Here’s an under-reported aspect of Operation Rough Rider (i.e., the Trump Administration beating the Houthis with a very large stick): The deployment of A-10 Warthogs to teach the Houthis the error of their ways.
The successful missions displayed some interesting capabilities.
“After three years without a major combat deployment, America’s most rugged aircraft is back in theater, and this time, it’s not just covering troops; it’s striking mobile launcher teams before they escape.”
“On March 29, 2025, several A-10 Warthogs from the 124th Fighter Wing and 300 ground crew from the 190th Fighter Squadron deployed to the Middle East. This deployment marks the largest such deployment of this infamous aircraft in three years and it’s for more than just showing the flag. Operating out of Al Dhafra Air Base in the UAE, these aircraft are giving a big helping hand to the Navy as they battle a foe with ever revolving tactics.” Namely learning to shoot-and-scoot after launching their attacks on shipping.
The missiles Houthis fire are “are typically C-802s that carry a 165-kilogram armor-piercing payload and can reach targets up to 180 kilometers away.”
“The first confirmed strike came on April 1. After taking off from their air base, the Warthogs were on station within 18 minutes. Thanks to its 11,000-pound fuel tank captivity, the A-10s can loiter over target areas for up to 90 minutes before having to head back to base.”
Details of the formidable GAU-8/A Avenger rotary cannon snipped, because I think all of my readers are familiar with it by now.
“On that day, a circling RC-135 Rivet Joint intercepted Houthi radio signals that they were going to launch a strike soon. Because the US has destroyed practically every secure communications method the Houthis had, enemy commanders in the field have to rely on regular civilian cell phones to talk to each other, which makes finding these guys that much easier.”
“The attack was supposed to go down in less than 20 minutes, so the two A-10s punched it at full power to get there. With a max speed of about 420 miles per hour, it would take roughly 18 minutes to get there, with not a second to spare.” Yeah, this channel loves to make things overly dramatic.
“As the A-10s flew across the mountains and desert of central Yemen, the pilots are using this device to scan for the targets. This is called the AAN/AAQ-28 Litening pod [Yeah, that’s the way it’s spelled. -LP], and is how the pilot ensures that the A-10’s payloads make it on target.”
“The pod measures 87 inches long and is 16 inches in diameter. Inside this roughly 440-pound pod are a series of high-resolution forward-looking infrared sensors, laser designators, and CCTV cameras; the pilots can spot man-sized targets up to 28 miles away.”
“With no enemy radars up due to US forces knocking them out in prior strikes, the A-10s came in low and slow. At a distance of 6,500 meters away, they let loose with their cannons and gave ‘em the BRRT the aircraft is so famous for.”
“In those two seconds, the A-10s fired about 260 baseball-sized rounds, each going at 3,500 feet per second. As one can probably guess, the launcher was neutralized.”
“On April 2, an ISR satellite detected unusual heat signatures northeast of Sa’dah. Since very few people in Yemen own a car, much less a 5-ton truck, intelligence flagged it as a probable mobile launcher and passed it along to the Air Force for a closer look.”
“With the Houthis now fully aware the A-10s ere in theater, the call went out far and wide, and soon every Houthi radar left was scanning the skies, looking for an easy victory. Thankfully, these aircraft were not gonna let them. These planes are called EA-18G Growlers. If you think they look like F-18s, that’s because they kind of are. Built on the same body, these aircraft are specially modified with sensors and weapons specially designed for a mission called suppression of enemy air defenses or SEAD.”
“The Growlers’ main mission is taking out Houthi radars with systems with this. This system here on this Growler is called the Next Generation Jammer…As Houthi gunners turn on their radars, they send out a particular frequency. Since the Next Gen Jammers in service operate in the mid-band of frequencies around the 2–6 Gigahertz range, any radar pulsing in that range can get picked up. This is because the US maintains a mission library of every adversary search, surface, fire control, and missile radar in the world. When the system picks up these signals, it automatically knows what kind of system it is and uses basic geometry to figure out where the enemy radar is located.”
“The pilot then sends a continuous burst of about 270 kilowatts of power towards the Houthi radar. Because radars know the time when every radar wave is sent out and know what time it arrives, the radar uses that data to help figure out the position. However, when blasted with such a strong energy pulse, the radar can’t see any of its own emissions because this jammer is just overloading the system with a continuous stream of energy. Although some modern radars are jam-resistant, most Houthi ones are based on legacy Soviet or Iranian models that get fried.”
“Within 15 minutes, the Growlers from the USS Eisenhower had knocked out three Houthi radar installations.”
Using their Litening targeting pods, [the A-10s] picked up movement—three launchers, including one where the Houthis were putting a camouflaged tarp on to hide it again. The lead pilot fired a laser-guided AGM-65 Maverick from 26 miles away to prevent them from getting away. With its 125-pound-shaped charge, the Maverick struck the first launcher center mass. The secondary detonation from the missile on board was huge. Shrapnel tore through the other two nearby launchers and knocked fist-sized holes in them.”
“Their teams attempted to flee in a Toyota pickup, but they didn’t make it far. The trailing Warthog rolled in low. At just under 250 knots, the pilot squeezed the trigger. A half-second burst of the GAU-8 sent 50 rounds slamming into the truck and neutralized four more operators.”
“By April 10, Houthi activity had visibly shifted. Launch points previously active went cold.”
The Houthis grew even more cautious, but the A-10s sensors can even detect heat signatures coming from underground bunkers.
“On April 13, operating out of Jawf province, [Houthis] wheeled out a launcher preloaded with a C-802, set up near an irrigation berm, and awaited GPS lock from their Iranian handlers. Unfortunately for them, a US drone had spotted the movement 40 minutes earlier. A Warthog was already on station and soon inbound. At 3,000 feet, flying just over the mountain tops, the pilot waited just until he reached the Maverick’s ideal release range of around seven nautical miles. With the ability to carry six of these missiles, with three under each wing, the pilot let loose with two of them to neutralize thelauncher and its accompanying radar. Upon seeing the Warthog, the Houthi gunners abandoned their launchers and tried to run but the last thing they heard was a BRRT, and it was all over.”
“Strategically, the A-10’s success has reignited debates over close air support. While the Air Force still plans to retire the fleet by 2029, Marine and Navy commanders have petitioned for extended deployment rotations. This is because the numbers speak for themselves. From April 2 through April 17, the A-10s flew 218 sorties without a single US loss. According to CENTCOM, 47 confirmed missile systems have been knocked out, along with nine senior Houthi commanders neutralized. Because of this, the A-10 has proven itself a valuable asset in what many have considered a Navy-centric fight.”
Remember, the A-10 is the weapon the air force tried multiple times to kill, yet it’s still flying vital missions a quarter of the way through the 21st Century. The latest deployment may indicate there’s still some life left in the old hog yet…
To hit or not to hit Iran, that is the question, illegal alien friendly judges land themselves in hot water, some party switch shenanigans in Florida, the Texas Senate passes some bills (good and bad), and updates on the proceedings against several disgraced politicos. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Also, Texas residents should remember that the Sales tax Holiday starts tomorrow.
Tenacity is the most important virtue of national leaders at war, which allows them to press on with no assurance of victory, fending off tremendous political pressures to fold. Winston Churchill displayed this quality in 1940. In June of that year, Germany appeared unstoppable. Paris and the entirety of Western Europe had fallen. The Luftwaffe was grinding down the grossly outnumbered British pilots, and German invasion barges were being assembled in Belgian ports. Even then, with Britain desperate for U.S. support, the American national debate on interventionism, prompted by the outbreak of war in September 1939, continued to break decisively in favor of the isolationists.
Exploring an accommodation with Germany appeared as the eminently reasonable and prudent course of action because of Herr Hitler’s generous offer to leave Britain and its vast empire intact. When British parliamentarians pressed Churchill to explain his plan, he confessed to his intimates that he had no plan at all. He was determined to just keep buggering on.
Then the situation became bleaker still for the British and for Churchill personally. In June 1941, the German army smashed its way into Russia, advancing rapidly toward what looked like an imminent victory. Although the Wehrmacht’s swift conquests promised to wholly remedy Germany’s only weakness—its lack of petroleum—the isolationists in the U.S. Congress remained dominant. Meanwhile, at home, London was abuzz with talk of Churchill’s heavy drinking, his personal dependence on gifts from his Jewish friends to pay for his extravagant tastes and, above all, his utter lack of strategy—he had failed to offer any path at all that could conceivably lead to victory.
Things looked grim all around. In North Africa, the brilliant German tactician Erwin Rommel was outmaneuvering British forces with ease. Much worse were the first reports of Germany’s astonishing technological progress: the world’s first jet fighter that could easily outfly every single British and American fighter; the world’s first air-to-surface missile (Fritz X) that, in September 1943, would sink the Italian battleship Roma (to prevent it from surrendering to the Allies); and the Tiger tank that could crush British armor.
Nevertheless, the isolationists in Congress refused to fund even a prosaic piston-engine fighter project—the P-51 Mustang, the war’s best Allied fighter—which was developed with fast-dwindling British funds.
Churchill’s answer? Just keep buggering on.
Snip.
Whereas Churchill’s problem was an isolationist Congress that constrained a generally sympathetic president, Netanyahu enjoyed ample support on the Hill but faced an American administration determined to cut Israel down to size and to remove him from power.
As Israel fought a major, multifront war in October 2023, key U.S. officials encouraged domestic uproar against Netanyahu and worked to constrain him and even collapse his government.
That was not all the president’s doing, but Joe Biden’s administration was stacked with Barack Obama’s leftovers, who ran the gamut of pathological Israel haters, from Samantha Power to Robert Malley—the red-diaper baby of Stalinist Jewish parents in Paris whom I met in my youth when they were working for Algeria’s National Liberation Front, which was not merely fanatically anti-Israel but also declaredly anti-Jewish, much like Yemen’s Houthis today. With the CIA mostly very hostile (as it has been since it was established in 1947, as declassified documents fully reveal), only the Pentagon harbored some friends of Israel—although that hardly stopped the administration from using every trick in the book to delay mid-war weapons supplies to Israel.
Netanyahu faced a concerted campaign, directed from Washington, that brought together Israeli nonprofits and Netanyahu’s political opponents. Almost from the get-go, Netanyahu had to overcome calls and protests by well-educated—and some even well-meaning—Israelis and American Jews, as well as all the usual suspects in European capitals and almost every other world government incessantly demanding a cease-fire, not as a pause, but as an end to the war.
Worse still, several of Israel’s retired and barely retired generals threw their weight behind the cease-fire push. Some did so with the authority of true heroes, such as Yair Golan, the head of the unsubtly named The Democrats (a merger of the left-wing Labor and Meretz Parties) and former IDF deputy chief of staff no less. Golan jumped into his small car on Oct. 7 to successfully rescue people with his handgun, as did the former head of the IDF’s Operations Directorate Israel Ziv, now a very successful security contractor overseas after distinguished service, who became the guru of an entire cabal of retired generals, including some who served in Netanyahu’s government until they left it to oppose him. Then, inevitably, there were tawdry time-servers who somehow became generals without doing much other than talking, like Amos Gilead, who’s well known and much-favored in U.S. officialdom because of his hostility to Netanyahu.
All those former generals demanded the same thing, albeit at different times: to stop the war with no way of recovering the Israeli hostages and no way of forcing Hamas to accept supervised disarmament, therefore allowing it to use a cease-fire to reconstitute.
Furthermore, these generals offered no solution whatever to the Hezbollah dilemma in the north. The day after the Oct. 7 attack, Hezbollah started launching rockets against Israel. If Israel did not attack, Hezbollah forces, then assuredly the most powerful non-state army in the world, was certainly capable of burning every Jewish town and village north of Haifa with countless rockets (the number 110,000 that was widely circulated turned out to be simply invented) while targeting power stations, Ben Gurion Airport, port facilities, every chemical plant and refinery, and every air base with thousands of guided missiles. If Israel were to attack, those massive barrages would immediately begin.
