Ron DeSantis drives more enemies before him, the Biden Administration keeps doubling down on tranny madness, Batgirl dies for DC’s sins, and the most “Ewww” inducing headline of the year. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Construction projects are undertaken within a legal and regulatory system that presents persistent, costly obstacles, while projects are being overseen by agencies who lack the resources and in some cases even the expertise to manage them.
Sepulveda’s numerous lawsuits and stakeholder conflicts are an example of a phenomenon that can be traced back to the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969. NEPA mandates developers to provide environmental impact statements before they can obtain the permits necessary for construction on huge swathes of infrastructure.
Shortly following the passage of NEPA, California’s then-governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) into law, which required additional environmental impact analysis. Unlike NEPA, it requires adopting all feasible measures to mitigate these impacts. Interest groups wield CEQA and NEPA like weapons. One study found that 85 percent of CEQA lawsuits were filed by groups with no history of environmental advocacy. The NIMBY attitude of these groups has crippled the ability of California to build anything. As California Governor Gavin Newsom succinctly put it, “NIMBYism is destroying the state.”
It is also destroying the U.S.’s ability to build nationally. The economist Eli Dourado reported in The New York Times that “per-mile spending on the Interstate System of Highways tripled between the 1960’s and 1980’s.” This directly correlates with the passage of NEPA. If anything, the problem has gotten worse over time. Projects receiving funding through the $837 billion stimulus plan passed by Congress in the aftermath of the financial crises were subject to over 192,000 NEPA reviews.
The NEPA/CEQA process incentivizes the public agencies to seek what is often termed a “bulletproof” environmental compliance document to head off future legal challenges. This takes time, with the average EIS taking 4.5 years to complete. Some have taken longer than a decade. A cottage industry of consultants is devoted to completing these documents, earning themselves millions in fees.
The NEPA consultants are just one of the numerous types of consultants that benefit from the way we build. Most infrastructure in the U.S. is built through a huge number of state and local agencies: for example, there are 51,000 community water systems alone in the U.S. This decentralized structure makes it much more difficult to develop the depth of expertise needed to manage the complexities posed by megaprojects. Often, the multiple public agencies that are involved with projects also have overlapping authorities, creating bureaucratic delays and slowing decision making.
The expertise problem is compounded by the fact that agencies are often staffed with a workforce of people either just at the beginning of their careers or near the end of them. Those at the beginning tend to leave if they are ambitious, which leaves senior positions in the hands of agency lifers. Because of this dynamic, and the fact that it is not economically feasible to have the wide range of expertise needed in-house, public agencies employ engineering consulting firms. These firms fill a valuable niche. If you are building a complex project—say, a long-span bridge or a desalination plant—you want advice from someone who has designed and built dozens of them. The problem arises when you become too dependent on such advice.
The High-Speed Rail project was undermined by such a failure. At its peak, the agency responsible for the project, the California High-Speed Rail Authority, had fewer than 30 permanent employees managing the $105 billion project. Instead of hiring staff, the Authority relied heavily on outside consultants. These consultants were well paid, with the primary consultant compensation for HSR at $427,000 per engineer, compared with the Authority’s in-house cost of $131,000 per engineer. This structure creates a principal-agent problem where they are incentivized to maximize their billable hours. As a California State Auditor assessment of the project noted, consultants “may not always have the state’s best interest as their primary motivation.”
This lack of in-house institutional expertise leads to bad decision-making. Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor at Oxford University who has written extensively about megaprojects summarized the problem when asked about California’s HSR project: “If you depend on consultants to know what you are doing then you are in real trouble…a good balance is where the owners are not outsourcing all the knowledge. A bad balance guarantees a bad outcome.”
The pitfalls of this lack of balance appeared before large parts of the project began. In 2014, Dragados, the contractor for a 63-mile section of the HSR, proposed radical design changes that they projected could save $300 million. The fact that Dragados’s bid was $500 million lower than its competitors and that it rested upon a design concept that had not been thoroughly vetted should have caused alarm. As a senior engineer who worked on the original environmental compliance document for HSR and reviewed the concepts told the Los Angeles Times, “it is mind-boggling they would entertain some of the things that Dragados proposed.”
Dragados’s approach may have been driven by the fact it didn’t have the experience of its competitors; it had never built a rail project in the U.S. before and needed an edge to be selected. It was a measured risk because it knew there were ways to limit its financial exposure if its design ideas didn’t work. A Los Angeles Times investigation of the project in 2021 found Dragados had issued 273 change orders for additional payment and had completed less than 50 percent of its planned work four years after its section was supposed to be complete. Its design ideas had been almost completely abandoned as unworkable and Dragados’s section of the work was $800 million over budget.
The principal-agent problem arises with union construction labor as well. Skilled union workers, such as electricians and carpenters, make solid hourly wages, but their pay really explodes with overtime. A 2011 study by the Real Estate Board of New York found that some union crane operators made up to $500,000 a year in pay. Union contracts mandate unnecessary positions as well, to the benefit of its members. The same study found 50 workers in unnecessary positions such as relief crane operators on the World Trade Center Project, including 14 unproductive employees making $400,000 a year at the project.
Similar statistics can be found on other projects; an investigation into the costs of the East Side Access rail project in New York, which cost nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track, found that only 700 of the 900 workers being paid on the project were needed. A TBM, which is largely run automatically and typically staffed with under 10 people, ostensibly had 25 or 26 people working on it. Because you can’t drill without a TBM, and you can’t build a high-rise without a crane operator, these union workers have inordinate power.
A common retort to the claim that union labor drives up costs is that other countries, especially in Europe, have both high union participation and lower project costs. But it is widely recognized in the industry that unions increase project labor costs by 20 to 25 percent on average in the U.S.
The fundamental problem isn’t unions per se, but rather the way that unions operate within parts of the U.S. system. The Netherlands has strong unions, but the Port of Rotterdam has been automated to an extent that has proven impossible in the U.S. due to union resistance. As the president of the International Longshoremen’s Association, Harold Dagget, recently put it, his union will “fight tooth and nail” against further automation in the U.S. Any attempt at real construction innovation runs into similar barriers at every level of the system. There are too many layers of permission needed to innovate, including groups whose interests run counter to innovation.
Innovation in physical work ultimately means substituting or complementing labor through technology to improve productivity. If your pay depends on overtime, you want inefficiency. The average dockworker at the Port of Los Angeles makes over $100,000 a year, largely due to overtime. The majority of foremen and managers earn more than $200,000, and the mariners who guide ships in and out of the port average nearly $450,000.
The result is that innovation is inhibited by both labor resistance and a decentralized government bureaucracy that has neither the incentives nor the capability of driving real change. Perhaps it should not be shocking that U.S. construction productivity has fallen by half since the 1960s according to research conducted by the consulting firm McKinsey.
In San Francisco, Soros-funded DA Chesa Boudin has seen a flood of departures from his office due to his criminal justice reform policies.
Boudin campaigned on a platform to end mass incarceration, eliminate cash bail, and vowed to create a panel to review sentencing and potential wrongful convictions. Following his election in November 2019, Boudin announced he would deemphasize the prosecution of drug cases, so-called quality-of-life cases, and property offenses.
Under his watch, vehicle break-ins increased 100-750% in parts of the city between 2020 and 2021, with the number of reported vehicle thefts reaching 1,891 in May 2021—more than double the 923 reported in May 2020.
San Francisco also recorded one of the largest increases in burglaries among major cities last year, with a jump of 47 percent—a trend that has continued this year. Fatal and nonfatal shootings in the first six months of this year were up more than 100 percent from the year-earlier period, increasing to 119 from 58, the city’s police chief said at a July press conference.
