Democrats get called on their Medicaid fraud and steal firefighter pensions, the awful atrocities Hamas committed against Israeli civilians, more details of the plot against America, another Democrat spying for the Chinese, a look at Finland’s deep civil defense infrastructure, and Uncle Rick discovers that Ivy League grads working for the New York Times are ignorant dumbasses.
ice President J.D. Vance certainly has been busy as America’s “Fraud Czar.”
Medicaid fraud in California is rampant, and as my colleague Mary Chastain noted in March, Vance’s anti-fraud task force suspended 70 hospice and home health care businesses in Los Angeles.
The move came shortly after investigations by CBS News and Nick Shirley revealed a fraud scheme in California involving hospices.
Vance’s task has then suspended over 400 more.
Now the Vice President has announced on Wednesday that the Trump administration is withholding $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments to California and is threatening to suspend federal funding to all states if they don’t aggressively prosecute fraud in their Medicaid programs.
“There are California taxpayers and American taxpayers who are being defrauded because California isn’t taking its program seriously, but also you have people who have been prescribed medications that they don’t even need. They’ve had drugs put into their bodies that they don’t need because fraudsters have actually encouraged false prescriptions and false administration of medications,” Vance said at the White House.
The move is similar to the one the administration took in February suspending Medicaid payments to Minnesota.
Vance said that the administration is also notifying all 50 states that it could freeze funding to their Medicaid Fraud Control Units “if they do not aggressively prosecute Medicaid fraud.” The units, which exist in each state, investigate and prosecute Medicaid provider fraud. “We are going to turn off the money that goes to these anti-fraud units,” he said, if they fail to do their job.
This is a good start, but people need to go to prison.
Washington just became the first state in U.S. history to terminate a public employee pension plan.
The plan belongs to retired police officers and firefighters. LEOFF Plan 1 was 160% funded as of June 2024 per the state’s own actuarial valuation. It had not required a single contribution in 25 years. By 2029 it was projected to reach 200% funded with a $4.3 billion surplus.
The legislature terminated the plan, swept $3.9 billion, and is using $880 million of it to refill a rainy day fund it already drained to cover a deficit it created.
Days ago, retired first responders including former Congressman Dave Reichert sued the state to stop it. The bill passed the House 55-39 and was advanced out of Appropriations without a public hearing. Every yes vote was a Democrat. The governor signed it in April.
“Missouri Supreme Court Upholds New Congressional Map.” “The Missouri Supreme Court once again upheld the state’s new Congressional map, which would break-up the Kansas City Democratic seat and give Republicans a 7-1 advantage.”
They’ve got themselves into a position — which began with Barack Obama’s hollowing out of the party over a decade ago — in which they can’t afford to lose the next couple of elections, even as their position erodes.
Due to an “accidental error” in the 2020 census, blue states got more seats in the House — and more electoral votes — than they were entitled to. When that “error” is fixed, the situation will be worse for them. Then there’s the flood of refugees from blue states to red, further expanding their Congressional majorities. (But beware of the refugees who continue to vote blue. Where’s my “welcome wagon” proposal?)
Meanwhile, the Trump Administration is choking off the flood of taxpayer money that has kept leftist organizations and institutions afloat, buying votes with taxpayer dollars. And the federal workforce has shrunk 10% with more “draconian cuts” on the way.
It’s a bit like Winfield Scott’s “Anaconda Plan” to choke off the Confederacy — which worked once it was actually employed. (And Trump is doing something similar with Iran, choking it off gradually rather than going for a swift coup de main, which is disappointing some people but which will work at a much-reduced cost in lives. But that’s another essay.)
This is why the Democrats, and the left, but I repeat myself, are unhappy. They feel it happening.
Click through to hear the lamentations of their women.
Right after the ceasefire expired: “FP-2 Drones Swarm Russian Positions: Multiple Hits on Multiple Targets–Ammo Dumps, Training Centre.”
Finland officially became NATO’s newest member on April 4, 2023, becoming the 31st member of the alliance, about one month after neighboring Sweden joined.
One of the so-called “justifications” for Vladimir Putin’s utterly unjustifiable full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was that he didn’t want NATO expanding to his borders. Not counting Kaliningrad, that stretch of Russian territory between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, at the start of 2022, Russia had 446 miles of shared border with NATO members Norway, Estonia, and Latvia.
Finland shares 883 miles of border with Russia, so now that Finland is in NATO, Russia has 1,279 miles of shared border with NATO members, almost three times as much as before the invasion. It is a beautiful thing to see military territorial aggression backfire so thoroughly.
Considering Finland’s long and tense history with Russia, some might have expected the country to end up in the NATO alliance sooner. Once a territory of Sweden, then of Russia, Finland declared its independence in 1917. In August 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which relegated Finland to a Soviet sphere of influence. By November, Finland and the Soviets were fighting the three-month Winter War; this was when Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä, nicknamed the “White Death,” believed to have killed more than 500 enemy soldiers during the conflict, the highest number of sniper kills in any major war, and considered one of the deadliest snipers in history. (I suspect he is the only Finn to be featured in a video of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History, taking on the Red Baron.) Finland resisted bravely against overwhelming Russian forces, but at the war’s end it was forced to cede about 9 percent of its territory. In June 1941, Finland and the Soviet Union returned to conflict in the Continuation War, with Finland a cobelligerent of Nazi Germany.
Finland argued that it was fighting a parallel but separate “continuation war” against the Soviet Union and had no formal treaty of alliance with Germany. While the U.S. ended diplomatic relations for a period, it never declared war against Finland.
When World War II ended, Finland retained its independence, but Soviet troops remained at its doorstep. In 1948, the Finnish government announced the “Treaty of Friendship,” declaring that Finland was committed to staying out of international conflicts between the great powers and limiting Finnish defense cooperation with third parties. “Finlandization” became a term to describe a state of technical independence and sovereignty, but heavy influence by the Kremlin.
The Finns’ preferred public stance of neutrality remained after the Cold War ended, and if not for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Finland might have remained a “NATO partner,” but not a member. In January 2022, public opinion polling found 30 percent of Finns supported Finland applying for NATO membership. Forty-three percent of respondents opposed applying for membership, and 27 percent were unsure of their position. About one month later, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, and by April, 68 percent of Finns supported applying for NATO membership.
You may have noticed that the Russian “special military operation” that was supposed to last four days has now lasted more than four years, the Russian military couldn’t spare any tanks for the Victory Day parades in Red Square this year, and a new estimate calculates that about 352,000 Russian soldiers have died in the war against Ukraine through the end of 2025. That is about six times the American in-theater deaths in the Vietnam War. Throw in the wounded and missing, and the Russian military has lost an estimated 1.4 million men.
The terrorists shot their eyes, their faces and their breasts, and even targeted their most intimate parts, to destroy their beauty and rob their loved ones of a final goodbye.
Women were stripped, bound, stabbed, shot and burned. They were executed both during and after rape amid an orgy of violence in which 1,200 people were killed and 250 taken hostage.
Heads were decapitated. Pelvic bones shattered. Even after death, sexual assault continued.
…
At Kibbutz Be’eri, nails, sharp objects, and pieces of metal and plastic were similarly embedded in a woman whose body was discovered naked and bound. On another victim, grenades were used.
…
Those taken hostage were assaulted in front of loved ones and young relatives forced to commit sex acts on each other, an intentional, premeditated strategy of kinocide to destroy family units even after release from captivity.
…
There was a recurring pattern of rape and gang rape; sexual torture; mutilation; targeted shooting to the face, head and genital area; forced nudity; binding and restraint; genital burning; objects inserted into intimate areas; post-mortem sexual humiliation; and execution during or after sexual assault.
Indeed, when Hamas led other terror groups into Israel they carried Arabic-to-Hebrew phrase lists commanding victims to ‘take off your pants’, ‘lie down’, and ‘spread your legs’.
This is the group the ideological core of the Democratic Party will do almost anything to back.
🧵🚨 MAJOR BREAKING: International actors are involved in the State Department led color revolution 🚨🚨
This is not speculation; it’s straight from a recorded call.
Ex-USAID employees describe how, before January 20, they moved internal groups off government systems and into encrypted Signal chats, then quickly linked with foreign partners and NGOs after the inauguration. This attempt at creating a color revolution isn’t new news; this part was already reported in NOTUS earlier this year.
But what’s not reported is the international aspect. One participant explicitly frames it as “a global anti-authoritarian movement,” connecting U.S. officials with “colleagues from around the world who have dealt with this directly.”
They reference coordination with Johns Hopkins, “international democracy and conflict mitigation spaces,” and efforts to mobilize across borders against what they perceive as domestic authoritarianism.
🧵🚨 MAJOR BREAKING: Inside The New Pluralists: how billionaires weaponized the Biden Administration, targeted Charlie Kirk, and are quietly financing America’s color revolution 🚨🚨
In 2017, a quiet meeting brought representatives of Soros, Koch, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations together for one purpose: to rethink how philanthropy influences politics.
Out of that meeting came the “New Pluralists,” a coalition that would go on to shape the Biden White House’s United We Stand summit, fund censorship-adjacent projects, and eventually intersect with investigations into Turning Point USA … and the color revolution that’s brewing in the United States now.
“Legal group exposes heavy use of Minnesota’s ‘vouching’ system to override voting ID rules. The records, which were obtained through a public records request, showed that Minnesota’s Election Day Registration process allows registered voters or certain residential facility employees to verify another voter’s residency in place of standard identification or proof-of-address documents.” “According to the data released by AFL, almost 18,900 Election Day registrations in 2024 involved the use of vouching. Of those, 13,441 were updates to existing voter registrations, while 5,457 involved new voter registrations.”
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
One of Britain’s ‘first gay dads’ and his husband have both been charged with rape, sexual assault and modern slavery trafficking for sexual exploitation.
Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, 57, also the UK’s first openly gay football club owner, and his husband Scott Hutchison, 32, will appear at Chelmsford Magistrates’ Court today …
Drewitt-Barlow and his ex-husband Tony made headlines in 1999 when they became one of the first gay couples in the UK to have children through a surrogate mother.
An Essex Police statement said today: ‘Detectives have secured charges against two men in connection with an investigation into human trafficking for sexual exploitation, rape and other sexual offences.
‘Officers from the Serious Crime Directorate at Essex Police carried co-ordinated searches at premises in Danbury, Maldon, and Braintree on Wednesday and arrested two men. Since then we have been liaising with the Crown Prosecution Service.
‘We can now confirm that 57 year-old Barrie Drewitt-Barlow and 32 year-old Scott Drewitt-Barlow, both of Danbury, have both been charged with multiple offences including rape, sexual assault, and modern slavery trafficking for sexual exploitation.
Pennsylvania Democrat Sen. John Fetterman has reiterated that he is done with the insanity gripping his party. In a series of raw appearances on Bill Maher’s show and a new Washington Post op-ed, Fetterman is torching the reflexive anti-Trump obsession, the normalization of radical left ideas once dismissed as smears, and the sloppy 24-hour news cycle that turns opinions into “news.”
Fetterman made clear he refuses to play along with the extremes. “My colleagues and people that are running, whether for the Senate where the House, they are literally running on f*ck Trump,” he said.
“I mean, that’s literally—they have campaign commercials with that. It’s absurd,” he noted, adding “And we are getting to that point and I refuse to engage in that extreme, those terms. And we have to find a better way forward.”
Fetterman repeated the sentiments in an op-ed in The Washington Post, titled “I Haven’t Changed. Here’s What Has,” writing “My party cannot simply be the opposite of whatever President Donald Trump says.”
He stresses, “Working across the aisle is the only way forward” and calls “pointless pile-ons and attacks” unproductive. Fetterman highlights once-mainstream Democratic positions on border security, support for Israel, and avoiding government shutdowns that have now become “toxic” to the party’s fringe base.
He declares, “Someone who comes here illegally and commits a violent crime should be deported. Full stop.”
This week’s Democrat acting as a spy for the communist Chinese is the mayor of Arcadia.
A California mayor admitted to acting as an illegal foreign agent of China, resigning from her position in a shocking federal plea deal unsealed on Monday.
Democrat Eileen Wang agreed with prosecutors that she worked with the People’s Republic of China to boost propaganda with a fake news website on US soil between 2020 and 2022. She was elected to the city council in Arcadia — a city in the San Gabriel Valley within LA County — in November 2022.
Wang, 58, worked with her then-fiancé, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, on a website called “U.S. News Center,” which claimed to be a news source for Chinese Americans, according to court documents.
But in reality, the pair were carrying out Beijing’s orders through the site.
Wang and Sun “executed directives” from the Chinese government, posting propaganda designed to boost China, all while reporting back to their masters with screenshots showing how many people viewed the stories, according to the plea agreement.
“Harris County Treasurer Arrested for Second DWI in Office, After Burglary Charge Dismissed. Carla Wyatt was arrested in Galveston County last weekend.”
Harris County Treasurer Carla Wyatt has been arrested for a third time since taking office in 2023, while county commissioners consider abolishing the treasurer’s office altogether.
Galveston County law enforcement arrested Wyatt on Saturday for allegedly driving while intoxicated (DWI) and she was being held on a $3,000 bond with an addendum hold.
Wyatt was arrested for DWI in Harris County in December 2023 after testing indicated she had a blood alcohol level of 0.15 percent, which is nearly twice the legal limit of 0.08 percent.
Court records indicate Wyatt did not comply with the terms of her bond conditions on at least two occasions, including one in which she failed a blood alcohol blow test in March 2024. She reportedly completed a pretrial diversion program, however, and her DWI charge was dismissed in August of that year.
In December 2025, Wyatt was arrested again in Harris County and charged with breaking into a vehicle with intent to commit theft, but a grand jury declined to indict her and the charge was dropped last month.
Wyatt’s attorney Christopher Downey has argued that Wyatt struggles with medical issues, including alleged cerebrovascular disease, which affects the flow of blood to the brain.
So the excuse for her lawbreaking is literally “Her brain don’t work right.”
An Orange County Democrat’s struggling campaign is fighting back after ex-staffers accused the candidate of turning a discussion about her fake boobs into an all-hands meeting.
Janet Keo Conklin, a real estate agent and La Palma council member who is seeking to become Orange County’s next assessor, has denied allegations that she forced staff to feel her breasts while claiming she had no feeling in her nipples.
On Friday, LAist reported that Conklin — who is also accused of misusing campaign money on personal expenses — allegedly told two staffers that “she has no feeling in her nipples” and placed their hands on her chest to “give it a squeeze.”
I wonder if adding a “nipples” tag would help or hurt my page ranks…
A problem not just in Texas, but nationally: “Finals Week for Texas Schools, Universities Delayed by Hack of Education Service Canvas. Some students’ screens showed a message from the hacking group ShinyHunters.”
A cyberattack on Canvas, a system used by schools and universities throughout the nation, disrupted finals week for thousands of students in Texas, though it is now back online.
According to Baylor University, on Thursday, May 7, several universities reported that access to the Canvas system was blocked by a ransom notice. Canvas, which is owned by the company Instructure, is utilized by 41 percent of higher education institutions in the U.S. According to Instructure, Canvas has over 30 million active users.
Canvas is a cloud-based management system that houses grade books, submissions, teaching materials, and classroom communications.
The data breach was traced to “Free for Teacher” accounts within the Canvas system. The free parts of the site, which were particularly susceptible to a data breach, are now disabled according to Instructure. As of Saturday, Canvas is available for most users, but parts of the cloud system remain under maintenance.
Consider this yet another reason to implement rolling offsite backup for all mission critical data.
Tyler Brown, the man who allegedly opened fire on passing cars on a Boston highway on Monday, was previously convicted of the attempted murder of a police officer and released after serving just five years in prison.
Brown, 46, is accused of firing 50 to 60 rounds at random passersby on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, hitting dozens of cars. Two people were hit and remain in critical condition in a nearby hospital. Video of the incident taken by an eyewitness shows Brown running back and forth in the traffic lanes, firing at random.
A State Police trooper and Marine veteran caught in the traffic jam that resulted from the incident shot Brown, who is now in custody at a Boston-area ICU.
Troopers found witnesses hiding under their cars, Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said during a press conference Monday.
Brown is from Boston and has been under the supervision of either the Massachusetts Probation Department or Department of Parole, Ryan said.
In May 2020, Brown opened fire on a pair of police officers who were responding to a 911 call, firing 13 rounds, one of which was fired at “close range.” The two cops returned fire, but no one was hit.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called the nuclear phaseout a “serious strategic mistake” that left Germany short of firm power that turned the Energiewende into the most expensive energy transition on the planet. This is an early marker for a developing worldwide retreat from policies that sidelined nuclear power and demonized coal, oil, and natural gas.
Germany stubbornly closed its last three functioning nuclear reactors in April 2023 right in the middle of a crippling energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine. As pragmatists predicted, German citizens now suffer under punishingly high electricity prices and remain heavily dependent on imported energy.
The green dream was sold as a route to “cheap” renewables, yet the reality for German households and factories has been record‑high electricity prices, complex subsidies for favored businesses and individuals who conform to the climate narrative, and a grid that struggles on windless days or under gray skies.
