More of the Democrat election fraud that doesn’t exist, more Democrat welfare state fraud, a commie scumbag gets indicted, Ukraine returns to hammering Russia’s oil infrastructure, a very busy week for Kash Patel, the BBC wants us to sympathize with Muslims who enable child rape, and the best bagels in America are found in…Dallas?
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
“Left’s election fraud denials crumble as DOJ exposes two-decade-long California cheating scheme. FBI Director Kash Patel says prior administrations looked the other way on election cheating but ‘those days are over.'”
Despite evidence to the contrary, liberal voting activists have spent years minimizing cheating concerns and portraying those who want to investigate such problems as “election deniers.”
But the FBI and the departments of Justice and Homeland Security are now systematically exposing electoral fraud – from non-citizen voting to ballot-box-stuffing schemes that are turning the table in epic fashion.
The latest strike came Monday when a longtime voting activist in California reached a deal with federal prosecutors to admit to illegally paying homeless people to sign election petitions and paying people to register to vote. The two-decade scheme allegedly leveraged the Democrat-run state’s lax mail-in voting system, which sends ballot forms to everyone whether they ask for them or not.
The felony charge and plea deal announced Monday against Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong, 64, of Marina Del Ray, Calif., not only signals an investigation into others, it likely will provide legal fodder to the Justice Department’s efforts to force California to turn over its voter registration database to look for other abuses.
That case, and others like it against blue states, are working their way through the federal courts in a major initiative led by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon.
Prosecutors said Armstrong spent two decades collecting ballot registration forms, including in California’s high-profile voter initiatives. On occasion, Brown targeted homeless people on Skid Row in Los Angeles, offering them money to fill out forms, and even sometimes letting them use her own address to put on the forms.
The plea deal mentioned Armstrong was paid by “coordinators” to gather signatures for ballots, and she used some of that money to enlist people to register to vote and sign petitions.
“Because her coordinators only paid for signatures attributable to registered voters, Armstrong endeavored to ensure the people who signed her petitions were registered voters,” the DOJ said in announcing the plea deal.
“Armstrong regularly paid and offered to pay individuals cash, usually in amounts between $2 and $3, to induce them to sign her petitions,” DOJ said, adding in January she “knowingly and willfully paid another person to register to vote. She paid the person for the purpose of causing that person to register to vote in federal elections.”
Democrats have hundreds of ways to cheat in elections, and one by one the Trump Administration is shutting them down and prosecuting the perps.
A vast improvement: “Trump administration had full year of zero border releases.”
While campaigning in 2024, President Donald Trump pledged to fix the nation’s broken immigration system, a system exacerbated by the rogue incompetence of the Biden administration. Now, after 18 months into his second term, Trump has maintained his excellence in border security and upheld his campaign promise regarding illegal immigration, as the Trump administration has achieved a year of zero releases at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Whereas the Biden administration wantonly permitted, if not outright encouraged, border security agencies to release illegal immigrants into the United States, Trump has ensured such ineptitudes would not happen under his watch. After innocent victims such as Laken Riley, Rachel Morin, Jocelyn Nungaray, and many others were murdered by violent illegal immigrants, the Trump administration utilized every possible avenue to ensure that such atrocities would not recur. The first barrier to accomplishing this was limiting border releases.
It is a remarkable success that shows the country’s border security issues stem from failed leadership and a failed president. Biden’s atrocious border policies made the country more dangerous. Trump’s policies made the country safe again. It’s a success that should not go unrecognized.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin touted the historic feat in a press release.
“Twelve straight months of ZERO releases at the border. Under President Donald Trump’s leadership, we are delivering the most secure border in American history,” Mullin said. “The days of catch and release are over. We are enforcing the nation’s laws and sending illegal aliens back to their home countries.”
Today – 15 individuals have been indicted for over $90 million in an alleged massive healthcare fraud scheme in Minnesota, after a sweeping FBI investigation with @TheJusticeDept
and our Interagency Partners.
These charges involve the two LARGEST Medicaid fraud cases ever charged in this district and first-of-their kind charges involving 7 additional Medicaid programs.
As alleged, the defendants defrauded Minnesota public healthcare resources for tens of millions, targeting programs such as Housing Stabilization Services, Child Care, Medicaid programs, Individualized Home Supports (IHS), and more.
In one case, defendants even developed a scheme worth over $40 million to target the Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention (EIDBI) – an autism healthcare program – paying kickbacks to parents who fraudulently used autism centers to diagnose children with autism regardless of medical necessity, and billing for services not actually provided. This not only defrauded taxpayers, but robbed valuable resources from families truly in need.
President Trump gave this law enforcement team a mandate to investigate and systematically dismantle this exact kind of public fraud in America – which grossly abuses and mismanages money from hardworking American taxpayers – and that’s exactly what we’re doing. Today’s indictment in a massive moment in this effort.
Gavin Newsom is, in many ways, the most corrupt governor in America.
By that, I don’t mean that he spends his time and effort skimming off the top to put money in his own pockets. I have no evidence that he does, although an awful lot of money flows to and through the fingers of his wife. His personal wealth is not staggering by California standards—estimated at a few tens of millions of dollars—and he has it through his relationship with the Getty Oil family. Sort of a nepo-baby once removed.
His corruption is more in the style of Putin—using power to make others rich and indebted to him, and he has pillaged the coffers of the City of San Francisco and the State of California in order to do so. The ultimate goal is ultimate power, and his path to that power has been to leverage the power he has gained at each step up the ladder to enrich a group of allies who will, in turn, fund his rise further.
In 2023 Newsom was given a bill to sign that would have required private insurers to cover hearing aids for children. Many other states require insurers to cover them.
According to NY Post, Newsom vetoed the bill and decided instead to have the state provide the hearing aids. The result was $23 million spent on hearing aids for 300 people. About $76,000 a person. About 20,000 children in CA still need hearing aids.
Well done Gavin.
The scale of Newsom’s corruption is almost beyond comprehension. California, if it were its own country, would have the fourth-largest economy in the world. Its economy is about twice the size of Russia’s, and its state budget is about 50% larger than Russia’s, despite having no war to fund against Ukraine or anybody else besides the taxpayers of California.
That gives a lot of room for corrupt spending, especially when nobody is looking to uncover it.
The other day, I took a look at Newsom’s Baby 2 Baby free diaper program, which is an obvious scam, paying highly inflated prices for cheap Mexican diapers to an NGO run by friends of his wife, who all make nice salaries.
The United States has indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro, a senior Trump administration official confirmed. A federal grand jury in Florida indicted former Cuban President Raúl Castro along with five other defendants, according to court filings made public Wednesday.
The charges mark a major escalation in a long-running US legal case tied to the 1996 downing of two civilian aircraft, an incident that killed four people and has remained a flashpoint in US-Cuba relations for decades.
Castro, 94, served as Cuba’s defense minister at the time of the shootdown before becoming president in 2008, following the illness of his brother Fidel Castro. Fidel Castro died in 2016.
Remember that the commie rulers have a secret corporation (GAESA (Grupo de Administración Empresarial S.A.) that allows them to rob Cubans blind. “How is it possible for a military company to control 40% of the national economy, accumulate $14.5 billion in bank deposits, not publish financial statements, avoid paying taxes in foreign currency, and not be accountable to the National Assembly?”
Hope you enjoyed your Victory Day parade, Vlad. “Moscow Attacked By Drones: Oil Depot, Microchip Factory & Airport All Hit.” The chip factory is Angstrem, which was reportedly running some very ancient process technology indeed. But I bet a bunch of what they could produce was used by the Russian military.
Gary Grief, the former executive director of the Texas Lottery Commission, has been re-indicted in connection with a rigged jackpot following the dismissal of a prior indictment.
A summons was issued one day after Texas Scorecard originally reported that an initial indictment against Grief had been quietly dismissed by the Travis County District Attorney’s office.
The reissued indictment, a carbon copy of the first, and the new summons come amid ongoing scrutiny of the handling of the high-profile case.
Travis County District Attorney José Garza told Texas Scorecard Thursday he could not currently comment on the matter, but that his office would release more information on the case soon.
Before the latest indictment came to light, Gov. Greg Abbott called the initial dismissal “incomprehensible.”
Snip.
Court records posted to X by Dylan McKim with KXAN-AUSTIN indicate that not only was Grief summoned, but the Texas Lottery Commission itself is named. A separate indictment identifies Ed Rogers and Clay Kidd alongside Grief as “managerial agents” acting on behalf of the agency.
Notably, Ryan Mindell, Grief’s right-hand man at the Texas Lottery Commission in 2023 and his short-lived successor, is not currently summoned in connection with the case. Mindell quit the commission after lawmakers called for his removal during the 2025 legislative session.
The original indictment against Grief was secured in April 2026 on a first-degree felony charge of abuse of official capacity involving more than $300,000, stemming from a rigged $95 million jackpot.
The charge came after a year-long investigation by the Texas Rangers into Grief’s controversial authorization of third-party companies that resold lottery tickets on behalf of customers, effectively enabling the online sale of Texas lottery tickets without legislative approval.
During the 2023 legislative session, Grief misled members of the Senate about resellers operating openly in Texas. The practice was ultimately outlawed during the 2025 legislative session after revelations that couriers facilitated bulk purchases, leading to a $95 million Lotto Texas jackpot win in April 2023 that was reportedly rigged by an international gambling syndicate.
Farmer and former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein prevailed over Representative Thomas Massie (R., Ky.) in a closely watched primary race on Tuesday evening, bringing to an end the most expensive U.S. House primary on record.
Massie, who has represented Kentucky’s fourth district since 2012, is one of several lawmakers to lose a seat this cycle thanks to a retribution campaign Trump has undertaken against legislators who have dared to cross him.
The bad blood between Massie and Trump dates back to the president’s first term. As early as 2020, Trump called the Kentucky Republican a “third-rate grandstander” after Massie voted against the president’s Covid-19 relief package.
While Trump and Massie seemed to make amends, with Trump endorsing Massie for reelection in 2022, the president’s second term has seen the pair butt heads repeatedly over a slew of issues, from the Iran war to tariffs.
Trump on Monday blasted Massie as an “obstructionist and a fool.”
Massie, who also controversially opposed Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” worked with Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California to advance a bill in Congress to compel the Trump administration to release government files on deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Massie’s opposition to U.S. aid to Israel and his vote against a resolution condemning antisemitism made him a target of not only the president but the Republican Jewish Coalition and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee as well. Both groups have spent more than $4 million on anti-Massie ads.
You can stray from the party on an issue or two and still survive, but when you make a habit of working with Democrats against stated Republican priorities time after time, expect a reckoning.
Republicans have one thing going for them in the midterms: Fat stacks of cash.
The Republican National Committee ended the month of April with more cash on hand than at any other point in the group’s history, as closely contested midterm elections draw near and the fate of Republicans’s majority in the House and Senate hang in the balance.
