aren’t getting benefits meant for American families. 29 states stepped up. 21 blue states refused — and two SUED US FOR ASKING!”
That’s because we’re spending billions on benefits to illegal aliens.
My guess is that the Center for Immigration Studies — which bills itself as “low-immigrant” yet “pro-immigration” — was being a bit ironic with this headline: Illegal Immigrants To Be Hit Hard As SNAP and WIC Benefits Expire.
The organization’s 2023 analysis of government data showed that “households headed by illegal immigrants make extensive use of the welfare system, particularly food assistance programs.” CIS estimated that 59% of households headed up by an illegal are on one or more welfare programs, whether it’s cash, food assistance, Medicaid, or housing.
Read that again. We’re giving cash, food, healthcare, and housing to people who aren’t even supposed to be here.
Millions of them, in fact. Even though I could have sworn that Democrats insisted up and down that sort of thing never happened. No wonder 21 blue states didn’t want Rollins looking at their books.
Houston, we have a problem. A very expensive problem.
His suggestions: Require proof of citizenship for all welfare benefits, and ban junk food from purchase with EBT.
The Schumer Shutdown continues. Democrats offered a one year ObamaCare extension and Republicans told them to get stuffed. Republicans should counter-offer an extension of the subsidies for American citizens…but none for illegal alien, plus states are required to submit their benefits database so illegal aliens can be kicked off the program and deported. That would make it even more painfully clear Democrats favor illegal aliens over citizens when they refuse…
Foreigners not only are paying to promote liberal causes and by extension liberal candidates but foreigners are running their own candidates. The Squad has a couple of them and Minneapolis is about to get a Somali mayor.
Foreigners are funding the Indian who was born in Uganda and sent to New York City at some point. Now he’ll a jihadist-friendly communist—but if justice prevails, he may end up in prison instead of being in City Hall.
The New York Post reported last week, “Zohran Mamdani was hit with two criminal referrals Tuesday filed by a campaign finance watchdog accusing the lefty socialist of accepting illegal contributions from foreign donors.
“The Coolidge Reagan Foundation filed the referrals—alleging Mamdani may have violated the Federal Election Campaign Act and New York Election Code—with the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office on Tuesday.
“The referrals were filed after The Post reported earlier this month Mamdani’s campaign raked in nearly $13,000 in contributions from at least 170 donors with addresses outside the U.S.—including one from his mother-in-law in Dubai.”
Ed Morrissey:
The Democrat Party has turned into the Globalist Party. Their constituency isn’t American voters; it’s the international cognoscenti, who want an America that submits to the “global community.” That is why Democrat leaders do not adapt their policies and positions to the clear consensus in the American electorate, because they have already adapted to constituencies outside the United States.
That isn’t the only institution orienting itself away from American constituencies, and for the same reason. Over the last several decades, Academia has seen billions of dollars flow into its coffers from places like China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. There too, the money has pushed institutions to indoctrinate students into radical-Left globalist values and agendas. Universities have largely stopped providing foundational Western-civilization values and education in favor of revisionist propaganda about Western imperialism and colonialism. This in turn colors all of the institutions into which radicalized graduates enter and rise within those structures.
Jonah Goldberg, from 2009 (back before Trump broke his brain):
Liberalism has openly yearned to “Europeanize” American social policy for decades. Liberals point to European health-care systems, union rules, tax policies, industrial policy, foreign policy, and even sexual mores, and say: “We need to be more like them.”
This is a very old story. The founders of modern liberalism, led by Woodrow Wilson and the two Roosevelts, were quite open about their effort to adopt a more European approach to political economy. The progressive leader William Allen White said in 1911: “We were parts, one of another, in the United States and Europe. Something was welding us into one social and economic whole with local political variations. It was Stubbs in Kansas, Jaures in Paris, the Social Democrats in Germany, the Socialists in Belgium, and I should say the whole people in Holland, fighting a common cause.”
But it was FDR’s New Deal that truly aimed to “assimilate the American into the ‘European’ political experience,” according to historian Daniel Boorstin.
After years of Democrats telling the American people that former President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA) was a thriving system, the glaring truth revealed now during the government shutdown is that not only has the ACA resulted in widespread fraud and allegations of kickbacks to insurance companies, the American people are footing the bill for subsidies to hide the fact that Obamacare is broken.
“Everything Obama told us was a complete lie,” E.J. Antoni told John Solomon during a special report on the government shutdown sponsored by the Association of Mature American Citizens.
Antoni, who serves as chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, continued: “When he said, ‘If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.’ No you couldn’t. Obamacare made a lot of those health care plans illegal. He said, ‘If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.’ No, it forced a lot of doctors out of business, and it forced a lot of doctors to no longer take most insurance.”
President Barack Obama repeatedly promised Americans during the rollout of the ACA — commonly known as Obamacare — that “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor,” a claim intended to reassure Americans about the ACA’s impact on existing healthcare arrangements. However, millions of people lost access to their preferred and established physicians due to narrowed insurance networks and cancellations of plans which did not comply with the law’s new requirements, leading even left-leaning PolitiFact to name it the “Lie of the Year” in 2013.
Rep. Jack Bergman, R-Mich., revealed the latest scandal within Obamacare. Bergman, speaking to Just The News, laid out the timeline for subsidies which were meant to lighten the burden for Americans but when unused, were pocketed by the insurance companies.
Bergman explained that “In 2010, the Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act. Then in 2014, ACA premium tax credits became available, meant to help families earning 100 to 140% of the federal poverty level – that was designed to help those folks. In 2021, through the ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act), Democrats temporarily extended and expanded those subsidies to everyone, regardless of income, for one year. In 2022, the IRA (Inflation Reduction Act), they extended the expansion again, but only through January 1 of 2026.”
Bergman emphasized that the expiration imposed by Democrats implicitly meant that the extension was not meant to be permanent. That extension expires and is what Democrats have shut down the government over. As Bergman puts it, “They’re blaming us, the Republicans, for letting their own temporary extensions expire.”
The largest surprise regarding these subsidies, is that they haven’t been going directly to patients. They’ve been going to insurance companies, according to Bergman. “Insurance companies’ profits right now are up something like 240+ percent. There’s something morally wrong with that. Not only is it shamefully wrong, but morally wrong.”
Bergman did not name any specific insurance companies.
“Millions of these so-called ghost enrollees, people who are technically eligible, but are unaware of it, never use these subsidies. The insurers pocket the difference.”
OpenSecrets reported that in 2012, the health insurance industry donated roughly $9.6 million to Democrats. In 2024, the industry donated almost $40 million to Democrats.
Five people between the ages of 16 and 20 were arrested Friday, CBS News has learned. Authorities say they were inspired by a former member of the Michigan Army National Guard who was arrested in May for allegedly planning an ISIS-inspired attack against a U.S. Army site in suburban Detroit.
(Just a reminder that Detroit suburbs like Dearborn Heights are majority-Muslim.)
The men were inspired by another “Michigan man” who was arrested in May:
Ammar Abdulmajid-Mohamed Said, 19, was accused of providing support for a planned attack on the U.S. Army’s Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command facility at the Detroit Arsenal.
Democrats have been importing unassimilated Muslims into America for, what, 30 year now? 40? Who initiated the plan, and why?
Over 1,500 alleged criminal illegal aliens were arrested during a 10-day operation in Southeast Texas — including documented gang members, a convicted murderer, and over a dozen sexual offenders.
The Houston branch of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducted the operation between October 22 and 31, arresting a total of 1,505 alleged criminal illegal aliens.
Among the arrests were 17 “documented gang members,” including an alleged Mexican Mafia gang member, who was convicted for raping and impregnating his minor sister and is wanted in Honduras for murder. A suspected MS-13 gang member was also among the arrested, after he “ran inside a local washateria, climbed through the ceiling panels to get on the roof and became wedged in a sign on the side of the building,” before being captured by Houston ICE.
Forty “aggravated felons” were reported as being among the 1,505 arrested, as were 13 sexual predators.
One of the arrested is Vongphachan Phothisome of Laos, who was convicted of sexual exploitation of a child. Similarly, an illegal alien from Honduras, Rony Andy Martinez Lopez, was convicted of “lewd and lascivious acts with a minor and cruelty towards a child.”
A comparable week-long operation conducted by Houston ICE in early September yielded about half the arrests as this October one, with 822 alleged criminal illegal aliens arrested last month.
Native American sovereignty and California’s policies that shield illegal immigrants have allowed Mexican drug cartels to swoop in on tribal lands of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, a confederation of several tribes, the sheriff said.
The valley, known for illegal marijuana grows on tribal lands, is remote and surrounded by forested mountainous terrain. It’s a patchwork of tribal lands and those sold off to private owners years ago.
[Mendocino County Sheriff Matt] Kendall, 56, grew up here in the 1970s. During the drive to Covelo, an isolated town in the valley, he talks about how the times have changed over the decades.
“Back in the ’60s and ’70s, it was a beautiful place—a lot of freedom here,” he said. “When we were kids, we’d be riding our horses and having fun. Every kid in this valley had a horse. We’d go out to the river. All of us had summertime jobs, hauling hay and cutting firewood.”
His nostalgic journey ends abruptly as he passes a burned-out building with murals of missing women on its walls—a stark reminder of the violence that plagues the valley. Other banners along the road display their names and faces, including that of Khadijah Rose Britton, a native American woman who, according to the FBI, was last seen in Covelo being kidnapped at gunpoint in 2018.
Today, Kendall says, “there’s a little bit of farming, and then just tons and tons of marijuana, and pretty much all of it is illegal.”
“We see a lot of Hispanics here when there is no work, no sawmill jobs, no grapes, no vineyards and not much logging. They’re all here taking orders to grow marijuana, and a lot of it’s happening on tribal lands.”
He estimates up to 80 percent of the illegal marijuana in Mendocino County is grown on tribal lands, based on aerial surveillance and satellite imagery revealing a vast network of illegal grow ops.
A blow against tranny madness. “Supreme Court Reinstates Trump Admin Requirement That Passports Reflect Biological Sex.”
Joe Rogan interviews Elon Musk, again. I have not remotely watched all three hours of it, but I don’t rule out posting clips from it in the future.