As Netanyahu pondered this dilemma, he had to deal not only with his security establishment but also with unremitting pressure from Washington. A mere few days after Oct. 7, the Biden administration intervened and made clear its opposition to an Israeli preemptive strike against Hezbollah—a position it would maintain over the next year. In fact, when Israel finally eliminated Hassan Nasrallah in a strike on his bunker on Sept. 27, 2024, Biden’s reaction was an irate “Bibi, what the fuck?”
The Biden administration displayed a similar hands-off attitude toward Iran’s proxy in Yemen, allowing Tehran to pile more pressure on Israel. The Houthis joined the fight with their skirts, sandals, and Iranian supplied anti-ship missiles and drones that not only deprived Israel of its secondary Red Sea sea port access but also targeted commercial vessels, blocking navigation in the area and forcing shipping companies to find longer, more expensive routes, thereby augmenting U.S. and international pressure on Israel to end the war. Washington allowed Iran to stop maritime traffic in the Red Sea and Suez Canal without any retaliation against Tehran and its own maritime traffic, while Western disarray was compounded by the spectacle of very expensive European navies doing nothing much even as their Mediterranean ports lost all their Asian traffic.
This shameful passivity reinforced the Israeli conviction that France, Italy, and Spain, unable and unwilling to defend even their own direct material interests, would only yield to Muslim demographic and political pressure in other respects as well. Only the British joined the United States in eventually striking the Houthis, though mostly symbolically and nowhere near the sustained and targeted campaign required to destroy Houthi capabilities.
Between American permissiveness toward Iran’s multipronged campaign and Washington’s support for Netanyahu’s domestic opposition, calls for a Gaza cease-fire intensified and became the default position across the political landscape, from Israel’s left and even moderate center to most European governments, in addition to the Biden administration.
It is against this backdrop that Netanyahu’s pure resolve must be understood. With this remarkable array of forces, external and internal, bearing down on him, his tenacity was the only thing that mattered.
Read the whole thing.
The Houthis in Yemen are in the find out phase, as U.S. forces just blew up a vital oil port.
Fresh US airstrikes on Yemen Thursday marked the single-deadliest known attack under President Donald Trump’s new campaign targeting the Houthi rebels. The Pentagon has been intensely bombing Yemen since March 15, when the Gaza truce collapsed.
A Houthi spokesman announced Friday that the attacks killed 38 people and wounded 102 others. The death toll was hours later updated to at least 74 killed. The operation mainly targeted and destroyed the Ras Isa oil port, which sent massive fireballs shooting into the night sky.
The final pillar of the plan, calling to “confront long-term contributors to domestic terrorism,” is laden with potentially controversial social proposals.
This section identifies “ghost guns”—unregistered weapons without a serial number, often created via 3D printer—as one such contributor, and calls to “[r]ein in the proliferation” of such weapons, “encourage state adoption of extreme risk protection orders, and drive other executive and legislative action including banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
It also called for “advancing inclusion” as part of the response to the COVID-19 pandemic to “mitigate xenophobia and bias.”
This would be in order to “address hate crime reporting barriers faced by disadvantaged communities by promoting law enforcement training and resources to prevent and address bias-motivated crimes,” according to the SIP.
Additionally, the plan encouraged “teaching and learning of civics education that provides students with the skill to fully participate in civic life,” and promoting “literacy education for both children and adult learners and existing proven interventions to foster resiliency to disinformation.”
The change at the border between President Biden and President Trump is nothing short of staggering, and two numbers best tell that story: 189,604 and 20.
The first is the number of illegal immigrants Border Patrol agents caught and immediately released into the U.S. in December 2023, at the depths of the Biden border chaos.
The second is the number of illegal immigrants agents caught and released into the U.S. in February — roughly one-hundredth of 1% of the total in Mr. Biden’s worst month.
For years, Border Patrol agents have been telling anyone who would listen that catch-and-release was the driver of illegal immigration.
Migrants who had a reasonable sense that they could live and work in the U.S. would pay $10,000 or more to smugglers to reach the border. If their chances of release were slim, they wouldn’t pay or make the trip.
Mr. Trump’s policies have drastically cut the chances of catch-and-release from 778 per 1,000 border crossers in December 2023 to just 2 per 1,000 in February.
“New Mexico Judge Resigns After Housing Alleged Tren De Aragua Member. The resignation occurred a few days after law enforcement arrested illegal alien Cristhian Ortega-Lopez…Democrat Doña Ana County Magistrate Judge Joel Cano resigned after police arrested an alleged Tren De Aragua (TdA) gang member.”
FBI Director Kash Patel announced Friday that the bureau has arrested Judge Hannah Dugan out of Milwaukee, Wisconsin on charges of obstruction, accusing the Dugan of obstructing an arrest of illegal immigrants last week.
“We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, allowing the subject — an illegal alien — to evade arrest,” Patel said in a brief statement shared on X – which was subsequently deleted and re-posted. “Thankfully our agents chased down the perp on foot and he’s been in custody since, but the Judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public.”
The days when Democrats can blithely ignore immigration laws are coming to a close.
Senator Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), the second most powerful Senate Democrat, announced Wednesday his decision not to run for another term after nearly three decades in the world’s greatest deliberative body.
Durbin, 80, is ending his Senate career after five terms, the longest tenure of any Senator in Illinois history. His retirement opens up a deep blue seat in 2026 and will create a leadership competition for Senate Democrats amid frustration with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and generational turnover within the party.
Remember, in Minnesota, crimes aginst designed hate objects are perfectly legal. “Progressive Minnesota Prosecutor Lets State Employee Off with No Charges for Alleged Tesla Vandalism.”
The Hennepin County Attorney’s office is seeking diversion for Minnesota Department of Human Service employee Dylan Adams after he allegedly vandalized at least six Teslas in Minneapolis while walking his dog….
Progressive County Attorney Mary Moriarty took office in 2023 and has faced strong criticism for her soft-on-crime approach. On several occasions, Moriarty has shown leniency to violent criminals, including suspects charged with murder and sexual assault, leading to disputes with prosecutors and outrage among victims’s families.
Is she Soros-backed? You better believe it. I hope Elon Musk sues all of them for everything they own…
Well, this is disturbing. “Stunned cops allegedly find 180K rounds of ammo packed in minivan driven by two Mexican nationals.”
Two Mexican nationals pulled over in a routine traffic stop in Colorado were found with 180,000 illegal rounds of ammunition in the back of their van, according to federal prosecutors.
Caesar Ramon Martinez Solis, 41, and Humberto Ivan Amador Gavira, 24, were pulled over late last month for failing to dim their headlights and using a turn signal in Canon City, 35 miles southwest of Colorado Springs, according to the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado.
Officers then found 180 boxes stacked in the back of the van — each labeled as having 1,000 rounds of ammo, mostly .308 but also 30 boxes of 7.62, the feds said.
Ammunition in back of minivan.
The federal government’s main website on COVID-19 information has been taken down and replaced with a new version discarding the natural-origin theory of the coronavirus that was pushed by the Biden administration.
Where the previous website pushed vaccine and testing information, the White House is now displaying scientific proof that the virus was man-made and leaked from a Chinese virus lab while calling out U.S. officials and agencies that it says “obstructed” the truth from the American people.
Dr. Anthony Fauci is named along with Dr. Peter Daszak, Dr. David Morens and other public officials who are accused of engaging in “a multi-year campaign of delay, confusion, and non-responsiveness in an attempt to obstruct the Select Subcommittee’s investigation” and to hide incriminating evidence.”
Now will Democrats finally accept the truth, or continue clinging to the “wet market” origins like they cling to all their other lockdown lies?
“Hegseth Denounces Journalists Who ‘Won’t Give Back Their Pulitzers for Discredited Stories as Pulitzer Board Facing String of Setbacks in Trump’s Lawsuit. He insists he is the subject of ‘hit pieces that ‘come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hoax.'” Soon the legacy media can be financially, as well as factually and morally, bankrupt.
So the Russians captured a Bradley in Ukraine. After analyzing how it compares to their own BMPs, they want one.
The Russians have gotten a closeup look at an M2A2 Bradley Fighting Vehicle and seem to like it better than their own armored vehicles.
The Bradley offers more protection and can fire more accurately than its Russian equivalent, the BMP-3, according to a Russian report that was leaked onto a Telegram channel earlier this month.
Experts told Task & Purpose that the report appears to be legitimate.
Priority legislation that would raise the homestead exemption for elderly and disabled homeowners by $50,000 passed the Texas Senate on Wednesday. With other planned exemption increases, elderly homeowners would receive a total of $200,000 in homestead exemptions.
Senate Bill (SB) 23 and Senate Joint Resolution (SJR) 85 raise the school tax homestead exemption — a reduction in the taxable value of a home — for age 65 and over homeowners from $10,000 to $60,000. The proposal is estimated to cost the state $1.2 billion through the next biennium.
Both passed by a 30 to 1 vote with the lone “no” coming from state Sen. Nathan Johnson (D-Dallas), which is the first “no” vote against a homestead exemption increase in the Senate in multiple sessions.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick prefaced this proposal in an early-April press conference, during which he said he and Speaker Dustin Burrows (R-Lubbock) were working together on the item.
This is on top of the planned standard homestead exemption increase from $100,000 to $140,000.
Just in case you hadn’t heard: Pope Francis dead at 88. “The pope, who led the Catholic Church for twelve years, passed away just one day after Easter Sunday when the world’s 1.3 billion Catholics celebrated the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Despite his ongoing health problems, he made several appearances during Holy Week, including a trip to St. Peter’s Basilica and a visit with Vice President JD Vance on Sunday.” Sic transit gloria mundi.
Hijacking thwarted. “A U.S. man hijacked a small plane in Belize on Thursday, stabbing two passengers and a pilot, before one of the stabbed passengers fatally shot him, officials in Belize and the United States said. The plane then landed safely.”
Pizzo, considered a possible candidate for governor in 2026, said unaffiliated voters helped elect him to office. He added that the state party needed new leadership, but Democratic leaders didn’t want him to be it. The party that his late father volunteered for in the 1960s, he said, “is not the party today.”
“Here’s the issue: The Democratic Party in Florida is dead. But there are good people that can resuscitate it. But they don’t want it to be me,” he said.
Pizzo’s stunning announcement — which caught Democrats completely by surprise — of a switch to no party affiliation is just the latest blow for Florida’s beleaguered Democratic Party. The state currently has 1.2 million more registered Republicans than Democrats, and no Democrat holds statewide elected office — a far cry from Florida’s former status as the ultimate swing state.
It’s got to hurt to have the Minority leader of the third largest state in the union leave your party because it’s too radical. Especially since a quarter century ago Florida was still The Land of the Hanging Chad…
Florida party switch shenanigans the second: “David Jolly, a former Republican U.S. Congressman in Florida’s 13th Congressional District who left the GOP amid his distaste for President Donald Trump, has now registered as a Democrat. He’s also launched a political committee, Florida 2026, ahead of what many expect to be a gubernatorial bid.” I doubt someone who left office in 2017 is going to be at the top of anyone’s list, and Charlie Crist’s post-Republican career hardly offers a blueprint for success in Florida politics…
“Disgraced former Representative George Santos (R., N.Y.) was sentenced Friday to 87 months in federal prison for wire fraud and identity theft, completing his remarkable rise and fall from a newly elected swing-seat congressman to widely ridiculed conman whose colleagues expelled him from the House..”
The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has opened an investigation into Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) over donations made to her 2024 campaign by the Democratic fundraising organization Act Blue.
The FEC began its probe after receiving a complaint from the conservative Coolidge-Reagan Foundation in late March.
The complaint alleges that Crockett received 53 separate donations of $595 from a 73 year old supporter named Randy Best through the Act Blue portal.
However, when one of Crockett’s opponents for 2026 spoke to Best’s wife, she denied that the couple knew anything about donations, raising concerns that the Act Blue donations may have been made by others with donations being given under false names.