The RNC raised $18.6 million in April, bringing its total cash on hand to $123.8 million, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
“Republicans have the candidates, resources, and momentum needed to win the midterms, but we cannot let up now,” RNC Chairman Joe Gruters said in a statement. “Democrats will spend whatever it takes to try to stop President Trump’s America First agenda, which is why the RNC is already investing aggressively in our ground game and election integrity operation, including deploying 34 State Directors and Election Integrity Directors across 17 key battleground states to drive turnout and secure victories this November.”
Democrats lie to everyone, including themselves: “Harris Campaign Didn’t Go Negative Enough on Trump, DNC Autopsy Concludes.”
A newly-released Democratic National Committee report looking back at how the party lost the 2024 election concludes that then-Vice President Kamala Harris lost, in part, because she failed to focus sufficient negative attention on President Trump.
“The national campaign did not effectively drive Trump’s negatives, and the White House did not effectively support Vice President Harris over three and half years to improve her standing before the candidate switch,” reads the autopsy, written by Democratic strategist Paul Rivera, who was asked by the DNC to investigate why the party failed to wing big in 2024.
Rivera goes on to suggest that Democrats failed to remind Americans why they disliked Trump in his first term.
“The idea Trump’s negatives were ‘baked in’ is a major failure of analysis and reality, given how his favorability has cratered less than a year into this term,” he adds.
Rivera’s finding that Harris wasn’t sufficiently negative is curious given that Harris and her surrogates incessantly depicted Trump as a threat to democracy who revealed his true colors on January 6.
Harris attacked Trump repeatedly during the campaign, calling her opponent “increasingly unhinged and unstable” and telling CNN that she believed he was a fascist who wanted “unchecked power.”
Party officials interviewed hundreds of Democrats in all 50 states to create the report. Democrats had asked DNC Chairman Ken Martin for months to publicly release the findings, but Martin chose to do so only after being “presented with CNN’s reporting about much of its contents,” according to the outlet, which first obtained the nearly 200-page report.
The report is littered with notes drafted by DNC editors pointing out that many of Rivera’s claims are unsubstantiated and/or contradict publicly available reporting.
Yay think? It wasn’t the fact that, oh, Harris was a cringingly bad candidate, that Biden was an ambulatory corpse whose headless administration was a disaster for ordinary Americans thanks to inflation and letting a flood of illegal aliens enter the country, or that actual voters hate transsexual madness and social justice lunacy? But no, telling the truth would offend the Party’s toxic cadres of intersectional grievance mongers. They’d rather lie to themselves and continue to lose rather than being dragged on BlueSky.
This trucker is in Eden, Ohio, and just parked at a truck stop where he got a bite to eat at an Indian restaurant.
(Sikh Indians now own 20% of all trucking businesses in North America.)
He says foreign truckers are being hit HARD after the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that logistics companies can be held liable for hiring unsafe drivers.
None of ‘em can get loads out of Ohio today. And I was talking to the Iman guy while I was in there at the Punjabi place getting something to eat, and he said that the reason they they can’t get freight out of Ohio today is because the freight workers won’t work with them anymore.
Apparently, what has happened, is yesterday they had the Supreme Court ruling that brokers could be held liable for accidents with carriers with red flags. Apparently, the trickle trickle-down effect happened like THAT.
A leftist might look at this and say it’s racist. An “inequitable” number of carriers with foreign drivers are being excluded??
Well, as it turns out, these truckers just so happen to be the ones that are the least safe.
I was looking up a few of these DoT numbers for these guys, and they do have pretty substantial track record of unsafe behavior – accidents, high out-of-service rates, things like that.
Many foreigners, even illegals, have been able to game the system, getting CDLs issued by Democrat-led states like New York and California even though they are not qualified. CDL schools run by migrants have participated in this fraud for years.
Meanwhile, the number of deaths involving 18 wheelers on U.S. roads has risen 50% in just the last 15 years. Thanks to SCOTUS, that might reverse very quickly in the near future.
As a bonus, Americans will have a chance to get back into a trucking industry that’s excluded them in favor of cheap, unsafe, illegal labor!!
The FBI announced on Wednesday that they were shutting down a scam call center in India which has defrauded hundreds of elderly Americans out of millions of dollars.
Snip.
Former CEO Adam Young, 42, of Miami, FL, and former CSO Harrison Gevirtz, 33, of Las Vegas, NV, admitted to operating a business that provided telecommunications-related services, including telephone numbers, call routing services, call tracking, and call forwarding services, to customers they knew were engaged in tech-support fraud schemes. Young and Gevirtz each pleaded guilty to misprision of a felony, in violation of federal law. They are scheduled to be sentenced on June 16, 2026. The sentences imposed will be determined by a federal district judge after consideration of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors …
Indian citizens Sahil Narang, Chirag Sachdeva, Abrar Anjum and Manish Kumar, were convicted of charges related to telemarketing fraud schemes based in the Republic of India that targeted and defrauded Americans of millions of dollars, many of them vulnerable to fraud schemes due to age or infirmity. The investigation also contributed to the conviction of another individual, Jagmeet Singh Virk, in the U.S. District Court for the Norther [sic] District of California. The investigation further revealed that call centers based in India utilized Young and Gervitz’s business to route their ‘tech fraud’ scheme calls and, in some instances, advised those fraudsters on methods intended to reduce complaints and prevent account terminations.
Now if they could just shut down every Indian company pretending to be an American company (a plague among temporary and contract work firms), that would greatly improve the situation for American job seekers.
“Texas Children’s Hospital Agrees to Create Detransition Clinic, Pay $10 Million in ‘Historic’ Settlement. The agreement stems from a years-long investigation into alleged Medicaid fraud tied to sex-change procedures on minors.”
A years-long controversy surrounding gender mutilation procedures at Texas Children’s Hospital have culminated in a sweeping settlement with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that will force the hospital to pay $10 million, fire five doctors, halt “gender-transition” procedures, and create the nation’s first “Detransition Clinic.”
According to Paxton’s office, the settlement resolves allegations that Texas Children’s improperly billed Texas Medicaid for sex-change interventions using false diagnosis codes despite longstanding state policy prohibiting Medicaid coverage for such procedures.
Under the agreement, Texas Children’s will establish a multidisciplinary clinic intended to provide care to patients who previously underwent “gender-transition” procedures. The hospital will fully fund the clinic for at least five years, with services provided free of charge to patients.
The settlement also requires Texas Children’s to terminate and permanently revoke privileges for five physicians accused of performing the procedures. The hospital further agreed not to provide “gender-transition” services moving forward and to adopt new ethics and compliance measures.
We asked the sick leftwing freaks not to mutilate children in the name of their perverse social justice religion, and they just couldn’t help themselves.
[sigh]: “Federal Judge Again Blocks Texas Law Allowing Arrest and Deportation of Illegal Immigrants.”
Just one day before a controversial Texas law on illegal immigration was set to take effect, a federal judge granted a new injunction saying most of the law would not pass constitutional muster before the U.S. Supreme Court.
U.S. District Judge David A. Ezra, who blocked implementation of Texas Senate Bill (SB) 4 in 2024, opined that the law “threatens the fundamental notion that the United States must regulate immigration with one voice.”
Approved by lawmakers in 2023, SB 4, filed by Texas Sen. Charles Perry (R-Lubbock), established a criminal offense for illegal entry into the state from a foreign nation, and provided a mechanism for judges to order offenders to return to their nation of origin.
Implementation was delayed until the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a pending lawsuit last month on the grounds that the plaintiffs did not have standing to sue, clearing the way for the law to take effect on May 15.
Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Texas Civil Rights Project filed a new challenge on behalf of two unnamed individuals who said they could be arrested and subject to SB 4’s provisions.
Ezra’s injunction applies to four provisions of SB 4: criminal penalties for re-entry without authorization; authorizing magistrates to order deportation; criminalization of failure to comply with a Texas magistrate’s deportation order; and SB 4’s requirement that magistrates continue a prosecution even when a person has a pending immigration case under federal law.
In his opinion released last week, Ezra noted that while federal authorities can elicit help with immigration enforcement actions from state and local law enforcement, SB 4 would clash with precedent set in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2012 ruling in Arizona v. United States.
The offences mainly took place in Dewsbury and Batley, north Kirklees, and involved three girls.
One was just 12 years old when the offences started in 1995. They ended in 2003.
The trials began in 2023 and the perps were convicted and sentenced in 2024 through late 2025. The reason we are only learning their sentences now is because there was a court-ordered ban on reporting (they can do this in England)
Reporting restrictions had been put in place to ‘safeguard the fairness and integrity of the court process.’
Translation: They were to ensure the safety of Labour poll numbers from outraged Britons…
California is the land of expensive, useless bureaucracies, which Democrats allow to do nothing but impose more regulations on Californians.
In 2023, California created a fast-food council to micromanage fast-food restaurants from wages to working conditions. The council, the first of its kind in the United States, exists to justify California’s fast-food minimum wage hike, which jumped to $20 an hour, and the council has the ability to increase over the coming years. By now, you know how this went: Fast-food restaurants shut down, cut jobs, cut worker hours, raised prices, or did some combination of those things.
More notably, though, the council that is required to meet at least twice a year does not really exist. The last subcommittee meeting for the council took place in February 2025. It has now been over a year since the council has done anything, and even then, it could not be bothered to gather all nine members. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) plucked the council’s chairman for a different state appointment after that last subcommittee meeting, and it hasn’t gathered since.
Despite this, the council was still allocated $1.1 million from the state budget.
Fender won a lawsuit (by default) in Germany, and now it’s suing every guitar maker in the world that makes guitars that look even remotely like Stratocasters. “The decision to enforce the EU-based ruling on US builders marks a huge development in the case, and the outcome of such legal battles could very well reshape the guitar industry as we know it.” I rather suspect this strategy isn’t going to work out well for them…
Google is about to ruin the Internet. “Google is changing its search engine to focus on AI recommendations and NOT links to websites, according to its Google I/O presentation. And it’s a wrap. That’s it for the free and open internet. Niche publications and independent voices will likely get completely shut out of organic search as the internet becomes pay-to-win.” Another reason to stick to DuckDuckGo.
And speaking of science fiction first editions, I’m going to be sending a new book catalog out next week. Drop me a line if you want a copy.
Critical Drinker reviews Pragmata, mostly enjoys it. If the terminally online left hadn’t freaked out about this game, I doubt I ever would have heard about it…
Once again, the Babylon Bee is doing straight up reporting from LA: “New Polls Show Dead Heat Between ‘Make Everything Worse’ Candidate And ‘Fix Everything’ Candidate.”
