Friday we reported the assassination of IRCG commander Mahmoud Haqiqat in Iranshahr.
Now, in a Livestream, TousiTV is reporting the assassination of other IRCG officials:
“Reza Kasab, head of a ballistic missile unit in Kashan, this was a professional hit. He was assassinated by a suicide drone attack.”
“There are a lot of operatives on the ground carrying out these attacks.”
“Multiple generals have been killed in Iran.”
He notes that Israel’s strikes last year killed multiple senior IRGC officials, so now the replacement leaders are being killed.
“Islamic State TV in Iran have confirmed that IRCG have lost hundreds of their personnel in leadership.” My suspicion is that the IRCG have lost hundreds, but not all in leadership.
Reports of Mossad agents on the ground helping the revolution. This is the sort of thing that both sides in the conflict would say to help shore up resolve in their respective bases, but the drone attack suggests it’s true. (Could also be IDF special forces, CIA, or U.S. special forces.)
But it carries more weight when it comes from Mossad’s official Farsi Twitter account. “Go out together into the streets. The time has come. We are with you. Not only from a distance and verbally. We are with you in the field.”
“There is someone professional carrying out these attacks against the Islamic occupation in Iran.”
“Reza Pahlavi has called for a general strike.” But everybody’s already on strike.
Reports of atrocities committed by the regime against the people (of course). “Over 2,000 people have been killed.”
Israel’s military is on full alert, and Iran is threatening to launch “over 500” missiles at them.
Caveats: Tousi TV is run by Mahyar Tousi, a fierce critic of Iran’s Islamist regime, so he’s more cheerleader for the revolution than a neutral observer. So am I, but I always council caution on believing good news you want to believe. But several elements of what Tousi has stated here appear to check out.
Those are just a few early highlights of a livestream that’s still ongoing.
There are already rumors circulating that the regime is flying gold to Russia in advance of Ali Khamenei bugging out to Moscow.
Things in Iran moving very fast indeed.
Update: Tousi has a livestream with the teaser “Trump is sending help” scheduled for 2:45 PM…
Update 2:
From that Livestream: “President Trump confirms he will be sending help to the Iranian people.”
Iranian people continue to occupy the streets of Tehran in defiance of the regime’s armed threats.
“There is a President in the White House who supports them.”
“They’re not going back to work. There’s no work. There’s no money. There’s no light. There’s no water.”
IDF hitting Hezbollah in Lebanon.
U.S.: “Multiple military options.” Including cybersupport.
Heh: “Lindsey Graham doing Lindsey Graham things.”
“Reza Pahlavi is coming.”
Protesters are disarming regime forces on the street.
Now the regime is trying to jam Starlink.
U.S. forces have been hitting Islamic State targets in Syria. (Not sure how relevant this is to Iran. The Islamic State considers shiia heretical so, unlike Hamas or Hezbollah, are unlikely to help the regime.)
Reports of regime forces seizing satellite dishes.
Iran teeters, Walz falls, more Russia’s shadow fleet has an epically bad week, more Minnesota Somali fraud fallout, more computer security vulnerabilities, and a policeman transformed into a frog using the power of AI! Plus the Austro-Hungarian and Achaemenid empires. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Personally, this week has been deeply frustrating, as I’ve been trying to withdraw money from my 401K account to pay my property taxes, a process I began mid-December, and it’s still not done. “Oh, these things take time,’ says 401K company. Then it’s “Oh, we haven’t heard back from your former employers.” Former employer: “Oh, we haven’t received the request from your 401K company.” Then: “Oh, the third party company we hired to handle 401K requests hasn’t received the request.” Now it’s “Oh, they’ve just started working on it, but they’re always slow at the end of the year.” It’s frustrating to have to jump through so many hoops to access my own money.
On to the LinkSwarm!
From the outside, it’s hard to tell how serious the chances of protesters are to free their own country, but they’re so fed up with the mullah’s rule that they’re burning mosques.
Iranian protestors demonstrating against the theocratic regime will face harsh punishment with absolutely zero leniency, Iran’s top judge has warned — as footage emerged Friday of mosques burning on the streets of Tehran amid the ongoing riots.
Chief Justice Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, the head of Iran’s judiciary, issued the stark warning after President Trump vowed to back those peacefully demonstrating across the country.
Signaling a potentially violent crackdown, Ejei vowed the punishment for rioters would “be decisive, maximum and without any legal leniency.”
Protesters gather as vehicles burn in Tehran, Iran.
Things in Iran seem to be moving very fast indeed…
“Authorities report that Mahmoud Haqiqat, a police station commander in Iranshahr, Iran’s southeastern Sistan and Baluchestan Province, was shot and killed by unknown assailants this week in a drive-by attack. Video circulating online appears to show gunmen firing on Haqiqat’s vehicle before it crashed. Social posts and video descriptions identify him as the former head of the city’s intelligence and allege that he was involved in operations targeting anti-regime Baluch groups in the area.” Add Balochs to Kurds and Lurs as ethnic minorities pissed at the mullah’s government. There’s also a substantial Baloch population in Pakistan, and they don’t like the Pakistani government either. Hell, history records the Balochs rebelling against the Achaemenid Empire three millennia ago…
With constant pressure from liberal activists, some states now dispatch mail-in ballots 45 to 60 days before Election Day and allow the counting of such absentee votes as many as three weeks afterward, creating an election trimester that causes vote tallies to wildly fluctuate days after polls close and increasingly erodes Americans’ trust.
But conservatives are now fighting back, first with an executive order by President Donald Trump requiring all ballots to be counted on election night, followed by a challenge to Mississippi’s counting process that has not reached the U.S. Supreme Court and then the Ohio legislature’s vote to require all its ballots to arrive on election night to be tallied.
“It’s common sense that ballots should arrive by Election Day,” Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose told Just the News this week after his state became the 35th to require mail-in ballots to arrive by Election Night in order to be counted. Previously, the state had a four-day grace period for ballots to arrive after Election Day.
“I think that trying to reduce complexity should be our goal in government, and certainly when it comes to the rules for how elections run,” LaRose said in a wide-ranging interview with the John Solomon Reports podcast. “If you were to stop the average person on the street last year and say, what’s the deadline for your ballot to get back to the board of elections, they would not know that it’s four days after. It’s kind of an arbitrary date.”
The National Conference of State Legislatures reported that many states now mail out ballots as early as 45 days to two months before Election Day and about a dozen states allow them to be counted days later — as long as three weeks afterward in Washington state, 14 days in Illinois, 10 days in Maryland and seven days in California and New York.
Tim Walz is dropping his bid for a third term as governor of Minnesota amid a national political firestorm sparked by the identification of massive welfare fraud in the state’s Somali community.
Walz released a statement Monday morning ahead of a late morning press conference announcing his withdrawal from the race.
“But as I reflected on this moment with my family and my team over the holidays, I came to the conclusion that I can’t give a political campaign my all. Every minute I spend defending my own political interests would be a minute I can’t spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity and the cynics who prey on our differences,” Walz said. “So I’ve decided to step out of the race and let others worry about the election while I focus on the work.”
Translation: “I got caught, and I need to see if I can get away from this giant pile of graft as quickly as possible.”
Walz and fellow Minnesota Democrats have been subjected to withering attacks at the hands of Trump and his allies over the staggering scale of welfare fraud that’s taken place under their noses in recent years. Federal prosecutors announced last month that the cost of the welfare fraud perpetrated against state-run Medicaid services alone could exceed $9 billion, half or more of the $18 billion paid out since 2018.
A federal probe into the matter has been initiated, and Minnesota officials have until January 9 to provide the administration with more information regarding who is receiving the welfare benefits in the state.
It’s amazing that anyone can give Gavin Newsom a run for the title of America’s Most Incompetent Governor, but Walz is just that special.
It’s been going on a while. “Minnesota Inspector General [Carolyn Ham] covered up hundreds of millions in Somali childcare fraud in 2018.”
You know how the Somali childcare fraud has been a big thing, kind of an open secret in Minnesota for years now?
Well, not only has this been happening for at least a decade, but, according to this report, the state has known about it for at least that long.
Check out these receipts from Maze on X detailing a nine-year-old investigation into the fraud at Minnesota’s Child Care Assistance Program — an investigation that went nowhere.
The Minnesota child care fraud saga is so strange because years ago it was fully investigated, documented, and reported on by a team of state investigators set up to catch and stop child care fraud.
They spent years gathering evidence including many hours of surveillance footage. In 2018 they compiled a detailed report and delivered it to their boss, the DHS Inspector General.
Directly from the report: ‘Investigators, as well as the Supervisor and Manager of this unit believe that the overall fraud rate in this program is at least 50% of the $217M paid to child care centers in CY2017.’
What did the Inspector General do with this information? She refused to meet with her own team, refused to discuss the findings of the report, and then spent $90,000 of taxpayer money to have an outside company write a report saying the fraud isn’t quite as bad as her own team of investigators was claiming.
Woke is a heckuva drug, isn’t it?
So is corruption, scamming, and Democratic politics in general.
Former Wall Street Journal reporter Asra Nomani, now at Fox News, is investigating the left-wing, billionaire-funded dark money networks in the nonprofit world and offering much-needed coverage for mainstream Americans on how these NGOs influence protest movements, unleash riots, and conduct sophisticated political pressure campaigns.
Snip.
Key details from the report:
MacKenzie Scott disclosed sending at least $5 million in a new round of donations to the Solidaire Network, on top of a $10 million gift in 2021 via her philanthropy vehicle, Yield Giving.
Solidaire funds a network of radical anti-Israel activist groups, including Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, both of which are under House and Senate investigation for alleged coordination with Hamas-linked activities.
Other Solidaire-backed groups include the Palestinian Youth Movement and the US Palestinian Community Network, which publicly justified Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
Scott’s grants are unrestricted, allowing recipients to spend funds freely. Solidaire used this flexibility to finance campaigns promoting “Palestinian liberation,” campus protests, and direct-action activism, including efforts to block U.S. military logistics supporting Israel.
Funding was often routed through fiscal sponsors such as WESPAC Foundation and Tides Foundation, structures that have drawn scrutiny from Republican lawmakers investigating possible links to extremist groups.
Scott’s cumulative charitable giving has reached roughly $26 billion since 2019, surpassing the lifetime donations of George Soros, and placing her at the center of growing political controversy over billionaire-funded activist networks.
The Somali ambassador to the United Nations, Abukar Dahir Osman, who is tied to a daycare company in Ohio under investigation in Washington, might have acquired an American citizenship fraudulently, according to a source in Somaliland.
Ambassador Osman, who currently serves as the rotating president of the UN Security Council, first entered America in the mid-1980s and again in 1989. He claimed to be a refugee of a minority in Somaliland persecuted by the Somali regime at the time, a Somaliland ambassador at large who tweets under the name of Haggoogane, tells the Sun via text.
Haggoogane, whose real name is Mustafa Osman but is unrelated to the ambassador, says that the current Somali UN ambassador was far from a refugee fearing extermination by the Somali regime. Instead, he tells the Sun, the UN ambassador was part of that regime in the late 1980s. “His job was to identify anyone the regime saw as a threat,” Haggoogane says.
Between 1960 and 1991 the government of Somalia killed hundreds of thousands of ethnic Isaaq and others in Somaliland, which declared independence of Mogadishu in 1991.
Following Israel’s recognition of Somaliland last month, the Israeli foreign minister, Gideon Sa’ar, visited its capital, Hargeisa, on Tuesday, and met with President Abdirahman Mohamed Abdullahi. After Israel became the first UN member to recognize Somaliland’s independence, Mr. Osman, the Somali UN ambassador, convened an “emergency session” of the security council.
At Washington on Tuesday, the deputy secretary at the Department of Health and Human Service, Jim O’Neill, confirmed a rumor regarding the Somali ambassador, which has long been whispered in UN corridors.
“I can confirm public speculation that Ambassador Abukar Dahir Osman, Permanent Representative of Somalia to the UN and President of the Security Council, is in fact associated with Progressive Health Care Services, a home health agency in Cincinnati,” Mr. O’Neill wrote on X. “HHS has previously taken action against Progressive in response to a conviction for Medicaid fraud. More to come.”
The United States seized a Russian-flagged oil tanker in the North Atlantic this week while also intercepting a separate stateless “dark fleet” vessel tied to Venezuelan oil exports, US officials said, marking a significant escalation in Washington’s enforcement campaign against sanctioned energy shipments.
According to US officials, the Russian-flagged tanker Marinera, previously known as Bella-1, was seized on Wednesday near Iceland after being tracked for more than two weeks across the Atlantic, reports Reuters. The operation occurred as Russian military assets, including a submarine, were operating in the general area, though officials said there were no signs of confrontation.
In a post on X, US European Command said the tanker was seized for violating US sanctions. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded, writing, “The blockade of sanctioned and illicit Venezuelan oil remains in FULL EFFECT — anywhere in the world.”
Two US officials said the operation was carried out by the US Coast Guard with support from the US military. The Coast Guard declined to comment. Russian officials have not issued a response, though Russian state media outlet RT published an image showing a helicopter hovering near the ship.
The Marinera had previously evaded US enforcement efforts in the Caribbean and refused boarding attempts. After those encounters, it re-registered under a Russian flag and changed its name, officials said. Sources indicated the vessel may now be heading toward British territorial waters, though its final destination has not been confirmed. The UK Ministry of Defence declined to comment.
Separately, US Southern Command confirmed that the Coast Guard intercepted another tanker, the Panama-flagged M/T Sophia, in Latin American waters early Wednesday. The vessel was described as a “stateless, sanctioned dark fleet motor tanker” linked to Venezuelan oil shipments.
U.S. First Assistant Attorney Bill Essayli Thursday called California Gov. Gavin Newsom “the king of fraud,” accusing him of a lack of oversight on spending to address homelessness.
Essayli made the comments on the “Fox and Friends” telecast, during which he discussed the federal fraud charges that were filed in October against real estate executives Steven Taylor and Cody Holmes for allegedly misusing grant money meant for homeless housing.
Holmes, 31, of Beverly Hills was charged with mail fraud charge that was allegedly linked to millions of dollars in grant money that the state paid Shangri-La Industries to purchase, build and operate homeless housing in Thousand Oaks, just north of Los Angeles. Holmes was Shangri-La’s chief financial officer.
Taylor, 44, of Brentwood, was charged with seven counts of bank fraud, one count of aggravated identity theft and one count of money laundering.
Essayli Thursday said the charges are the “tip of the iceberg” in an investigation he launched with a task force in April. He said more charges would be coming, probably later this month.
The state spent $24 billion in the last five years to address homelessness and can’t account for where the money went, Essayli said on “Fox and Friends.”
California Democrats: “Hey, let’s institute a wealth tax on billionaires!” California billionaires: “See ya!”
A ballot measure that could tax the wealthiest people in California may reportedly push billionaires Larry Page and Peter Thiel to leave the state, while other wealthy residents have condemned the idea, whose supporters claim could generate up to $100 billion—though the measure has yet to be considered by state officials or voters.
Thiel, who cofounded PayPal and Palantir, and Google cofounder Page have held discussions to reduce their ties to California by the end of the year because of the billionaire tax proposal, The New York Times reported, citing people familiar with their thinking.