Crockett’s campaign received more than $870,000 in donations through Act Blue.
At this point, I think we have to assume that ActBlue was consciously constructed to enable fraud.
In the latest scandal to rock the state’s largest public school district, on Friday, a federal jury found Houston Independent School District’s (HISD) former chief operating officer, Brian Busby, and vendor Anthony Hutchison, guilty on 33 charges related to a long-running bribery scheme.
The scheme, which prosecutors say began as early as 2011, included kickbacks to Busby as well as cash payments to former HISD board president Rhonda Skillern-Jones and multiple other officials in exchange for lucrative contracts for construction, landscaping, mowing, and maintenance at district schools.
In some instances, Hutchison overbilled the district by $6 million through his exclusive contract to provide mowing and landscaping for the entire district. He also obtained contracts through Skillern-Jones to complete projects at several schools using funds derived from a 2012 voter-approved bond referendum.
After a trial that lasted nearly four weeks, both Busby and Hutchison were convicted on charges of conspiracy, bribery, filing false tax returns, and witness tampering. Hutchison was also convicted of wire fraud.
Skillern-Jones, who also later served as a Houston Community College trustee and worked for Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis (D-Pct. 1), entered a plea deal in 2021 and admitted that she had received $12,000 in cash from Busby in a Walmart parking lot.
Deadpool creator Rob Liefeld says that the people at the top of Marvel comics, Dan Buckley, David Bogart and David Gabriel, have done a horrible job, especially with X-Men, and have to be fired.
And speaking of people getting fired for being bad at their job, Alyssa Mercante fired from Kotaku. Asmongold: “Put the fries in the bag.”
For all his talk about bringing peace, Donald Trump (in both 45 and 47 incarnations) has proven more than willing to bring the wood when it comes to whacking jihadis that have attacked American interests.
On Thursday, U.S. Central Command forces, in cooperation with Iraqi Intelligence and Security Forces, conducted a precision airstrike in Al Anbar Province, Iraq, that killed Abu Khadijah, according to a statement from CENTCOM.
“As the Emir of ISIS most senior decision-making body, Abu Khadijah maintained responsibility for operations, logistics, and planning conducted by ISIS globally, and directs a significant portion of finance for the groups global organization,” officials said.
After the strike, CENTCOM and Iraqi forces moved to the strike site and found the two dead bodies, both of whom were wearing unexploded “suicide vests” and had multiple weapons, CENTCOM said.
CENTCOM and Iraqi forces were able to identify Abu Khadijah through a DNA match from DNA collected on a previous raid where Abu Khadijah narrowly escaped, officials confirmed.
President Donald Trump on Saturday ordered “decisive and powerful” U.S. airstrikes on Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen and issued a new warning in response to the group’s attacks on shipping in the Red Sea.
The strikes mark the largest U.S. military operation in the Middle East since Trump’s return to the White House for a second term.
Trump warned the Houthis in a social media post that “HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE” if they don’t cease their attacks on ships in the Red Sea.
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“To Iran: Support for the Houthi terrorists must end IMMEDIATELY!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. He told the Iranians if they continue to back Houthi attacks on shipping then “America will hold you fully accountable and, we won’t be nice about it!”
The strikes resulted in the initial deaths of at least nine civilians and nine injured in Sanaa, the largest city in Yemen, according to the Houthi-run health ministry.
Residents in Sanaa said the strikes hit a building in a Houthi stronghold. “The explosions were violent and shook the neighborhood like an earthquake. They terrified our women and children,” one of the residents, who gave his name as Abdullah Yahia, told Reuters.
Will this stop the Houthis from attacking shipping? Maybe. For a while. Maybe a longer while if followed up by targeted special forces assassinations of sundry Houthi leaders and their Iranian enablers. But only bankrupting or deposing the Mullah’s regime in Iran will effect a real end to their shenanigans.
Destroying the Assad regime has eliminated that particular Iranian catspaw from backing terrorist activities outside Syria (though at the cost of some continuing low-level genocide within it). Hopefully we can fund elements in Yemen to destroy the Houthis for us without a side-order of slaughtering innocents.
Democrats used election fraud and lawfare to strike down a glad-handing, dealmaking Trump the Grey who was treated with deep suspicion by the Republican establishment, and now he’s returned, more powerful than ever, as Trump the White with a unified GOP behind him, someone who has already unleashed a executive order blitzkrieg the likes of which the nation has never seen before. Trump now threatens the Democrats’ one-ring control of the federal bureaucracy, not to mention black and Hispanic voters, in a way previous Republican presidents never did. And Democrats have only themselves to blame for it, not only for their radical, shrieking TDS obstruction in his first term and their radical embrace of a deeply unpopular social justice agenda, but also their use of overreach in using so many executive orders to achieve their agenda. Now Trump has the blueprint and precedent to go after all their power centers. The scope and ferocity of Trump’s assault on a permanent leftwing deep state makes it seem less like The War of the Ring than The War of Wrath, in which the Valar returned to Middle Earth to finally settle Morgoth’s hash once and for all.
OK, I’ll stop making Tolkien analogies now.
Let’s just say that Trump’s first week back in the White House has unleashed a blizzard of winning, and I haven’t even remotely corralled all of it here.
In his final minutes as president, Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons to his two brothers, James and Francis, and his sister, Valerie, to protect them from what he predicts will be politically motivated attacks led by President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans.
“My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me—the worst kind of partisan politics,” Biden said in a statement. “Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.”
Biden used his presidential power to pardon five members of his immediate family: James, his wife Sara, Valerie, her husband John Owens, and Francis. The outgoing president said the pardons “should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that they engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”
James and Sara, in particular, were pardoned, presumably because James wrote Joe a $200,000 check on March 1, 2018 — the same day he received the funds from distressed rural hospital provider Americore.
In September 2017, James and his wife also sent his older brother a $40,000 check that used funds originating from a Chinese energy firm CEFC in addition to other transactions involving Joe that caught the attention of the Republican-led House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. Both checks were classified as loan repayments.
The other family members were pardoned to ensure they aren’t targeted by the incoming administration. The clemency act covers any nonviolent offenses they may have committed since January 1, 2014.
Like running an illegal pay-for-play graft mill for foreign governments. Which is what the Biden Crime Family did.
The federal government’s method of searching through information incidentally collected on U.S.-based individuals violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, a federal judge has ruled.
“To countenance this practice would convert Section 702 into precisely what Defendant has labeled it – a tool for law enforcement to run ‘backdoor searches’ that circumvent the Fourth Amendment,” U.S. District Judge LaShann Dearcy Hall said in the ruling, which was released on Jan. 21.
Government officials acquired information on the defendant, Agron Hasbajrami, a legal permanent resident who they arrested in 2011 and charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization. The information was gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lets authorities spy on people.
After Hasbajrami pleaded guilty, authorities disclosed that some of the evidence they used in the case was the fruit of information they obtained without a warrant under a FISA supplement called Section 207, which enables authorities to conduct surveillance on non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States.
Donald Trump won the 2024 election in part because the Left’s hysterical style of attacking Trump no longer worked.
After a decade of this unhinged furor, it proved worthless in winning public support — and for two simple reasons.
One, after years of Russian collusion hoaxes, the laptop disinformation farce, and the warped lies about the “suckers” and “fine people on both sides” — the shrill Left became predictable.
So, the bored public began tuning them out, switching channels, hitting the mute button, and pulling the plug.
Like the deleterious effects of inflation that eventually render a currency worthless, nonstop hectoring, hysterics, pontification, and distortion finally made all such criticisms of Trump mostly as valueless as 1930s German marks.
Second, the wearied public never heard reasoned counterarguments from the likes of a Rachel Maddow. Instead, on spec, she kept mouthing, “The walls are closing in” on Trump.
Former President Joe Biden did not explain why his open border was a better idea than Trump’s closed one. He preferred mumbling about “semi-fascists!” and the “ultra-MAGA!”
The Never Trumpers did not critique the Trump deficits. Instead, they hammered away that Trump was Hitler, or Mussolini, or Putin — or just a dangerous dictator or autocrat.
Angry retired generals never demonstrated why Trump was, in their view, an existential threat to democracy. Instead, they shouted nonstop in op-eds and interviews that he was a fascist, Nazi-like, no different from the guards at Auschwitz, a pathological liar, and should be summarily removed.
Worn-out voters began to understand that these psychodramas were substitutes for substantive criticism or occasions for legitimate debate.
Indeed, the exhausted public finally concluded that the hysterics increased in direct proportion to the poverty of the charges.
So, what did 10 years of such derangement achieve for the Left?
Trump now has control of the White House and both houses of Congress operate under Republican majorities.
The Supreme Court is mostly conservative. Almost all of Trump’s issues — the border, immigration, the economy, foreign policy, and crime — poll well over 50 percent.
No matter, the Left is still hammering away at the trivial and irrelevant — and remains paralyzed in furor and hysterics.
Former Okaland mayor Sheng Thao was “indicted [last] Friday. Also indicted: Andre Jones, who the NYT describes as her ‘boyfriend,’ David Trung Duong, and Andy Hung Duong. David Duong is the head of a local waste management company, and Andy is his son.”
“Starbucks Lost $25 Million Lawsuit Because They Fired An Employee For Being White.” Good. Don’t be racist and don’t violate anti-discrimination laws. It’s not rocket science.
Left UK Guardian newspaper staffers: We’re striking for better wages! Guardian management: Enjoy being replaced by AI.
And another huge Russian oil facility goes up in a giant fireball, this one in Ryazan, some 476 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
Biden: Stop attacking American ships. Houthis: LOL. Trump: Stop attacking American ships…or else. Houthis: “Yes, Mr. President. Please don’t kill us.”
“West Texas Teacher, Coach Charged With Continuous Sexual Assault of a Child. Justin Esquell is accused of sexually abusing a victim for four years, starting when the child was under the age of 14.”
This could be a very big story. “Trump Announces Tech Companies Will Invest $500 Billion in AI Infrastructure.”
President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a joint venture between three large tech companies to invest as much as $500 billion into building out U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The joint venture, known as Stargate, involves Oracle, Open AI, and Softbank and will see the companies join together to build out American data centers to power artificial intelligence systems, including ChatGPT. Stargate, which could cost up to $500 billion over a four-year period, will begin with a data center in Texas, a state friendly to crypto and other parts of the tech industry.
The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners. The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.
That’s a lot of heavy hitters, but some of them (I’m looking at you Microsoft) have embraced wokeness. Hopefully their AI project won’t be infected with it.
If they need a technical writer, I know one who’s going to be available soon… (Update: I’m hearing it will be built out in Abilene.)
An end to flag madness. “State Department implements “one flag policy,” meaning no more Pride or BLM flags flown at U.S. facilities.”
CNN laid off 210 people or about 6% of it’s staff of 3,500. That still seems an unsustainably high staff for a network that averages less than a million viewers. Indeed, it’s something like 286 viewers per staffer. What advertisers are willing to pay money to reach so few people?
Harris plagiarizes Wikipedia and blows off Catholics, Gwen Walz assigns America homework, social justice groomers keep trying to trans your kids, Williamson County’s sheriff gets accused of pay-for-play corruption, another Hamas leader eats a last meal of kosher drone, Columbia U wants to silence a pro-Israel professor, and a meat recall expands to my local supermarket.
The Biden-Harris administration announced [last] Friday that it was filing a lawsuit against the state of Virginia for enforcing voter integrity laws in the state that aim to curb illegal voting in elections.
Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who has a history of espousing racist views, claimed without evidence that Virginia’s move to increase election integrity was an “eleventh hour effort” intended, in part, to “disenfranchise qualified voters.”
The DOJ claimed that it was doing so because it was “too close to the Nov. 5 general election” to remove voters:
Section 8(c)(2) of the NVRA, also known as the Quiet Period Provision, requires states to complete systematic programs aimed at removing the names of ineligible voters from voter registration lists no later than 90 days before federal elections.
However, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s executive order requiring that non-citizens be removed from voter rolls was signed on August 7, 2024 — exactly 90 days before Election Day.
The problem is the people who are being removed from the voter rolls are not, in fact, voters because they are not citizens, said Youngkin.
“With less than 30 days until the election, the Biden-Harris Department of Justice is filing an unprecedented lawsuit against me and the Commonwealth of Virginia, for appropriately enforcing a 2006 law signed by Democrat Tim Kaine that requires Virginia to remove noncitizens from the voter rolls – a process that starts with someone declaring themselves a non-citizen and then registering to vote,” Youngkin said.
Youngkin said that the lawsuit was a “desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections in the Commonwealth, the very crucible of American Democracy.”
At the beginning of Harris’s political career, in the run-up to her campaign to serve as California’s attorney general, she and co-author Joan O’C Hamilton published a small volume, entitled Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor’s Plan to Make Us Safer. The book helped to establish her credibility on criminal-justice issues.
However, according to Stefan Weber, a famed Austrian “plagiarism hunter” who has taken down politicians in the German-speaking world, Harris’s book contains more than a dozen “vicious plagiarism fragments.” Some of the passages he highlighted appear to contain minor transgressions—reproducing small sections of text; insufficient paraphrasing—but others seem to reflect more serious infractions, similar in severity to those found in Harvard president Claudine Gay’s doctoral thesis. (Harris did not respond to a request for comment.)
Let’s consider a selection of these excerpts from Harris’s book, beginning with one in which Harris discusses high school graduation rates. Here, she lifted verbatim language from an uncited NBC News report, with the duplicated material marked in italics:
In Detroit’s public schools, only 25 percent of the students who enrolled in grade nine graduated from high school, while 30.5 percent graduated in Indianapolis public schools and 34 percent received diplomas in the Cleveland Municipal City School District. Overall, about 70 percent of the U.S. students graduate from public and private schools on time with a regular diploma, and about 1.2 million students drop out annually. Only about half of the students served by public school systems in the nation’s largest cities receive diplomas.
There’s more. In another section of the book, Harris, without proper attribution, reproduced extensive sections from a John Jay College of Criminal Justice press release. She and her co-author passed off the language as their own, copying multiple paragraphs virtually verbatim. Here is the excerpt, with the airlifted material in italics and abbreviations, such as percentages and state names, treated as verbatim substitutions:
High Point had its first face-to-face meeting with drug dealers, from the city’s West End neighborhood, on May 18, 2004. The drug market shut down immediately and permanently, with a sustained 35 percent reduction in violent crime. High Point repeated the strategy in three additional markets over the next three years. There is virtually no remaining public drug dealing in the city, and serious crime has fallen 20 percent citywide.
The High Point Strategy has since been implemented in Winston-Salem, Greensboro, and Raleigh, North Carolina; in Providence, Rhode Island; and in Rockford, Illinois. The U.S. Department of Justice is launching a national program to replicate the strategy in ten additional cities.
In a section about a New York court program, Harris stole long passages directly from Wikipedia—long considered an unreliable source. She not only assumes the online encyclopedia’s accuracy, but copies its language nearly verbatim, without citing the source. Here is Harris’s language, with duplicated material in italics, based on the page as it appeared in December 2008, before she published the book:
The Mid-town [sic] Community Court was established as a collaboration between the New York State Unified Court System and the Center for Court Innovation. The court works in partnership with local residents, businesses, and social service agencies to organize community service projects and provide on-site social services, including drug treatment, mental health counseling, and job training. What was innovative about Midtown Court was that it required low-level offenders to pay back the neighborhood through community service, while at the same time it offered them help with problems that often underlie criminal behavior.
To make matters worse, in duplicating Wikipedia’s language, Harris seems to have missed critical information and misstated a relevant detail. She claims, in prose identical to the online encyclopedia’s, that “illegal vending was down 24 percent” as a result of the court’s policies. Early in the paragraph, Harris cites the Bureau of Justice Assistance report to substantiate the figure. But she made a mistake: On Wikipedia, the “24 percent” figure was apparently tied to a different report, which found that “arrests for unlicensed vending,” rather than unlicensed vending as such, “fell by 24 percent” (emphasis mine). Her reliance on Wikipedia, an unreliable source, led to an unreliable conclusion.
While the BJA report was not the proper source for the “24 percent” claim, it did appear in the Wikipedia entry’s list of citations, and apparently was a fruitful resource for Harris and her coauthor, as they reproduced substantial portions of its sentences.
Nothing says “commitment to rigorous academic scholarship” quite like not just quoting verbatim from Wikipedia, but doing so incompetently.
Host of Fox News “Special Report” Bret Baier finally snagged that interview with Vice President and selected Democrat nominee Kamala Harris. Harris was campaigning in Washington Crossing, PA and was proud of the former Republicans and Trump administration people who took the stage with her and happy with their endorsement, delighted in their support of her as a presidential candidate.
The entire interview was a train wreck, but there were particular moments that were exceptionally cringeworthy, damaging, and proved with glaring certainty why she is unfit to lead.
Baier started off with the topic of illegal immigration, and you could visibly see Harris deflate like a balloon before the first question was asked.
Immediately Harris tried to filibuster Baier and do this interview’s version of “I’m speaking.” Harris brought up the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, which she claimed addressed the flaws in the asylum system with more judges, 15 million more border agents, increased penalties, stemming the flow of fentanyl, shore up entry points, and how she has worked toward bipartisan efforts to strengthen the border.
Baier gently pushed back with documented facts, and Harris briefly got that deer in headlights look she gets when she is desperately trying to find her talking points. Then she jumped on her supposed record as California Attorney General (not her current position as VP) as proof that she knew how to handle this crisis. Failing to understand that the fact that a crisis exists is proof that you have no ability to correct it.
But the most purely evil and damning part of this topic of illegal immigration was the fact that Harris could not even form the words to apologize for allowing criminals into the country that resulted in the senseless deaths of Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin.
Former president Donald Trump poked fun at vice president Kamala Harris during the Al Smith dinner on Thursday evening, criticizing his political rival for failing to show up at the charity event in person.
Harris addressed the crowd at the white-tie event, which raises funds for Catholics charities, in a pre-recorded video – a highly unusual move for a presidential candidate. It has become a tradition for presidential candidates to speak at the event since Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy appeared together in 1960.
The vice president is the first presidential contender to skip out on the dinner since Walter Mondale in 1984.
There’s an auspicious precedent.
“I guess you should have told her the funds were going to bail out the looters and rioters in Minneapolis and she would have been here, guaranteed,” Trump said.
He went on to joke that Harris must be “out receiving communion from Gretchen Whitmer,” a reference to a viral video from earlier this month of the Michigan governor feeding a chip to a leftist influencer on her knees.
Trump accused the vice president of being “disrespectful to Catholics.”
He also quipped about the Democratic nominee’s odd’s of winning the election, saying, “There’s a group called White Dudes for Harris but I’m not worried about them. Their wives and their wives’ lovers are voting for me.”
Does Kamala Harris need a mea culpa in PA? Or does her disconnect from voters in the Rust Belt go beyond state lines and religion?
That question has rolled around in my head since reading William McGurn’s column yesterday at the Wall Street Journal. McGurn uses Gretchen Whitmer’s bizarre mockery of the Catholic Eucharist while wearing a Harris-Walz hat to argue that the Democrat anointee for the presidency now has a Whitmer-created problem. But is that entirely true, or does it go beyond Whitmer’s blasphemy?
McGurn recognizes a broader problem, but perhaps not its scope. First, he outlines the direct issues with Catholics, who comprise 30% of Pennsylvania:
As California’s attorney general, Ms. Harris signed several friend-of-the-court briefs opposing religious exemptions for private employers such as Hobby Lobby and religious nonprofits such as the Little Sisters of the Poor. She said she was “proud” to have co-sponsored California’s Reproductive FACT Act, which compelled pro-life pregnancy centers to display notices about where women could get an abortion. The Supreme Court in 2018 rejected the law as a likely violation of the First Amendment.
But perhaps Ms. Harris’s most notorious Catholic moment came after she was elected senator. When Brian Buescher was nominated for a federal judgeship, she grilled him about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s fraternal organization. Although President John F. Kennedy was also a Knight, Ms. Harris treated the group as though it were the Ku Klux Klan.
She would later co-sponsor the Equality Act, which the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops said could force doctors and hospitals to perform abortions they oppose. Last month she snubbed New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan by declining to attend this Thursday’s Al Smith dinner, an election-year staple that has brought Democratic and Republican candidates together in a civil setting for decades.
Those are the direct issues, and those aren’t limited to Pennsylvania. Overall, Republicans now have a statistically significant edge in party ID among Catholics, according to Pew polling this year, 50/44. Nationally, Catholics accounted for 25% of the vote in 2020, although apparently pollsters didn’t include data on religion in state-level exit polling. One can expect a similarly significant number of Catholics in Wisconsin and Michigan, and perhaps slightly lower levels in states like Arizona and Georgia. In every state, however, Catholics make up a far larger part of the electorate than the Arab-Americans did in Michigan, and yet both Biden and Harris obsessed over their support all year long.
That’s one problem, but that’s not the only problem. A more recent Pew poll shows Harris trailing Donald Trump with Catholics by five points, even worse than Hillary Clinton performed in 2016. But the issue isn’t entirely religious:
Mr. Biden may be the last of the big-time Democrats whose base was the white working class. But it confers a sensibility Ms. Harris is conspicuously lacking. …
Politico reports that Ms. Harris’s prospects are “considerably dicier” because of a “cultural dissonance” between her progressive San Francisco persona and white working-class Catholic Pennsylvanians.
That gets closer to the real danger for Democrats, but it has less to do with “white” and “Catholic” than it does to working class. Biden had a political and cultural connection to working-class voters, not just because of his Catholicism but because of his background. He fit into that milieu even if that mainly came as a conceit, especially after fifty years in Washington DC, but he could talk in their language too … at least before his brain turned to jelly. People keep overlooking his 2012 address to the Democrat convention, which turned out to be the best of the week, in which he artfully bridged the gap between the working class and the Academia-drenched elite that had mainly taken over the party in the current generation.
Harris simply can’t do that. Not only is she incapable of connecting at anywhere near that level, she only recently even showed a desire to do so. Her lame attempt at repeating the mantra “I was raised in a middle-class household” ad nauseam is about as close as she gets. Culturally, she comes from the Academia-drenched elite and speaks their language, to the extent she speaks any political language effectively at all. Harris tosses around clichés as a means to connect to working class voters, which initially appeared to appeal to them but have turned into a major liability now.
The Democratic Party’s naked contempt for both religious believers and the actual working class has been evident for a long, long time.
More on the subject: “Blowing Off the Al Smith Dinner Might Have Cost Harris Pennsylvania — and the Election.”
The Catholic vote is not as monolithic as it used to be. In 1928, the Catholic vote was overwhelmingly Democratic, concentrated in urban centers. By 1960, the Catholic vote was fracturing through intermarriage and economic issues, but Kennedy still received about 65% of the vote from his co-religionists.
Today, Donald Trump can expect to get about 60% of the Catholic vote. In Pennsylvania, The Catholic vote might be pivotal in a state that Harris absolutely, positively has to win.
“Her San Francisco progressive persona isn’t a good fit for Joe Biden’s native state,” William McGurn wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday.
Snip. “In an election in Pennsylvania that will almost certainly be decided by less than 100,000 votes, Harris skipping the Al Smith Dinner was not only stupid but might be the mistake that cost her the White House.” Eh, probably not. Harris will probably lose the election because she’s part of an administration had presided over a wretched economy and let in millions of illegal aliens. Plus she’s a horrible candidate that literally nobody voted for. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Google is up to its old tricks, “hiding Conservative news on election 23 pages deep.””When using the search term “donald trump presidential race 2024,” researchers had to scroll through 23 pages of results before they come to a U.S.-based right-leaning news source, a single Fox News video six results down on the 23rd page.”