More than 700 people died of drug overdoses in 2021 in the city, a record that is likely to be surpassed this year, according to the chief medical examiner.
Rudy Giuliani – the former Mayor of New York City whose claim to fame was a massive reduction in crime (and who’s traded barbs with Soros in the past), isn’t letting the billionaire off the hook.
“If there is one single person responsible for the record increases in murder and violence in America’s cities it’s George Soros,” Giuliani said in a Monday tweet.
“Major contributor to BLM, Antifa, Democrat Party, Biden, Harris and 40 or so pro Criminal DAs. The blood is on his hands,” he added.
Assistant State’s Attorney James Murphy described an understaffed office in turmoil in his email to colleagues, saying, “I cannot continue to work for an Administration I no longer respect.”
“I would love to continue to fight for the victims of crime and to continue to stand with each of you, especially in the face of the overwhelming crime that is crippling our communities,” Murphy wrote. “However, I can no longer work for this Administration. I have zero confidence in their leadership.”
Murphy, who could not be reached directly for comment, zeroed in on many of the issues that have made Foxx a target of opponents who argue she’s gone easy on some accused of violent crimes, as carjackings and gun violence have risen in the Chicago area.
Murphy wrote that he first started thinking about leaving the office early in 2021 with Foxx’s involvement in the passage of the SAFE-T Act, a wide-ranging law that aims to reform the state’s approach to criminal justice, including by narrowing the definition of who can be charged with first-degree murder.
DeSantis has suspended State Attorney Andrew Warren for ‘picking and choosing which laws to enforce based on his personal agenda,’ and has appointed Susan Lopez as his replacement during the suspension.
Warren, who had served the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit, has most recently refused to follow state policy criminalizing abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade – and repeatedly refused to enforce laws cracking down on child sex-change surgeries, according to DeSantis.
The liberal state attorney also declined to prosecute 67 protesters arrested in George Floyd demonstrations, and said in 2017 that he would only pursue the death penalty “in the very worst cases,” and not where “mental illness played a role.”
“We are suspending Soros-backed 13th circuit state attorney Andrew Warren for neglecting his duties as he pledges not to uphold the laws of the state,” DeSantis’ office said in a statement, per Fox News.
Update: DeSantis sent state police to physically remove Warren from his office, “with access only to retrieve his personal belongings, and (ii) to ensure that no files, papers, documents, notes, records, computers, or removable storage media are removed from the Office of the State Attorney…”
PayPal has reportedly unfrozen Moms for Liberty’s account funds after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his state would crack down on woke banking.
Payment platform PayPal allowed grassroots, anti-woke education group Moms for Liberty to access its funds after DeSantis’s new initiative against woke banking, Florida’s Voice reported. Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich reportedly told Florida’s Voice that her organization had been using PayPal for more than a year before the platform censored the group.
Descovich reportedly said that many Moms for Liberty donors give monthly and automatically through PayPal. The payment processor not only stopped these donor payments but froze $4,500 belonging to Moms for Liberty, and prohibited any transfer of the money out of the account, according to Florida’s Voice. PayPal subsequently reversed its block by unfreezing the funds.
PayPal notified Descovich that Moms for Liberty’s accounts were initially frozen during DeSantis’s July 15 speech at the Moms for Liberty National Summit, according to Florida’s Voice. The funds were unfrozen after DeSantis announced his initiative against woke banking.
The world is facing serious food and energy shortages as an outgrowth of the war in Ukraine and supply-chain shortages. Farmers are working to solve these problems, but we need help from the federal government if we are going to have any chance of success.
That’s why national corn grower leaders recently called on the Biden administration to address regulatory overreach.
That call comes after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently revised its atrazine registration, a move that could restrict access to a critical crop protection tool that has been well tested and shown to be safe for use. Farmers fear that new requirements will impose arduous new restrictions and mitigation measures on the herbicide, limiting how much of the product they use.
The atrazine decision comes on the heels of a development involving the herbicide glyphosate. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a case decided by a lower court from California, leaving in place a ruling that supports the claim that glyphosate use causes cancer – even as the EPA has repeatedly affirmed that the widely sold and well-studied herbicide is not carcinogenic.
The Supreme Court’s decision came after the solicitor general in the Biden administration submitted an amicus brief advising the court against hearing the case.
As a result, the door is now open for states to create a patchwork of regulations governing herbicide use, which will increase costs as manufacturers must now jump through hoops in every state, on top of making compliance difficult for the users of these products.
Farmers in Iowa and across the country have also experienced major fertilizer price hikes and shortages over the last year, thanks in part to steps taken by the U.S. International Trade Commission to impose tariffs on fertilizers. Thankfully, ITC recently voted against adding tariffs on nitrogen fertilizers. But tariffs on phosphorous fertilizers from Morocco remain in place, driving up input prices for growers.
Speaking of foolish regulations that can contribute to famine, new “debarbonization” shipping rules could do just that.
A new report found that more than 75% of ships will not meet the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) new Environmental social and corporate governance (ESG) index aimed at decarbonizing the industry. This means that many ship owners will be forced to slow ships down to reduce emissions but doing so could deepen the global food and energy crisis by reducing available ship capacity.
“IMO decarbonization targets will cause ships to slow down delaying food shipments and people will starve,” a global security analyst told gCaptain. “How many people will die as a result of the IMO’s ESG efforts is unknown at this time. I don’t think most shipowners even understand the severity of the EEXI threat but it could be millions of lives.”
“Ships have to attain EEXI approval once in a lifetime, by the first periodical survey in 2023 at the latest.” The certification is currently voluntary, but banks and insurers may force ships to comply or be cut off. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Russo-Ukrainian War update: “Ukraine takes out Russian ammunition railway connecting Kherson to Crimea.” I keep seeing rumors of a big Ukranian counteroffensive to retake Kherson, but it seems like it’s slow to make much headway.
In 2016, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services issued a rule that would have forced doctors across the country to assist in transitioning patients out of their biological sex, regardless of a provider’s medical opinion or conscience objections.
“A provider specializing in gynecological services that previously declined to provide a medically necessary hysterectomy for a transgender man,” for example, “would have to revise its policy to provide the procedure for transgender individuals in the same manner it provides the procedure for other individuals.”
The rule left no room for religious physicians or institutions to breathe, instead menacing them with draconian fines, were they not to toe the controversial new line.
In stepped the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which swiftly secured a preliminary injunction in federal court that stopped the rule from going into effect, on the grounds that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and likely violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It was a decision later confirmed in 2019, and made permanent by a 2021 ruling.
On August 4, however, Becket attorney Luke Goodrich, who has been working on the case since the Obama-era rule was first issued, will march back into the courtroom, having been dragged back in by the Biden administration and Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra.
“They say that our lawsuit was only about the 2016 rule. . . . They say, ‘well, all you were challenging was the 2016 rule, and you won that, but now we’re using a different rule or a different rationale for imposing the same requirement on you, and so you have to file a new lawsuit,’” explained Goodrich.
Under the Biden administration’s theory, the Affordable Care Act provides the administration with “all the authority” it needs “to punish groups that don’t perform gender transitions and abortions,” Goodrich told National Review. The 2016 rule also included language that Becket alleges would force religious institutions to perform abortions.