Thiel operates the investment firm Thiel Capital and may open an office for the company in another state, with plans to spend more time outside of California, while Page has filed documents to incorporate three limited liability companies in Florida, according to the Times.
Bill Ackman weighed in, calling California “on a path to self-destruction,” adding, “Hollywood is already toast and now the most productive entrepreneurs will leave, taking their tax revenues and job creation elsewhere.”
Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya wrote on X the proposed ballot measure would result in an “exodus of the state’s most talented entrepreneurs” who would opt to “build their companies in less regressive states,” and argued the middle class would be the worst hit by the tax.
Dear Fleeing Billionaires: Welcome to Texas! Please be sure to discard any liberal ideas you brought with you in the nearest trash receptacle…
“Major train crash on key route used to feed Putin’s war machine with North Korean military equipment…A freight train hauling 35 wagons spectacularly derailed in Russia’s remote Amur region on the Transbaikal Railway – a strategic line linked to the famed Trans-Siberian route.”
Ukraine also hit Russian shadow fleet tanker Elbus in the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey. It’s been a bad week all around for Russia’s shadow fleet…
France and UK bomb Islamic State targets in Syria. This isn’t the first time France has bombed Islamic State terrorists, as they also participated in Operation Chammal in 2014, back when the would-be caliphate was much closer to the extremely short zenith of its limited powers.
Minnesota woman tries to run over ICE agent, immediately enters find out phase.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers fatally shot a woman during an operation in Minneapolis Wednesday.
As videos of the incident went viral, the Department of Homeland Security justified the shooting on self-defense grounds, calling the slain woman a “violent rioter” who “weaponized her vehicle” by driving towards federal agents.
Today, ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism. An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots,” said DHS assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
“The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. The ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries. This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement.”
She wasn’t the only idiot dirtnapped trying to run over ICE agents. A Tren de Aragua scumbag tried the same trick, and met the same fate, in Portland. Naturally, the usual leftist idiots there rioted.
Yesterday, Border Patrol officers had to shoot a dangerous criminal gang member in self-defense after he committed a vehicular assault on them to evade arrest. Leftists in the sanctuary city of Portland, Ore., promptly turned out to protest his shooting — and apparently to try to accomplish his deadly intention against federal officers.
In case you still have any illusions that the Democratic Party is not essentially a criminal organization, just look at the fury and violence the last few days in blue cities over the shootings of individuals who deliberately tried to seriously injure or kill Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Border Patrol officers. Renee Good in Minnesota and the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua member in Oregon were both violently and dangerously ramming their vehicles into officers at the time they were shot. That makes them leftist heroes and martyrs, it seems.
The American left is trying to do a repeat of the summer of love and mostly peaceful protests in 2020. They want to burn down what is still standing after their previous riots. With Democrat politicians and media lying to fuel violence and their followers cheering for murder, how can we avoid the conclusion that the Democratic Party is acting like a terror organization?
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has suspended the funding for Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley (CCRGV) pending an investigation into whether or not the charity is complying with federal grant requirements.
According to CCRGV, the charity learned of the suspension in late November 2025. It claims that it is “committed to compliance with federal grant requirements and will work expeditiously with DHS to resolve the matter.”
The charity stated that all of its funding was used to care for people brought to CCRGV by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) — individuals who were “released by CBP with a document that gave them permission to travel to their points of destination with instructions on where to follow up with their immigration proceedings.”
CCRGV runs the Humanitarian Respite Center in McAllen, a place that offers food and shelter to immigrants who are awaiting court hearings.
According to reporting by Fox News, CCRGV was suspended after a DHS investigation revealed what the outlet called “major grant violations.”
The suspension follows “months of warnings and data reviews that auditors say uncovered sweeping inaccuracies, large gaps in migrant records, and significant billing outside federally allowed timeframes,” Fox News reported.
The investigators also reportedly found 248 instances in which CCRGV billed the federal government for services to immigrants outside of the 45-day window allowed by federal rules.
Surging liquefied natural gas exports from new North American export plants likely pushed global LNG shipments in 2025 by the most since 2022, Kpler data showed on Tuesday.
The annual rise in 2025 would be the steepest increase in global LNG exports since 2022, when shipments grew by 4.5% compared to 2021, the data showed.
North America was the key supplier of new LNG volumes, as Canada’s first-ever export facility, LNG Canada, started shipments in the middle of 2025, and Plaquemines LNG in Louisiana launched operations and ramped up shipments throughout the year.
Thanks to rising capacity and volumes, the U.S. is set to become the first LNG exporter in the world to have passed in 2025 the threshold of 100 million tons of LNG exports in one year.
Additional LNG supply is poised to hit the market between 2026 and 2030 as more U.S. export plants come online and Qatar begins shipments from its huge capacity expansion of the North Field export facilities.
The U.S. is set to export 14.9 billion cubic feet per day of LNG in 2025, up by 25% from 2024, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in its latest Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) for December. With new projects ramping up, the EIA expects U.S. LNG exports to jump to an average of 16.3 billion cubic feet per day in 2026.
President Donald Trump on Friday blocked the Delaware firm HieFo Corporation from acquiring assets in New Jersey-based aerospace and defense specialist Emcore for $3 million, citing national security and China-related concerns.
The president claimed HieFo was “controlled by a citizen of the People’s Republic of China,” and that there was evidence to believe HieFo, through the merger, may “take action that threatens to impair the national security of the United States.”
“The Transaction is hereby prohibited,” Trump said and ordered HieFo to “divest all interests and rights in the Emcore assets, wherever located,” within 180 days.
Snip. “HieFo purchased Emcore’s chips business and indium-phosphide wafer-fabrication operations for $2.92 million.” Indium-Phosphide is a pretty exotic wafer material used in optics and photonics chips.
Leprino Foods, the world’s largest mozzarella producer and a vital supplier to major pizza chains like Domino’s, Pizza Hut, and Papa John’s, moved its operations from California to Texas. “For over a century, the Lemoore plant in California’s Central Valley served as a cornerstone of the dairy industry, but the company is now shifting billions of dollars and hundreds of jobs into a new $870 million facility in Lubbock, Texas.”
Progress! “Corporation for Public Broadcasting votes itself out of existence. The private agency, which has distributed federal funding to PBS, NPR and hundreds of local television and radio stations across the country for more than a half-century, saw its appropriations from Congress eliminated this past summer.” They promised Big Bird and delivered leftwing propaganda.
I get an incredible sense of deja vu all over again looking at Mitre’s list of top 25 exploits for 2025.
The top 4 are all very, very old. I myself demonstrated #4 when I taught a computer security class (with corporate IT Security present) back in 1994. That’s three decades ago.
And what’s with numbers 11 and 14? One of the classic papers on software security is Smashing The Stack For Fun And Profit – from 1996.
Numbers 3, 6, and 22 are web server vulnerabilities that are over 20 years old, and I’ve posted about them before.
17, 19, and 21 have been known since before I was in this industry. Call it the 1980s, although it’s likely older.
Yesterday I cautioned that the loss of two relatively minor Kurdish cities to anti-regime forces wasn’t a sign that the fall of the regime was imminent. However, today things seem to be getting much spicier, with reports that Mashhad, Iran’s second largest city, was under protestor control.
“Protests in Iran’s second largest city, Mashad, have surpassed 1 million participants. Unable to withstand the pressure from the protesters, security forces were forced to leave the city.”
“Footage circulating on social media shows demonstrators, mostly young people, chanting slogans against the ruling regime. Protesters say the clerical regime will soon be overthrown and that Reza Pahlavi will return to power.” While he would be an unquestionable improvement over the Mullahs, restoring the Pahlavi monarchy is not a course I would have expected or advised, but there seems to be a surprising amount of sentiment for it online. It’s impossible to say, at this remove, whether this sentiment is widespread among Iranian protestors.
“In cities, portraits of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as well as statues of Qasem Soleimani are being burned.”
Random protester: “Reza Pahlavi, come to Iran! Bibi Netanyahu, come to Iran!”
“A video released in social media shows a standoff between protesters and riot police in Iran’s northeastern Mashhad province as anti-government demonstrations have entered the 12th day. In the video, security units are seen pulling back in the face of large and angry crowds.”
“Government forces were also forced to retreat in Borazjan, Bushehr province in southern Iran.”
In other places, security forces are still shooting protestors.
Huge crowds of protesters have been marching through Iran’s capital and other cities, videos show, in what is said to be the largest show of force by opponents of the clerical establishment in years.
The peaceful demonstrations in Tehran and the second city of Mashhad on Thursday evening, which were not dispersed by security forces, can be seen in footage verified by BBC Persian.
Later, a monitoring group reported a nationwide internet blackout.
Protesters can be heard in the footage calling for the overthrow of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the return of Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the late former shah, who had urged his supporters to take to the streets.
It was the 12th consecutive day of unrest that has been sparked by anger over the collapse of the Iranian currency and has spread to more than 100 cities and towns across all 31 of Iran’s provinces, according to human rights groups.
The US-based Human Rights Activist News Agency (HRANA) has said that at least 34 protesters and eight security personnel have been killed, and that 2,270 other protesters arrested.
Norway-based monitor Iran Human Rights (IHR) has said at least 45 protesters, including eight children, have been killed by security forces.
BBC Persian has confirmed the deaths and identities of 22 people, while Iranian authorities have reported the deaths of six security personnel.
On Thursday evening, videos posted on social media and verified by BBC Persian showed a large crowd of protesters moving along a major road in Mashhad, in the country’s north-east.
Chants of “Long live the shah” and “This is the final battle! Pahlavi will return” can be heard. And at one point, several men are seen climbing on an overpass and removing what appears to be surveillance cameras attached to it.
Another video showed a large crowd of protesters walking along a major road in eastern Tehran, while in the north of the city a small gathering was heard chanting “Long live the shah” and “Death to the dictator” – a reference to Khamenei.
Protesters were also filmed chanting “Long live the shah” at a main square in the northern city of Babol.
It came not long after Reza Pahlavi, whose father was overthrown by the 1979 Islamic revolution and lives in Washington DC, had called on Iranians to “take to the streets and, as a united front, shout your demands”.
Are the mullahs ready to topple? I remain unconvinced, but it does appear more likely than yesterday.
And we’re creeping closer and closer to President Trump and allies thinking it’s time to give them a nudge.
Tiny problem: The city of Ilam is overwhelmingly Kurdish and very far from Tehran. So we can’t use Ilam as proof that the mullahs are on the brink of losing power, as much as that is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
But it’s an interesting data point, as is Kanal 13’s video on the Islamic regime losing control of Abdanan as well:
And wouldn’t you know it, Abdanan is another Kurdish city in western Iran.
It looks like the mullahs have a Kurdish problem. Or, more specifically, the mullahs can no longer repress the Kurdish problem they’ve always had.
But it’s not just the Kurds! Take a look at this BBC report on where mass protests against the Islamic regime have broken out.
Notice how heavy protests are in the western part of the country:
Those clashes mapped in the upper, western part of the country are probably majority Kurds. But not the ones in the southwestern part of the country. Those are Lurs.
No, not that one.
You may not have heard of the Lurs, because they haven’t played a significant role in the war against the Islamic State, or any of the various other Iraqi and Syrian civil wars, the way the Kurds have. They’re an Iranian ethnic minority with their own language, and while they’re also Shia, they have a lot of syncretic elements from Yarsanism and Zoroastrianism, so naturally the mullahs consider them heretical.
So while having the Kurdish and Lur areas of the country rise up against the Islamic Republic isn’t necessarily a sign of the regime’s immediate demise, it does present a unique challenge to it. Right now, the regime probably needs all its military and security forces to keep a lid on Tehran and adjacent areas, and likely doesn’t have any to spare to bring restive western areas to heel.
Dictatorships with significant minority populations inside their country either need to repress them or buy them off. Vladimir Putin has used both approaches with the Chechens. With its currency in freefall, Iran is too broke and overextended to pay them off, but will be hard-pressed to scrounge up enough muscle to repress them, having to play whack-a-mole with outbreaks of resistance across the country.
And the longer the Kurds and Lurs stay free of Tehran, the more difficult and painful it will be to bring them to heel, even if the mullahs survive the most recent uprising.
Will Venezuela’s leaders play ball with President Trump? Signs point to yes.
At a moment Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro and his wife Flores are set to appear before a New York federal judge on various drug-trafficking and gun-running related charges, his VP and now apparently Interim President Delcy Rodriguez is offering a huge olive branch.
This is unsurprising given the staunchly socialist, pro-Maduro number two under the ousted president is herself under immense pressure from Washington, and still facing down the barrel of Uncle Sam’s gun – or rather the collective might of the Pentagon’s persisting US naval blockade just off Latin America’s coast.
he’s quickly expressed her willingness to cooperate with the United States on the future of Venezuela, in a significant shift in tone following Maduro’s Friday into Saturday morning ‘shock’ abduction by US special forces.
“We consider it a priority to move towards a balanced and respectful relationship between the US and Venezuela,” Rodriguez wrote on Telegram Sunday.
And more than that, her following words convey willingness of Caracas to bend the knee: “We extend an invitation to the US government to work together on a cooperation agenda, aimed at shared development, within the framework of international law, and to strengthen lasting community coexistence,” she stated.
Snip.
President Trump has warned that if authorities in Venezuela fail to cooperate, the United States would carry out a second strike on Venezuela, noting that any decision to deploy ground troops there would depend on how the situation develops and how Venezuela responds.
So cooperate with the United States in transition to a Democratic, non-Socialist government (and presumably retire to seized mansions with shares of their ill-gotten loot), or get droned. This should be an easy choice…
So who’s in charge of Venezuela now? President Trump says we are.
President Donald Trump said the United States will “run” Venezuela until a peaceful transition of power is executed, following an operation carried out in the Latin American country early Saturday morning that successfully captured President Nicolás Maduro and his wife.
“We’re going to run this country until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” Trump said from Mar-a-Lago during a press conference. “We want peace, liberty, and justice for the great people of Venezuela, and that includes many from Venezuela that are now living in the United States and want to go back to their country. It’s their homeland.”
Asked on Saturday who would be running the country, Trump said that they would be designating people but that, “for a period of time,” it would largely be those standing behind him at the press conference — apparently meaning Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine.
The United States is in Venezuela, and will remain in the country until a “proper transition can take place,” Trump said.
General Caine said the attack was known as “Operation Absolute Resolve.” The president clarified that no American lives or military equipment were lost during the operation, and the embargo on Venezuelan oil also remains in full effect.
Just how dominant America’s military was in carrying out the operation is covered by this France24 clip:
“Only the US can carry out this kind of mission, so far from home at such a scale and with such coordination.”
“At least they’re the only country to have proved that they can still do it.”
“And now when we hear that jargon from Dan Caine about air and space support providing layering effects. That’s not just firepower, but it’s everything that’s needed to protect those helicopters as they went into that highly defended capital city and got out again. This requires not just the latest in satellite technology, high-tech jamming, stealth drones, but also just months of old school intelligence, fighter jet platforms that have been tried and tested over decades, and of course, sheer numbers just to provide that operational redundancy.”
The U.S. also managed to blackout Caracas during the attack.