Back before I was suspended on Twitter (I’m still suspended, since the Twitter/X appeals process is broken), I followed ShoeOnHead, who frequently had sane things to say about the lunacy of the left. I think she blocked me because I noted she was wrong about transexism, but this nice rant showed up in my feed recently.
“New York was closer to flipping red than Florida was to flipping blue.”
Where she’s coming from: “I voted for Bernie in the primaries in 2016 and I watched as the Democratic party did everything in their power to destroy this man. Twice. So it is safe to say I am a little biased when it comes to the Democratic Party.”
“You idiots! You morons. You imbeciles! Kamala Harris? Really? That’s who you threw up there? The one who dropped out before Iowa? The one who got blown the out by Tulsi Gabbard. Why didn’t you hold a primary? Aren’t you the saviors of democracy?
“Oh, big congratulations to Tim Walz on being the first white male DEI hire. It didn’t work. The DNC completely neutered that guy, reduced him to this weird token white man. ‘Hello, fellow men. I do play football.'”
A nice slam on the Liz Cheney/#NeverTrumper idiocy.
A discussion of how young came out in force to vote for Trump…and of feminists openly wishing for them all to die.
“‘We need a liberal Joe Rogan!’ You had a liberal Joe Rogan! His name was Joe Rogan!” Dave Rubin and Jordan Peterson (among others) have made this point as well.
“Democrats can’t have a Joe Rogan, because everything that makes Joe Rogan Joe Rogan is not allowed on the left.”
Plus a discussion of populism.
I’d advise watching the whole thing. You probably won’t agree with everything, but you might with a good 80-85% of it…
What a freaking epic (and tiring) week! I waited until Fox and Decision Desk had declared Trump the winner past 1 AM Wednesday morning, and then had to get up a few hours later to get ready to work. So we’ve got more election fallout, Israel bags more terrorist scumbags, Elon Musk and Ron Paul may team up to fight government waste, Texas continues to purge wokeness from public institutions, and a song mystery is solved.
Last time around, Trump squandered his momentum. He passed the tax bill that the establishment GOP wanted, after which they didn’t need anything from him and turned to obstructing him….
Like airplanes on a runway. Trump’s approach this time around should be what he should have done last time: Shock and awe. Shut down departments, fire bureaucrats, exercise emergency powers, all so fast that the establishment’s responses are saturated. Javier Millei’s whirlwind assault in Argentina should be the model, sometimes in specifics but also in general approach. Bureaucrats move slowly; Trump should move fast.
Elon Musk says he can cut $2 trillion easily; do it. Also, set bureaucrats competing with each other for what funds remain. Divide and conquer.
The FBI’s files on its policing of domestic dissent should be opened up, as should the details of the NSA’s illegal domestic spying. Trump should have outsiders investigate possible (likely) prosecutorial misconduct in the January 6 prosecutions – something judges have already raised – and fire those responsible, as well as subjecting them to what other legal consequences may apply. The lesson that the deep state can’t intervene in domestic politics needs to be driven home, and the only way to do that is to ruin a lot of lives on the part of people who deserve to have their lives ruined, from the top of the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies to the bottom. Likewise those involved in social media censorship programs, “Operation Chokepoint” style economic warfare, and the like. Abuse of government power against the citizenry should be treated as a criminal matter, because it is.
Trump should also announce that the federal government is waiving qualified immunity on the part of such officials.
There are lots more ideas – you can submit your own in the comments below, and the much-maligned Project 2025, though not actually a Trump initiative, contains some – and Bloomberg is already warning that if elected Trump will dismantle the White House’s gun control ministry. Oh no!
The specifics aren’t really the point here, though I should probably post another essay just about those. But the point here is rapid action across a wide variety of fronts. Trump should take advantage of the precedents that Biden has set for far-reaching executive action, though you can bet that when he does the press will pretend this is the first time anything like that has ever been done.
The story of how Harris pocketed record sums while failing to gain support from voters will be studied by campaigns for decades to come. Democrats who successfully pressured octogenarian President Joe Biden to pass the torch to the former California senator are now conducting an internal autopsy of the 2024 race, in which Trump raised and spent hundreds of millions of dollars less than Harris.
“A billion dollars paled in comparison to the increased prices Americans were seeing across the country,” Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch and a longtime Trump ally, told the Washington Examiner. “Voters weren’t fooled.”
The Harris campaign and its affiliated committees dropped more than $654 million on advertising from July 22 to Election Day, whereas Trump spent $378 million, or 57% less, in the same category, according to data from AdImpact.
Future Forward, the $500 million “ad-testing factory” and super PAC that supported Harris, was a reliable clearinghouse for checks from wealthy Democrats such as Reid Hoffman, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Dustin Moskovitz. And anonymous donations, or so-called “dark money,” also benefited Harris at a faster and more substantial clip than Trump thanks to lax federal laws that progressives often criticize but, nonetheless, exploited in 2024.
The Harris campaign declined to comment on its finances. A fuller portrait will be public after the election, as the Federal Election Commission mandates post-general election reports for candidates within 30 days.
In mid-October, the Harris campaign disclosed that it had spent over $880 million this election, almost $526 million greater than the roughly $354 million that the Trump campaign had disclosed spending, according to a Washington Examiner analysis of federal filings. Much of the Harris campaign’s spending was allocated for digital media advertising, polling, and travel from state to state, including to a private jet company called Advanced Aviation.
Payroll and the taxes that accompanied it accounted for $56.6 million of the Harris campaign’s spending. In comparison, the Trump campaign reported spending $9 million on payroll — employing hundreds fewer staff members.
There was also the army of political, digital, and media consultants who were paid over $12.8 million by the Harris campaign, filings show.
One vendor, Village Marketing Agency, received over $3.9 million and reportedly worked to recruit thousands of social media influencers to boost Harris online. Others that scored lucrative consulting gigs from the campaign included the likes of Precision Strategies, a Democratic-aligned marketing agency; Ethos Organizing, founded by former Ohio Democratic Party director Malik Hubbard; and the Biden-allied SKDK communications firm.
Snip.
“Event production” was also a staple spending area of the Harris campaign, which notably hosted a star-studded lineup of musicians from Lady Gaga to Katy Perry for an election eve rally.
The campaign paid more than $15 million, according to federal filings, to companies for such services.
There was $1 million for Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions on Oct. 15 in West Hollywood, California.
Winfrey, a top Harris ally, appeared at a town hall with the vice president in September and was at her final rally in Philadelphia before Election Day.
Viva Creative, a marketing agency that has touted its work with Oprah, comedian Trevor Noah, the Washington Nationals baseball team, and American Express, scooped up $1.8 million from the Harris campaign for event production from September to October. A company called Production Management One in Maryland received $1.7 million, with large payments also going to Vox Productions, Temple University, Wizard Studios North, the Park Hyatt Chicago, and other entities for event production, filings show.
Then there was Majic Productions, a Wisconsin-based company, which has worked the NBA playoffs, the Super Bowl, and at the Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The Harris campaign paid that company $2.3 million.
A source familiar with the matter told the Washington Examiner that the Harris campaign spent six figures on building a set for Harris’s appearance on the popular Call Her Daddy podcast with host Alex Cooper. The interview came out in October and was reportedly filmed in a hotel room in Washington, D.C.
In the end, San Francisco mayor London Breed’s recent efforts to crack down on homelessness and crime weren’t enough to save her from the wrath of voters frustrated by years of disorder and talk of a “doom loop” in the famously progressive city.
After 14 rounds through the city’s ranked-choice voting process, Breed lost decisively to Daniel Lurie, a more moderate Democrat and a wealthy heir to the Levi Strauss fortune.
Lurie was ahead from the first round, and after 14 rounds led with 56.2 percent of the vote to Breed’s 43.8 percent, according to the San Francisco Department of Elections.
With San Francisco actually restoring sanity, pretty soon Austin will be the only crazy leftwing city left in America…
“UK Conservative Party elects ‘anti-woke’ Kemi Badenoch as new leader. The UK’s Conservatives on Saturday elected Kemi Badenoch as their new leader, replacing Rishi Sunak after the party’s poor performance in July’s general election. Badenoch, a staunch “anti-woke” advocate, faces the challenge of uniting a divided party while redefining its future.”
Israel seems to be on another winning streak. Israeli Commando Raid Captures Hezbollah Naval Commander….The terrorist, identified by Lebanese media as Imad Amhaz, chief of Hezbollah’s naval operations, was picked by Israeli commandos from the town of Batroun, some 100 miles into the terrorist-held hostile territory.”
Today, the Board of Regents of Texas A&M University System pushed back against “shared governance” with woke faculty members. They voted to end 52 low-performing programs, including an LGBTQ minor.
Over the course of many months, State Rep. Brian Harrison (R-Midlothian) repeatedly criticized DEI courses and the LGBTQ studies minor at Texas A&M. In September 2024, a university spokesperson confirmed that they would deactivate 38 certificates and 14 minors, including the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies minor.
On November 7, the Board of Regents unanimously approved the deactivation of these programs by voice vote.
The only question is why it took so long to fight back against the woke mind virus…
Want to be infuriated? “A federal disaster relief official ordered workers to bypass the homes of Donald Trump’s supporters as they surveyed damage caused by Hurricane Milton in Florida, according to internal correspondence obtained by The Daily Wire and confirmed by multiple federal employees.”
“The Grift Is Ending: ESG Fund Managers Being Told To “Keep Their Lawyers Very Close.”
Green New Boom: “Lithium-Ion Battery Recycle Plant Explodes in Missouri.”
RIPeanut. “Outrage Ensues After Beloved Rescue Squirrel Seized By NY, Euthanized.”
Speaking of sickening, you might want to skip to the next LinkSwarm entry if you don’t want to hear about horrific child abuse: “Animator Bolhem Bouchiba was sentenced to 25 years in prison for ordering the torture of children on live streams, paying parents to abuse their own kids.” Now he works for Disney.
Remember all that money to was supposed to flow to semiconductor companies that fabbed chips in America thanks to the CHIPS Act? Well Intel has seen exactly jack and squat from it. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger: “As we said on our [earnings] call, we are disappointed by the time it is taking to get it done: it is well over two years since the CHIPS Act passed and over that period I have invested $30 billion in U.S. manufacturing and we have seen $0 from the CHIPS grants.” What are the odds that the money has actually been raked off into the usual Democratic pockets? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Followup: “For five years, Mickey Barreto lived in Room 2565 at the storied New Yorker Hotel without paying a dime. But the free ride ended when he was not only evicted, but also charged earlier this year with a criminal scheme to claim ownership of the Midtown Manhattan hotel. Now, two doctors and prosecutors have said that he is not mentally competent to stand trial, and a judge has given him seven days to find inpatient psychiatric care.” (Hat tip: Dwight.) (Previously.)
Kotaku lays off more writers, though ultra-woke leftist Alyssa Mercante evidently left on her own. Evidently they’re down to six fulltime staffers.