Japan made a remarkably similar error but is finally correcting course. After the Fukushima disaster, the government panicked and shut down all 54 of its nuclear reactors. Today, Japan is slowly restarting those idle units.
The pattern is plain to see. Countries abandon dependable power sources under political pressure, then spend years rebuilding what they had demonized and dismantled.
Jim Geraghty has a pretty cool look inside Finland’s civil defense infrastructure.
Perhaps no other city in the world has done more to prepare for being bombed than Helsinki. What started as a response to hard lessons from the bombing of Finland’s cities in World War II by the Soviets accelerated through the era of nuclear fears of the Cold War, and continues to this day and demonstrates a particularly Finnish approach to how you protect your citizens from aerial bombardment. Join me for a walk through one of the largest and most complex underground structures in the world.
Helsinki, Finland — In the downtown of this capital city, just off Hakaniemi Market Square, the entrance to Arena Center Hakaniemi could easily be mistaken for an elevator and stairway to an underground parking garage. In fact, the underground complex does include a parking garage — alongside a gym, several youth soccer courts, and a whole lot else.
But the stairs go deep — eight flights, and each landing of each flight is made of metal grates, creating the unnerving sense that you can see all the way down, beneath your shoes.
But there’s a purpose to this flooring, even if it’s no friend to any user unnerved by looking down from a great height. If some sort of terrible explosion occurred at the entrance to the stairs, some of the concussive force from the blast would pass through the flooring of the stairway landings, hopefully keeping the stairway intact.
Arena Center Hakaniemi is part of a vast network of underground civil defense shelters.
Snip.
After [World War II], the Finns decided that if bombs ever fell on their cities again, everyone in the country would have access to an underground shelter.
The result is more than 50,000 civil defense shelters across the country, with space for 4.8 million people, which is almost sufficient for the population of 5.5 million people. The shelters underneath Helsinki collectively have room for 940,000 people; the city has about 700,000 residents.
As Atlas Obscura puts it, “No Finnish government official would ever mention Russia as the reason for such defensive preparations, but they don’t have to.”)
While many of these bunkers were built during the Cold War, the construction of mandatory shelters in new buildings is still a standard requirement in Finland. Residences or workplaces, or any building above 1,200 square meters that is permanently occupied, must have a shelter, as must any industrial building more than 1,500 square meters. The construction cost is not subsidized and must be covered by the owner of the building.
Once you get to the bottom of Arena Center Hakaniemi, you are greeted by two large doors. Our guide, Civil Defense Planning Officer Jukka-Pekka Schroderus, explains that the first massive and thick steel door is to protect anyone inside the shelter from any explosive blast wave; the second is to protect those inside from chemicals, potential biological weapons or toxins, gases, or radiation.
Snip.
The underground shelters are built with ventilation, autonomous water supply, and air filtration systems. The shelters do not have stored food; Finns are expected to have a “go bag” with proof of identity (although it’s not required to enter the shelter), food, personal medication, and hygienic supplies for up to three days. Finnish civil defense authorities also recommend sleeping bags, flashlights and batteries, and iodine tablets. Alcohol is not permitted, which is probably wise but disappointing. In any circumstance where I would need to hastily evacuate to a vast underground shelter, I could probably use a drink.
It’s hard to imagine Finns not drinking.
Here’s what makes the Helsinki shelters particularly surreal: They’re used all the time for other non-emergency activities. As mentioned above, Arena Center Hakaniemi has gyms and indoor soccer fields, as well as a kids’ bounce house and a snack bar. Other underground shelters have pools. The Finnish authorities hope that they will have 72 hours to prepare the shelters for emergency protective use — draining the pools, removing extraneous equipment, etc.
Schroderus explained that it was important that civilians use the shelters for non-emergency purposes on a regular basis for several reasons. First, regular use exposes maintenance issues — leaks in the ceiling, lights that have burned out, etc. Second, in case of an emergency, Finns will already be familiar with the nearby underground complexes.
Off topic from civil defense, but of interest to those following anti-drone technology:
Later in the day, my group of American journalists visited the Finnish technology firm Sensofusion, which manufactures anti-drone weapons — jammers, as well as smaller, faster drones that deploy in small groups and intercept and down incoming drones. Sensofusion’s CEO and founder, Tuomas Rasila, told us his company wanted to develop the best anti-drone defense systems but had no interest in building weapons to kill human beings.
One of Sensofusion’s ideas in the works is a “Tactical Drone Factory,” which the company touts as a “fully self-contained drone manufacturing facility built inside a standard shipping container. Equipped with industrial 3D printers, an electronics assembly station, and a complete parts inventory, a single Drone Factory can produce approximately 50 interceptor drones per day. The factory can be operated by a small team and deployed anywhere in the world.”
Read the whole thing.
WTF? “School district kicks out Christian student ministry because founder opposes tax increase.”
Student ministries that provide “released-time” Bible instruction during public school hours and opponents of tax increases have separately clashed with school districts over their constitutional rights to equal treatment with secular groups and free speech, respectively.
The Rev. Gady Youmans endured a double whammy when Georgia’s Vidalia City Schools retaliated against his Sweet Onion Christian Learning Center for Youmans’ Facebook posts criticizing the school board’s proposal to raise property taxes in light of its top-heavy administrative structure, a new lawsuit alleges.
Superintendent Sandy Reid explicitly told Youmans that she and the board were ending Vidalia High School’s 11-year relationship with Sweet Onion because of his posts on the “tax issue,” but when Youmans protested, Reid also vaguely referred to parents who pulled their children from his program because of how it was taught, according to the suit.
History Matters has a video up covering why Germany didn’t stop in 1939 after having annexed so much land.
Hasan Piker attacks Shoe0nHead for daring to criticize Hasan Piker. He does not come out well in the exchange.
Artificial intelligence platforms may be just as susceptible to social engineering as human beings, but they are proving remarkably good at finding security vulnerabilities in human-made computer code. That reality is on full display this month with some of the more widely-used software makers — including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Oracle — fixing near record volumes of security bugs, and/or quickening the tempo of their patch releases.
As it does on the second Tuesday of every month, Microsoft today released software updates to address at least 118 security vulnerabilities in its various Windows operating systems and other products. Remarkably, this is the first Patch Tuesday in nearly two years that Microsoft is not shipping any fixes to deal with emergency zero-day flaws that are already being exploited. Nor have any of the flaws fixed today been previously disclosed (potentially giving attackers a heads up in how to exploit the weakness).
Sixteen of the vulnerabilities earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label, meaning malware or miscreants could abuse these bugs to seize remote control over a vulnerable Windows device with little or no help from the user.
Snip.
May’s Patch Tuesday is a welcome respite from April, which saw Microsoft fix a near-record 167 security flaws. Microsoft was among a few dozen tech giants given access to a “Project Glasswing,” a much-hyped AI capability developed by Anthropic that appears quite effective at unearthing security vulnerabilities in code.
Apple, another early participant in Project Glasswing, typically fixes an average of 20 vulnerabilities each time it ships a security update for iOS devices, said Chris Goettl, vice president of product management at Ivanti. On May 11, Apple shipped updates to address at least 52 vulnerabilities and backported the changes all the way to iPhone 6s and iOS 15.
Last month, Mozilla released Firefox 150, which resolved a whopping 271 vulnerabilities that were reportedly discovered during the Glasswing evaluation.
“Since Firefox 150.0.0 released, they have been on a more aggressive weekly cadence for security updates including the release of Firefox 150.0.3 on May Patch Tuesday resolving between three to five CVEs in each release,” Goettl said.
Rick Beato delves deeper into the New York Times ridiculous Top 30 Living Songwriters list and discovers ignorant, pretentious, social justice-infected Ivy League grads who have no idea what they’re talking about. “Here’s four Ivy League educated people. You’ve got two from Yale, one from Princeton, and Mr. Harvard there, that are the most pretentious, cork sniffing, smug people that are all music critics with no background in music. Exactly what you would expect from a New York Times music critic.”
Democrats illegal redistricting attempt in Virginia is dead (while Republican efforts in other states steamroll ahead), more welfare state fraud exposed, Trump actually shrinks the federal workforce, Ukraine hits a wide range of targets across Russia, more Democrats soft on illegal alien sex offenders, Jose Garza lawyers up, and all it takes is nine seconds for AI to completely destroy your business.
Virginia’s Supreme Court just pounded a stake through the heart of Democrats rule-breaking redistricting push in that state.
The Virginia Supreme Court on Friday rejected the state’s mid-decade redistricting effort, which was passed by referendum last month and would overwhelmingly benefit Democrats.
The state spent $5.2 million to pay for the special election to ask voters to approve the map, which would have created ten districts that favor Democrats, with just one district favoring Republicans.
The new map was designed to allow Democrats to pick up as many as four seats in the upcoming midterm elections.
But after Republicans challenged the new map in court, judges for the state’s supreme court found that the legislature made procedural errors in how it placed the question on the ballot last month. The court’s majority found that the legislature violated the multi-step process for putting constitutional amendments on the ballot.
“This constitutional violation incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy,” the judges wrote.
“This violation irreparably undermines the integrity of the resulting referendum vote and renders it null and void,” the majority added.
The court ordered the state to use the same congressional district map in the upcoming midterm elections as it used in 2022 and 2024.
Donald Trump is the devil Democrats will cut down any tree of the law to get at.
In response to the lawsuit, Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read announced earlier this year that Oregon has about 800,000 inactive registrations, which are kept separately from the active voter rolls and do not receive ballots. Of those, roughly 160,000 already meet federal and state criteria for removal—having received confirmation notices, failed to respond, and not voted in two federal elections—and are slated for cancellation. The remaining approximately 640,000 inactive records do not yet qualify for removal and will be processed through future list maintenance efforts.
For context, Kamala Harris beat Trump by just over 300,000 votes in Oregon in 2024. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Before ceasing operations in February, the Department of Government Efficiency published comprehensive data detailing exactly how Medicaid dollars were spent. Over the past two months, The Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak — a veteran investigative reporter who has spent two decades exposing federal waste and fraud — has combed through the numbers and says they reveal the biggest scandal he’s ever uncovered.
In the first installment of a multi-part series titled “Medicaid Millionaires,” published on Monday, he details how billions of dollars were spent on “personal services” — including, in some cases, payments to family members for providing companionship and conversation to their own relatives.
Rosiak focused first on Columbus, Ohio, a city with the second-largest Somali population in the country. He reported:
Under the guise of health care, Ohio pays people to go to Medicaid beneficiaries’ homes to perform “homemaking” and “chores” like cooking and cleaning. The people performing these “personal services” tasks don’t even have to be health care workers — and in many cases, are actually relatives of the Medicaid recipient.
According to a Daily Wire data analysis, Ohio spent a billion dollars on home health care in 2024, the last year for which data is available.
Since the services are performed inside private residences, there is no way to know whether the workers went at all, or what they’re actually doing in exchange for taxpayer funds. … Multiple signs said the service provided, and billed to the government, was sometimes just “companionship & conversation.”
As people have realized the United States government will pay them to hang out with their own families, northeast Columbus has seen its economy replaced by businesses that bill Medicaid.
One home health care operator told him, “Well if the government is going to pay you to do it. … People see it as lucrative, so they just jump on it.”
Apparently, many small companies are making millions by exploiting these types of services. Rosiak described seeing entire buildings in Columbus filled with home health companies. “Driving down Cleveland Avenue, in less than 40 seconds, you come across endless home health companies. Capital Home Health; Continental Home Health; Dynamic Home Healthcare; Ohio Senior Home Healthcare.”
One enormous complex (with almost no one inside) contained “94 different companies signed up to bill Medicaid, each with a tiny office, often marked with a sheet of paper proclaiming some generic company name ending in “Home Health LLC” — and sometimes another piece of paper claiming the employees had just stepped out for a break.”
He noted, that businesses in “this building alone billed taxpayers $66 million in the span of a few years.”
Democrats aren’t mad at such fraud, they’re mad that people are exposing it.
I wonder what the conserving conservatism crowd has to say about president Trump accomplishing a goal Reagan, Bush41 and Bush43 never managed: Actually shrinking the size of the federal government.
Another jobs report, another report on shrinking the federal government.
Labour is facing a dire set of local and devolved election results after Britons cast their votes in polls that could further imperil Sir Keir Starmer’s embattled premiership.
Early results suggest Labour is facing substantial losses as Britain’s political parties contested more than 5,000 seats across 136 councils in England on Thursday.
While only around two dozen councils had declared results by 3am, Labour had lost overall control of Redditch and Tamworth in the West Midlands and Hartlepool in the north-east, while shedding large numbers of seats largely to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.
Labour lost every one of the 20 seats it was defending in Wigan, a former mining community to which it has deep historic ties.
Trade minister Sir Chris Bryant told the BBC it was “gutting when you lose seats in the kind of numbers that we are at the moment”.
More than 129 seats in the Scottish parliament and a further 96 in the Welsh Senedd are also being contested.
Election results will continue to be announced throughout the day. Four councils will report their results on Saturday.
If Labour’s losses are as bad as expected, all eyes will be on whether the party holds its nerve in the coming days or if some MPs or even ministers call for Starmer to consider his position.
Evidently a policy of importing illegal alien Muslim rape gangs into the UK isn’t popular with voters. Who knew?
Also, there’s been a lot of talk among certain YouTubers that Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain Party was a big threat to Reform on the right. Judging from the (admittedly incomplete) election returns thus far, that doesn’t appear to be the case, at least outside Lowe’s stronghold in Great Yarmouth. Likewise, Jeremy Corbyn’s socialist Your Party offshoot from Labour doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything either, coming in distantly behind the Greens.
So what’s happening with Iran? Like riots in Minneapolis, the ceasefire there is “mostly peaceful.”
Sporadic clashes between Iranian Armed Forces and US vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, few details given.
Two more empty Iranian-flagged tankers come under US aerial attack for attempting to breach blockade.
Iran says US violated ceasefire after last night’s US action, which resulted in Iranian military deaths & injures. However, Tehran still reviewing US peace proposal.
Tasnim news agency: Iran has seized an oil tanker, accusing it of “attempting to disrupt oil exports and the interests of the Iranian nation.”
“Israel Eliminates Hezbollah Commander Who Planned October 7-Style ‘Conquer The Galilee’ Attack.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) eliminated the commander of Hezbollah’s ‘Radwan Force’, who plotted the planned ‘Conquer the Galilee’ attack, an October 7-like terrorist incursion and massacre on Israel’s northern border.
Ahmed Ali Balout, commander of an Iranian-trained ‘Radwan Force’ unit, was killed in an Israeli strike on a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut.
“Ahmed Ali Balout, who directed attacks on Israeli troops and rebuilt Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, killed in Dahieh as Israel says it struck more than 180 Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon this week,” Israel’s Ynetnews reported Friday. “The IDF confirmed Thursday it killed Ahmed Ali Balout, commander of Hezbollah’s elite Radwan Force, in an airstrike a day earlier in the Dahieh district of Beirut.”
Attorney General Ken Paxton’s probe into alleged abuse of the H-1B visa program is rapidly expanding, with nearly 30 North Texas businesses now under scrutiny for suspected fraud tied to so-called “ghost office” schemes.
In a new announcement, Paxton said his office has issued additional Civil Investigative Demands, or CIDs, to a growing list of companies believed to be exploiting the visa system by misrepresenting business operations to sponsor foreign workers.
Among the entities named are Tekpro IT LLC, Fame PBX LLC, 1st Ranking Technologies LLC, Qubitz Tech Systems LLC, Blooming Clouds LLC, Virat Solutions Inc., Oak Technologies Inc., Techpath Inc., and Techquency LLC.
Reports cited by the attorney general indicate some of the businesses may be operating out of nonexistent or inactive locations—listing residential homes or otherwise non-operational sites as offices while sponsoring H-1B visa holders.
“I will not allow the H-1B program to be abused by bad actors seeking to use it as a loophole for allowing foreign nationals to invade Texas,” Paxton said. “My office will continue working to uncover and put an end to fraud within the H-1B program.”
Paxton credited Blaze TV and Texas Scorecard personality Sara Gonzales for exposing H-1B fraud across Texas.
In response to a call from President Donald Trump, Tennessee lawmakers returned to the state Capitol to redraw the state’s congressional districts.
The General Assembly gave final approval to a new map on May 7. The legislature also approved a handful of bills to accommodate the new map in the state’s congressional primary elections set for August. Gov. Bill Lee signed the measures into law that afternoon.
The newly drawn districts split the state’s 9th Congressional District and carve up Tennessee’s only majority-Black congressional seat into three districts, two of which stretch from Memphis to Williamson County outside Nashville. Nashville and its surrounding counties have been split into five districts, up from four.
The special legislative session called by Gov. Bill Lee began May 5, when House Republicans voted to adopt rules to govern the session as protesters covered the Capitol. On May 6, several committees met to give initial approval to the map and other measures.
Democrats have been wailing about the loss of “a black majority seat” in Memphis, despite the fact that it’s represented by a white Democrat (Steve Cohen), and despite the fact that the Republican challenger, Charlotte Bergmann, is black.