Remember how Republicans said ObamaCare would endanger religious liberty and the MSM dismissed their concerns? Just like “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”
According to Goodrich, “the merits are completely resolved and haven’t been appealed; the fight on appeal is about the scope of relief.” He described an effort to work around a losing legal argument by burdening religious objectors and opening up new fronts of battle.
“They want religious organizations to have to play Whac-A-Mole every time the government violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and they want a ruling that will leave them free to keep violating religious liberty every time they shuffle the same legal requirement from one volume of the Federal Register to another,” he said.
That strategy is observable in the proposal of yet another, even broader rule — modeled after the 2016 one — issued by Becerra, who has made his political brand on waging one ruthless culture war after another.
As attorney general of California, Becerra sought to punish independent journalists who exposed Planned Parenthood’s sale of fetal remains harvested during abortions. The Los Angeles Times editorial board described his decision to charge those involved with felonies “disturbing,” and the progressive Mother Jones called it “chilling.”
He also happily enforced a plainly unconstitutional California statute requiring pro-life crisis pregnancy centers to provide pro-abortion materials to patrons, and, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, voted against legislation that would allow providers not to perform abortions without fear of government reprisal.
Has Tranny Madness peaked in the UK? There, the Rugby Football Union and Rugby Football League just banned men from playing women’s rugby. In other news, there’s evidently women’s rugby.
“What’s the worst performing stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average so far this year? Disney.”
The Mickey Mouse company, headquartered in Burbank, has lost about 35% of its value this year versus a nearly 15% loss for the broader index. As a result, tens of millions of Americans who hold Disney stock either directly or indirectly as part of passive index funds have seen their finances take a hit at the worst possible time as inflation spirals out of control.
Disney’s poor financial performance is a product of its own making. In recent months, the company has aggressively waded into controversial cultural issues such as gender identity, making it clear it is putting politics over its shareholders and customers. Disney is a prime example of the threat posed to shareholders and the broader economy of “woke” capitalism. Its story should serve as a cautionary tale for other companies looking to follow in its footsteps.
Disney has all but admitted it’s leveraging its prized position as a top children’s content creator to push a divisive cultural agenda. In March, Disney’s president of content told employees the company plans to have at least 50% of its regular characters come from “underrepresented groups.” Another top producer boasted about Disney’s “not-at-all-secret gay agenda,” including “adding queerness” to children’s programming. Yet another senior executive promised that Disney would implement a “tracker” to ensure programs contain enough “canonical trans characters.”
We’re getting a look at what this woke agenda looks like in practice. An upcoming episode of Disney’s new children’s show “Baymax!” features a transgender man buying menstrual pads. “I always get the ones with wings,” says the “man” wearing a shirt with the transgender flag. Disney is also abolishing the words “boys” and “girls” at its theme parks.
“BLM Activist Shaun King Used Donor Funds To Buy $40k Thoroughbred Show Dog.” That’s infuriating. Not that premagrifter Talcum X siphoned BLM money into his own pockets. That part’s hilarious and predictable. No, that he spent forty grand on a dog when they are so many shelter dogs who need a home.
A pretty good list of the 95 Best Action Movies Ever. Has all the stuff you would expect to be on there (Die Hard, Hard-Boiled, The French Connection, etc.), plus a good bit of Jackie Chan, Sorcerer, Safety Last, Hot Fuzz, and even Andy Sedaris’ hilarious low-budget breastsplotation “classic” Hard Ticket To Hawaii.
And, oh yeah, the Critical Drinker is there. “Warner Brothers may be the first domino to fall, but something tells me they won’t be the last. And when other companies realize that you can safely drop THE MESSAGE and the people peddling it…well, the next year or two could turn out to be very interesting.”
The Biden Recession picks up downhill speed, liberals are spending $160 million to seize control of elections, Biden wants to starve your children until you accept transgenderism, and another Soros-backed DA gets the heave-ho from voters. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
GDP shrunk by .9% in Q2, making the Biden recession official, no matter how much Biden Administration officials and their Democratic Media Complex toadies attempt to spin it otherwise.
Two big money liberal operations, ready to spend $80 million each, are trying to determine who controls elections and how in the years ahead.
“The overall objective of the political left is to change the way you conduct overall elections,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, which advocates clean elections, told The Daily Signal.
One of the two liberal groups, Run for Something, is a political action committee founded by a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer. In the spring, Run for Something established its Clerk Work project with the goal of electing clerks, election supervisors, registrars, recorders, and other local officials charged with running elections.
The PAC says it will promote thousands of election administrators in the years ahead. But for 2022, it reports endorsing 11 candidates competing in races in California, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
Local election clerks generally are empowered to interpret and enforce state election regulations. They often have discretion on matters such as whether to count absentee ballots that come in after Election Day, how strictly to enforce voter ID or signature-matching requirements, and how closely poll watchers may monitor the ballot counting on Election Day.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, county-level election officials are elected in 22 states. In 10 states, elected officials appoint members to a local board of elections. Another 18 states divide election administration duties between two or more offices.
In any case, donating to specific candidates to oversee elections could directly or indirectly affect who holds these positions.
Some practices of local election administrators also could be guided by another $80 million effort by the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a coalition of mostly left-leaning organizations financed in part by Big Tech executives to train local officials in running elections.
Snead and other critics say they see parallels between Run for Something and efforts to elect liberal prosecutors financed by liberal hedge fund manager George Soros. They also see strong similarities between the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s election administration grants in the 2020 election cycle.
“What we shouldn’t lose track of is they are playing the long game,” Snead said. “They are going to look for every possible way to impact elections, and they can make substantial changes in the long run through this kind of program that they wouldn’t have been able to make in 2020.”
When Soros-backed socialist son of convicted terrorists Chesa Boudin was recalled as San Francisco DA, the writing was on the wall. “Decarceration” is a disaster for everyone . . . except criminals.
Now another Soros-backed “decarceration” state’s attorney has lost her reelection bid. It’s not clear if the multiple crimes for which Marilyn Mosby has been charged are the impetus for Baltimore’s voters deciding it’s time to move on or if it’s the shocking crime rates in the city as a result of her radical anti-law and order agenda. Maybe both.
Mosby rose to national attention in the wake of the Freddie Gray riots and for her hyper-politicized botching of the prosecution in those cases.
Fox News reports:
Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby lost her reelection bid to defense attorney Ivan Bates in the Democratic primary after she was indicted by a grand jury on federal charges alleging that she used coronavirus hardship as a reason to take money out of her city retirement account.
The Associated Press called the race in favor of Ivan Bates, a defense attorney, on Friday night. Bates is a former prosecutor in Baltimore who served from 1996 to 2002 before becoming a defense attorney.
Mosby, a Democrat, directed her office to stop prosecuting offenses such as drug possession, prostitution, urinating in public, and more during the coronavirus pandemic in an attempt to stop the virus from spreading in jails and prisons.
In May, the Biden administration announced that any school that participates in the federal school lunch program (which is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service) must allow students to use bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers and play on the sports teams aligning with their gender identity if they want access to funds for the program — effectively holding money meant for ensuring student nutrition in exchange for compliance on radical leftist gender ideology.
Now, twenty-two Republican attorneys general are fighting back by suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture over that new guidance.
“We all know the Biden administration is dead-set on imposing an extreme left-wing agenda on Americans nationwide,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said. “But they’ve reached a new level of shamelessness with this ploy of holding up food assistance for low-income kids unless schools do the Left’s bidding.”
According to the Washington Times, nearly 30 million students take advantage of the National School Lunch Program at about 100,000 public and non-profit private schools and residential childcare institutions. The Biden administration policy was seen as a direct assault on the 18 states with existing laws barring male athletes from participating in female sports.