Speaking of Musk, Telsa shareholders just approved a $1 trillion pay package for him, assuming he hits certain metrics over the next decade. My guess is that’s a whole lot of pie in the sky, even for him…
Speaking of three hour Joe Rogan interviews, he did one with Billy Bob Thorton that just dropped. I’m sure I’ll watch all of that one as well…
Nancy Pelosi announces her retirement. She was able to force the abomination that was ObamaCare over the line, and grab a lot of taxpayer-funded pork for Democrats, but it’s doubtful her terms as Speaker resulted in lasting achievements for Democrats. She was bad, but if another Democrat manages to be Speaker in my lifetime, my default assumption is that they’ll be much, much worse…
A Washington Parish grand jury in Louisiana has indicted Democratic Bogalusa, Louisiana Mayor Tyrin Z. Truong on charges of malfeasance in office, public intimidation, and theft, according to the Bogalusa Daily News.
The indictment is part of what officials describe as an ongoing multi-agency investigation involving federal, state, and local authorities. Prosecutors allege Truong intentionally carried out his official duties unlawfully and knowingly allowed other city employees to ignore theirs. His arraignment is scheduled for November 10, 2025.
According to prosecutors, the case centers on claims that Truong misused Bogalusa taxpayer funds to pay a personal legal debt from a 2023 Louisiana public records lawsuit in which a judge ruled that Truong personally owed attorney fees and penalties after refusing to release public documents.
When the Bogalusa City Council denied his request to use public money, prosecutors say Truong threatened retaliation, vowing to overwhelm council members with records requests. Investigators allege he then pressured a city insurance vendor to issue a check labeled as a “reimbursement,” had it deposited into a city account, and ordered another check for the same amount to be written to himself.
Rookie mistake. Graft pros always have the check written to an intermediary cutout who withdraws the money and pays them in cash…
In 2022, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) announced a plan to give $715 million in taxpayer cash and tax incentives to lure Gotion, a Chinese battery maker, to rural central Michigan. She did it in the midst of a reelection campaign so she could fire off a press release claiming credit for 2,600 “good-paying jobs.”
She didn’t mind the fact that this proposed one-square-mile plant would be located less than 100 miles from an Army and National Guard training facility called Camp Grayling. The real irony is that the U.S. military has been training the Taiwanese military at Camp Graying for years to repel a Chinese invasion. Our governor was going to pay the CCP to operate a plant in the middle of the state. Genius!
Local residents rose up. Yes, of course, because they objected to the possibility of Chinese spies roaming around their community. But also because they resented the way in which the project was unveiled. Elected officials signed nondisclosure agreements with economic development agencies and then said they were legally bound from sharing details with the residents footing the bill.
The more questions citizens had, the more obstinate company, township, and state officials became. Green Charter Township is made up of normal people: farmers, small business owners, and the like. James Chapman, the chief project proponent and former township supervisor, quickly lost his patience in meetings and yelled at the rubes who had the temerity to attend and voice their opinions. They would yell right back. The massive project, shrouded in arrogant secrecy, bitterly divided the small community.
It reached a boiling point when township officials who were supporting the project either resigned or were overwhelmingly recalled. A new board was elected, and they went about doing the due diligence that taxpayers expect elected officials to pursue for such an expensive and disruptive project.
The CCP-linked company sued the new board, driving up massive legal bills for the tiny community. The company didn’t want to wait for environmental approvals, tearing down trees and homes. The community continued fighting, even employing President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. Trump publicly opposed the project. Vance held a campaign rally across the street.
When they took office in January, they changed former President Joe Biden’s scam electric vehicle mandates, and the whole racket collapsed. It was the beginning of the end for the Gotion project.
Last week, the state of Michigan announced it was withdrawing the promise of $175 million in taxpayer cash, although $50 million had already been delivered. It’s unclear whether taxpayers will receive an accounting of where that money went.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
Voting fraud alert. “North Carolina Republicans say texts show that local Democrats are paying for people’s votes.”
The North Carolina Republican Party referred an alleged vote-buying scheme to the State Board of Elections for investigation on Friday, claiming that a voter had been offered $100 to vote for Democratic candidates in the Wilmington City Council election.
‘This is a troubling allegation and an egregious affront to our democracy and an attempt to buy votes in exchange for cash,’ NC GOP Chair Jason Simmons said in a press conference. ‘The North Carolina Republican Party stands committed and steadfast in its determination for free, fair and transparent elections.’
“FAA Orders Flight Cuts at Texas Airports as Democrat-Led Shutdown Deepens. The FAA will cut flights by 10 percent at 40 of the nation’s top airports due to staffing shortages among air traffic controllers.”
The Department of Energy (DOE) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) recently signed Addendum No. 9 to their 2019 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU), paving the way for faster follow-on licensing of advanced nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel technologies.
This agreement, signed Oct 24th and effective immediately, comes as major concerns have been raised by reactor development companies and industry observers regarding the double work that may be required of developers when they bring their tested products over to the NRC. Demand for clean, reliable energy by data centers and major industrial companies has created a stronger need for change in the path to reactor design commercialization, with companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon signing long-term offtake agreements with reactor operators Constellation, NextEra, and Talen.
The addition to the MOU comes from the directives out of Trump’s executive orders signed back in May of this year. From section 5.d of the executive order “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission”:
“Establish an expedited pathway to approve reactor designs that the DOD or the DOE have tested and that have demonstrated the ability to function safely. NRC review of such designs shall focus solely on risks that may arise from new applications permitted by NRC licensure, rather than revisiting risks that have already been addressed in the DOE or DOD processes.”
Surprisingly, the DOE and NRC took the executive order one step further and included a streamlined licensing process for nuclear fuel facilities as well. It becomes less surprising when we remember the current administration has highlighted multiple times the desire to reduce the reliance on foreign nuclear fuel supplies. Even with the Russian uranium import ban, the US is still importing over a fifth of the required enriched uranium from Russia through last year. The US government is looking to expand the domestic capacity of every step in the fuel chain as quickly as possible.
Faster, please.
“Top 20 Theories on Why the EU Committed Cultural Suicide.” They’re not mutually exclusive. And the piece needs an entry for cultural relativism/Frankfurt School and a Gramscian “war of position” against civil society.
Digital media hasn’t become the antidote to television. Digital media, empowered by the serum of algorithmic feeds, has become super-television: more images, more videos, more isolation. Home-alone time has surged as our devices have become more bottomless feeds of video content. Rather than escape the solitude crisis that Putnam described in the 1990s, we now seem to be more on our own. (Not to mention: meaner and stupider, too.)
It would be rash to blame our berserk political moment entirely on short-form video, but it would be careless to forget that some people really did try to warn us that this was coming. In Amusing Ourselves to Death1, Neil Postman wrote that “each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.” Television speaks to us in a particular dialect, Postman argued. When everything turns into television, every form of communication starts to adopt television’s values: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. In the glow of a local news program, or an outraged news feed, the viewer bathes in a vat of their own cortisol. When everything is urgent, nothing is truly important. Politics becomes theater. Science becomes storytelling. News becomes performance. The result, Postman warned, is a society that forgets how to think in paragraphs, and learns instead to think in scenes.
Snip.
Short-form video is indistinguishable from what today’s youth consider the definition of American success. For five straight years, Gen Z has told pollsters that the thing they most want to be when they grow up is an “influencer.”
When literally everything becomes television, what disappears is not something so broad as intelligence (although that seems to be going, too) but something harder to put into words, and even harder to prove the value of. It’s something like inwardness. The capacity for solitude, for sustained attention, for meaning that penetrates inward rather than swipes away at the tip of a finger: These virtues feel out of step with a world where every medium is the same medium and everything in life converges to the value system of the same thing, which is television.
I’m not free from guilt myself. I only turn on my TV one day a week, but I watch waaaaaaay too much YouTube. (Previously.) (Hat tip: Greg Ellifritz via Dwight.)
GM to iPhone users: Drop dead. “General Motors is dropping Apple CarPlay and Android Auto support across all of its brands—Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and GMC.”
“Microsoft just revealed that OpenAI lost more than $11.5B last quarter.” “If Microsoft owns 27 percent of OpenAI, it stands to reason under equity accounting that it bears 27 percent of OpenAI’s losses. Microsoft’s admission that it shaved $3.1 billion off its net income to account for its share of OpenAI losses therefore suggests OpenAI lost about $11.5 billion during the quarter.”
“Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL: THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR unites Volume 1 and Volume 2 into a single, unrated epic—presented exactly as he intended, complete with a new, never-before-seen anime sequence.”
Coming to theaters in December. If I wasn’t in financial turtle mode, I’d probably go out and see it…
The rubber match between the progressive Austin City Council and the collection of opposition organizations headlined by Save Austin Now (SAN) has gone the latter’s way.
Proposition Q is a voter-approval tax rate election (VATRE) worth $110 million, intended to close the $33 million deficit gap in the City of Austin’s budget.
The ballot language states the item is “for the purpose of funding or expanding programs intended to increase housing affordability and reduce homelessness; improve parks and recreation facilities and services; enhance public health services and public safety; ensure financial stability; and provide for other general fund maintenance and operation expenditures included in the fiscal year 2025-2026 budget as approved or amended by City Council.”
Though it was not the only spending item within the proposition, the headliner was the homelessness response appropriation.
This is the third time the two sides — the city’s dominant political establishment and the insurgent opposition made up of Austin’s few Republicans, Independents, and even Democrats — have grappled over a ballot proposition.
The first was the May 2021 reinstatement of the public camping and lying ban, a rebuke of the progressive city council headlined by then-Mayor Steve Adler and then-Councilman Greg Casar; 57 percent of voters, including 40 percent of Democrats, voted to reinstate the camping ban.
Playing into SAN’s favor at that time was the visceral nature of the council’s policy. Overnight, encampments cropped up on Austin’s boulevards, under its overpasses, and within its creekbeds.
The next bout between the factions came on a November 2021 proposition from SAN that would have established a minimum staffing threshold for the city’s police department; a year earlier, the city council had cut and redirected $150 million from the Austin Police Department budget that included nixing financial authorization for 150 patrol positions.