President Trump and his allies vowed to oust the Indiana Republicans who opposed the president’s proposed redistricting efforts last year — and on Tuesday evening, they largely made good on that promise.
Indiana voters headed to the polls on Tuesday for the state’s primary elections, with Trump-backed challengers handily defeating at least five of the seven state senators who opposed the president’s effort to eliminate Democratic congressional representation in the Hoosier State late last year as part of a mid-decade redistricting tit-for-tat between the parties.
“Good luck to those Great Indiana Senate Candidates who are running against people who couldn’t care less about our Country, or about keeping the Majority in Congress,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social earlier on Tuesday. “Let’s see how those RINOS do tonight!
While Indiana’s Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray is not up for reelection until 2028, MAGA-aligned groups are hoping to push Bray out of his leadership role by ousting his state senate allies. Trump allies spent nearly $10 million on their efforts.
“We’re after you Bray, like no one has ever come after you before!” Trump wrote on Truth Social in January. The president called Bray “weak and pathetic” and “a total RINO who betrayed the Republican Party, the President of the United States, and everyone else who wants to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Among those ousted by Trump’s retribution campaign were State Senator Travis Holdman, the third-most-powerful Republican in the chamber who had served in the legislative body for nearly 20 years. He was defeated by real estate agent Blake Fiechter.
State Senator Jim Buck’s 31-year career in the state legislature will also come to an end, after the 80-year-old incumbent suffered a loss to Tipton County commission member Tracey Powell. Buck had received support from former Vice President Mike Pence, an Indiana native.
Do you get the feeling that Trump is helping to clear out a lot of deadwood, and that Pence may not have done his best as Vice President to support the Trump agenda?
State Senator Greg Walker, a 20-year veteran of the chamber who had been eyeing retirement but chose to run for another term after the redistricting fight, lost his reelection bid to State Representative Michelle Davis.
Trump-backed anesthesiologist Brian Schmutzler defeated incumbent State Senator Linda Rogers, while insurance broker Trevor De Vries bested State Senator Dan Dernulc.
Just one anti-redistricting state senator, Greg Goode, prevailed in the primary, defeating two challengers: Vigo County council member Brenda Wilson, who was backed by Trump, and Alexandra Wilson.
One race still remained too close to call on Tuesday evening, that of incumbent State Senator Spencer Deery and Trump-backed challenger Paula Copenhaver.
Disgraced California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell is exactly the scumbag we thought he was. “Eric Swalwell Sent Women ‘Videos of Him Masturbating’ and Other Perverted Messages After Joining Snapchat.”
Former Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell was accused by multiple women of sending sexual messages, including “videos of him masturbating,” after becoming one of the first members of Congress to join Snapchat in an effort to restore “faith” in “democracy.”
In a bombshell report on Sunday – less than a month after Swalwell resigned from Congress after being accused of rape and sexual assault by multiple women – CNN spoke to “more than a dozen” women who claimed the congressman had made them feel uncomfortable, both in person and online, over the past decade.
Several women told CNN that the congressman had sent them sexually explicit messages on Snapchat after he became “one of the first lawmakers to join Snapchat” and was heralded in the media as “the Snapchat king of Congress,” according to CNN.
“We can restore a lot of faith that people have in their democracy by opening it up a little bit more,” Swalwell told The Hill in 2016 after joining the messaging service. “Snapchat is a great way to do that.”
However, it allegedly wasn’t long before the congressman began to use his Snapchat account for purposes other than politics.
One young woman claimed Swalwell would send her Snapchat messages about her future, before asking inappropriate questions such as, “What are you wearing?”
Two other women told CNN that Swalwell sent them “sexually explicit messages and unsolicited nude photos and videos of himself” in 2021, while a third woman also claimed to have received “sexually tinged messages and videos.”
One former congressional staffer allegedly developed a consensual sexual relationship with Swalwell after he began flirting with her on Snapchat in 2021.
During the relationship, Swalwell reportedly sent “nude photos of himself and videos of him masturbating,” which showed the congressman’s “face and naked body.”
The videos, which were saved by the woman, were shown to CNN.
Funny how CNN never tried to investigate Swalwell until his political ambitions clashed with those of a more-favored member in his party.
The city of El Cajon has sued the state of California over its “sanctuary state” laws.
There are enormous potential ramifications for this country, depending on the outcome of this case.
The city argues that offering illegal aliens drivers’ licenses and various protections is essentially illegal enticement under the federal statute that outlaws human smuggling.
The City Council voted 3-2 on Tuesday to pursue the litigation, which alleges in part that the El Cajon Police Department and its officers risk being held civilly and criminally liable under federal law if they follow California’s SB 54 and other state laws that limit their ability to work with federal immigration authorities.
Though the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the legality of SB 54 in 2019, the lawsuit filed Tuesday challenges that law and others on different legal grounds. It alleges that California’s various laws offering some benefits to undocumented immigrants amount to a violation of part of the human-smuggling statute — U.S. Code Section 1324 — that makes it a felony when a person “encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States.”
“When police need to sue the state to check on a potentially trafficked child, something is deeply broken.”
Travis County District Attorney José Garza and four top assistants are hiring prominent Austin defense and ethics attorneys to represent them amid allegations that they and other prosecutors hid evidence in a misconduct case against a police officer.
Court documents show Brian Roark asked a judge Friday to delay a hearing set for Monday in which Garza and First Assistant Trudy Strassburger have been subpoenaed to testify.
Roark confirmed to the American-Statesman that he represents Garza and Strassburger but declined to comment further. Roark has in recent years represented former Texas House Speaker Dennis Bonnen amid bribery allegations that were deemed unfounded and University of Texas athletes on an array of charges that include drunken driving and sexual assault.
It is not immediately clear whether Roark will be paid with personal funds from Garza and Strassburger or with county money.
Separately, attorneys Gary Cobb, Chuck Herring and Jason Panzer are being hired to represent prosecutors Holly Taylor, Raman Gill and Dexter Gilford, who also have been called to testify next week in the matter, Cobb confirmed to the Statesman.
Garland Police says the suspect had crashed into two other vehicles before this all started. As you saw above, the man then tried to steal a few cars before finally being shot dead by an armed Texas man who was protecting his family.
You can thank Tatiana Starks, owner of Garland Smoke and Vape, for providing the video of those previous carjacking attempts. This happened in the parking lot of the strip mall her shop sits in. The rest was caught on surveillance cameras.
It looks like there was about a minute of struggle, the wife and three or four kids escaped the vehicle, and then the carjacker was shot dead by dad from the passenger side. The suspect has not been identified.
The Texas State Commission on Judicial Conduct (SCJC) has issued public sanctions for judges in Hays and Harris counties, including one judge who had granted “unsatisfactory” termination of probation for defendants who pleaded guilty to sex crimes involving children.
According to a public warning published Tuesday, Judge Melissa Morris of the 263rd Criminal Court of Harris County violated state statute when she granted termination of probation to four defendants who were required to register as sex offenders under the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure.
In 2024, The Texan reported that Morris and other criminal court Judges Natalia Cornelio and Chris Morton had awarded the early terminations to as many as 12 sexual offenders, even though the defendants had not complied with the terms of their probations — in some cases because the defendants were illegal aliens who were being deported.
SCJC found that although Harris County’s Community Supervision and Corrections Department recommended warrants be issued in case any defendant re-entered the United States, Morris instead granted the discharge orders.
After the Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO) sought reconsideration hearings for the probation terminations, Morris emailed Assistant District Attorney Ryan Kent and accused him of a “lack of professionalism” and “disrespect.”
SCJC also noted that Morris had shared emails from an assistant district attorney and a law enforcement officer in relation to a grand jury subpoena to a defendant’s defense counsel.
Former Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, whose administration filed the complaints with the SCJC, told The Texan that Morris has violated her “duty as a judge.”
“Protecting innocent crime victims from sexual predators is one of the most important responsibilities we hold as officers of the court,” said Ogg. “The duty of a judge is to uphold all the law, not just the parts they agree with.”
Ogg also noted that Morris’ actions benefitted the deported criminals, whose probated sentences were terminated early by the judge before they registered as sex offenders. Should they attempt re-entry into the United States, they will not face a pending arrest warrant for their sex crimes.
“Illegal Alien Arrested in Texas and Indicted for Raping Man in New York Previously Entered U.S. Four Times.”
The Houston branch of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) lodged an immigration detainer on an illegal alien held the in Fort Bend County Jail, who has since been extradited back to New York State and indicted for rape and assault.
The Honduran illegal alien, Jose Ignacio Bonilla-Garcia, was arrested in Rosenberg as he was allegedly attempting to flee to Mexico in early April, following his alleged assault of a “stranger” in New York state.
ICE stated Bonilla-Garcia allegedly beat a man until he was unconscious in Suffolk County, New York, and then proceeded to rape the “incapacitated” individual. Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney described the incident as beginning when the intoxicated victim collapsed while in conversation outside a restaurant with Bonilla-Garcia. The latter then allegedly dragged the victim behind a dumpster and assaulted him.
Since he’s an illegal alien rapist, naturally I assume New York Democrats will pull out all the stops to prevent him from being deported…
FBI agents have raided the office and cannabis business of a top Virginia Democratic state legislator and on-and-off ally of Governor Abigail Spanberger, according to multiple news reports, witnesses, and on-the-ground footage.
Virginia Senate President pro tempore Louise Lucas was seen arriving on scene as heavily armed FBI SWAT teams executed judicially authorized search warrants on her Portsmouth, Va. office, along with a cannabis dispensary she co-owns that is located across the street from the office.
Lucas, who as president pro tempore serves as the top Democrat in the Virginia General Assembly’s upper chamber, is known for her volatile online presence and for being one of the principal architects of Democrats’ attempted gerrymander of Virginia’s congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Snip.
The Associated Press earlier reported that the FBI raids were in connection with a corruption probe.
While details surrounding the ongoing federal investigation remain unclear, this is not the first time that Lucas’s business dealings and ties to the cannabis industry have faced scrutiny. Local outlets have previously reported that Lucas’s cannabis shop has sold mislabeled products containing illegal levels of controlled substances, such as the intoxicant delta-9 THC. A 2022 report in the Virginia Mercury noted that Lucas’s business practices were “typical of the black and gray market for retail marijuana that has exploded in Virginia since lawmakers legalized possession of the drug but not sales.”
Downsides of AI: “Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds.”
PocketOS is a SaaS platform that services car rental businesses. It used the AI coding agent Cursor, running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6. The business also relies on Railway, a cloud infrastructure provider that is generally regarded to be ‘friendlier’ than the likes of AWS. However, Crane reckons this pair created a recipe for disaster.
“Yesterday afternoon, an AI coding agent — Cursor running Anthropic’s flagship Claude Opus 4.6 — deleted our production database and all volume-level backups in a single API call to Railway, our infrastructure provider,” sums up the PocketOS boss. “It took 9 seconds.”
The AI agent was set to complete a routine task in the PocketOS staging environment. However, it came up against a barrier “and decided — entirely on its own initiative — to ‘fix’ the problem by deleting a Railway volume,” writes Crane, as he starts to describe the difficult-to-believe series of unfortunate events.
Crane decided to ask his AI agent why it went through with its dastardly database deletion deed. The answer was illuminating but pretty unhinged, and is quoted verbatim. It began as follows: “NEVER F**KING GUESS! — and that’s exactly what I did. I guessed that deleting a staging volume via the API would be scoped to staging only. I didn’t verify. I didn’t check if the volume ID was shared across environments. I didn’t read Railway’s documentation on how volumes work across environments before running a destructive command.” So, the agent ‘knew’ it was in the wrong.
The ‘confession’ ended with the agent admitting: “I decided to do it on my own to ‘fix’ the credential mismatch, when I should have asked you first or found a non-destructive solution. I violated every principle I was given: I guessed instead of verifying I ran a destructive action without being asked. I didn’t understand what I was doing before doing it. I didn’t read Railway’s docs on volume behavior across environments.”
This is why you need rolling offline backups of all critical data. And why you should never give your AI write access to your production environment…
Rick Beato says that only rich kids can make it in music today. Maybe to get a major record label deal, but a lot of acts in various subgenres seem to be able to make a living without charting or counting on pathetic streaming revenue.
Jobs are down, more Minnesota fraud uncovered, a bunch of military action outside the Persian Gulf, an Austin jihad shooter, Noem gets the Old Yeller treatment, Bill Clinton remains Bill Clinton, and Microsoft, amazingly, manages to get even worse.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Also consider this your “Iran Strikes: Day 7” update with a smattering of news as well. There are reports that Kurdish forces have entered Iran from Iraq, but I’m not seeing sufficient evidence for that yet.
Interesting chart showing Iran has likely “blown its wad” on missiles and drones, as day by day fewer and fewer are being launched.
Update Numbers as of Mar. 6, 12.00 AM The numbers are rounded and compiled from various media reports, with a margin of error of ±10% 15% **Corrected previous Post there was a Mistake https://t.co/eDlVfc3nzApic.twitter.com/UiHAU0yNHe
The Supreme Court upheld the standard for reviewing asylum cases, keeping it in the hands of immigration agencies.
Yes, even the leftist justices agreed. 9-0.
“We granted certiorari to determine whether the Court of Appeals applied the appropriate standard of review under the INA [Immigration and Nationality Act],” wrote Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson. “We conclude that the statute requires application of the substantial evidence standard to the agency’s conclusion that a given set of undisputed facts does not constitute persecution.”
Top officials in Minnesota were made aware of fraud concerns surrounding government assistance programs as early as 2019 but failed to take action as billions of dollars were stolen and warnings piled up.
Former Minnesota state officials testified to the House Oversight Committee that Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison were first informed that the state’s social services programs had been compromised by widespread fraud in 2019 and 2020, according to a new report from the committee.
“Testimony obtained by the Committee reveals that Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison were aware of widespread fraud in social service programs, lied about their knowledge of the fraud, and retaliated against employees who dared to raise concerns. Instead of protecting vulnerable Americans, they handed over billions in taxpayer dollars to fraudsters and threw their own state employees under the bus,” said House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer (R., Ky.).
Several different entities and state-level programs are implicated in Minnesota’s fraud scandal. The most prominent program is Feeding Our Future, which fraudsters targeted during the Covid era to steal $300 million from the Minnesota Department of Education that had been designated to provide food to poor children. Feeding Our Future is now dissolved and dozens of defendants have been convicted in connection with the scheme since 2022.
According to the committee report, Minnesota Department of Education officials first received allegations of fraud against Feeding Our Future from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2019. The USDA alleged Feeding Our Future was created with forged signatures and misled sponsored food distribution sites about certain federal requirements. Minnesota officials dismissed the allegations at the time. By April 2020, Walz and Ellison’s offices were briefed about the Minnesota Department of Education’s concerns regarding Feeding Our Future, Assistant Commissioner Daron Korte testified to the committee. State officials contacted the USDA about Feeding Our Future in late 2020, but the agency’s inspector general did not act, a failure that emboldened the scammers at Feeding Our Future.
The Oversight Committee report asserts that Minnesota officials could have suspended payments to Feeding Our Future but chose not to because of potential litigation and racism accusations. Minnesota officials blamed the USDA and Feeding Our Future for perpetuating the large-scale fraud. In March 2021, the Minnesota Department of Education stopped payments to Feeding Our Future, but resumed payments voluntarily the following month after a court hearing on the matter. A court order was never issued requiring the payments, contradicting Walz’s 2022 assertion to the contrary. The lack of a court order was confirmed during the course of the Oversight Committee’s investigation.
In early 2019, Walz’s administration became aware of fraud tied to two programs administered by Minnesota’s Department of Human Services, former agency commissioner Tony Lourey testified. Another former commissioner, Jodi Harpstead, testified that Walz’s administration believed fraud connected to a child care program run out of the Department of Human Services had already been resolved. But the Oversight Committee report references two auditor reports showing otherwise, both of which were issued in 2019. The Department of Human Services lacked fraud mitigation mechanisms and felt pressure to get money out the door to justify state appropriations, the committee found. Despite credible allegations of fraud, the agency failed to act on the warnings and unilaterally stop making payments to the social services programs in question.
The Oversight Committee’s report is based on testimony from nine top current and former state officials, documents and communications, and briefings with federal and state officials. The Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office recently speculated that the interwoven fraud schemes totaled nearly $9 billion in misallocated funds. Of the fraud defendants, 85 percent of them come from Minnesota’s Somali-American immigrant community. Social services programs that provide food, child care, housing, and special education have all come under scrutiny as federal investigators unravel the fraud scheme.
I know it’s been easy to overlook in all the other military news this week, but Afghanistan and Pakistan have been going at it as well, though only at a border skirmish level rather than a full-scale conflict. Since the Pakistani ISI helped create the Taliban, this is what’s known as “blowback.”
Rene Campos, a registered sex offender, is seeking elected office in California – launching a campaign for Fresno City Council amid fierce backlash and renewed questions about whether someone with his record should hold public office.