“We can assume that the Space Force obviously provided latest state-of-the-art mapping to their forces, and potentially threw Venezuelan tracking off the scent as well. The Americans would have also used their EA-18G Growler aircraft which we know were involved. They have highly sophisticated jamming technology. The F-35s that were used can also use electronic warfare capabilities and jamming. So that could well have knocked out a lot of the Venezuelan radar.”
Combined arms are hard, but no one does them as well, or has the sheer reach, of the United States military.
The public narrative, stitched together from US statements and multiple reports, looks like this: months of planning, a narrow window, a rapid “snatch” mission at a heavily protected residence, and a fast exfiltration under fire.
Thank to reporting by the New York Times, we know the CIA has been on the ground in Venezuela for some time. They were almost certainly collecting the intelligence necessary for this exact operation.
US officials described a five-hour operation with more than 150 aircraft launching from roughly 20 bases across the Western Hemisphere, with a helicopter-borne ground force as the core maneuver element.
If those numbers are accurate, this was not a raid. This was a joint campaign compressed into one night.
Start with the centerpiece: USS Iwo Jima.
A quick aside: When I was in high school in Texas, I was a member of the Air Force junior ROTC. We were invited to march in three Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans, and we stayed aboard the USS Iwo Jima while we were there.
A Wasp-class LHD is a Swiss Army knife that swims. It gives you a flight deck, fuel, maintenance, command spaces, medical capacity, and the ability to surge rotary-wing sorties without asking anyone’s permission to use their runway.
If you want to push helicopters into a denied or semi-denied area and pull them back out fast, a big-deck amphib is the kind of platform you park nearby.
That matters because the reported “tip of the spear” was US special operations aviation. Multiple reports point to a large contingent of 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment or SOAR helicopters, also called the Night Stalkers, involved.
The 160th’s whole personality is flying low, at night, in bad weather, into places that don’t want them there, and bringing your people home anyway.
For reference, it was the Night Stalkers who played a critical role in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden (Operation Neptune Spear).
I’ve personally ridden with the Night Stalkers at Fort Campbell while in the Army… They can do some crazy shit with helicopters. I should note that I was not special forces, I was just hitching a ride as a grunt.
In Venezuela, those helicopters carried US Army Delta Force soldiers along with FBI agents who would perform the actual snatch (or kill if Maduro resisted).
Some readers might be wondering what the difference is between Delta Force and a group like the US Navy SEALs.
Well, first of all, SEALs always have a promising career in Hollywood waiting for them after their service… Or a lucrative book deal. Fucking prima donnas.
Delta are the “quiet professionals”.
Jokes aside, Delta Force and SEAL teams are both elite Tier 1 special mission units under JSOC, handling complex counterterrorism, hostage rescue, and direct action missions, but differ in their backgrounds and specializations. Delta excels in land-based, covert operations, while SEAL Team Six (DEVGRU) retains maritime roots, training SEALs for sea-based operations.
SEALs could have easily performed this operation and they may have been involved, but my initial sources are telling me it was Delta.
Reports from multiple outlets confirm that FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) agents, physically executed the takedown of Nicolás Maduro inside Caracas.
That pairing, America’s most elite special mission unit (Delta) and its most capable federal law enforcement strike team, is unusual but not unprecedented.
It signals one important thing: Washington wanted Maduro alive and in custody, not vaporized.
Delta Force, formally known as 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta (Airborne), is the Army’s top-tier counterterrorism and direct action unit. Their bread and butter isn’t messy firefights or holding ground, it’s surgical raids, high-value target snatches, and hostage rescue under conditions that would make most mortals short-circuit.
If a door needs breaching in a palace defended by an armored brigade, Delta is who goes through it.
The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, meanwhile, exists in that strange intersection between domestic law enforcement and tactical counterterrorism. They’re federal agents first but trained to the same operational standard as their military counterparts.
When American leadership needs a mission with law enforcement optics like arrest warrants, indictments, legal custody, the HRT adds the thin blue veneer that separates an extradition from an invasion.
In practice, the operation probably looked like this: Delta cleared the perimeter and neutralized armed resistance. HRT followed close behind, securing the detainees and beginning immediate chain-of-custody procedures to satisfy Justice Department requirements.
The Night Stalkers with their Delta/FBI contingent were supported by an impressive stack of US military hardware: F-22s, F-35s, F/A-18s, EA-18s, E-2s, B-1 bombers, Sentry, and “numerous” remotely piloted aircraft.
F-22s are air dominance and high-end insurance. They deter or swat down any manned aerial response, and they do it before the other side’s pilots finish their climb.
F-35s are the quiet burglars. They sniff emitters, map threats, and cue strikes. If you want to dismantle air defenses quickly, you bring the jet that was built to hunt radars. We currently don’t know how many air defense systems the F-35s removed, but I’m sure we will learn more in the coming days.
F/A-18s and EA-18Gs are the Navy’s workhorses for strike and electronic attack. The Growler exists to turn an air defense network into a migraine.
An E-2 Hawkeye is the Navy’s “baby Sentry” airborne battle management. It gives the air picture, deconflicts assets, and helps keep fratricide from becoming the main headline.
B-1s presence signals: if you escalate, we will flatten the area. They also provide standoff fires and a psychological effect that Venezuelan air defenders will be aware of.
E-3 Sentry is the quarterback.
I doubt B-1s were on call, but the presence of the other assets seems logical. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Suchomimus has a detailed look at exactly where U.S. forces landed near Maduro’s bunker to capture him, and what Venezuelan military equipment they took out in the process:
Among those taken out was a Russian 9K37 Buk SAM system. “Russian air defense systems proving to be just as useless in Venezuela as they are in Ukraine and Russia.”
“There were some reports a few weeks back that Russia tried to bulk up Venezuela’s air defense by sending two S300 launchers and two book SAM systems, as well as up to a dozen to SAM systems as well….And all for naught. The American operation was a complete success, with zero American aircraft shot down.”
Did Chinese radar also fail?
🚨Beijing’s Shield Fails! Venezuela’s “Strongest Air Defense in South America” Collapses in U.S. Military Action
For years, the Venezuelan military poured vast sums into acquiring Chinese-made military equipment, building what it claimed was the “most modern” defense system in… https://t.co/hsoDv1np6Vpic.twitter.com/OdZdNnEzJ7
— Inconvenient Truths — Jennifer Zeng Reports (@jenniferzeng97) January 3, 2026
How are ordinary Venezuelans taking Maduro’s capture? They’re celebrating:
Heh:
Look, Maduro got a free helicopter ride AND a landing, so I don’t want to hear any complaints from the rest of the Commies.
Triggernometry adds some background on just how much socialism in Venezuela sucks:
Plus this: “Nicholas’s Maduros’s nephews were captured by the DA in Haiti with kilos of cocaine. They were brought here. They went to trial. They were declared guilty. And then Biden pardoned them and sent them back.”
Maybe part of the eventual settlement with Venezuela can include banks records for all regime payments to American politicos…
While Venezuelans hit the streets in wild celebration, popping bottles and celebrating freedom, Democrats in Washington, D.C., clutched their pearls and went into full meltdown mode, accusing Trump of getting us into a war and violating the Constitution.
“Trump’s unilateral operation last night was an illegal act of war without Congress’s authorization,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) claimed.
“Maduro is a brutal dictator who has oppressed the Venezuelan people, but our constitution does not yield for bad people. If Congress is to survive as an institution, the Republican majority must join us exercising our power to hold this administration accountable for this flagrant violation of the constitution.”
He wasn’t the only Democrat to claim that Trump acted illegally.
“Without authorization from Congress, and with the vast majority of Americans opposed to military action, Trump just launched an unjustified, illegal strike on Venezuela,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) claimed.
“He says we don’t have enough money for healthcare for Americans—but somehow we have unlimited funds for war??”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also chimed in.
“President Trump’s unilateral military action to attack another country and seize Maduro — no matter how terrible a dictator he is — is unconstitutional and threatens to drag the U.S. into further conflicts in the region,” she argued.
“The American people voted for lower costs, not for Trump’s dangerous military adventurism overseas that won’t make the American people safer.”
Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) similarly accused Trump of getting the United States into an “illegal” war.
“This war is illegal, it’s embarrassing that we went from the world cop to the world bully in less than one year,” he said.
But these claims don’t hold water.
“Trump does not need congressional approval for this type of operation,” explains constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley. “Presidents, including Democratic presidents, have launched lethal attacks regularly against individuals. President Barack Obama killed an American citizen under this ‘kill list’ policy. If Obama can vaporize an American citizen without even a criminal charge, Trump can capture a foreign citizen with a pending criminal indictment without prior congressional approval.”
You know who else hates Maduro’s capture? The current leaders of China, Russia and Iran.
President Trump’s historic intervention in Venezuela offers needed hope to friends of freedom around the world and nervous traders in the oil market.
A pro-America, free-market government could unleash the country’s oil potential and lower energy prices around the globe. This is bad news for the Kremlin and clerics in Iran, who need high oil prices to perpetuate their regimes.
For decades, Venezuela’s socialist leaders have plunged their country into a black hole of poverty. Populist leader Hugo Chavez promised his voters unlimited riches. Nicolás Maduro, Chavez’s hand-picked successor, turned those hopes into an economic nightmare.
Chavez and Maduro seized the infrastructure of American oil firms in their country and ran the national economy into the ground. Under Maduro’s rule, the economic decline in Venezuela has been worse than the Great Depression in the US.
In the 1930s, America’s GDP declined by 30%.
Under Maduro, Venezuela’s economy has shrunk by about 75%, and Moscow and Beijing have been circling like vultures.
Last year, China purchased around 568,000 barrels per day from Venezuela; and Beijing needs Venezuela to fuel its economy. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin has been keen to keep the Maduro regime as a proxy in the Western Hemisphere.
The loss of Maduro in Caracas, who has welcomed Russian weapons and support to prop up his wobbly regime, is a major blow to Moscow. It also sends a powerful message to dictators around the world who look to America’s rivals as an alternative to US leadership: When the chips are down, Putin and Xi Jinping can’t help you.
While Maduro was in power, both Putin and Xi were eager to include oil-rich Venezuela in their “Axis of Aggressors.”
Trump abruptly changed the geopolitical balance by putting Maduro in handcuffs. He can now put more pressure on Beijing and box out Moscow’s hopes for a sustained partnership with Caracas.
The clerics in Tehran are also worried. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps needs Venezuela to enable its sanctions-evasion schemes that were in place under Maduro. Worse, the ghost tanker fleet that serviced the IRGC out of Venezuela is now in jeopardy. And with the prospect of increased Venezuelan oil exports, there’s a potential opportunity to put a squeeze on all remaining Iranian oil.
Funny how often Democrats are on the save wavelength as the dictators in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran when it comes to opposing Donald Trump’s foreign policy successes…
Happy New Year! The Somali welfare fraud scandal just grows and grows, Ukraine hits more Russian oil refineries, Iran revolts against the Mullahs, and Austin steels itself for an .0825% budget cut.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Here’s the original Nick Shirley video exposing child care fraud in Minnesota:
🚨 Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet. We uncovered over $110,000,000 in ONE day. Like it and share it around like wildfire! Its time to hold these corrupt politicians and fraudsters accountable
A 42-minute bombshell video by journalist Nick Shirley and a local private investigator documents an on-the-ground investigation in Minneapolis that alleges massive, ongoing fraud in government-funded social services. The main focus is on Somali-owned businesses in child daycare, adult/autism care, home healthcare, and non-emergency medical transportation programs that draw from the taxpayer-funded Child Care Assistance Program.
Shirley claims his team uncovered more than $110 million in questionable payments to Somali-owned businesses on just the first day of their investigation, as part of a broader welfare fraud scandal totaling upwards of $9 billion.
Shirley and the investigator visited several childcare facilities that had no visible children, toys, or activities during peak hours. Staff could not answer basic questions about rates or licenses. Both were denied entry to the reception areas of these facilities:
Quality Learing Center: Licensed for 99 children; received $4 million over two years. Sign misspells “learning” as “learing”; no children visible, doors locked, no playground.
Future Leaders Early Learning Center: Licensed for 90 children; received $6.67 million over two years. Facility empty; staff evasive when asked about child numbers.
Mako Child Care and Mini Child Care Center (combined): Licensed for 120 children; received $1.3M (2020), $987K (2021), $714K (2022), $1.6M (2025). No children observed.
ABC Learning Center: Licensed for 40 children; nearly $3 million over three years. Blacked-out windows, no activity.
Sweet Angel Child Care: Licensed for 74 children; $1.26 million in 2025 alone.
Millions of taxpayer dollars went to one daycare company that could not even spell “learning” correctly…
Agents with Homeland Security Investigations, the primary investigative arm of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are on the ground in Minneapolis Monday morning, conducting what DHS Secretary Kristi Noem described as a “massive investigation into childcare and other widespread fraud.”
Snip.
While allegations of Somali-linked welfare fraud in left-wing-controlled Minnesota have been known for years, the timing of Nick Shirley’s bombshell investigation suggests the federal government needed positive sentiment in the news cycle to begin the action phase on the ground. That’s usually how these types of operations work.
* * *
A viral video that has topped 76 million views on X within 48 hours has significantly heightened public scrutiny of multiple Minneapolis daycare centers linked to Somali operators that received millions in state and federal funding despite showing minimal operational activity. The apparent mismatch between allocated taxpayer funds and observable services strengthens a recent report by Christopher F. Rufo, which alleges that Somali-linked fraud in the left-wing-controlled state may involve front companies potentially diverting taxpayer funds to at least one overseas terrorist network.
Update: And according to FBI Director Kash Patel, the agency will “continue to follow the money” in Minnesota, and their investigation is “ongoing.” (And why did it take Chris Rufo cracking the case before they took action?)
“To date, the FBI dismantled a $250 million fraud scheme that stole federal food aid meant for vulnerable children during COVID. The investigation exposed sham vendors, shell companies, and large-scale money laundering tied to the Feeding Our Future network,” Patel said on Sunday.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party and its PR machine across left-wing corporate media outlets, including CBS, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, 60 Minutes, The New York Times, and the Associated Press, have largely remained silent on citizen journalist Nick Shirley’s investigation.
And the “Quality Learing Center” has been shut down…
Moreover, it’s obvious that the fraudulent child care facilities were always fraudulent, and yet the checks kept coming.
Daycare centers with millions of dollars in government funding and no children inside, and neighbors who say they’ve never seen children going in or coming out. This is a slam dunk, and I couldn’t possibly love it any more.
He names the daycare centers he visits, so you can start to find out how much the State of Minnesota knows about the scam without getting off the couch. Daycare centers are licensed and inspected: government inspectors regularly show up with a clipboard and look around. So go look at the record of inspections for Quality Learning Center of Minneapolis, the one in the video with the misspelled sign over the door. The whole thing instantly becomes darkly funny, because there’s no way anyone has ever believed that this is a functioning daycare center running at anything near its declared and funded capacity of 99 children.
He then supplied a list of 29 code violations just from May of 2022. And there are lists of violations from 12 other visits.
This inspection implies that there have been some children on site at some point, possibly family, but the inspector couldn’t identify anyone in the building: “The program did not have a file for each child,” and, “The program did not have a file for each staff person.” No training, no equipment, no records. This place has never been a functioning daycare center. No one has ever believed that it was. But the government checks kept coming, and government inspectors kept coming around and playing make-believe.