SAN’s progressive opponents came out on top in that instance, with nearly 70 percent of voters rejecting the proposition.
It was a heavy blow to the group trying to build a bipartisan oppositional coalition in the city, but it set the table — along with other electoral skirmishes in the years since — for what came this year.
When it came to reinstating the camping ban, the message for SAN, led by Matt Mackowiak, was provided for them in the form of unsightly encampments on many street corners and increased confrontations between homeless individuals and pedestrians. That didn’t take much creativity.
But for the police staffing proposition, it was harder to fashion a winning message out of crime statistics that, while higher than the city’s historical levels, remained less tangible in what is still a historically low-crime city. The messaging cut the other way, too.
Opponents of the minimum staffing item framed it as a mandatory spending increase — which it was — and it worked to a prolific degree.
This November, the “spendthrift” theme fell squarely on the city council; SAN and its allies ran with it to a great effect.
SAN, with donations from donors like attorney Adam Loewy, purchased billboards across the city that read, “Stop the largest property tax increase in Austin history.”
Countermessaging by Proposition Q supporters focused heavily on President Donald Trump, including a mailer quote from City Councilwoman Vanessa Fuentes that read, “Passing Proposition Q tells Donald Trump and Greg Abbott they don’t call the shots in Austin. Our Community takes care of its own, and Proposition Q shows it.”
In short, the messaging dynamic was one of bipartisan opposition to more increased spending, versus a partisan rebuke of the GOP and its faces at the federal and state levels; the former won out, a remarkable feat in a city that has generally approved ramping up spending levels.
SAN’s $300,000, together with $120,000 from Ellen Wood’s Restore Leadership ATX, lapped the pro-Proposition Q Love Austin PAC’s $94,000 spent in the closing weeks of the campaign.
Snip.
With multiple elections of voter data to reference, SAN identified 70,000 likely supportive voters across both major parties and unaffiliated voters — and through early voting, that voter universe turned out at a rate of 2.3 times more than the rest of the voter universe.
SAN’s money paid for mail to 140,000 households, 300,000 text messages to voters, radio ads on five stations, a digital ad blitz, and billboards and small-scale signs across the city, per data shared with The Texan. Get-out-the-vote robocalls and digital ads continued along with the radio spots through the close of polls on Tuesday.
I didn’t cover Proposition Q because I live just outside the Austin city limits, I’ve had plenty of other stuff to blog about these past few months, and 40 years of experience has led me to believe that Austin voters will vote for pretty much any cockamamie spending increasing that comes down the line. So I didn’t have much hope they’d defeat Proposition Q, but I did see signs against it just about everywhere I went.
Through early voting, SAN’s internal modeling put “No on Prop Q” ahead 57 percent to 43 percent, basically the final breakdown of the camping ban reinstatement election. SAN reached that conclusion by extrapolating their polling from a couple of weeks ago that put “No on Prop Q” at 40 percent among Democrats, the largest voter universe in bright blue Austin.
More than 30 percent of the early vote turnout was modeled to be from SAN’s universe or a universe of strong Republican voters, all likely to be “Nos” on the proposition.
After initial results, Proposition Q went down in flames with over 60 percent of votes against it.
Maybe the lesson here is that bond issues are one thing, but tax increases are quite another. While the former almost inevitably leads to tax increases down the road, maybe even Austin’s notoriously left-wing voters have had enough of being taxed to death. Forcing governments to seek voter approval for tax increases means a whole lot less tax increases get enacted.
Finally, Austin voters may simply be sick and tired of their hard-earned money keeping drug-addicted transients shuffling down their streets. There’s evidently no homeless scheme the Austin City Council won’t throw money at, but actual voters seem tired of shoveling taxpayer money into the insatiable maw of the homeless industrial complex.
Bill Maher noted how Democrats are in danger of going the way of other “ghost brands” like Sears and Playboy.
“A ghost brand, that’s a company or a store that like Sears still exists, but only as a pathetic shell of its former self.”
“I fear the Democratic party is at risk of becoming a ghost brand too. Like Sears, it used to be mighty and ascendant and popular. Sears once accounted for 1% of the entire American economy and 41% of the appliance market and built the country’s tallest tower. Democrats once controlled Congress and the Supreme Court, or were at least competitive.”
“The Democrats have their lowest rating in 35 years. 63% unfavorable. What happened? I don’t know.” This is a lie. Maher knows that social justice is killing the Democrat Party, he just doesn’t want to say it.
“What happened to Sears? It used to be synonymous with the American Dream because it kept faith with what the customer wanted.” This is a reductio ad absurdum, as the American Dreams mean a whole lot more than the ability to buy decent material goods.
“Did we love Sears? No. But that was besides the point. You just went. It was like an Avatar movie that sold tools. It used to be where your family bought everything from school clothes to appliances to your family Christmas portrait.”
“Sears used to have 3,500 stores and now it has five.”
“Same thing happened to Playboy, except in silk pajamas and a captain’s hat.”
“For for 66 years, Playboy magazine was also a fact of American life. Sears sold your father a mattress and Playboy was what he hid under it.”
“Plus real journalism. You could read an interview with Carter while enjoying photos of bush.”
“But but then it started messing around with the formula. Like the Democratic Party, Playboy decided they didn’t need straight men anymore. They put transgender women and gay men on the cover and predictably sales, like their subscribers penises, collapsed.”
“The staff began using terms like intersectionality, sex positivity, and privileging. And in response, Playboy readers use terms like, ‘No thanks, get the fuck out of here, and buy-bye.'”
Cracker Barrel analogy snipped.
“It reminded me of when Chuck Schumer said in 2016 that for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we’re going to pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philly, Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Yeah, how’d that work out?”
“But at least Cracker Barrel had the sense to immediately say, ‘Oh sorry.’ and put the sling blades back on the wall. Democrats don’t seem to be doing that. They still seem to want to be that upscale store that impresses celebrities.”
Description of how Barney’s went from a solid discount clothing store to a wannabe upscale failure snipped.
“And I’m not making this up just because it’s Halloween, but after Barney’s closed for good in 2020, it became, yes, a Spirit Halloween.”
“I’m just saying Democrats need to get their shit together, because America needs two political parties, not one party and one Halloween store.”
What’s doing in the Democrats is what did in Playboy: Intersectionality, transgenderism, supporting illegal aliens over American citizens, and the entire post-modern social justice woke-mind-virus zoo. They went from seeing blue collar workers as the backbone of the party to seeing them as icky carriers of hetronormative toxic masculinity, patriarchy and white privilege. Donald Trump, alone of all the 2016 Republican presidential candidates, saw those same voters as a key ingredient into making Republicans into America’s natural majority party.
But unlike Sears or Playboy, there’s a limit to how much the free market can correct a self-destructive ideology. The woke are absolutely sure of their unshakable virtue, and seizing and maintaining control of the Democrat Party is far more important to them than pleasing mere voters. Social Justice Democrats believe they’re on “the right side of history,” and like Tareyton smokers, they’d rather fight than switch. Or, as poor Charlie Kirk found out, they’d rather kill the “Nazis” that oppose their policies than consider the possibility that they’re wrong.
Texas Democrats went through a similar struggle in the 1960s through 1990s. Liberals knew that if they were ever to take control of the party, they would have to drive conservatives out of the Party, so they convinced conservatives they had to leave the Democrats and vote in Republican primaries, as documented in Wayne Thorburn’s Red State. This they accomplished, but somehow seemed to think Texans would just continue voting Democrats in year after year.
And that’s why Democrats haven’t elected anyone statewide in Texas in over 30 years.
Come Tuesday, New York City Democrats will quite likely elect a Jew-hating communist rather than consider the possibility that their ideas are not just wrong, but evil. And thus the party will take yet another lurch toward electoral ghost brand irrelevance.
And they’re a whole lot less popular and innovative than Spirit Halloween…
Labour’s policy of continuing to import unassimilated Muslim illegal aliens is so popular that Prime Minister Keir Starmer needs a police escort to guard him through a crowd screaming things at him like “traitor” and “child abuser.”
Huge marches against unassimilated Muslim immigration continue to happen all across the UK. The government recently banned a UKIP march in Tower Hamlets, a London borough that’s been taken over by Muslims. Here’s one resident stating why they’re leaving.
I moved to Tower Hamlets a few years ago as a centrist, but will shortly leave the place as an Advance UK College member – a ‘Far-Right’ enemy, if my local council are to be believed. Living here has certainly played a large role in my philosophical evolution, by forcing me to contend with the harsh reality of life in multicultural Britain.
In Tower Hamlets I am surrounded by hardcore religious conservatism. It seems like 50% of the women I see on a daily basis wear full black niqabs or burkas, with only a thin slit for them to see out of. It is a radically misogynistic culture that would be more at home in Iran, growing in the heart of London.
This radical shift in culture is demographic in origin. The local population is now 34.6% Bangladeshi and nearly 39.9% Muslim, and a Bangladeshi Muslim party named Aspire dominates politics.
For an example of the corrosive effects of this on our democracy, the mayor of Tower Hamlets is a charming fellow called Lutfur Rahman. Rahman was barred from running for five years after he was found to have engaged in vote-rigging.
The Election Commisioner also upheld the allegations of bribery, giving food and drink to encourage people to vote for him and spiritual influence after voters were told it was their duty as Muslims to vote for Rahman.
Staggeringly unperturbed by this, voters have put him in charge once more. This sort of outcome is utterly alien to the United Kingdom. It is pure sectarianism.
I wonder whether anyone who is not Bangladeshi will ever win political power in Tower Hamlets again.
As for the area itself, Tower Hamlets is a sea of urban decay, graffiti, and the third highest crime rate in London. Nothing works. When my car was stolen from directly in front of a CCTV camera, the council told us that they were unwilling to scan the footage to find out who had stolen it. Perhaps, in an area rife with low-grade gang warfare, the reasons for that go beyond laziness.
It’s a borough in which days ago masked Muslims took to the street flying the same black-and-white flag favoured by Islamists and jihadists the world over.
All of the above is a direct result of mass immigration, multiculturalism, and foreign ethnoreligious sectarianism. Wherever these factors become dominant, similar dysfunctional end results will play out across the country.