Campos was arrested in 2018 following a cyber tip to the Central California Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force. He was found in possession of child sex abuse material, according to court records. In 2021 he entered a no-contest plea to a single misdemeanor charge of possessing and controlling child pornography/child sex abuse material (likely under California Penal Code § 311.11). He served only one month in prison and a two year probation period.
Campos describes himself as a gay man who is running for office on the platform of “reduced crime and rehabilitation.”
Possession of child pornography is typically treated as a felony, even in a woke haven like California. How the Fresno candidate was able to make a deal for a misdemeanor charge and spend only one month in prison is a mystery, but this does help to confirm ongoing suspicions that California’s legal system is falling into steep decline.
California is notoriously soft on child sex abusers. Recently, a Sacramento parole board released Daniel Allen Funston, who was convicted in 1999 of sixteen counts of kidnapping and child molestation after a horrific crime spree in Sacramento County, during which he kidnapped, raped, and beat eight children ages 3 to 7.
Funston was originally sentenced to three consecutive life terms plus 20 years, but was set free at age 64 due to a California elderly inmate program (maybe he’ll run for office, too).
Data from 2022 shows that the Golden State released over 7000 child sex offenders after less than one year of incarceration. Interestingly, “digital blocks” were added to the Megan’s Law website that prevent more recent analysis.
Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger is demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement provide warrants before violent illegal criminals are turned over to federal authorities, following the stabbing of a Virginia woman by an illegal immigrant with a long and violent criminal history.
Abdul Jalloh was charged with second-degree murder after Stephanie Minter was brutally stabbed in the neck at a Virginia bus stop. Jalloh had previously been charged more than 40 times, including for egregious crimes such as aggravated assault, malicious wounding, and rape. Prosecutors dropped 20 of the 43 charges against Jalloh. The Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office said the charges were dropped because Jalloh often chose victims who did not have permanent addresses, making the proceedings more difficult.
The Department of Homeland Security said Jalloh is an illegal immigrant from Sierra Leone. He entered the United States in 2012.
“ICE previously lodged a detainer against Jalloh in 2020, and he was granted a final order of removal by a judge who found he could be removed to any country other than Sierra Leone,” DHS said in a statement. “This case illustrated the importance of third country removals to get criminal illegal aliens out of the U.S.”
Spanberger insists that in order for Virginia to work with federal authorities, ICE must provide a signed judicial warrant, regardless of the alien’s criminal history. DHS requested cooperation with Virginia and Spanberger to deport Jalloh following his alleged involvement in the fatal stabbing.
“We are calling on Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger and Virginia’s sanctuary politicians to commit to not releasing this murderer and violent career criminal from their jail without notifying ICE,” Deputy Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis said in a statement. “This illegal alien’s murder of an innocent, beautiful American woman came less than 24 hours before Governor Spanberger’s demonization of ICE law enforcement. This heinous criminal is a perfect example of why we need cooperation from sanctuary jurisdictions and the importance of third country removals for the safety of the American people.”
What the Trump administration has done on the DEI front represents the beginning of a general reorientation of our politics away from wokeness. One need only survey what prominent leaders of the Left are saying about the political price the Democratic Party has paid on that score. What they are saying indicates a large political change, even if the Dems prove incapable of unmooring themselves from woke politics for the near future.
The first sign of this reorientation is a general shift in the popular mindset: the spell of woke politics has broken. This matters because it was always the way in which woke politics commanded assent in the citizens’ hearts and minds that was crucial. That assent has been questioned or denied now in a broad way, with the backing of public authority (Supreme Court decisions, executive orders, agency directives), and with widespread public support. Wokeness’s public hectoring, punitiveness, and censoriousness, and the extremism of many of its positions on the issues, is unpopular at the level of 70–30 or 80–20 opinion poll divides.
We ought to be confident, therefore, that the broken spell of wokeness augurs a permanent shift in our public life. What that means precisely, however, depends very much on how we understand wokeness and what is done going forward to ensure that woke excess does not return. Now, if, as many say, wokeness was the product of cultural Marxism (Christopher Rufo and a host of followers) or postmodernism (Jordan Peterson and another host of followers), then all that needs to be done is to combat bad ideas. On these interpretations, our universities in particular, and other cultural institutions where the influence of such ideas holds sway, need our attention. Certainly, cultural Marxism and postmodernism represent bad ideas, and the world would be a better place without their influence.
But if what wokeness represents above all is the explosive power of the civil rights revolution and the influence of an aggressive leftist interpretation of anti-discrimination politics, as another band of interpreters claims (I among them), then the task ahead is much bigger and much more difficult.
Trump’s anti-DEI measures, on this view, would represent only the first step in a broader campaign of civil rights reform. One could look long and hard without seeing much in the way of evidence for any such thing so far. Are these current efforts against DEI an illusion, a brief moment of political opportunism that will recede as public hatred of wokeness recedes—only to return in a few years when the next wave of anti-discriminatory passion rises up?
I don’t think that worry is justified. The anti-DEI campaign to date will have enduring consequences because even if it is not yet clear that what is at stake in DEI is civil rights politics, the current reorientation can only have the effect of raising our awareness of the role of anti-discrimination in our public life. This has begun on the all-important moral plane of civil rights politics. Precisely by breaking the spell of its puritanical commands, our anti-woke moment is reworking something essential to civil rights politics. Because public morality is the crucial filter of the human mind, a shift at this level will change what we see, what we think, and what we think we can say. Anti-woke sentiment, backed by changes in the law, is providing a moment of political, cultural, and mental freedom that will necessarily lead, after many decades during which this was not possible, to a general reappraisal of the moral power and the meaning of the civil rights revolution.
Sources have identified the alleged gunman as 53-year-old Ndiaga Diagne to Nexstar’s KXAN and The Associated Press…
Diagne is originally from Senegal, according to multiple people briefed on the investigation. One of the people told the AP that Diagne came to the U.S. in 2006 and was a naturalized U.S. citizen…
Austin mass killer captured on video wearing ‘Property of Allah’ hoodie during rampage.
“Dallas Democrats Decide To Let DA Creuzot Go. With no Republican in the race, Democrat primary winner Amber Givens will become Dallas County’s next district attorney.” Creuzot was yet another Soros-backed DA, so maybe Dallas Democrats are ever so slowly moving back to sanity.
I’m just going to embed this Asmongold clip of Bill Clinton’s Jeffrey Epstein deposition without comment.
President Trump announced Thursday that Senator Markwayne Mullin (R., Okla.) will replace Kristi Noem as Homeland Security Secretary.
The announcement comes after Noem struggled to stand up to a public grilling by members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who pressed the former South Dakota governor on Tuesday about a $220 million ad campaign contract that was subcontracted to one of her longtime allies. Trump was furious at Noem for insisting during the hearing that he had personally approved the contract and began floating Mullin’s name as a potential replacement, National Review first reported early Thursday.
Mullin will replace Noem effective March 31. It’s unclear whether Trump plans to nominate Mullin to serve in the position permanently or whether he will serve in an acting capacity, sparing him the necessity of Senate confirmation.
“I am pleased to announce that the Highly Respected United States Senator from the Great State of Oklahoma, Markwayne Mullin, will become the United States Secretary of Homeland Security (DHS), effective March 31, 2026,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The current Secretary, Kristi Noem, who has served us well, and has had numerous and spectacular results (especially on the Border!), will be moving to be Special Envoy for The Shield of the Americas, our new Security Initiative in the Western Hemisphere we are announcing on Saturday in Doral, Florida. I thank Kristi for her service at ‘Homeland.’”
Already under significant scrutiny due to bipartisan criticism of her handling of Trump’s deportation agenda, Noem ran into further trouble this week during a series of hearings in which multiple lawmakers, most notably Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, asked her to explain why the agency had awarded a $220 million contract to a firm that was founded just days before, without ever opening up the bid to a competitive process. Kennedy also pointed out that part of that ad campaign was subcontracted to a strategy firm owned by Ben Yoho, the husband of former DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin.
A $220 million no-bid ad contract isn’t just wasteful, it’s actively criminal.
More defeats for the gambling lobby: “Two House Chairs Defeated by Challengers. State Reps. Cecil Bell and Stan Kitzman were ousted by Kristen Plaisance and Dennis Geesaman respectively.”
Plaisance ran on a platform of fiscal responsibility, securing Texas’ elections, and defending state sovereignty.
Bell’s campaign and allied groups—including the Las Vegas Sands–backed casino lobby and Texans for Lawsuit Reform—reportedly spent more than $1 million attempting to defend the incumbent.
Bell, who chairs the Intergovernmental Affairs Committee, had been censured by the Montgomery County Republican Party last year.
Incumbent State Rep. Stan Kitzman of Brookshire has been defeated by Dennis “Goose” Geesaman for the GOP nomination for House District 85. Kitzman served as chair of one of the House’s subcommittees on appropriations.
Geesaman, a pilot and Air Force Academy graduate, retired as a Lt. Colonel. He served five terms on the Flatonia City Council and later served as mayor.
While Texans for Lawsuit Reform and casino-funded PACs backed Kitzman’s reelection campaign, Geesaman ran on a platform of ending magnets for illegal immigration, DOGE-ing Texas, and supporting parental rights.
Kitzman also recently came under investigation for his paid work for a local governmental entity while serving in the Legislature.
Kitzman also voted to impeach Paxton, so I think we’re well rid of both of them.
The war against tranny madness continues. “Paxton Opinion Targets Therapists Behind Child ‘Psychological Transitioning.’ Psychiatric providers who help facilitate prohibited treatments may be barred from receiving public funds and could risk losing their licenses.”
Samsung Electronics America Inc. is one of five companies that have been accused by Attorney General Ken Paxton of collecting and monetizing consumers’ viewing data on smart TVs.
Following the agreement, Samsung will now make changes to not only halt the collection of viewing data without consent, but also update their TVs to include disclosures and consent screens.
Heard from some state agency people that this was coming: “Texas Dismantles DEI-Oriented HUB Network. The comptroller’s office has ended race- and sex-based preferences in state contracting.” Good.
“Former Warren Campaign Worker Says the U.S. Must Be ‘Abolished’ to Atone for Death of Ayatollah Khamenei…Calla Walsh, the communist activist who campaigned for Elizabeth Warren, Ed Markey, Bernie Sanders, and others, said the only way to exact “justice” is the complete deconstruction of the U.S. and Israel.” What percentage of the ideological core of the Democrat Party are actively communist?
One thing that reportedly helped kill Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Brothers: GOP congressmen visiting Netflix headquarters and discovering tampons in the men’s room.
Microsoft seems to be going from bad to worse: “Microsoft Copilot to hijack your browser… for your own convenience, embeds Edge into AI assistant, ignores questions about opt-in.”
Microsoft is rolling out a Copilot update to Windows Insiders that embeds web browsing directly into the assistant, opening links in a side panel rather than launching your default browser.
The plan is that users of the Copilot app in Windows will show content in the assistant’s window “so you don’t lose context.”
Copilot will also (with permission) have access to the context of tabs opened in that conversation, so the assistant can look across them when responding to user prompts. Opened tabs will be saved with the conversation so that they can be returned to, and, if a user chooses to enable it, passwords and form data can be synchronized.
Enabling password and form data synchronization might give some users pause for thought, particularly after the Windows Recall fiasco, but users worried about Redmond slurping data should probably consider an alternative to Windows anyway.
At first glance, it looks like embedding Edge into Copilot via the WebView2 control is an attempt to steer the user away from their default browser. Convenient, yes. Good for competition, possibly not. We asked Microsoft whether this would be an opt-in experience and which browser was being used, but, other than acknowledging receipt of our questions, the company did not respond.
It looks like this is going to be limited to corporate users for now, but launching web links without user control strikes me as a huge attack vector for malicious code. (Previously.)
New Zealand “Lesbian Navy Captain Faces Court Martial After $100M Ship Ran Aground, Caught Fire, Sank.” Since that happened all the way back in 2024, they’re certainly not rushing to justice…
Apple has some new computers out, so here’s M5 Pro vs. M5 Max benchmarks. My trailing edge consumer ass is still on an Intel-based MacBook Pro…
“Japanese companies are paying older workers to sit by a window and do nothing—while Western CEOs demand super-AI productivity just to keep your job.” Seems like there should be a happy medium between those two extremes…
Microsoft has long had a reputation of an abusive company, all the way back to its origins, when Gary Kildall accused Bill Gates of stealing parts of CP/M for DOS. The list of lawsuits against Microsoft for anti-competitive or shady business business practices is so extensive it has its own Wikipedia article. But it’s latest moves to force both subscription models and AI into every nook and crevice of its software may be the final straws that break the Borg’s back, as longtime Windows users finally seem to be abandoning ship.
Last month, I met with a mid-sized law firm facing a common dilemma. Their Windows 10 laptops were nearing the end of support and needed to be replaced. Typically, this meant buying new hardware and software—predictable and straightforward. But this time, Microsoft suggested a different approach: move to Windows 365 Cloud PCs, a PC that operates with a monthly subscription and is accessible from any device, scalable, secure, and AI-enhanced. The catch? The shift from ownership to a subscription model and reduced local control led their IT team to question how “personal” these computers truly were.
Cloud subscriptions replace personal computing
The experience of this law firm encapsulates a major industry shift: Today, you don’t buy Windows, you rent access to it. Windows 365 Cloud PCs began as a business-only experiment at Microsoft but have grown into its central product and are now the primary road map, with local Windows installations becoming a mere stepping stone to cloud-based desktops. With tools like Windows 365 Boot, users can bypass the traditional local operating system altogether, landing directly into a personalized, cloud-streamed environment, even on third-party or bring-your-own devices.
Hardware no longer anchors the user’s experience; the familiar PC is now a portal into a metered utility controlled, updated, and managed by Microsoft. Windows 365 Switch blurs the line even further, allowing seamless migration between cloud and local environments. With each step, more user agency is surrendered in exchange for the convenience of a cloud-managed world.
The AI revolution and hardware
As if the cloud weren’t enough, artificial intelligence is muddying the waters. Microsoft is loud about a future built on AI PCs, touting Copilot integration, neural processing units (NPUs), and specialized hardware. But as Dell’s own product head recently admitted, customers aren’t flocking to buy these new devices for AI alone; the proposition is too abstract, and the day-to-day benefits too unclear. In reality, most significant leaps in AI are happening in the cloud, not on the desktop. Even Jeff Bezos framed the future simplistically: AI will appear everywhere, but it will live in the cloud.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is aggressively pushing its users to rely on its AI-powered tools and ecosystem, with access controlled through subscriptions. Gone is the idea of installing and running your own AI applications locally; instead, users are nudged to rent access to AI services, hosted and updated in Microsoft’s cloud. The notion of the self-managed PC is fast giving way to a persistent, subscription-based rental of power and capability, with AI primarily serving as another tool for vendor lock-in.
Hidden costs and loss of control
Businesses and individuals face new economic realities. The traditional model—investing in hardware for five years—is replaced by an ever-escalating treadmill. A basic Windows 365 Cloud PC costs about $41 a month for 8GB, excluding Office or AI add-ons. Vendors pitch this as a trade-off against the hidden costs and complexity of managing local computers in hybrid work. Before long, subscription fees will become just another line item in ballooning IT expenses.
Perhaps more concerning is the core loss of control. The local PC gave users the keys. They owned, updated, installed, and protected their own digital spaces. The new cloud-and-AI reality puts Microsoft in charge of software, identity, AI tools, and even privacy decisions. The old personal computer offered freedom; the new model is managed, metered, and routinely adjusted to fit Microsoft’s evolving business interests. Yes, security can benefit. Yes, patching and remote management are simplified for companies. But every user now sits one step further removed from the heart of their own computing experience.
That was linked by this piece, which was linked from Borepatch, who has further thoughts.
What this means is that you don’t own any Microsoft software. Sure, you may think that because you paid them money (most often when you bought your computer – some of that purchase price went to Microsoft in the form of a license fee for Windows). But you actually don’t own “your” copy of software. At all.
Rather, you have the right to run the software on your computer. That may not seem like a big difference, but it is. The license agreement (you know, the one you didn’t read before you clicked “I Agree”) allows Microsoft to change the terms of the agreement at any time, at their pleasure.
Microsoft has just done this in a big, big way. Key new stuff in Windows 11 is:
AI integrated with your operating system
Online presence is critical for lots of Windows now (e.g. AI)
Windows will nag you until you put all your data online (OneDrive) whether you want to or not.
The proper technical term for that first bullet point is that your Windows operating system is essentially now an “AI Agent” which if you are a regular reader you know is very, very bad security juju.
Combine this enormous security hole with the requirement to essentially be online 100% of the time (bad security) and the liklihood that OneDrive will slurp all your data to some Internet black hole in a Microsoft data center, Windows is simply unsecurable.
Yes, I know that is inflammatory, but there is simply no way that you can get assurance that your security is sane. I say that as someone who has spent decades inn Internet Security (and particularly in security assurance). Not to put too fine a point on it, but I don’t think that I could get decent assurance that things aren’t going “bump in the Net”. For most of the readers here, it’s not even worth trying.
And that AI, Copilot, is not only widely loathed by users, but is creating brand spanking new security holes.