Everything you know is wrong. “A new peer-reviewed study led by Sydney-based researchers Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falleti has found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets, and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe.”
“Democrats Admit Trump Actually Won In 2020 And Is Now Unable To Serve Third Term.” “We probably should have been more up-front about the fact that we stole the election and Biden was never president, but oh well. Hindsight is 20-20. I guess Kamala wins by default now, right?”
More signs of the Biden Recession, the DOJ wants to put its thumb on the scale against Trump again, more Secret Service incompetence comes to light, more Kamala cringe, a bunch of lawsuit news, and a metric ton of Babylon Bee links. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
I keep thinking I’ll keep the LinkSwarms to shorter lengths, and the world continues not to cooperate.
The start of the third quarter saw a deterioration in business conditions at US manufacturers as new orders declined for the first time in three months, according to S&P Global.
This makes sense as we have seen ‘hard’ US macro data serially disappoint for three months.
S&P Global US Manufacturing PMI falls to 49.6 in July, dropping into contraction for the first time since Dec 2023.
ISM Manufacturing PMI plunged to 46.8 (48.8 exp) – weakest since Nov 2023 (near post-COVID lockdown lows)
The FBI is going to resume its coordination with social-media companies on content moderation ahead of the 2024 election, after the Supreme Court dealt a blow to free-speech advocates who argue the federal government’s close cooperation with Big Tech firms violates the First Amendment.
According to a Department of Justice memo drafted earlier this month, the FBI “will resume regular meetings in the coming weeks with social media companies to brief and discuss potential [Foreign Malign Influence] threats involving the companies’ platforms.”
By “Foreign Malign Influence,” what they mean, of course, is “the possibility of a Trump victory.”
The memo is featured in a report from DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz on the effectiveness of the department’s information-sharing system for monitoring foreign threats to U.S. elections. National Review has reached out to the FBI for comment on the memo.
Horowitz recommended the DOJ increase its transparency around the policies it put in place to ensure information sharing does not trample on the First Amendment, and to ensure the coordination strategy evolves to keep up with ever-changing foreign threats. The report’s appendix says both of the recommendations have been taken up by the DOJ, and requests documentation of the FBI’s outreach to social-media companies over the coming months.
The FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF) and local offices will be tasked with building relationships with social-media companies in areas under the purview of various FBI field offices. As part of this outreach strategy, FBI officials are being instructed to make companies aware of the new standard operating procedure for monitoring suspected foreign influence operations online.
I’m so old that I remember when the primary duty of the FBi was to solve crimes, not to aid the Democratic Party…
Acting Secret Service Director Ronald Rowe was directly involved in denying additional security resources and personnel, including counter snipers, to former President Trump’s rallies and events – despite repeated requests by the agents assigned to Trump’s detail in the two years leading up to his July 13 attempted assassination, according to several sources familiar with the decision-making.
Rowe succeeded former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned last week after bipartisan calls following her widely panned testimony before the House Oversight Committee. But both Rowe and Cheatle were directly involved in decisions denying requests for more magnetometers, additional agents, and other resources to help screen rallygoers at large, outdoor Trump campaign gatherings.
It was Rowe’s decision alone to deny counter sniper teams to any Trump event outside of driving distance from D.C., these sources asserted.
Criminal negligence all the way down:
🚨🚨🚨 EXCLUSIVE: A Secret Service counter sniper sent an email Monday night to the entire Uniformed Division (not agents) saying he will not stop speaking out until "5 high-level supervisors (1 down) are either fired or removed from their current positions." The counter sniper… pic.twitter.com/0dg99EESQk
The Democratic Party ruling class’s bloodless coup of their own democratically elected presidential nominee, who also happens to be the nominal sitting president of the United States, is one of the most astonishing political developments of my lifetime. Joe Biden, though clearly physically and mentally impaired, has sought the presidency for quite literally longer than I have been alive. Biden had been defiant ever since the June 27 presidential debate debacle that he was not going anywhere, despite overwhelming pressure from party elites and sycophantic media lapdogs demanding he do precisely that. He has a Lady Macbeth-like wife who craves power, and he has a felonious son in desperate need of a presidential pardon.
Yet the coup succeeded. Biden became the first incumbent president to not seek reelection after his first term since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. Biden made the much-anticipated announcement—not with a solemn Oval Office address—three days later, and he didn’t even explain his decision. Rather, he issued a bedridden tweet from a personal, not even official, account. It’s the equivalent of divorcing your wife over text message. As if that weren’t crazy enough, the announcement came smack in the middle of a five-day period in which Biden was not publicly seen and during which he apparently experienced an unspecified medical emergency. Suspicious much?
The Democrats’ decision to coup their own president is a curious one, on the political merits.
Hold aside the galling hypocrisy of the purported party of “democracy” trying to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot under an outlandish constitutional theory while simultaneously attempting to bankrupt, prosecute and incarcerate him on equally spurious grounds. Hold aside the self-proclaimed party of “democracy,” feigning ignorance over how its overheated rhetoric laid the seeds for their political opponent’s recent near-assassination and its continuing to depict that opponent as an existential threat to the American constitutional order. And hold aside that purportedly “democratic” party deposing its own presumptive elected nominee—a stark reversal from its presidential primary, when party poobahs worked hard to shut out all viable competition. Somewhere in Minnesota, Dean Phillips would like a word.
Hold all that aside. Because even on its own terms, the coup of Biden for cackler-in-chief Kamala Harris is going to spectacularly backfire on the Democrats.
Already, Democrats and the corporate media have been working hard to “define” Harris for the American people. At times, this has included some rather dubious retconning, such as magically pretending she wasn’t the Biden administration’s appointed “border czar.” (She was.) But the even bigger problem for Democrats is that Harris is not an unknown commodity. On the contrary, she is a very well-known commodity—one who just happens to be about as popular with the American public as venereal disease.
Harris’ current average approval rating is under 38%, and an NBC News poll last June found her to be the single least popular vice president in American history—only 32% of Americans had a positive view of her, putting her 17 points underwater. Harris’ 2020 presidential campaign was an absolute dud, self-imploding well before the first primary votes were cast. And as recently as a month or two ago, Democratic elites were openly discussing whether she could still be dropped as Biden’s 2024 running mate. Funny how quickly one can go from the weakest link to the great savior of “Our Democracy.”
Practically, the path to winning 270 Electoral College votes still runs through the Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. It is frankly bizarre for Democrats to swap out the man who talks ceaselessly about his hardscrabble Scranton upbringing for a Californian who boasts the most left-wing voting record of any presidential nominee in modern history. Do Democrats really think Harris’ support for the Green New Deal and a national fracking ban will play well in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania or in the auto factories of Detroit? Will white working- and middle-class voters concerned about skyrocketing crime look favorably upon Harris’ enthusiastic support for the 2020 Black Lives Matter riots, which racked up $2 billion worth of property damage?
Tucson-based World View, cofounded by now-U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly in 2012, received venture capital from Tencent — among the largest tech companies in China — both in 2013 and 2016. Tencent, like most Chinese tech giants, has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party….
Spy balloons partially funded by ChiComm ties? Like, how is this considered a totally normal business for a Senator to be in?
Not sure how much you can trust Seymour Hersh, but he says that Obama is the one who finally pushed Slow Joe out, threatening to invoke the 25th Amendment on him. He also says Obama is pulling Kamala’s strings. So there’s that.
Early in the morning, the FBI raided the home of Linda Sun, a former official for Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration. Sun served as Hochul’s deputy chief of staff for a year. Before that, she was the deputy superintendent for intergovernmental affairs and chief diversity officer under disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo. The federal officers searched the $3.5 million home, which resides in the exclusive neighborhood of North Shore.
That’s on top of a raid aimed at Winnie Greco, a top aide to New York Mayor Eric Adams.
While the left is trying it’s hardest to recast Kamala Harris as a moderate Democrat – quietly scrubbing her public record over the past 5 years – her actual positions have always been radical.
For starters, she’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, ban fracking and offshore drilling, defund the police, provide US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and ban private health insurance.
Meanwhile, during 2020 Democratic primary debate Harris said that if elected president, she would “ban by executive order the importation of assault weapons.”
She also said she would reinstate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status and DACA protection for illegal immigrants, and end other Trump-era immigration policies.
And in multiple speeches and interviews, Harris insisted America needed racial ‘equity’ as well as ‘equality.’ In other words, she endorses ‘equality of outcomes’ over ‘equality of opportunity.’
As The Federalist pointed out on Tuesday:
She Supported Bailing Out 2020 Rioters
Accused rapists, repeat offenders, and rioters alike benefitted in June 2020 when Harris encouraged her social media followers to donate to a bail fund dedicated to those arrested for their months-long, $2 billion siege of cities like Minneapolis. The vice president later lied about her involvement in the money-raising scheme.
She Put Other Countries’ Borders Before Her Own
Harris traveled thousands of miles away from the U.S. border invasion she was tasked with handling to deliver “peace and security” to the borders of Ukraine, which “is a country.”
She Proudly Enabled the Jussie Smollett Race Hoax
Harris called the staged hate crime an “attempted modern-day lynching.” She did not apologize even after Smollett was found guilty of felony disorderly conduct and making false police reports.
She Sponsored Legislation That Would Codify Abortion Through All Nine Months
As a senator, Harris was a proud co-sponsor of the original version of the “Women’s Health Protection Act,” which sought to codify abortion through all nine months of pregnancy.
She’s Openly Anti-Catholic
As a senator in 2018, Harris smeared Brian Buescher, a nominee for the U.S. District Court in Nebraska, for his affiliation with the famous Catholic fraternal organization Knights of Columbus and its historically pro-life views.
Flip, meet flop, as Kamala Harris tries to walk back all her radical positions.
In 2019, Kamala Harris was rated the ‘most liberal’ Senator in a now-scrubbed rating from GovTrack. She’s on record wanting to abolish ICE (which she compared to the KKK), letting criminals like the Boston Marathon bomber and rapists vote, banning fracking and offshore drilling, defunding the police, providing US taxpayer subsidized healthcare to illegals, and banning private health insurance.
According to the NY Times, “video clips of her old statements and interviews are being weaponized as Republicans aim to define her as a left-wing radical who is out of step with swing voters.”
“The archive is deep,” said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist and ad maker who is working with David McCormick, the G.O.P. Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, among other campaigns. “We will run out of time before we run out of video clips of Kamala Harris saying wacky California liberal things. I’m just not sure that the rest of this campaign includes much besides that.”
To that end, McCormick’s campaign has produced one of the first TV ads to attack Harris on her longstanding positions.
Yet, according to the Times, nevermind all that- Harris is now a reformed moderate – and has suddenly reversed course on virtually all of her most radical views.