The lawsuit argues that the Biden administration (again) violated the Administrative Procedures Act by issuing regulations without going through the rulemaking process and that Bostock v. Clayton, the 2020 Supreme Court’s 2020 decision on employment discrimination, doesn’t apply to Title IX as the Biden administration claimed when they announced the guidance.
“This case is, yet again, about a federal agency trying to change law, which is Congress’ exclusive prerogative,” Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III said. “The USDA simply does not have that authority. We have successfully challenged the Biden Administration’s other attempts to rewrite law and we will challenge this as well.”
Paying people not to work makes them worse off, Democrats sleepwalk toward disaster, another would-be assassin of a Republican congressman walks away without bail, more Democratic judicial officials who refuse to obey the law, and a disturbing number of pedophiles in our school systems. Welcome to a special Saturday LinkSwarm!
The “experts” didn’t expect it to turn out this way. An experiment conducted by Harvard University and University of Exeter social scientists found no-strings-attached handouts harmed low-income recipients rather than help them.
Funded by an anonymous nonprofit, the study centered on an experiment in which 2,073 low-income people were randomly selected to receive a single, unconditional cash transfer of either $500 or $2,000. Another 3,170 low-income study subjects received no money from the study.
The experiment was conducted from July 2020 to May 2021. On average, the subjects were earning roughly $950 a month while receiving another $530 in food stamps and other government benefits. A little over half were unemployed and 80% had children.
Over a 15-week period, participants were periodically surveyed about their financial, physical and mental health. Across a wide range of financial and non-financial attributes, researchers found no positive effects on those who received free money — but plenty of negative ones.
For a few weeks, people who received the extra money spent more than the control group — $182 a week for the people who received $500, and $574 a week for the ones given $2,000.
The additional spending didn’t bolster their financial health. The handout recipients reported the same rate of overdraft fees, late-payment charges and cash advances as did those who didn’t receive the extra money. And it was all downhill from there. The handout recipients reported:
Less earned income
Less job satisfaction
Lower work performance
More financial stress
Less liquidity
Worse sleep
Worse physical health
More anxiety
More loneliness
The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley writes:
“It’s no surprise that people who received a large percentage of their monthly income for doing nothing were less motivated to work and less satisfied with their work.
Earning a paycheck can give workers a sense of personal agency that encourages them to make better financial and health decisions. Receiving a handout may do the opposite.”
The editors of The Economist beg the Democratic Party’s leaders to “wake up” to the fact that they’re about to get demolished in the upcoming midterms. Politico reports that, “The gubernatorial race in Pennsylvania has begun to look more competitive than either party expected.” The Economist blames the loud voices of the hard-left fringe, and warns that Democrats must “moderate, or die.” But this is just about the least likely moment for centrist Democrats to launch a new fight against the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez types, and Democrats won’t have that fight until a midterm thrashing forces them to — and even then, Democrats may well choose to learn the wrong, but more comforting lessons, from a sweeping defeat.
The editors of The Economist, sensing an impending midterm blowout and the ensuing empowerment of a Trump-friendly GOP, beg the Democratic Party’s leaders to distance themselves from their fringe elements:
Fringe and sometimes dotty ideas have crept into Democratic rhetoric, peaking in the feverish summer of 2020 with a movement to “defund the police”, abolish immigration enforcement, shun capitalism, relabel women as birthing people and inject “anti-racism” into the classroom.
Snip.
First, out of all the possible times for the leaders of the party and its centrist members to embrace a fight with their hard-left grassroots, four months before Election Day is perhaps the worst time. Right now, Democrats desperately need progressives — the Bernie Bros, the Squad fans, and your crazy Aunt Edna with the Ruth Bader Ginsburg prayer candles — to turn out in November; they’re disappointed enough with Joe Biden already. The future of Senators Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and Mark Kelly of Arizona depends upon frustrated and impatient progressives in those states.
Second, rebuking the fringe Left is going to be difficult, and few people embrace difficult change until they hit bottom. Nobody likes admitting that they got something wrong, and nobody in politics wants to admit that their approach didn’t work — until after they’ve paid a high price at the ballot box.
The disappointing results of 2020 were clearly not enough. Shortly after the election, Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia seethed about her party’s left wing: “Tuesday was a failure, it was not a success. . . . If we don’t mean defund the police, we shouldn’t say that. . . . And we need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. Because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter, and we lost good members because of that. If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get f***ing torn apart in 2022.”
Do the Democrats seem more centrist and results-focused now than they did in 2020?
Democrats can’t rebuke their social justice warrior radicals because the shock-troops of that “fringe” has taken control of vast swathes of the party machinery. The SJW faction is willing to endure electoral disaster as along as it lets them sieze full control of the party machinery and thus all the spigots party patronage.
How bad is it? Ruy Teixeira, whose “emerging Democratic majority” thesis is is so central to Democratic administrations refusing to enforce border controls, is leaving the Center for American Progress because it’s gotten too radical.
Ruy Teixeira, a prominent scholar at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), is leaving his job for a conservative organization because of liberals’ obsession with race, gender and other identity issues, according to Politico.
The obsession with identity politics at CAP made it difficult for him to do work involving class and economics, he told the outlet, so he’s leaving for the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. Left-leaning think tanks have given in to demands of junior staffers and made it difficult for scholars to discuss crime, immigration and other issues beyond a narrow set of default assumptions, according to Teixeira.
The culture within left-leaning organizations “sends me running screaming from the left,” Teixeira told Politico. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land … the fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out.”
Attack a Republican congressman? Enjoy your Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. “A 43-year-old man [David G. Jakubonis] accused of attacking Representative Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.) with a sharp object at a campaign stop in upstate New York on Thursday evening was charged with a felony and released from custody just hours after his arrest, police said…Jakubonis was charged with attempted assault in the second degree and was released on his own recognizance.”
The groomer plague is not your imagination. “At least 181 K-12 teachers, principals, and staff have been arrested for child sex crimes in the United States so far this year.”
“Self-Proclaimed Socialist Judge in Harris County Facing Removal by Judicial Conduct Commission. Judge Franklin Bynum allegedly ordered the sheriff not to collect DNA samples required by law and repeatedly dismissed domestic and family violence cases for no probable cause.”
Cost of living index for cities worldwide. Weirdly, Austin is still pretty affordable in relation to purchasing power compared to most of the world. Also weirdly, New York City is the index city…
Gascón’s prosecutors sued him so they could “charge repeat offenders to the fullest extent of the law.” The DA wants to appeal in front of the California Supreme Court:
In June, the Second Appellate District Court upheld portions of a lower court’s injunction that said Gascón cannot refuse to charge three-strike cases, which can dramatically increase prison sentences for some of the most serious repeat offenders.
Gascón is hoping to have the court’s order overturned, arguing that it is “draconian,” creates “a dangerous precedent” and amounts to “taking the charging decision out of a prosecutor’s hands.”
“The district attorney overstates his authority,” the Second Appellate District ruling reads. “He is an elected official who must comply with the law, not a sovereign with absolute, unreviewable discretion.”
Don’t the peasants know that laws are for the little people?
Good. “San Francisco’s New DA Goes On Firing Spree After Voters Recall Soros-Backed Predecessor…”The new district attorney in San Francisco fired at least 15 employees from the prosecutor’s office after her left-wing predecessor Chesa Boudin was recalled last month.