Spending in Minnesota has risen 19% per person since 2019.
As government does more and spends more, government does less. Explosive budget growth leads to declining effectiveness and quality. Low-tax red states pave the roads. High-tax blue states slop cash around to friends. Progressive elected officials view the task of governance as a series of costumed performances.
They’re not trying to run anything. They intend to make faces for the camera and steer money to their friends, the end.
The “Nick Shirley Effect” has begun, with Muckraker founder Anthony Rubin on the ground in Columbus, Ohio, home to the second-largest Somali community in the U.S., investigating daycare centers. This development comes less than a day after Ohio attorney Mehek Cooke said federal investigators are examining allegations that elements within Ohio’s Somali community defrauded millions of dollars from the state’s Medicaid system.
“The first Somali-affiliated daycare facility that we knocked on after landing in Columbus, Ohio, today did not answer,” Rubin wrote on X, alongside a video showing the daycare center, Great Minds Learning Academy.
Rubin continued, “A neighbor across the street told us, ‘I’ve never seen anybody come out of the building or go into the building.'”
On Sunday, Breitbart News published an interview with Ohio attorney Mehek Cooke, who alleges that members of the Somali community in Ohio have defrauded millions of dollars from the state’s Medicaid program. She said that authorities at the highest levels are investigating “what is happening in Ohio.”
Since Ohio is a red state, at least there’s a chance that officials there will actually investigate the fraud…
“Could Democrat Tim Walz Face Criminal Charges Over Growing Somali Fraud Scandal in Minnesota?”
The growing social services scandal in Minnesota — now reckoned to amount to billions of dollars — raises the possibility that the state’s two term Democratic governor, Tim Walz, could face criminal jeopardy.
Congressman James Comer, who leads the House Oversight Committee, is widening his probe into the scandal, which is centered on Minnesota’s Somali community. This week he took to Fox News to declare that “The walls are caving in on Tim Walz,” who was Vice President Kamala Harris’s choice as a running mate in the 2024 election. They lost to President Trump.
While regular citizens are not usually required to report crimes, public officials like Mr. Walz are usually held to a higher standard. They are generally seen to have a fiduciary duty to protect state assets. Actively concealing a felony could amount to the crime of “misprision of felony” or, alternatively to obstruction of justice. A failure to report could —theoretically — even lead to a charge of conspiracy, with the silent party accused of being an accessory to a crime.
Mr. Walz has a national reputation due to his service as Ms. Harris’s running mate, and has become a lightning rod for criticism of how such staggering fraud could have gone unnoticed for years until two New York-based publications, the New York Post and City Journal, an outlet of the conservative Manhattan Institute, published investigations.
Earlier this month, Mr. Walz sought to deflect negative attention from the Somali community, telling reporters that society “should be holding a lot of white men accountable for the crimes that they have committed,” rather than focusing on one ethnic group. Mr. Walz has also said he is accountable, as the fraud occurred “on my watch.” He added that “I am accountable for this, and more importantly, I am the one that will fix it.”
Mr. Comer announced his intention to invite whistleblowers to testify under oath and subpoena banks that operate out of Minnesota. He added that “hopefully we’ll have some criminal referrals at the end of this investigation.” Once a criminal referral is issued by Congress, it is up to the Department of Justice — led by Attorney General Pam Bondi — to seek indictments, perhaps of the governor himself.
Snip.
Mr. Comer, in a statement last week, declared that “The House Oversight Committee is aggressively investigating widespread fraud in Minnesota’s social services programs and the failures of Governor Walz’s administration that allowed taxpayer funds to be funneled to terrorist networks responsible for the deaths of Americans.” The reference is to allegations that stolen money made its way to the coffers of Al-Shabaab, a Somali terrorist group.
Longtime critics of Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party – what the state’s Democratic Party is known as — accuse Mr. Walz of looking the other way at misconduct in the Somali community since they wield significant political power as a voting bloc.
Snip.
Prosecutors claim that more than half of the $18 billion in taxpayer funding spent on 14 Medicaid programs in Minnesota since 2018 was stolen. More than 90 people have been charged, the vast majority of Somali ancestry. The lead federal prosecutor, John Thompson, said in a statement earlier this month that “What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It is staggering industrial-scale fraud.”
The question, of course, is whether Walz is merely grossly incompetent, or an active participant in the fraud and the cover-up.
And why do Somalis keep getting away with all this fraud? Because Social Justice infected Democrat judges let them.
Meet three AWFL (Affluent, white, female, liberal) Minnesota judges who are making headlines for the most predictable reasons imaginable.
These ladies have recently dismissed cases against Somali fraudsters in Minnesota, even overturning jury verdicts, allowing the immigrants stealing millions from Americans and Minnesotans to walk free.
🚨 BREAKING: Multiple corrupt Minnesota judges are under fire for dismissing a FLURRY of recent Somali fraud cases
– Judge Sarah West: Abdifatah Yusuf – Judge Amber Brennan: Yusuf's wife Lul Ahmed – Judge Hilary Caligiuri: co-defendant Abdiweli Mohamud
Each of these judges found small, technical prosecutorial errors, resulting in the cases being tossed.
Snip.
Here’s local reporting in Minnesota on the case where Judge Sarah West tossed the jury verdict:
Jurors who were chosen for the case were shocked by West’s decision.
‘I am shocked,’ jury foreperson Ben Walfoort told KARE 11 News.
‘I’m shocked based off of all of the evidence that was presented to us and the obvious guilt that we saw based off of the said evidence.’
When the one case was tossed, these other lady judges decided to toss the related cases.
More Minnesota reporting:
… Judge West’s decision stems from a strict review standard for cases that involve mostly circumstantial evidence. A jury is not asked to consider that standard, but appeals courts do, and Young said in this case, Judge West based her decision on it …
Judges analyzing these cases look not just at proof beyond reasonable doubt but whether guilt is the ‘only reasonable hypothesis.’
‘In other words, if there is another reasonable explanation, that could be the reasonable doubt,’ Young said.
So Somali fraudsters haven’t been convicted because Democrat judges don’t want the fraudsters convicted.
In Iran, the people have launched massive protests against the theocratic government in the wake of the currency collapsing. “Protests come as the country deals with economic instability and declining living standards. Not to mention, citizens might just want to be a regular country instead of being the world’s terrorist state.”
In the videos, protesters chant anti-regime slogans and confront security forces in crowded streets.
Footage included scenes of screaming and apparent gunfire, with demonstrators throwing objects and shouting, ‘Death to the Dictator’ and ‘Proud Arakis, support, support.’
What proud Arakis might look like
Additional footage shared by MEK shows crowds chanting, ‘Death to Khamenei!’ and ‘Shame on you, shame on you!’ as anger appears to spread across the country, with a particular focus on bazaar-led protests in Tehran.
The four days of protest have left at least one Revolutionary Guard member dead and the country was at a “near standstill” for about a day due to the unrest. In the city of Fasa, protesters stormed the governor’s office, forcing the Revolutionary Guard to open fire on the insurrectionists. The military then flew helicopters over the city to intimidate the protesters.
Moreover, President Trump is threatening dire consequences if the regime starts killing protestors.
President Donald Trump warned early Friday that the U.S. would intervene if Iran started killing protesters.
Writing on Truth Social, the president said if Iran shoots and “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue.”
“We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” Trump said.
Trump’s warning comes as demonstrations triggered by Iran’s deteriorating economy expand beyond the capital and raise concerns about a potential heavy-handed crackdown by security forces. At least seven people — including protesters and members of Iran’s security services — have been reported killed during clashes, according to international reporting.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.) It’s possible that hostile regimes in Iran, Venezuela and Cuba could all be swept aside before the end of 2026.
Moscow suburb blacks out after Ukrainian drone strike on power sub-station.
Australia donated a number of M1A1 tanks to Ukraine, and they’ve already arrived and entered key fights.
Massachusetts: “When we said ‘life without parole’ we didn’t mean it.”
The Massachusetts Parole Board has granted parole to 39 individuals convicted of murder who were originally sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, following a landmark state Supreme Judicial Court decision that upended sentencing practices for a specific group of offenders.
Under the 2024 Commonwealth v. Mattis ruling, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held that it is unconstitutional to impose life-without-parole sentences on people who were 18, 19 or 20 years old at the time of their offense. The court defined those in that age range as “emerging adults.”
If you’re old enough to vote, you should be old enough to hold accountable for murder.
As a result, individuals who previously had no opportunity for release were made eligible for parole hearings. In recent months, the Parole Board has processed dozens of cases under that framework, ultimately approving the release of 39 murder convicts while denying parole to a dozen others.
Murderers seem to be one of the social justice Democrats most respected constituencies.
Italian prosecutors said on Saturday they had arrested nine people on suspicion of financing Hamas through charities based in Italy, in an operation coordinated by anti-mafia and anti-terrorism units.
The suspects are accused of “belonging to and having financed” the Palestinian group – classified as a terrorist group by Israel, its top ally the U.S. and the European Union – prosecutors in the northern Italian city of Genoa said in a statement.
Those arrested allegedly diverted to Hamas-linked entities around 7 million euros ($8.2 million) raised over the last two years for ostensibly humanitarian purposes, prosecutors said. Police seized assets worth more than 8 million euros.
In another statement, police said officers had seized 1.08 million euros in cash found in the offices of a pro-Palestinian charity and in suspects’ homes, as well as material supportive of Hamas, Israel’s foe in the two-year Gaza war.
At this point it’s safer to just assume that every “Islamic charity” is funding terrorism.
Are you eating slave sushi? “Feds say Chinese brothers ran sushi slavery ring in Arizona that forced illegal aliens to work 7 days a week.” “Court documents allege Yung Lau, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from China, along with two managers, including his brother, kept dozens of undocumented immigrants in four “stash houses” and forced them to work at restaurants seven days a week with no days off. The restaurants involved were Sakura Sushi in Gilbert, Mesa, and Phoenix and Akita Sushi in Scottsdale.”
Austin’s municipal government is poised to cut its social services budget by approximately $5.3 million.
According to a memo from City Manager T.C. Broadnax, the city plans to “reallocate” social services contracts from a series of city departments. Affected departments include economic development, homeless strategies and operations, Austin community court, and public health.
The $5.277 million in proposed reductions represents a .0825 percent decrease from the record-setting $6.3 billion budget the city council passed in August.
This curtailment follows the landslide defeat of Proposition Q last November. Had it passed, Proposition Q would have represented a record-setting tax increase.
The council had previously approved $95 million in emergency budget cuts following Prop Q’s defeat.
The reductions come as a coalition of citizen groups has launched a petition drive to amend the city charter, requiring an independent audit of municipal finances before any future tax increases. If successful, this petition drive would place the proposed charter amendment on the May 2026 ballot.
A .0825% decrease isn’t enough. All the social justice items in Austin’s budget need to be removed with a chainsaw.
And speaking of Austin, groundbreaking on a planned downtown condo hes been delayed until market conditions improve.
Part 2 of the Professor of Rock’s interview with Rick Beato.
Matt of Diesel Creek once again exposes his junk to the camera. If you ever thought you’ve just got too many projects going on, here’s the ultimate “hold my beer.”
Greetings, and welcome to a rare Saturday LinkSwarm! This week: The Supreme Court stays the injunction against the Texas redistricting map, a bunch of Twitter fakes exposed, Trump drops the boom on Somali illegal alien scumbags,
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued an administrative stay of Tuesday’s ruling by an El Paso panel of federal judges that rendered the new congressional map passed by Texas Republicans this summer unusable for the 2026 midterm election.
The order restored the new map, pending consideration of the appeal by the State of Texas, and directed the Democratic-aligned parties to submit their response by Monday.
Snip.
The ruling drew a particularly pointed dissent from Judge Jerry Smith, the lone dissenter on the panel, who asserted that the motivation behind the redraw was clearly partisan gain — a position that sits outside the jurisdiction of the court.
Following that ruling, Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, asking for an administrative stay — which Alito granted.
“Compounding the harm, the district court entered its sweeping injunction far too late in the day — ten days after Texas’s candidate filing period had already opened. The injunction changes the boundaries of all but one of the State’s 38 congressional districts, enjoining Texas from using its duly enacted 2025 map and resurrecting the repealed 2021 map,” Texas wrote in its appeal.
“The chaos caused by such an injunction is obvious: campaigning had already begun, candidates had already gathered signatures and filed applications to appear on the ballot under the 2025 map, and early voting for the March 3, 2026, primary was only 91 days away. The lateness of the district court’s injunction (issued 38 days after the hearing) alone warrants a stay.”
As things stand, Texas Republicans’ map is back in effect while the U.S. Supreme Court considers the case in expedited fashion.
Texas’ candidate filing deadline is December 8, 2025.
Twitter/X turns on locations and it turns out a lot of “American” account pushing that “GOP civil war”` nonsense were foreign psyops.
There are thousands of accounts like this. Many of them explicitly claim to be American or Western, but are run by random people in Asia and Africa to sow chaos and get clicks.
BREAKING – Waves of Democrat influencers are being exposed as foreigners under X’s new location update, including leftist X agitator Alex Cole, who claimed he voted for Kamala but has now been revealed to be Canadian. pic.twitter.com/3LrAsYCiMw
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is supposed to be used in extreme cases of humanitarian need for short terms (usually for 6, 12, or 18 months), allowing foreign refugees a safe haven in America.
As deportation efforts have ramped up, however, the American public has learned that some foreigners have remained in the country on TPS for decades. Some politicians and businesses have purposely imported large numbers of foreigners into small American towns, such as Haitians in Ohio and Pennsylvania, as cheap labor to replace Americans.
President Donald Trump’s initiative to eliminate government waste and fraud through a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has quietly disbanded with a full 8 months still left on its charter.
Earlier this month when Reuters asked Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor about the status of DOGE, Kupor replied, “That doesn’t exist.”
Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) said that Elon Musk, who headed up the DOGE effort, was pushed out Washington D.C. because he was getting too close to exposing corrupt officials who are enriching themselves through dark money non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
Burchett told Benny Johnson, “NGO money pours into Washington and ends up in politicians’ pockets as dark money.”
DOGE had made dramatic impact on the federal government during the early months of Trump’s second term, shrinking the size of federal agencies and cutting their budgets or revealing astonishing amounts of questionable money flowing through NGO coffers.
Sound like a good reason to continue the work, not abandon it…
All that “don’t obey illegal orders” nonsense Democrats are regurgitating? Yeah, it’s Soros-funded, “Sponsored by Win Without War, a progressive advocacy group,” which in turn is funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned from congress. As in the NFL, there’s always someone that has to “set the edge,” and MTG was the person who did that in the Trump era.
What the hell? Is China committing war crimes in Philippines coastal waters?
The Philippine Navy recently caught Chinese Fishing Militia putting Cyanide in the water near the BRP Sierra Madre at the Second Thomas Shoal.
The incident that was recorded on camera demonstrates the brutality & destruction meted out by the Chinese Fishing Militia inside… pic.twitter.com/L7NCI0UIik
The apparent reason Armata failed is this: sanctions.
But there’s more to the story, too. In fact, several interlocking factors account for the T-14’s failure to materialize as intended.
Let’s first look at costs and priorities: the unit cost of the T-14 was estimated at several million dollars – far higher than Russia had budgeted for.