On Friday, the Harris campaign announced that she no longer wants to ban fracking – a ‘significant shift’ from where she stood four years ago. She’s also reversed course on funding for border enforcement, no longer supports a single-payer health insurance program, and has walked back liberal fever dreams of a mandatory gun buyback.
She is no longer pushing for a single-payer health care system, and on Friday her campaign said she would maintain Mr. Biden’s pledge not to raise income taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. -NYT
Packing the Court? Nah…
On Monday, as Mr. Biden prepared a speech in Texas calling for term limits and ethics guidelines for Supreme Court justices, the Trump campaign resurfaced statements Ms. Harris made in 2019 saying she was “open to this conversation” about expanding the Supreme Court. Ms. Harris, in a statement released by her campaign, endorsed Mr. Biden’s proposal, which does not call for adding additional justices to the court.
According to Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank, Harris has ‘evolved’ into a Biden style centrist (if centrism is defined as letting 20+ million illegals into the country and cooking Americans with inflation).
“There’s a tremendous difference in changing one’s policy ideas and changing one’s principles,” said Bennett. “She has not changed her principles. She still thinks climate change is an existential threat — she just doesn’t think the Green New Deal is the way to address it.”
Sure Matt.
The Times also hints that Harris is essentially an idiot who didn’t really understand her own positions while running for president in 2020.
…during that race, Ms. Harris also often appeared as if she were not sure what she believed. In a CNN town-hall event the day after what was widely viewed as a successful campaign rollout in Oakland, Calif., she appeared tentative while discussing health care policy, eventually saying she would eliminate private health insurance and institute a single-payer health care program.
She would go on to propose an array of policies popular with progressives. She sought to increase pay for public-school teachers by an average of $13,500 through a bump in the estate tax.
She also called for an assault weapons ban and said she would sign an executive order mandating background checks for customers of any dealer who sold more than five guns in a year.
Minnesota governor Tim Walz is on the short list to be Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate. This is almost laughable when you look at Walz’s record running the state government, which somehow manages to combine the honesty of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, the competence of former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco, and the sharp-eyed ethical-watchdog instincts of soon-to-be-former New Jersey senator Bob Menendez. A whole lot of shady and unethical people in Minnesota see the state government as a giant pile of money just waiting to be taken, with a sleepy guard in the form of the governor.
“J. D. Vance is weird.” Yeah, the modern Democratic Party is the last set of people who should be accusing others of weirdness…
“Did the Israelis just take out two key leaders in Iran’s proxy armies? Just hours after announcing that a strike in Beirut killed Hezbollah’s top military commander, the Iranian state media announced that Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh had been “martyred” in Tehran. Haniyeh had just arrived there to meet the newly elected president.” Reports say he stayed in the same room in the same complex every time he visited, so Israel managed to sneak a bomb under his bed several months ago…
“Canada’s standard of living is on track for its worst decline in 40 years, according to a new study by Canada’s Fraser Institute. The study compared the three worst periods of decline in Canada in the last 40 years – the 1989 recession, the 2008 global financial crisis, and this post-pandemic era. They found that, unlike the previous recessions, Canada is not recovering this time. Something broke. In fact, according to the Financial Post, since 2019 Canada’s had the worst growth out of 50 developed economies. Inflation-adjusted Canadian wages have been flat since 2016.” That’s what happens when you elect socialist asshats like Justin Trudeau.
Like the electoral blowout feared by national Democrats with Biden at the top of the ticket, Phelan’s abysmal record of the Texas House under his mismanagement resulted in a political disaster; more incumbent Republicans lost their primary re-election campaigns than any time in modern history.
Phelan himself is damaged goods, politically. He outspent his primary opponent by a 5-to-1 margin yet garnered a “win” of less than 700 votes in a race that saw a couple of thousand Democrats flip primaries, clearly to “help” him.
Everyone in the House knows that their defeated colleagues earned challengers because Phelan made them vulnerable… and then left them to go down in defeat.
But he is, for now, still the speaker… in name, anyway.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was publicly done with Phelan more than a year ago after the speaker and his cronies sent a deeply flawed, legally problematic, and factually vacuous “impeachment” of Attorney General Ken Paxton to be sorted out by the Senate.
The Democratic Party’s social justice agenda in action: “At least eleven transgender-identifying male felons are currently housed at a formerly women-only prison in Washington State. Many of them committed violent crimes against women and children before they entered the Washington Corrections Center for Women (WCCW), colloquially known as ‘Purdy.'”
Speaking of which, the NFL’s $4.7 billion antitrust judgement was just overturned. “The jury’s damages verdict was otherwise unsupported by the evidence.”
“A Bakersfield College professor who was investigated and disciplined after he questioned the use of grant money to fund social justice initiatives at his school has agreed to a $2.4 million settlement to resolve his lawsuit.” Keep hitting them in the pocketbook…
Bungie games, of Destiny and Halo fame, just laid off a bunch of staff. Official line says 17% of the company, but elsewhere I’m hearing the true total is closer to 40%. Microsoft bought then spun out Bungie, and Sony bought them in 2022.
Republicans subpoena Biden Crime Family members, Israel is handily kicking Hamas’ ass in Gaza, Jezebel goes down in flames, and The Marvels looks to be doing as badly as everyone expected. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Hunter Biden and his uncle James Biden have been subpoenaed Wednesday by the House Oversight Committee, which took the remarkable step of seeking depositions from family members of President Biden amid its impeachment inquiry.
As part of the request, the committee asked for James Biden’s wife, Sarah Biden, as well as Hunter Biden’s wife, Melissa Cohen, to sit for transcribed interviews. The panel also asks for interviews with Hallie Biden, the widow of Beau Biden, and her sister Elizabeth Secundy.
The subpoenas come weeks after the Oversight Committee demanded both Hunter and James Biden’s personal bank records, and also include a subpoena for Hunter Biden’s former business partner Rob Walker.
The panel is also requesting to speak with Tony Bobulinski, whom Hunter Biden’s attorney have accused of lying to the FBI.
The release from House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said he “plans to send additional subpoenas and transcribed interview requests later this week.”
If James Biden is a potential felony suspect (which he is), I doubt the House can compel his wife to testify.
The IDF’s tactical success so far in its nearly two-week-old ground incursion into Gaza – cutting the north from the south and entering Gaza City with limited troop casualties – has surprised some observers. There have been 32 Israeli troops killed during the incursion, according to The Times of Israel, which is far fewer than anticipated. The IDF said it is killing fighters and destroying scores of tunnel shafts and other Hamas infrastructure during its advance that has reached the Mediterranean Sea coast. Still, the mounting casualty toll and displacement of civilians remains a grave cause for concern as outrage grows and calls for a ceasefire increase.
Snip.
While good analysis of any major news story should not accept on face value any claims by the participants, it most certainly must not accept the claims of a source known to lie. And yet, the mainstream press and the experts it has relied on have accepted and continue to accept what Hamas tells them, with no skepticism, to the point that several media sources (Reuters, CNN, AP, and the New York Times) allowed themselves to be used by Hamas as propaganda outlets. Their blind passion to get the story combined with their willingness to repeatedly accept the words of an organization not only known to repeatedly lie but to rape, torture, and slaughter women, children, and babies caused them to misread the situation badly.
Others might not be so kind, and will instead say this poor analysis was because many of these news organizations and the experts they relied on have taken sides. They see Hamas as the good guy and victim, and Israel as the bad guy and oppressor. Thus, their analysis is warped because they assume Israel is lying and Hamas is telling them the truth.
This conclusion is certainly possible with some news organizations and some experts, but it is a mistake to rely on it entirely. For example, many of the military experts quoted in the articles above were from Israel itself. Yet they too were fooled, and thought Hamas was stronger than it is.
Muslim fanaticism and Jew-hatred are poor substitutes for planning, training, doctrine and logistics.
West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin will not run for reelection. That’s pretty much a lock for Republicans to flip next year in a state that went for Trump over Biden by 49 points in 2020.
If the 2024 Presidential election were held today, Trump would win over 300 electoral votes. “Five out of six swing states that Joe Biden won in 2020 show Trump winning well outside the margin of error.” Usual poll caveats apply.
“Pennsylvania voting machines shut down after displaying flipped votes for judges in Northampton County.” This looks more like a bug than a felony, as votes between candidates were swapped, not simply switched from a Democrat to a Republican.
Green Charter Township, Michigan board: “Here, have a Chinese battery company.” Voters: “Here, have a pink slip.” All of them were voted out.
Leftwing rage monkey Cenk Uygur thinks he’s running for President, despite being constitutionally ineligible.
WeWork files for bankruptcy. I thought there might have been a pre-Flu Manchu use case for making a profitable business of co-working spaces, but even that wasn’t possible for WeWork, since they lease rather than own all their space. This means they’re just a middleman in an economy that increasingly eliminates middlemen, and there’s nothing special about their model that actual landlords can’t do better.
Speaking of Nelson-worthy news: Fake meat company Beyond Meat is laying off workers. Seems like Vegetarianism is a luxury good people will are willing to go without in the Biden Recession. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
“Right now, The Marvels is tracking to have one of the lowest openings in the entire MCU, with just around $60 million. To put that into perspective, Captain Marvel opened with $153.4 million in 2019.”
Oh, and as you might imagine, Critical Drinker is not impressed. “People aren’t even angry anymore, they just don’t care. The original Captain Marvel was a divisive movie that inspired debate and controversy, but this one falls victim to a far more Insidious problem: absolute apathy. This really is how the MCU dies, not with a bang, but with a whimper.”
Speaking of the Drinker, he referenced this extensive Variety piece on MCU troubles. There’s a lot to chew on here, including how the Blade reboot “morphed into a narrative led by women and filled with life lessons.” (I’m guessing the Variety stylebook forbids using the word “woke.”) But the most interesting bit was the disasterous incompetence surrounding the She-Hulk TV series:
But some internal sources suggest [Victoria] Alonso was a scapegoat and point to the “She-Hulk” VFX issues as a symptom of a deeper rot — namely a lack of oversight on script development. In the original arc of “She-Hulk,” a flashback of star Tatiana Maslany’s transformation into her Hulk character didn’t take place until Episode 8, the penultimate episode. But after Marvel’s brain trust watched footage, it realized the scene needed to happen in the pilot episode so that audiences could see more of the character’s backstory early. That meant that the VFX team was tasked with fixing the mess in postproduction.
“The so-called bad VFX we see was because of half-baked scripts,” says one person involved with “She-Hulk.” “That is not Victoria. That is Kevin. And even above Kevin. Those issues should be addressed in preproduction. The timeline is not allowing the Marvel executives to sit with the material.”
All the while, Marvel was bleeding money, with a single episode of “She-Hulk” costing some $25 million, dwarfing the budget of a final-season episode of HBO’s “Game of Thrones, ” but without a similar Zeitgeist bang. The August 2022 series premiere at the El Capitan Theatre foreshadowed what was to come six months later at the “Quantumania” bow: the “She-Hulk” special effects were out of focus in multiple scenes.