“Charlene Carter, a flight attendant who had worked at Southwest Airlines for 20 years but was fired in 2017 because she had publicly opposed the use of her union dues to fund pro-abortion protests, has now won a $5.1 million lawsuit against both Southwest and her union.” Good. Coerced speech violates the First Amendment. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Beto O’Rourke gets a $1 million donation from George Soros. Well, at least that’s $1 million that won’t go toward burning down small businesses and defunding the police. Also, remember how Democrats are always saying they want to get money out of politics? They never mean it.
Friday’s LinkSwarm mentioned the plight of New York City bodega clerk, who was viciously attacked by the convicted-felon boyfriend of a patron whose credit card had been refused. Defending himself from the attack, Alba stabbed his attacker to death, and was charged with murder.
GoFundMe has deleted the legal defense fund page for the hard-working Manhattan bodega worker holed up at Rikers Island on a whopping $250,000 bond after he fatally stabbed a violent ex-con he was trying to fend off.
Jose Alba, 51, is currently languishing behind bars at the notorious jail despite surveillance video capturing the alleged victim, Austin Simon, 35, storming behind the counter of the bodega to attack him Friday night.
Alba’s family insist he was acting in self-defense when he grabbed a knife to fight off Simon inside the Hamilton Heights Grocery.
Relatives immediately launched a GoFundMe page to help raise funds to cover Alba’s sky-high bail and legal fees after he was hit with a second-degree murder charge — but the page was mysteriously removed Wednesday night.
“Our terms of service prohibit fundraising for the legal defense of a violent crime. At this time, the fundraiser has been removed and all donors have been refunded,” GoFundMe said in a statement Thursday.
The page had already raised $20,000 for Alba when it was suddenly removed, the Daily Mail reported.
Under GoFundMe’s terms of services, the platform can’t be used for the legal defense of “alleged crime associated with hate, violence, harassment, bullying, discrimination, terrorism.”
Controversial Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has faced backlash over Alba’s case after his office brought the charges — and then pushed for $500,000 bail for the father-of-three at his arraignment Saturday.
This is just the latest example of a Soros-backed Democrat DA filing charges against law-abiding citizens daring to defend themselves from violent attacks by felons. (See also: Kyle Rittenhouse.)
Former New York City resident Louis Rossmann has a nice video rant on the subject.
“If you are a criminal, Alvin Bragg has your back!”
You have felonies that have been, in many cases, decreased to petty misdemeanors. So if you commit a felony, it’ll get decreased to a petty misdemeanor. However if you are one of the people that allow society to function, one of the people that puts in work every day, a law-abiding citizen that simply wants to go home without getting killed by somebody half his age, who has a criminal record, who is beating you up, we throw the book at you this is sickening and tiring and it has to stop!
“They will always simp for the criminal.”
He’s right about everything, but the name “George Soros” never appears anywhere in his rant. Pretty much every-time you see this sort of coddling of criminals and throwing the book at the law-abiding, a George Soros-backed DA is the one making the prosecution decisions.
Soros-backed DAs seem intent on destroying the social fabric of America, and of prosecuting the law-abiding Americans as though the right to self-defense didn’t exist. It goes hand-in-hand with the Democratic Party’s obsession with disarming law-abiding Americans.
Two landmark Supreme Court cases drop, another woke social justice child-rapist exposed, Keith Olbermann channels John C. Calhoun, and the secret plans to nuke Yorkshire. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Just like the old gypsy woman said leakers indicated, the Supreme Court has overturned Roe vs. Wade.
The Supreme Court on Friday overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that legalized abortion, allowing a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks to take effect.
“The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the 6-3 majority.
Justice Alito was joined by Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority. Justice Roberts wrote in a concurring opinion with the majority that he would have taken a “more measured course” stopping short of overturning Roe altogether, but agreed that the Mississippi abortion ban should stand.
The Court’s liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented….
The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization means each state will now be able to determine its own regulations on abortion, including whether and when to prohibit abortion.
In New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court affirmed that gun rights are due the same protection as all other constitutional rights.
To which I can only reply “Duh. What took them so long?”
Today’s Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen is not only the most important Second Amendment ruling since D.C. v. Heller, it is potentially the most important Second Amendment ruling in American history.
Not sure about that, as Heller firmly established the gun ownership was an individual right unconnected to militia service. That laid the conceptual groundwork for today’s ruling.
For all the brouhaha, the question at hand in Bruen was rather straightforward: Can the state of New York require that applicants for gun-carry permits “demonstrate a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community,” or is New York obliged by the Constitution to offer a “shall issue” regime of the sort that 43 of the other 49 states have adopted? By a 6–3 vote, the justices decided that the latter approach is required. In the United States, Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion concluded, “authorities must issue concealed-carry licenses whenever applicants satisfy certain threshold requirements, without granting licensing officials discretion to deny licenses based on a perceived lack of need or suitability.” Moreover, while there is nothing illegal about America’s existing state-level permitting systems, those systems may not be mere smokescreens for outright prohibition, unequal protection, or unacceptable delay. “We do not rule out,” Thomas added in a footnote, any “constitutional challenges to shall-issue regimes where, for example, lengthy wait times in processing license applications or exorbitant fees deny ordinary citizens their right to public carry.”
As Justice Alito was keen to note, this “holding decides nothing about who may lawfully possess a firearm or the requirements that must be met to buy a gun. Nor does it decide anything about the kinds of weapons that people may possess.” It concludes solely that:
The exercise of other constitutional rights does not require individuals to demonstrate to government officers some special need. The Second Amendment right to carry arms in public for self-defense is no different. New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms in public.
Bottom line: New York is allowed to exclude carry-permit applications on a categorical basis (e.g., the applicant has a felony conviction), but not on a subjective one (e.g., the applicant doesn’t “need” a gun in the view of the determining officer).
To get there, the majority first determined that “nothing in the Second Amendment’s text draws a home/public distinction with respect to the right to keep and bear arms.” Indeed, “to confine the right to ‘bear’ arms to the home,” the majority observed, “would nullify half of the Second Amendment’s operative protections.” This, Thomas explained, would not do, because “the constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.’”
Liberals are taking the gun and abortion rulings well. Ha, just kidding! Keith Olbermann came out for nullification. Because nothing says “progressive liberalism” like adopting the policies of South Carolina from 1832.
Ukraine has banned the main opposition party. Not a great look. Though you know FDR would have tried that with Republicans if he thought they posed more of a threat to his agenda and the Supreme Court would let him get away with it…
Israel is headed for yet another election. “After almost one year of taking power, Israel’s ruling coalition has agreed to dissolve the parliament and hold new elections. ‘Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s office announced Monday that his weakened coalition will be disbanded and the country will head to new elections.'” (“How many elections is that now, five?” “Shut up! Don’t tell Mere!”)
International Swimming Federation bans men from competing. It’s astonishing that headline even needs to be written…
Powers that be in Tennessee are threatening YouTuber Whistlin Diesel with a year in prison for…splashing with a jet ski. Sounds like a clear abuse of power to me…
A review of one of the last production Trebants, the crappy, under-powered, plastic communist car East Germans had to wait years to buy. Let this be another reminder that commies aren’t cool and the consumer goods produced by commie companies that don’t have to deal with market competition are crap.
“In my day, we had to work twenty-five hours a day, eight days a week, and they set off a nuclear explosion underneath us! You tell that to kids these days and they don’t believe you!”
“After ‘Lightyear’ Bombs, Disney Quietly Cancels Their Upcoming Movie ‘Brokeback Woody.
Fed-up San Francisco voters ousted their progressive district attorney on Tuesday in a recall election that rejected his soft-on-crime policies following surges in shameless shoplifting, car break-ins and rampant, open-air drug dealing.