The increase in cost meant that it couldn’t actually be sustained at scale. And, faced with heavy losses in Ukraine and urgent demands to ramp up numbers, Moscow opted to modernize its legacy platforms, such as the T-90, rather than invest in an expensive and unproven system. A tough choice, but a logical one.
The domestic production line for the T-14 never actually achieved accurate serial output, in large part thanks to sanctions and industrial bottlenecks.
There was no assembly line. Yes, really: every vehicle was hand-built like a luxury car. Sanctions and supply-chain constraints further hindered the manufacture of key components and high-end electronics required for the platform.
But even if Russia had been able to assemble more of the tanks before the sanctions really kicked in, it might not have changed the reality on the battlefield. Even when the war in Ukraine created a burning need for armored vehicles, Russia hesitated to commit T-14 units to the frontline for one worrying reason: they were vulnerable.
With the rise of automated systems, drone warfare, and long-range combat, those tanks may have proven as vulnerable as older units – and losing tanks built pre-sanctions would mean replacing them with older tanks.
That wouldn’t have made sense.
For more than a decade, the T-14 Armata has embodied Russia’s ambition to leap ahead of the West in tank design and warfare.
But it failed.
The usual lefty sorts are trying to raise Maryland’s minimum wage to $25. Virginia’s minimum wage will be $12.77 in 2026. Which state will businesses choose?
Brown County Judge Shane Britton was suspended from office without pay on Tuesday, one day after he was arrested on multiple charges that included allegations he assaulted a female prosecutor and interfered with the prosecution of a family violence case.
According to indictments handed down by a grand jury last week, Britton has been charged with three felonies: tampering with a witness in a family violence case, assault of a public servant, and tampering with a government document.
To understand the difference, it helps to look at what each chip was originally built to do. A GPU is a “general-purpose” parallel processor, while a TPU is a “domain-specific” architecture.
The GPUs were designed for graphics. They excel at parallel processing (doing many things at once), which is great for AI. However, because they are designed to handle everything from video game textures to scientific simulations, they carry “architectural baggage.” They spend significant energy and chip area on complex tasks like caching, branch prediction, and managing independent threads.
A TPU, on the other hand, strips away all that baggage. It has no hardware for rasterization or texture mapping. Instead, it uses a unique architecture called a Systolic Array.
The “Systolic Array” is the key differentiator. In a standard CPU or GPU, the chip moves data back and forth between the memory and the computing units for every calculation. This constant shuffling creates a bottleneck (the Von Neumann bottleneck).
In a TPU’s systolic array, data flows through the chip like blood through a heart (hence “systolic”).
It loads data (weights) once.
It passes inputs through a massive grid of multipliers.
The data is passed directly to the next unit in the array without writing back to memory.
What this means, in essence, is that a TPU, because of its systolic array, drastically reduces the number of memory reads and writes required from HBM. As a result, the TPU can spend its cycles computing rather than waiting for data.
Google’s new TPU design, also called Ironwood also addressed some of the key areas where a TPU was lacking:
They enhanced the SparseCore for efficiently handling large embeddings (good for recommendation systems and LLMs)
It increased HBM capacity and bandwidth (up to 192 GB per chip). For a better understanding, Nvidia’s Blackwell B200 has 192GB per chip, while Blackwell Ultra, also known as the B300, has 288 GB per chip.
Improved the Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI) for linking thousands of chips into massive clusters, also called TPU Pods (needed for AI training as well as some time test compute inference workloads). When it comes to ICI, it is important to note that it is very performant with a Peak Bandwidth of 1.2 TB/s vs Blackwell NVLink 5 at 1.8 TB/s. But Google’s ICI, together with its specialized compiler and software stack, still delivers superior performance on some specific AI tasks.
The key thing to understand is that because the TPU doesn’t need to decode complex instructions or constantly access memory, it can deliver significantly higher Operations Per Joule.
“TPU v6 is 60-65% more efficient than GPUs.”
Austin’s APL bookstore Recycled Reads will be closing in January and the stock distributed to individual library sales shelves. I doubt I’ll be visiting various library branches to book scout. Maybe they should go back to the book sale events they used to hold.
Remember when Google was a world-leading corporation whose motto was “don’t be evil”, universally trusted for Internet searches, branching out into other businesses and could seemingly do no wrong? You may not, since that was a good 15-20 years ago. Since then, Google has done plenty of evil to lose our trust, from spinning up useful services only to allow them to be killed off a few years later to letting itself be infected with social justice to ruining search results to plump ad revenues.
Now Google is infecting itself with AI across all its divisions, and the results are disasterous.
No, Cheney didn’t vote for Kamala in 2020, and indeed only announced outright opposition to Trump after January 6. Google’s AI garbage has conflated the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections.
This is far from the first time Google’s AI systems have made mistakes.
A whole bunch of YouTube channels were banned based on the actions of completely unrelated channels, and the creators blamed AI. YouTube eventually restored them and denied AI was involved, but does anyone really believe anything Google/YouTube says anymore?
But Google AI is definitely improving one thing: malware.
Google’s Threat Intelligence Group (GTIG) is warning that bad guys are using artificial intelligence to create and deploy new malware that both utilizes and combats large language models (LLM) like Gemini when deployed.
The findings were laid out in a white paper released on Wednesday, November 5 by the GTIG. The group noted that adversaries are no longer leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) just for productivity gains, they are deploying “novel AI-enabled malware in active operations.” They went on to label it a new “operational phase of AI abuse.”
Google is calling the new tools “just-in-time” AI used in at least two malware families: PromptFlux and PromptSteal, both of which use LLMs during deployment. They generate malicious scripts and obfuscate their code to avoid detection by antivirus programs. Additionally, the malware families use AI models to create malicious functions “on demand” rather than being built into the code.
Google says these tools are a nascent but significant step towards “autonomous and adaptive malware.”
PromptFlux is an experimental VBScript dropper that utilizes Google Gemini to generate obfuscated VBScript variants. VBScript is mostly used for automation in Windows environments.
Ah, Windows, a fecund garden of malware for over 30 years.
In this case, PromptFlux attempts to access your PC via Startup folder entries and then spreads through removable drives and mapped network shares.
“The most novel component of PROMPTFLUX is its ‘Thinking Robot’ module, designed to periodically query Gemini to obtain new code for evading antivirus software,” GTIG says.
The researchers say that the code indicates the malware’s makers are trying to create an evolving “metamorphic script.”
According to Google, the Threat Intelligence researchers could not pinpoint who made PromptFlux, but did note that it appears to be used by a group for financial gain. Google also claims that it is in early development and can’t yet inflict real damage.
The company says that it has disabled the malware’s access to Gemini and deleted assets connected to it.
Google also highlighted a number of other malware that establish remote command-and control (FruitShell), capturing GitHub credentials (QuietVault), and one that steals and encrypts data on Windows, macOS and Linux devices (PromptLock). All of them utilize AI to work or in the case of FruitShell to bypass LLM-powered security.
Beyond malware, the paper also reports several cases where threat actors abused Gemini. In one case, a malicious actor posed as a “capture-the-flag” participant, basically acting as a students or researchers to convince Gemini to provide information that is supposed to be blocked.
Google specified a number of threats from Chinese, Iranian and North Korean threat groups that abused Gemini for phishing, data mining, increasing malware sophistication, crypto theft and creating deepfakes.
So Google has created a power bottle genie that refuses to stay in the bottle, but will grant wishes to just about anyone, no matter how evil their intent.
Also, not limited to Google, researchers have demonstrated new exploits for AI browsers (or rather, very old exploits refurbished for the AI age).
Several new AI browsers, including OpenAI’s Atlas, offer the ability to take actions on the user’s behalf, such as opening web pages or even shopping. But these added capabilities create new attack vectors, particularly prompt injection.
Prompt injection occurs when something causes text that the user didn’t write to become commands for an AI bot. Direct prompt injection happens when unwanted text gets entered at the point of prompt input, while indirect injection happens when content, such as a web page or PDF that the bot has been asked to summarize, contains hidden commands that AI then follows as if the user had entered them.
Last week, researchers at Brave browser published a report detailing indirect prompt injection vulns they found in the Comet and Fellou browsers. For Comet, the testers added instructions as unreadable text inside an image on a web page, and for Fellou they simply wrote the instructions into the text of a web page.
When the browsers were asked to summarize these pages – something a user might do – they followed the instructions by opening Gmail, grabbing the subject line of the user’s most recent email message, and then appending that data as the query string of another URL to a website that the researchers controlled. If the website were run by crims, they’d be able to collect user data with it.
When Isaac Asimov crafted the Three Laws of Robotics, he thought that robots would have built-in safeguards deep in their source codes to prevent them from doing harm. What he never could have envisioned is multiple artificial intelligence being created as quickly as possible by competing corporations, none of whom seem to value safety over time-to-market, and that some of these AIs could be capable of modifying their own source code for greater speed and efficiency, so that no one knows precisely at any given time what exactly they’re running, and what data sets have been used to feed their pet Frankenstein monsters…
President Trump does the impossible by bringing peace to the Middle East, France continues to circle the drain, Ukraine continues to wreck Russia’s oil infrastructure, a look at gamed crime statistics, another monthly budget surplus, and stories of various corrupt Americans taking Chinese money.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
President Trump once again confounds his critics by doing the impossible. “All Living Israeli Hostages Return Home.”
Hamas finally released the remaining 20 living Israeli hostages on Monday, ending two years of captivity as part of a cease-fire deal that requires Israel to release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners.
The hostages, taken during the brutal October 7, 2023, attack against Israel, were reunited with their families. In Tel Aviv’s Hostage Square, a public square that became the focal point for protests and rallies over the last two years, thousands gathered to celebrate their return, cheering, waving flags, and holding up signs. Tens of thousands of Israelis also watched the return at public viewings across the country.
After the Israeli hostages, all men under 50, were freed, Israel began releasing 1,900 Palestinian prisoners, who were greeted by cheering crowds as they were bussed into the West Bank. Of the 1,900 prisoners, 250 were serving life sentences on murder and terrorism convictions, and 1,700 had been detained since October 7.
Israeli troops will be escorting four deceased hostages from the Gaza Strip back to Israel, according to Israeli military. The return of deceased hostages is part of the cease-fire deal. The timeline on when the remaining 24 deceased hostages will be returned back to Israel, however, is still unclear.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed that he was “committed to this peace” in a speech to the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
Netanyahu was followed by President Trump, who received a standing ovation from Israeli lawmakers as he took the podium.
Weird how the Israeli Knesset gave standing ovation after standing ovation to Literally Hitler…
When your beat is the whole wide world, from Ukraine to Syria to Taiwan to India, the news is almost never as good as it is today. So, let’s savor today’s images of the Israeli hostages finally reunited with their families. The Israeli hostages were held 296 days longer than the Iranian regime held the American hostages in 1979-1981.
It’s understandable if you thought you would never see this headline: “Last 20 living hostages return to Israel.”
It is a spectacular breakthrough, and yet not every Israeli taken by Hamas is home yet, as our Jessica Hornik notes:
There are some two dozen hostages who are deceased. Among them are two American-Israelis, Itay Chen and Omer Neutra. Some of the dead were murdered by Hamas on October 7, their bodies taken into Gaza. Others were murdered in captivity. As part of the agreement, Hamas must return all their remains. The Chen and Neutra families, and all the families of the dead, may finally be able to bury their loved ones.
This is likely the greatest day of Trump’s second term, so far. The Israelis are thrilled and are effusively singing the president’s praises:
Addressing US President Donald Trump at the Knesset, Opposition Leader Yair Lapid lauds the American leader for saving “millions from the horrors of war,” stating that he has “done the unimaginable.”
“Mr. President, you have saved the lives of our hostages. But you saved so much more. You have saved the souls of the bereaved whose loved ones now will be brought home for burial, you have saved thousands of soldiers who will not fall in battle, and you have saved millions from the horrors of war. You have saved far more than one life, and each life is an entire world,” Lapid declares in the Knesset plenum ahead of Trump’s address to the body.
“When you were elected, you declared that you would be ‘the President of Peace.’ You have kept your word. The fact that you were not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is a grave mistake by the committee — but they will have no choice, Mr. President. They will have to award it to you next year,” Lapid says.
So how did Democrats celebrate the ceasefire they’ve been demanding for so long? Obviously they didn’t.
Way back on October 11, 2023, New York City Council Member Tiffany Cabán called for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. Now, at that point, Hamas had just massacred civilians in 21 communities, killing 1,195 people including 38 children. The Israel Defense Force had barely begun its retaliation for the atrocity, but the answer in the mind of Cabán was clear: Everyone should stop shooting and accept a permanent cease-fire. To some of us, this sounded like allowing Hamas to get a free shot at Israelis and then preventing the Israelis from hitting Hamas back.
Two days later, on October 13, a then-little known state senator by the name of Zohran Mamdani joined the call for a cease-fire: “Now is the moment for all people of conscience to call for a ceasefire and no more military funding.” The same day, another Democratic socialist state senator, Julia Salazar concurred: “A ceasefire is urgent. Please implore your federal elected officials to take every action they can to stop this from continuing.”
On October 28, 2023, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined her call. “Some may dismiss a ceasefire as naïve or worse. Yet who has a plan for what follows this destruction? What do we call that?”
Mamdani offered a statement on Twitter yesterday that declared “Today’s scenes of Israelis and Palestinians are profoundly moving” but also said that “we have watched as our tax dollars have funded a genocide.” At least Mamdani acknowledged that the cease-fire occurred.
AOC’s X feed had nothing about the cease-fire in the past few days. Nor has Cabán’s. Nor Salazar’s.
For two years, prominent leftist Democrats have been screaming their heads off to get a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, and now they’ve finally got one. But suddenly, it’s as if the issue just doesn’t interest them anymore. It’s like a Men in Black neuralyzer has wiped the issue of the Gaza Strip from their memories. It’s shameless, hilarious, and deeply revealing about how the Democratic Party perceives issues and America’s role in the world.
I’m not going to quote Jim Geraghty’s demonstration that Biden’s being “too pro-Israel” didn’t hurt Kamala Harris, because nobody outside the loony left believes that. Unfortunately for Democrats, the loony left is firmly in charge of their party’s foreign policy. Democrats can’t celebrate President Trump’s peace deal because they wanted Hamas to win.
Kurt Schlichter: “The Well-Deserved, Utter Humiliation of Palestinian Terrorists and Their Friends.”
There is a lot of rejoicing in America, Israel, and among normal people around the world about the peace deal in Gaza, but the Palestinian terrorist-huggers are heartbroken. And, of course, they should be. This isn’t really a peace deal. This is an utter capitulation, a total surrender by the losers of Hamas who have completely and utterly failed. They started a war and got their asses kicked, yet again. Their fight from the sewers, where they hid behind women and children, was not an example of brave resistance as they steadfastly endured victimhood. Every single misery that the Palestinians have suffered over the last two years was utterly deserved – in fact, they deserved much, much worse.
That’s why my beef with Israel is that it has been far too kind. Because of the unique aspects of Israeli politics and culture, and because Joe Biden’s puppet masters refused the total support America should’ve given, this absolutely necessary war has dragged on unnecessarily for two years. If I were in charge, this would’ve been over in November 2023, and the semi-human savages who started this war would use my name to scare children for the next hundred generations.