Important safety tip: If you’re choosing a victim to rob at knife-point, try not to pick an Ex-MMA fighter.
Here Lies Love, David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s disco musical about Imelda Marcos will be closing on Broadway. The first sign the production was in trouble: It was a disco musical about Imelda Marcos. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
“Researchers Discover Miracle Cure For Gender Dysphoria Called ‘Deleting TikTok.'”
I don’t mean to cause no fuss/But can I ride your doggy bus?
Dog Bus
In Alaska, a married couple is engaged in dog walking and supervision of them. To do this, they even purchased a bus to conveniently and safely pick up pets, like children to school. Dogs spend all day together, have fun, eat, and then they are transported to the houses… pic.twitter.com/OjLX2Rgb4S
Vice Media is laying off workers, so let’s have a moment of silenceOK that’s enough.
Aw, who am I kidding? Break out the tiny violin!
“Thursday’s layoffs mainly came from Refinery29.”
I had honestly forgotten that Vice owned that feminist well of suck.
Vice had done some interesting work early on, but had gradually morphed into a hard-left Gawker-lite. Indeed, having either on your resume should be as toxic to future employment prospects as having Gawker itself on there.
And here’s a great zinger from The Babylon Bee’s managing editor:
Have them all come work for us at @TheBabylonBee. They can write the same kind of pieces they always did and we’ll just publish them as satire
This has been a long time coming. At least a generation, maybe two. The left methodically has taken control of key institutions to implement an anti-American, anti-Capitalist agenda.
You send your kids to public schools and college, where they are taught from their earliest years that America and capitalism are the sources of evil in the world, that we are a systemically racist society that consumes ‘black and brown bodies,’ while socialist and communist systems are more equal and fair. It’s all a lie, but it’s a lie told by the teachers, professors, and administrators with power. The real racists are the people who obsess about race, and who judge people based on the color of their skin.
When your kids emerge from the social justice warfare meat grinder, you don’t recognize them anymore. Oh well, you shrug.
There is a concerted effort funded by leftist billionaires and high tech companies to control what you can say, and to silence you through mob action or social media throttling if you get out of line. The large corporate media, with only a couple of exceptions, is thoroughly corrupt and works every day to elect their preferred candidates, always Democrats.
The law enforcement system is being undermined by district attorneys funded by George Soros whose agenda is to prevent enforcement of laws, and politicians whose goal is to see those arrested released immediately without bail. We’re seeing that right now with rioters and looters almost immediately released. The next push is to defund the police.
Hollywood, The music industry. Television. Gone.
We still have the vote and can win elections, despite the disadvantage. But it’s not a guarantee. Which is why the left wants to subvert voting integrity.
All this time, you have seen bits and pieces, and figured that while you might not agree, it wasn’t a threat to our existence.
The wilding and looting should be your wake up call. When seconds counted, the police were pulled back by the policitians.
Reminder: The #BlackLivesMatter chant “Hands Up Don’t Shoot” is founded on a lie.
Let us know Biden and his party by what they have done for black people in all the decades Dems have enjoyed a firm hold on their vote.
If they really cared about black lives, they would have tried to address the real reasons for black disadvantage. They would worry about fatherlessness, the 70 percent of black children born to single mothers, the illiteracy that holds down black achievement, and drugs that blight black lives.
They would champion school choice, which Attorney General Bill Barr calls the “civil rights issue of our era.”
They would wonder why black disadvantage and violence is entrenched in cities they have controlled for decades.
But instead, Democrats blather about “systemic racism” and blame cops and President Trump.
Texas hit a new daily high in COVID-19 cases Tuesday with 2,504 new cases reported, according to data released Wednesday by the Texas Department of State Health Services. That topped the previous daily high of 1,949 cases May 31.
Just over 21% of the new cases were reported in Jefferson County, which reported 537 new cases Tuesday, nearly doubling its previous total.
Asked about the cause of the increase, DSHS spokesperson Chris Van Deusen pointed to Jefferson County’s three state prison units.
Most of the new cases were “due to a change in how the local health department is reporting” cases from the prisons, he said.
Hot spots like prisons have recently started to do mass testing, and the data is not always reported daily.
To the growing list of opinions that could cause you to be cast out of public life we can now add: thinking white privilege is a bullshit idea and thinking that staging a protest in Wales against police brutality in Minneapolis is a bit stupid.
For over the past 24 hours it has been revealed that two British men have been sacked and suspended respectively for the crime of gently criticising the tactics and rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Stu Peters, a presenter on the Isle of Man’s Manx Radio station, has been suspended and put under investigation following an on-air clash with a black caller. In the exchange, Peters criticised the concept of white privilege (‘I’ve had no more privilege in my life than you have’) and questioned the point of BLM protests on the Isle (‘You can demonstrate anywhere you like, but it doesn’t make any sense to me’). The case has even been referred to the Isle of Man’s Communications Commission.
We just had the biggest spike of new gun buyers in recorded history — and then did it again one month later
The NSSF (the gun industry’s main trade group) just released their report on gun sales in the first four months of 2020. Record-breaking spikes in guns sales actually happen relatively frequently, and that’s certainly been the case in 2020. But the unique thing this year is how many of those gun sales were to first-time owners. The NSSF estimates that 40 percent of sales were to newbies, two-thirds higher than the typical level of 24 percent. Combined with 6.5 million background checks in the first four months of the year, NSSF estimates that the January–April 2020 period created 2.6 million new gun owners in the US.
There are 209 million adults in the US. Thirty percent of them personally own a gun. So 2.6 million new gun owners means a 4.1 percent increase in the total number of gun owners. In four months, driven by COVID. That’s before the second wave of new buyers from all the May–June upheaval — which wave, judging by the images of 2-hour lines outside gun shops, could be just as big as the first one.
Much bigger, I would guess, if demand can keep up.
West Palm Beach Mayor Keith James announced a ban on gun and ammunition sales. So Democrats not only want to encourage rioters, refuse to prosecute them, and defund the police, they want to take away the means to defend yourself as well…
Know whose views the media wants to supress? Yours:
The left is seeking to define the scope of acceptable thought, and they do it by marginalizing the mainstream and mainstreaming the marginal.
They do it by lying both directly and by omission of normal views the leftists disapprove of. I talk about it in detail (and brutally) in my new non-fiction book The 21 Biggest Lies About Donald Trump (and You!). Even as my tome prepares to drop on 7/7, new examples of this crap keep popping up.
Look at the “defund the police” idiocy. This sinister power grab – it’s not crazy, but rather a calculated effort to centralize force within left-wing power structures and leave you disarmed and defenseless – gets the support of only a rounding error of American citizens, but it’s the only view you hear on the commie cable shows. Some try to gaslight it so not to freak out the whiny white wine women of suburbia who know their Ken-doll feminized and gunless husbands won’t be able to protect them. The sugar coaters assert that only a stupid conservative dummy would think “defund the police” actually means “defund the police,” just like “believe all women” could never be reasonably interpreted as meaning that people should “believe all women.”
For more privileged individuals such as [Catherine] Tait, as Glenn Loury told the Quillette podcast recently, the anti-racism movement is now more akin to a performative religion, presenting garment-rending adherents with concepts analogous to original sin (whiteness) and excommunication (cancelation). America and its white inhabitants are presented as having permanently cursed souls, a defect that can be addressed only through elaborate rites of penance, as in recent scenes of white people washing the feet of black community leaders. And it’s notable that the above-described art-house and newsroom controversies always seem to originate in some supposedly sacrilegious text or monologue, whose heretical nature is taken as proof of a contaminated character.
Snip.
The reason the Times has lost its editorial moorings isn’t that social media is crazy and tribalistic. Social media has always been crazy and tribalistic. What’s changed is that the firewall between social media and real life has now broken down completely thanks to the pandemic lockdown. Since we’re all working from home, and dealing with co-workers only through digital means, the line between colleague and troll has blurred to nothingness.
It was one thing when Times staffers had to co-exist in a world of cubicles, water fountains, lunchrooms, and elevator chit chat. We all say we’re exasperated by office life, but the annoying rituals of communal work help remind us that our colleagues are actual human beings who tell stories about their dogs and put stick-it notes on their Tupperware. Canceling James Bennet, Real Human Being, would have been a lot harder than canceling @James_Bennet, the Slack-channel avatar. Certainly, it’s no coincidence that the Times’ descent into full-blown progressive cancel-culture social panic happened to coincide with the only period in the newspaper’s history when people who once rubbed elbows daily suddenly never saw each other for many months.
Speaking of the Times, Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell is not impressed with their intestinal fortitude:
“One of our nation’s most storied newspapers just had its intellectual independence challenged by an angry mob, and they folded like a house of cards,” McConnell said Wednesday on the Senate floor. “A jury of people on Twitter indicted them as accessories to a thought crime, and instead of telling them to go take a hike, the paper pleaded guilty and begged for mercy.”
Important questions:
100 million dollar question that leftists are refusing to answer:
To what organization do the funds raised on the Black Lives Matter website go?
BLM raised 40 million dollars in 48 hours because of George Floyd’s death. But WHO did Act Blue direct that funding to?
Rioters in Philly deface a statue of Matthias Baldwin, an early abolitionist who fought against slavery 30 years before it ended. pic.twitter.com/1HKrDusPBh
President Donald Trump’s plan to pull troops from Germany irks Angela Merkel. Well duh. People hate it when you end their free ride.
President Donald Trump’s decision to cut the number of U.S. troops in Germany has irked Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government and German media.
The White House plans to withdraw 9,500 out of 35,000 U.S. troops stationed in Germany by September, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
The move came after Germany ignored President Trump’s repeated warnings and kept defaulting on the agreed defense spending, leaving the U.S. to pick up the hefty NATO bill.
“The United States is spending far more on NATO than any other country. This is not fair, nor is it acceptable,” President Trump said at the 2018 NATO summit. The U.S. shoulders more than 70 percent of the NATO defense budget.
Peter Beyer, a German politician and a key Merkel ally, called the planned U.S. troop withdrawal “completely unacceptable” to Germany. “It’s not just about 9,500 soldiers, but also their families, an estimated 20,000 Americans,” he added.
What’s the last year Germany met it’s 2% funding target?
The Austin City Council, which turned the city into bumsville and wants to reduce funding for police by $100 million, wants to hike property taxes 25% to pay for a giant mass transportation boondoggle. Evidently the opportunities for graft there are far more extensive. The good news is that it requires voter approval, and I’m hoping that (for once) Austin voters will show a modicum of sanity.