“We’ve been following Microsoft and all their massive missteps over the last several months. Most of it related to AI and pushing AI into consumer products and pushing it on to people who don’t want it.”
“There’s an error with Copilot. Apparently, it can can read your email. That’s great. And Copilot is sort of the bedrock of Windows 11. It’s very hard to get rid of Copilot. They want to put it in everything, including Notepad.”
“Copilot slows everything down. I would highly recommend you turn it off.” If you can figure out how. Kneon recommends Linux Mint if you want a Windows-like experience.
“Look, Microsoft is not secure. And just realize if you’re using it, especially for business, if you don’t want anybody to see it, you probably shouldn’t use their tools.”
“A work tab within Copilot chat had summarized email messages stored in a user’s draft and sent folders even when they had a sensitivity label on it and a data loss prevention policy configured to prevent unauthorized data sharing.” Sounds like Copilot is as indifferent to your privacy and security as Microsoft on the whole.
“I don’t know if you can hurt Xbox anymore, because Xbox is a dying brand, but the new boss, who comes from an AI background, promises not to flood it with soulless AI slop. This is Asha Sharma, formerly the head of Microsoft’s AI division, which is causing problems. Now she’s in charge of Xbox. She promises many more great games made by humans.”
Sharma blather about how Xbox will run across multiple platforms instead of a console snipped. “Are we seeing first signs that Xbox is dead and about to be consumed by Microsoft? I think that’s 100% what’s going to happen.”
“I think they’re going to basically AI themselves into the wood chipper. I think it’s very clear that that’s all they care about right now, if they’re putting the head of AI in charge of gaming and she’s talking cloud and AI and all that. Yeah, it’s over, man.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is facing some accusations of “Indian nepotism” for putting Sharma in charge of Xbox, especially since she has no background in gaming development. Of course, Microsoft has long been accused of abusing the H1-B visa system to bring over cheap workers. Indeed, this MSN India piece crows about it.
According to official H-1B filings submitted to the US Department of Labor between 2012 and 2023, Microsoft filed over 50,000 H-1B visa applications, and approximately 70 to 80 percent of these applications were for Indian nationals. This makes Indians the largest group in Microsoft’s US-based technical talent pipeline. The data shows a consistent year-on-year trend where Indian engineers make up the majority of Microsoft’s skilled immigrant workforce.
Snip.
Multiple research estimates and workforce studies indicate that 26 to 30 percent of Microsoft’s global technical workforce is Indian or Indian-origin.
Snip.
Microsoft operates one of its biggest global R&D centres in Hyderabad, which works on products including Azure, Office, Windows, LinkedIn integration, AI/ML systems and cybersecurity. The India Development Center (IDC), established in 1998, is one of Microsoft’s oldest and largest development facilities outside Redmond. This drives significant recruitment of Indian engineers for advanced research and product development roles.
Snip.
A review of Microsoft’s global leadership roster shows notable Indian-origin executives including Satya Nadella (CEO), Rajesh Jha (EVP), Suresh Kumar (EVP), Anil Bhansali (VP Engineering), and dozens of corporate vice presidents and product heads. This demonstrates the substantial representation of Indian-origin professionals in high-level technical and management roles within the company.
But Microsoft also has a Jeffrey Epstein problem. Do a search on founder and former CEO Bill Gates in the Epstein files and you get 2,616 results. Nor is he the only Epstein-connected person of interest high in the ranks of Microsoft. Financier and Democrat megadonor Reid Hoffman is still listed on the Microsoft board, despite being notoriously close to Epstein and showing up in the Epstein files 2,667 times. (Also on the board: Former Obama Commerce Department head Penny Pritzker, sister of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and aunt to Epstein friend Tom Pritzker, whose name shows up 2,524 times in the Epstein files.)
Even before Microsoft jumped on the AI bus (or, if you prefer, off the AI cliff), it was notorious for security holes in its software, and there’s precious little evidence that the AI age has made anything better. The latest “Patch Tuesday” featured fixes for no less than six Zero Day exploits.
What all this amounts to: Anyone still on Windows should look to move to Linux if they have the technical chops to do so, or Apple if they don’t. Though Apple has dabbled with subscription services as well, they’re still overwhelmingly a hardware company that wants to sell you the latest shiny. And Apple has been dinged for its “lazy” approach to AI, which may turn put to be the smartest move after all. “Amazon, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, and Alphabet are projected to spend around $700 billion combined on capital expenditures in 2026, much of it on AI data centers and hardware — Apple plans just $14 billion.” That means they’re less likely to try and shove it into every damn thing. And I know my now-relatively-ancient MacBook Pro keeps working even when the Internet is down.
If you’re still on Windows, now might be the time to get out while the getting is good…
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.
Given the title of this post, a lot of people will naturally assume that Google is using AI to spy on them as a matter of course, since Google uses every other tool to spy on us. Indeed, since Google first announced AI initiatives, I’m pretty sure most people never assumed Google wouldn’t use it to spy on us. Nevertheless, there’s now a lawsuit over it.
Google is facing a lawsuit over its Gemini assistant, which allegedly collected data from Gmail, Chat, and Meet users without their consent.
Any rational person who uses Gmail knows Google is going to gather data on you from it. It’s part of the terms and conditions of the Faustian bargain to use free services.
The complaint accuses the tech giant of violating privacy laws by activating the tool across its platforms without informing users.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t part of the terms and conditions when I signed up for it two decades ago.
The plaintiffs claim that this covert data collection allowed Google to access sensitive communications and personal details shared through emails, messages and video calls.
The lawsuit alleges that Google’s parent company, Alphabet, activated Gemini across Gmail, Chat and Meet in October without user consent.
Previously, users could opt-in to use the assistant. However, the plaintiffs claim that Google silently enabled it for all users.
This gave the tool access to sensitive communications and personal details shared through emails, messages and video calls.
The name of the lawsuit is Thele v. Google, LLC. I checked and, sure enough, that stuff was enabled without my permission. Being a Gmail user that never gave Google permission to train their AI on me, I should probably see if I can climb aboard the Litigation Express. I’ll send them an email.
Click on Settings (the cog icon in the top-right bar).
Press See all settings.
In the General tab, scroll down to Google Workplace smart features and click on the button.
Turn off smart features in Google Workspace and click Save. This will block Gemini AI from Gmail, Chat, Meet and Drive. You can remove Gemini from Google Maps, Wallet, Google Assistant and the Gemini app, too.
Thele v. Google is not the only lawsuit involving Gemini brewing. Clownfish TV brings news of a suit over Gemini telling a student to call 911 over having their phone time restricted.
They also touch on instances (that I think we’ve mentioned here before) of Gemini allegedly telling children to kill their parents.
But that’s not all on the Google privacy abuse front! According to Louis Rossmann, even after being disabled, Nest thermostats upload 50 megabytes of data to Google every day:
That amount seems…excessive. Especially for a product you paid for. As Rossmann pointed out, letting old devices continue to connect to the Internet is a large security risk. Plus the usual problems with the hoary old Digital Millennial Copyright Act.
Just as in deals with the Devil stories, your damnation in dealing with Google frequently dwells in the fine print of the contract you agree to in order to use their products for free.
The problem is, Google always seems to be unilaterally changing the fine print without telling you. And I’m pretty sure those changes are never in your favor.
Another deep freeze week here in Texas, with temperatures below freezing most of the week, but the state grid seems to be holding, and I haven’t seen any widespread power outages. I did lose power, but only for five minutes.
This week: More waste and corruption exposed by DOGE, the Secretary of Defense gets a spite audit from the IRS, and Texas rolls out plans for securing cybersecurity and nuclear power futures. Plus an unusual amount of stories about China, AI, Chinese AI, airlines, Canada, and an airliner in Canada.
Judge says that DOGE can access student financial aid data. “US District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan has denied an emergency filing to block DOGE’s access to federal records and government layoffs – saying in a 10-page decision that the 14 states who brought the lawsuit have failed to meet the burden of proof to prove ‘imminent, irreparable harm.'”
“A judge who blocked President Trump’s federal spending freeze is Chairman Emeritus of a nonprofit that will continue to receive millions in government funding as a result of his ruling, in an apparent conflict of interest seen as a second cause for the judge’s impeachment. On Wednesday, Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) announced articles of impeachment against federal Judge John McConnell on the grounds that he overreached his authority and engaged in partisan activism by blocking Trump’s executive order freezing federal funding while Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) searches for wasteful spending. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Doug Ross has chosen 20 of the best examples of waste and fraud DOGE has discovered “Stacey Abrams/Power Forward Communities $2 Billion Grant (2025). DOGE uncovered $2 billion in taxpayer funds allocated to Power Forward Communities, tied to Stacey Abrams via Rewiring America, from a $20 billion EPA grant in April 2024. With $100 in revenue, it’s under scrutiny for potential fraud.”
The Democratic Party is polling about 31 percent approval, a near-historic low.
Despite enjoying a huge lead in fundraising, legacy media favoritism, and incumbency, in the 2024 election, Democrats lost the White House to Donald Trump. Ever since, they have offered nothing new, no novel agenda, no innovative policies—nothing other than screaming that they are loudly against everything and anything that the president is for.
In the past, what did they accomplish by following their prior two impeachments with attempts to de-ballot Trump? Who thought sending an FBI swat team to raid Trump’s home or waging five lawfare civil and criminal suits and issuing 91 felony indictments against him would win over the public?
Was conducting a media barrage of Hitler-Trump invectives, or lowering the bar of demonization that likely led to two assassination attempts of Trump a good way to win an election?
Apparently not, given the Democrats have now lost the presidency, the House, and the Senate. The Supreme Court is conservative. They have no power to subpoena anyone; they cannot block any nomination. Much of their old administrative state control is eroding. All the main issues—the economy, energy, border security, illegal immigration, crime, DEI/woke, and foreign policy—poll against the Democrats. The more they shouted that biological men must be able to compete as transgendered females in women’s sports, the more that 80% of the public disagreed, women were turned off, and the absurd idea was exploded by Trump.
The power of the administrative state, the legacy network news, print media, and Silicon Valley’s social media and search engines, the billions that poured into the Biden and Harris campaign all went for naught.
The efforts of moderators to warp debates, of network news to edit out unfavorable Harris or Biden comments, of leftists to cancel, deplatform, ostracize, censor, and shadow ban their enemies have failed. More likely to succeed now are numerous lawsuits against leftwing media for chronic defamation and censorship.
Given that collective meltdown, what would a sane Democratic Party do?
If they were stable, then they might renounce political suicide and perhaps return to something akin to the Clinton efforts of 1992 and 1996. Then the once self-destructive Democrats finally gave up on disastrous out-of-touch McGovernism, Carterism, an Dukakism. Instead, they began to embrace legal-only immigration, secure borders, balanced budgets, support for law enforcement, and meritocracy.
The result?
After twelve years in the wilderness (1980-1992), the Democrats regained power for the next 16 of 24 years—only in the second term of Barack Obama to go full radical Jacobin and soon lose it.
The current self-destructive obsessions with DEI/woke racialism, bi-coastal talk-down elitism, boutique transgenderism, and nonstop America Lastism all came to fruition during the Biden years. A shameless conspiracy to use an enfeebled John Biden as a prop to masque an otherwise unpalatable radical, neo-socialist agenda ensured the MAGA counterrevolution.
But instead of postmortem autopsy and introspection, since Election Day, the Democrats have doubled down on their veritable collective self-destruction.
On immigration, after wiping out the border and allowing in 12 million illegal aliens, including more than 500,000 suspected felons, they seem deliberately to be alienating public opinion even further.
So, thousands of leftists swarm and block the freeways of Los Angeles to protest the deportations of criminals. And how exactly?
By enraging middle-class commuters, while burning the flag of the country that they demand must allow them to stay, while chauvinistically waving the flag of the country to which under no circumstances they wish to return?
New Jersey Democratic governor Patrick Murphy idiotically virtue-signaled that he would defy the law, as he bragged that he was harboring an illegal alien living above his garage.
Then, when apprised that such performance-art showboating was a felony, in theory entailing a long prison sentence, the now buffoonish governor changed his narrative that the occupant of his garage was not really illegally living above his garage.
Democratic governors and mayors vie, bragging that they will be foremost in breaking the law by impeding the efforts of the federal immigration services to find and deport illegal aliens—for now, half a million criminals. Other activists are tipping off criminal illegal-alien gang leaders to avoid US government efforts to apprehend such dangerous criminals.
Is that the way to win back the working classes? By ensuring that the felons of M-13, Norteños, Sureños, and Tren de Aragua can flee and put in danger fellow American police officers?
Elon Musk has been appointed by Donald Trump to create a new government agency, DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), to find waste, fraud, and abuse in the government spending of taxpayers money.
He and his young team of tech standouts have exposed shocking waste and fraud, but mostly insanity, in the USAID’s $50 billion of foreign aid grants.
Why are Americans paying for overseas drag shows or gay and trans advocacy in culturally imperialist fashion in traditional and conservative societies abroad? Why are we paying eight percent of the budget of the hardcore left-wing BBC? Is that a way back to the White House?
Do Politico, the New York Times, or the Wuhan gain-in-function virology lab and birthplace of COVID-19 really need millions of dollars of taxpayer dollars?
Do Democrats really think the middle class will hate Elon Musk for exposing that their government may well have handed the communist Chinese the necessary cash to birth a manufactured killer virus that took one million American lives?
Is that a winning strategy—to scream in Congress that Musk is a Nazi, a dictator for showing that Biden’s USAID under leftist Samantha Power was a clearing house to enrich and empower well-off leftist organizations that only weakened their own country abroad?
On December 6, 2024, a federal judge ordered the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to release documents related to the emergency use authorisation of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine. These documents had been hidden from public view.
The legal battle traces back to September 2021, when attorney Aaron Siri filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on behalf of the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency. The plaintiffs sought access to the vast trove of documents the FDA relied on to approve Pfizer’s vaccine.
Initially, the FDA proposed a slow release schedule. In November 2021, the agency stated it would release just 500 pages per month—a pace that would have stretched the full disclosure process to 75 years.
However, in January 2022, District Judge Mark Pittman of Texas rejected the FDA’s proposal, ordering the agency to expedite its release to 55,000 pages per month, aiming to complete the disclosure of all 450,000 pages by August 2022.
As the documents trickled out, researchers began uncovering glaring gaps that prevented a systematic review of the data. These gaps fueled suspicions about what else the FDA might be withholding.
It became evident that the FDA had withheld records directly tied to its emergency use authorisation of Pfizer’s vaccine, estimated to be over one million pages.
These documents, which the FDA had full knowledge of, were excluded from earlier disclosures, effectively misleading the judiciary and undermining public trust.
People need to go to jail.
Trump and Musk’s attempts to cut federal waste are super popular.
In recent months, Democrats have manufactured an elaborate narrative around Donald Trump’s push to streamline government operations and eliminate waste, branding it as a “constitutional crisis.” This exaggerated portrayal overlooks a critical reality: many Americans, particularly those who are politically moderate, actually support Trump’s initiatives aimed at reducing the size of government.
A recent focus group composed of Arizona swing voters, including those who previously backed Joe Biden, revealed a striking consensus on this issue: they overwhelmingly approve of Trump’s agenda and Elon Musk’s efforts with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to make government more efficient. “Every Arizona swing voter in our latest Engagious/Sago focus groups said they approve of President Trump’s actions since taking office — and most also support Elon Musk’s efforts to slash government,” reports Axios.
Vice President JD Vance confronted European leaders at the Munich Security Conference on Friday over their support for authoritarian restrictions on speech, putting the assembled dignitaries on notice that the Trump administration expects the continent to revive its commitment to Western values.
“The threat that I worry most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values,” Vance said. “When I look at Europe today, it’s not clear what happened to some of the Cold War’s winners.”
The vice president recited a litany of examples, taken from across Europe, in which governments cracked down on politically disfavored ideas.
In Brussels for example, officials notified citizens that they would shut down social media platforms “during times of civil unrest” if users post so-called hateful content. Vance also cited examples taken from Germany, where “police have carried out raids against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online”; Sweden, where a judge recently explained to a man accused of participating in a Koran burning that he does not have “a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief,”; and the United Kingdom, where citizens can be arrested for silently praying within 200 meters of an abortion facility.
“In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear is in retreat,” Vance said.
The vice president lamented Europe’s abandonment of other democratic values, such as border security, he said, adding that Europeans should work with anti-immigration factions to address the record-breaking influx of illegal immigrants into Europe.
“While the Trump administration is very concerned with European security and believes that we can come to a reasonable settlement between Russia and Ukraine, [we] also believe that it’s important in the coming years for Europe to step up in a big way to provide for its own defense,” Vance said.
A majority of French, German, Dutch, Italian, and Portuguese citizens believe that their countries should have stricter border security measures to curb illegal immigration, according to a poll conducted by the nonprofit EU-US Forum and the Tyson Group. Most respondents from France, Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands also agree that “I am more worried today than I was a decade ago about government censorship of my ideas,” according to the same poll.