An excerpt from the book Walz' wife was reading to children shows them all riding the gay dad while he puts a vacuum cleaner up to his mouth. I'm sure it's nothing. From: Bathe the Cat. pic.twitter.com/2npr5s6mDN
Gwen Walz also seems to feel that the best way to get men to the polls is assigning them homework.
Can you put some really money behind that and put it on air? Maybe during college football?
There are still men out there who don’t hate this campaign with every fiber of their being, and I think this ad could be enough to nag them right into Trump’s arms. https://t.co/vk6jwJY9oM
Yes, social justice warrior teachers do want to trans your kids. “Court Shuts Down BLM Teacher Trying To Force Trans Ideologies On Kids.”
Megan Williams is a first-grade teacher who forced her 6 and 7-year-old students to “observe” so-called Transgender Awareness Day. This Black Lives Matter activist subjected these small children to non-curricular propaganda about “gender identity” and sex changes.
Williams disturbingly went so far as to tell these kids that their “parents ma[d]e a guess whether they’re a boy or a girl” and may have been wrong. Parents complained, but Williams was backed by her school principal and superintendent.
Three mothers fired back by filing a lawsuit against Williams, the school, the district, and district officials in June of 2022. Their goal was to obtain a moratorium “on gender dysphoria and transgender transitioning,” parental notice and opt-out rights on the topic absent such a prohibition, compensatory damages, and punitive damages.
Thankfully, Judge Joy Conti of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania just ruled largely in favor of these mothers.
Judge Conti stated that “parents have a constitutional right to reasonable and realistic advance notice and the ability to opt their elementary-age children of noncurricular instruction on transgender topics and to not have requirements for notice and opting out of those topics that are more stringent than those for other sensitive topics.”
Here’s the remarks in the aired clip shared by Johnson:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%…The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
And here — I’ll put it in bold — is what CBS edited out for the broadcast:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, the FEMA Director says there’s only $11 billion left from that $20 billion that was allocated. So that’s a different accounting than this 2% you say was distributed.
SPEAKER JOHNSON: Yeah. So they’ve obligated some funds, but they’ve only distributed 2%, and when I was there on the ground, and you should go, I mean, bring the cameras and talk to the people there, they’ll tell you, don’t- don’t take politicians words for this or the administration’s word, talk to the people there on the ground they had not been provided the resources almost two weeks out from the storm that they desperately needed. And when I was there 13 days, post- you know, post the storm hitting that state, people are still being rescued. They’re stuck in the higher elevations in the mountains because the roads are down and all the rest. So they need every- every available resource and all hands on deck. The rescue and recovery efforts are still going on, and then we address the rest of it.
Issues in the debate ranged from abortion to the border crisis, and allowing boys in girls’ sports.
On abortion, Cruz said he supported Texas’ pro-life laws while acknowledging that other states would make different decisions.
“In Texas, we overwhelmingly support that parents should be notified and have to consent before their child gets an abortion. In Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that late-term abortions in the eighth and ninth months, that’s too extreme. And I’ll tell you, in Texas, we overwhelmingly agree that taxpayer money shouldn’t pay for abortions,” said Cruz.
He went on to attack his opponent’s position on abortion as extreme, noting that Allred “voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental notification law. He voted in favor of striking down Texas’ parental consent law. He voted to legalize late-term abortions, including the eighth and ninth months.”
Allred, meanwhile, said he would fight to “restore a woman’s right to choose” and to “make Roe v. Wade the law of the land again.”
Snip.
One of the biggest issues playing out in the campaign thus far has been Allred’s position on allowing boys in girls’ sports. The issue has been the target of Cruz’s campaign ads and led to Allred denying the accusations, despite voting against legislation to protect girls sports.
“I know a lot of y’all at home, for example, saw two biological men competing in women’s boxing at the Olympics,” said Cruz. “That was wildly unfair. You know, my youngest daughter plays volleyball. It’s not fair for a biological boy or man, a teenage boy, to spike the volleyball at her, and he has voted repeatedly in favor of that.”
FEMA’s entanglement with the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous open southern border policies by diverting storm relief funds ($1.4 billion, according to NYPost) for illegal and legal aliens may have undermined the federal agency’s ability to effectively manage emergencies, such as the Katrina-like disaster unfolding in the US Southeast.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas dropped the bombshell [two weeks ago]: FEMA “does not have the funds” to see Americans through the rest of this Atlantic hurricane season. The federal agency drained the funds by prioritizing taxpayer funds for illegal and legal aliens versus US citizens as the Biden-Harris globalist team rolled out the red carpet to anyone, even terrorists, via the open southern borders.
Connect the dots, if you can,” Tim Murtaugh, an adviser to former President Trump’s campaign, wrote on X, adding, “DHS says FEMA might not have enough cash to help people through hurricane season. But in 2 years of a new Biden-Harris program, they’ve spent $1 BILLION on housing and other services for migrants.”
Shedding a whole heck of a lot of color on the situation, Savanah Hernandez, a reporter for Turning Point USA, wrote on X that she has uncovered some of the “first looks” inside fully furnished luxury apartments for migrants that received free rent and utilities for two years.
Hernandez wrote in a note on The Post Millennial:
The Brunswick Landing apartments in Maine sparked controversy earlier this year when it was discovered that homeless migrants in the area were getting the opportunity to live in the units rent-free for up to two years. Migrants living in the apartments shared that not only is the rent-free, the utilities are paid and we got an inside look at the furnished apartments that would run the average American about $2,300 dollars.
“FEMA: Disaster Relief No Longer About Emergency Response, It’s About ‘Disaster Equity.'”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is supposed to be the government’s premier emergency relief organization in times of disaster, like the situation now faced by victims of Hurricane Helene’s aftermath in North Carolina and Tennessee.
But according to the FEMA website, the agency now places higher priority on instituting Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity guidelines than on easing the suffering of Americans displaced by disaster.
Among the goals listed in FEMA’s strategic plan are to:
Instill equity as a foundation for emergency management
Lead whole of community in climate resilience
Promote and sustain a ready FEMA & prepared nation
What does that look like in action?
Here’s an example of a FEMA disaster preparedness meeting where participants discuss how LGBTQIA individuals were suffering disproportionally before the storm compared to other disaster victims.
Notice how the focus shifts from doing the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people to ensuring that they are promoting “equity in disaster relief.”
Social justice is racist poison that ruins everything, and now it’s costing Americans their lives.
Here we go again. “Report: Migrant Caravans Leaving Southern Mexico Headed Toward US Border.”
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has declared a “blood feud” against three federal lawmakers from neighboring North Caucasus republics in his first comments on last month’s deadly shooting outside the Moscow headquarters of Russia’s largest online retailer Wildberries.
Kadyrov has vowed to help Vladislav Bakalchuk, the estranged husband of Wildberries CEO Tatiana Kim — Russia’s wealthiest woman — to return his wife and block the merger of their e-commerce giant with the smaller outdoor advertising group Russ.
The family and business dispute escalated last month when Bakalchuk led a group of men to Wildberries’ Moscow offices and allegedly tried to force their way into the building. Two security guards, who were ethnic Ingush, were killed in the shootout and multiple felony charges, including murder, were filed against Bakalchuk and several other ethnic Chechens involved in the incident.
Kadyrov is a piece of work, but one with a sufficiently strong independent power base that Putin has felt compelled to buy him off. Kadyrov declaring a blood fued against Russian officials probably isn’t a sign of harmony in Russia’s government…
Sinwar is only the latest high-profile terrorist to meet his fate at the hands of the IDF. His predecessor at the top of Hamas’s hierarchy, Ismail Haniyeh, was killed in Tehran when a bomb covertly smuggled into an Iranian diplomatic safehouse exploded in July. Mohammed Deif, the commander of Hamas’s military wing, was neutralized in a July airstrike after seven unsuccessful IDF attempts to deliver him to justice. Hamas deputy commander Marwan Issa met his fate in March, two months after his deputy, Saleh al-Arouri, was cut down in the suburbs of Beirut by an Israeli drone.
A little over a year after the war Hamas inaugurated against Israel on 10/7 in the deadliest one-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, the terrorist organization has been entirely decapitated. Its fighters are scattered, disorganized, and reduced to chaotic rearguard actions against the Israeli troops busily rolling them up. Critics of Israel’s campaign like to insist that Hamas is an idea and therefore cannot simply be dispatched like the thousands of its fighters the IDF has cut down. True enough, but an idea cannot shoot at you or launch rocket attacks on your cities. That requires well-connected, deeply embedded commanders with years of experience conducting asymmetrical insurgent attacks on a superior force. Those commanders are all dead.
The Israeli officials who have pursued Hamas’s barbarians until the end have done so without much encouragement from the West. Indeed, the death of every Hamas commander was fretted over in the West as though it created a new impediment to peace and to the negotiations over the hostages Hamas itself captured on 10/7 — 97 of whom still have not yet been located. Joe Biden’s administration withdrew almost all rhetorical support for Israeli operations in places like Rafah, where Sinwar himself was taken out. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government deserves the gratitude of the civilized world for rejecting these entreaties seeking Israel’s surrender in its righteous war.
The Israelis did not choose the way this war began, but they will be the authors of its conclusion. And the end is near. The Israelis have brought the Gaza Strip closer to its day of liberation from the tyranny of an illegitimate terrorist regime than all the combined efforts of the peace processors in the global diplomatic corps ever achieved. It is a shame that the American administration that stood so stalwartly with Israel at the outset of this campaign willingly sacrificed its ability to celebrate alongside its Israeli counterparts. This should be America’s victory, too. But by spending months on end agonizing over how Israel was achieving its honorable objective, the Biden White House and its allies lost sight of our shared strategic goals.
We hit the Houthis with B-2s. I didn’t have that on my 2024 dance card…
“Williamson County’s Democrat Sheriff Accused of Accepting Pay-to Play Donation. On September 24, the Williamson County Commissioners Court issued a contract for over $500,000 to Family Hospital Management Company for ‘Jail Inmate Psychological Services’. Just four days before a county contract was issued, [Democrat Sheriff Mike] Gleason received a $20,000 campaign donation from the founder and CEO of the company that received the contract.” “Jail Inmate Psychological Services” sounds like a great avenue for leftwing graft…
“A North Carolina Democratic county leader, who is also running for a seat in the state House, was arrested after allegedly stealing Trump signs near a road last week. Moore County, North Carolina, County Chair Lowell Simon, 68, was charged with two counts of misdemeanor larceny of political signs after he admitted to removing Trump signs and keeping them in his car.”
“The Young Turks’ Ana Kasparian says she ‘woke up’ after being molested by LA homeless man and ‘the good people’ slammed her for talking about it. Kasparian described feeling “politically homeless” and shared how the backlash she received from liberals after the assault played a key role in her reevaluation.” Seems like social justice warriors feel that being molested by a homeless man or raped by an illegal alien is a small price to pay for taxpayer-subsidized abortion…
Boy dressed as girl assaults actual girl, gives her a concussion and blurred vision. You know what the school administrators did, don’t you? That’s right, they suspended the victim.
“Edgewood ISD Superintendent Gets Raise While Students Are Failing. Edgewood ISD extended Superintendent Eduardo Hernández’s contract until 2029 and raised his annual salary to $291,923.””Only 23 percent of Edgewood ISD students can read, write, and do math at or above grade level.” Edgewood is on the west side of San Antonio.
Columbia U is trying to make their campus Judenfrei.
Columbia University is temporarily suspending a prominent pro-Israel business professor’s access to campus after he publicly criticized school officials for permitting anti-Israel campus demonstrations on the anniversary of the October 7 massacre.
Columbia notified Israeli-American business professor Shai Davidai on Tuesday that he will be banned from campus for violating university policy on harassing school employees.
On Tuesday night, Davidai posted a video on social media accusing Columbia of retaliating against him for posting a video of himself asking Columbia’s chief operating officer Cas Halloway why he allowed pro-Hamas demonstrators to protest on the anniversary of October 7.