But I’m not in charge, nor are you, nor are any of us except the Palestinians and the Israelis. It’s those in charge who get to make the choices and bear the consequences. The Palestinians got here because they chose to continue a war they’ve been losing since 1948. The Israelis got here because they chose not to allow themselves to be murdered by the people who’ve been trying to kill them since 1948. But I’m not interested in history, not anymore. There’s a time to argue and there’s a time to fight, and it’s time to fight. But you can still see people, both smart and dumb, arguing about history all over the media, both mainstream and social, yet it doesn’t really matter. Certainly, the Israelis are right on the facts – it’s their land, both in terms of historical precedence and the more important fact of physical reality. The owner of the land is the guy who you can’t knock off it; that’s how history works. Here, history just happens to align with justice. The idea that Jews only turned up in the Holy Land in 1946 after Hitler failed to complete his Holocaust is utter nonsense, and people pushing it know that. They don’t care. History is just another weapon for them in their quest for actual genocide, like Kalashnikovs, flotillas of moronic Westerners, and suicide bombers. That it’s all a lie doesn’t matter to them in the least. Their idols are the people who invented Pallywood and made stars of the guys who would portray honor students, a doctors, and a future Nobel Prize winners who just happened to be murdered by the Israelis for no reason, and whose deaths – complete with subtle breathing by the ubiquitous thespians – just happened to be captured on video by their fake reporters.
The real weapon of Hamas, though, is the suffering of their own people. With it, and its documentation, both real and fraudulent, they hope to leverage the humanity of Westerners to get them to choose suicide rather than righteous resistance to Jihadi savagery. It doesn’t just work on millions of morally illiterate leftists – and some ridiculous idiots on the right – in America and Europe. It even works on some Israelis. The October 7 atrocities fell mostly on the leftist “peace” people in the Jewish state who were trying to show solidarity with the Palestinians by living adjacent to Gaza. They died at the hands of the people they wanted to be friends with, horribly, but that didn’t stop many on the Israeli left from trying to undermine the war. Some people will choose suicide over admitting they were wrong.
And what they were wrong about was considering the Palestinians a wonderful but misunderstood people. In reality, it is a broken and hideous culture, poisoned by radical Islam and the humiliation of being defeated again and again and again by the tiny Jewish outpost that would still be a barren desert if the Israelis had not made the desert bloom. The prosperity and freedom of Israel shame them in their squalor and despotism. It drives the hate that is central to their society. They train their little kids to be terrorists, and these little kids grow up to be terrorists. Mommy and daddy were so proud, delighted when their disgusting spawn called from the bloody kibbutzes to brag about killing unarmed Jews. As gruesome as the Hamas degenerates are, it wasn’t just Hamas. The Palestinians elected Hamas, and they still support Hamas. They got what they voted for.
You know who’s not pleased by President Trump’s Middle East peace success? The ChiComs.
One of the biggest losers in President Trump’s great, historic Middle East peace plan is Communist China.
Maybe that’s a reason for China’s petulant rare earths trade control circular it dropped on everyone last Friday, completely out of the blue.
Was that a Chinese temper tantrum heard around the world?
China wasn’t at the peace summit. Its horse lost.
For years, China was the biggest purchaser of Iranian oil, thereby financing the Iranian-backed terrorist war against Israel.
Iran was always the key — backed by China.
And that is why Israel’s Operation Rising Lion, the war with Iran in June, and the United States’s Operation Midnight Hammer on June 22, obliterating Iran’s nuclear facilities at Natanz, Fordow, and Esfahan — were so essential to the Trump peace plan.
Here’s what Mr. Trump said yesterday: “So we dropped 14 bombs on Iran’s key nuclear facilities. Totally, as I said originally, obliterating them.”
He added: “If we didn’t do that and assuming we made the same deal that we have today, there’d be a dark cloud over this deal.”
Mr. Trump concluded: “Some of the things I hated to do, I hated certain of the weapons. Because the level of power is so enormous. It’s so dangerous, it’s so bad. But we have to do what we have to do.”
So Iran was crushed. The use of American-Israel military force was crucial. Not Bidenesque appeasement, but Trumpian force.
Mr. Trump is working with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the two great warriors saving democracy and freedom in the Middle East, in America, and around the world.
Yet China lost big also. Not only did it watch the judicious use of allied military force to decapitate Iran, but it’s also watching a new coalition of Middle East nations put together by Mr. Trump.
Out of this new coalition can come a Saudi-Israeli alliance, an expanded Abraham Accords, new business ventures to rebuild Gaza, and a whole new panoply of peaceful foreign policies, buttressed by new trade and investment.
China is not likely to be a player in all of this. Its influence is now almost at rock bottom — because its bet on Iran did not pay off.
No Nobel Prize for President Trump, theoretically because all his peace-making deeds fell after their previous deadline (that that that stopped them from ridiculously handing the award to Obama). Instead they gave it to Venezuelan dissident Maria Corina Machado…who promptly dedicated it to Trump.
A foreign-policy expert who had an advisory role with the State Department is being accused of stealing classified information and meeting with Chinese officials several times.
The Justice Department announced Tuesday the arrest of Ashley Tellis, a well-respected scholar specializing in Asia and India, for unlawfully possessing national defense information.
“We are fully focused on protecting the American people from all threats, foreign and domestic. The charges as alleged in this case represent a grave risk to the safety and security of our citizens,” said eastern Virginia U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, an appointee of President Trump.
“The facts and the law in this case are clear, and we will continue following them to ensure that justice is served.”
Tellis was an unpaid adviser at the State Department and a contractor with the Department of War’s Office of Net Assessment, Fox News reported based on a Justice Department affidavit.
He is currently a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a prominent foreign-policy think tank that opposes the Trump administration. Tellis published analysis for the think tank as recently as last week.
Those looking for data on the US budget deficit contained in the Monthly Treasury Statement had to wait a few weeks because of the government shutdown, but better late than never, and today at 2pm, the Treasury unveiled the US income statement for the just concluded fiscal year 2025. It was ugly, but not as ugly as it could have been and the month of September was outright impressive.
Starting at the top with the month of September, the numbers were surprisingly sold: total tax revenue of $543 billion were the highest since April (which is tax-collections month), a 3.2% improvement from a year ago, and pushed the 6-month moving average to a record high $496 billion.
As usual, the vast majority of govt receipts was in the form of individual income taxes ($298BN out of $544BN), with Social Security contributing about a 3rd of the total receipts and Corporate Income Taxes accounting for 11% or $62 billion of the total.
On the outlays side, here too there were notable improvements, with the US government spending only $346 billion, a sharp from from the $689 billion in August, and down a whopping 25% from the $463 billion last September. Even more remarkable is that the six month moving average of govt spending suddenly slumped from $604 billion – the highest since covid – to $573 billion, the lowest since June 2024. Yes, the improvement may be small, but every little bit helps and whatever Trump is doing to shrink govt spending is starting to show.
Snip.
A big reason for the stellar September surplus is that tariff collections continued apace, and in September the US government collected a record $29.7 billion in tariffs, which translated in a record $195 billion for the fiscal year. And since Trump’s tariff regime was only active for 6 of the past 12 month, expect tariffs to deliver about $350 billion in annual revenue every year, unless they are canceled.
Still a long way to go to actually balance the budget.
Data from my new Centre for Heterodox Social Science report, ‘The Decline of Trans and Queer Identity among Young Americans’, shows that since 2023 both trans and queer identification have dropped sharply within Generation Z.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which conducts a large annual survey of US undergraduates, polled over 60,000 students in 2025. My analysis of the raw data shows that in that year, just 3.6% of respondents identified as a gender other than male or female. By comparison, the figure was 5.2% in 2024 and 6.8% in both 2022 and 2023. In other words, the share of trans-identified students has effectively halved in just two years.
“Two Suspects Indicted on First Antifa-Related Terrorism Charges in Texas ICE Attack…A federal grand jury indicted Cameron Arnold and Zachary Evetts on Wednesday. The pair are charged with providing material support for terrorism, attempting to murder federal officers and assisting officers, and discharging firearms during attempted murders, according to the indictment, which was unsealed Thursday.”
Fiscally bankrupt, France is trapped in economic stagnation.
The immediate issue is the 2026 budget. Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu resigned due to an inability to negotiate a budget for 2026. Still, President Emmanuel Macron and Lecornu insist that a path to a budget compromise remains possible. Time will tell. However, the political crisis is pushing up interest rates among the countries that make up the European Monetary Union. Through the European Central Bank, the Union backstops France’s sovereign debt. The crisis also weakened the euro relative to the United States dollar.
France’s major problem?
Any budget deal will be a fudge that fails to put France on a path to fiscal stability. France will continue to violate the fiscal deficit limits of the European Union. But France must reduce its annual fiscal deficit to 3% of GDP, or, at least, set a credible path to reaching that level. Next year, regardless of whatever budget agreement is reached, France’s fiscal deficit will exceed 5% of GDP. In addition, France is obligated by its EU membership to enact policies to reduce its total debt from the current 115% of GDP to 60% of GDP. Obviously, this will be impossible. So, expect fudges and more fudges for years to come.
The French left and populist right want to get rid of the 2023 reforms, which increased the national retirement age from 62 to 64. But repealing the pension reform legislation would increase the deficit by about $3.5 billion USD a year. At the same time, fewer people would be working, so tax collections would be lower. Fewer workers would mean slower economic growth. France is already experiencing an extended period of stagnation.
The other possible area of compromise is to implement a wealth tax on French citizens with a net worth of €100 million/$116 million USD or more. Again, proponents of a wealth tax say that the tax would raise to $23 billion USD a year, but mainstream economists say wealth taxes don’t work. The wealthy simply respond with legal tax avoidance strategies and migrate to lower tax jurisdictions.
The top line is that any budget deal will just delay the inevitable reckoning with financial markets and the ECB’s monetary authorities. At some point, the ECB will force France into austerity. Otherwise, France will drag down Europe’s economy, and France’s politics could actually jeopardize the European Monetary Union.
As France lurches from government to government in a political crisis engulfing President Emmanuel Macron, there has been one consistent beneficiary: Marine Le Pen and her far-right Rassemblement National party.
Hours after Macron’s third new prime minister resigned on Monday, Le Pen cast the RN not just as a party ready to govern but also capable of restoring stability to a nation in turmoil.
Snip.
The RN outflanks rivals from across the political spectrum in opinion polls and maintains a solid base of about a third of the electorate, though its lead has not grown exponentially even as it stands to gain from the chaos.
The populist party also has its own internal divides and problems — not least after Le Pen was barred from running for office for five years when she was convicted of embezzling EU funds. She is appealing against the verdict, with further proceedings scheduled for January.
Still, a series of errors by Macron, Le Pen’s opponent in the last two presidential run-offs, is helping her bolster the RN’s credibility, after a long-running effort to shed the racist and antisemitic legacy of her late father and party founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Macron’s unexpected gamble to call a snap parliamentary vote last year in a bid to stem the RN’s rise backfired, leaving him well short of a majority, while the RN won its biggest ever haul of seats, 120 in the 577-strong lower house.
The French president’s subsequent attempts to break the deadlock by naming prime ministers from the centre-right or his own centrist camp — including Sébastien Lecornu, one of his closest allies — further amplified the crisis, with no premier able to stay in office for more than a few months and struggling to pass budgets.
France’s “centre-right” is probably to the left of Obama.
“It feeds the ongoing feeling that there’s a form of political elite that’s occupying positions of power, and in a totally disconnected way from the people, keep bringing back the same figures,” said Jean-Yves Camus, a political scientist at the Iris think-tank.
Snip.
The political damage from recent months is lasting.
Polling group Odoxa found last week that a third of those who voted against the RN in 2024 — heeding calls by Macron and French centrists to band together against the far-right — would not do so again.
“We found voters were really fed up with this idea of being told to vote against [the RN], they had a feeling they had been asked to do so to purely serve political interests,” Odoxa head Céline Bracq said.
Pollsters and analysts said the RN would at the very least do as well as last year in a new election, and would be one of the few parties set to increase its number of seats, even if the two-round voting system complicates predictions. Much would hinge on a left-wing bloc uniting or not.
Within the RN, however, party executives said they were readying for an outright majority if, as they hope, Macron is at some point forced to call another snap election. In that scenario, the president would have no other option than to appoint Le Pen’s right-hand man and party chief Jordan Bardella as prime minister.
“The RN has to get to Matignon,” said Edwige Diaz, an RN lawmaker, in reference to the prime minister’s official residence. “The people of France can’t take it anymore, they want change.”
Once again, gold and silver hit record highs. There is evidently a shortage of physical silver in London, which is helping drive prices.
They also hit Samara and Kstovo oil refineries, and a Samara substation near a railroad. “Kstovo was the first refinery targeted by Ukraine in the current campaign against Russian oil, hitting it on August the 2nd and again on October the 5th. So the third strike targeting this refinery…This is a big one, the fourth biggest in Russia with a 17 million ton capacity a year. This one alone represents 6% of Russia’s refining capacity overall.”
During last year’s presidential debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump said violent crime was rising. ABC moderator David Muir immediately fact-checked him, claiming, “President Trump, as you know, the FBI says overall violent crime is coming down in this country…”
Nearly every major media outlet echoed that narrative. National Public Radio ran the headline, “Violent crime is dropping fast in the U.S. – even if Americans don’t believe it.” The Wall Street Journal declared, “Violent Crime Rate Falls Sharply After Pandemic Surge.” Vox insisted, “Violent crime is plummeting.” Axios reported, “New data shows violent crime dropping sharply in major U.S. cities.”
However, a new Bureau of Justice Statistics report, which includes data through 2024, shows that Trump was right during the debate when he said, “Crime here is up and through the roof.” The National Crime Victimization Survey shows violent crime surged 59%, with rape and sexual assault up 67%, robbery up 38%, and aggravated assault up 62%. That’s the largest four-year increase in the survey’s 52-year history.
The contrast with Trump’s first term is stark. The NCVS data shows that between 2017 and 2020, violent crime fell 15%, including a 6% drop in robbery and a 24% decline in aggravated assault. Although rape and sexual assault rose slightly, the increase was less than 10% of what occurred under Biden.
The federal government tracks crime in two main ways. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports count the number of offenses reported to police each year. The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, by contrast, annually asks about 240,000 people living in the United States whether they were crime victims. The latter method captures both reported and unreported incidents.
Last year, the media focused almost entirely on the FBI data.
Before 2020, the FBI and Bureau of Justice Statistics trends generally moved in tandem. Since then, they’ve diverged sharply: The FBI reports fewer crimes, while more Americans say they’ve been victimized. Unreported crime was always a factor – and the reasons for it vary. They range from people reluctant to report being victimized by loved ones to a simple aversion by undocumented people to involve themselves with the criminal justice system. In recent years, however, another factor appears to have skewed the FBI data: the breakdown of law enforcement in this country. When people believe police won’t catch or prosecutors won’t punish criminals, they’re simply less likely to report crimes. Between 2010 and 2019, victims reported 63.3% of violent crimes to police. In the last three years, that number plummeted to 48.8%. Arrests fell as well – from 26.5% before COVID-19 to just 16.6% afterward.