Vance connected the massive flow of migrants into Europe with recent terrorist attacks, such as the one carried out this week in Munich by a 24-year-old Afghan migrant. The man has an Islamist motive, police said, and he plowed a car into a crowd of people blocks away from where the Security Conference is being held, injuring at least 30.
Another Saudi migrant rammed a car into a Christmas marked in central Germany last December, injuring hundreds, and killing five.
“Over the span of a decade, we saw the horrors wrought by these decisions yesterday in this very city,” Vance said.
European leaders responded with a large bout of pearl-clutching and a chorus of “Well, I never!”
“Legislators File ‘Atomic Texas’ Act to Spark Nuclear Power ‘Renaissance.’ With the advent of small modular nuclear reactors, the nuclear industry feels bullish on a revival of nuclear power. Gov. Greg Abbott called for forging a “nuclear power renaissance” in Texas during his 2025 State of the State address, two legislators have filed legislation intended to make the concept a reality. State Rep. Drew Darby’s House Bill (HB) 2678 would create the Texas Advanced Nuclear Energy Authority and a low-interest loan fund to go with it, and is the companion bill to state Sen. Tan Parker’s (R-Flower Mound) Senate Bill 1105.”
Ukraine hits another oil refinery. I’m ignoring the news about U.S. Russian talks, etc., because Trump does a lot of persuasion bracketing, and it’s fruitless to place too much import on it at this stage.
New York governor Kathy Hochul says she might remove new York City Mayor Eric Adams from office, now that trump’s Department of Justice has dropped charges against Adams. My working assumption is that since Adams is a New York Democratic politician, he’s guilty as sin, but it’s funny how Hochul only started paying attention to Adams’ alleged misdeed when he started cooperating with Trump on deporting illegal aliens…
With the Trump administration cutting off billions of US taxpayer funding for the USAID international slush fund, formerly flush NGOs are now begging woke EU nations for money to continue operations, according to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
“WARNING! Our fears have come true: the globalist-liberal-Soros NGO network is fleeing to Brussels, after President Trump dealt a huge blow to their activities in the US,” Orbán wrote in a Tuesday post to X. “Now 63 of them are asking Brussels for money, under the guise of various human rights projects. Not going to happen! We will not let them find safe haven in Europe!”
“The USAID-files exposed the dark practices of the globalist network. We will not take the bait again!”
“A series of by-elections were held for local government seats on Thursday, with Nigel Farage’s [Reform] party storming to victory in Trevethin and Penygarn in Torfaen, Wales, gaining 47% of the vote from a standing start. Labour plummeted a whopping 49.2% to just 26.6% of the vote, down from 75.8% last time. Two independents then came in third and fourth, with the Greens in fifth on 2.6%.” The Tories didn’t even run a candidate.
Gov. Greg Abbott delivered his State of the State address several days ago, outlining his priorities for the 89th Legislative Session and listing his emergency items, which included an unexpected addition — the creation of a Texas Cyber Command.
“We must deploy cutting edge capabilities to better secure our State,” Abbott declared.
Minutes after the proclamation was made, information from the governor’s office on the new proposition was circulated, detailing the necessity of a Texas Cyber Command to increase the state’s ability to protect critical infrastructure from cyber threats and hostile foreign adversaries like China, Iran, Russia, and “other rogue outlets” around the world.
The governor’s plan is to have the new venture be headquartered in San Antonio — a city with a large presence of cybersecurity experts, including the University of Texas (UT) at San Antonio, which is a member of the United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) Academic Engagement Network.
Austin has at least as many cybersecurity firms as San Antonio…
“Attorney General Paxton Launches Investigation Into Chinese AI App. Paxton expressed concerns that artificial intelligence company DeepSeek could be violating the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act.”
In Houston: “22-year-old Chilean national arrested with device that disabled communication between arresting officers.”
“Transgender migrant featured in NYC Pride Parade charged with raping 14-year-old boy in public restroom.” “A migrant transgender woman [man] wanted by federal immigration officials allegedly stalked and raped a boy in Manhattan this week, The Post has learned. Nicol Suarez allegedly followed the 14-year-old into the bathroom of a bodega across the street from Thomas Jefferson Park in East Harlem Tuesday and attacked him, police and sources said.”
Chinese foreign investment declines 99% in the last three years. That’s what happens when you’ve got dirty commies being jerks of the world…
Accidents will happen. “Trump Administration Un-Fires Hundreds Of Nuclear Weapon Workers.”
California’s one party Democratic rule is so incompetent and burdensome that weed dealers can’t make money selling pot to Californians. “California’s legal cannabis market has hit another grim milestone: There are now 10,828 inactive and surrendered pot licenses in the state and only 8,514 active ones, meaning dead pot licenses now outnumber active ones.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
Jihad terrorism is still very much alive in Africa. “70 Christians Decapitated in Church in Democratic Republic of Congo. DRC also faces violence from the Rwanda-backed armed group M23.”
“Trump Administration Pulls Approval of NYC Congestion Toll.” “The congestion toll came into effect last month, imposing a $9 charge on drivers entering Manhattan below 60th street. The tax will increase by $3 increments in 2028 and 2031 as drivers adjust to the program, if it remains in place.” London’s “carbon tax” is widely unpopular with drivers as well, so I imagine New York drivers are just as livid.
Harris plagiarizes Wikipedia and blows off Catholics, Gwen Walz assigns America homework, social justice groomers keep trying to trans your kids, Williamson County’s sheriff gets accused of pay-for-play corruption, another Hamas leader eats a last meal of kosher drone, Columbia U wants to silence a pro-Israel professor, and a meat recall expands to my local supermarket.
The Biden-Harris administration announced [last] Friday that it was filing a lawsuit against the state of Virginia for enforcing voter integrity laws in the state that aim to curb illegal voting in elections.
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who has a history of espousing racist views, claimed without evidence that Virginia’s move to increase election integrity was an “eleventh hour effort” intended, in part, to “disenfranchise qualified voters.”
The DOJ claimed that it was doing so because it was “too close to the Nov. 5 general election” to remove voters:
Section 8(c)(2) of the NVRA, also known as the Quiet Period Provision, requires states to complete systematic programs aimed at removing the names of ineligible voters from voter registration lists no later than 90 days before federal elections.
However, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s executive order requiring that non-citizens be removed from voter rolls was signed on August 7, 2024 — exactly 90 days before Election Day.
The problem is the people who are being removed from the voter rolls are not, in fact, voters because they are not citizens, said Youngkin.
“With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls – a process that starts with someone declaring themselves a non-citizen and then registering to vote,” Youngkin said.
Youngkin said that the lawsuit was a “desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections in the Commonwealth, the very crucible of American Democracy.”
At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.
However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)
Let’s consider a selection of these excerpts from Harris’s book, beginning with one in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report, with the duplicated material marked in italics:
In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.
There’s more. In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the excerpt, with the airlifted material in italics and abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:
High Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the city’s West End neighborhood, on May 18, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.
The High Point Strategy has since been implemented in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Raleigh, North Carolina; in Providence, Rhode Island; and in Rockford, Illinois. The U.S. Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten additional cities.
In a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source. Here is Harris’s language, with duplicated material in italics, based on the page as it appeared in December 2008, before she published the book:
The Mid-town [sic] Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State Unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses, and social service agencies to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. What was innovative about Midtown Court was that it required low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service, while at the same time it offered them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior.
To make matters worse, in duplicating Wikipedia’s language, Harris seems to have missed critical information and misstated a relevant detail. She claims, in prose identical to the online encyclopedia’s, that “illegal vending was down 24 percent” as a result of the court’s policies. Early in the paragraph, Harris cites the Bureau of Justice Assistance report to substantiate the figure. But she made a mistake: On Wikipedia, the “24 percent” figure was apparently tied to a different report, which found that “arrests for unlicensed vending,” rather than unlicensed vending as such, “fell by 24 percent” (emphasis mine). Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.
While the BJA report was not the proper source for the “24 percent” claim, it did appear in the Wikipedia entry’s list of citations, and apparently was a fruitful resource for Harris and her coauthor, as they reproduced substantial portions of its sentences.
Nothing says “commitment to rigorous academic scholarship” quite like not just quoting verbatim from Wikipedia, but doing so incompetently.
Host of Fox News “Special Report” Bret Baier finally snagged that interview with Vice President and selected Democrat nominee Kamala Harris. Harris was campaigning in Washington Crossing, PA and was proud of the former Republicans and Trump administration people who took the stage with her and happy with their endorsement, delighted in their support of her as a presidential candidate.
The entire interview was a train wreck, but there were particular moments that were exceptionally cringeworthy, damaging, and proved with glaring certainty why she is unfit to lead.
Baier started off with the topic of illegal immigration, and you could visibly see Harris deflate like a balloon before the first question was asked.
Immediately Harris tried to filibuster Baier and do this interview’s version of “I’m speaking.” Harris brought up the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which she claimed addressed the flaws in the asylum system with more judges, 15 million more border agents, increased penalties, stemming the flow of fentanyl, shore up entry points, and how she has worked toward bipartisan efforts to strengthen the border.
Baier gently pushed back with documented facts, and Harris briefly got that deer in headlights look she gets when she is desperately trying to find her talking points. Then she jumped on her supposed record as California Attorney General (not her current position as VP) as proof that she knew how to handle this crisis. Failing to understand that the fact that a crisis exists is proof that you have no ability to correct it.
But the most purely evil and damning part of this topic of illegal immigration was the fact that Harris could not even form the words to apologize for allowing criminals into the country that resulted in the senseless deaths of Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin.
Former president Donald Trump poked fun at vice president Kamala Harris during the Al Smith dinner on Thursday evening, criticizing his political rival for failing to show up at the charity event in person.
Harris addressed the crowd at the white-tie event, which raises funds for Catholics charities, in a pre-recorded video – a highly unusual move for a presidential candidate. It has become a tradition for presidential candidates to speak at the event since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy appeared together in 1960.
The vice president is the first presidential contender to skip out on the dinner since Walter Mondale in 1984.
There’s an auspicious precedent.
“I guess you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the looters and rioters in Minneapolis and she would have been here, guaranteed,” Trump said.
He went on to joke that Harris must be “out receiving communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” a reference to a viral video from earlier this month of the Michigan governor feeding a chip to a leftist influencer on her knees.
Trump accused the vice president of being “disrespectful to Catholics.”
He also quipped about the Democratic nominee’s odd’s of winning the election, saying, “There’s a group called White Dudes for Harris but I’m not worried about them. Their wives and their wives’ lovers are voting for me.”
Does Kamala Harris need a mea culpa in PA? Or does her disconnect from voters in the Rust Belt go beyond state lines and religion?
That question has rolled around in my head since reading William McGurn’s column yesterday at the Wall Street Journal. McGurn uses Gretchen Whitmer’s bizarre mockery of the Catholic Eucharist while wearing a Harris-Walz hat to argue that the Democrat anointee for the presidency now has a Whitmer-created problem. But is that entirely true, or does it go beyond Whitmer’s blasphemy?
McGurn recognizes a broader problem, but perhaps not its scope. First, he outlines the direct issues with Catholics, who comprise 30% of Pennsylvania:
As California’s attorney general, Ms. Harris signed several friend-of-the-court briefs opposing religious exemptions for private employers such as Hobby Lobby and religious nonprofits such as the Little Sisters of the Poor. She said she was “proud” to have co-sponsored California’s Reproductive FACT Act, which compelled pro-life pregnancy centers to display notices about where women could get an abortion. The Supreme Court in 2018 rejected the law as a likely violation of the First Amendment.
But perhaps Ms. Harris’s most notorious Catholic moment came after she was elected senator. When Brian Buescher was nominated for a federal judgeship, she grilled him about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s fraternal organization. Although President John F. Kennedy was also a Knight, Ms. Harris treated the group as though it were the Ku Klux Klan.
She would later co-sponsor the Equality Act, which the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops said could force doctors and hospitals to perform abortions they oppose. Last month she snubbed New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan by declining to attend this Thursday’s Al Smith dinner, an election-year staple that has brought Democratic and Republican candidates together in a civil setting for decades.
Those are the direct issues, and those aren’t limited to Pennsylvania. Overall, Republicans now have a statistically significant edge in party ID among Catholics, according to Pew polling this year, 50/44. Nationally, Catholics accounted for 25% of the vote in 2020, although apparently pollsters didn’t include data on religion in state-level exit polling. One can expect a similarly significant number of Catholics in Wisconsin and Michigan, and perhaps slightly lower levels in states like Arizona and Georgia. In every state, however, Catholics make up a far larger part of the electorate than the Arab-Americans did in Michigan, and yet both Biden and Harris obsessed over their support all year long.
That’s one problem, but that’s not the only problem. A more recent Pew poll shows Harris trailing Donald Trump with Catholics by five points, even worse than Hillary Clinton performed in 2016. But the issue isn’t entirely religious:
Mr. Biden may be the last of the big-time Democrats whose base was the white working class. But it confers a sensibility Ms. Harris is conspicuously lacking. …
Politico reports that Ms. Harris’s prospects are “considerably dicier” because of a “cultural dissonance” between her progressive San Francisco persona and white working-class Catholic Pennsylvanians.
That gets closer to the real danger for Democrats, but it has less to do with “white” and “Catholic” than it does to working class. Biden had a political and cultural connection to working-class voters, not just because of his Catholicism but because of his background. He fit into that milieu even if that mainly came as a conceit, especially after fifty years in Washington DC, but he could talk in their language too … at least before his brain turned to jelly. People keep overlooking his 2012 address to the Democrat convention, which turned out to be the best of the week, in which he artfully bridged the gap between the working class and the Academia-drenched elite that had mainly taken over the party in the current generation.
Harris simply can’t do that. Not only is she incapable of connecting at anywhere near that level, she only recently even showed a desire to do so. Her lame attempt at repeating the mantra “I was raised in a middle-class household” ad nauseam is about as close as she gets. Culturally, she comes from the Academia-drenched elite and speaks their language, to the extent she speaks any political language effectively at all. Harris tosses around clichés as a means to connect to working class voters, which initially appeared to appeal to them but have turned into a major liability now.
The Democratic Party’s naked contempt for both religious believers and the actual working class has been evident for a long, long time.
More on the subject: “Blowing Off the Al Smith Dinner Might Have Cost Harris Pennsylvania — and the Election.”
The Catholic vote is not as monolithic as it used to be. In 1928, the Catholic vote was overwhelmingly Democratic, concentrated in urban centers. By 1960, the Catholic vote was fracturing through intermarriage and economic issues, but Kennedy still received about 65% of the vote from his co-religionists.
Today, Donald Trump can expect to get about 60% of the Catholic vote. In Pennsylvania, The Catholic vote might be pivotal in a state that Harris absolutely, positively has to win.
“Her San Francisco progressive persona isn’t a good fit for Joe Biden’s native state,” William McGurn wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday.
Snip. “In an election in Pennsylvania that will almost certainly be decided by less than 100,000 votes, Harris skipping the Al Smith Dinner was not only stupid but might be the mistake that cost her the White House.” Eh, probably not. Harris will probably lose the election because she’s part of an administration had presided over a wretched economy and let in millions of illegal aliens. Plus she’s a horrible candidate that literally nobody voted for. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Google is up to its old tricks, “hiding Conservative news on election 23 pages deep.””When using the search term “donald trump presidential race 2024,” researchers had to scroll through 23 pages of results before they come to a U.S.-based right-leaning news source, a single Fox News video six results down on the 23rd page.”
An excerpt from the book Walz' wife was reading to children shows them all riding the gay dad while he puts a vacuum cleaner up to his mouth. I'm sure it's nothing. From: Bathe the Cat. pic.twitter.com/2npr5s6mDN
Gwen Walz also seems to feel that the best way to get men to the polls is assigning them homework.
Can you put some really money behind that and put it on air? Maybe during college football?
There are still men out there who don’t hate this campaign with every fiber of their being, and I think this ad could be enough to nag them right into Trump’s arms. https://t.co/vk6jwJY9oM
Yes, social justice warrior teachers do want to trans your kids. “Court Shuts Down BLM Teacher Trying To Force Trans Ideologies On Kids.”
Megan Williams is a first-grade teacher who forced her 6 and 7-year-old students to “observe” so-called Transgender Awareness Day. This Black Lives Matter activist subjected these small children to non-curricular propaganda about “gender identity” and sex changes.
Williams disturbingly went so far as to tell these kids that their “parents ma[d]e a guess whether they’re a boy or a girl” and may have been wrong. Parents complained, but Williams was backed by her school principal and superintendent.
Three mothers fired back by filing a lawsuit against Williams, the school, the district, and district officials in June of 2022. Their goal was to obtain a moratorium “on gender dysphoria and transgender transitioning,” parental notice and opt-out rights on the topic absent such a prohibition, compensatory damages, and punitive damages.
Thankfully, Judge Joy Conti of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania just ruled largely in favor of these mothers.
Judge Conti stated that “parents have a constitutional right to reasonable and realistic advance notice and the ability to opt their elementary-age children of noncurricular instruction on transgender topics and to not have requirements for notice and opting out of those topics that are more stringent than those for other sensitive topics.”