Owner of Minneapolis manufacturing plant burned down by rioters has seen enough. “Kris Wyrobek thought he could rely on the city to protect his manufacturing business. In the wake of the city’s paralysis in the rioting — which the Star Tribune helpfully notes “sometimes overshadowed peaceful protests” — Wyrobek has had enough. He’s packing up his 7-Sigma plant to rebuild elsewhere after the city let it burn down, and he’s taking 50 jobs with him.”
Follow-up: Remember that “George Floyd and Derek Chauvin butted heads working at the same club” story? Yeah, not so much.
Wokeness comes for kid’s show Paw Patrol, which dares to feature a police dog as one of the characters.
Speaking of which, the Babylon Bee nails it again: “Paw Patrol Replaces Chase The Cop With Karl The Antifa Rioter.”
Related: “McGruff The Crime Dog Put Down.” You would not believe how long a I’ve been waiting to reuse the “McGruff the Crime Dog” tag…
Netflix just released a new Dave Chappelle comedy special, Sticks and Stones. Guess who he takes aim at?
“Chappelle humorously critiques school mass shooting drills, Jussie Smollett, the excesses of the #MeToo movement, and LGBTQ activists—or “the alphabet people” as he calls them—for thinking they should be immune from mockery.”
The Margaret Dumonts of the Social Justice Warrior left are already condemning him for “misogyny” and “transphobia,” which instantly rocketed the special up my “must see” list.
— Mike Real-Last-Name-Unknown (@TheOtherMike_) August 26, 2019
I have no issue with people feeling however they feel about Dave Chappelle’s jokes. What I do take issue with is acting like he can’t joke about certain topics because they’re off limits.
Recall that Trump was running after eight years of President Obama. Those eight years saw the federal government attempt to force nuns, literally the Little Sisters of the Poor, to violate their consciences and fund birth control. Obama took ’em to court over that. The eight years of Obama saw activist leftists haul Christian cake bakers to court and destroy their livelihood. The eight years of Obama saw a very emboldened left vent its hatred for everyone to their right, and evangelicals knew we were in their crosshairs. They went after Christian-owned Hobby Lobby, they used our tax dollars to fund abortion, they made their disdain for our faith abundantly clear. The Democrats’ 2016 appeal to us amounted to “Vote for us, you stupid, racist, bucktoothed haters!”
That’s terrible marketing anywhere outside the New York Times newsroom.
Their 2020 message is worse. They’re pushing failed 19th-century socialism paired with anti-Semitism (while calling us “racist”), along with the policy plan that just finished killing Venezuela. They want to erase our borders and take away our guns. They’ll betray Israel at the first opportunity. Remember — Rep. Eric Swalwell (D) threatened to nuke gun owners, fellow Americans! Plus: they still hate evangelicals and want us to pay for abortion on demand.
Hillary Clinton did not offer a break from any of that. She called us “deplorable” and relished cranking Obama’s hostility up a notch. The third-party guy, Evan whatever, also spent too much time attacking to his right, not his left. That’s not a good look. Ditto for the NeverTrumpers.
Snip.
Speaking for myself and the evangelicals I know, Trump earned our votes by articulating many of our ideals fearlessly. This suggested he might actually follow through, unlike many who have called themselves “conservative” for their entire lives but “grow” left once they get to Washington. If we got some policy wins out of him, all the better.
Trump has been strongly pro-life, strongly pro-American, strongly pro-Israel, strongly pro-capitalism, and he has pushed back against the freedom-robbing regulatory state. He cut taxes and he left evangelicals alone. He didn’t sue the nuns. He doesn’t want our guns.
Voting for Trump is not “trading Christian values for political power.” It’s voting in self-defense against the radical, evangelical-hating left and hoping for the best – and getting more than expected.
Why did we get Trump? Because he fights the battles no one else would.
First, he alerted us to a media no longer impartial but zealously preoccupied in manufacturing fake news on behalf of a radical-left wing agenda.
He then exposed us to the dangerous reality of a vast government bureaucracy, akin to a shadow government, operating on behalf of its own interests and concerns and not those of the American people. The deep state, operating confidently and without checks and balances, ignores representatives elected by the people while pursuing a globalist and self-serving agenda.
Now Trump is challenging the unofficial rule that people dare not criticize those whom the liberal community considers icons, personalities who may never be questioned or probed due to their liberal credentials.
Well, it’s about time!
It started when the president tweeted about the deplorable conditions in some of our major urban areas. He began pin-pointing what we have all seen, namely, how Democrats have run these cities for decades, contributing to their degradation and decay, and causing severe harm to their inhabitants. The liberal “icons” that have controlled these municipalities for decades have allowed urban centers, through their enforced and sanctimonious liberalism, to devolve from once-great cities to districts akin to war zones and rubble. It’s not about the race of the leaders, but their left-liberal policies, as may be seen in parts of New York City under Bill de Blasio and in Chicago until recently under Rahm Emanuel.
Once-untouchable liberal icons, such as U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), are a major part of the problem. Trump points this out. Grandstanding about conditions along the U.S. southern border, Cummings has stood idly by as his own West Baltimore district has fallen apart. His only purpose seems to be to demand more money for the district’s power brokers.
Similarly, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez continually shrieks about the southern border. She might pay more attention to the inferior conditions in large swaths of her Bronx and Queens district. President Trump is spotlighting these conditions as well as the actors involved.
No person is above criticism. Not Cummings, not Al Sharpton, nor “squad” members Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), or Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.). If they can dish it out—as they do daily, often by tarring their opponents as racists and white supremacists—they should be able to take it.
“It’s the Trump economy man. You can say what you want but he wants to help all of us. I’ve never made more money than I am right now. We don’t even work with wealthy buyers. It’s almost all working class people. These people who hate Trump are dumb.
He continued…”they’re mad he wants to build a wall? I always say to them, do you have a fence around your house? He’s trying to protect the people who live in America!”
If the Democrats heard this man talking, they’d have called him a white supremacist. Lol!
The MAGA economy is REAL. It’s not slowing down. It’s actually picking up.
The wealth and easier credit have FINALLY made it into the lower socioeconomic levels and I got to witness firsthand the action.
The liberal elites who think they are so much better than us are mainfestly worse:
Never before have so many snobs had so little to be snobbish about. It’s not like the ruling caste that turns up its collective snout at the people who actually make this country work has a CV full of achievements to back up its arrogance. Our elite is anything but. It’s a collection of pedestrian mediocrities who inherited our civilization from the people who actually created it and fought for it, and like every spoiled child who was handed free stuff by his doting mommy and daddy, our elite is resentful and obnoxious.
We’re ruled by a bunch of Veruca Salts.
Snip.
In what way has our garbage elite proven itself capable of doing anything right, much less overseeing our doctors, protecting our newly-disarmed citizenry and controlling the weather? In no way – which is why they hate accountability, and why the elite’s lapdog media is entirely unconcerned with the elite’s constant screw-ups and utterly focused on the invented flaws of those of us who refuse to be serfs of incompetent elitist twerps.
They figure that if maybe if we can be shamed into subservience, they can get on with their civilizational pillage unimpeded by us Normals demanding accountability. Calling us “traitors” didn’t work, so they figure maybe trying to hang slavery around our necks will.
Tawanna Hilliard works in an administrative role for the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, court documents say. According to the US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, over a period of more than two years, Hilliard used her access to information to help her son Tyquan Hilliard, 28, and his gang, the 5-9 Brims set of the Bloods.
If any of them got whacked by the Bloods, she should be tried as an accessory to murder.
Americans don’t trust the media. “78% of voters say that what reporters do with political news is promote their agenda. They think they use incidents as props for their agenda rather than seeking accurately record what happened. Only 14% think that a journalist is actually reporting what happened.”
Just as they are doing with seemingly every obstacle in their way, Hong Kong protesters innovated around the need for a strong leader. They are using communications technology to be both highly organized and leaderless, leaving the authorities unable to take out any key elements that would cause the effort to collapse.
Where a strong leader would make strategic decisions, the protesters are using a Reddit-like forum called LIHKG where ideas can be upvoted, allowing the best ones to rise to the top. Hong Kong’s largest citywide strike in decades, and the city’s only general strike in 50 years, originated from a post on this forum. Translated from Cantonese, the post read, “Skip work, you may lose your job. But if you don’t skip work, you will lose Hong Kong and your home! Freedom is not free, I beg you, let’s recover Hong Kong.” The ideas that are most representative of the desires of the participants end up going forward, giving the movement a greater degree of legitimacy and likely winning more support from the Hong Kong populace.
WeWork gets ready for an IPO, despite never having earned a profit. In fact, the more money they pull in, the greater their losses.
Liberal women: “Respect #MeToo!” “Hey, want to talk to serial harasser Mark Halperin about how to beat Trump?” Also liberal women: “Sure!” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
This is a half-interesting profile of Joe Rogan that’s harmed by the writer’s blinkered SJW-biases. The subtext (sometimes overtext) is “How dare Rogan not condemn non-liberals for wrongthink?” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager the media is nakedly boosting to pimp climate change, is the manufactured dupe of corporate green energy shills. “Someone’s looking for a payday, and sure enough, that someone found exactly the useful fool he wanted for a get-rich-quick scheme to line his own pockets.”
They had invested so much in their fantasy that President Donald Trump was a treasonous agent of Russian boss Vladimir Putin. But when special counsel Robert Mueller’s report came out, and there was no collusion, no crime charged, their fantasy collapsed.
And so, after a brief spasm of despair, the left pivoted to their default position: race.
Race. Race. Race. Race. Race.
With Americans working and with money in their pockets again, with the 2020 election approaching, Democrats are reaching for the race card the way a sick man reaches for the waters of Lourdes. Desperately. Their allies in media followed suit, with Trump called everything from a white supremacist, to a Nazi, and on and on.
“Bodyguard for CNN’s April Ryan charged with assault for forcibly removing journalist from event.” A free press for the overclass, but not the peasants…
False Positives are a hard problem to solve, and requires diligence to keep bad things from happening. This is why you get a second opinion if your doctor tells you that you have a disease that is expensive and painful to treat. Few diagnoses are 100%, and you don’t want to go through that if you’re one of the 15% that didn’t actually have the disease.
But it costs money, time, and effort to get rid of these False Positives. The government employees clearly didn’t care one bit that the guy didn’t remotely fit the description. Protecting the guy’s rights wasn’t a priority for them.
This is a type of malice that has been well documented in literature throughout the ages. Pretty much everything by Franz Kafka covers this, as well as more recent works like Catch-22. The callousness of uncaring governmental employees is legendary.
To those who would say that this isn’t really personal malice on display, the question is how is this functionally different from malice? OK, so the guy will get his day in court next month, but that’s on his dime. The government has neatly shifted the cost of their False Positive to him.
And quite frankly, this is what we see every time new gun laws are proposed. The restrictions may not be very big or very expensive, but they always fall on law abiding gun owners. Every time. People proposing these laws simply don’t care about that. There’s a word that describes someone who wants his fellow citizens to suffer inconvenience, expense, or worse.