The recall effort against Chesa Boudin, a former public defender and the son of convicted Weather Underground terrorists, was supported by 61% of voters in early returns, according to NBC.
Tuesday’s recall election, Proposition H on the ballot, could prove a bellwether of voter sentiment across the US, including in New York City, where Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has faced widespread criticism since enacting a slew of progressive policies after taking office in January.
“Around the country, we have seen the rise of the so-called progressive DAs,” Richie Greenberg, a former Republican mayoral candidate and spokesman for the recall effort, told The Post before Tuesday’s vote.
“We here in San Francisco have lived it and we don’t want to see the great city of New York fall in the way that San Francisco has.”
Snip.
Viral videos have revealed shoplifters running rampant during smash-and-grab thefts at high-end stores, with city police Lt. Tracy McCray lamenting to Fox News last year that “we can have a greatest hits compilation of people just walking in and cleaning out the store shelves.”
Offenses against Asian-Americans also proliferated amid the pandemic, with lifelong resident Henry Wong, 74, who worked for the late comedian Robing Williams saying that people “spit on me on elevators, on the streets” and calling Boudin “the worst district attorney the city has ever had.”
“These are crimes,” Wong told the Washington Post.
“And he doesn’t care. It’s just so easy to break the law.”
The latest official police statistics show that overall crime in the city is up nearly 8 percent this year, with a 20 percent surge in larcenies, as well as spikes in homicides, rapes and assaults.
Boudin was just one of 75 George Soros-backed prosecutors elected around the country. (Here’s a list to get started on.) Here’s a partial list of Soros fronts:
Open Society Foundation
The Tides Center
The Tides Foundation
Tides Advocacy
Alliance for Safety and Justice
The Brennan Center for Justice (“Brennan also employs the public relations firm Berlin Rosen, which also happens to be the largest expenditure item for nearly all Soros DA campaign spending.”)
Color of Change
Equal Justice Initiative
Fair and Just Prosecution
Justice and Public Safety PAC (and various subsidiary state organizations)
NEO Philanthropy Fund
New Virginia Majority
The New Venture Fund
The Sixteen Thirty Fund
Texas Organizing Project
Vera Institute for Justice
I’m betting there are others.
Bouncing Boudin is an excellent start, but all Soros prosecutors need to be recalled, defeated, or indicted. Crime cannot improve as long as racist Soros-backed prosecutors refuse to indict, try or convict criminals due to the color of their skin.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grinds on (but Ukraine launches a successful counterattack), Joe Biden said Democrats are responsible for inflation and ignoring the needs of the middle class, Rand Paul gets pissed, ESG is officially a great big fraud, more shenanigans from Soros-backed DAs, and debunking a Victorian vibrator myth.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is 100 days old. While Russia continues to grin forward on some fronts in Donetsk, Ukrainian forces seem to have taken back part of Severodonetsk while also making some gains in the south. Caveat for that link in that this Ukrainian guy’s shtick is tracking day-to-day map movements without a lot of tactical depth. So: Grains of salt may be in order. (Update: More successful Ukrainian counterattacks near Severodonetsk at Metolkine. Same guy, same caveats…)
In a speech on the Senate floor Friday, Rand Paul blasted efforts by Democrats to paint up all law enforcement officers and those in the military as dangerous radical racists.
Paul was addressing The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, blocked by Republicans in the Senate, that demands the FBI and Department of Homeland Security change the way they investigate and monitor domestic terrorism suspects.
The official summary of the bill notes that an “interagency task force” would be established in order to probe into “white supremacist and neo-Nazi infiltration of the uniformed services and federal law enforcement agencies.”
“This bill should be called by a more accurate name: the Democrat plan to brand our police and soldiers as white supremacists and neo-Nazis,” Paul proclaimed.
He continued, “How insulting,” adding “We knew that Democrats despise and want to defund the police, but now, they believe that the police, federal law enforcement, and the U.S. military are full of white supremacists and neo-Nazis?”
Referring to the now mothballed ‘Disinformation Governance Board’, Paul also noted “Those of us who still care about the Bill of Rights just got done taking down the DHS ‘Ministry of Truth,’ and a day later, Democrats want to create the DHS Thought Police. You couldn’t make it up if you tried. But they don’t stop there.”
“The bill creates two other Thought Police offices at the Department of Justice and at the FBI, which seems like a self-defeating choice, since elsewhere in the bill, we are told that federal law enforcement is shot through with white supremacists and neo-Nazis,” Paul urged.
The Senator also noted that “None of the bill makes sense. It doesn’t make sense because it was a bill that was never intended to become law. It’s a dumb, Washington talking points memo masquerading as legislation.”
“But congressional Democrats have gotten so radical, so extreme, and so out-of-touch with the American people that when they read it, they see something worthwhile,” he added.
Paul concluded that “This bill will fail today because the Democrats’ message — hate the police, defund the police, slander the military and police as racists and white supremacists — has been roundly rejected by the American people.”
The bill failed to pass, but 47 Democrats voted for it…
A bunch of kids are being murdered by some semi-human, so what do you do? Draw your weapon and put him down or die trying? Or do you sit there, doing nothing?
The same government we’re supposed to give up our guns to because they have it all under control chose Option B. It chose failure.
Tell me more about how the real problem is that we have the capacity to defend ourselves.
But the real problem, to our enemies, is not that murderers murder. The real problem, to our enemies, is the very fact that we can defend ourselves. The objective of our trash elite is not to have a country that runs well, where people are secure, and where rights are respected. The objective is to rule. And if a bunch of kids die for that, they’re fine with it. They can live with failure, but not accountability.
The clusterfark in Uvalde is just a symptom of a much bigger pathology. It is a symbol of the failure of every institution in our society. And the solution is never to revamp the institutions and eject the parasites heading them. It’s always – always – to take power from us and give it to the people who screwed up in the first place.
“The Democrats lost an election they never expected to lose. They basically lost to a reality TV show host when Hillary Clinton had all the backing of the establishment in the world. And instead of asking, what is it about our ideology that ruled the country for eight years, that drove people away from us into Donald Trump’s arms, they instead decided they were going to blame everybody else,” he said.
“The Democrats simply replaced Trump with the same ideology they governed with for 8 years under Obama that caused people to run away from them as fast as they could,” he said. “And now that people are doing that again, instead of asking ‘why is that happening’ they’re getting poised to blame the electorate for being stupid — for thinking the economy’s bad when it’s actually good.”
Haven’t had time to talk about the farce that was the Sussmann acquittal, but here’s a tweet:
TURLEY: “I mean, he is facing a jury that has three Clinton donors, an AOC donor, and a woman whose daughter is on the same sports team with Sussmann’s daughter. With the exception of randomly selecting people out of the DNC headquarters, you could not come up with a worse jury” pic.twitter.com/RHqen6AMAc
Fairfax County commonwealth’s attorney Steve Descano (D.) and Arlington County commonwealth’s attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (D.) since 2020 dismissed or declined to prosecute a 25-year-old Maryland resident for nearly a dozen charges related to larceny. The looting incidents amounted to thousands of dollars in stolen merchandise and include felony offenses, including two grand larcenies and one assault on a police officer, making the offender eligible for years behind bars. The prosecutors found the looter guilty of just a few misdemeanors. No verdict levied more than a few hundred dollars in fines, and he served no time in prison.