They’re slashing their payrolls in anticipation of spinning off basket-case MSNBC from also basket-case NBC “News…”
NBC News eliminated its teams dedicated to covering issues affecting Black, Asian American, Latino and LGBTQ+ groups as part of its layoffs of about 150 staffers on Wednesday, according to two sources familiar with the matter, a significant culling as the Peacock network separates from its sister news network, MSNBC.
The cuts mean that the verticals NBC BLK, NBC Asian America, NBC Latino and NBC OUT will no longer have dedicated teams bolstering their coverage. The verticals will continue to publish stories related to the specific groups and NBC News may ultimately retain up to five staffers who will contribute coverage on the verticals to the newsroom, according to one source, as the dedicated teams focused exclusively on these verticals are sunset.
The total reductions, which affected NBC News’ entire news operation, make up about 7% of NBC News’ newsroom of about 2,000 staffers and 2% of the wider NBCU News Group, which includes Telemundo and the network’s owned-and-operated local news stations. The cuts did not target specific teams and were driven by the network’s budget and the desire to streamline its editorial efforts, according to one source.
They should purge all DEI/social justice hires to help improve shareholder value.
That was quick. “Court Orders Immediate Halt to Loving County ‘Takeover’ Scheme.”
A state district judge has granted Attorney General Ken Paxton’s request for a temporary restraining order against Malcolm Tanner, the Indiana man accused of orchestrating an illegal plan to “take over” Loving County by importing out-of-state voters with promises of free housing.
The order immediately bars Tanner and anyone acting with him from allowing new residents onto the property or discharging sewage that could contaminate soil or groundwater.
A hearing on whether to extend the order or issue a temporary injunction is set for October 31.
“The show is over,” Paxton said in a statement. “A court has ordered that this illegal and deceptive political sham must come to an immediate end. Malcolm Tanner is a two-bit charlatan attempting to defraud people out of their money with false promises of free homes and unlawful government payouts. Texas is for Texans, not out-of-state grifters trying to steal political power from the people who live here.”
The judge found that Tanner and his associates “violated or are threatening to violate Texas Health and Safety Code § 341 by discharging or allowing the discharge of sewage or human excreta in a manner that could contaminate the soil, sub-surface drinking water, or create the potential for disease transmission.”
The court agreed that such contamination posed “immediate and irreparable injury” to public health and justified emergency relief.
The ruling follows Paxton’s earlier lawsuit accusing Tanner of violating public-health laws, running a public nuisance, and committing deceptive trade practices by luring followers—mostly women and children—to a remote site in West Texas with false promises of “free homes” and monthly cash payments.
Tanner, who has described his group as “Melanated People of Power,” claimed on social media he plans to rename Loving County and replace local officials in the 2026 elections.
I feel about Paxton the same way Abraham Lincoln felt about Ulysses S. Grant: “I cannot spare this man. He fights.” (Previously.)
Attorney General Ken Paxton has informed the Texas State Securities Board that his office has uncovered evidence showing entities connected to the East Plano Islamic Center and its controversial proposed EPIC City land development project violated both federal and state securities laws.
In a letter to Chairman E. Wally Kinney and Commissioner Travis J. Iles, Paxton said his office conducted an investigation into Community Capital Partners LP (CCP), the group raising funds for EPIC City, after receiving multiple complaints. The attorney general’s office requested extensive records from CCP and says it has now reviewed more than 750 documents related to the offering of securities tied to the project.
“In the course of the investigation, the OAG identified evidence that CCP violated federal and state securities laws and regulations, including both procedural violations and fraudulent conduct,” Paxton wrote. He invited the Securities Board to meet with his investigative team, review the evidence, and—if it agrees with his findings—refer the case back to the attorney general’s office so that legal action can proceed.
Paxton noted that the Texas Securities Act requires the commissioner and the attorney general to work together to “prevent or detect a violation of the law,” saying he looks forward to collaborating “to ensure that Texas law is being enforced and Texans are protected.”
“After a thorough investigation, it has become clear that the developers behind EPIC City flagrantly and undeniably violated the law,” said Paxton. “The bad actors behind this illegal scheme must be held accountable for ignoring state and federal regulations.”
The development marks a significant escalation in the state’s ongoing crackdown on EPIC City. Multiple state agencies have launched investigations into the project, including the Funeral Service Commission, the Commission on Environmental Quality, and the Workforce Commission.
Additionally, Gov. Greg Abbott has also recently signed legislation he said will effectively ban “Sharia compounds” like EPIC City in Texas. The measure removes certain religious exemptions from the Texas Fair Housing Act for organizations owning more than 25 acres and prevents them from limiting home sales based on religion.
Snip.
If the Securities Board agrees with his office’s conclusions and formally refers the case, the attorney general is expected to file suit against Community Capital Partners and other parties tied to EPIC City for violations of securities law.
At this point the whole project is deader than the last three leaders of Hamas…
Lonoke County, Arkansas: “Dad charged with killing his 14-year-old daughter’s rapist now running for sheriff.” “Aaron Spencer allegedly gunned down Michael Fosler, 67, after catching him driving off with his daughter, whom Fosler had already been charged with grooming and abusing, according to court docs.” “The monster who hurt our child was charged quickly, but released even faster on a $50k bond. He was awaiting court in December for several felonies in relation to what he did to our child.”
Among those charged include Kanaisha Middleton, a supervisor at the Garden City branch of the DMV, as well as her sister, Jamie Middleton, who is accused of taking at least 10 different permit tests for no-show drivers.
Surveillance images show Jamie Middleton wearing different disguises, even fake facial hair as she posed as a man who would be applying for a commercial driving permit, but she forgot to take off her fake nails.
A woman with prior convictions in several southeastern Texas counties and multiple pending felony charges is free on at least nine bonds despite allegations that she has frequently violated the terms of her probation.
Juanetta Solomon’s criminal history dates to at least 2015 with convictions in Brazoria, Fort Bend, Galveston, and Harris counties related to drugs, personal care fraud, and felony theft. She has served time in the state prison system and county jails.
While on probation, in 2023 Solomon was charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon in Harris County, and in 2024 for practicing dentistry without a license. According to Houston police records, she allegedly pretended to be a dentist with ISmilez Cosmetic Designz and injured a patient after using a dental drill, file, and chemicals.
Not Juanetta Solomon.
Last year Solomon was also charged with unlawfully carrying a weapon and prosecutors alleged she repeatedly violated the terms of her probation.
Despite Solomon’s record, 232nd Criminal District Court Judge Josh Hill declined to revoke her probation, and she is free on seven felony bonds out of Harris County.
Electing social justice Democrats means letting black criminals walk the streets so they can continue victimizing law-abiding black citizens.
“Men charged with sex crimes in three states get in girls’ locker rooms by invoking gender identity…Case High School Aquatic Center staff invoked Racine Unified School District’s gender-identity policy to justify letting 64-year-old Rohan de Silva use the girls’ locker room.” So thanks to social justice, high schools are now letting 64 year old perverts into girl’s locker rooms. Keep doing that, and you’re going to get a lot more Aaron Spencers…
“ICE Arrests Illinois Cop For Being Illegal Alien Who Arrived On Six-Month Tourist Visa.” Radule Bojovic of Montenegro came over on a tourist visa in 2015…
A Chinese businessman whose company has strong ties to the Chinese Communist Party has poured at least $65,000 into Rep. Mikie Sherrill’s bid for New Jersey governor, records show.
Pin Ni, the founder of Wanxiang America Corporation, cut at least two checks for a combined $60,000 this year for the One Giant Leap super PAC, which is backing Sherrill’s bid against Republican Jack Ciattarelli.
Pin also gave another $5,800 — the maximum allowable — directly to Sherrill’s campaign in June, records indicate.
Only American citizens or permanent legal residents are allowed to make donations to political campaigns. Pin’s status is not fully clear, though records indicate he has a Social Security number.
Remember Des Moines public schools chairman Jackie Norris, who hired an illegal alien superintendent? She just suspended her campaign for U.S. Senate. Do you think that maybe ordinary Iowa voters aren’t as gung ho about importing illegal aliens as the Democrat Party’s ideological core?
Louis Rossmann reports on an interesting story: Denver City council votes 12-0 not to purchase AI cameras. Denver mayor Mike Johnston buys them anyway. Seems like there’s a big push to install these in American cities over the wishes of voters. (Previously.)
Another attempt to “reinvent farming” goes awry. “A company known for its vertical farming is shutting down its North Texas facility and laying off more than 100 employees, according to a recent filing with the Texas Workforce Commission. Both of Eden Green Technology’s greenhouses at 1845 Sparks Dr. in Cleburne are set to close permanently on Dec. 13. The layoffs affect employees at every level—from executives, including the CEO, CFO and Chief Innovation Officer, to greenhouse managers, production and packing staff, and sanitation workers.” There are probably places were “vertical farming” might prove a viable option, like Alaska or Saudi Arabia, but there’s very little point to trying it in a place so well supplied with sun, water and soil as north central Texas… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Iconic Corpus Christi building fails to attract a bidder. Downtown Corpus is weird. As so0meone once said, “it’s like they rebuilt the city after the monster attack but none of the people came back.” I heard someone that a small group of money Corpus families bought up all downtown with the express intention of not letting it be developed. of course, I was last there in 2000, so maybe things have changed…
“Tough Love” Level: Illegal. “Florida parents reportedly ditched 16-year-old son on roadside with sack of guns: ‘You are the chosen one… good luck.'”
An annoyingly awesome and well-thought out vanlife build. I say “annoying” because they evidently paid to have all the custom work done rather than laboriously building it up from bare metal themselves like most van life videos I watch…
Trump tackles mail-in ballot fraud, the Democrat Party sinks (and sinks, and sinks), millionaires and billionaires pump money to the same lefties who decry them, a kangaroo verdict gets slapped down, a platoon of swamp creatures get smacked down, Ukrainian drones are producing gas shortages in Russia, Lebanon declares itself Iranian influence-free, a heavyweight joins the Texas AG race, Dade bows out, a neo-Nazi expertly trolls the German justice system, and Facebook’s AI wants to have sexytime with your children.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The next voting fraud vector President Trump is ready to tackle: mail-in voting fraud.
President Donald Trump has been warning for years that mail-in ballots and voting machines are riddled with vulnerabilities that invite fraud and undermine trust in elections. We’ve discussed these vulnerabilities here at PJ Media extensively, and now Trump is taking action on them. On Monday morning, President Trump announced on Truth Social that he will issue an executive order to put an end to mail-in ballots before the 2026 midterms and restore “honesty and integrity” to America’s elections.
In a lengthy post on Truth Social, Trump announced, “I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly ‘Inaccurate,’ Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.” He argued that such machines cost “Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election.”
Trump said the United States stands alone in continuing to use widespread mail-in voting. “We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED,” he wrote.
The president made clear that he intends to act quickly, pledging to use executive authority to move the plan forward. “WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections,” Trump said.
Snip.
In 2021, Democrats in Congress tried to ram through a series of radical bills — the Freedom to Vote Act, the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, and the For the People Act — that would have federalized state elections and permanently undermined election integrity. These schemes included universal mail-in ballots, counting votes up to ten days after Election Day, automatic voter registration, granting felons the right to vote, and even laying the groundwork to abolish the Electoral College altogether. It was a brazen attempt to lock in Democrat power forever by destroying the safeguards that protect free and fair elections.
Trump’s announcement proves that election integrity will be a central priority of his presidency as the 2026 midterms approach.
Some think Trump will run into states rights issues. We’ll see…
A federal appeals court handed the Trump administration a decisive 2-1 victory Wednesday, ruling that the president can proceed with cutting nearly $2 billion in previously approved foreign aid payments. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia overturned a lower court’s order that had required the administration to continue sending taxpayer funds abroad.
How the Working Families Party sells itself as “grassroots” — with IRS-documented, publicly admitted “common control” revealing it’s really a Soros-financed political money washer.
In New York politics, there’s one machine that towers above the rest. No, not the Democratic Party—it’s the Working Families Party, the most powerful minor party in America. Its name sounds wholesome enough—who doesn’t support “working families”? But behind that branding lies a $2 billion tax-exempt laundromat that’s anything but local, grassroots, or honest.
Take Zohran Mamdani, their current belle of the ball.
Easy answer: Zohran Mandani is the product of a grassroots washing syndicate of 501c3 and 501c4 entities funded by George Soros and Silicon Valley billionaires. He is their manufactured product.
Easy answer: Zohran Mandani is the product of a grassroots washing syndicate of 501c3 and 501c4 entities funded by George Soros and Silicon Valley billionaires. He is their manufactured product.
After winning his race, he announced on NBC: “I don’t think we should have billionaires.” Hilarious considering Mamdani’s “grassroots” revolution was fueled by over $2 million in PAC and organizational spending, much of it courtesy of the very billionaire class he allegedly opposes.
This is the theater of modern politics: denounce wealth while being powered by it. And the actors know their audience. They’ve learned that if you slap “grassroots” on the packaging, voters won’t check the label.
But let’s check it anyway.
The money trail revealed in Sam Antar’s breaking report is straightforward enough. Soros donates to the Open Society Institute, a $4.5 billion “charity” that enjoys generous tax deductions. OSI then transfers millions to other “charities” like Tides Foundation, which mysteriously claims to run a $350 million operation with zero employees. From there, the money “converts” into political cash: Tides passes funds to the Working Families Organization, a 501(c)(4), which then wires millions to PACs that bankroll candidates like Mamdani.
What you have is billionaire money dressed up in “working families” clothing, masquerading as the will of the people while being anything but.
Drawing on data from the nonpartisan data firm L2, the New York Times’s Shane Goldmacher conducted an in-depth analysis of the changes in these numbers over the past few election cycles. His findings paint a stark picture for the Democratic Party. It is in the midst of what he calls a “voter registration crisis,” with the party “hemorrhaging voters long before they even reach the polls.”
Goldmacher first looked at how these figures shifted between 2020 and 2024. In the span of four years, Democrats lost roughly 2.1 million registered voters across the 30 states and the district that track party affiliation, while the GOP gained approximately 2.4 million.
As the map below shows, Democrats fell behind in each one of these states. This includes blue states such as California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, and Rhode Island, as well as the swing states of Arizona, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
NEW at NYT: The Democratic Party is facing a voter registration crisis in red, blue and battleground states alike — losing ground to the GOP everywhere.
My deep dive into the numbers and what it reveals about the party's brand.
The shift in Pennsylvania has been dramatic. In November 2020, Democrats held a registration advantage of 517,310 active voters. Today, that margin has shrunk to just 53,303.
A similar scenario has played out in North Carolina, where Democrats once enjoyed a 400,000-voter edge. Their lead now stands at less than 17,000.
Goldmacher noted that, in percentage terms, Democrats’ advantage over Republicans narrowed from nearly 11 points in 2020 to just over 6 points in 2024.
President Donald Trump was still able to win because so many Democratic votes are concentrated in deep-blue strongholds such as California and New York. By contrast, large red states such as Texas don’t allow voters to register by party affiliation — and thus aren’t reflected in the data.
In some cases, Democrats still retained an edge over Republicans (such as in Pennsylvania). But the majority of new registrations in other states, such as Florida, shifted from Democrats to the GOP. Goldmacher expects more states to follow.