Ultimately, Britain is not Bangladesh or Pakistan. If people want to participate in ethnoreligious sectarianism on behalf of those cultures then they can freely and rightly do so – in Bangladesh or Pakistan. Meanwhile, we should not be afraid to assert the same principles here in the United Kingdom, on behalf of the British people and our culture.
Labour popularity is hitting record lows in polls, but Labour seems to think if they can just brazen it out until the next mandatory parliamentary election, they can import and amnesty enough Muslims to give them a permanent electoral majority.
But ordinary Brits may reach their breaking point before then.
Happy Halloween! Biden’s FBI turned January 6 investigations into a vast monitoring program aimed at Republicans, the Schumer Shutdown continues, a whole of disturbing illegal alien sex offenders, Milei wins again in Argentina, Russian floating crane does what Russian ships do best, the autopen scandal deepens, and one really weird gun.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Arctic Frost was an operation by the Biden FBI to use the half-assed January 6 riot to turn the federal government into a Stasi aimed at Republicans, including “Nearly 200 Subpoenas Targeting 400 GOP-Linked Individuals, Entities.”
The Biden-era FBI’s “Arctic Frost” investigation into President Trump and the broader GOP’s role in the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot was more wide-ranging than previously known, according to newly released documents showing the bureau issued nearly 200 subpoenas targeting more than 400 Republican entities and individuals as part of the probe.
Senator Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) released records on Wednesday showing 197 subpoenas were issued to individuals and businesses during the FBI’s “Arctic Frost” investigation targeting 430 GOP individuals and entities. He obtained the records through protected whistleblower disclosures.
Financial institutions, Trump-aligned political organizations and operatives, conservative think tanks, and payroll companies were among the subpoena recipients, according to a list compiled by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Federal investigators sought communications between the targeted individuals and media companies, prominent Trump-world officials, and legislative staff. The investigative efforts also encompassed MAGA fundraising efforts and donors.
Several GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the panel Grassley leads as chairman, spoke at a press conference Wednesday afternoon unveiling the new information.
“What is revealed in those 1700 pages of documents, those 197 subpoenas, is nothing short of a Biden administration enemies list,” Senator Ron Johnson (R., Wis.) said.
ohnson said he knew most of the 38 individuals from his state on the Biden administration’s “enemies list” and urged his fellow lawmakers to assist the Trump administration with getting to the bottom of the FBI’s conduct.
“This extended far beyond President Trump and extended to President Trump’s supporters not only here in the United States Senate but more broadly,” Senator John Cornyn (R., Texas) lamented.
“Merrick Garland was a member of Joe Biden’s cabinet. He was willing to do whatever Joe Biden and his political operation wanted him to do, including destroying President Trump,” Cornyn added.
The “Arctic Frost” investigation looked into the role President Trump played in the Capitol riot. The probe eventually morphed into special counsel Jack Smith’s Washington, D.C., criminal case against Trump. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland and then-FBI Director Christopher Wray personally signed off on the investigation when it was launched in 2022, according to a decision memo Grassley divulged last week.
Snip.
A ninth GOP Senator, Ted Cruz of Texas, was also targeted during the “Arctic Frost” investigation, Axios first reported. Several of the GOP lawmakers in the FBI’s crosshairs promoted Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential election being stolen from him. The attempts by Trump’s allies to contest the 2020 election formed the basis of Smith’s D.C. criminal case and criminal prosecutions in the swing-states Trump lost to former President Biden. Numerous individuals targeted in “Arctic Frost” later faced criminal charges for their failed attempts to overturn the 2020 election results.
“Jack Smith was a fundamentally corrupt prosecutor. This was a political enemies list from the beginning,” Cruz said. “This is an executive who believes it is justified spying on their opponents in the legislature because they convinced themselves the ends justified the means.”
Smith attempted to subpoena AT&T to obtain Cruz’s cellphone communications and the company’s legal counsel declined to comply, Cruz said. He praised the company for standing its ground against Smith’s attempt to gain his phone records. Cruz said that Washington, D.C., federal Judge James Boasberg signed an order prohibiting AT&T from informing Cruz of the subpoena for a year because of the potential for Cruz to destroy evidence or intimidate witnesses.
And Cruz has sent me three fundraising emails based on it this week alone.
Victory in Portland. “Antifa Retreats From Portland ICE Facility After Police Dismantle Encampment.”
The decentralized anti-fascist warriors in the Portland-area cell, aligned with the radical Democratic Party, were in full retreat overnight after officers from the Portland Police Department cleared out their encampment in front of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in the Portland metro area.
Nick Shirley, who is an independent journalist and who met with President Trump at the White House earlier this month for a round table on Antifa, wrote on X, “ANTIFA HAS BEEN DISMANTLED IN PORTLAND After 140 days of controlling and camping on this street in Portland, Antifa has officially been cleared out as the police FINALLY stepped in and cleared the encampment.”
“Inside the encampment, they had loads full of medicine, medical gear, party supplies, a fridge, BBQ, etc ANTIFA’s 140 days of control have officially come to an end,” Shirley said, with an accompanying video showing inside the encampment that housed gender-confused purple-haired people who hate the Western world and capitalism.
Federal Reserve drops interest rates by a quarter point. Feel the excitement…
Democrats have badly weakened their party with left-leaning ideas and rhetoric, growing only with self-described “white liberals” while losing ground with other voters, according to a new center-left group’s report shared first with Semafor.
The group, called Welcome, consulted hundreds of thousands of voters over six months for its broad findings, including that 70% of voters think the Democratic Party is “out of touch.” Most voters, the group found, believe the party over-prioritizes issues like “protecting the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans,” and “fighting climate change” while not caring about “securing the border” or “lowering the rate of crime.” (Welcome began as a PAC in 2022, then founded a nonprofit with the same name for political research.)
Elected Democrats will receive copies of the report after its Monday publication, followed by events to promote it in DC and New York. The report urges party members to abandon some of the progressive language about race, abortion, and LGBTQ issues that Democrats began using after the 2012 election — and recommends the nomination of more candidates willing to vote with Republicans on conservative immigration and crime bills.
“The Democratic Party had better listen — for the good of our nation,” former Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos, who ran the party’s House campaign committee when it lost seats in 2020, wrote in her endorsement of the report.
Inspired by The Politics of Evasion, an influential 1989 paper that inspired the party’s more centrist shift under Bill Clinton, the 70-page Deciding to Win document argues that Democrats must be “willing to break with unpopular party orthodoxies.” Its prescription for getting the party out of its current wilderness isn’t simple: avoidance of “both a pivot to corporate centrism and the pursuit of progressive ideology purity.”
Greg Schultz, who managed Joe Biden’s 2020 primary campaign but was replaced for the general election, worked with Welcome to shape the report.
“For the last 20 years, Democrats have just misunderstood how you actually win elections,” he told Semafor. “I thought Biden had proven in the 2020 primary that the base of the Democratic Party is a 58-year old woman without a college degree. But when you hear people in DC say ‘the base,’ they mean white intellectuals that live in a few coastal cities.”
The report directly challenges Democrats’ predilection for the interests of “highly educated and affluent voters,” arguing that their influence “may be responsible” for the party’s closer association with left-wing politics.
Sort of sounds like Weigel’s friends are finally noticing what Republicans were saying at least as far back as Obama’s first term. But wait!
“We have much to learn from the relentless focus of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani” on those fronts, the authors write.
The risk they see is in Democrats moving left on other progressive policies, which even some in the party establishment have done while criticizing Mamdani and other democratic socialists. From 2013 to 2024, between the beginning of Barack Obama’s second term and the end of Joe Biden’s sole term, the report offers clear metrics to show how the party changed its language and gave support to left-wing bills that had little chance of passage.
So they only want the Democrat Party to be a little bit pregnant with socialism and social justice. Yeah, good luck with that, heretic. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Two rogue Democrat judges think they can bypass the executive and judiciary branches and order specific programs funded during the Schumer Shutdown. “On Friday, US District Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island announced that he would order the US Department of Agriculture to distribute a pool of contingency funds ‘as soon as possible.’ While minutes before, Boston US District Judge Indira Talwani ruled that the US government must announce by Nov. 3 whether they would authorize at least partial funding for the program using around $6 billion in contingency funds – and if so, when will they do it.”
Mexican authorities in August, with the use of DNI intelligence, captured an infamous human trafficker who would lure pregnant women to steal their babies and organs.
She would then sell the stolen babies and organs on both sides of the border, which is how the United States got involved.
Aguilar was part of the Jalisco New Generation drug cartel.
California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pimp shield law, pushed by Democratic legislator Rep. Scott Weiner, has helped foster a disturbing new sex market on Figueroa Street in Los Angeles, featuring prostitutes as young as 12 and 13 years old. For far too long, the “kiddie stroll,” as it’s known, has gone unreported because major media outlets refused to cover it, allowing it to flourish under the watch of Democratic politicians.
But now it’s time to shine a light in the darkness and expose the truth about what’s happening to these poor young girls and why nothing has been done to bring the harrowing evil to an end.
An article from the New York Times Magazine is finally covering this horrific scene in Los Angeles, though they’ve conveniently neglected to cover anything concerning the prostitution law Newsom’s administration passed.
“For the 77th Street Division, which covers the northern half of the Figueroa Corridor, prostitution had always been a problem. But in recent years, the officers had seen the magnitude of child sex trafficking explode,” wrote reporter Emily Baumgaertner Nunn.
“Gangs that had long sold drugs began to take advantage of Figueroa’s lucrative opportunity. With a dozen girls, one trafficker could easily make $12,000 a night. ‘Drugs are sold once and gone forever, but girls can be resold indefinitely,’ said [police sergeant Alvaro] Navarro, who had been in the division for two decades. Motel owners who noticed the parades of customers but feared the gangs’ retribution kept quiet,” Nunn continues.
There’s little doubt that much of the silence and fear of gang retaliation for speaking out against this vile form of human trafficking stems from the lack of police presence on California streets, particularly in Los Angeles. Democrats in the state slashed funding for police and tied officers’ hands, making it harder to pull these girls — who are just children — out of sex trafficking.