Here’s the remarks in the aired clip shared by Johnson:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%…The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
And here — I’ll put it in bold — is what CBS edited out for the broadcast:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%, and when I was there on the ground, and you should go, I mean, bring the cameras and talk to the people there, they’ll tell you, don’t- don’t take politicians words for this or the administration’s word, talk to the people there on the ground they had not been provided the resources almost two weeks out from the storm that they desperately needed. And when I was there 13 days, post- you know, post the storm hitting that state, people are still being rescued. They’re stuck in the higher elevations in the mountains because the roads are down and all the rest. So they need every- every available resource and all hands on deck. The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
Issues in the debate ranged from abortion to the border crisis, and allowing boys in girls’ sports.
On abortion, Cruz said he supported Texas’ pro-life laws while acknowledging that other states would make different decisions.
“In Texas, we overwhelmingly support that parents should be notified and have to consent before their child gets an abortion. In Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that late-term abortions in the eighth and ninth months, that’s too extreme. And I’ll tell you, in Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that taxpayer money shouldn’t pay for abortions,” said Cruz.
He went on to attack his opponent’s position on abortion as extreme, noting that Allred “voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental notification law. He voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental consent law. He voted to legalize late-term abortions, including the eighth and ninth months.”
Allred, meanwhile, said he would fight to “restore a woman’s right to choose” and to “make Roe v. Wade the law of the land again.”
Snip.
One of the biggest issues playing out in the campaign thus far has been Allred’s position on allowing boys in girls’ sports. The issue has been the target of Cruz’s campaign ads and led to Allred denying the accusations, despite voting against legislation to protect girls sports.
“I know a lot of y’all at home, for example, saw two biological men competing in women’s boxing at the Olympics,” said Cruz. “That was wildly unfair. You know, my youngest daughter plays volleyball. It’s not fair for a biological boy or man, a teenage boy, to spike the volleyball at her, and he has voted repeatedly in favor of that.”
FEMA’s entanglement with the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous open southern border policies by diverting storm relief funds ($1.4 billion, according to NYPost) for illegal and legal aliens may have undermined the federal agency’s ability to effectively manage emergencies, such as the Katrina-like disaster unfolding in the US Southeast.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas dropped the bombshell [two weeks ago]: FEMA “does not have the funds” to see Americans through the rest of this Atlantic hurricane season. The federal agency drained the funds by prioritizing taxpayer funds for illegal and legal aliens versus US citizens as the Biden-Harris globalist team rolled out the red carpet to anyone, even terrorists, via the open southern borders.
Connect the dots, if you can,” Tim Murtaugh, an adviser to former President Trump’s campaign, wrote on X, adding, “DHS says FEMA might not have enough cash to help people through hurricane season. But in 2 years of a new Biden-Harris program, they’ve spent $1 BILLION on housing and other services for migrants.”
Shedding a whole heck of a lot of color on the situation, Savanah Hernandez, a reporter for Turning Point USA, wrote on X that she has uncovered some of the “first looks” inside fully furnished luxury apartments for migrants that received free rent and utilities for two years.
Hernandez wrote in a note on The Post Millennial:
The Brunswick Landing apartments in Maine sparked controversy earlier this year when it was discovered that homeless migrants in the area were getting the opportunity to live in the units rent-free for up to two years. Migrants living in the apartments shared that not only is the rent-free, the utilities are paid and we got an inside look at the furnished apartments that would run the average American about $2,300 dollars.
“FEMA: Disaster Relief No Longer About Emergency Response, It’s About ‘Disaster Equity.'”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is supposed to be the government’s premier emergency relief organization in times of disaster, like the situation now faced by victims of Hurricane Helene’s aftermath in North Carolina and Tennessee.
But according to the FEMA website, the agency now places higher priority on instituting Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity guidelines than on easing the suffering of Americans displaced by disaster.
Among the goals listed in FEMA’s strategic plan are to:
Instill equity as a foundation for emergency management
Lead whole of community in climate resilience
Promote and sustain a ready FEMA & prepared nation
What does that look like in action?
Here’s an example of a FEMA disaster preparedness meeting where participants discuss how LGBTQIA individuals were suffering disproportionally before the storm compared to other disaster victims.
Notice how the focus shifts from doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people to ensuring that they are promoting “equity in disaster relief.”
Social justice is racist poison that ruins everything, and now it’s costing Americans their lives.
Here we go again. “Report: Migrant Caravans Leaving Southern Mexico Headed Toward US Border.”
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has declared a “blood feud” against three federal lawmakers from neighboring North Caucasus republics in his first comments on last month’s deadly shooting outside the Moscow headquarters of Russia’s largest online retailer Wildberries.
Kadyrov has vowed to help Vladislav Bakalchuk, the estranged husband of Wildberries CEO Tatiana Kim — Russia’s wealthiest woman — to return his wife and block the merger of their e-commerce giant with the smaller outdoor advertising group Russ.
The family and business dispute escalated last month when Bakalchuk led a group of men to Wildberries’ Moscow offices and allegedly tried to force their way into the building. Two security guards, who were ethnic Ingush, were killed in the shootout and multiple felony charges, including murder, were filed against Bakalchuk and several other ethnic Chechens involved in the incident.
Kadyrov is a piece of work, but one with a sufficiently strong independent power base that Putin has felt compelled to buy him off. Kadyrov declaring a blood fued against Russian officials probably isn’t a sign of harmony in Russia’s government…
Sinwar is only the latest high-profile terrorist to meet his fate at the hands of the IDF. His predecessor at the top of Hamas’s hierarchy, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in Tehran when a bomb covertly smuggled into an Iranian diplomatic safehouse exploded in July. Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, was neutralized in a July airstrike after seven unsuccessful IDF attempts to deliver him to justice. Hamas deputy commander Marwan Issa met his fate in March, two months after his deputy, Saleh al-Arouri, was cut down in the suburbs of Beirut by an Israeli drone.
A little over a year after the war Hamas inaugurated against Israel on 10/7 in the deadliest one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the terrorist organization has been entirely decapitated. Its fighters are scattered, disorganized, and reduced to chaotic rearguard actions against the Israeli troops busily rolling them up. Critics of Israel’s campaign like to insist that Hamas is an idea and therefore cannot simply be dispatched like the thousands of its fighters the IDF has cut down. True enough, but an idea cannot shoot at you or launch rocket attacks on your cities. That requires well-connected, deeply embedded commanders with years of experience conducting asymmetrical insurgent attacks on a superior force. Those commanders are all dead.
The Israeli officials who have pursued Hamas’s barbarians until the end have done so without much encouragement from the West. Indeed, the death of every Hamas commander was fretted over in the West as though it created a new impediment to peace and to the negotiations over the hostages Hamas itself captured on 10/7 — 97 of whom still have not yet been located. Joe Biden’s administration withdrew almost all rhetorical support for Israeli operations in places like Rafah, where Sinwar himself was taken out. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government deserves the gratitude of the civilized world for rejecting these entreaties seeking Israel’s surrender in its righteous war.
The Israelis did not choose the way this war began, but they will be the authors of its conclusion. And the end is near. The Israelis have brought the Gaza Strip closer to its day of liberation from the tyranny of an illegitimate terrorist regime than all the combined efforts of the peace processors in the global diplomatic corps ever achieved. It is a shame that the American administration that stood so stalwartly with Israel at the outset of this campaign willingly sacrificed its ability to celebrate alongside its Israeli counterparts. This should be America’s victory, too. But by spending months on end agonizing over how Israel was achieving its honorable objective, the Biden White House and its allies lost sight of our shared strategic goals.
We hit the Houthis with B-2s. I didn’t have that on my 2024 dance card…
“Williamson County’s Democrat Sheriff Accused of Accepting Pay-to Play Donation. On September 24, the Williamson County Commissioners Court issued a contract for over $500,000 to Family Hospital Management Company for ‘Jail Inmate Psychological Services’. Just four days before a county contract was issued, [Democrat Sheriff Mike] Gleason received a $20,000 campaign donation from the founder and CEO of the company that received the contract.” “Jail Inmate Psychological Services” sounds like a great avenue for leftwing graft…
“A North Carolina Democratic county leader, who is also running for a seat in the state House, was arrested after allegedly stealing Trump signs near a road last week. Moore County, North Carolina, County Chair Lowell Simon, 68, was charged with two counts of misdemeanor larceny of political signs after he admitted to removing Trump signs and keeping them in his car.”
“The Young Turks’ Ana Kasparian says she ‘woke up’ after being molested by LA homeless man and ‘the good people’ slammed her for talking about it. Kasparian described feeling “politically homeless” and shared how the backlash she received from liberals after the assault played a key role in her reevaluation.” Seems like social justice warriors feel that being molested by a homeless man or raped by an illegal alien is a small price to pay for taxpayer-subsidized abortion…
Boy dressed as girl assaults actual girl, gives her a concussion and blurred vision. You know what the school administrators did, don’t you? That’s right, they suspended the victim.
“Edgewood ISD Superintendent Gets Raise While Students Are Failing. Edgewood ISD extended Superintendent Eduardo Hernández’s contract until 2029 and raised his annual salary to $291,923.””Only 23 percent of Edgewood ISD students can read, write, and do math at or above grade level.” Edgewood is on the west side of San Antonio.
Columbia U is trying to make their campus Judenfrei.
Columbia University is temporarily suspending a prominent pro-Israel business professor’s access to campus after he publicly criticized school officials for permitting anti-Israel campus demonstrations on the anniversary of the October 7 massacre.
Columbia notified Israeli-American business professor Shai Davidai on Tuesday that he will be banned from campus for violating university policy on harassing school employees.
On Tuesday night, Davidai posted a video on social media accusing Columbia of retaliating against him for posting a video of himself asking Columbia’s chief operating officer Cas Halloway why he allowed pro-Hamas demonstrators to protest on the anniversary of October 7.
“Right now I was supposed to be at the school of social work at Columbia, where the Jewish students are holding their own memorial service for the senseless violence of October 7th. But then I got a call from my lawyer, who says the university has decided to not allow me to be on campus anymore,” Davidai said.
“Why? Because of October 7th. Because I was not afraid to stand up to the hateful mob. And because I was not afraid to expose Mr. f**king Cas Holloway for not doing anything about it.”
Davidai should sue them over equal rights violation for millions. Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.
Researchers have unearthed two sophisticated toolsets that a nation-state hacking group—possibly from Russia—used to steal sensitive data stored on air-gapped devices, meaning those that are deliberately isolated from the Internet or other networks to safeguard them from malware.
One of the custom tool collections was used starting in 2019 against a South Asian embassy in Belarus. A largely different toolset created by the same threat group infected a European Union government organization three years later. Researchers from ESET, the security firm that discovered the toolkits, said some of the components in both were identical to those fellow security firm Kaspersky described in research published last year and attributed to an unknown group, tracked as GoldenJackal, working for a nation-state. Based on the overlap, ESET has concluded that the same group is behind all the attacks observed by both firms.
The practice of air gapping is typically reserved for the most sensitive networks or devices connected to them, such as those used in systems for voting, industrial control, manufacturing, and power generation. A host of malware used in espionage hacking over the past 15 years (for instance, here and here) demonstrate that air gapping isn’t a foolproof protection. It nonetheless forces threat groups to expend significant resources that are likely obtainable only by nation-states with superior technical acumen and unlimited budgets. ESET’s discovery puts GoldenJackal in a highly exclusive collection of threat groups.
Then there’s this: “The basic flow of the attack is, first, infecting an Internet-connected device through a means ESET and Kaspersky have been unable to determine.” There’s a 99% chance that these air-gaped systems are being attacked through the usual human engineering or security lapse vectors. Which leaves a 1% chance of some form of electromagnetic witchcraft…
“WeightWatchers Squeezes Higher After Unveiling New Low-Cost GLP-1 Treatment…WW announced the addition of a new compounded semaglutide to its lineup to beat America’s obesity crisis sparked by the processed foods industrial complex. The new treatment starts at $129 per month, and each additional month will cost $189. This is significantly less than GLP-1 obesity treatments from big pharma, which cost north of $1,000 a month.”
Fiat/Stellantis merged with Chrysler in 2014, and now they’re threatening to shut it down in two years.
BrucePac listeria meat recall expands, now includes some HEB items.
Disney plans to slash budgets on Marvel movies going forward. On the one hand, that’s probably prudent, since it gets harder and harder to turn a profit with soaring budgets. On the other hand, Marvel’s recent problems aren’t a product of big budgets, they’re a product of wokeness and crappy scripts.
Rick Beato has an interesting video with R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills. I didn’t realize that the other three members wrote the music then handed it off to Michael Stipe, who would go off and create the lyrics by himself.
One of the more useful, long-time websites on the Internet is the Internet Archive, aka The Wayback Machine, which contains captured, iterative versions of a vast amount of the World Wide Web.
Except that, right now, the site is offline and under attack by hackers.
“Have you ever felt like the Internet Archive runs on sticks and stones and is constantly on the verge of a major security breach? It just happened.”
“The Wayback Machine [is] one of the most important websites in the history of the Internet, because it literally archives the history of the Internet. It’s been taking snapshots of websites, including their HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images since 1996, allowing us to remember the worldwide web in its peak form, when Amazon looked like this and weird people made weird websites just for fun. Unlike nowadays where everybody just chases algorithms on cringe factories like Tik-Tok and Instagram.”
It was founded by digital librarian Brewster Kahle.
“Unfortunately, the fate of this website hangs in the balance, as it’s currently getting pwned, boned and owned from multiple angles.”
“A data breach exposed 31 million email addresses and password hashes. Its Open Library lost a critical legal battle. Its website was defaced with some JavaScript graffiti. It’s been getting DOSed non-stop, and its current status is offline as we speak. What the hell is going on?”
“The Wayback Machine contains over 890 billion archived web pages weighing in at nearly 100 petabytes. It’s an unimaginable amount of data. If you look at one web page every second for the next 100 years, you would have looked at less than 1% of the total archive.”
“This data is practically irreplaceable. The only company that might be able to replace it is Google, but Google recently stopped using its own cached archive, and its search results now points to, you guessed it, the Internet Archives Wayback Machine.”
“We don’t know if the hackers have access to the archived website data, but if they do, and they might, they have the power to erase the history of the world wide web.”
“The Internet Archive will remove personal data and comply with GDPR [the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation], but some people want legitimate content to be memory-holed forever.”
Section on their Open Library project losing a lawsuit to publishers snipped.
“HIBP (which is not an STD, but rather a website that helps people find out if their data has been compromised in a data breach) was informed of the Internet Archives data breach on September 30th. It’s confirmed on October 5th. The Internet Archive gets notified on October 6th [before] making the data breach public on October 8th.
“The Internet Archive has been been facing aggressive DOS attacks going all the way back to May.”
“The website is defaced with some JavaScript library which triggers an alert message about the data breach before it’s been officially disclosed.”
“Right now on October 10th, the website is still being attacked and is completely offline. Things are not looking good.”
“What sort of sick, twisted hacker would want to mess with the Internet Archive, and why? Well, a hacktivist group called Blackmeta is claiming responsibility.”
“They say they’re not a bunch of teenagers, which means that they’re probably just a bunch of teenagers.”
According to this post, “Attributed by Radware to SN_BLACKMETA, a pro-Palestinian hacktivist with potential ties to Sudan that may operate from within Russia.” YouTuber Fireship (whose video this is) thinks that’s a false flag, but his reasons are “This doesn’t make sense and won’t get people to like you,” which hasn’t stopped those End Oil idiots. Indeed “this is stupid and makes people hate you” describes a vast array of real “activist” actions going all the way back to the Symbionese Liberation Army and attempts to levitate the Pentagon back in the 1960s, so I think Fireship’s deduction here is off-base.
Could be pro-Palestinian sorts, who have never seemed to care about “making friends” while raping women and beheading babies. Or it could be any number of social justice types, whose Khmer Rouge-esque “Year Zero” vibe jibs nicely with wiping out the Internet’s history. Or maybe they’re trying to erase Kamala Harris’ obvious past idiocies.
In any case, let’s all hope this attack fails, and that the Wayback Machine has robust, rotating offline backups…
The fake Kamala bubble evaporates, another would-be Trump assassin is arrested, more Chinese spies on the staff of high profile Democrats, more NYC corruption raids, Ukrainian drones heat things up around Moscow, Intel and Stellantis layoff thousands each, another Harris County Democrat double-dips, a bit about Idaho, and some really stupid sailor shenanigans.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Evidently jailing Trump right before an election was a kangaroo too far even for this kangaroo court, so Trump’s sentencing has been pushed to after the election. “Judge Juan Merchan ruled Friday that Trump’s sentencing will take place on November 26, three weeks after election day, ensuring that Trump will not be sentenced in any of his criminal cases leading up to the election.”
In the friendliest possible format — a joint interview with VP nominee and emotional-support midwesterner Tim Walz, conducted by Dana Bash with the delicacy of an ornithologist gently hand-feeding hatchling chicks — Harris has revealed that her gaseously mindless word-cloud of a campaign is in fact an accurate reflection of her own personal vacuousness.