Moreover, between 2018 and 2024, new young voters have shifted noticeably toward the Republican Party. In 2018, 66% of voters under 45 registered as Democrats, but by 2024 that share had fallen to just 48%.
Goldmacher reported that, last year, for the first time since 2018, new voter registrations nationwide favored Republicans over Democrats.
That was a long time ago and today Democrats’ image is significantly worse and over a wider range of cultural issues than it was back then. The animus toward the party among working-class voters has reached epic proportions and Democrats appear clueless on how to overcome that. The reigning theories seem to be talking more about economics (“kitchen table issues” or, more daringly, “abundance”), insisting they’re “fighters” and cussing a lot. Damon Linker gets to the heart of how absolutely hopeless this approach is.
[W]hat liberals need to do to defeat right-wing populism…[is] to moderate on culture. That means on policies and moral stances wrapped up with the old culture war (like trans and other gender-related issues) as well as in other areas of policy that have a strong cultural valance—like crime, immigration, and DEI. This isn’t just necessary because Democratic positions on these issues are unpopular at the moment. It’s also crucial because culture is more fundamental than politics: It sends a signal to voters about where a politician or party stands on base-level moral questions. When voters become convinced that a specific politician or party has bad (or just sufficiently different) moral judgment, they lose trust in that politician or party. And then other, more superficial policy commitments don’t matter…
The area surrounding the Texas-Arkansas border has been solidly Republican for a while, but the Biden people wanted to demonstrate that federal dollars are available to all, regardless of political leanings, and they hoped they might be able to tilt the area’s partisan alignment a bit back toward the Dems if those dollars were used to jump-start a solar-panel-construction industry in the region, creating jobs and boosting the local economy in other ways…The money arrived, but in the 2024 election, the region voted even more overwhelmingly for Donald Trump than it had in the previous two election cycles…The effort failed because the voters in Texarkana, like voters in rural and exurban communities around the country, have learned to distrust the Democrats on fundamental issues of morality and culture, making them disinclined to trust them on anything else…
The way to [reach these skeptical voters] is for the party to make an effort to distance itself from the leftward cultural stances associated with its most animated progressive activists, but also often affirmed by many millions of well-educated upper-middle-class white and often female professionals. Since people fitting this description frequently hold top jobs in the Democratic Party itself, this is a hard ask…
This, I’m convinced, is the top challenge facing liberalism and the Democratic Party today.
Exactly. This is the top challenge facing the Democrats today. Yet they are shockingly M.I.A. in dealing with it. Democrats overwhelmingly would rather do anything than do what is needed: two, three many Sister Souljah moments. Consider how Democrats have handled culturally-inflected issues since their 2024 election defeat.
Trans? A few peeps, quickly slapped down by the Groups and party activists.
Immigration? Everything Trump’s doing is wrong. We’ll only cooperate with federal law enforcement when we feel like it.
Crime? Not a problem. Everything’s going great—especially in D.C.! Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries: “The crime scene in D.C. most damaging to everyday Americans is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.” Trump’s turning D.C. into a police state!
Race? DEI is wonderful and we’ll defend it to our dying breath. Same thing with racial preferences. Those who oppose these policies are racists and white supremacists.
The list could go on. Using the traditional 0-10 Sister Souljah scale, where zero is doing nothing at all, 5 is barely adequate, and 10 is what Bill Clinton did, I’d give today’s Democrats a 1 for the occasional grudging admission in interviews and the like that maybe the Democrats have overdone their noble commitments a little bit (though of course their heinous opponents are 100 percent wrong). And the 1 might be generous.
Teixeira is 100% right on the problem, and on Democrats complete inability to address the problem. Sister Souljah is the Democratic Party. The insane wing is in the process of driving out the last remnants of the Corrupt Wing, the latter of which foolishly believes that actually winning elections is somehow more important than the perpetual virtue signaling festival to remind those inbred redneck freaks of JesusLand that Democrats are the Good People, and anyone who disagrees is a hetronormative racist transphobic white supremacist who must be cancelled at all costs.
Social Justice controls the ideological core of the Party hook, line and sinker. Opposing social justice is heretical #WrongThink that must be punished. Social justice warriors cannot be argued out of their convictions by logic, as logic had nothing to do with forming them. Social justice is a religious imperative, and the only way to free the party from the grip of social justice is to burn it to the ground. The Democrat Party needs to go the way of the Whigs. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard announced Tuesday that she will be revoking security clearances for 37 current and former intel officials for allegedly abusing the public’s trust by manipulating information and conducting political activities.
The officials on Gabbard’s list includes former top aides to Obama Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who was involved with a discredited intelligence assessment that claimed Russia favored once-and-current President Donald Trump to win the 2016 election over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.
Gabbard has accused the 37 officials accused of politicizing and weaponizing intelligence, failing to safeguard classified information, or other instances of failing to follow standards.
Andrew Cedar: Former Senior Director for Global Engagement at the National Security Council
Andrew P. Miller: Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israeli-Palestinian Affairs
Benjamin A. Cooper: Associate Scholar in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute
Beth E. Sanner: Former Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Mission Integration
Brett M. Holmgren: Former Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research
Charles A. Kupchan: Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown University and former Senior Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council
Christopher Center: Former intelligence analyst and official
Corinne A. Graff: Former Senior Advisor at the United States Institute of Peace
Dipreet K. Sidhu: Former intelligence and policy official
Edward Gistaro: Former National Intelligence Officer for Europe
Emily J. Horne: Former Spokesperson and Senior Director for Press at the National Security Council
Harry Hannah: Former intelligence official
Heather R. Gutierrez: Former intelligence analyst
Jamie S. Jowers: Former intelligence and policy advisor
Jeffrey M. Prescott: Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture
Joel T. Meyer: Former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Strategic Initiatives at the Department of Homeland Security
Joel Willett: Former CEO of Cybermedia Technologies
John W. Ficklin: Former Senior Director for Records and Access Management at the National Security Council
Julia S. Gurganus: Former National Intelligence Officer for Russia and Eurasia
Julia Santucci: Former Director for Egypt at the National Security Council
Loren DeJonge Schulman: Former Deputy Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security
Luke R. Hartig: Former Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council
Maher B. Bitar: Former Coordinator for Intelligence and Defense Policy at the National Security Council
Mark B. Feierstein: Former Assistant Administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean at USAID
Mary Beth Goodman: Deputy Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
Megan F. Doherty: Former Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Middle East at USAID
Michael P. Dempsey: Former Acting Director of National Intelligence
Perry Blatstein: Former intelligence analyst
Richard H. Ledgett: Former Deputy Director of the National Security Agency
Samantha E. Vinograd: Former Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention at the Department of Homeland Security
Sarah S. Farnsworth: Former intelligence official
Shelby L. Pierson: Former Intelligence Community Election Threats Executive
Stephanie O’Sullivan: Former Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence
Thomas W. West: Former Special Representative for Afghanistan
Thom X. Nguyen: Former intelligence analyst
William J. Tuttle: Former intelligence official
Yael Eisenstate: Former Vice President of Global Affairs at the Anti-Defamation League
I’m including the entire list here because I think it’s important to name and shame. Also, having this posted and tagged lets me keep track when one of those swamp creatures pops up in a new role, and helps track the corruption of previously important institutions (I’m looking at you, ADL).
Speaking of swamp creatures: “Kash Patel’s FBI raids John Bolton’s home, office in probe over sending classified documents to family.” Bolton reminds me of Mark Felt, Watergate’s “Deep Throat,” in that both stabbed metaphorical knives in the President they served over being denied the influence and deference they felt they deserved. Bolton was actually a pretty good UN ambassador, where he served the useful function of scaring the shit out of America’s foreign enemies. Alas, he Peter Principled himself to National Security Advisor, where he never got on the same page with Trump’s unorthodox (but effective) diplomacy.
“LaToya Cantrell, the mayor of New Orleans, has been indicted on Federal charges….The indictment alleges that [Cantrell] and Jeffrey Paul Vappie, a member of her Executive Protection Unit (EPU), developed a personal relationship in October 2021. To conceal their relationship and maximize their time together, they allegedly created a scheme to defraud the City of New Orleans by engaging in personal activities while Vappie was on duty and being paid for providing protection.” They were canoodling on the taxpayer’s dime. (Previously: “It’s the mayor’s exorbitant travel spending that has people up in arms. She traveled to sister cities Ascona, Switzerland, and Juan Antibes-les-Pins on the French Riviera this summer, costing the City of New Orleans close to $45,000, including first-class international airfare with lie-flat seating.”)
“The Unecha pumping station which is part of the Druzhba pipeline has been hit for the second time this week by drones.” This is near to the border with Belarus.
“Unprecedented Shift In Lebanon’s Attitude Towards Iran: Our Government’s Decision To Disarm Hizbullah Stands; We Will Not Tolerate Your Intervention In Our Internal Affairs; Relations With Lebanon Must Be Conducted Via State Institutions, Not Via Hizbullah,” MEMRI, August 14, 2025:
On August 13, 2025, during his visit to Lebanon, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, heard unequivocally from Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam that Lebanon is no longer under Iranian patronage and will not tolerate Iranian dictates or interference in its internal affairs.
Larijani’s visit came amid tension between the two countries that followed the historic August 5 decision by the Lebanese government to disarm Hizbullah by the end of the year – a decision that sparked rage in Hizbullah’s patron Iran. Iranian officials, among them Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, as well as Ali Akbar Velayati, top advisor to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, and Iraj Masjedi, deputy commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Qods Force, expressed their vehement opposition to the Lebanon’s sovereign decision, claiming that it reflected not the will of the Lebanese people but only Israeli and American aspirations. These senior Iranian officials voiced support for Hizbullah’s refusal to comply with the demand to disarm, and warned that Hizbullah could thwart this plan because it had already rebuilt itself following the war with Israel and is now “at the height of its powers.” They added that Iran would support the organization in this matter.
Lebanon was quick to respond to these statements, perceiving them as direct and blatant interference in its domestic affairs. In a notable response, the Lebanese Foreign Ministry issued, unprecedentedly, not one but two harsh condemnations of “the violation of Lebanon’s sovereignty, unity, and stability.”
More condemnation and criticism came from the anti-Hizbullah and anti-Iran camp in Lebanon, which called on the Lebanese government to take diplomatic measures against Iran, such as expelling the Iranian ambassador and even severing relations with Iran, in addition to filing a complaint with the UN Security Council.
Israel’s decision to crush Iran’s terrorist catspaws continues to reap benefits across the region.
The Texas Attorney General’s race just got a major shake up.
Conservative firebrand and U.S. House Freedom Caucus member Congressman Chip Roy (R-TX-21) will run for Texas attorney general, the four-term legislator told The Texan.
“It has been my honor to represent the 21st Congressional District of Texas — the best part of the best state in the greatest country in the history of the world. I am particularly proud of our work to deliver on President Trump’s agenda and fight to drain the swamp. I could do it forever and be fulfilled professionally. But representatives should not be permanent,” Roy said in a release.
“And my experience watching Texans unite in response to the devastating Hill Country floods made clear that I want to come home. I want to take my experience in Congress, as a federal prosecutor, and as First Assistant Attorney General to fight for Texas from Texas.”
Roy’s 21st Congressional District stretches from Austin to San Antonio and west of Kerrville. During the devastating Hill Country flooding last month that killed over 130 people, Roy, who represents the area, was on the ground in the community more than most other state officials responding to the disaster.
He joins a field that includes state Sens. Mayes Middleton (R-Galveston) and Joan Huffman (R-Houston), as well as former Department of Justice appointee Aaron Reitz. Polling released by Texas Southern University on Thursday morning, which did not include Roy, put Huffman at 12 points, Middleton at eight, and Reitz at seven with nearly three-quarters of respondents undecided.
Previously Ted Cruz’s chief of staff before getting elected to congress, Roy has to be considered the immediate favorite to win the Republican nomination.
Minnesota Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party stripped the party’s endorsement of radical leftist Minnesota state Sen. Omar Fateh in the Minneapolis mayoral race over “brazen cheating.” The emerging election cheating scandal hilariously occurred amongst Democrats. Awkwardly, this comes from the same party of woke leftists that insists U.S. elections are the “safest in the world” and free from manipulation. Clearly, this corrupt party that serves progressive elites – not the working class – wants a do-over in this local election.
On Thursday, Minnesota DFL chair Richard Carlbom wrote in a statement, “After a thoughtful and transparent review of the challenges, the Constitution, Bylaws & Rules Committee found substantial failures in the Minneapolis Convention’s voting process on July 19, including an acknowledgement that a mayoral candidate was errantly eliminated from contention.”
Carlbom added, “Now it’s time to turn our focus to unity and our common goal: electing DFL leaders focused on making life more affordable for Minnesotans and holding Republicans accountable for the chaos and confusion they’ve unleashed on Minnesotans.”
A series of challenges were submitted to the Minnesota DFL after last month’s convention, citing serious issues with the electronic voting system and raising questions about election integrity in Fateh’s endorsement over incumbent Jacob Frey. The Minneapolis DFL also recognized it had erroneously eliminated DeWayne Davis after the first round of voting due to 176 undercounted votes.
Funny how Democrats swear up and down that there’s absolutely no voting fraud…until they accuse a fellow Democrat.
Trump is calling on Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook to resign over mortgage fraud allegations, namely claiming two separate homes as her primary residence.
Moribund lefty legacy outlet MSNBC is rebranding as MS NOW. Until that woke hive of scum and villainy is entirely purged, no sane American will ever trust it.
“Texas Is Preparing To Cut Off Power To Data Centers During Grid Emergencies.” Well, yeah. If it’s data centers or people’s homes and apartments, people should generally win. Data centers should have backup power and orderly shutdown procedures, not to mention redundant arrays of backups and rotating off-site backups…
Texas Democratic State Rep. James Talarico (TX-50) decries the effects of money on politics while taking “a whopping $59,000 in donations from a billionaire’s PAC last year. The Texas Sands PAC, which is pushing for the Lone Star State to legalize casino gambling, gave Talarico the donations to encourage him to lead that initiative.”
“Senator launches investigation into Meta over allowing ‘sensual’ AI chats with kids.” It seems that all the billions Facebook has been sinking into AI has only made the world worse. Much like Facebook itself…
Flesh-eating bacteria is on the rise again. Avoiding swimming in the ocean or eating raw oysters seems to be the key to avoiding it.
Dwight has a swell obit up for RAF Flight Lt. John Cruickshank, a Catalina pilot who was so shot up by a U-boat, with blood soaking through his flight suit, that his crewmembers thought he wouldn’t make it on the five hour flight home. Not only did he make it back to help land the plane, he lived to be 105.
“U.S. Agriculture Secretary Rollins, Gov. Abbott Announce $850 Million to Combat New World Screwworm Threat. Hundreds of millions will be appropriated by the federal government to build a sterile fly facility.”
German neo-Nazi claims to be a woman so he can serve his time in a women’s prison. ‘Sven Liebich, who now goes by ‘Marla-Svenja,’ was convicted of “slander and incitement to hatred’ and lost his bid to appeal. Now that he’s headed to jail, he has suddenly identified as a woman, despite previously calling transgender people ‘parasites.'” Liebich appears to be an actual neo-Nazi rather than just an AfD member, and neo-Nazis are scum, but you have to admire the brazenness of the hustle, especially not even bother to shave off his mustache, and actually demanding kosher meals.