In fact, Nunn points out that the sex-trafficking unit in the city was disbanded due to budget cuts, which means each division within the police department has fewer resources available to tackle the issue. There are supposed to be a total of six investigators looking into human trafficking. Now there’s only one.
Children suffer abuse in ways too sick and twisted to imagine, and thanks to anti-cop policies from radical leftists trying to appease minorities for votes, leaders ignore it instead of acting. This is truly a miscarriage of justice. It’s immoral and evil.
“Their jobs grew even more challenging when California repealed the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution. The repeal, known as SB 357, was intended to prevent profiling of Black, brown, and trans women based on how they dressed. But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them.
Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage — but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell. One girl told vice officers that her trafficker had explained things succinctly: ‘We run Figueroa now,’ he said,” Nunn writes in her article.
By the end of 2023, the city attorney started referring to Figueroa as the “Kiddie Stroll” because many of the girls working the street were under 13.
The Democrat Party is now objectively pro-rape and pro-pedophilia.
“ICE continues arresting ‘worst of the worst‘ illegal migrants accused of sexual crimes.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) on Tuesday told Just The News exclusively that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials are continuing to arrest the “worst of the worst” illegal migrants, despite a government shutdown.
The latest arrests include illegal migrants who have been convicted of crimes such as lewd and lascivious acts on a minor, aggravated criminal sexual assault with bodily harm, aggravated kidnapping and possession with the intent to distribute.
Monday’s arrests include a Cuban illegal migrant in Florida who was convicted of lewd and lascivious act on a minor, a criminal illegal migrant from Mexico, convicted of aggravated criminal sexual assault with bodily harm, and aggravated kidnapping in Illinois, and an illegal migrant in Tennessee who was convicted of sexual assault.
“Nothing—not even the Democrats’ government shutdown—will slow us down from arresting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens,” Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Yesterday, the brave men and women of ICE arrested pedophiles, rapists, and kidnappers. These are the types of predators ICE is taking off of America’s streets every single day. DHS will stop at nothing to make America safe again and remove these violent illegal offenders from our streets.”
Another illegal migrant from Mexico, identified as Adan Martinez-Gonzalez, was arrested in Texas after being convicted of aggravated kidnapping. Mexican illegal migrant Nicanor Hernandez-Gutierrez was apprehended by ICE and was previously convicted of possession with intent to distribute a quantity exceeding five kilograms of cocaine.
Former DOE nuclear engineer Matt Von Swol notices something that’s been floating around for years; the insane number of minorities (mexicans and blacks) who are booked as “WHITE” when they get arrested – something which obviously manipulates ‘inconvenient’ crime stats – something that TPUSA’s Andrew Kolvet noted have been “widely corrupted to serve a racist agenda.’
“I searched through thousands of arrests in my county and every single Hispanic individual who has been arrested is labelled as “WHITE”” Van Swol posted on X.
We cannot trust crime stats in America. They have been widely corrupted to serve a racist agenda. https://t.co/UEpwDbnv2F
It’s axiomatic in Washington, D.C., that changes that are undertaken by administrative action alone are easy to reverse.
There’s no doubt that if a Democratic president wins next time, he or she will undo much of what Trump has done through executive action, but will he or she be able to take it all the way back to where it was before?
I don’t think so. It will certainly be goodbye to the Gulf of America and the Department of War, and ICE raids will stop immediately. But Trump has struck blows against long-standing progressive priorities that were pursued in a piecemeal fashion, meant to build up and become irreversible over time. On these, it will be hard for the left to recover — in other words, Trump has broken the progressive ratchet.
How does the ratchet work? It begins with small, unobjectionable, or perhaps even salutary steps, coupled with assurances that potential downsides or extreme outcomes will never come about. Then, over time, incremental moves are made in the same direction until the unreasonable policy that we’d been assured would never happen is entrenched reality.
It is the work of decades, and it depends on no one ever pushing things back in the other direction (that would be reactionary) and everyone’s accepting the endpoint as a fait accompli.
To wit: First, women flying in combat roles. Then, women in ground combat roles, with the proviso that training and standards will stay the same. Then, gender-normed physical fitness tests and lower standards for everyone.
First, race-neutral civil rights laws, then temporary affirmative action, then permanent quotas and set-asides, then a widespread corporate and educational architecture devoted to promoting racialist practices and ideology.
First, respect and rights for gay people, then respect and rights for trans people, then everyone in America having to designate their pronouns, people getting shamed and fired for “misgendering” trans people, “gender-affirming” surgeries for minors, males competing in female sports, and the active encouragement of nonconforming sexual identities in the schools.
Trump has yanked the other way so far on these ratchet issues that it’s not clear when or how the left can get them back to the status quo ante.
It took so long to get there in the first place that snapping back to politicized training standards, pervasive DEI, or the most outlandish forms of the trans agenda will be very difficult.
Also, the sense of inevitability that the ratchet created, and the sense of helplessness on the part of opponents, has now been shattered.
Finally, there’s the problem that plausible deniability has been lost. The ratchet allowed for radical social change to be sheathed in incrementalism and in the righteousness of the starting point — DEI was on a continuum with civil rights; watered-down physical standards on a continuum with the inclusion of women in combat roles who needed no special accommodation.
Now, a revanchist Democratic administration would have to proceed directly to the most controversial and unpopular parts of the left’s agenda.
Top Biden administration officials misused executive authority and took actions without then-President Joe Biden’s authorization as his mental acuity declined, a House investigation found.
President Biden’s inner circle hid the extent of his mental decline from the American people and exercised executive authority by abusing the presidential autopen and taking advantage of a lax chain-of-command, according to a report released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee.
“The Biden Autopen Presidency ranks among the greatest scandals in U.S. history. As President Biden declined, his staff abused the autopen and a lax chain-of-command policy to effect executive actions that lack any documentation of whether they were in fact authorized,” the report reads.
“The Committee has found that there was, in fact, a cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline and that there is no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him,” the report adds.
The Biden White House worked to conceal the extent of his mental decline through scripted messaging, controlled public appearances, and limited access. Staffers controlled Biden’s daily activities, appearances, and workload to prevent the public from seeing his diminishing mental capacity, the report says.
For the most part, Biden’s staff dismissed the possibility that the American people were concerned about his mental faculties. In a similar manner, Biden’s staff attributed his disastrous June 2024 debate performance to a bad cold and minimized Biden’s struggles on that fateful night.
The Oversight Committee investigated the coverup of Biden’s mental capacity with a specific focus on the Biden administration’s autopen usage at the end of his term. According to the committee, Biden officials used presidential authority and initiated executive actions without direct authorization from Biden himself, including using the autopen to sign executive orders without written approval.
Top Biden administration officials misused executive authority and took actions without then-President Joe Biden’s authorization as his mental acuity declined, a House investigation found.
President Biden’s inner circle hid the extent of his mental decline from the American people and exercised executive authority by abusing the presidential autopen and taking advantage of a lax chain-of-command, according to a report released Tuesday by the House Oversight Committee.
“The Biden Autopen Presidency ranks among the greatest scandals in U.S. history. As President Biden declined, his staff abused the autopen and a lax chain-of-command policy to effect executive actions that lack any documentation of whether they were in fact authorized,” the report reads.
“The Committee has found that there was, in fact, a cover-up of the president’s cognitive decline and that there is no record demonstrating President Biden himself made all of the executive decisions that were attributed to him,” the report adds.
The Biden White House worked to conceal the extent of his mental decline through scripted messaging, controlled public appearances, and limited access. Staffers controlled Biden’s daily activities, appearances, and workload to prevent the public from seeing his diminishing mental capacity, the report says.
For the most part, Biden’s staff dismissed the possibility that the American people were concerned about his mental faculties. In a similar manner, Biden’s staff attributed his disastrous June 2024 debate performance to a bad cold and minimized Biden’s struggles on that fateful night.
The Oversight Committee investigated the coverup of Biden’s mental capacity with a specific focus on the Biden administration’s autopen usage at the end of his term. According to the committee, Biden officials used presidential authority and initiated executive actions without direct authorization from Biden himself, including using the autopen to sign executive orders without written approval.
National Review previously reported on internal emails showing the White House’s process for deciding on commutations for violent criminals was chaotic and insular. The Biden administration did not consult with the families of the victims of the violent criminals as part of its clemency process.
Another instance the report mentions is the pardons Biden issued in the final hours of his presidency to members of his family. No records exist for the in-person meeting that led to the decision to grant those pardons.
Rather, Zients verbally authorized the use of the autopen after an aide of his transmitted the decision to issue the pardons. Zients did not know who actually applied the autopen and did not confirm with President Biden that he approved the pardons. The aide sent an email on Zients’s behalf expressing approval of the Biden family pardons.
If Biden didn’t issue the pardon, the pardon is invalid.
Free marketeers have good reason to cheer, or at least sigh with relief, with Milei’s party doing well in the Argentinian midterm elections…
In the middle of the month, this newsletter explained why the Trump administration traded $20 billion in U.S. dollars for the equivalent amount in Argentinian pesos. The Argentinian currency, which had already lost a lot of its value, was dropping perilously over fears President Javier Milei’s party might lose the midterm elections and the country would revert to its previous reckless big-spending habits. The currency trade, spearheaded by U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, represented an economic lifeline to Argentina and a metaphorical bet that Milei’s party would do well in the midterms, and keep the country on a smaller-government, more free-market-oriented path.
Secretary Bessent, collect your winnings. From the Wall Street Journal:
With nearly 99 percent of votes counted, Milei’s Freedom Advances party won almost 41 percent of the national vote, more than doubling its representation in Congress. That means his party and allies secured at least one-third of the seats in both chambers — the critical threshold that allows Milei to preserve his veto power and defend his sweeping decrees.
The result, stronger than most polls had predicted, gives Milei fresh political momentum after months of unrest over deep spending cuts and a grinding recession last year. It also shores up his standing with Washington and the International Monetary Fund, which have tied future financial support to the survival of his austerity experiment. Market analysts expect Argentine bonds and the peso to rally when trading opens Monday, reflecting relief that Milei still has political traction after taking office two years ago.
“Ukrainian drones hit the Mariysky oil refinery in Mari El, the Stavrolen chemical plant and the Novospasskoye oil depot.”