Malice.
Italy’s government falls. The Northern League/Five Star coalition government lasted one year and 81 days, which is about par for the course for Italy, which has had some [counts] 65 governments since World War II.
“When The Founders Wrote The First Amendment, They Never Imagined There Would One Day Be Things I’d Disagree With.”
I’m a reasonable, tolerant person. That means when people say things that I disagree with, they are being unreasonable and intolerant. How does it benefit society to have such things said? It does not.
As someone who has carefully thought through every issue, social and political, it’s offensive to hear things I disagree with since I know how right I am, and there is no room for having another view. And that is what the First Amendment has been perverted into: a weapon to offend people—me, for the most part. Thus it’s time to get rid of that outdated amendment and finally crack down on hate speech, or at least speech I hate.
Iran’s official press has recently bragged about its military prowess when downing a US drone worth about $130 million, touting it as a nasty black eye for the world’s military superpower.
But a recent Reuters report said Iran’s oil exports are down to a scant 300,000 barrels per day. In April 2018, before Trump exited the Iran deal, which provided the country with sanctions relief in exchange for its commitment to not build nuclear weapons or their key components, Iran was exporting 2.5 million barrels a day.
At today’s rate per barrel, the Trump-induced decline in exports has probably cost Iran $120 million a day from oil alone — almost the cost of the US’s pricey drone.
For the US, losing a drone is costly and destabilizing [?-LP] but not really a big deal for a country with a $718 billion annual defense budget. In Iran, the currency has crashed, and the country has become gripped by protests and strikes. And it has felt a crackdown on the financial freedom for all of its citizens.
Martin Peretz reflects on the two towering achievements brought about by the Oslo Accords since 1993, namely “jack” and “squat”:
For years even after the failure of Oslo and of the 2000 summit at Camp David, D.C. notables and even some prominent Zionists had photos with Arafat displayed on their credenzas.
That sociology stuck in my mind. It testified to the tenaciousness in certain left-liberal circles of an idealizing impulse—one that altered the judgments of normally lucid people, leading them to make heroes of figures like Arafat who didn’t fit the bill. They justified this impulse with the old progressive belief in rational political improvement—a respectable belief when it’s applied in context, a misleading one when the context is altered to fit the wish. Their willed naiveté struck me, and not just on Oslo, as the place where effective progressivism goes to die.
Snip.
The counterpoint to this accommodation of Iran was the marginalization of Israel—the cutting-down-by-proxy of the country to what Obama saw as its physical and psychological size. True, it wasn’t a financial marginalization—as his defenders have said ad nauseam, Obama allowed Israel to buy more weapons than any other president before him. But by centering his policy on compromising with Iran, the one major Mideast power that had yet to reach some détente with Israel, and allowing Israel’s other enemy Assad to murder unimpeded, Obama shifted the strategic ground under Israel’s feet. Rhetorically, he did even more: He used the president’s bully pulpit to dramatically change the terms on which conversations about Israel would be conducted among Democrats and the world.
You can draw a line from his tepid 2009 justification of Israel to the speech he sent his towering shikying’l John Kerry to give to the United Nations in 2016: a refusal to block a U.N. resolution condemning Israel for its support of right-wing settlements in the West Bank. A lot of people—myself included—oppose some of the outlier settlements, without seeing them as a major cause of the current impasse. But Kerry’s speech made them equal—or greater than equal—problems to the Palestinian leadership’s endemic corruption, its weakness in the face of Hamas and refusal to accept peace offers made by four Israeli prime ministers from 1993 to 2009. (Actually, the Palestinians haven’t made a territorial compromise in 52 years—that is long enough for the Israelis to grow impatient.) Kerry’s speech, itself an instance of sacrificing the reality to the ideal through the principle of making Israeli and Palestinian histories equivalent, shifted the terms of the debate.
That rhetorical shift, coupled with Obama’s highly publicized, ultimately corrosive enmity towards Bibi Netanyahu—a partisan leader with a surer grasp of regional realities than the American president had—helped create the Democrats’ current political condition, which is not just counterproductively idealizing but supportive of the party’s most destructive foreign policy impulses. A party that defines itself by the chances it gives to marginalized groups always has, on its edges, radicals pushing in toward the center who define their politics by the principle of marginalization: the boiled-down Marxist dichotomy of oppressor and oppressed. When the center of the party shows weakness, the radicals naturally move in, and that’s what Obama’s rationalists allowed them to do: By shifting the party from its center and creating a rhetoric of false equivalence, they gave the hard leftists an opportunity they were only too happy to take.
In essence, the EU’s freedom of movement guarantees an absence of barriers for anyone looking for a job within the 28 countries and makes discrimination based on nationality in work or employment illegal. For many of the EU’s new entrants in the East—including Poland, Hungary and Romania—a future where capital and people could move more freely between themselves and France, the UK, or Germany looked like a fast-track to the top-tier of developed nations. But somewhat ironically, it has only accelerated the departure of those who are crucial to getting there.
In the last century, Eastern Europe has suffered the most dramatic population decline in recent history. According to one study, between 2013 and 2016, approximately 230,000 people left Croatia—a country with a population of only four million—for the 11 “core EU countries” of Western Europe. In the United States, this would be the equivalent of a city the size of Chicago leaving every year. This mass exodus of people is not lost on the country’s politicians; last year the Croatian President called the freedom of movement the “biggest drawback” of the EU. “Mobility is good, as long as people come back. But Croatia is now recording strong negative demographic trends,” she said during a visit to Brussels.
Since Latvia joined the EU, it has lost one-fifth of its population. Romania, a country that according to one organisation is due to see the most drastic population decline, has seen over three million leave the country since it joined the EU in 2007. It lost half of its doctors between 2009 and 2015, the vast majority to better-paid employ in the richer hospitals and surgeries of Western Europe, leaving its health service poorly staffed and on the brink of collapse. High mortality (including infant mortality) and low birthrates are only accelerating the decline.
Large-scale migration of healthcare workers from East to West has been an uncomfortable reality for over a decade, and the young needn’t travel long distances to drastically increase their standard of living. One Estonian doctor who graduated from medical school in 2001 was able to quadruple his salary by moving only 200 kilometres to Finland. In 2018, Denmark enjoyed the EU’s highest average gross annual pay at nine times that of the continent’s lowest in Bulgaria. Who can blame those who head for the greener pastures on the other side?
It’s not just highly skilled labor. When I visited London, it seemed that at least half the workers in restaurants and hotels were from eastern Europe.
Dwight found an amazing story of corruption in the Honolulu DS’s office. (One guess as to which party controls Hawaii.) The list of sleazy crimes Katherine Kealoha engaged in is staggering.
Prosecutors alleged that Shih, alongside co-defendant Kiet Ahn Mai of Pasadena, California, conspired to gain access to a sensitive system belonging to an unnamed US firm which manufactured semiconductor chips and Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs).
The victim company’s PC systems were accessed fraudulently after Mai posed as a potential customer, giving Shih the opportunity to obtain custom processors. While the firm in question believed the chips would only be used in the United States, Shih transferred the products to the Chengdu GaStone Technology Company (CGTC), a Chinese firm building an MMIC manufacturing plant.
Last time I checked, finding electrical engineers with experience designing RF circuits for mixed signal ICs is hard. I bet finding those that can design MMICs is even harder…
Whenever I read a court opinion describing a campus sexual-assault proceeding, I routinely find myself shocked at the staggering unfairness and ridiculous bias of campus kangaroo courts. Driven by the need to find more men guilty — and rationalized by a #BelieveWomen ideology — campus administrators have systematically discarded every fundamental notion of due process in American law.
Across the nation, courts on the right and on the left are saying no. They’re blocking biased sexual-assault adjudications, protecting basic fairness, and restoring a degree of sanity to colleges’ procedures. On Friday it was the turn of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals to protect the Fourteenth Amendment, and an all-woman panel, led by Judge Amy Coney Barrett, established a precedent that could be used against woke college administrators nationwide.
The facts of the case are extraordinary. After a female college student accused her ex-boyfriend of groping her in her sleep, Purdue University conducted an investigation and adjudication so amateurish and biased that it’s frankly difficult to imagine that human adults could believe it was fair or adequate. The plaintiff (John Doe) alleged that he was “not provided with any of the evidence on which decisionmakers relied in determining his guilt and punishment,” his ex-girlfriend didn’t even appear before the hearing committee, he had “no opportunity to cross-examine” his accuser, the committee found his accuser credible even though it did not talk to her in person, the accuser did not even write her own statement or provide a sworn allegation, and the committee did not allow the plaintiff “to present any evidence, including witnesses.”
After that farce of a process, Purdue found the student guilty and suspended him for a year. The suspension meant the automatic loss of the student’s Navy ROTC scholarship and expulsion from the ROTC program. Incredibly, the lower court dismissed the student’s claims. He appealed to the Seventh Circuit, and a unanimous panel resurrected his lawsuit.
The conclusion is that campuses are are blaming men as a class and this is a clear violation of Title IX. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
“I have never met antisemitism in Britain…until now.”
I generally come to Britain from my home in Portugal whenever a new work of mine is released to give talks at bookshops, libraries and literary festivals. My publisher’s attempts to interest event organisers in me aren’t always successful, of course. But this year, for the first time, I have been turned down for being Jewish. A little context. Peter Owen Publishers launched my new novel, The Gospel According to Lazarus, in mid-April. An old friend of mine who is a part-time book publicist began trying to set up events for me three months earlier.
In early March, he called and confessed – in a distressed tone I’d never heard before – that he had just been turned down by two cultural organisations that had previously shown enthusiasm for hosting an event with me. “They asked me if you were Jewish, and the moment I said you were, they lost all interest,” he said. “They even stopped replying to my emails and returning my phone messages.”
Snip.
Has the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement played a role in deepening this atmosphere of fear? That’s what my friends in the UK tell me. They also speak bitterly of the unwillingness of the Labour party to take a firm stand against antisemitic discourse. If cultural organisations are afraid of hosting events for Jewish writers, then Britain has taken a big step backwards.
Let’s not get sidetracked with references to Israel. Although it’s perfectly legitimate for those who oppose Netanyahu’s policies to protest against them, I have no connection with Israel. I have neither investments nor family there. And my most well-known books take place in Portugal and Poland. It’s true my new novel is set in the Holy Land, but it takes place 2,000 years before the foundation of the state of Israel.
Of course, that piece is from that notorious bastion of right-wing belief, The Guardian…
* Joe Biden * Immigrant holding cells at the border * The Betsy Ross flag * Using the OK sign
Using the objective criteria the media has outlined for us, we must come to the reluctant conclusion that @BarackObama is, by the evidence presented, a white supremacist.