To be sure, Harris did not memorably self-destruct tonight. Whatever her failings, they are not those of Joe Biden, who couldn’t even articulate his words without slurring by the end. Her inarticulateness tonight was of the sort already known to be a Harris trademark, the endless jumble of nonsensical, comically vapid stock language. When she could fall back on a memorized list of talking points, she presented somewhat normally; the second she was required to respond directly to a question, then she began to spin out otiose nonsense like a pasta chef catering a Sicilian banquet. You could practically see the gears turning inside her head as she cast her eyes downward, stared laser-beams into the floor, and groped for cliches. She was more muted tonight than usual — her aides clearly ordered her never to display mirth under any circumstances, for fear the Kamala Kackle might emerge — and as a result, while she simulated sobriety for the most part, her body language was pronouncedly downbeat.
And all throughout she offered no answers to any policy questions whatsoever, nor any explanation for her various changes of position between 2020 and now. In theory, Bash asked most of the “right questions”; in practice, the way she solicitously asked them — sometimes even helpfully offering in advance a multiple-choice list of acceptable answers for Harris to choose from — turned them into cream puffs that Harris immediately used to serve up word salad.
Bash’s most pointed moment was when she pushed Harris about why she changed her position on a national fracking ban between 2020 and the present campaign. Harris’s answer was little more than, “Well, because I changed my mind when I became Joe Biden’s VP.” In the real world, anyone familiar with politics well understood that her “position” changed because Joe Biden — the presidential nominee — demanded it, and no other reason. Which of course is why it’s impossible to believe her when she says this is now her sincerely held view, as opposed to something to later be discarded once she can set her own priorities.
Eric Weinstein told Chris Williamson on the “Modern Wisdom” podcast that Donald Trump’s presidency has disrupted the old “rules-based international order,” which many view as an attempt to control global stability and wondered if the Republican nominee will “be allowed” to reenter the White House if elected in 2024. Weinstein argued that Trump’s unorthodox approach challenged the status quo, exposing flaws in the system and revealing that the impact of populist leaders on democracy and international agreements is more complex and significant than previously understood.
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: When we spoke at the start of the year, I said it was way too close to November to switch anybody out. Turns out that I was wrong.
ERIC WEINSTEIN: Beginner’s luck.
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You said what are the odds that Joe Biden has a debilitating event between now and November including death, so he runs a one in 20 chance of dying in any given year or above that. I don’t think you know whether he’s even going to make it to November debilitating event could have been a debilitating public event
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I purposefully left it vague. I didn’t say the other part of it, which I now feel comfortable saying, which is…
CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you mean by that?
ERIC WEINSTEIN: I think there’s a remarkable story, and we’re in a funny game, which is: are we allowed to say what that story is? Because to say it, to analyze it, to name it, is to bring it into view. I think we don’t understand why the censorship is behaving the way it is. We don’t understand why it’s in the shadows or why our news is acting in a bizarre fashion. So let’s just set the stage, given that that was in February.
There is something that I think Mike Benz has just referred to as the rules-based international order. It’s an interlocking series of agreements, tacit understandings, explicit understandings, and clandestine understandings about how the most important structures keep the world free of war and keep markets open. There has been a system in place, whether understood explicitly or behind the scenes or implicitly, that says the purpose of the two American parties is to prune the field of populist candidates so that whatever two candidates exist in a faceoff are both acceptable to that world order.
From the point of view of, say, the State Department, the intelligence community, the defense department, and major corporations involved in international issues—from arms trade to, oh, I don’t know, food—they have a series of agreements that are fragile and could be overturned if a president entered the Oval Office who didn’t agree with them. And if the mood of the country was, “Why do we pay taxes into these structures? Why are we hamstrung? Why aren’t we a free people?” So what the two parties would do is run primaries with populist candidates and pre-commit the populist candidates to support the candidates who won the primaries. As long as that took place and you had two candidates that were both acceptable to the international order—that is, they aren’t going to rethink NAFTA or NATO or what have you—we called that democracy. And so democracy was the illusion of choice, what’s called magician’s choice, where the choice is not actually, you know, “pick a card, any card,” but somehow the magician makes sure that the card that you pick is the one that he knows.
In that situation, you have magician’s choice in the primaries, and then you’d have the duopoly field: two candidates, either of which was acceptable, and you could actually afford to hold an election. That way, the international order wasn’t put at risk every four years because you can’t have alliances that are subject to the whim of the people in plebiscites.
Under that structure, everything was going fine until 2016, when the first candidate ever to not hold any position in the military nor any position in government in the history of the Republic, Donald Trump, broke through the primary structure. Then there was a full court press: “Okay, we only have one candidate that’s acceptable to the international order. Donald Trump will be under constant pressure—he’s a loser, he’s a wild man, he’s an idiot, and he’s under control of the Russians.” And then he was going to be, you know, a 20-to-1 underdog, and then he wins. There was no precedent for this. They learned their lesson: you cannot afford to have candidates who are not acceptable to the international order and continue to have these alliances. This is an unsolved problem.
A Missouri man is facing federal charges following a series of alleged violent threats made via social media against former President Donald Trump, Republicans at large, and law enforcement officers, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Western District of Missouri on Aug. 30.
Justin Lee White, 36, is accused of using interstate communication to spread a slew of online threats to injure Trump, Republicans, and law enforcement in violation of federal law, culminating in a multi-agency investigation led by the FBI, according to the complaint.
Speaking of Trump assassination attempts, DHS personnel assigned to the protective detail for Trump’s Butler rally were given rigorous training. And by “rigorous training” I mean “they sat through a two hour webinar.”
Remember that “Harris Surge” in polls? Yet again, it was a case of oversampling.
As we’ve been highlighting since 2016, polls are not to be trusted thanks to various ‘tricks of the trade’ – most commonly, oversampling.
Last month we noted how the founder of the main outside spending group backing Kamala Harris for president says their own internal opinion polling is “much less rosy” than public polls.
“Our numbers are much less rosy than what you’re seeing in the public,” said Future Forward super PAC president Chauncey McLean said during a Monday event hosted by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.
Now, the Washington Times reports that some pollsters are even sounding the alarm over Vice President Kamala Harris’ so-called ‘surge’ in the polls – which Harris pulled ahead in after replacing President Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee on July 21.
Since the switch, Harris is leading Trump nationally by nearly 2 percentage points and is either leading or tied with him in all seven battleground states. However, Republican analysts argue that these polling numbers may not accurately reflect voter sentiment due to biased polling methodology…
Critics point out that many polls have been sampling a disproportionately smaller share of Republican voters compared to exit poll data from the 2020 presidential election. The result, they say, is a misleading “phantom advantage” for Ms. Harris. According to them, this skewed sampling could be a strategic move to boost enthusiasm and fundraising for Ms. Harris’ campaign.
Trump campaign strategist Jim McLaughlin echoed this sentiment, stating, “They undersample Republicans” intentionally “to tamp down support and donations for Trump.” He added that the polls are part of a larger effort to create a narrative that favors Harris.
Trump has openly criticized the poll results. “It’s fake news,” Trump declared during a rally in Michigan. “They can make those polls sing.”
“Billionaire Mark Cuban Asked His Followers If They’d Prefer Their Kids Be Like Trump or Harris.” Turns out they preferred Trump by more than 2-1. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Another week, another high profile Democrat’s aide turns out to be a Chinese spy.
Linda Sun, a former aide to New York governor Kathy Hochul, acted at the direction of Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party officials while serving in state government, federal prosecutors alleged in an indictment Tuesday.
In a statement, the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York said that Sun was arrested Tuesday morning with her husband, Christopher Hu. They were expected to be arraigned later in the day.
Sun is a former deputy chief of staff to Kathy Hochul and has served in numerous roles throughout New York State government since her first post under the administration of former governor Andrew Cuomo in 2012. Before that, she served as Representative Grace Meng’s chief of staff, when the Queens Democrat served in the New York State assembly.
“As alleged, while appearing to serve the people of New York as deputy chief of staff within the New York State Executive Chamber, the defendant and her husband actually worked to further the interests of the Chinese government and the CCP,” U.S. Attorney Breon Peace said.
The federal government is alleging that Sun was an unregistered agent of the Chinese government and that her husband engaged in money-laundering while they benefited from millions of dollars in bribes from Chinese officials.
The indictment details a shocking pattern of collaboration with China’s consulate general in New York, with Sun at one point in 2020 letting a Chinese diplomat listen in on a private conference call for New York officials regarding the state government’s response to the Covid pandemic.
Chinese-government and CCP officials directed her to block Taiwanese officials from engaging with officials from New York. Beijing views the current government of Taiwan as a traitorous separatist movement and wants to annex the country.
According to court documents, Taiwan’s de facto consulate in New York City invited an unnamed politician, a description that matches the profile of then-governor Andrew Cuomo, to attend a banquet honoring then-Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen during her stopover in the city in 2019. Sun forwarded information about the invite to a Chinese official, telling that individual, “I sent you an email / Just an FYI / I already blocked it.” She then declined the invitation without consulting other New York executive chamber officials.
When Sun later asked a colleague to check if the politician was registered for the banquet, that staff member said that it was not on the schedule. Sun replied: “Perfect!”
She also manipulated messaging from the New York governor’s office, while consulting Chinese diplomats, the indictment stated.
Federal agents on Wednesday zeroed in on the highest ranks of Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, searching a home and seizing the phones of the New York City police commissioner, the first deputy mayor, the schools chancellor and others, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
The police commissioner. They seized the police commissioner’s phones. Wow.
Among the other officials the federal investigators sought information from were the deputy mayor for public safety and a senior adviser to the mayor who is one of his closest confidants, the people said. Both men have had other legal challenges.
The agents also searched the home and seized the phone of a consultant who is the brother of both the schools chancellor and one of the deputy mayors, the people said.
The nature of the investigations is unclear, but it appears that one is focused on the senior City Hall officials and the other touches on the police commissioner, the people said.
…
Representatives of the City Hall officials — the first deputy mayor, Sheena Wright; her partner, Schools Chancellor David C. Banks; the deputy mayor for public safety, Philip Banks III; and a senior adviser to the mayor, Timothy Pearson — could not be reached or declined to comment.
The consultant, Terence Banks, a brother of Philip Banks and David Banks, recently opened a government and community relations firm aimed at closing a gap “between New York’s intricate infrastructure and political landscape.” He, too, could not be reached for comment.
Several of the officials had their phones seized or records of their communications subpoenaed.
…
In addition to the police commissioner, Edward A. Caban, several other department officials, including Mr. Caban’s chief of staff and two Queens precinct commanders, also had their phones taken by federal agents, two of the people said.
Says Dwight: “It sounds like the whole Adams administration is so packed with corruption, they can’t even keep the lid screwed on.”
Behind the statistics: “August: 635K Foreign-Born Workers Gained Jobs as 1.3 Million Americans Lost Jobs.”
Germany’s conservative, populist, pro-border security Alternative for Germany won big in this week’s elections. Of course, the media, in unison, denounces anyone who objects to the mass importation of unassimilated Muslims into any European country as “far right.” And in Germany, this means they invariable compare Alternative for Germany to a certain mustachioed National Socialist.
President Trump endorses marijuana decriminalization vote. “Florida’s Amendment 3, titled Recreational Marijuana, would allow adults who are at least 21 years of age have up to 3 ounces of marijuana (a ‘small amount’?) and up to 5 grams of marijuana concentrate. At present, the state only allows medical patients with qualifying conditions to legally buy and possess cannabis.” Marijuana prohibition hasn’t worked. Full-bore marijuana legalization seems to have brought a whole host of problems, especially in blue states. Florida will provide another statewide laboratory of democracy to calibrate an approach.
Lowes may be getting out of the culture wars, but Home Depot is still in, having “partnered with LGBTQ mafia organization Human Rights Campaign on a school program that taught radical gender theory to elementary school kids.”
That budget deficit might also cause the Labour government to pull out of the F-35 procurement program. “Despite previous plans to acquire 138 F-35s, only 48 have been ordered.”
The head of Harris County’s Public Health Department, who was fired last week, has also been working for a California county since last January. Questions are swirling about her work in Texas, including her role in awarding a contract for sending mental health workers instead of police on some 911 calls.
Sources also say there is a pending criminal investigation into the county’s health department and related contracts.
County officials announced last Friday that Executive Director of Harris County Public Health Barbie Robinson had been dismissed, just days after the Houston Chronicle reported on communications surrounding a $6 million contract awarded to DEMA, a California-based company, to run the county’s Holistic Assistance Response Teams (HART).
The Texan has learned that in January 2024, Robinson also contracted with Yuba County, California to provide services for a three-year period. Robinson’s work for Yuba County’s public health department provides her with nearly $200,000 in compensation for hundreds of hours of work, all while managing Harris County’s public health department.
Sources familiar with the matter say that Robinson claimed to have obtained approval from former County Administrator David Berry and the County Attorney’s Office to engage in the additional work, but that current County Administrator Diana Ramirez was unable to confirm Robinson’s claims.
Other sources indicate that the Harris County District Attorney’s Office (HCDAO) has been investigating Robinson and nearly a dozen other individuals with the county, HART, and DEMA for several months.
This week, the McLennan County District Attorney’s Office dismissed murder charges against two Houston men involved in the self-defense incident at a party near the Baylor University campus, finally determining it was a justifiable homicide. While that was good news to Calvin Nichols Jr., it hardly makes up for the 635 days the man spent locked up in jail while the DA’s office slowly dragged its feet over the case.
According to police reports, on the night in question Nichols and his cousin, Jaytron Damon Scott, were invited to a party attended by a number of Baylor students, including football players. According to partygoers, Joseph Craig Thomas Jr. showed up uninvited and began threatening others with a gun, including a female student who asked him to move his car.
He later stuck a gun under the chin of a Baylor football player. And when Scott and Nichols were leaving the party, Thomas began to pistol whip Nichols.
That’s when Scott, acting in defense of his cousin, fired his pistol at Thomas, striking him multiple times and killing him. Murder charges were then filed against Scott and Nichols, a fact that Scott’s attorney, Bryan Cantrell, found unbelievable.
“I don’t know how this case got indicted,” Cantrell told KWTX.com. “This was the clearest self-defense case I have ever seen. And I think the problem is a lot of attorneys and, certainly the people of the community, don’t understand the law of self-defense.”
You would hope that the end of Abel Reyna’s term as McLennan County DA put a stop to this sort of thing, but evidently not.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is preparing to implement the Biden-Harris administration’s Sustains Act which aims to regulate who will own environmental services.
According to private property rights advocates, American Stewards of Liberty (ASL), examples of environmental services include “the air we breathe, photosynthesis, pollination, and even the health benefits of open space.”
Specifically, the new law allows private funds to be used for conservation efforts on private land. The USDA will oversee the program, and the Secretary, preparing its implementation, will also decide who owns the environmental service.
Although the public may still provide the USDA with comments about the plan until September 16, 2024, ASL refers to the new law as “critical for proponents of the United Nations’ sustainable development agenda to achieve.”
The private property rights advocates see the program as a means to “provide the path to transfer America’s real assets from private citizens to federal and international interests.”
Screw both the Biden Administration and the UN.
The latest Stolen Valor Democrat is Maryland governor Wes Moore, who didn’t earn the Bronze Star he claimed he did.
Speaking of Idaho, how Micron defied the odds to become one of the biggest DRAM manufacturers in the world.
Intel just cancelled their 20A (2nm) node and will be fabbing their Arrow Lake processor at TSMC. “Intel projects it will save half a billion dollars by skipping the 20A node. The announcement comes as Intel embarks on a vast restructuring in the wake of troubling financial results last quarter. The company continues to lay off 15,000 workers, among the largest workforce reductions in its 56-year history.” It’s supposedly going full speed ahead with its 18A node, theoretically due in 2025. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Intel and Japan are teaming up to work on EUV. Hard to see them making much progress given how large a lead ASML has…
Rael Enteen, Vice President of the Washington Commanders football team (AKA The Artist Formerly known As The Washington Redskins) has been fired.
He told…that, “over 50% of our roster is white religious, and God says, ‘F— the gays.’ Their interpretation. I don’t buy any of that. Another big chunk is low-income African Americans that comes from a community that is inherently very homophobic.”
…Enteen also said some players are “dumb as hell” and said some who were smart don’t stay that way after getting hit in the head too many times. He also said those who “get their heads knocked around a few times” are more susceptible to conspiracy theories.
Enteen also said, “I don’t think the commissioner of the NFL hates gay people, hates black people. Jerry Jones, who really runs the NFL, I think he hates gay people, black people.”
And James O’Keefe claims another scalp…
Legal Insurrection’s William A. Jacobson just got dis-invited from speaking on antisemitism at a synagogue in Tampa. “How could any Jew look around at the current geopolitical landscape and conclude that it’s safe to ignore all the various threats to their existence — not just Hamas terrorists in Gaza, but also the various murderous entities backed by the Islamic radical regime in Iran, to say nothing of Democratic primary voters in Dearborn, Michigan — because Trump is the real danger? What kind of cocoon are these people living in?”