“Right now I was supposed to be at the school of social work at Columbia, where the Jewish students are holding their own memorial service for the senseless violence of October 7th. But then I got a call from my lawyer, who says the university has decided to not allow me to be on campus anymore,” Davidai said.
“Why? Because of October 7th. Because I was not afraid to stand up to the hateful mob. And because I was not afraid to expose Mr. f**king Cas Holloway for not doing anything about it.”
Davidai should sue them over equal rights violation for millions. Let a thousand lawsuits bloom.
Researchers have unearthed two sophisticated toolsets that a nation-state hacking group—possibly from Russia—used to steal sensitive data stored on air-gapped devices, meaning those that are deliberately isolated from the Internet or other networks to safeguard them from malware.
One of the custom tool collections was used starting in 2019 against a South Asian embassy in Belarus. A largely different toolset created by the same threat group infected a European Union government organization three years later. Researchers from ESET, the security firm that discovered the toolkits, said some of the components in both were identical to those fellow security firm Kaspersky described in research published last year and attributed to an unknown group, tracked as GoldenJackal, working for a nation-state. Based on the overlap, ESET has concluded that the same group is behind all the attacks observed by both firms.
The practice of air gapping is typically reserved for the most sensitive networks or devices connected to them, such as those used in systems for voting, industrial control, manufacturing, and power generation. A host of malware used in espionage hacking over the past 15 years (for instance, here and here) demonstrate that air gapping isn’t a foolproof protection. It nonetheless forces threat groups to expend significant resources that are likely obtainable only by nation-states with superior technical acumen and unlimited budgets. ESET’s discovery puts GoldenJackal in a highly exclusive collection of threat groups.
Then there’s this: “The basic flow of the attack is, first, infecting an Internet-connected device through a means ESET and Kaspersky have been unable to determine.” There’s a 99% chance that these air-gaped systems are being attacked through the usual human engineering or security lapse vectors. Which leaves a 1% chance of some form of electromagnetic witchcraft…
“WeightWatchers Squeezes Higher After Unveiling New Low-Cost GLP-1 Treatment…WW announced the addition of a new compounded semaglutide to its lineup to beat America’s obesity crisis sparked by the processed foods industrial complex. The new treatment starts at $129 per month, and each additional month will cost $189. This is significantly less than GLP-1 obesity treatments from big pharma, which cost north of $1,000 a month.”
Fiat/Stellantis merged with Chrysler in 2014, and now they’re threatening to shut it down in two years.
BrucePac listeria meat recall expands, now includes some HEB items.
Disney plans to slash budgets on Marvel movies going forward. On the one hand, that’s probably prudent, since it gets harder and harder to turn a profit with soaring budgets. On the other hand, Marvel’s recent problems aren’t a product of big budgets, they’re a product of wokeness and crappy scripts.
Rick Beato has an interesting video with R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills. I didn’t realize that the other three members wrote the music then handed it off to Michael Stipe, who would go off and create the lyrics by himself.
Lebanon’s Hezbollah group confirmed on Saturday that its leader and one of its founding members, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in a southern suburb of Beirut.
The killing of the powerful militant group’s longtime leader sent shockwaves throughout Lebanon and the Middle East, where he has been a dominant political and military figure for more than three decades.
Nasrallah, linked by Israel to numerous deadly attacks on Israeli and Jewish targets, has been on Israel’s kill list for decades. His assassination is by far the biggest and most consequential of Israel’s targeted killings in years, and significantly escalates the war in the Middle East. The Israeli military said it carried out a precise airstrike on Friday while Hezbollah leaders were meeting at their headquarters in Dahiyeh, south of Beirut.
Quick reaction:
Good.
Fuck that guy.
Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that has a long history not only of killing Israeli women and children, but also killing Americans, stretching back into the 1980s, and we should celebrate every time a member is killed. Indeed, a whole bunch people who oppose jihad reportedly celebrated Nasrallah’s death in Syria and Iran. Muhannad Alazzeh, former member of the Jordanian Senate, explains:
Hezbollah is an ideological party based on the principle of Wilayat al-Faqih or Guardianship of the Jurist, which is the cornerstone of the Shiite doctrine. It demands the loyalty of its followers to the guardian jurist, who acts on behalf of heaven’s command. That person is Iran’s Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, and Hezbollah’s fealty to Khomeini is what pushed the party without hesitation to engage in civil wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, and to intervene in the protests in Bahrain years ago. These interventions by Hezbollah were not against Israel but against the Muslim citizens in those countries, most of whom were engaged in revolts against tyrannical dictatorial regimes, who built their power off the bodies of their opponents.
Hezbollah’s support for criminal and corrupt regimes in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Iran has had a much stronger impact on the Arab and Islamic masses than Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel, which is why the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah is not an event worth shedding tears for most of these masses.
Hezbollah’s involvement in repressive actions in neighboring countries elevated strongman leaders who oppressed their fellow Muslims, which angered enough people that Israel was able to recruit a large base for espionage missions, one which undoubtedly helped in carrying out successive assassinations of Hezbollah leaders, the last but not least of which was the assassination of Nasrallah.
Even at home in Lebanon, Hezbollah is accused by Lebanese citizens (with the exception of the Shiite community) of being an armed militia that undermines and weakens the Lebanese state. This accusation has turned out to be true over the past years; Hezbollah took up arms against Saad Hariri’s Future Movement in 2008 and occupied buildings and facilities in Beirut in a blatant show of force. The group was also accused of being involved in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
From the perspective of the overwhelming majority of Arab and Muslim peoples, Hezbollah is a destructive element that fuels sectarian conflicts and supports authoritarian regimes so long as these regimes share a common sectarian affiliation with Hezbollah and the Supreme Leader of Iran wishes to support them.
Now Israel must deal with Nasrallah’s successor, Hassan Khalil Yassin, who—
Oh wait. They just did. “The IDF eliminated senior Hezbollah intelligence array terrorist Hassan Khalil Yassin in an additional precision strike in the Dahieh district in Beirut on Saturday, the military reported.”
Join Our Team! Now hiring for all positions, no experience necessary. Starting at $15 per hour plus great fringe benefits. Send applications to Tehran Temp Services pic.twitter.com/3SjCuaUtjF
He left out “opportunities for rapid advancement.”
One of the primary goals of warfare is to take out an enemy’s C3: command, control and communications. Operation Grim Beeper took out their communications, and the bombing campaign has taken out their command and control. It’s as close to an absolute decapitation strike as I’ve seen in warfare. They’ve taken out all of Hezbollah’s leadership, along with several of their Iranian handlers. Hezbollah’s network is gone, and it will take years to reconstitute those hierarchies of competence, if ever. Does Hezbollah have a written succession chart for this situation? Does the Assistant Undersecretary for Raping Jewish Women move all the way up to the top spot? Expect a lot of power-jockeying and internecine warfare among surviving lower-level terrorists, all of whom, in classic Arab fashion, see no reason why they shouldn’t be the ones running things
The MSM is doing their usual hand-wringing over “escalation” and “a wider war.” With whom? Israel has effectively destroyed Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Syria is still mired in its own unending civil war. Israel aircraft are now pounding the snot out of the Houthis in Yemen. And via Instapundit:
There are unconfirmed reports in Iranian media of a helicopter crash in southwestern Iran.
It is reported that Mohammad Abdul Salam, the head of Houthi coordination in Iran, and several others have been killed.
Is Iran going to send Republican Revolutionary Guard units through Syria to attack the Golan Heights? Are they finally going to pack their much-rumored nuke on one of their missiles and pray really hard it gets past Arrow-2 and -3, David’s Sling and Iron Dome? I’m not even sure the Mahdi personally assuring the mullahs he would unoccult himself would convince them to go toe-to-toe with Israel in a game of nuclear war.
Israel has effectively destroyed its nearest foes and delivered blows to Iran’s prestige it will take the mullahs years, if not decades, to recover from. As I said back in July, Israel is settling all family business.
There’s obviously going to be a lot of fallout:
What happens to Lebanon’s ruling March 8 coalition, of which Hezbollah is a member? How many Hezbollah members are even still alive? Who do they even take orders from if the entire “military wing” leadership is dead? It’s also no secret that a lot of Hezbollah’s coalition “partners” (especially Christians and Druze) hate their guts, and might take the opportunity for a quick political divorce.
One reason Bashar Assad has been able to maintain his tenuous grip on power in Syria is the active support of Hezbollah. With Hezbollah gone, Assad’s position becomes more precarious still, especially with overextended allies Iran and Russia reeling from their own difficulties.
Whoever is running the Obama-Biden-Harris foreign policy axis just had their Netanyahu loathing and “Now Israel, you play nice!” dictates blow up in their face. (Exactly a year ago, Biden Administration National Security Advisor Jack Sullivan declared that “The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades.” How’d that tempting fate think work out for you, Jake?) Their insistence on playing footsie with Iran (because…why? Just because they hate America? Or did some of those billions they handed over to the Mullahs somehow get kicked back into Democratic Party pockets?) and propping up the Palestinians got them October 7, and October 7 finally got Israel to finish off Hamas and Hezbollah in the same war. And Israel wiping the map with Hezbollah and Hamas may end up pushing those “Muslim Michigan voters” we keep hearing about (the ones Democrats spent so much time and effort importing) to vote against Harris in November.
Benjamin Netanyahu ignored Biden Administration blithering to finish off Israel’s terrorist enemies, much to the consternation of global anti-Israeli political elites. Netanyahu will probably emerge from the Israeli-Hamas not only stronger than ever, but possibly the most significant Israeli leader since David Ben-Gurion.
Superman gets tired of Iran’s catspaws tugging on his cape, the Biden Recession has both inflation and budget deficits soaring, another polar vortex barrels down on Texas, and the crazy-eyed girlfriend of a corrupt Democrat shows up on the Epstein list. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
The Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen just had to keep fucking around, so now they’ve found out.
The U.S. and Britain launched air strikes in Yemen on Thursday in response to the Iran-backed Houthis’ recent attacks against vessels in the Red Sea.
The strikes came hours after White House national-security spokesman John Kirby called on the Houthis to “stop these attacks” and warned that the group would “bear the consequences for any failure to do so.”
The militants have launched 27 attacks on vessels in the Red Sea since November 19, the U.S. military said earlier on Thursday. The group says the attacks are in protest of the Israel–Hamas war.
The retaliatory strikes targeted a source of the group’s attacks, Bloomberg News reported, noting that heavy explosions were seen in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa and the port city of Al Hudaydah. The attacks were carried out with support from Australia, the Netherlands, Bahrain, and Canada, while the U.K. contributed aircraft.
President Biden confirmed the strikes in a statement on Thursday evening, explaining that the action was “in direct response to unprecedented Houthi attacks against international maritime vessels in the Red Sea — including the use of anti-ship ballistic missiles for the first time in history.”
“These attacks have endangered U.S. personnel, civilian mariners, and our partners, jeopardized trade, and threatened freedom of navigation,” he said, noting that more than 50 countries had been impacted by the attacks on commercial shipping, while crews from more than 20 countries have been threatened or taken hostage in acts of piracy.
“More than 2,000 ships have been forced to divert thousands of miles to avoid the Red Sea — which can cause weeks of delays in product shipping times. And on January 9, Houthis launched their largest attack to date — directly targeting American ships,” Biden said.
Suchomimus has taken a break from his Ukraine war work to do a video on the strike:
Plus another one on the locations hit:
Is there a Habitual Linecrosser video for this strike? Yes, yes there is:
The Biden Recession bites even deeper, with higher inflation and record food prices. And those are just the official numbers. Food inflation seems a hell of a lot higher than official numbers are letting on…
Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis appointed a former romantic partner to lead the prosecution against the former president and his associates, a former Trump campaign official and co-defendant alleged in a court filing late Monday.