Greece sends Ukraine the big guns. “Greece is transferring 60 U.S.-made M110A2 203mm self-propelled howitzers to Ukraine, along with 150,000 shells and thousands of Zuni rockets.”
Finally: “Texas Higher Ed Board Officially Bans In-State Tuition for Illegal Aliens.” Rick Perry was a very conservative governor in many ways, but backing subsidized tuition for illegal aliens was one of his stupidest ideas.
Ken Paxton takes a scalp. “Dallas Doctor Surrenders License After Texas AG Sues For Prescribing Gender Transition Drugs To Minors.” “Paxton announced on Oct. 24 that Dr. May C. Lau has given up her state medical license but that the legal case over her alleged violation of Texas’s ban on gender transition treatment for minors is still ongoing.”
“California’s Retirement Fund Lost 71% Of $468M Investment In Clean Energy And Won’t Say How.” “According to state records analyzed by the Center Square, the CalPERS Clean Energy & Technology Fund (CETF), launched in 2007, has seen its value fall from a total commitment of $468.4 million to $138 million as of March 31, 2025. That represents a loss of more than $330 million, even after paying $22 million in fees and costs to private equity managers.” I’m sure the right pockets got lined. For Democrats, losing taxpayer money is ephemeral, but virtue signaling is forever.
Oklahoma: “State Rep. Ajay Pittman suspected of embezzling campaign funds, forgery, court records show.” Guess the party.
The Peace President keeps on winning. “President Trump participates in a peace treaty, trade and critical mineral agreement signing with the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Cambodia and the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Thailand.”
“A staffer for Democratic Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey was hit with drug trafficking charges after authorities intercepted eight kilograms of cocaine being delivered to a state office building. LaMar Cook, who has served as deputy director of Healey’s western Massachusetts office since 2023, was charged with trafficking over 200 grams of cocaine, unlawful possession of a firearm, and unlawful possession of ammunition related to the bust, Hampden District Attorney Anthony Gulluni announced Wednesday. Multiple parcels containing about 21 kilograms of cocaine have been seized by Massachusetts State Police throughout the investigation into Cook.” Why yes, eight kilos of Peruvian Marching Powder is indeed more than 200 grams. Indeed, that’s the sort of quantity that might keep Hunter Biden supplied into the spring…
Biden’s autopen pardons are the gift that keeps giving. “Thirty-one-year-old Khyre Holbert—a convicted felon whose 20-year crack cocaine and firearm-possession sentence was commuted by former President Joe Biden at the end of his term—was slapped with a felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition charge following his alleged participation in a shooting in Omaha, Nebraska.”
Slam Frank is “Holocaust victim Anne Frank reimagined as a pansexual Latina with non-binary lover and neurodiverse family in controversial NYC musical.” Maybe NYC deserves Mamdani…
The Schumer Shutdown continues, “No Kings” rallies turns out to be a shuffling parade of elderly white dorks, Ukraine continues destroying Russia’s oil infrastructure, that Dutch chip company seizure has bigger ramifications than I anticipated, Canada wants to steal people’s homes, an NBA gambling scandal erupts, and you have a chance to buy a painting from the Iron Lady Collection.
Senate Democrats killed a bill proposed by GOP Sens. Ron Johnson (WI) and Todd Young (IN) that would have paid government essential workers during the extended shutdown.
It failed 54-45. It needed 60 votes to advance.
Only Democrat Sens. John Fetterman (PA), Raphael Warnock (GA), and Jon Ossoff (GA) voted with the Republicans.
“Democrats have voted down the stopgap bill 12 times.”
“How Did California Spend Billions on Homelessness Only for It to Get Worse? Two New Criminal Cases Offer a Clue.” Honestly, the first sentence supplies its own answer even without the second.
How did California manage to spend $24 billion in taxpayer money to address homelessness over the past years, only for the problem to get substantially worse?
The state has not offered any explanation since that figure was revealed in a state audit released earlier this year. But the arrest of two California men on Thursday suggests that at least some of the money may have been stolen through fraud.
Cody Holmes, the former chief financial officer at a downtown Los Angeles-based developer of affordable housing, was arrested on a federal criminal complaint charging him with mail fraud. In a separate case, Steven Taylor is accused of defrauding lenders to aid his property-flipping business. He is charged with seven counts of bank fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft, and one count of money laundering.
The arrests come as part of a larger federal investigation into homelessness funding fraud in the Golden State.
“Accountability begins today,” said acting U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli when he announced the arrests on Thursday. He said the two cases are part of a pattern of the larger misappropriation of billions in state funds meant to combat homelessness.
An audit released by the state in April revealed that California has spent more than $24 billion over the past five years to address the state’s homelessness crisis. The acting U.S. attorney formed a Homelessness Fraud and Corruption Task Force earlier this year to investigate where those tax dollars have gone.
“The two criminal cases announced is only the tip of the iceberg and we intend to aggressively pursue all leads and hold anyone who broke any federal laws criminally liable,” Essayli said.
Holmes, 31, is accused of fraudulently obtaining $25.9 million in state grant money for Shangri-La Industries, the developer of affordable housing for which he served as CFO. That money was intended to be used to purchase, construct, and operate homeless housing in Thousand Oaks under a state project called “Homekey.”
Holmes allegedly knowingly submitted inflated, fake bank records to the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), to falsely prove the company had the capacity to fulfill homeless housing projects. However, authorities say the bank accounts that Holmes said contained these funds did not exist.
Holmes is now accused of using more than $2 million in state grant money to pay credit card bills that he was associated with, including purchases at luxury retailers.
HCD had previously paid millions of dollars to Shangri-La to buy, build, and operate housing for the homeless in Redlands and King City, among other California cities.
If convicted, Holmes faces up to 20 years in federal prison.
Meanwhile, Taylor, 44, is accused of using fake bank statements and false cash representations to obtain loans and lines of credit to operate his real estate business from August 2019 to July 2025.
The Brentwood man is also accused of lying to lenders about his intended use of various properties. He allegedly lied to the lender behind his purchase of a Cheviot Hills property, telling the lender he intended to renovate and use the property himself. However, he apparently had already contracted to sell the property, which he bought for $11.2 million thanks to a loan acquired through the use of fake bank statements. He was contracted to sell the property to a homeless housing developer who was purchasing the property with public funds from the city of Los Angeles and the state of California for $27.3 million in a double-escrow transaction hidden from the victim lender and others.
If convicted, Taylor would face up to 30 years in federal prison for each bank fraud count, up to ten years in federal prison for the money laundering count, and a two-year prison sentence for the aggravated identity theft count.
I’m sure this is only the tip of the Homeless Industrial Complex iceberg…
Speaking of homeless industrial complex fraud: “FBI raids homes of Charlotte activist Cedric Dean in health care fraud investigation.”
The FBI raided the home of Cedric Dean, a well-known community activist in Charlotte’s Palisades neighborhood, on Thursday.
The search is part of a federal investigation into an alleged multi-million dollar health care fraud scheme, according to federal court documents released to Queen City News.
A spokesperson for the FBI confirmed on Thursday that agents were “engaged in court-authorized investigative activity,” but did not offer further details.
Court documents obtained by QCN reveal that Dean and his company, Cedric Dean Holdings, are accused of fraudulently billing Medicaid for mental health services that were never provided. Investigators said Dean targeted vulnerable people, including those experiencing homelessness, in exchange for their Medicaid information, offering food or temporary shelter in return.
Dean allegedly submitted inflated or false claims to Medicaid, sometimes using fake diagnoses, and paid staff and recruiters through services like CashApp. Authorities said his company billed roughly $1 million per month and operated without enough staff to actually provide care.
“They’ve lost culture… Calling someone a Democrat is an insult,” Travis noted, adding “Calling someone a Kamala voter is an insult. This is white, black, Asian, Hispanic: young men across America are over the BS that they saw at this No Kings rally.”
“Look at the dance. These are huge dorks. They have no power. They are losers. No one wants to hang out with them,” Travis continued, pointing to the event as emblematic of the party’s disconnect.
“They’re old, 1960s protesters who now are on the side that they used to protest against. They don’t realize that the world has shifted around them and they are awkward lunatics,” he further emphasized.
No Kings? They don’t mean it, as they rebranded as “No Tyrants” in countries with monarchies.
“Ukraine hit Russia’s Novokuybyshevsk refinery in Samara, one of Rosneft’s key plants, processing 8.8M tons of crude annually, about 3% of Russia’s total refining capacity,” some 1,000km from Ukraine.
Hamas is carrying out the terms of the ceasefire every bit as well as you would expect. “After Attack on Troops, Israel Hits Hamas Terror Targets in Gaza BBC. Hamas carried out ‘multiple attacks against Israeli forces beyond the yellow line.'”
Israel struck terrorist targets in southern Gaza after Hamas terrorists attacked its troops located inside the agreed ceasefire line, violating the U.S.-brokered agreement. “The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out airstrikes in the Rafah area on Sunday morning in response to violations of the ceasefire by Hamas,” the Israeli TV channel i24NEWS reported.
In response to Hamas’s action, the Israeli military targeted terror tunnels used in the sneak attacks. “Earlier, an IED or anti-tank explosion struck near an IDF engineering vehicle in the same area,” the broadcaster added. “Reports from Gaza indicate the strikes targeted Hamas positions shortly after the terror group fired an anti-tank missile at IDF forces.”
Trump’s genius wasn’t getting an agreement that would bring lasting peace for all time, it was getting the remaining living hostages out before Hamas inevitably violated the ceasefire.
“Palestinian illegal alien arrested by FBI for participating in October 7th terror attack.” “The complaint described the man, identified in court documents as Mahmoud Amin Ya’qub al-Muhtadi, as an operative for a paramilitary group in Gaza that has fought alongside Hamas.” Naturally, the media refers to him as “Louisiana Man.”
“Haitians who replaced American workers in tiny Pennsylvania town will be unemployed as factory shuts down.” “Many of these migrants were employed by a meatpacking plant known as Fourth Street Barbecue, also operating under the name Fourth Street Foods. They displaced native-born workers, drained local resources, and wired their paychecks overseas to third-world countries.”