“If Stuart Kirk’s devastating accusations are correct, in my opinion his words could be interpreted as suggesting the inputs to financial models which predict a demand for the climate investment products currently being sold are being heavily manipulated to produce a preconceived outcome. Stuart appeared to claim he is being “pressured” to add unrealistic assumptions to climate financial models, to ‘move the needle’ on predicted economic harm from climate change.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Iranian military bases attacked by drones launched from inside Iran. Hmmmmm…
“Miracle Cures and Murder For Hire: How A Spoon-Bending Turkish Magician Built A $600 Million Nasdaq-Listed Scam Based On A Lifetime Of Lies.” You really need to read the whole thing to see how Enochian Biosciences’ co-founder Serhat Gumrukcu fled from one alleged scam to another. Here’s just one line-item: “Gumrukcu claims to have spent 12+ years earning an M.D. and multiple PhDs in Russia and Turkey. Our research indicates he made it all up. He has no medical degree and no PhDs.” Plus that pesky murder thing… (Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)
The jury in Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit against Amber Heard ruled Wednesday that the actress did in fact defame Depp by identifying herself as a victim of domestic abuse and awarded Depp $15 million in compensatory and punitive damages, capping a blockbuster trial that has seen immense media coverage over the last several weeks.
The jury of five men and two women reached their unanimous verdict after 13 hours of deliberations, which began on Tuesday afternoon. It also awarded Heard $2 million in damages for a countersuit against Depp for statements made by his lawyer.
Depp may be a self-indulgent hedonist with poor judgment and substance abuse issues, but he came out smelling like a rose in comparison to his extra-crazy ex.
Slogans are no substitute for facts. “Hear all women” is a pledge we should all make. “Believe all women,” however, is asking people to shut their brains off at the approach of a slogan and forget the fact that women are people, too. Sometimes they shade the truth or lie, sometimes they are the more abusive party, and sometimes they are cynical, show-business shams. The evidence at trial changed a lot of minds, all the more so the more people watched it.
A favorite theory about Victorian vibrators turns out to be made up out of whole cloth.
With the anniversary of D-Day coming up, here’s a look at Operation PLUTO, which laid gasoline pipelines underneath the English channel to help fuel the invasion.
Inflation is soaring, Democrats are lying, and more MSM pedophiles are exposed. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Slow Joe Biden is hoping voters will ignore all that inflation on his watch. Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.
Apparently, the Biden administration’s approach is to just insist that the economy is doing great and hope people believe it, despite their mounting frustration every time they buy groceries, out to eat, or fill up their tank. On the day President Biden took office, retail prices for gasoline averaged $2.38 per gallon. This morning, they are $4.19 — not all that different from the $4.20 they were a month ago….
By and large, Democrats just don’t want to discuss or acknowledge inflation — at least not in their campaign ads:
And as of Friday, [Ohio Democratic Senate candidate Tim] Ryan was one of seven Democratic candidates who have run ads this year that mentioned inflation, according to the media tracking firm AdImpact. By contrast, dozens of Republican candidates and allied groups have done the same. In polls, Americans have cited inflation as a top issue.
“Burying your head in the sand,” Mr. Ryan said, “is not the way to approach it.” Asked about the biggest challenges facing his party, he replied, “A response to the inflation piece is a big hurdle.”
To Democrats, inflation is like Bruno: We just don’t talk about it.
Snip.
With poll after poll showing that inflation is foremost in voters’ minds, you would think that the president would be holding regular events focused on the problem and showcasing what his administration is doing to solve it.
“I get video almost every day now from people who we featured on ‘Dirty Jobs” and ‘How America Works.’
“They’re just sending me videos of them at the gas pump and some of them are filling up 18-wheelers. And, I’m not kidding you, $1,100, $1,200.
“Most people, all we can think about is the price for us at a relative terms know it’s awful.
“When you put $1,200 in your gas tank and just six months ago it was costing you $600 or 700, the exponential reality of it is starting to sink in. You just can’t walk that back. It touches every single thing that matters in this country. From food production to transportation … all of it,” Rowe explained.
Hmmmm:
Meet Elizabeth Deutsch. She's currently a law clerk for Justice Breyer.
And, in my humble opinion, she's the most likely person to have leaked the draft Supreme Court opinion in Dobbs, purporting to overturn Roe v. Wade.
A secretive group backed by millions of dollars from liberal billionaire George Soros is working behind the scenes with President Biden’s administration to shape policy, documents reviewed by Fox News show.
Governing for Impact (GFI), the veiled group, boasts in internal memos of implementing more than 20 of its regulatory agenda items as it works to reverse Trump-era deregulations by zeroing in on education, environmental, health care, housing and labor issues.
“Open Society is proud to support Governing for Impact’s efforts to protect American workers, consumers, patients, students and the environment through policy reform,” Tom Perriello, executive director of Soros’ Open Society Foundations, told Fox News Digital.
Snip.
GFI, however, works to remain secretive. It is invisible to internet search engines like Google (an unrelated “Govern for Impact” is the only group that appears in a search). No news reports or press releases appear on its existence outside of a mention of its related action fund in a previous Fox News article on the $1.6 billion Arabella Advisors-managed dark money network, to which it is attached.
But as the group attempted to conceal its operations, it sought talent on Harvard Law School’s website, which was discoverable. The posting, which no longer appears on the site, was for legal policy internships.
Snip.
According to its website, Rachael Klarman, a Harvard Law School grad, steers the group. Her father, Michael Klarman, is a professor at Harvard Law and also has ties to progressive advocacy groups. He is an advisory board member of the left-wing dark money judicial group Take Back the Court. Last year, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-RI, invited him to testify before Congress on dark money’s “assault” on the judiciary system.
“Governing for Impact is the perfect example of the Left’s fake outrage over ‘dark money’ in politics,” said the Capital Research Center’s Parker Thayer, who discovered the group and alerted Fox News.
“As a ‘fiscally sponsored’ dark money project that writes and pushes regulations from the shadows, hidden from the public and funded by one billionaire foundation, GFI embodies everything the Left pretends to abhor.”
The most egregious and blatant official U.S. disinformation campaign in years took place three weeks before the 2020 presidential election. That was when dozens of former intelligence officials purported, in an open letter, to believe that authentic emails regarding Joe Biden’s activities in China and Ukraine, reported by The New York Post, were “Russian disinformation.” That quasi-official proclamation enabled liberal corporate media outlets to uncritically mock and then ignore those emails as Kremlin-created fakes, and it pressured Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to censor the reporting at exactly the time Americans were preparing to decide who would be the next U.S. president.
The letter from these former intelligence officials was orchestrated by trained career liars — disinformation agents — such as former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. Yet that letter was nonetheless crucial to discredit and ultimately suppress the New York Post’s incriminating reporting on Biden. It provided a quasi-official imprimatur — something that could be depicted as an authoritative decree — that these authentic emails were, in fact, fraudulent.
After all, if all of these noble and heroic intelligence operatives who spent their lives studying Russian disinformation were insisting that the Biden emails had all of the “hallmarks” of Kremlin treachery, who possessed the credibility to dispute their expert assessment?
Snip.
This same strategic motive — to vest accusations of “disinformation” with the veneer of expertise — is what has fostered a new, very well-financed industry heralding itself as composed of “anti-disinformation” scholars. Knowing that Americans are inculcated from childhood to believe that censorship is nefarious — that it is the hallmark of tyranny — those who wish to censor need to find some ennobling rationale to justify it and disguise what it is.