“The district attorney and the special prosecutor have been seen in private together in and about the Atlanta area and believed to have co-habited in some form or fashion at a location owned by neither of them,” the court document submitted by Michael Roman’s legal representatives argues. Roman served briefly as a special assistant and researcher to President Trump.
The submission does not offer any explicit proof of the DA’s connection to special prosecutor Nathan Wade, but instead claims “sources close to both the special prosecutor and the district attorney have confirmed they had an ongoing, personal relationship.” Wade was paid over half a million dollars throughout his involvement in the Trump election-interference case, which Willis has overseen and authorized.
How long until the radical left argues that it’s perfectly normal with elected black female Democrats like Fani Willis and Kamala Harris to commit adultery with other Democrats to further their career, and it’s just those right-wing troglodytes who are hung up over it?
It’s a problem in the western world that is rarely discussed in the media beyond puff-piece articles and glancing polls that avoid connecting the dots. The precipitous decline of dating, committed relationships and marriage along with a flatline in population in the past couple decades in the US is treated as a novelty issue rather than the threat to the stability of civilization that it actually is. History shows that without the traditional family structure, numerous ugly societal consequences follow.
One could argue, though, that the situation is far worse than that. We may be heading into a future where families become a novelty, and many argue that the root cause is feminism and the hyperinflated delusions of progressive women.
In order to understand the problem we have to look at the stats.
More than 50% of American women are still childless by age 30. By age 35 fertility goes into steep decline with women having a 15% chance of becoming pregnant, and a less than 5% chance of motherhood at age 40. Meaning, the best window of opportunity for women to find a compatible partner and build a family is in their 20s.
Feminists argue, though, that this is the time in a woman’s life when they should be building a career and having fun. Family life, they say, is an artificial prison “created by the patriarchy” in order to oppress the fairer sex. Corporate media and Hollywood entertainment often reinforce this narrative and encourage unrealistic life goals.
The propaganda has generated what many refer to as the “Female Happiness Paradox.” Surveys show that increased power, job access and responsibility for women in society since the 1970s has also led to a diametrically opposed decline in overall happiness for those same women. The correlation suggests the exact opposite of what feminism originally promised and that the ideology has been a net negative.
Though some will argue that a general decline in economic conditions is the real cause, surveys show that women have suffered a far more pronounced drop in happiness compared to men. Meaning, men were already acclimated to the struggles of the workaday world and their roles as providers and protectors. Women were happy until they joined men in the trenches.
For men, the reaction has been to back away from the dating scene and the double standards involved. Over 63% of men under the age of 30 are now single; that’s up from 51% in 2019. The majority of single men say this is by choice and that they are seeking to avoid relationships altogether. Why? The consensus appears to be that modern western women cost too much money and cause too much trouble.
Fear of failed marriage is one aspect that has the younger generation of men on edge, with family courts still largely in favor of women in divorce settlements and child custody. This is one reason why marriage rates have declined by 60% since the 1970s. However, the obstacles go well beyond divorce and into a new culture of female entitlement.
The word on the street is “Hoeflation”: The dramatic increase in cost for men today to maintain a relationship with a woman while the quality of women continues to go down. That is to say, it is an increase in female expectations vs what they bring to the table in a relationship.
In other words, women of the past used to have something to offer beyond sexual companionship, from greater femininity, greater potential for motherhood, less combativeness and narcissism, as well as a superior ability to raise children and maintain a home. Such traits are highly attractive to men even after 60 years of widespread feminism, but are seen as non-existent among women under 30 in 2023.
It should be noted that “Hoeflation” seems to be directly linked to progressive influences, and not all women fall into this category. Unfortunately, around 71% of young women identify with progressive beliefs, as opposed to young men who are only 53% progressive. It should also be noted that progressive today means something a lot different from what it meant in the 1990s (progressive now means woke, or extreme leftist cultism).
Terrified journalists being forced to kneel in a TV studio by gunmen pointing high-powered weapons at their heads as the cameras rolled, police officers pleading for their lives after being kidnapped on duty.
The scenes which have unfolded in Ecuador show the extent to which this once peaceful haven in Latin America has descended into violence.
Snip.
Ecuador’s president, Daniel Noboa, has ordered the armed forces to restore order in the country after days of unrest which saw two gang leaders escape from jail, prison guards held hostage, and explosive devices set off in a number of cities across the country.
In the most dramatic attack, a group of armed men forced their way into the studios of TC Television in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, and tried to force one of the presenters to read out a message live on air.
The gunmen were eventually overpowered by soldiers and have been arrested but the live footage of the stand-off between the hooded men and the armed forces while TC staff cowered on the floor has terrified Ecuadoreans.
“Ohio House Votes to Override DeWine’s Veto of Bill Banning Child Gender Medicalization.” An Ohio senate vote on overriding the veto is scheduled for January 24.
Second Amendment victory: ” In Stunning About-Face, 9th Circuit Prohibits California from Banning Concealed Carry in Public Places.”
From the court’s Order Granting Plaintiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction:
California will not allow concealed carry permitholders to effectively practice what the Second Amendment promises. [The new law’s] coverage is sweeping, repugnant to the Second Amendment, and openly defiant of the Supreme Court. The law designates twenty-six categories of places, such as hospitals, public transportation, places that sell liquor for on-site consumption, playgrounds, parks, casinos, stadiums, libraries, amusement parks, zoos, places of worship, and banks, as “sensitive places” where concealed carry permitholders cannot carry their handguns. SB2 turns nearly every public place in California into a “sensitive place,” effectively abolishing the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding and exceptionally qualified citizens to be armed and to defend themselves in public.
Slowly but surely, Bruen is stopping the gun grabbers dead in their tracks.
“Director of ‘Bronx Rises Against Gun Violence,’ Caught With Illegal Guns, Sentenced To Prison…Michael Rodriguez, 49, the now-former director of “Bronx Rises Against Gun Violence” was sentenced to ten years in state prison following his arrest last summer on drug and gun charges.”
Nearly 59,000 registered Pennsylvania Democrats left the party in 2023; that makes more voters than fans needed to fill the capacity of the Franklin Field Football Stadium at the University of Pennsylvania.
Of those nearly 59,000 who left the Democratic Party, 36,950 switched to the Republican party, and 21,644 switched their party affiliation to “other,” the category the Pennsylvania Department of State uses in its data to cover parties such as Green and Libertarian.
“As the Democrat Party tilts further to the progressive left, more historically traditional, working-class families are moving to the Republican Party, both in terms of how they vote and how they’re registered,” conservative political strategist Charlie Gerow told the Epoch Times.
Scary traffic controller incompetence via Instapundit:
Holy smokes this is terrifying. Female Air traffic controller argues with a pilot who’s been flying for 15 years about a landing and says she “googled it” so she’s right and knows best.
DTO is the airport for Denton, Texas, a college town northwest of Fort Worth.
“Georgia Tech researchers claim they have created ‘the world’s first functional semiconductor made from graphene.’ Importantly, the research team’s epitaxial graphene is claimed to be compatible with conventional microelectronics processing methods and is thus a realistic silicon alternative. Moreover, this refined material achieves a desirable band gap for electronics applications and has latent potential for future quantum computing devices.” Higher band gap is necessary for switching a circuit from on to off; it’s what puts the “semi” in “semiconductors.”
Billions of insects are predicted to burst out of the ground in the United States during late spring, in an event which hasn’t happened for more than 200 years.
The red-eyed, winged insects called periodical cicadas, emerge in 13 to 17-year cycles and are completely harmless.
In 2024, two of these groups – called Brood XIII (meaning 13) and Brood XIX (19) – are predicted to burst from the ground together for the first time since 1803.
The US states of Wisconsin and Illinois will be mainly affected as billions of the bugs making a loud clicking noise will fill the air, cover branches, sign posts and pavements for about a month later this year.
Interesting how the BBC feels it has to explain what Roman numerals mean…
“Three Austin Police Department (APD) SWAT officers have been cleared by a Travis County grand jury following a deadly shooting last year.” As well they should be. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Another day, another machete wielding lunatic keeping Austin weird. Steve Adler may be out of office, but his legacy lives on…
The Texans host a playoff game tomorrow after winning three games each in the previous two seasons. But ESPN hates rookie quarterback phenom C. J. Stroud giving all the glory to God.
Nick Saban retires. That’s a lot of turnover among legendary winners in one week…
Echo: “When it comes to casting roles like this, you usually have to choose between fighters who can’t act, or actors who can’t fight. But unfortunately, Alaqua Cox can’t seem to do either…Because she can’t speak, she really needs to sell the performance with her body language and facial expressions. The problem is, she doesn’t seem to have any.”
It’s hard to report on Houthi rebels telling U.S. armed forces to “bring it on” and keep a straight face. It’s like Steve Urkel declaring he’s going to kick Mike Tyson’s ass, or Bambi vs. Godzilla.
I mean, their video features a Northrup F-5, a plane introduced to service in 1964 and last manufactured in 1987. It would be very, very unlikely to defeat an F-15, much less an F-35, which would probably splash it from 50 miles away with an AIM-120 and be back in time for breakfast.
I’m a bottomless well of Skiffy pop culture references.
And the rest of their air force (or what little of it survives after Saudi air strikes) is old (and probably ill-maintained) Soviet crap of the type that got smoked by F-15s during Desert Storm more than 30 years ago.
Beyond that, the Houthis probably only have the shitty drones Iran sells to Russia, and the even shittier rockets they give to Hamas, and neither of those will get the job done, either.
So: Yeah.
So instead of the laughable idea of direct Houthi-U.S. military confrontation, let’s turn to Peter Zeihan (yeah, him again) to talk about who the biggest losers are in the Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. (Hint: It’s not the U.S., or Israel.)
“Militants in Yemen are launching a combination of low-grade ballistic missiles and drones at commercial shipping in the Red Sea. And that’s led the 10 major shipping companies of the world to basically suspend operations in that area, and either tell their ships to wait [until] the threat passes, or simply sail around the Red Sea completely, which means going all the way around Africa for the Asia-Europe run.”
“Here we have basically a bunch of drug-adled militants, some of the world’s least competent ones, operating from some of the world’s least valuable land in Yemen, probably at the instigation of the Iranians who are their primary supporter, because this is a little conflict that is a needle in the side of Saudi Arabia cost them very little.”
“This is is not a formal shutting down of trade, this is more of a heavy annoyance.”
It’s not the danger of being sunk deterring traffic, it’s the dangerous of losing insurance for going into a zone of conflict.
Who’s hurt worst by all this? First, China. “Roughly 30% of all global containerized traffic [goes through Suez], and the biggest single chunk of that is Chinese exports to the European Union…it increases the sailing distance by 1/3rd to 2/3rds, and that means you need 1/3rd to 2/3rd more container ships to maintain the same flows. So we’re going to see a lot of pinches in the supply chains for finished goods.”
“In an environment where consumption is basically seized up in China and all they have left are exports, it’s also going to make it a little bit easier for the Europeans to put trade sanctions on the Chinese for product dumping.”
The Saudis might find it a bit more difficult to ship crude to Europe, but there are some ways around that.
Then there’s Russia: “Because of a lack of infrastructure, Russian crude had to be exported through the same port points on the Black and Baltic Sea, but it had to be then shipped through the Mediterranean through Suez through the Red Sea across the Arabian Sea to India, southeast Asia and China.”
“Well, that is barely an economically viable route now, which is one of the reasons why the Russians are typically selling their crude at a $20 to a $30 a barrel discount. But if Suez is closed, then they can no longer send these small tankers through it, and these small tankers don’t have the reach to go all the way around Africa.” I find the last assertion dubious, as they are surely ports in Africa they can resupply and refuel at, especially since I don’t think any countries in Africa have signed up for sanctions against Russia.
“So you’re looking at something like 1.5 to 2 million barrels a day of Russian crude that might finally actually be stranded if this isn’t solved pretty quickly now.”