One day after German tabloid newspaper Bild reported that Volkswagen had suspended production of the Golf at its Wolfsburg factory due to a worsening semiconductor shortage caused by a supply stoppage of Nexperia chips, the Dutch chipmaker, recently seized by the Netherlands government, warned Japanese automakers on Thursday that it may no longer be able to guarantee chip supply. The chip crisis spreading from Europe to Japan has set off alarm bells across the industry.
Bloomberg reports that the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association (JAMA) has confirmed that its members, Toyota, Nissan, and Honda, have received warnings from Nexperia about chip supply woes and are working with customers to mitigate disruptions.
JAMA cautioned that chip shortages could have a “serious impact” on global auto production and urged governments to reach a “prompt and practical solution.”
“The chips manufactured by the affected manufacturers are important parts used in electronic control units, etc., and we recognize that this incident will have a serious impact on the global production of our member companies,” JAMA wrote in a statement, adding, “We hope that the countries involved will come to a prompt and practical solution.”
There’s something weird going on here. Any global manufacturing giant worth it’s salt should have second-source contingency plans for such lowly parts as semiconductor discretes. Even in Europe, there are other discrete manufacturers like Infineion and STMicroelctronics. Somebody (or a whole lot of somebodies) dropped the ball here.
“In just 7 minutes, thieves allegedly mounted a ladder, stole priceless jewels from the Louvre and fled on motor scooters.” No painstaking disarming of the alarm system? No sophisticated computer intrusion? No hanging from a cable to avoid triggering the floor alarm? Just smashing windows and cases with brute force? The ghosts of a century’s worth of French screenplay writers sigh in disappointment…
Welcome to Richmond, British Columbia, a suburb of Metro Vancouver.
This is a letter the city sent to residents to notify them that their home might belong to the natives who once camped there 200 years ago.
Please take note that the recent BC Supreme Court decision of Cowichan Tribes v Canada, 2025 BCSC 1490 made some very important decisions which could negatively affect the title to your property. A briefing paper prepared by City of Richmond staff is attached for your reference.
If you look at the draft map attached to the briefing, your property is located within the Claim Area outlined in green. For those whose property is in the area outlined in black, the Court has declared aboriginal title to your property which may compromise the status and validity of your ownership – this was mandated without any prior notice to the landowners. The entire area outlined in green is claimed on appeal by the Cowichan First Nations.
Snip.
A liberal female judge issued an 863-page ruling ordering that private properties, some of which have been in families for generations, must return to the hands of a nomadic tribe that once loosely lived on the land hundreds of years ago, long before anyone who is currently alive was ever born.
This matter was so important to the judge and other liberal allies that it was the “longest trial in Canada’s history.” It is also seen as setting a precedent for confiscating property across the nation.
Now you know why the radical left keeps pushing those bullshit “land acknowledgements.”
A tenured professor at the University of Texas at Austin says he was dismissed from his senior administrative post due to “ideological differences,” marking the latest shake-up in Texas’ statewide effort to reform higher education and curb campus DEI influence.
Last week, Art Markman posted that UT leadership had dismissed him in late September as academic affairs senior vice provost.
Climate activist David Bookbinder admits its a shakedown. “Essentially, the tort liability is an indirect carbon tax. You sue an oil company, an oil company is liable, the oil company then passes that liability on to the people who are buying its products.”
NBA gambling scandal: “ESPN is reporting the arrest of Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups. Also arrested: Terry Rozier, guard for the Miami Heat.”
Billups, an NBA Hall of Famer, has been charged with partaking in an alleged illegal poker ring tied to the Bonanno, Genovese and Colombo crime families, sources told The Post.
A total of 31 people across the country are charged with running rigged games, which took place in Manhattan, the Hamptons and Las Vegas, sources said.
The players involved were being paid by mobsters to play in card games fixed with technology and card shuffling machines to give the house the advantage, sources familiar with the case said.
The athletes were told to take a dive when they had to and win when they were told. It didn’t appear as if they were attempting to pay off any debts, sources said.
Rozier is being charged with point-shaving.
Director Blue has a lot more details about the mob guys running the games, and the sophisticated technologies used, like special contact lenses to read marked cards, cryptocurrency money laundering and x-ray tables.
The Critical Drinker walks through every Disney Star Wars film, how much they cost, and how much they made or lost. Since they received substantial tax credits for filming in the UK, they evidently had to submit real numbers rather than the usual Hollywood Accounting bullshit. The Force Awakens evidently cost $638.9 million to make, which would probably rank it as the most expensive film of all time.
In the wake of the social justice madness that metastasized across America in the Biden years, a whole lot of things past generations took for granted now have to be spelled out. Things like: “There are only two sexes, male and female, biologically determined before birth.” Or “official government discrimination based on race is wrong.” Or “facial tattoos are not an advantage when seeking gainful employment.” Add to that list “Only American citizens should be allowed to vote.” You would think that would be a given, but blue states like Minnesota are handing our driver’s licenses like candy and accept that as proof of citizenship for voting. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, along with a lot of other state AGs, is trying to do something about it.
Attorney General Ken Paxton has joined with 13 other states in support of a rulemaking petition that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.
Paxton filed a multistate comment with the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) backing a petition by America First Legal Foundation (AFL) to amend federal voter registration regulations. The proposed change would tighten election integrity rules under the National Voter Registration Act by mandating documentary proof of U.S. citizenship on federal voter registration forms.
“It’s imperative that only eligible U.S. citizens are registering and voting in our elections,” Paxton said. “Free and fair elections are the cornerstone of our Republic, and every illegal vote dilutes the voice of law-abiding American citizens. We must require proof of citizenship to protect the voice of the true American people, which is why I’m leading this national coalition in supporting AFL’s rulemaking petition.”
The filing argues that the current voter registration process—based on self-attestation of citizenship—fails to adequately safeguard voter rolls from ineligible registrations.
Paxton and the coalition of attorneys general urged the EAC to revise its regulations to allow states to verify citizenship status more effectively and maintain accurate voter lists.
Paxton also referenced President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14248, Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections, issued earlier this year. The order directs federal agencies to strengthen election security and prevent unlawful voting.
Snip.
The attorneys general of Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Nebraska, Ohio, South Carolina, South Dakota, and West Virginia joined Paxton.
Again, that only citizens should vote in American elections should go without saying. But even here in Texas, a state with strong voter ID laws the state government tries to actively enforce, over 2,000 non-citizens were registered to vote.
After running its entire list of more than 18 million voters through the SAVE database, Texas has identified 2,724 potential noncitizens who are registered to vote in the state.
Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced Monday that her office had completed a full comparison of the state’s voter registration list against data in the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ SAVE database.
SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) is an online service for government agencies to verify the immigration status and naturalized/acquired U.S. citizenship of applicants seeking benefits or licenses.
“Only eligible United States citizens may participate in our elections,” stated Secretary Nelson. “The Trump Administration’s decision to give states free and direct access to this data set for the first time has been a game changer, and we appreciate the partnership with the federal government to verify the citizenship of those on our voter rolls and maintain accurate voter lists.”
Nelson announced in June that Texas had become one of the first states to partner with USCIS to compare its voter list with SAVE data. In its initial review, the agency found 33 potential noncitizens who may have voted illegally in the November 2024 election and referred them to the Office of the Attorney General.
In a state that had 18.6 million registered voters in 2024, 2,724 may seem like a tiny sum. But Texas is a deep red state that takes voting fraud very seriously. How many orders of magnitude worse is the situation in blue states where Democrats have actively destroyed safeguards with the explicit goal of getting more illegal aliens registered to vote?
Ever since Steve Adler and the Austin City Council voted to let drug addicted transients camp on Austin streets, the city has been a magnet for sturdy beggars across the state They flocked to Austin to “party,” a situation only partially cured by reinstating the “camping” ban. After proposition B, the larger homeless camps were cleared, but smaller ones continued to exist around the city.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been more than critical of the move from the very beginning, threatening state action to clean up Austin’s mess:
Look at this insanity caused by Austin’s reckless homeless policy.
All state-imposed solutions are on the table including eliminating local sovereign immunity for damages and injuries like this caused by a city’s homeless policy.
According to this press release, Abbott is finally following through on his threats.
Governor Greg Abbott today announced an operation dedicated to making Austin safer and cleaner by relocating homeless individuals and removing encampments in and around the capital city and state property.
“Texans should not endure public safety risks from homeless encampments and individuals,” said Governor Abbott. “Weapons, needles, and other debris should not litter the streets of our community, and the State of Texas is taking action. I directed state agencies to address this risk and make Austin safer and cleaner for residents and visitors to live, travel, and conduct business.”
The operation, led by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) in close coordination with the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), the Texas State Guard, and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), has led to a cleaner, safer Austin.
Homeless individuals violating state law or local ordinances will be arrested and debris created by homeless encampments will be removed. Since the operation began late last week, Texas has arrested numerous individuals for a variety of criminal offenses, and removed firearms, drug paraphernalia, and encampments from public areas across Austin.
Since the operation began late last week, The State of Texas has:
Removed 48 encampments
Removed over 3,000 pounds of debris
Arrested 24 repeat felony offenders
Seized over 125 grams of narcotics
During the camp cleanup operations, ten subjects have been found to have outstanding warrants. Several of these individuals were identified in their warrants as being armed and dangerous and exhibiting violent tendencies. One subject was wanted out of state for Aggravated Escape from Custody. Additionally, 24 of the subjects arrested were identified as repeat felony offenders.
This is good news, and getting any repeat felons off the streets makes things safer for law-abiding Austinites. There are a few news stories on the cleanup, but none that I can see with any more details than are in the governor’s press release. In particular, I’m not seeing a map of those 48 cleared camps. I haven’t traveled around to see if the (generally very small) homeless camps in northwest Travis and southern Williamson counties have been cleared, but I suspect they haven’t.
Though, what do you know, the City of Austin has announced they’re doing homeless camp cleanups as well “according to a memo from Director of Austin Homeless Strategies and Operations David Gray.”