They have thus created a litany of neutral-sounding groups with benign names — The Atlantic Council, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, various “fact-checking” outfits controlled by corporate media outlets — that claim to employ “anti-disinformation experts” to identify and combat fake news. Just as media corporations re-branded their partisan pundits as “fact-checkers” — to masquerade their opinions as elevated, apolitical authoritative, decrees of expertise — the term “disinformation expert” is designed to disguise ideological views on behalf of state and corporate power centers as Official Truth.
Yet when one subjects these groups to even minimal investigative scrutiny, one finds that they are anything but apolitical and neutral. They are often funded by the same small handful of liberal billionaires (such as George Soros and Pierre Omidyar), actual security state agencies of the U.S., the UK or the EU, and/or Big Tech monopolies such as Google and Facebook.
Indeed, the concept of “anti-disinformation expert” is itself completely fraudulent. This is not a real expertise but rather a concocted title bestowed on propagandists to make them appear more scholarly and apolitical than they are. But the function of this well-funded industry is the same as the one served by the pre-election letter from “dozens of former intelligence officials”: to discredit dissent and justify its censorship by infusing its condemnation with the pretense of institutional authority. The targeted views are not merely wrong; they have been adjudged by official, credentialed experts to constitute “disinformation.”
This scam is the critical context for understanding why the Biden Administration casually announced last week the creation of what it is calling a “Disinformation Board” inside the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). There is no conceivable circumstance in which a domestic law enforcement agency like DHS should be claiming the power to decree truth and falsity. Operatives in the U.S. Security State are not devoted to combatting disinformation. The opposite is true: they are trained, career liars tasked with concocting and spreading disinformation.
Business leaders are waking up to the destructive “woke” policies being foisted on businesses by boardrooms more concerned with virtue signaling than their primary responsibility of ensuring corporate profitability and enhancing shareholder values.
In short, the “woke” buck stops here, more corporate executives are saying. Mixing the politics of culture wars with business is a losing strategy.
Former McDonald’s CEO Ed Rensi is leading the charge. He ran McDonalds from 1991-1997, bringing the chain’s McNugget to market and also served on the boards of Famous Dave’s Bar-B-Que, Great Wolf Resorts and Snap-on Inc. These days, he’s launching The Boardroom Initiative, comprised of three conservative advocacy groups — The Job Creators Network, which was founded by Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, The Free Enterprise Group and Second Vote. The goal: get business back to business and out of politics.
“Corporations have no business being on the right or the left because they represent everybody there and their sole job is to build equity for their investors,” Rensi told FOX Business.
Rensi knows how to grow a business. While leading McDonalds, he saw U.S. sales double to more than $16 billion, the number of U.S. restaurants grow from nearly 6,600 to more than 12,000 and the number of U.S. franchisees grow from 1,600 to more than 2,700.
“It is not the province of board members or executives to take shareholder money profit and spend it on social matters,” Rensi explained. “Corporations should not get involved in social engineering.”
Trump goes 55-0. Everyone he endorsed won their primary or made the runoff. All those are from Indiana, Ohio, and Texas. I didn’t realize that so few states have had their primaries already. Hopefully that record will be shattered and Dr. Oz (a bad pick by Trump) will lose when Pennsylvania votes May 17th.
Trying to make your children into the Youth Stasi: “DC elementary school gives 4-year-olds books to report racist family members.”
The only surprise here is that he didn’t work for CNN. “MSNBC Anchor Busted ‘Driving 3 Hours’ To Meet Little Boy For Sex.” “A New York group specializing in exposing child-sex predators seemed to all but confirm this after they posted a video online Friday busting a potential pedophile who appeared to be NBC anchor Zach Wheeler. Wheeler had driven an approximate total of 3 hours in order to meet up with a 15-year-old boy for sex, the group claims.”
Speaking of school districts wasting money and lying to you:
You're not alone if you feel like your school district is lying to you while smearing your reputation. It happened to me. The answer is not to retreat, but to get louder and expose their lies and hypocrisy.
If you wonder why conservative victories seem so few and far between sometimes, this story offers one explanation.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s former chief of staff Daniel Hodge is now a lobbyist for one of the biggest liberal organizations in the country.
After a long history with Abbott since serving on his campaign for attorney general in 2001, Hodge was promoted to chief of staff when Abbott first took office in 2015. The key position gave him an incredible amount of power as both an informal advisor to his boss and a liaison between the governor’s office and the state Legislature.
In 2017, it was announced that he was parting from the role. Shortly after, he became a registered lobbyist.
Since then, Hodge has quickly become one of the highest-paid lobbyists in the state of Texas, with lobby reports revealing he could be making up to $8,269,999 on his contracts.
One of his high-paying clients, however, raises questions about where the former Abbott staffer’s loyalties lie.
Reports reveal Hodge is receiving $200,000-$300,000 from the left-wing Tides Center, the sister organization that helps manage donations from the Tides Foundation.
First established in 1976 in San Francisco, the Tides Foundation says it is dedicated to “working to advance progressive causes and policy initiatives in areas such as the environment, health care, labor issues, immigrant rights, LGBTQ+ rights, women’s rights and human rights.”
Look into pretty much any radical Social Justice Warrior issue destroying the quality of life for Americans (#BlackLivesMatter, defunding the police, CRT, radical transgenderism, Acorn, etc.) and you’ll generally find Tides Foundation somewhere in the background.
According to an analysis from Influence Watch, “Tides’ fiscally sponsored groups have been prominent in the anti-war movement, anti-free trade campaigns, gun control, abolition of the death penalty, abortion rights, and gay rights.”
The Tides Center is funded by major leftist foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
That brings up the question: What the hell was such a publicly conservative Governor as Greg Abbott doing with Hodge as his Chief of Staff?
I understand that lobbyists are hired guns, but this is like someone from the American Cancer Society leaving to work for R. J. Reynolds.
It’s impossible to imagine top aides to Ted Cruz or Dan Patrick going to work lobbying for George Soros. The fact that it happened to one of Abbott’s longest-serving aides (and the manager of his 2006 Attorney General reelection campaign) does not reflect well on his staffing judgment.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but it’s imperative that conservative Republican elected officials appoint conservative staffers to important positions. Progress towards conservative goals is all but impossible if you have foxes guarding the hen-house.
Tucker Carlson digs into traffic death statistics and discovers that a huge jump in deaths occurred in 2020, despite the lockdowns. Turns out the deaths were among black Americans, because police stopped making traffic stops on black Americans in the wake of the Antifa/BLM riots.
There was also a jump in black deaths from crime, for the same reasons (as well as pushes to defund the police). “Same reason, same effect…Less law enforcement means more crime.”
He covers how Chicago under Lori Lightfoot has stopped enforcing the law. The same people who scream about “gun violence” refuse to prosecute convicted felons despite repeated gun law violations. Recidivism in Illinois is twice the rate it is in sane states like Texas.
He also covers how Soros-back LA DA George Gason has done “so much in so little time to destroy the city,” and how a mother of six was gagged and murdered by a repeat offender who had been let out after committing two other murders.
“George Soros has paid people just like George Gason, and Chicago, Alvin Bragg now in Manhattan, and others.” Thousands of Americans have died as a result.
“Who is benefiting from this slaughter?”
Black Americans cite crime as their top issue, but racism and “equity” is near the bottom.
“In San Francisco, the lunatic, equity-mongering DA there Chesa Boudin is facing a recall, which could succeed.” Thanks to the open-air drug markets, drug overdoses in San Francisco are twice as numerous as Flu Manchu deaths.
The U.S. attorney’s office is even to refuse to charge criminals in D.C. who stole a puppy at gunpoint.
“Most of the dead come from the very group political leaders say they’re protecting.”