Russian insurance update: “You have some Russian players, some Indian players, and some Chinese players who have started started to offer indemnification insurance. So we might get this really colorful situation where the real shipping companies stop using Suez and the Red Sea, but these shadow companies that have never had to pay out start using it and then we get to find out what happens if an Iranian-backed militant Force hits a Chinese Indian or Russian ship.” Good times, good time…
I also have to wonder if there are mercenaries Ukraine could hire to carry out letters of marquis and reprisal on Russian ships…
Biden family corruption tops this week’s LinkSwarm (with a lot of links to go through), Juicy heads back to jail, and the Houthi’s tug on Superman’s cape.
A corporation owned and controlled by Hunter Biden made several direct monthly payments to President Biden beginning in 2018, according to bank records released by the House Oversight Committee on Monday.
The subpoenaed bank records obtained by National Review reveal Owasco PC established a monthly payment of $1,380 to President Biden beginning in September 2018. The committee says the payments establish a direct benefit Biden received from his family’s foreign business dealings, despite Biden’s claims that he has never benefitted from or been involved in his son’s ventures.
“This wasn’t a payment from Hunter Biden’s personal account but an account for his corporation that received payments from China and other shady corners of the world,” House Oversight chairman James Comer says in a new video detailing the findings. “At this moment, Hunter Biden is under an investigation by the Department of Justice for using Owasco PC for tax evasion and other serious crimes.”
Comer says the payments “are part of a pattern revealing Joe Biden knew about, participated in, and benefited from his family’s influence peddling schemes.”
“As the Bidens received millions from foreign nationals and companies in China, Russia, Ukraine, Romania, and Kazakhstan, Joe Biden dined with his family’s foreign associates, spoke to them by speakerphone, had coffee, attended meetings, and ultimately received payments that were funded by his family’s business dealings,” the committee added in a press release.
It was unclear based on the bank records how many monthly payments were made, but a source familiar with the committee’s probe said investigators had discovered at least three payments.
Last week, the committee released an email from a bank money-laundering investigator who expressed serious concerns about a transfer of funds from China that ultimately trickled down to President Biden in the form of a $40,000 check from his brother, James Biden.
Biden received a $40,000 personal check from an account shared by his brother, James Biden, and sister-in-law, Sara Biden, in September 2017 — money that was marked as a “loan repayment.” The alleged repayment was sent after funds were filtered from Northern International Capital, a Chinese company affiliated with the Chinese energy firm CEFC, through several accounts related to Hunter Biden and eventually down to the personal account shared by James and Sara Biden.
Northern International Capital sent $5 million to Hudson West III, a joint venture established by Hunter Biden and CEFC associate Gongwen Dong on August 8.
On the same day, Hudson West III then sent $400,000 to Owasco, P.C., an entity owned and controlled by Hunter Biden. Six days later, Hunter Biden wired $150,000 to Lion Hall Group, a company owned by James and Sara Biden. Sara Biden withdrew $50,000 in cash from Lion Hall Group on August 28 and then deposited the funds into her and her husband’s personal checking account later that day.
On September 3, 2017, Sara Biden wrote a check to Joe Biden for $40,000.
An unidentified bank investigator sent an email on June 26, 2018 to colleagues raising concerns about money sent from Hudson West III to Owasco P.C. The email said the $5 million in funds sent from Northern International Capital to Hudson West III were primarily used to fund 16 wire transfers totaling more than $2.9 million to Owasco PC. The wires were labeled as management fees and reimbursements.
Joe Biden used several email aliases to regularly correspond with Hunter Biden’s business partner in recent years, including while he was serving as vice president, a GOP-controlled House committee leading the Republican impeachment inquiry revealed Tuesday.
IRS whistleblowers Joseph Ziegler and Gary Shapley provided the eleven-page log of emails ahead of a closed-door hearing before the House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday. The document includes metadata associated with emails sent to and from Joe Biden’s alias email addresses from 2010 to 2019, though it does not include the content of those emails.
In total, Joe Biden exchanged 327 emails with Hunter Biden’s business partner, Eric Schwerin, the founding partner and managing director of Hunter’s defunct Rosemont Seneca Partners investment firm. Fifty-four of those emails were sent directly to Schwerin, while the rest included other parties. Out of the 327 emails logged in the document, 291 were sent during Joe Biden’s Vice Presidency. Joe Biden’s email aliases included “robinware456,” “JRBware” and “RobertLPeters.”
“Through months of testifying for hours and producing hundreds of pages of documentation, and just as many months of baseless attacks against them, their story has remained the same and their credibility intact. The same cannot be said for President Biden,” committee chairman Jason Smith (R., Mo.) said in a statement.
“So far, our witnesses have produced over eleven-hundred pages of evidence, sat for 14 hours of closed-door testimony with counsel from the majority and minority on this committee, testified publicly before the Oversight Committee, and today, have provided us with new evidence.”
Smith also emphasized that much of the email correspondence between Joe Biden and Schwerin occurred around the then-vice president’s June 2014 trip to Ukraine.
Hunter Biden received a whopping $4.9 million from Hollywood lawyer Kevin Morris in a three-year period, according to an IRS agent who investigated the president’s son for alleged tax evasion.
The revelation signifies a substantial increase in the known amount that Hunter, 53, got from his so-called “sugar brother” after the men reportedly met for the first time at a December 2019 campaign fundraiser.
IRS agent Joseph Ziegler shared the jaw-dropping figure and additional documentation Tuesday with the House Ways and Means Committee in a follow-up appearance as House Republicans near an expected vote to authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Biden for his alleged role in his family’s foreign dealings.
Prior reporting indicated Morris paid about $2 million in tax debts for Hunter and purchased some of his novice artworks.
Morris’ motives for helping the first son financially and the authenticity of their friendship have been debated by Republicans.
As part of his Tuesday testimony, Ziegler provided legislators an email showing that as early as Feb. 7, 2020 — two months after they met — Morris was contacting accountants on Hunter’s behalf and warning them to work quickly to avoid “considerable risk personally and politically.”
Ziegler, who investigated Hunter’s taxes for five years before he was removed from the case this year, said the first son’s income from Morris — at least some of it deemed loans — resembled Hunter’s practice of trying to avoid paying taxes on other income by describing it as loans.
And after the hundreds of stories of Hunter Biden’s corruption, and his key role in funneling foreign money into his father’s hands, Hunter has finally been indicted on nine criminal counts.
An American warship and several commercial ships faced attacks in the Red Sea on Sunday, the Pentagon said.
“We’re aware of reports regarding attacks on the USS Carney and commercial vessels in the Red Sea and will provide information as it becomes available,” the Pentagon said.
A U.S. official told the Associated Press the attack began around 10 a.m. in Sanaa, Yemen, and lasted five hours.
Officials did not say where the attacks may have come from.
Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels have launched several attacks in the Red Sea in recent weeks and has launched drones and missiles toward Israel since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October.
Texas is suing the Biden Administration yet again, this time over imposing censorship.
The Texas Office of the Attorney General (OAG) filed a joint lawsuit, along with co-plaintiff media outlets The Daily Wire and The Federalist, against the U.S. Department of State, alleging the federal government both directly and indirectly violated the First Amendment rights of certain online news outlets by placing them on a censorship “blacklist.”
According to the OAG, the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, alleges an office within the state department known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC) was used to “limit the reach and business viability of domestic news organizations by funding censorship technology and private censorship enterprises.”
The stated purpose of the GEC is to lead the federal government’s effort to “counter foreign state and non-state propaganda” and disinformation efforts that pose a risk to the United States or influence the government’s policies.
However, the plaintiffs argue the GEC was weaponized to “violate the First Amendment and suppress Americans’ constitutionally-protected speech.”
In short, the lawsuit describes how the government created multiple censorship programs that worked to de-platform, shadowban, discredit, and demonize certain American media outlets.
It argues that some of these mechanisms were not just surveillance tools for the government to monitor and identify potential propaganda and disinformation, but rather characterized the technology that had been developed as “tools of warfare” used to shape opinions and perceptions that had been “misappropriated and misdirected to be used at home against domestic political opponents and members of the American press with viewpoints conflicting with federal officials.”
“Media Plaintiffs each face blacklisting, reduced advertising revenue, reduced potential growth, reputational damage, economic cancellation, reduced circulation of reporting and speech, and social media censorship — all as a direct result of Defendants’ unlawful conduct,” the lawsuit states.
“I am proud to lead the fight to save Americans’ precious constitutional rights from Joe Biden’s tyrannical federal government,” Attorney General Ken Paxton said in a news release announcing the lawsuit.
“The State Department’s mission to obliterate the First Amendment is completely un-American. This agency will not get away with their illegal campaign to silence citizens and publications they disagree with.”
“Those government-funded, government-promoted censorship technologies and enterprises targeted conservative media outlets, including The Daily Wire,” Ben Shapiro said in a video statement released regarding the lawsuit. Shapiro is the editor emeritus of The Daily Wire.
“Their goal is to paint us as unreliable and therefore to push advertisers away from advertising on programs like this one, websites like The Daily Wire, websites like The Federalist, that is an ongoing problem that is being pushed by the state department,” he said.
Back to jail for Juicy. Nate the Lawyer offers a good overview of the twists and turns of the case. I had forgotten that he had paid his “attackers” with a personal check…
The F-117 Nighthawk was retired in 2008. Or was it?
the Belarus Red Cross Society is suspended from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).
The suspension is the result of noncompliance by the Belarus Red Cross with the request for the dismissal of Mr. Dimitry Shevtsov, Secretary General of the National Society. This follows the decision of the IFRC’s Governing Board of 3 October 2023 relating to the investigation into the allegations against Belarus Red Cross Secretary General for his statements, including on nuclear weapons and on the movement of children to Belarus, and his visit to Luhansk and Donetsk.
The suspension means that the Belarus Red Cross loses its rights as a member of the IFRC. Any new funding to the Belarus Red Cross will also be suspended.
“Governor Greg Abbott is keeping the endorsements rolling, announcing his support for Marc LaHood for Texas House. LaHood, an attorney from San Antonio, is challenging State Rep. Steve Allison (R–San Antonio), who was elected to the House in 2018 to replace retiring House Speaker Joe Straus. Since then, Allison has consistently had one of the most liberal voting records among his Republican colleagues.”
The Walt Disney Co. effectively controlled the local government around the site of Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, for decades in what an extensive review by the state government calls “the most egregious exhibition of corporate cronyism in modern American history.”
After Disney bought the land that would become its massive amusement park and resort, it received permission from the Florida Legislature and governor in 1967 to create a local government, the Reedy Creek Improvement District.
From that time until Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill Feb. 27 abolishing the Reedy Creek district, Disney heavily influenced the local government to its advantage, according to a new report Monday from the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District.
The legislation signed into law by DeSantis, a Republican, transformed the Reedy Creek district into the Central Florida Tourism Oversight District, which aims to root out what critics see as Disney’s corrupt hold over the local government.
In the report, a copy of which was provided early to The Daily Signal, the new Central Florida Tourism Oversight District claims that “Disney not just controlled the Reedy Creek Improvement District, but did so by effectively purchasing loyalty.”
Although the Reedy Creek district was a separate entity from the Walt Disney Co., the district treated its employees as if they were Disney employees, sometimes referred to as “cast members,” and awarded them lavish perks unavailable to the general public.
The new Florida government report used the expertise of George Mason University Professor Donald J. Kochan in governance; William Jennings at Delta Consulting Group in accounting; the consulting firm Kimley-Horn for engineering; and Public Resources Advisory Group Managing Director Wendell Gaertner for public finance.
The report notes: “Disney effectively bribed RCID employees (and retirees, members of the [RCID] Board of Supervisors, and vendor VIPs) by showering them with company benefits and perks: millions of dollars’ worth of annual passes to theme parks worldwide, 40% discounts on cruises, free transferable single-use tickets during the holiday season, steep discount on merchandise, marked discounts on food and beverage, and access to non-public shopping reserved for Disney cast members (where merchandise was greatly discounted and items were made available that were otherwise not available for public purchase).”
House in Arlington, Virginia explodes after police reportedly approached it with a search warrant 