“According to another memo obtained by KXAN regarding results from the first day of that surge, the city cleaned up 46 encampments and visited 29 more for outreach Monday. ‘Most people agreed to leave voluntarily, and staff connected several people to shelter and/or additional services.'” Well, if they’re in the shelter, it’s easier for the Homeless Industrial Complex to rake money off them. I also wonder if they’re just double-counting the sites state troopers already cleared.
Alder and the Austin City Council’s foolish policies put Austin in a deep hole in terms of dealing with the drug-addicted lunatics lured here. It will probably take more homeless site cleanups before they move elsewhere.
Another off-year local and Texas Constitutional Amendment election has snuck up again, and early voting for it started today.
Let’s take a look at those amendments and whether you should vote for or against them. And, what do you know, Texas Scorecard has already done a roundup incorporating analysis from of Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, True Texas Project, Texas Policy Research, and Texas Eagle Forum. There’s a lot of unanimity, with a few notable exceptions. Scorecard’s links are to the bill’s legislative tracking page, but I’ve drilled down slightly deeper to link to the actual text of the bills in question.
Proposition 1 (SJR 59): Creating funds to support the capital needs of educational programs offered by the Texas State Technical College System.
TFR: Oppose
TTP: Oppose
TPR: Oppose
TEF: Oppose
My analysis: Texas higher education has done a poor job with the money they’ve already been allotted, and shouldn’t get big new piles of it, especially until the taint of social justice has been completely eradicated from the system. My recommendation: Oppose.
Proposition 2 (SJR 18): Banning taxes on the realized or unrealized capital gains of an individual, family, estate, or trust.
TFR: Support
TTP: Support
TPR: Support
TEF: Support
My analysis: This is a preemptive strike against the loony left idea of taxing unrealized capital gains, an absolutely insane idea guaranteed to discourage investment and destroy the economy. My recommendation: Support.
Proposition 3 (SJR 5): Denying bail under certain circumstances to persons accused of certain offenses punishable as a felony.
TFR: Neutral
TTP: Support
TPR: Oppose
TEF: Oppose
My analysis: This amendment has the most split verdict of any of them. Conservatives see law and order breaking down in blue cities thanks to Democrat judges letting repeat felons out on trivial bonds. Libertarians see this measure as possibly violating due process rights. But the problem we’re seeing on places like Harris County stem from letting criminals walk rather than too many innocent citizens being denied bail. My recommendation: Support, but I expect any gains in keeping more dangerous repeat offenders off the streets will be minimal as long as those same (frequently Soros-backed) Democrat judges are in office.
Proposition 4 (HJR 7, enabling legislation HB 16): Dedicating a portion of state sales and use tax revenues to the Texas water fund and to provide for the allocation and use of that revenue.
TFR: Oppose
TTP: Oppose
TPR: Oppose
TEF: Oppose
My analysis: Water is a largely local issue, and should be handled at the local level, not using a statewide slush fund. My recommendation: Oppose.
Proposition 5 (HJR 99, enabling legislation HB 1399): Exempting from ad valorem taxation tangible personal property consisting of animal feed held by the owner of the property for sale at retail.
TFR: Support
TTP: Support
TPR: Support
TEF: Support
My analysis: For those outside of Texas, most food you buy in a grocery store here isn’t taxed (save junk food like candy, etc.). This adds animal feed to the sales tax exemption list, which will help out Texas farmers. My recommendation: Support.
Proposition 6 (HJR 4): Prohibits the Legislature from imposing an occupation tax on certain entities that enter into transactions conveying securities or imposing a tax on certain securities transactions.
TFR: Support
TTP: Support
TPR: Support
TEF: Support
My analysis: This makes sure that security trading venues like the new Dallas Stock Exchange don’t get hit with transaction taxes that would drive them away. My recommendation: Support.
Proposition 7 (HJR 133): Providing for an exemption from ad valorem taxation of all or part of the market value of the residence homestead of the surviving spouse of a veteran who died as a result of a condition or disease that is presumed to have been service-connected.
TFR: Support
TTP: Oppose
TPR: Support
TEF: Neutral
My analysis: Another split decision. While theoretically an extension of the war widow exemption, it gets off into the weeds, especially when it specifies that the surviving spouse cannot have remarried. My recommendation: Neutral.
Proposition 8 (HJR 2): Prohibiting the Legislature from imposing death taxes applicable to a decedent’s property or the transfer of an estate, inheritance, legacy, succession, or gift.
TFR: Support
TTP: Support
TPR: Support
TEF: Support
My analysis: If we could fund the entire government off death and land taxes instead of income taxes, I could get behind that. But that’s not the world we live in. Texas doesn’t have an estate or inheritance tax, and doesn’t need one, and that fact provides incentive for wealthy individuals in state that do have those (New York and Illinois among them) to move here. My recommendation: Support.
Proposition 9 (HJR 1, enabling legislation HB 9): Exempting from ad valorem taxation a portion of the market value of tangible personal property a person owns that is held or used for the production of income.
TFR: Support
TTP: Support
TPR: Support
TEF: Support
My analysis: This is a big, welcome jump from the current $2,500 exemption, and will help small businesses keep more of their own money. My recommendation: Support.
My analysis: Stands to reason you shouldn’t be taxed for property that burned down, but this seems oddly specific. Maybe it’s a result of the screwage that California property owners are getting after the Pacific Palisades fire. My recommendation: Support.
My analysis: Interestingly, the institutes oppose this because it isn’t broad-based tax reform. True, but I favor it because you can’t let the best slay the better, and because I’ll be eligible for it entirely too soon. My recommendation: Support.
Proposition 12 (SJR 27, enabling legislation SB 293): Relating to the authority of the State Commission on Judicial Conduct, the tribunal, and the Texas Supreme Court to more effectively sanction judges and justices for judicial misconduct.
TFR: Neutral
TTP: Support
TPR: Support
TEF: Support
My analysis: This effectively removes two seats appointed by the Texas State Bar Association and replaces adds those seats to those appointed by the governor. Bar Associations all across the country have been infected by social justice, and this removes another potential infection vector. My recommendation: Support.
My analysis: Once again the think tanks are bellyaching that this isn’t the broad-based elimination of the property tax they wanted. Get over it, and don’t let the best slay the better. And this one will benefit me personally. My recommendation: Support.
My analysis: Important cause, but let individual institutions and foundations pay for the research on this, not create a state-run slush-fund for the connected. My recommendation: Oppose.
My analysis: This is to head off those radical leftists that declare that children belong to the state, and those states using that power to oppose transsexual madness on children behind parent’s backs. True Texas Project opposes it because it doesn’t think it should even have to be stated, but a lot of obvious things now have to be spelled out thanks to the madness of social justice here in the crazy years. My recommendation: Support.
Proposition 17 (HJR 34, enabling legislation HB 247): Providing an exemption from ad valorem taxation of the amount of the market value of real property located in a county that borders the United Mexican States that arises from the installation or construction on the property of border security infrastructure and related improvements.
TFR: Support
TTP: Support
TPR: Support
TEF: Support
My analysis: This just means that property owners can’t be taxed extra for the border wall. My recommendation: Support.
Kash Patel is following the money, and may soon release the answer to who’s funding and controlling domestic terrorists Antifa:
FBI Director Kash Patel tells Just the News that the bureau is “on the verge” of unmasking the command structure and financing for anarchist groups like Antifa that have unleashed unrest around America and has also identified potential new criminal activity related to the abuse of federal law enforcement and intelligence.
“We are looking at so many different leads on criminal activity by those who are in positions of power, and we’re not going to stop until every single one of those is fully exposed,” Patel said during a wide-ranging interview this week on the “Just the News, No Noise” television show.
When asked whether more indictments against those accused of weaponizing government may be ahead, he said: “the documents are provided either to Congress or the courts of law and we make every referral we can under the Department of Justice.
“These indictments that you’ve seen, and the ones that you’re going to see coming up here in this near future, are just the beginning,” he added.
The director, a close ally of President Donald Trump, has pressed his team to uncover tens of thousands of pages of documents long withheld from Congress that chronicle abuses by law enforcement and intelligence agencies in scandals spanning from Russiagate and Ukraine impeachment to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and the raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
Those documents have already led to the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly making false statements to thwart Congress during an investigation of news leaks and the indictment Thursday of former National Security Advisor John Bolton for the mishandling of classified information.
Patel asked Americans to be patient, saying some of the abuses of a weaponized government were systematically built over many years and are complex to unravel.
“I have to remind the audience of one thing. Everybody’s like, it’s seven months. What have you guys been doing? Well, they spent 20 years building this diseased temple of corruption,” he said. “It takes a little bit of time to defeat it and beat it down. I’m not asking you to trust me. I’m asking you to look at the work the men and women of the FBI have done so far in these seven, eight months, and just imagine what we’re going to do come the year’s end.”
Patel said one area where the FBI has made rapid progress is the tracking of financing and command structures of anarchist groups like Antifa that have fomented unrest in American cities, attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rounding up illegal immigrants and antisemitic movements on college campuses.
He said there are indications that some support may come from overseas enemies and U.S. nonprofit groups that have tax exemptions from the IRS.
“Look, the thing I can tell you is that money doesn’t lie, and the thing we’re doing at the FBI is following the money,” Patel explained. “And thanks to President Trump, we now have Antifa designated, rightfully so, as a domestic terror organization. And we have had multiple investigations going on.”
Patel said those probes are “mapping out the money, and we are using social media and the influencers that the President had here just this last week, because they’re the ones on the ground, getting us ground level intelligence, because law enforcement isn’t able to enter these spaces, and these people are brave enough to do it.”
Here’s Glenn Beck breaking down the various moving parts of Antifa, from the foot soldiers to the funders:
If you’ve been following the story on BattleSwarm (see here and here, just for starters), a lot of the names (George Soros, Tides Foundation, Alliance for Global justice, Open Society Foundations, ActBlue, etc.) are familiar, though he’s missing Arabella Associates, and Fidelity and Schwab are going to be a shock for some.
“Look, I’m I am not accusing anyone here. I’m just saying this is pretty much off the top of my head. I’m just showing the connections that have a very strong odor attached to them. And I’ve followed these people long enough to know this is the way it works.”
I’m hoping Patel has enough evidence to decapitate all the hydra heads once and for all.
